Midnight Fugue

‘You want I should still be hanging round here like this when Pinchbeck turns up? I can feel those beady little eyes tracking over every inch of flesh, looking for bite marks. You knew about this when I rang yesterday afternoon, right? But you didn’t say a thing in case I told you I didn’t care to be kicked out of bed at sparrowfart like some cheap tart. Well, I bloody well don’t!’

She disappeared into the bathroom. He heard the new power shower switch on. Half a minute later there was an enraged scream and Sophie appeared dripping water in the doorway.

‘You some kind of masochist, or what?’ she demanded. ‘That shower, it’s gone from red hot to icy cold of its own accord.’

He regarded her indifferently. Even a nicely put together body like hers ceased to be a turn-on when it was wet and goose-pimpled and topped by a face contorted by anger.

‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘I’ve been having some problems. Maggie got me a couple of Poles to fix things. Looks like I’ll need to have them back.’

‘Maggie!’ she spat. ‘I might have known she’d have something to do with it!’

She vanished.

David Gidman the Third yawned then picked up a remote from the dressing table and clicked it at a mini hi-fi system on top of a chest of drawers. Terfel’s sumptuous voice started singing ‘Ich habe genug’.

‘Now that’s what I call serendipity,’ he said.

He turned to a full-length mirror set in the wardrobe door and sang along for a while, studying himself in the glass.

Golden-skinned, craggily handsome, muscularly slim, reasonably well hung, and above all youthful; David Gidman the Third MP, the Tory Party’s Great Oil-white Hope.

He stopped singing, dropped his voice, uttered a couple of gorilla grunts, scratched his balls, leered prognathically into the mirror, and said huskily, ‘The next PM but one–here’s looking at you, baby!’

08.55–09.15 (#ulink_f562d767-8966-5136-805e-becf72508d66)

For what felt like a good minute the woman called Gina Wolfe said nothing, but stared down at her hands, which were nervously plucking at the hem of her short skirt. Then suddenly out came a tumble of words.

‘Look,’ she said, ’the thing is, I’d like to make it clear from the start, I don’t want Alex dead…OK, I know that’s the way it started out, me needing to prove he was dead, but what I mean is if I found him alive I wouldn’t want him to be killed

‘Just as well, missus,’ interrupted Dalziel. “Cos I need to know folk really well afore I start doing favours like that.’

That stemmed the flow. Her hands stopped their movement and she looked him straight in the face. Then she smiled weakly.

‘I’m gabbling, aren’t I? It’s just that I didn’t think I was going to have to start at the start, so to speak.’

‘Because Mick Purdy would have put me in the picture, right? OK, let’s see if I can get you on track with a couple of questions. First, who’s Alex?’

‘Of course. Sorry. Alex Wolfe. My husband.’

‘And he left you?’

‘Yes. Well, no, I suppose strictly speaking I left him. But not really. I never abandoned him…I never thought of it as permanent…things had just got so bad that I needed space…we both did. And in a sense, he’d left me a long time before…’

‘Whoa!’ said Dalziel. ‘Lots of things I need to get straight afore we get into the blame game. Where was this? When was this? What did Alex Wolfe do for a living? Why did you leave him? I think that’ll do for starters.’

‘It was in Ilford, we lived in Ilford. I still do. That’s part of the problem…sorry. What did Alex do? He was like you. A policeman. Not as important. A detective inspector.’

Ilford. He’d heard of Ilford. It was in Essex. DI Mick Purdy had been with the Essex division of the Met. And Alex the walkabout husband had been a cop. Things were beginning to join up, but he was still a lot of lines short of a picture.

‘And you leaving him? What was that about? A woman?’

‘No! That would have been easy. Easier. It was a very bad time. For both of us. We lost…there was a bereavement…our daughter, Lucy…’

He could feel the effort she was making to keep herself together. Oh shit, he thought, me and my big boots. He’d have known about this presumably if he’d listened to Purdy on the phone.

On the other hand, not knowing meant he was getting everything up front, no pre-judgments.

He said, ‘I’m sorry, luv. Didn’t know. Must have been terrible.’

She said with unconvincing matter-of-factness, ‘Yes. Terrible just about sums it up. Certainly not the best of times to have this other stuff at work start up. Not that it seemed to bother Alex. He just didn’t seem to care. About anything. I got angry with him. I needed someone, but all he wanted was to be left alone. So I left him alone. I didn’t abandon him…we were in it together…except we weren’t…so I thought if left him alone…no I didn’t think that, I didn’t really think anything. I just had to be with people who would listen to me talking, and going into a room where Alex was felt like going into an empty room

She was off again. Dalziel could only see one thing in this turmoil that might have anything to do with him. If it helped the woman to focus, that would be a plus too.

This work stuff, what was that about?’ he interrupted.

She stopped talking and took a deep breath. Refocusing from her bereavement to her husband’s work problems seemed to bring a measure of genuine control. Her voice was stronger, less tremulous as she said, ‘They called it a leak enquiry, but it was actually about corruption. Alex was second in charge of a team targeting this businessman. It was called Operation Macavity That was a joke. From T.S. Eliot’s poem. You know, Cats, the musical.’

Dalziel was untroubled by the presumption that the only way he was likely to have heard of Eliot was via Cats. There were a lot of smart people spending a lot of hard time behind bars because they’d made similar presumptions.

‘Yeah, loved it,’ he said. ‘Because he was never there, right?’

‘Yes. But this time they had high hopes of getting to the man. It didn’t work out. I don’t know any details, but he always seemed to be several steps ahead of them. And while things were going wrong at work, at home things went into a nose dive…’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Dalziel, determined not to drift back towards the dead child. ‘So the powers that be started wondering how the hell this Macavity always knew what was going on.’

‘I suppose so. Why the rat pack–sorry, that’s what Mick Purdy calls Internal Investigations–why they focused on Alex, I don’t know. But they did.’

‘Did they suspend him?’ said Dalziel.

‘Didn’t need to. This all blew up at the same time as…the rest, and he was on compassionate leave, so he wasn’t going into work anyway’

‘So he’s at home, on compassionate leave, he’s in a state, the rat pack’s sniffing around, and eventually you leave him. Then…what? He takes off?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And you looked for him?’

‘Of course I looked for him!’ she exclaimed. ‘I got in touch with his friends, his relations. I talked to the neighbours. I checked out everywhere I thought he was likely to have gone, places we’d been on holiday, that sort of thing. I rang round hospitals. I did everything I could.’

‘Including telling the police, I suppose?’

‘Obviously,’ she snapped. ‘They were just about the first people I contacted. Why wouldn’t I?’

‘Well,’ said the Fat Man, ‘for a start, they’re investigating him, right? It must have crossed your mind maybe they’re the ones he’s running from. Not sure, in your shoes, they’re the first buggers I’d tell.’

She said tightly, ‘I knew Alex. I believed in him. He was confused, desperate maybe. But he certainly wasn’t corrupt. All I could think was he was out there somewhere, alone. So I called Mick Purdy. They were friends, so naturally I called Mick.’

He’d anticipated this was probably Purdy’s connection. How had he reacted to the news? he wondered. Like a friend or like a cop?