First in line, alphabetically, came Sable di Santis, who lived at Flat 37J. She had opened her door circumspectly - it proved to be a common habit among the denizens of Needle Grove - and had glared at Milner with an unnerving mixture of aggression and dismissal. She was taller than him by nearly a foot and had short spiky hair that matched the short-spiked dog collar she was wearing. The towelling bathrobe she had on revealed a glimpse of leather corsetry. While greeting her and introducing himself, Milner glanced past her and noticed an array of implements mounted on one wall of the main room - whips, manacles, ball-gags, and some large, long, nobbly devices the sight of which, frankly, alarmed him. He was still speaking when a muffled female voice called out from an adjoining room in the flat, asking Sable if she was coming back. Sable snapped a reply: 'Shut your mouth, bitch!' Then, not much more pleasantly, she told Milner she was busy with a client, he should state his business, otherwise fuck off. Milner apologised, said he'd made a mistake, got the wrong flat, sorry for bothering her, goodbye.
So much for SABLE DI SANTIS - LESBIAN SADIST.
Next up was Serena Drummer, down on the fourth floor, flat number 4P. Milner had arrived just in time to find her locking her door, on her way out with a group of snivelling, clamouring children around her legs. 'Miss Drummer?' he had asked, and had been firmly and tartly corrected: 'Mrs.' She wasn't any more warm or agreeable a woman than Sable di Santis, and during her conversation with Milner broke off to scold each of her children at least once. She had dull, grainy skin, lank hair, a chipped front tooth, an all-over air of harassment. She was, however, surprisingly forthcoming. She was just off with the kids to visit her husband, she explained. Went every Tuesday. He was inside, she said. Been banged up for killing someone eight years ago. Brixton Towers jail. He didn't do it, though. Well, he did. But the bastard had it coming. Fiddled with one of the kids, didn't he. 'Anyway,' she said, 'if yer another journalist after me story, I in't talkin' to yer. Not till we've discussed terms.' Milner informed her he wasn't a journalist. 'Why you wastin' my fuckin' time then?' she snorted, and strode off with her brood in tow. Milner couldn't help but wonder if her husband, after all this time in clink, found it curious that at least three of her offspring were under eight years old. Did he ask himself how she kept getting pregnant? Or were conjugal visits less well supervised than Milner had been led to believe?
Not his problem, though. And SERENA DRUMMER, MURDER MAN SEER, wasn't his problem either.
Sherman Dungate, of Flat 19C, answered his door in vest and underpants but appeared fully clothed thanks to the tattoos that covered his torso to the neck, his arms to the wrists and his legs to the ankles. There were skulls, roses, angels and naked women on his body but the majority of the tattoos were non-representational, zigzags and swirls and interlocking knots, like a kind of animal marking, blue-ink camouflage. He was liberally pierced, too, with a dozen earrings, a nose stud, a lip ring, and a nipple ring prominent through the fabric of his vest. He was skeletal-skinny, with rodent eyes, and the moment he caught sight of Milner his expression turned peevish and sullen. 'You're new, aintcha,' he said. 'All right, I'll give you your bung. But tell your Super I can't keep paying off every fucking one of you who turns up at my door. I got a business to run here, you know.' Before Milner could say anything, Dungate disappeared into the flat and returned with a wad of greasy, crumpled banknotes. 'Fifty usually covers it,' he said, licking a finger and peeling off five tenners. 'Cop tax,' he sneered, holding out the money. At last it dawned on Milner what was going on, and he assured Dungate that he wasn't a policeman, at which the other man brightened. 'Oh, you're here for some stuff then, are you?' Milner said no, not that either. Now Dungate became resentful. 'So why you fucking bothering me? There's half a dozen buyers probably been scared off by seeing you here. You're costing me money, man.' Milner tried to apologise but Dungate launched into a volley of invective, using all sorts of unflattering terms to describe Milner,
time-waster
being the least offensive. Milner beat a retreat.
SHERMAN DUNGATE was many things, including a MEAN DRUGS THANE, but he was not, Milner was quite sure, Provender Gleed's kidnapper.
Fourth on the list came Dudley St Barstow, and although Milner did not actually meet the man face to face, what he heard through the door to Flat 48F was enough to convince him that St Barstow was not holding Provender on the premises. He seemed to have plenty of livestock in there, however, to judge by the clucks and squawks and woofs and oinks that emanated from within, and he seemed to be enjoying an unnatural relationship with several of them. Milner, ear pressed to the door, heard a crooning male voice compliment a bird on its alluring tail feathers, refer admiringly to some mammal's shanks, and entice another mammal to come over and snuffle around for a treat he had hidden somewhere in his lap. St Barstow cracked jokes with the animals. He sounded a lot like an Arab sheik immersed in his harem, doting on his many concubines. Milner did not knock on the door. Nothing on earth would have persuaded him to meet the man inside.
And so DUDLEY ST BARSTOW, exponent of WRY ODD BEAST LUST, was eliminated from Milner's enquiries.
It was with some haste that Milner had moved on to Dennis Sandringham, who proved to be the best of a bad bunch. Sandringham looked, dressed, was coiffed, above all
smelled
, like the perfect lothario. As the flat door opened, a waft of cologne greeted Milner, then Sandringham did too. Immaculate in blazer and cravat, late-middle-aged but not looking it, he invited Milner in, offered him a nip of sherry, behaved like the most beneficent of hosts, and did not bat an eyelid when Milner asked to use his bathroom, a pretext for taking a sneaky peek around the entire flat. The phone rang while he was doing so, and when he returned to the main room, satisfied that Provender was not here, he found Sandringham cradling the receiver and chatting in such a way that Milner had no doubt the person on the other end of the line was a favoured female. 'One of my ladyfriends,' Sandringham explained after he hung up. 'Wants me to drop round and see her. Can't say no, can I? She'll want me to stick my todger in that dried-up crack of hers, worse luck, but a chap has to earn a living somehow. Speaking of which,' he added, insinuatingly, 'I could fit you in if you like.' Milner made his excuses. 'I do men as well, you know,' said Sandringham. Milner made more excuses, vehement ones this time, and left.
DENNIS SANDRINGHAM, DAMN DASHING SINNER, had not been the likeliest candidate for the role of Provender's kidnapper. Milner had felt obliged to check him out anyway, just to be sure. He rather wished he hadn't.
So, five down, two to go; and the final two were the ones Milner was most hopeful about, and most dreading meeting. Their names had given him the strongest hits out of all the seven. Last in alphabetical order was Demetrius Silver, who lived at the very top of the block in Flat 60M. DEMETRIUS SILVER, the anagrams said, IS DEVIL MUSTERER. Milner envisaged a goateed Satanist in a flat adorned with pentacles and inverted crucifixes, black candles guttering everywhere, the curtains permanently drawn.
It was an unappetising image, but the question was whether or not it was preferable to the impression Milner had built up of the resident of Flat 45L, one Damien Scrase.
From DAMIEN SCRASE Milner had extracted a plethora of anagrams, none of which was exactly a source of great comfort: SCARES MAIDEN, CRANIA MESSED, MEAN CAD RISES, INCREASES MAD, I END MASSACRE... The anagrams spake sooth. This Scrase fellow was not someone to be taken with a pinch of salt. He was, if not unhinged, then close to it. Potentially very dangerous. I END MASSACRE could, Milner supposed, be regarded as a good attribute rather than a bad. Then again, a person who ended a massacre might well be the very same person who started it, and in the light of the other anagrams Milner was more inclined towards the negative interpretation of the phrase rather than the positive.
The Satanist or the madman? It was a tough call, and in order to defer the decision, Milner found an exit from the shopping arcade and went outdoors.
He was on an overpass. The sun, now at its zenith, sent a hard white light straight down on his head. He shaded his eyes and basked in the brilliance, thinking that in these slivers of space between buildings the presence of direct sunshine must be a rarity and a blessing. He wondered if areas of Needle Grove ever even saw the sun during winter, when it was low and usually behind cloud.
He decided he would amble the length of the overpass, to the adjacent block, and come back. Idly he mused on Romeo Moore. How was he getting on? How far had he got in his quest to nail Arthur Gleed as the culprit? Not far at all, Milner suspected. Moore was a good anagrammatic detective but not, to be perfectly honest, as good an anagrammatic detective as Milner. Often Milner felt he was carrying Moore, doing a greater than fair share of the work. In any partnership, however much of a meeting of equals it appeared to be, there was inevitably one person who was superior to the other. An unwelcome truth but it had to be acknowledged. And if the current divergence of investigative paths proved anything, it would prove that.
On this uncharitable note, Milner sallied forth along the overpass ... and that was when the table, like a divine judgement, came hurtling down from heaven.
It missed him by inches. It landed slap bang in front of his right toecap. If he had been half a stride further on, if he had started walking a split-second sooner, Milner would have been right under it. He would have been killed instantly.
He watched the table, as if in slow motion, hit the concrete in front of him. It seemed to dismantle itself, shrugging into its component parts, the planks of its top separating, its legs splaying, its bracing timbers splintering in all directions. The impact made an almighty
whump
but was also somehow soundless, too stunningly loud for Milner's ears to comprehend. Fragments and flinders flew. The bulk of the table collapsed, plank bouncing off plank, shard off shard, slithering, spreading, coming to rest. Milner found himself staring at a heap of firewood at his feet, and he thought,
That used to be a table
, and then he thought,
Was that a table?
It seemed inconceivable that the wreckage just seconds ago had had shape, had been functional, had been a Thing and not merely Stuff.
Reflexively he anagrammed the word
table
.
TABLE - BLEAT.
That was all. Only BLEAT.
Then sense returned. His scattered wits came thronging back. He glanced up where the table had come from, not really looking. He saw tower blocks, balconies, windows, sky, sun. An impression of Needle Grove bearing down angrily upon him. He spun on his heel. He headed for the exit he had come out of. He plunged back into the shopping arcade, back into apparent safety, into a place where tables did not, could not, fall on you from a great height. He fetched up against a shopfront. He leaned into it for support, panting. Adrenaline surged through him like jolts of electricity. His legs went weak. He slumped. His heart rat-a-tat-tatted. He stayed there, shellshocked, for he didn't know how long.
Death. Death had come within a hair's breadth of getting him.
Gradually Milner began to realise how lucky he had been. How fortunate he was to be alive still. With that realisation a calm began to descend on him, and his breathing slowed and so did his heart rate.
What he would never know was that the falling table incident was a near-miss in more ways than one.
Had he remained outdoors a moment longer, had he kept looking up, Milner would have seen two heads appear, looking down from adjacent balconies directly overhead, fifteen storeys above the overpass. He would, if he had been in full possession of his faculties, surely have recognised one of the heads as belonging to none other than Provender Gleed.
That was how close Merlin Milner came top cracking the Provender Gleed case, and in the process winning his gentlemen's bet with Romeo Moore.
Painfully close.
Lamentably close.
Tragically close.
40
Is felt many things when the table dropped away. The first was annoyance. If Provender hadn't scuttled across in such a frantic hurry, the table would not have started bouncing and the end she was holding down would not have slipped out of her grasp. The next thing she felt was chagrin. She should have held on tighter. She was to blame for the table falling, not Provender. Then came exasperation, as an old, familiar thought-routine welled to the surface:
Typical Family, taking everything, leaving nothing for anyone else
. Finally there was a peculiar kind of guilt, as she recalled the real reason she had gone back into the flat before Provender set off across the table - not to fetch the hypodermic, as she had claimed, but to leave a kind of time-bomb for Damien. She had committed an act of petty vengeance, and already karma had caught up with her. She had done something she should never have stooped to doing, and here was her reward, to be stranded on the balcony with her means of escape well and truly gone.
All these emotions came and went in a flash. It then occurred to her that there might have been somebody below when the table fell. She poked her head out over the parapet. Provender, on Mrs Philcox's balcony, did the same.
The table had struck the overpass. It was in about a thousand pieces but none of those pieces, thank God, was embedded in the anatomy of a human being. There was no one on the overpass. The only person adversely affected by the table's fall was Is herself.
'Shit,' she sighed. She looked across at Provender. His body language said
puzzled
and also
sheepish
. 'Well, that's that, then. What the hell am I going to do now?'
'Erm...' Provender scratched his head. 'No idea. Bugger. I'm sorry, Is. I don't even know how it happened.' His expression turned hopeful. 'Look, I could go into Mrs What's-her-name's flat and asked to use her phone. Call the police.'