Reginald Hill - Midnight Fugue

Then he said, ‘I thought he was hurting you, sis,’ and her anger dissolved.

He is what he is, she thought, and for better or worse she loved him. In fact he was the only person on the face of the earth that she had any positive feeling for, and his need to be protected was matched by her need to protect him. These two, the dead man and the probably dying woman, were so much collateral damage, the high but necessary price that had to be paid for the love between her and her brother. Everything came second to that. Love was a harder taskmaster than even The Man, promising small reward at the end of the day. But you knew when you entered his service that you signed all your rights away.

She said wearily, ‘We’ll talk about it later, Vince. For now, let’s get things sorted in here then be on our way.’

misterioso

She says I’m pregnant.

The words bring such an explosion of joy that it shatters the barriers his mind had built against pain.

She sees only the pain and turns away.

But he turns with her, and now she sees the joy, and it’s so great that in a moment she thinks she must have imagined the pain.

He knows once more who he is…no, not is…he knows who he was, for now the nowhere existence in which he had felt himself shadowy, insubstantial, has sent out roots and will grow like the seed in her belly, while that other existence in that other world of pain proves to be the world of shades, inhabited by ghosts, himself nothing more than ghost when he visits it.

He knows he has to visit it, for that ghost of himself needs to be laid. So he descends into the shadowland to seek his old love, and when he sees her there, safe and secure in another shade’s arms, he turns away and climbs back to the light, not fearing to look over his shoulder because he knows she will not be following.

His new love waits for him, radiant to see him return, not questioning where he has been for no doubt lies between them, and he tells her no lies for how can a man lie about a world that no longer exists?

He feels the new world of her ripening belly under his hands.

Lucinda, he says.

What did you say?

Lucinda. That’s her name.

But we don’t even know that we’ll have a girl!

Yes we do, he says with the smiling certainty of one who knows that that other existence had been but a dress rehearsal whose disasters were a necessary prelude to a triumphant and lengthy run. And her name will be Lucinda. And from the moment she is born, she shall have nothing but the best.

So easily in joy and love a man plots his own betrayal.

Gwyn Jones left the community centre without troubling the buffet. When he had the scent of a story in his nose, he lost all other appetite. Also his unexpected presence had aroused unwelcome curiosity from some other journalists. Bumping Gem Huntley off the assignment hadn’t been a problem. Not long up from the provinces, she was still eager to please. Very eager. He’d taken advantage of her eagerness in the traditional style only last week when Beanie was out of town for a couple of nights. She wasn’t bad looking, in a peasant kind of way; carrying a bit too much flesh perhaps, but it was young flesh, and while a man might grow tired of such a plain diet every night, she was touchingly eager to learn. It had made a pleasant change from the Bitch’s cordon bleu menu. So a squeeze of her buttock and a promise that he would meet up with her later to explain everything had been enough to get her out of the way.

The others were more of a problem, the trouble being that his antipathy for Gidman was so well known that his presence at such a bland public relations affair was bound to spark interest.

The groundwork for his dislike had been laid on his first arrival in London six years before. His mother, the one person from whom he’d hidden his delight at leaving Llufwwadog, had been worried that her eldest son might not survive the inevitable pangs of homesickness he must feel alone in a great foreign city. So before parting she extracted a solemn oath from him that, as soon as he settled in, he would make contact with her cousin (twice removed) Owen Mathias. Owen, she averred, being a recently retired policeman, would be able to provide good sound advice as well as a reminder of his beloved home country.

When, after much maternal cajoling, Jones finally travelled out to Ealing to pay his respects, he saw at a glance why the man had taken early retirement. Mathias, in his mid-fifties, could easily have been taken for eighty. The upside was that he showed no sign of wanting to wallow in Celtic nostalgia and proved an entertaining and generous host, so Jones was happy to accept his invitation to come back soon, much to the delight of his mother.

His reward for this filial piety was that on subsequent visits he was introduced to many of Owen’s former colleagues, young and old. True, several of them shrank away as if from a wandering leper when they heard he was a journalist, but a few showed signs of sociability which he hoped to cultivate into a mutually beneficent relationship. One thing they all did was wince and look for excuses to leave whenever the subject of Goldie Gidman came up. This man, of whom Jones had never heard, was evidently Owen’s King Charles’s head.

‘I could never lay hands on him,’ the ‘old’ man complained after they’d got to know each other better. ‘But you’re an investigative journalist, you can sort him out, boyo. You can make those blind bastards at the CPS see what’s plain to all honest men. He’s a bad job, a crook through and through.’

Scenting a possible early scoop, Jones had listened closely to the ex-policeman and mentioned Gidman in the office. There he had been warned in no uncertain terms that Gidman was off limits unless you had an absolutely water-tight story to tell.

Then within a year of their first meeting, Owen Mathias died. On learning that he had been mentioned in the will, Jones for a while had pleasant hopes of a modest legacy. What he got in the event was a box of CD-roms on to which had been downloaded so far as he could see everything in the Met’s records about Goldie Gidman and his associates.

Recognizing that possession of these probably constituted an offence under several Acts, he stashed them away behind his wardrobe. And there they remained till the famous bye-election that signalled the eruption of David Gidman the Third on the political scene.

Warned of a possible upset, Jones in company of many other journalists had been on the spot. It wasn’t till well into the victory celebration that he’d managed to get close enough to the Golden Boy to ask his questions. When he introduced himself, Gidman, not yet a finished product of the Millbank School of Charm and flushed with success and champagne, cried, ‘Jones? Why is everybody in Wales called Jones? Only way they can sort the buggers out is by calling them Dai Grocer and Nye the Nutter and so on. From the Messenger, you say? I shall think of you as Jones the Mess!’

A feeble joke in doubtful taste, but certainly more of a bird-bolt than a cannon bullet. He had smiled with the rest and carried on with his questioning. And afterwards, it had seemed to him that he was doing no more than his job when he joined the journalistic pack in digging around to see what murky secrets might lie in the new boy’s past.

When their combined efforts failed to turn up any drug convictions, dodgy dealings with right-wing extremists, or documented instances of sexual deviancy, most of his fellows gave up the chase.

But Jones found he couldn’t let it alone. Eventually he tried a bit of self-analysis. It had to be more than the initial slur. He wasn’t a professional Welshman, for God’s sake, no super-sensitive Celt eager to take umbrage at the merest sniff of an Anglo-Saxon attitude. No, there had to be something more, something chemical as much as political. Perhaps it was in the blood, perhaps he had inherited it from the same source as cousin Owen.