Midnight Fugue

‘Back then, Miss Pinchbeck, half a century ago, things were very different in Britain. Black people were expected to know their place. Physically, that place was usually a slum. Professionally it was a low-paid manual job. Sexually it was with their own kind. You saw a black man who complained about living accommodation, a black man who understood how money could be made to work, a black man who married a white girl, what you saw was an uppity nigger who needed to be put back in his place. He makes money, it must be ’cos he’s a crook. He marries out of his race, that’s because like all black men he has this insatiable lust to bang a white woman. As for the white woman in question, everybody knows that she has to be a whore who’s turned on by the thought of his eighteen-inch bone. I hope I don’t shock you, Miss Pinchbeck.’

‘No, Mr Gidman, you don’t shock me. So all the rumours about your early career are malicious? But weren’t you investigated by the police?’

‘All the time! Malice don’t dry up. Like floodwater, it can’t find one way of getting under your defences, it looks for another. If it can’t get under, it just mounts up, looking either to come in at you over the top or to break through by sheer pressure alone.’

‘You sound bitter, Mr Gidman.’

‘Not for myself. I’ve fought against it for too long. I’ve got its measure. In fact, I thought I’d won the battle a few years ago. But then my son comes of age and begins to make his mark in the world and suddenly the floodwaters see what looks like a breach. The rumours start again. But I’m not the target now. I’m out of reach. They tried everything they know to blacken my name, but you check the records, Miss Pinchbeck. I have no convictions for anything. Not surprising, as I never got charged with anything. My business accounts have been picked over by people more picky than hens in a coop at feeding time, and none of them ever found a single decimal point out of place.’

‘So why are the rumours so persistent?’

‘Like I say, because of David here. Me they can’t touch because they need proof to touch me. But they don’t need no proof to harm David. Let the rumours grow strong enough and they will do the trick. Look at him, people will say, throwing his money around to buy advantages for himself. And we all know where that dirty money came from. You hear what I’m saying, Miss Pinchbeck?’

‘Yes, I do, Mr Gidman. But I’m wondering why you’re bothering to say it to me.’

Now at last she’d asked a question Dave the Third was interested in. He couldn’t believe that Pappy was letting this chit of a girl get away with her impudence. His father’s answer was even harder to believe.

‘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 short-cutting. 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 (#ulink_3ed66153-9fe6-5431-8156-376287871a49)

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.