Midnight Fugue (2 page)

As they passed the woman, Vincent turned his head to stare at her through the open window. She noticed his interest and glared back, mouthing something inaudible.

‘Up yours too, you old scarecrow,’ growled the man.

‘Vince, don’t draw attention,’ said Fleur.

‘What attention? Must be a hundred. Probably deaf as a post and can’t remember anything that happened more than five minutes ago.’

‘Maybe,’ said the woman, turning into the car park and finding a spot a few cars along from the Nissan. Here they sat and watched as the fat man made his way towards the cathedral followed closely by the blonde.

‘Who the fuck is that?’ said Vince. ‘Can’t possibly be our guy, can it?’

The woman said, ‘Don’t swear, Vince. You know I don’t like it any time and particularly not on a Sunday.’

‘Sorry,’ he said sulkily. ‘Just wondering who Tubby is, that’s all.’

‘And it’s a good question,’ she said in a conciliatory tone. ‘But we know where he lives, so finding out won’t be a problem. Now get after them.’

‘Me?’ said Vince doubtfully. Following was subtle stuff. Usually he didn’t get to do the subtle stuff.

‘Yes. You can manage that, can’t you?’

‘Sure.’

He got out of the car, then stooped to the window.

‘What if they go inside?’

‘Follow them,’ she said in exasperation. ‘Grab a hymn book. Try to look religious. Now go!’

He set off at a rapid pace. Ahead he saw Blondie going into the cathedral.

He followed. Inside he stood still for a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the light. Blondie was easy to spot and through her he located Tubby.

When the woman sat down, he took a seat several rows behind her, picked up a hymn book, opened it at random.

His lips moved as he read the words.

The world is very evil,
The times are waxing late,
Be sober and keep vigil,
The Judge is at the gate.

Fucking judges, thought Vince.

08.12–08.25

For the first couple of miles, Andy Dalziel’s reaction to the surprisingly light traffic had been relief. He should get to the meeting in plenty of time and without use of what clever clogs Pascoe called
son et lumière
.

But by the time he approached the town centre, he was beginning to find the absence of other vehicles suspicious rather than surprising. This after all was Monday morning, when traffic was usually at its worst.

Couldn’t be a Bank Holiday, could it? Hardly. September had just turned into October. Last Bank Holiday, spent in a sea-side convalescent home, had been at the end of August. No more till Christmas, by which time the rest of the European Union would have had another half-dozen. Faintest sniff of no matter how obscure a saint’s day, and them buggers were parading idols, wrestling bulls and throwing donkeys off the Eiffel Tower. No wonder we had to win their wars for them!

He came out of his Europhobic reverie to discover that, despite being well ahead of the clock, his automatic pilot had directed him via his usual short-cut along Holyclerk Street in defiance of the sign restricting entry ‘within the bell’, i.e. into the area immediately surrounding the cathedral, to residents and worshippers. And now his suspicions about the lightness of traffic began to take on a more sombre hue.

There were people walking towards the cathedral with that anal-retentive demeanour the English tend to adopt when trying to look religious; not great numbers, but a lot more than he’d have expected to see at this time on a Monday morning. Mebbe during his absence there’d been a great conversion in Mid-Yorkshire. In fact, mebbe his absence had caused it!

Slowing to the pace of a little old lady clutching a large square volume bound in leather, its corners reinforced by brass triangles that gleamed like a set of knuckle-dusters, he leaned over to the passenger side and wound down the window.

‘How do, luv. Off to church, are you? Lovely morning for it.’

She turned, fixed him with a rheumy eye, and said, ‘My God, how desperate must you be! I’m seventy-nine. Go away, you pathetic man!’

‘Nay, luv, I just want to know what day it is,’ he protested.

‘A drunkard as well as a lecher! Go away, I say! I can defend myself.’

She took a swing at him with her brass-bound book which, had it connected, might have broken his nose. He accelerated away, but doubt was now strong enough to make him turn into the cathedral car park a hundred yards on.

A sporty red Nissan pulled in behind him. Its driver, a blonde in her late twenties, got out the same time as he did. She was wearing wrap-around shades against the autumn sunlight. She eased them forward on her nose, their eyes met and she gave him a smile. He thought of asking her what day it was but decided against it. This one might have hysterics or spray him with mace, and in any case back along the pavement the little old lady was approaching like the US cavalry. Time to talk to someone official and male.

At the cathedral’s great east door he could see a corpse-faced man in a black cassock acting as commissionaire. No backward collar, so a verger maybe. Or a cross-dressing vampire.

Dalziel moved towards him. As he entered the shadow of the great building his mind drifted back to a time when he’d been hauled along this street as God on top of a medieval pageant wagon and something like an angel had come floating down from the looming tower…

He pushed the disturbing memory from his mind as he reached the holy doorman.

‘So what’s on this morning, mate?’ he asked breezily.

The man gave him a slightly puzzled look as he replied, ‘Holy Communion now, matins at ten.’

Meant nothing, he reassured himself without conviction. The God-squad had services every day, even if all the congregation they could muster was a couple of geriatrics and a church mouse.

‘Owt special?’ he said. ‘I mean, is it a special Sunday, twenty-second afore Pancake Tuesday or summat?’

He hoped to hear something like, ‘Sunday? You must have had a good weekend. This is Monday!’ But he no longer expected it.

‘No, nothing special, sir. If you want it spelled out, it’s the twentieth after Trinity in Ordinary Time. Are you coming in?’

Rather unexpectedly, Dalziel found he was.

Partly because his route back to the car would mean passing the old lady with the knuckle-duster prayer book, but mainly because his legs and his mind were sending from their opposite poles the message that he needed to sit down somewhere quiet and commune with his inner self.

He passed through the cathedral porch and had to pause to let his eyes adjust from the morning brightness outside to the rich gloom of the interior. Its vastness dwindled the waiting worshippers from a significant number to a mere handful, concentrated towards the western end. He turned off the central aisle and found himself a seat in the lee of an ancient tomb topped with what were presumably life-sized effigies of its inmates. Must have been a bit disconcerting for the family to see Mam and Dad lying there every time they came to church, thought Dalziel. Particularly if the sculptor had caught a good likeness, which a very lively looking little dog at their feet suggested he might have done.

His mind was trying to avoid the unattractive mental task that lay before him. But he hadn’t got wherever he’d got by turning aside when the path turned clarty.

He closed his eyes, rested his head on his hands as if in prayer, and focused on one of the great philosophical questions of the twenty-first century.

Didn’t matter if it was Ordinary Time or Extraordinary Time, the question was, how the fuck had he managed to misplace a whole sodding day?

08.25–08.40

Gina Wolfe watched the bowed, still figure with envy.

He no longer looked fat; the cathedral’s vastness had dwindled him to frail mortal flesh like her own.

She did not know what pain had brought him here, but she knew about pain. What she did not know was how to find comfort and help in a place like this.

She hadn’t been inside a church since the funeral. That was seven years ago. And seven years before that she’d been at the same church for her wedding.

Patterns. Could they mean something? Or were they like crop circles, just some joker having a laugh?

At some point during the funeral her mind had started overlaying the two ceremonies. One of her wedding presents had been a vacuum cleaner, beautifully packaged in a gleaming white box. The small white coffin reminded her of this, and as the service progressed she found herself obsessed by the notion that they were burying her Hoover. She tried to tell Alex this, to assure him it was all right, it was just a vacuum cleaner they’d lost, but the face he turned on her did more than anything the words and the music and the place could do to reassert the dreadful reality.

Neither of them had cried, she remembered that. The church had been full of weeping, but they had moved beyond tears. She had knelt when invited to kneel but no prayer had come. She had stood for the hymns but she had not sung. The words that formed in her mind weren’t the words on the page before her, they were words she had seen when she was seventeen and still at school.

It had been a pre-A-level exercise.
Compare and contrast the following two poems
. One was Milton’s ‘On the Death of a Fair Infant’, the other Edwin Muir’s ‘The Child Dying’.

She’d had great fun mocking the classical formality of the earlier poem.

It began with child-abuse, she wrote, with the God of Winter’s chilly embrace giving the Fair Infant the cough that killed her. And it ended with an attempt at consolation so naff it was almost comic.

Think what a present thou to God hast sent.

Any mother finding comfort in this, she’d written, must have been a touch disappointed it hadn’t been triplets.

Perhaps her pathetic confusion of the coffin and the wedding gift box was a late payback for this mockery.

The other poem, viewing death through a child’s eyes, she’d been much more taken with. In fact the Scot, Muir, had become one of her favourite poets, though now her love for him, sparked by ‘The Child Dying’, seemed peculiarly ill-omened.

Back then its opening lines —
Unfriendly friendly universe, I pack your stars into my purse, And bid you, bid you so farewell —
had struck her as being at the same time touchingly child-like and cosmically resonant. But she knew now she had been delighting in the skill of the poet rather than the power of his poem.

Then she had been admiring the resonance from outside; now it was in her being.

I did not know death was so strange.

Now she knew.

And she was sure that the Fair Infant’s mother, Milton’s sister, must have known this too, must have felt the cold blast of that air
blown from the far side of despair
.

But did she
wisely learn to curb her sorrows wild
? Had she been able to draw warmth from her brother’s poem and wrap herself in its formality? Find support in those stiff folds of words?

Had she been able to sit in a church and bury her grief in these rituals of faith?

If she had, Gina Wolfe envied her. She’d found no such comforts to turn to.

At least she hadn’t fled. Unlike Alex. She had found the strength to stay, to endure, to rebuild.

But was it strength? For years her first thought on waking and her last thought before sleeping had been of lost Lucy. And then it wasn’t. Did a day pass when she didn’t think of her daughter? She couldn’t swear to it. That first time she’d given herself to Mick, she’d pendulum’d between joy and guilt. But later, when they holidayed together in Spain, she recalled the extremes as contentment and ecstasy with never a gap for a ghost to creep through.

Perhaps this meant that Alex had loved so much he could only survive the loss by losing himself, whereas she…

She pushed the thought away. She could do that.

Was that strength?

Alex couldn’t. The thought pushed him away.

Was that weakness?

These were questions beyond her puzzling.

Maybe that portly figure two rows ahead, sitting as still as the statues on the tomb above him, would have the answers.

08.25–08.40

Fleur Delay watched her brother disappear into the cathedral then opened her bag and from it took a small pack of tablets. She slipped one into her mouth and washed it down with a swig of water from a bottle in the door pocket.

Letting Vince loose in a cathedral was not normally an option, but it had seemed marginally better than collapsing in the car park.

She took another tablet. After a while she began to feel a little better. All the car windows were wide open to admit the morning air. Now she closed them and took out her mobile phone. There was no one in hearing distance but minimizing risk was an instinct so deep ingrained it had ceased to be a thought process.

She speed-dialled a number. It took a long time for it to be answered.

‘
Buenos dÃas, señor
,’ she said. ‘
Soy Señora Delay
.’

She listened to the response for a while then interrupted in English.

‘Yes, I know it’s Sunday and I know it’s early, but I don’t know where it says in our very expensive agreement that you stop working for me at weekends or before nine o clock. I’ll write it in if you like, but I’ll cut your fee by half,
comprende usted
?’

She listened again, cut in again.

‘OK, no need to grovel. I just want a progress report. And before you start on with the crappy reasons why things move so slowly over there, you ought to know I’m looking to move in a bit earlier than planned. Four weeks, tops. That means not a day longer than four weeks, OK?’

After she’d finished her call, she opened the windows again and took another drink of water.

This had not been a good idea, but turning down The Man could have been a worse one.

She leaned back in her seat and relaxed. She didn’t fall asleep but drifted into a state of waking reverie that was becoming more and more common as her medication increased proportionately to her illness. The past would come and sit next to her. She could see the world as it was at present with the great cathedral towering over her, but it floated on her retina like a mirage. It was the images nudging her memory that felt like reality.