Midnight Fugue. Reginald Hill
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didn’t care to pursue the acquaintance, it was no skin off his nose.
‘OK. Where?’ she said without hesitation. So he must have made an impression. Or she were really desperate!
He said, ‘You’re at the Keldale, right? All the best folk take Sunday lunch on the terrace there. Tell them you want a table overlooking the gardens. Any problem, tell Lionel Lee, the manager, you’re meeting me.’
‘Mick said you were a man of influence,’ she said.
‘Did he now?’
For perhaps the first time since his return, he actually felt like it.
He stood up. She remained sitting.
‘You not leaving?’ he said.
‘I think I’ll sit and listen to the music for a while,’ she said.
‘Oh aye?’ Then recalling he was allegedly here because he was fond of this chase-me-round-the-houses stuff, he added, ‘You a fan of old Bach then?’
‘Very much so. Occupational hazard. I’m a music teacher by profession.’
That surprised him. His notion of music teachers involved wire-rimmed spectacles, scrubbed cheeks, and hair in a bun. Mebbe he should get out more.
‘Grand job,’ he said, overcompensating for his uncharitable thoughts. ‘Kids can’t get too much music’
‘Indeed,’ she said, smiling at him warmly. ‘It’s good to know we have music in common, Mr Dalziel. It wasn’t something I anticipated from the way Mick spoke of you. Sorry, I don’t mean to be rude…’
‘Forget to mention I was Renaissance Man, did he?’ said Dalziel. ‘Mind you, all I can recall of his tastes is he fancied himself as Rod Stewart on the karaoke.’
‘Still does. And he can’t tell a fugue from a fandango.’
She smiled again. She really was fine-looking woman. Mebbe his knight-errant days weren’t done and dusted after all. Mebbe Sir Andy of the Drooping Lance had one last tilt in him.
He began to walk away but had only gone half a dozen steps when she called after him.
‘Mr Dalziel, you didn’t say what time for lunch.’
His stomach rumbled as if in response, reminding him he’d skimped on breakfast in his rush to not be late.
‘Best make it twelvish,’ he said. ‘Folks up here stick to the old timetables, even when they’re eating at the Keldale.’
And I’d not like to get there and find the roast beef had run out, he added to himself as he turned away.
He wasn’t unhappy to be getting out of the cathedral. There was something weird and disturbing about all that space. But he had a curious fancy as he strode towards the door that he could hear little feet pattering behind him.
He glanced back and met the eager eyes of the marble dog peering over the edge of the tomb.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Another time, eh? I’ll be back.’
And to his surprise he found he actually meant it.
Fleur Delay watched the fat guy come out of the cathedral.
No sign of Vince.
She guessed he’d be suffering an agony of indecision about whether to follow the man or stick with the woman. Vince didn’t do structured thinking. Rationalizing his way to a choice was like walking across hot coals.
What he might be now if she hadn’t finally decided that taking her big brother in hand was a full-time job didn’t bear thinking of. Looking back, it seemed as if she’d been training for it the whole of her life, or at least since the age of nine when their father left.
To start with there’d been a lot of self-interest here. If the family fell apart, the only route for herself was into care. Someone had to hold things together, and she didn’t need to be told that neither her mother nor her brother was up to the job. By the time she left school and got her job with The Man, she’d become expert at dealing with social workers who expressed doubts about the set-up. An hour in Fleur’s company saw them persuaded, not without relief, that she was much better qualified than they were to save her mother from the worst consequences of her own excesses while at the same time trying with diminishing success to keep her brother out of jail and making sure he had a home to return to on release.
She’d been working for Gidman for nine years when her mother finally succumbed to a cocktail of alcohol and chemicals. Not long after the funeral, the other half of her family responsibility was put on hold by a judge deciding short sharp shocks were clearly having no effect on Vince and sending him down for a ten stretch.
His behaviour inside ensured he did the full term and, as his release date approached, Fleur found herself having to work out a strategy for the future not only for her brother but herself.
During her twenty years working for The Man her reliability and ingenuity had won golden opinions and rapid advancement. But Goldie Gidman’s career horizons had widened considerably too.
Fleur’s career running The Man’s financial affairs had begun shortly before Margaret Thatcher began to run the country’s. During the Thatcher years Goldie Gidman had come to see that this brave new world of free market enterprise offered opportunities to become stinking rich that did not involve the use of a hammer. Though the implement had changed, the principle was one he was very familiar with. Human need and greed left people vulnerable. Looking west out of the East End into the City he saw a feeding frenzy that made his own localized pickings seem very Lenten fare. And so began the moves, both geographical and commercial, that were to turn him into a financial giant.
But changes of direction can be dangerous.
It was Fleur who had pointed out to him the paradox that going completely legit left him much more exposed than staying completely bent. The movement from crookedness to cleanliness meant abandoning a lot of old associates whose faces and attitudes were at odds with the new glossy picture of himself and his activities he was preparing for the world. The trick was to make sure that, as new doors opened before him, the old doors were firmly locked and double barred behind. Fortunately he’d always tidied up as he went along and those who knew enough to do him active harm were few and far between. Now once more he scrutinized them very carefully and those he had any doubts about got visited by his long-time associate and enforcer, Milton Slingsby.
No one knew more about The Man’s affairs than Fleur Delay. Her record should have made her invulnerable. But the trouble was that her professional usefulness had more or less come to an end. Her talent for manipulative accountancy had been invaluable in the days when his main financial enemies were local tax inspectors and VAT men, and she had been helpful during the early moves into legitimate areas of speculation. But as Goldie prospered, he had turned more and more to the specialized tax accountants without whom a man could sink without trace in the mazy morass of the modern markets. In their company she was like an abacus among computers, but an abacus whose database was very computer-like. While she did not believe she was in imminent danger of a visit from Sling, she knew that Goldie valued people in proportion to their usefulness, and to have dangerous knowledge but no positive function was potentially a fatal combination.
As Vince’s release date approached, she saw a way to solve both her problems.
The key was Milton Slingsby.
Sling’s great merit was total loyalty. Whatever Goldie told him to do, he did. But he was nearly ten years older than Goldie and his early years in the boxing ring, where he was renowned for blocking his opponents’ punches with his head, were starting to take their toll. With Goldie by his side telling him what to do he could function as well as ever. But now the new respectable Goldie wanted to be as far away