Reginald Hill - Midnight Fugue

‘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.

Goldie Gidman watched his guest’s reaction to the food that Flo had set before him with an amusement he took care to hide.

The man had been an hour late for his eleven o’clock appointment at Windrush House. As his purpose was basically to beg for money, it might have been expected that he would be punctual. On the other hand, as a peer of the realm condescending to visit the tasteless mansion of a self-made black man, he perhaps did not feel that the courtesy of kings need apply. Certainly his explanation for his lateness with its casual reference to the number of roadworks between Sandringham and Waltham Abbey had more of condescension than apology in it.

Goldie Gidman was not offended. When asked as he frequently was by journalists why a man with his background should be such a staunch supporter of the Conservative Party, he had a stock reply that included references to traditional values, British justice, fair play, equal opportunity, enlightened individualism, and cricket.

Privately, and not for publication, he had been known to say that he’d looked closely at British politics and seen that the Tories were his kind of people. Folk he could deal with, motives he understood.

Internally, in that core of being where all men hide their truths and which will only be laid completely open at the great Last Judgment, if such an event ever takes place, Gidman believed that all politicians were little better than reservoir dogs, so you might as well run with the pack that fed off your kind of meat.

The peer was what is known as a fund raiser. His purpose in visiting Goldie was to discover why in recent months his hitherto generous donations to the Party had diminished from a glistening flood to a muddy trickle. It should not be thought that the Party’s ringmaster was so naive as to think that Gidman was likely to be impressed by an ancient title. Rather his thinking was that, by hesitating his payments, Gidman was taking up a bargaining position. In consequence of recent scandals, such negotiations tended to be delicate and oblique, with the attendant danger of misunderstanding. When a man who thinks he has bought a villa in Antibes finds himself fobbed off with a timeshare in Torremolinos, dissatisfaction at best, and at worst defection, will follow. So this particular peer had been chosen because he gave out such an impression of intellectual vacuity that Goldie might feel constrained to explain in words of at most two syllables what precisely it was he wanted in return for his largesse.