Midnight Fugue (13 page)

Gina Wolfe watched him, puzzled. He didn’t look like a man who made toasts in water. A change in the buffet music from lively Mozart to dreamy Strauss drew her attention to the party in the garden. They seemed to be enjoying themselves. There was a colourful semi-formalism about the way they were dressed. Not a wedding party; no buttonholes, no one in morning suits. Then she saw a woman holding a baby. The child was wrapped in a long white robe that floated in the gentle breeze.

A christening. Her heart made a little movement in her breast and she felt tears forcing their way upwards into her eyes.

Then her breathing stopped and she blinked furiously to try to remove the watery veil through which she was peering.

And at that moment the jug slipped from Dalziel’s fingers and crashed on to the table.

12.15–12.25

The claims to quality made by the Keldale were more than justified by the noise produced by the shattering jug.

No unbreakable plastic this, nor cheap glass which dissolves into powder, but genuine high-tensile crystal that exploded in a scintillation of diamantine fragments, turning heads not only on the terrace but in the garden too.

Peter Pascoe was already on his third glass of champagne and his sixth lobster ball.

‘Enjoying yourself,’ said Ellie, coming up alongside him.

‘You know, I do believe I am,’ he said. ‘These fish fingers are really rather nice. As for the bubbly… you did say you were driving us home, right?’

‘Yes. My turn. I’m measuring the units carefully, which, considering the quality of this stuff, is a real sacrifice. I may expect to be rewarded for my relative temperance when we get home, so don’t go over the top, so to speak.’

‘You interest me strangely,’ said Pascoe. ‘Talking of temperance, I hope Rosie’s sticking to the juice. We don’t want her doing her Gigi act.’

‘No problem. Nothing alcoholic or even bubbly with her performance coming up.’

‘Performance?’ said Pascoe, alarmed. ‘You didn’t say anything about a performance.’

‘Didn’t I?’ said Ellie innocently. ‘It’s just a little clarinet duet Ali put together for Rosie and another star pupil. It’ll give the Sinfonietta quartet the chance to get some refreshment.’

‘Oh God. I need another drink.’

As if in response, Ed Muir approached with a champagne bottle at the ready.

‘Top up, Peter?’ he asked.

‘You bet.’

He watched approvingly as the man took his glass. He’d only met Muir a couple of times previously, hadn’t felt able to relate very closely to him, perhaps because of the gap between his appearance and his manner. With his shaven head and five-o’clock shadow he looked like someone you’d step aside for if you met him on a lonely street. But his quiet speech and self-effacing manner faded him into the background when you met him in a group. Today, however, at his daughter’s christening, he was so full of joy and pride that he generated more warmth than the pleasant autumn sun.

And if any doubt about his clubbability remained, the way he tipped a champagne bottle tipped the balance.

Ali Wintershine had picked well!

‘Great party, Ed,’ said Pascoe effusively. ‘The perfect way to launch little…’

For a moment the baby’s name escaped him. Then he saw Ellie mouthing something at him.

‘…Lolita,’ he concluded triumphantly.

Ellie rolled her eyes upwards in exasperation while Muir looked slightly puzzled as it came to Pascoe that the child’s name was Lucinda.

To correct or not correct? But before he could reach a decision God intervened in the form of an explosion somewhere behind him.

Sensitized by the anti-terrorist briefings which were now a staple of police life, Pascoe span round.

Whatever had happened had happened at a table right on the edge of the terrace. Attention centred on a large fat man and a willowy blonde, both on their feet, she looking a touch damp down the front of her dress, he mouthing what were presumably apologies as he tried to wipe her dry with his napkin.

‘Oh my God,’ said Ellie. ‘
Et in Arcadia ego
!’

‘What the hell’s he doing at the Keldale?’ said Pascoe, assuming the high tone of the habitué. ‘And who’s that with him?’

‘I don’t know, but if he doesn’t stop trying to massage her tits, I think he might get his face punched,’ said Ellie hopefully.

This entertaining possibility was unhappily brought to nothing by the rapid arrival of a darkly handsome young man who, assisted by a couple of waitresses, smoothly restored calm and order to the table. Pascoe worked out that something fragile and heavy, a bottle perhaps or a jug, must have been dropped and shattered. Andy getting clumsy in old age? That from a man who for his size had always been incredibly nimble and dextrous was yet another cause for concern about the extent of his recovery.

And Dalziel chatting up a young blonde while his long-time partner was away for a few days…

Didn’t the trick cyclists say that a sharp reminder of mortality often sent a man in desperate search for earnests of potency?

No problems himself in that field, he thought smugly. Though with the afternoon stretching ahead of him and the sun warm on his back and Ellie getting that languorous look, he should perhaps take her advice and slow down a little on the bubbly.

But not yet!

He turned to retrieve his glass from Ed only to discover that that particular temptation had been removed. His host had disappeared and with him Pascoe’s refill. Perhaps, he thought charitably, after the explosion, he’d felt constrained to rush and reassure his young wife that all was well.

Ellie, disappointed in her hope of seeing the Fat Man assaulted, was now concentrating her attention on her husband.

‘What?’ said Pascoe.

‘
Lolita
!’ said Ellie, shaking her head. ‘What are you like?’

‘Your fault,’ he said. ‘The longer I look at you, the younger you get.’

He waggled his eyebrows at her and tried for a salacious leer.

She couldn’t help smiling. But Pascoe’s instincts had been right. The warmth of the sun and the single glass of bubbly she’d allowed herself were combining very nicely to make a bit of salacity seem not such a bad idea.

‘Keep working on it, Mr Humbert,’ she said huskily. ‘Who knows? You may get lucky.’

12.20–12.30

Not all heads had turned at the sound of the exploding jug.

Shirley Novello’s gaze had remained fixed on the black moustached man at the edge of the lawn.

As the jug shattered, she saw his head jerk back and his hand go up to the headphones.

‘Gotcha,’ she said.

Now she turned her attention to the Fat Man’s table and watched the pantomime of Dalziel apologizing to everyone in hearing distance and making ineffectual attempts to dry his lunch date down. In no time at all, Pietro was on the scene, directing operations. Novello wondered idly if he were as efficient in everything as he clearly was in his job. He had the glass cleared, the table re-laid, and Dalziel and the blonde re-seated in just a couple of minutes.

Down on the lawn, the listener seemed to have got over his shock. He was back in his former mode, standing looking vacant, his head nodding as if he were mesmerized by some disco beat. But he had a mobile phone in his hand and, as she watched, he slipped the headphones off one ear and started speaking into the mobile.

She let a couple of minutes pass till the corner table was no longer a focus of interest, then took up her phone once more and thumbed in the Fat Man’s number.

‘Hello?’

‘I was right,’ she said. ‘You’re bugged.’

‘Grand. I’ll sort it.’

‘What do you want me to do now?’

He thought a moment then said, ‘Stick to the bugger. But don’t get close.’

‘I’m on him.’

The bugger had his headphones back on. Then something happened; nothing as violent as the shattering of the jug, but enough to make him remove the ’phones and give them a shake. Service interrupted, guessed Novello. When the Fat Man said he’d sort something, it usually got sorted.

The bugger gave up on the ’phones but now he had his mobile to his ear again, receiving this time, not calling. So he wasn’t a loner, he must have back up. Would he continue as an observer now he could no longer listen in?

Her view was blocked by Pietro, who set an open prawn sandwich and a glass of white wine before her. This guy really was efficient.

‘You serve table as well as clean up?’ she said, smiling up at him.

‘Depends on the table,’ he said.

‘I didn’t order any wine.’

‘On the house. To make up for the disturbance.’

‘So everyone will be getting a glass?’

‘Only the sensitive ones. Any news of your friend?’

‘Definitely not coming,’ she said indicating her mobile. ‘That woman, at the table where the jug got broken, has she been on telly or something? I’m sure I’ve seen her.’

‘Mrs Wolfe? Don’t know. She’s certainly got the looks, but I don’t watch too much telly. I prefer real life.’

‘Me too,’ she said. ‘She’s a hotel guest, is she?’

‘That’s right. And the guy with her’s some sort of cop. Mr Lee, the manager, was around when she asked if she could book a table overlooking the garden, and I told her, Sorry, those tables are all taken. And she said, My guest, Superintendent Dalziel, will be disappointed. And suddenly Mr Lee got in on the act and told me he was sure there must be a table available. So I looked again, and there was.’

‘Theirs, was it?’ said Novello, glancing at Hook-nose and his partner. At least the exploding water jug seemed to have distracted them from their heavy petting. Maybe it had reminded them of their stolen table. Whatever, they were now deep in conversation.

‘Shush! Don’t want to start him on at me again,’ said Pietro.

His wish wasn’t granted. The couple rose and headed for the hotel entrance. As they passed Pietro, Hook-nose said, ‘After cocking up our table, the least I expected was efficient service. We’ll find somewhere decent to eat.’

They moved on. Pietro made a face at Novello and said, ‘Better cancel their order. Enjoy your prawns.’

‘Oh, I will,’ said Novello.

But even as she spoke she realized she wouldn’t.

For as Pietro moved away opening up her sightline to the lawn again, she realized to her horror that the man with the ’phones had vanished.

12.20–12.35

Gwyn Jones sank back on the sofa and felt the voluptuously soft leather upholstery embrace his naked flesh.

Life was good. Back home in the sleepy Mid-Wales township of Llufwwadog they would probably still be in the chapel now, perched on pews as narrow and hard as a cliff ledge, listening to an interminable sermon that started at
hwyl
and built up to hysteria, and made the hell it threatened seem like a welcome deliverance.

Outside it would be raining. He knew the Met Office had declared that there was an anti-cyclone stationary over the British Isles, guaranteeing the continuation of the Indian summer right into the middle of October, but as all natives of Llufwwadog knew, such fair-weather forecasts did not apply to them. When the wind was in the east it pushed the rain clouds over the Black Mountains before they burst, and when it was in the west, it punctured them as they reached the foothills. He supposed there must have been days when the Welsh sky was as perfectly blue as the one he could see now backing the topless towers of Canary Warf, but his memory seemed to have scrubbed them all.

What it hadn’t scrubbed was his waking resolution from an early age — birth, it seemed like now, but that was probably pushing it — to get out of Llufwwadog as quickly as he could. The conventional exit routes for a growing
hogyn
of sport, art and education were closed to him. He was hopeless at rugby, couldn’t sing or act, and had very little academic ability. So it was either the army or journalism. He had gone for the latter on the grounds that you didn’t have to get up so early in the morning and there was less chance of being shot at.

It had been a happy choice. The disadvantages of a dreadful prose style and an excitable stutter were negated by a huge natural curiosity, a complete insensitivity to rebuff, and an acuity of eye, ear, and nose that took him places others did not care to tread.

After an apprenticeship on his local rag, he had moved to Cardiff, where he rapidly made a name for himself by pulling the lid off a little pot-pourri of financial and sexual improprieties in the Welsh Assembly. This it was that got him his move to London, where six years later he was established as one of the
Daily Messenger
’s famous team of investigative journalists, his particular remit remaining the political scene.

He was well paid but not well enough to be able to even dream about a pad in Marina Tower, one of the most exclusive developments on Canary Wharf. To do that you needed an editor’s screw, or, failing that, you needed to screw an editor. If she had a bit left over from an extremely profitable divorce, that didn’t do any harm either. This combination of qualities came together in the person of Beanie Sample, the driving spirit behind
Bitch
!, the glossy mag which for eighteen months now (a long time in magazine life) had contrived to win the hearts, titillate the senses, and open the wallets of readers of both sexes and all ages from eighteen to thirty-eight.

Beanie, known both eponymously and epithetically as
the Bitch
, had a reputation for devouring young journalists, then dumping them when she’d had enough. Gwyn Jones had no problem with this. As he told his friends, why would a virile youngster want a long-term relationship with a woman twenty years his senior? Nonetheless, since moving into her Docklands apartment, he’d come to the conclusion that maybe long term wasn’t so bad. A man could put up with a lot of this luxury. Also it was within a fit man’s strolling distance of Canary Tower, which housed the
Messenger
offices. Compared to this, his own flat above a dry-cleaners in Bromley seemed like a particularly remote and ascetic monk’s cell.

Somewhere his phone was ringing. He recognized the ring tone, the opening bars of ‘Cwm Rhondda’, chosen to remind him he need never listen to a male voice choir again.