Midnight Fugue (16 page)

‘Beef, is it? How’s it cooked?’

‘It’s not.’

‘Bloody hell! My dad used to warn me, never get mixed up with a lass who eats raw meat!’

‘Perhaps you should have listened to him,’ she said. ‘But it tastes fine. Really.’

‘Well, I’ll try owt, except for incest and the Lib Dems.’

He cut off a sliver, chewed it, said, ‘Not bad,’ and pulled her plate towards him.

His second bottle of Barolo was almost gone.

She on the other hand was showing no inclination to push beyond her second glass. Pity, perhaps. But waste not, want not.

He said, ‘The rest of yon white stuff, you’re not leaving that too, are you?’

Smiling she pushed the bottle towards him.

He had made good inroads into the raw beef when his phone rang again. He looked at the display and said, ‘’Scuse me, luv. Private,’ stood up and descended the steps towards the garden before answering.

‘Wieldy,’ he said.

‘That number, I’ve got a name and address,’ said the sergeant.

Dalziel scribbled it down into his notebook.

‘Thanks, Wieldy.’

‘No problem. Owt I should know about, sir? Or Pete, mebbe?’

‘Talk about it tomorrow,’ prevaricated Dalziel. ‘And if I need to talk to Pete, as it happens I’m looking at the bugger right this minute. Thanks, Wieldy. Cheers.’

It was true, more or less. He could distantly see Pascoe’s head among a group of people at the buffet party.

He thumbed in Novello’s number.

‘Ivor, here’s the name and address. Alun Watkins, 39 Loudwater Villas. Listen, see what you can find out, but softly softly, OK? Good girl. No, no need to get back to me. Unless something really important comes up, it’ll keep till the morning. Enjoy thasel!’

He suddenly felt very relaxed. Maybe it was the fact that he’d sunk two bottles of lovely Italian plonk, but relaxing here in the sun looking out over a garden where the glories of summer were enhanced rather than threatened by the first touch of autumn, with that pleasantly mazy music drifting up from the gazebo while behind him, impatient (he hoped) for his return, sat a golden-haired damsel begging him to ease her distress, he found he’d shed all the doubts and concerns that had beset him since his return to work.

And there was still pudding to come!

Once more master of his soul and captain of his fate, he could do anything he wanted.

Except maybe drive home.

But sufficient be the evil…

He turned round and realized Gina Wolfe had risen too and was standing close behind him. Close enough to have overheard? Mebbe. But it didn’t matter. He’d said nowt that suggested the calls had anything to do with her.

She said, ‘This is a lovely spot, isn’t it? It seems somehow, I don’t know,
ungrateful
to be unhappy in such a place on such a day.’

‘Then let’s try not to be unhappy,’ he said, leading her back to the table and pouring an inch of golden wine into her glass and filling his own to the brim. ‘Let’s have a toast. To a bright future, eh?’

‘No,’ she said seriously. ‘Don’t tempt fate by bringing in the future.’

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Wise man sticks to here and now. So, let’s see. Here’s to Iti wine, English weather, and a little chance music out of doors. Cheers!’

‘I’ll drink to that,’ she said, smiling.

13.00–13.40

David Gidman the Third stepped up to the microphone and acknowledged the applause.

Pinchbeck had been right. Again. The crowd at the opening was at least fifty per cent larger than the church congregation. The bloody woman had probably also been right to run interference when that dishy deaconess had tried to top up his glass on the vicarage lawn. The notion of pleasuring a woman in canonicals was strangely appealing.

He shook the thought from his mind and concentrated on carrying his audience back to 1948 and the arrival in England of the
Empire Windrush
, bringing with it David Gidman the First and his young son, not yet known as Goldie.

Maggie listened critically as he outlined his grandfather’s early days in the East End, his emergence as a community leader, his rise from railway cleaner to guard on the
Flying Scotsman
. She had to acknowledge he was good. More convincing than Cameron, beefier than Brown, less lachrymose than Blair, he had it all. In the right hands he could really go far.

He made the transition from his grandfather to his father with consummate ease, projecting Goldie as a hard-working, self-made entrepreneur who’d used the opportunities offered by a benevolent state to get an education and make a fortune.

‘There was one other thing my dad shared with his dad as well as a capacity for hard work,’ he declared. ‘Neither of them ever forgot where they came from. They always gave something back and the more they earned the more they gave.

‘Now here am I, the third generation of the UK Gidmans. By their standards, I’ve had it easy. Not for me the long journey across a wide ocean to a new land, a new life. Not for me the long journey from the back streets of the East End to the boardrooms of the City. No, I stand before you, benefiting from the advantages of going to a first-rate school and a first-rate university.

‘Yet I do not feel any need to apologize for these advantages. They’ve been paid for, and paid for with interest, by the love and the devotion and the damned hard work of my father and his father.

‘But I’m always aware that, if I’m to show myself worthy of their efforts, their love, their sacrifice, then I too have payments to make.

‘I’m proud of my pappy and of my granpappy, and I want to make them proud of me. It’s people like you standing here before me today who will tell me by your comments and your votes if I succeed.

‘But I won’t be doing my political career much good if I keep you any longer from the refreshments waiting inside! So without further ado, I would like to declare the David Gidman the First Memorial Community Centre well and truly open.’

He took the scissors that Maggie handed him and flourished them for the cameras, making sure his head was inclined slightly to the right. Both profiles were good, but the left was slightly better. Silently he counted up to three, then he snipped the white silk ribbon stretched across the open double door of the ultra-modern reflective glass and white concrete building squatting like a crash-landed space cruiser within world record javelin-throwing distance of the no man’s land that was allegedly going to blossom into the London Olympic village.

He acknowledged the applause, then stood aside and waved the public in towards the promised refreshments.

First to the barricades, last to the refreshments, that’s the way to win hearts and minds, Maggie said. He looked for her now, and saw her making sure that the Centre manager had taken control of the official civic party so that she could give her full attention to the much more important posse of journalists.

She’d vetoed Dave’s suggestion of a formal press conference.

‘That would make it look like it’s all about you,’ she said.

‘But it is,’ he objected. ‘That’s why Pappy said he’d stay away.’

‘Yes, but we don’t want it to look like that. It’s OK, you’ll get the coverage.’

To this end, she stage managed a series of semi-private conversations as they trailed in the wake of the civic party. All PAs like to claim they can deal with the press. Maggie was one of the few who actually could. So unobtrusive you never knew she was there till you stepped out of line, she was gaining a reputation for never failing to deliver on a promise, or a threat.

First up was the
Independent
. Not their top political man; you needed something a bit meatier than an upwardly mobile young politician opening a community centre to get him off his wife’s Norfolk estate on a Sunday. No, this was a pleasant enough young fellow called… he needed Maggie’s whisper this time.

‘Hello, Piers. Good to see you.’

‘Thank you, Mr Gidman. Your father must be disappointed he couldn’t be here today. How’s he keeping?’

‘He’s fine. Just a touch of cold. Thanks for asking.’

‘Hope he shakes it off soon. But we don’t seem to have seen a lot of him recently anyway. Not leaving the field clear so you can shine, is he?’

‘No one shines brighter than Goldie Gidman, isn’t that what they say? No, he just likes the quiet life nowadays.’

‘Quiet? I understand he’s in and out of Millbank all the time, helping the shadow chancellor get his sums right in the current crisis.’

‘He’s always available when his country needs him, but today he really is treating himself to a day of rest.’

‘Unlike you, eh? Busy busy, in and out of the House. Where do you get the energy? Your friends must be worried you’re taking too much on.’

‘You know what they say — if you want something done, ask a busy man.’

‘I’m sure the PM agrees with you. There’s a rumour going around that there may be something for you in the next reshuffle. Any comment?’

‘I am at my Party’s and my country’s disposal.’

‘And the rumour…?’

‘Almost impossible to stop a rumour, Piers, so do keep spreading it.’

Now Maggie Pinchbeck materialized between them and with a sweet smile indicated that the reporter’s time was up. Obediently he moved aside.

Next up was the
Guardian
. Again second string, though his well-worn bomber jacket and balding suede shoes looked as if they’d been handed down by his superior.

He too wanted to focus on Goldie Gidman’s contributions to the Tory coffers. When he started getting aggressive, suggesting that if Goldie wasn’t looking for some payback to himself, maybe he regarded it as an investment in his son’s career, Maggie stepped in again, turning as she did so to signal the next journalist on her list to move forward. It should have been Gem Huntley, a rather pushy young woman from the
Daily Messenger
. Instead it was Gwyn Jones, who was to political scandal what a blow-fly is to dead meat, and he’d been trying to settle on the Gidmans ever since Dave the Third burst on the scene.

‘Gwyn,’ she said, ‘good to see you! What happened? Shandy not sending double invites then?’

It never did any harm to let these journalists know that they weren’t the only ones who kept their eyes and ears open. She knew about the Shandy party because Gidman had been sent an invitation which she’d made sure never reached him. While fairly confident she could have persuaded him that cancelling the Centre opening to attend what the tabloids were calling the mega-binge of the month would have been a PR disaster, it had seemed simpler and safer merely to remove the temptation.

Jones smiled in sardonic acknowledgement of the suggestion that he would only have been invited on Beanie’s ticket and said, ‘Man cannot live on caviar alone. Give me a good honest sandwich any time. Anyway, young Gem wasn’t feeling too well this morning so they asked me if I could step in.’

He made as little effort to sound convincing as Maggie did to sound sincere as she replied, ‘I’m sorry to hear that, hope she’s OK. David, we’re honoured today. The
Messenger’s
sent their top man to talk to you.’

She had to give it to Dave. Not by a flicker did he show anything but pleasure as he smiled and said, ‘Gwyn, great to see you. Must have missed you at St Osith’s.’

‘Didn’t make the service, Dave, sorry. Good to see you’re taking your leader’s strictures to heart. What was it he said?
Religion should have no politics. We will all stand naked before God
. When doubtless we will find if size really does matter.’

Gidman’s heart lurched. Could the bastard be on to Sophie?

But his smile remained warm and his voice was light and even as he replied, ‘You’re talking about majorities, of course. So what do you think of the Centre?’

‘Looks great. No expense spared, eh? Folk round here must be very grateful.’

‘Gratitude isn’t the issue. We just want to put something back into the area.’

‘Yeah, I can see why you’d feel like that. Though it does raise the question, would it ever really be possible for your family to fully put back in everything you’ve taken out? You’d have to build something like Buck House, wouldn’t you?’

Maggie was taken aback. The
Messenger
was never going to be Gidman’s friend, and Jones hated his guts, but even so his approach here was unusually frontal.

Her employer’s initial reaction was relief. Sexual innuendo would have bothered him. Anti-Goldie slurs were old hat and easily dealt with.

‘Do what you can then do a little more, isn’t that what they say?’ he declared.

‘Is it? Who was that? Alex Ferguson?’

‘Someone even older, I think. Confucius, perhaps.’

‘That’s really old. But we should always pay attention to the past, right, Dave? You never know when something’s going to come up behind you and bite your bum. Man with a bitten bum finds out who his real friends are. Of course, it depends what’s doing the biting. A flea would just be irritating, but something a bit bigger, like a
wolf
, say, that could be serious. You wouldn’t have a
wolf
trying to take a bite somewhere behind you, Dave?’

Why the hell was he stressing
wolf
?

‘Not even a flea to the best of my knowledge, Gwyn.’

‘Lucky you. Talking of the past, I heard a rumour your dad was thinking of writing his autobiography.’

‘Another rumour! Definitely nothing in that one, Gwyn. I once suggested it to him and he said, who’d want to read about a dull old devil like me?’

‘Oh, I think there’s quite a lot of people who’d like to hear the whole moving story, Dave,
wolves
and all. If he ever does go down that road, I’d be more than happy to help him out with the research. It’s never easy digging up the past. People move on, disappear. That’s where a journalist could come in really useful. We’ve got the skills. Finding disappeared people’s a bit of a specialty of mine.’

‘That’s a kind offer. I’ll be sure to mention it to him, Gwyn.’

His gaze flickered to Maggie, who took the hint and brought the interview to a close by advancing the friendly face of the
Daily Telegraph
. For which relief much thanks, thought Gidman. The
Telegraph
loved him. But as he answered the bromidic questions, the voice he was hearing in his mind was still Gwyn Jones’s.