Provender Gleed (28 page)

Is snorted. 'He's really going to believe that!'

Again, that crestfallen expression, badly disguised.

'The point is, Provender,' she went on, apologetically, 'this whole thing has been a mistake. I should never have got involved in the first place. Somehow I've got to make amends.'

'You already have.'

'Then, also, I've no great urge to be here when Damien gets back.'

'Fair enough.' Provender surveyed the table, precariously poised, a slender traverse, all that stood between the person crossing it and a drop of several hundred feet. Just a few thin planks. Certain death below.

He turned to Is. 'Ladies first?'

37

Gratitude Gleed went in search of her father and found him where he had been all morning, in the television room, sitting on a sofa, transfixed by the images being projected over his head via a system of magnifying lenses onto the bare white wall in front of him. A Phone was waiting in a corner of the room - there, clearly, for when the Kuczinskis rang to talk terms.

Hearing his daughter enter, Prosper Gleed patted the space next to him on the sofa. Gratitude declined the invitation.

'I just came to say we're about to have lunch, Dad. In the solarium.'

'Have someone bring something through for me.'

'Also, Arthur's dropped by. What are we supposed to tell him? About Provender.'

'Tell him whatever you like. Might as well tell him the truth. He is Family.'

Not exactly
, Gratitude thought.
Step-Family perhaps. If you wanted to be totally, brutally accurate: halfling bastard
.

'If you say so,' she said. 'Dad?'

She waited for him to look round.

On the wall, a reporter with an enormous microphone was addressing the camera from beside a road.
Lower Saxony
read the caption below him. Behind him, a convoy of armoured personnel carriers was rolling past, against a background of flat green plains. Dust clouds and engine thunder were making it difficult for the reporter to do his job. He kept half ducking and swatting the air in front of his nose. About one in every three words he said was intelligible.

The glow of the epidiascoped image on the wall lit up Prosper Gleed's face. It flickered and moved there, throwing his features into shifting relief. His expression, though, beneath the changing light, stayed firm. Resolute. His eyes, bright-wide, drank in all they were seeing.

'Dad?'

Again he did not look round, and Gratitude wondered if he realised she was still there. All she wanted from him was a word of reassurance. All he had to do was turn and say,
This will get your brother back
.

He continued to gaze straight ahead.

Silently, Gratitude slipped out of the room.

Uncle Fortune was in the solarium, as were Extravagance, Arthur, Great and Carver. They were ranged around the circular glass table with glass flatware and glass-handled cutlery set before them, all of them in glass chairs except Great who was in his wheelchair. Sunshine drenched the room and permeated its many transparent surfaces, some of which refracted the light prismatically and sent lozenges of rainbow-pattern brilliance scattering in a dozen different directions.

Gratitude arrived just as the first course, gazpacho soup, was being served. Everyone tucked in apart from Arthur, who was halfway through a thespian anecdote and would not be diverted from finishing it. When he was done with his tale of a faulty camera and the perfect take that was never captured on film, he paused and looked around, expecting some display of appreciation from his audience. He was taken aback when none came.

'I'm sorry, am I missing something here?'

The others exchanged glances.

'Only, I've played to livelier crowds of old-age pensioners.' He bowed to Great. 'Begging your pardon, of course, Coriander.'

Great glared glitteringly back at him, as if to say,
Why are you using my first name? Why are you even here?

'Good soup,' said Fortune, slurping. 'Prosp not joining us, Gratitude?'

'Busy.'

'And Cynthia?'

'Still up at the Chapel, I think,' said Extravagance.

Gratitude shot her sister a look.

'What?' Extravagance demanded.

In spite of her father's edict, Gratitude was loath to let Arthur in on the situation. It was none of his business. He took liberties as it was - for instance, turning up at Dashlands whenever he felt like it, uninvited. He behaved like he was one of the Family, this cuckoo-cousin, and he wasn't, not really, and Gratitude, whenever she could, did what she could to remind him of that fact.

'The Chapel, eh?' Arthur said. 'So what's wrong?'

'Nothing,' Gratitude replied, quickly. Too quickly.

'Oh, come off it. Aunt Cynth retreating to the Chapel? That's a sure sign all's not well. Has your dad made another conquest? Carved another notch on someone else's bedpost?'

'No.'

'What, then?'

'Perhaps,' said Carver, turning round from feeding Great, 'Mrs Gleed is simply concerned about the rather tense state of affairs in Europe.'

'Yeah, could be,' Arthur said. 'Bad business, that. You know, my director actually phoned me this morning, wondering if we shouldn't cancel tonight's performance because of it. I told him, "Never." I said, "In troubled times, people need the solace of art more, not less." I said, "Even if only one ticket-holder turns up tonight and all the rest stay home, frightened, we will play to that person as if to a full house. We will bring that courageous soul the Shakespearian consolation he is seeking." That pretty much settled it. Anyway, I'm sure it'll all blow over. I imagine that's what Uncle Prosper is busy doing right now. Trying to calm things down. Smoothing ruffled feathers. What else is a Family head for? Correct?'

He looked round the table. Silence and sombre faces told him he was way off the mark.

'Not correct. Oh dear. Oh yes, how obvious. The Poles. Our blood-guzzling chums the Kuczinskis. What's happened? They must have made some serious blunder.'

'You may as well know,' said Fortune, and explained.

The news that Provender had been abducted, possibly by the Kuczinski Family, had Arthur going through paroxysms of incredulity and anguish. He waved his hands about; he shook his head; he gasped 'No!' loud enough to be heard in the back row of the stalls. It was all very histrionic, Gratitude thought, but then with Arthur the boundary between profession and life had long since become blurred. Drama was his natural state of being. Everything was an act.

'My God, and there we were at the party just the other night,' he said, 'me and Provender, having a lovely time. Rubbing along like we always do. And then - somebody nabbed him. Right from under our noses. I can't believe it.'

'None of us can,' said Extravagance.

'I even invited him to the show tonight. All of you, too. I insisted he come. That feels so - so
trivial
now.'

'So perhaps you will cancel tonight's performance after all,' Gratitude suggested. She said it with just a soupçon of viciousness, hoping Arthur's answer would confirm her low opinion of him.

It did.

'Hell, no.' Arthur bent over his soup and dipped his spoon in. 'Show must go on and all that.' He glanced up. 'I mean, it's what Provender would want, isn't it? Surely?'

38

What Provender would have wanted, right then, was not to have to crawl across an upturned pine table, forty-five storeys up, with no guarantee whether that the table would support his weight or that it would remain securely perched on the two balcony parapets while he was on it. He would have wanted anything but this sickened feeling in the pit of his stomach, this sense that every last drop of moisture in his mouth had somehow transferred itself to the palms of his hands, above all this fear that if fate was going to choose any day for him to meet a messy, spectacular death, why not today, the twenty-fifth anniversary of his birth? Fate had a nasty sense of humour, after all. This was not the day for him to be inviting it to play one of its grim practical jokes.

Then again, he had no desire to remain in Damien Scrase's flat, and the table was his only viable means of escape.

The opportunity for Provender to entertain these thoughts arose because Is had left him alone on the balcony. Saying she had just remembered something, she had ducked back into the flat, and Provender was waiting for her to come out again. He wasn't crossing the table without her holding one end of it down as they had planned. What she was actually doing in the flat, he had no idea. A part of him wished she would get on with it. A part of him didn't.

Finally she emerged. She had with her a hypodermic syringe and a medical ampoule containing some sort of fluid. She showed them to Provender, then bundled them up in a cloth and stuck the bundle in her shoulder-bag.

'Just in case,' she said.

'Not for me, then.'

'Not this time.'

'Funny. I could do with being unconscious right now.'

'Me too.'

Provender gestured at the table and looked plaintive. 'Are you sure you don't want to go first?'

'You're heavier than me. If it can take you, it'll take me.'

'What if it can't take me?'

'It will.'

'You know that for certain?'

'Stop fannying about and get on the table, Provender.'

Is placed her hands close together on the end of the table and pressed down with all her might. Provender, feeling his heart start to pound, slid himself into the gap between her left arm and the table leg nearest the building. He eased himself out across the table's underside, lying flat, braced on his forearms. His feet were still on the balcony floor, taking most of his weight. Cautiously he lifted one leg, then the other. His weight was transferred to his torso.

The table creaked. Provender froze, his legs sticking straight out behind him.

'Can't do this,' he breathed. 'It's going to break.'

'It's not. Keep going.'

Little encouraged, Provender wriggled a few inches further forward.

The table creaked again, a deeper, sadder sound this time - the sound of resignation, almost, as if the table accepted it wasn't going to survive this ordeal.

Provender thought of the drop beneath him. He thought of the thickness of the wood that was keeping him from falling, or rather the thinness of it. An inch at most. Closer on three quarters of an inch.

Three quarters of an inch of cheap pine. It was nothing. Nothing. He might as well be lying on a sheet of balsa.

'Provender.'

Is's voice. Urging.

But what Provender was listening to was the sound of space around him. The faint breeze thrumming through Needle Grove's canyons. Distant shouts that echoed nebulously. The height - and depth - of the world he had now ventured into. Air. Immensity.

He quailed inside. He clenched his eyes shut. He wanted to slide back onto the balcony where Is was, where safety was, but he couldn't. He couldn't move.

A table. A few glued-together planks.

He was going to die.

'Provender, listen to me. You've just got to go forward. There's nothing else you can do. You'll be fine.'

'Is...'

'I mean it. I promise.'

She meant it. She promised.

How could she promise something like that? That he would be fine?

She couldn't.

But what mattered was that she said she could.

Provender took a breath; held it. He clamped his teeth together. Eyes still tight shut, he threw himself fully onto the table. He slithered forward. He did it fast. Knees, elbows, scrambling, and there was a noise coming out of him, a fusion of expelled breath and battle cry, low-pitched, rising. The table flexed beneath him. The table jumped. The table juddered and groaned. He heard a yelp from Is. He fell.

Forward.

A short plunge.

Landed hands first on Mrs Philcox's balcony.

Tumbled.

Rolled.

Fetched up with his head between two plant pots.

He lay dazed, glad, numb, exultant. Alive.

Then he levered himself up onto his elbows and craned his neck to peer over the parapet at Is. He was about to say something blithe and plucky like 'Nothing to it' or 'Hop on over then', until he saw Is's face ... and realised that the table was no longer there, suspended between the two balconies.

At that precise instant, from far below there came a faint but fulsome
crash
.

39

Merlin Milner had had a busy but so far fruitless morning in Needle Grove. He had crossed off five names on his list of seven. He had not yet found the person he was after.

Still, he refused to be discouraged.

Even when a pine table plunged from the sky and almost killed him.

Shortly before this incident occurred, Milner had decided to take a breather, grab a bite to eat, and assess the state of his investigations. It never hurt to take time out to regroup and retrench - especially after having come across five of the least savoury individuals he had ever had to misfortune to encounter, in surroundings that were not, anyway, conducive to feelings of goodwill toward one's fellow-men. Moreover, Milner wasn't looking forward to tackling the last two names on the list, and certainly didn't want to do it on an empty stomach.

Midway up Block 26 there was a mezzanine area which boasted a shopping arcade, along with a café and various other communal amenities. Milner had glimpsed it a couple of times on his way between different flats, as the lift had a tendency to stop at that floor to let people in or out. At the café he purchased a ham sandwich and a bottle of orange juice. The sandwich was so dry as to be near inedible, the juice so sharp as to be near undrinkable. He persevered with both while sitting at a cigarette-singed plastic table and perusing his list of suspects and the notes he had appended to the names of the ones he had already approached.