Midnight Fugue (10 page)

‘I’ll tell you why. Because my boy needs taking care of. He don’t like me saying that, but he can pull faces all he wants, it’s the truth. I’ve been out there in that world and I know what it’s like. He’ll find out eventually, but I’d like him to find out without too much pain. I haven’t worked hard all these years and put up with all the crap I’ve put up with to sit back and see my son suffer the same. He needs someone like you, Miss Pinchbeck. That’s why I’m talking to you.’

‘I think you are mistaking me for someone else; I’m not a bodyguard!’

‘Bodyguards I can buy ten a penny. You’re the kind of guard he needs the kind of places he goes, the kind of people he meets. I know, I’ve had you checked out. No need to look offended. I bet you’ve spent a bit of time checking me out too — am I right?’

‘I did do a bit of checking, yes.’

‘And you found nothing bad, else you wouldn’t be here. And I found plenty that was good, else you wouldn’t be here either!’

He glanced down at a sheet of paper on the arm of his chair.

Maggie said, ‘That my life story you’ve got there, Mr Gidman?’

‘Not all of it,’ he answered, unperturbed. ‘Just from the age of eighteen. You were doing one of them gap years, working with VSO in Africa, when you got news that your mammy and daddy had been killed in a car accident, right?’

She went very still.

He leaned forward and looked into her eyes.

‘You miss them, don’t you?’

‘Yes, Mr Gidman,’ she said quietly. ‘I miss my parents very much.’

‘I can see that, and I’m truly sorry for your loss. Theirs too, not getting the chance to see what a great job they’d done bringing you up. But what I want to ask is, why, after you done your college course, did you go for an office job at ChildSave rather than heading back out to Africa or somewhere to work on the ground?’

Good question, thought Dave, recalling his own uncharitable thoughts about her suitability for a career of digging latrines for fuzzy-wuzzies.

‘I don’t see that it’s relevant, Mr Gidman,’ she replied, ‘but I looked at my abilities, such as they were, and decided I could do more good by looking after ChildSave’s profile at home than being a general dogsbody in a Third World village.’

‘Good answer, Miss Pinchbeck,’ said Gidman. ‘And by all accounts, you done so well at ChildSave, I bet that soon as they got a notion you were getting restless, they started throwing money at you to try and keep you. Which brings me to my next question. You such a bright girl, knowing your own abilities like you do, why would you want to leave ChildSave and work for my boy? Whatever else he is, he ain’t no charity!’

The pair of them, the dignified old man and the slight, unprepossessing young woman, exchanged a smile.

‘No, he’s not,’ said Maggie. ‘But from what I read, your son could end up having more power to do good than all the UK charities put together, if he’s steered right. And I’d like to be around to help with the steering. So, pure self-interest, Mr Gidman.’

‘Hey, you two, I am still here,’ protested Dave the Third, feeling excluded.

‘We know that, boy,’ said his father. ‘And if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll be about to offer this young lady the job. If she doesn’t like the salary, up it and I’ll pay the difference, OK?’

‘I’m not worried about the money, Mr Gidman,’ said Maggie.

‘Maybe you’re not, but how you value yourself is one thing, how other folk value you is something else. If I thought you could be bought, I wouldn’t waste a penny on you. So why don’t you go and have a think while I talk to my boy? You got some deciding to do. Either you believe all them rumours, in which case I’m sorry. Or you think they’re crap and you’d like the job. It’s been a real pleasure talking to you. You’ll find Flo in the kitchen. With luck she’ll be doing apple turnovers. Try one. You won’t have tasted better. So remember this before you decide. Work for my son, and you’ll never be further than a phone call from them turnovers!’

Maggie left the room, looking slightly shell-shocked.

Dave, always keen to learn, said, ‘Why’d you tell her to see Mom before we left?’

‘’Cos after ten minutes talking to your mother, sometimes I find myself believing I can’t be all that bad! You hire her, boy. She’s what you need. Bright as a button and she’ll work for you ’cos she believes in you.’

And so it had proved. And now she was indispensable.

But like the song says, sometimes the honesty’s too much. Having someone to keep you straight’s fine. But straight can get boring; occasionally a man needs to stray.

Once, early on in her employment, he’d asked her to factor a diversion into a Continental trip so that he could contrive an assignation with the wife of a British Embassy official. She had simply refused, leaving it up to him to react as he would.

If she’d preached about the dangers of such activities, he’d have carried on regardless. But she said nothing. After that he didn’t try to involve her in his private life.

He’d come to see what his father had spotted at once. Maggie Pinchbeck had all the qualifications. Super efficient, very bright, a smoother of paths, a sniffer of perils, an organizer sans pareil, she knew all the tricks common to PR and politics — the spinning, the wheeling and dealing, the compromising, the shortcutting. But she was only willing to play those ambiguous games if and when she believed the end was just. That was the quality that Goldie had spotted. You couldn’t buy that.

But sometimes he still found himself fantasizing about those two-metre models…

As now, when that dry cough, which others probably never noticed but which rang out to him like the Lutine Bell, warned him he’d spent long enough in prayer. Any longer and people would be wondering what he had to pray about.

He straightened up. As if this were a signal, the organ boomed, and the congregation rose as the vicar and the choir made their way up the aisle singing the processional hymn, ‘Now thank we all our God, with heart and hands and voices’.

David Gidman the Third joined in lustily, aware that he had much to be thankful for. Already blessed through birth with countless gifts of love, wealth and opportunity, he could not doubt that it was his destiny to enjoy many more wondrous things.

Truly his future shone so bright it took the eye of an eagle to look into it.

Bring it on!

10.55–11.20

As soon as Andy Dalziel entered his living room, he knew something was wrong.

He stood in the doorway and tried to isolate it. But his mind, though building up to its old speeds, was not quite there yet. He moved from intuition to examination. By the time he’d checked everything off and found nothing missing, nothing moved, nothing open that had been shut, or shut that had been open, no muddy footprints on the carpet, no greasy fingerprints on the door handle, he had to admit that everything was exactly as he’d left it, which meant that his sense of something not right was a load of bollocks, just another example of the continuing fragility of his mental processes.

‘Oh well, Rome weren’t rebuilt in a fortnight,’ he reassured himself, and sat down next to the answer machine with the intention of listening to Mick Purdy’s message.

But as his finger hovered over the
playback
button, it came to him.

Yes, everything was exactly as he’d left it, but it shouldn’t have been!

He’d heard the start of Purdy’s message as he made for the front door. When Purdy rang off, the presence of a new message on the machine should have been registered by a red light around the
play
button.

There was no light, meaning someone had played the message.

Or maybe the red bulb had simply failed.

He pressed the button and found himself listening not to Purdy but to a message Cap had left six days ago, reminding him to eat a casserole she’d put in his fridge.

This confirmed it.

When the red light showed, what you got was new messages.

Otherwise when you pressed
play
, you got all the messages unerased from your tape, the oldest first.

He left the tape playing, armed himself with a heavy brass candlestick, and went through every room in the house.

Two conclusions: one, the place was absolutely empty; two, it was becoming a bit of a tip. His regular cleaner had defaulted during his long lay-off. Cap Marvell had seen that the place was spick and span for his return, but if you leave a horse to muck out its own stable, you’ll soon be knee-deep in manure. Time to get organized afore Cap organized something for him. He liked to pick his own staff, in and out of work.

The machine was playing Purdy’s message when he returned to the living room. Now he was listening to it rather than leaving it behind him, it struck him that there was a note of strain here with the attempt at banter sounding false and forced.

He sat down, and dialled the return number.

It answered on the second ring, a terse, ‘Yeah?’

‘That you, Mick? Andy Dalziel here.’

‘Andy! Hang on.’

There was a pause, then Purdy spoke again.

‘Sorry about that. At the fag-end of an op. Been on the go since sparrowfart yesterday, so forgive me if I yawn from time to time.’

‘Get a result?’

‘Way to go, but it’s looking promising. How about you? Happy with your enquiries so far?’

‘Sorry. Not sure what enquiries that ’ud be,’ said Dalziel.

‘Come on, Andy, soon as you’d talked to Gina you’d be straight off down the nick to trawl through the records.’

‘You’ve spoken to Gina then?’

‘Briefly. Couldn’t talk long though. I gather she gave you the basic facts?’

‘Aye, she gave me summat, and you’re right, I’ve dug up a bit more. But what I haven’t found yet, Mick, is any hint of what the fuck it might have to do with me.’

‘Yeah, I’m sorry. Thought I’d be able to have a chat with you before you saw Gina, but she’s not one for letting the grass grow under her feet, know what I mean? OK, let me give you the facts, though I’ve a strong suspicion you won’t need them. Alex Wolfe was a good mate and a good cop. But like you know, even good cops can come under suspicion. Nothing was ever proven, there was no smoking gun, just enough smoke to make it necessary to take a closer look.’

‘Resigning and doing a runner smells very smoky to me.’

‘He was under a lot of pressure. Not just the investigation. I reckon that was just the straw that broke him. Look, what exactly did Gina tell you?’

‘Something about a family bereavement. A kid. No details.’

‘No, she wouldn’t want to get into that. All those years and it’s still painful, so we can only guess what it must have felt like back then. It was their daughter, Lucy. She’d been diagnosed with a rare form of acute leukaemia. They tried everything, travelled everywhere; it was a real switchback for a couple of years. And just when they thought that maybe this time they had it licked, bang, she was gone. She was six, by the way.’

‘Jesus. What a fucking world.’

‘Yeah. A thing like that takes people different ways. Some couples turn to each other. Some turn on each other. I think Gina wanted all the support she could get, but Alex went right back in on himself. He just wasn’t there for her, and didn’t want anyone to be there for him. He got compassionate leave. Then this investigation thing came up.’

‘Nice timing,’ said Dalziel.

‘Oh yes. I’m sure those Internal Investigation rats thought so. They had to box clever. Pressurizing a bereaved cop at his most vulnerable doesn’t play well. Unless they got cast-iron proof of corruption out of it, they’d end up with a lot of egg on their faces.’

‘And they didn’t? Get proof, I mean.’

‘I never saw the paperwork, but obviously not. When Alex took off, there was a debate about classifying him as a fugitive, but his boss put his foot down. That was Owen Mathias. Did you know him?’

‘Heard of him. Died, didn’t he, soon after he retired?’

‘Yeah. Always a bad move that, retiring. On the job you don’t have enough time to die. I think Owen felt a bit guilty about Alex. Operation Macavity was Mathias’s baby. He was obsessed with Goldie Gidman. Thought the guy was laughing at us. So when Macavity started getting nowhere, Owen called foul and asked Internal to check it out, and they looked for an easy target and turned up Alex.’

‘So Mathias didn’t point the finger himself?’

‘I don’t think so. And after Alex vanished, he told the rat pack that, seeing as they’d found nothing to charge him with while he was in their sights, they weren’t going to blacken his name when he wasn’t around to defend himself. So, no warrant.’

‘What about media coverage? Them sharks can smell blood at a Scotch mile.’

‘A bit of local interest, but we had it covered. Alex had written a letter of resignation when they put him on compassionate. Mathias had stuck it in his desk drawer till he saw how things panned out. When the time came, he dug it up and slipped it into the files. So when the press started asking questions, all they found was an ex-cop who’d resigned because of personal problems, then walked away. Worth a para or two on a bad day.’

‘And you personally, Mick? What did you think had happened?’

‘Breakdown, maybe. Losing a kid’s devastating for anyone, and Alex was the sensitive sort — university entrant, bit of a bleeding heart, you probably know the type.’

‘Yeah, I’ve got one of them, but mine’s come along nicely. Like they say, you can do a lot with a graduate if you catch the bugger young.’

‘True, and I had high hopes of Alex, but it wasn’t to be. So, as I say, some kind of breakdown seemed favourite, but as time went by and there wasn’t the slightest trace, no movement on his bank account, nothing on credit cards, no contact with Gina…’

‘You knew that for certain?’

‘I believed her then and, since we got close, I’ve been absolutely sure. Anyway, as time went by I stopped thinking breakdown. Something doesn’t move for that long, it’s got to be dead.’

‘Right,’ said Dalziel. ‘Educated guess at how he might have died?’

‘Could have cracked under the strain and topped himself,’ said Purdy. ‘Could have been an accident. Guy in his state of mind is quite capable of walking under a bus.’