Midnight Fugue (31 page)

‘Hey, Pete, don’t forget to tell him Novello’s on the mend,’ Wield called after him.

Over his shoulder Pascoe rasped, ‘I’ll do better than that, Wieldy. I’ll maybe put him in the next bed so he can find out for himself.’

17.00–18.00

Maggie Pinchbeck sat in her flat, which in total occupied about the same space as Beanie Sample’s bedroom, and downloaded Gwyn Jones’s folder on Goldie Gidman. The greater part of it consisted of confidential police intelligence reports. It occurred to her that you’d probably get a longer sentence for having this stuff on your computer than you would for downloading child pornography.

She had her own file on Gidman, compiled when putting in her application for the post of Dave’s PA. She had confronted the man himself and been impressed by the way he answered her questions. Subsequently she had found much to admire in him and she’d become really fond of his wife, Flo. Personal feelings apart, she knew that, when he became a donor, the Millbank mandarins would have sent in their most experienced investigators to run their beady eyes over him. They would probably have seen everything in Gwyn Jones’s Gidman file and found nothing that came close to usable evidence of wrong-doing.

Nor did Maggie.

Yet underpinning everything in the folder was the unswerving certainty on the part of at least one policeman, Owen Mathias, that Goldie Gidman was a villain. Operation Macavity had been Mathias’s last throw of the dice before Gidman moved lock stock and barrel away from his shadowy beginnings into the sunlit uplands of the commercial Establishment.

And Macavity failed. Either because there was nothing to find, or because someone had been keeping Goldie two steps ahead of the investigation.

Mathias, naturally, had gone for the latter option. Internal Investigations had looked for the man most likely and picked on DI Alex Wolfe, although there did not seem to have been a scrap of real evidence against the man. Even his disappearance was less suggestive than it might have been when you considered the tragic circumstances of his family life.

She Googled Mathias. He had retired from the Met a year after the failure of Macavity. Perhaps that had contributed to his going. Or it might have been ill health as he died just a year later.

She guessed that he had been the source of all these confidential files in Jones’s folder. And from him also she presumed Jones had inherited his strong antipathy towards the Gidmans,
père et fils
.

Not that it mattered why Jones was so obsessed. What mattered was where his investigation was going to lead.

She started reading again, this time selectively, making notes.

What she ended up with was just one name to put alongside that of Alex Wolfe.

Mick Purdy.

Purdy’s name occurred only three times.

Thirty-odd years ago DC Purdy, no initial, had taken a witness statement — or rather an
alleged
witness statement, as the alleged witness denied having seen anything.

Forward a couple of decades and it’s DCI Purdy now answering the questions from Internal Investigations and giving DI Alex Wolfe a glowing testimonial.

Jump to the present and Commander Mick Purdy is in a close relationship with Gina Wolfe, wife or, as she probably imagined until recently, widow of Alex Wolfe, tragic father and/or bent copper, who vanished without trace seven years back.

Did it mean anything? She knew from study and observation that many of the great political scandals arose because someone got spooked into believing that something meant something it didn’t. And by the time the error was realized, it was too late, the hounds were loose, and they were not going to let themselves be whipped back into their kennel before they’d torn something to pieces.

Another chance to quiz Goldie might be helpful, but she could hardly ring him up and demand an interview.

She sipped on a can of orange juice and nibbled at a wedge of cheddar. It seemed a long time since she’d had a real meal. Coffee and a stale muffin for breakfast had been supplemented by a snatched half-sandwich at the Centre opening. She thought of ordering in a pizza. Then her phone rang.

It was Dave Gidman.

‘Maggie, that stuff you said we should do tonight. Is it urgent?’

‘Pretty urgent. Why?’

‘Thing is, I’m not at home. I’m at Windrush House. Thought I’d probably spend the night here, make an early start in the morning. That way I can really explore Pappy’s disgustingly expensive cellar. And I don’t have to worry that my shower is suddenly going to freeze my bollocks off. You’re sure the Chuckle Brothers are coming to fix it in the morning?’

‘Yes, they’ll be there, don’t worry,’ said Maggie. ‘I can come up to Windrush now, if you like. Best we get things done before you start popping corks.’

‘If you’re sure it won’t keep,’ said Dave, without a great deal of enthusiasm.

‘Unlike Goldie’s wine, it certainly won’t improve with keeping,’ said Maggie. ‘I’ll be there about half six.’

She sat still for a moment after the call. Her earlier feeling that she was on some kind of lucky roll had evaporated. Or rather it had changed into a sense of being pushed towards some place she might not want to be. First the lying call from Jones just before she spoke to Beanie on the
Shah-Boat
. Then the email from Gem Huntley stoking up the Bitch’s resentment again and giving her access to the Goldie folder.

And now, just when she’d been thinking another chat with Goldie Gidman would be useful to clear things up, Dave had given her the chance to revisit Windrush House.

Perhaps the wise move would be to delete the computer folder, ring Dave and say the morning would do after all, and settle down to a night with the telly.

Except she had a job to do, and she’d decided a long time ago that doing your chosen job was the only thing that made sense out of life.

Correction.

The only thing that might for some portion of three score years and ten delude you into thinking life made any sense at all.

furioso

PRELUDE

It is like waking.

Waking is odd. Sometimes sudden, like bursting through the surface of a pool after long minutes swimming under water. Light, air, sound, all in a terrifying triumphal confusion.

Sometimes so slow and gradual that there are stages when you still do not know if you wake or sleep.

He has been waking gradually.

That moment when he thought love and joy had brought him fully back to the waking world he now realizes was only a partial waking, the border country where dreams and reality meet and are still confused.

Such certainty of happiness, such a sense of renewal, of leaving the old far behind and striding forward joyously towards the new, had made him feel invulnerable, had led him to take the risk, which of course he did not see as a risk.

He sees it now.

As clearly as he sees the long straight road tapering downhill before him, empty except for the bright red car.

There is nothing in sight behind it. He has summoned it here to make sure it is alone. That piece of planning, of forethought, belongs to that old world he now knows he has to wake into. He hasn’t left it behind him. He’d been fooling himself to think there was any way he could ever do that.

The final act of waking will take place when he speaks into his phone.

He waits. And he waits. Then he waits some more.

He tells himself this long wait is necessary. He has to be absolutely sure nothing has followed the red car. But he knows in truth it has nothing to do with being secure, at least not in that sense. He needs to be confident that the barriers he has built to protect his new world are strong enough to resist all onslaughts from the old.

So still he waits.

Then finally, knowing if he does not speak now, he may never speak, he raises the phone to his lips and says, ‘Leave the car. Walk up the hill to the pub. Go to the car park.’

The late afternoon has an autumn chill at its edges. The car park has only a handful of cars in it, mostly parked near the entrance to the pub. His is parked in the corner furthest away. He is the only person out here.

He watches the blonde woman get out of the red car and start walking up the hill.

He puts his phone in his pocket and gets himself ready for the final waking.

17.55–18.15

‘Hello, Gina.’

‘Hello, Alex.’

This was the real, the final waking. Here they were, face to face, standing awkwardly, like a pair of youngsters uncertain where their first date is going to take them.

He made no attempt to touch her. A handshake would have been absurd, a kiss obscene. What would he say? What would for him be the most important thing to say?

He said, ‘Let’s sit in my car.’

She followed him to an old pale grey Astra in need of a good scrubbing. She remembered that when she used to complain about the condition of his vehicle, he’d grin and say, ‘Man in my line of work wants a car nobody takes notice of.’ She remembered…

She dug her nails into the palms of her hands. Once let memories take control and all the pain she had fought her way through seven years ago would come rushing in again, and she did not know if she had the strength to fight it a second time.

She got into the passenger seat, he got behind the wheel.

He looked straight ahead and said, ‘I came to see you… to see how things were.’

She turned her head to look at him. It was definitely him, but different. Concentrate on the differences, they would help anchor her in the here and now. Head shaven, nothing remaining of those light fair locks so easily ruffled by even the gentlest breeze. Face slightly fatter. Strange. She would have looked for it to be thinner. She knew hers was.

She said, ‘Last year.’

‘Yes.’

‘You were in the street… late one night…’

‘Very late. I’d arrived earlier in the evening. No one was in. I waited. I needed to see… how things were…’

‘And you saw me and Mick. You saw us embracing. You saw me take him into the house.’

‘Yes.’

‘How did that make you feel?’

He didn’t answer and she said impatiently, ‘It must have made you feel something.’

Interrogation. Take control, set the agenda. Mick had said that. Or was it Alex? Did it matter? Somehow it felt that it did.

He said, ‘It made me feel relieved. It confirmed who I was, where I was.’

He turned his head now and looked straight at her.

‘I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt you.’

‘Not hurt me?’ she cried incredulously. ‘You disappeared. All those years without a sound. And suddenly you feel you don’t want to hurt me!’

He shook his head and said, ‘Back then, to start with I knew nothing, I was nothing. I didn’t think about hurting you because I didn’t know anything about you. Or about anything. Even when things started coming back, they had nothing to do with feelings. For a long time I was just a sackful of fragments trying to learn how best to reassemble itself.’

Take control, set the agenda
. Well, that didn’t last long, she mocked herself.

‘Fragments?’ she echoed.

‘I was in pieces. I didn’t just run away and hide from you, Gina. I hid from myself. You have to believe that.’

‘Of course I believed that,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t let myself think you’d simply abandoned me without a word. I told myself it had to be something in your mind, or…’

‘Or?’

‘Or you were dead. I didn’t think that at first. It took me a long time to come round to that. But after so many years of nothing, that became the easiest thing to believe.’

‘So Mick was…’

‘A long time after I gave up on you. Not until I was sure you were never coming back. You know what made me sure? It was seeing you that night in the street. For a moment you were so real I knew you had to be an illusion. Does that make sense?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, because seeing you, and Mick, made me realize that to me, the new me, you were an illusion too.’

She wanted to scream, But I was there! I hadn’t run away! You could have stepped out of the shadows and spoken to me, how the hell dare you say that I was an illusion too?

Instead she said, ‘And that’s why you were relieved. Because you decided I was… what? Unreal? Unimportant?
What
?’

‘You were with Mick. You’d moved on. You weren’t letting the past rule your life. We had nothing to give each other except pain. Better for both of us that we ceased to exist to each other.’

They sat in silence for a moment, their eyes averted, then she burst out, ‘So why are you here now, Alex? What’s going on? You say you decided we had nothing to give each other but pain. So why the hell are we sitting here now?’

He turned his head to meet her gaze once more.

‘Not to hurt you, believe me,’ he said. ‘I’m truly sorry…’