Reginald Hill - Midnight Fugue

More likely, his thought processes had just slowed to a crawl.

The footsteps receded, finally there was silence, and then the organ started playing. He wasn’t a great fan of organ music, something a little ponderous about it, something too diffused to cut to the emotional heart of a good tune. But here in the great cathedral, whose dim and vast prismoids of space felt as if they might have been imported from beyond the stars, it was easy to think of it as the voice of God.

He straightened up and the voice spoke.

‘Mr Dalziel?’

He rolled his eyes upward. What was it going to be-the blinding light, or just a shower of dove crap?

‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ said the voice of God. ‘I’m Gina Wolfe.’

That God should be female didn’t surprise him. That she, or She, should be called Gina did.

He turned his head to the right and found himself looking at the blonde from the red Nissan. Would God drive Japanese? He didn’t think so. This was flesh and blood, and very nice flesh and blood at that.

‘Gina Wolfe?’ she repeated with a faintly interrogative inflexion, as if anticipating the name would mean something to him.

To the best of his recollection, he’d never seen her before in his life.

On the other hand, a man whose recollection could dump whole days on a whim couldn’t be too dogmatic. Best to box clever till he worked out the circumstances and degree of their acquaintance.

‘Nice to see you again, Gina Wolfe,’ he said, thinking by the use of the whole name to cover all possible gradations of intimacy.

Her expression told him he’d failed before she said, ‘Oh dear. You’ve no idea who I am, have you? I’m sorry. Mick Purdy said he was going to ring you…’

‘Mick?’ With relief he found a context for this name. ‘Oh aye, Mick! He did ring, just afore I came out this morning, left a message. I were in a bit of a hurry.’

‘I noticed. I really had to put my foot down to keep up with you. Look, I’m sorry to interrupt your devotions. If you like, I can wait for you outside.’

Dalziel was pleased to feel his mind clicking back into gear, not top maybe but a good third, which was enough to extrapolate two slightly disturbing pieces of information from what she’d just said.

The first was, she’d been following him.

The second, and more worrying, was she thought he’d been in a hurry to get to the cathedral to pray. Couldn’t have her telling Mick Purdy that. Important operational information could vanish without trace in the mazy communications network that allegedly linked the regional police forces. But news that Andy Dalziel had got religion would be disseminated with the speed of light.

He said, ‘Nay, I weren’t devoting, luv. Just like to come here and listen to the music sometimes.’

‘Oh, I see,’ she said, rather doubtfully. ‘It’s Bach, isn’t it? “The Art of the Fugue”.’

‘Spot on,’ he said heartily. ‘Can’t get enough of them fugues, me.’

A cop could survive worse things than a taste for the baroque. There was that hard bastard down in the Midlands who collected beetles and nobody messed with him. But get a reputation for religion and you were marked down as bonkers. Even Tony Blair knew that, though in his case mebbe he really was bonkers!

‘Right, luv,’ he went on. ‘Grab a pew, I mean a chair, not many pews left these days. Then you can tell me what it is Mick would have told me if I’d answered my phone.’

She sat by his side. Though not quite recovered to his full fighting weight, his flesh still overspread the limits of the chair and he could feel the warmth of her thigh against his. She was wearing a perfume that would probably have got her burned during the Reformation.

He raised his eyes not in supplication but simply to focus his mind away from these distractions. His gaze met that of the little marble dog who was peering over the end of the tomb as if in hope that after so many centuries of immobility at last someone was going to cry, ‘Walkies!’

‘OK,’ said Dalziel. ‘We’re in the right place. Confession time!’

David Gidman the Third awoke.

It was Sunday. That was something being brought up in England did for you. Maybe it was some ancient race-memory, maybe all those church bells set up a vibration of the air even when you were well out of ear-shot; whatever it was, physical or metaphysical, it was strong enough to make itself felt no matter how many supermarkets were open, no matter how many football matches were being played.

You woke, you knew it was Sunday. And that was good.

He rolled over and came up against naked flesh.

He felt it cautiously. A woman.

That was even better.

She responded to his touch by saying sleepily, ‘Hi, Dave.’

He grunted, not risking more till he was certain who it was.

Like a blind man reading Braille, his fingers traced round her nipples and spelt out her name. He gave her a gentle tweak and breathed, ‘Hi, Sophie.’

She turned to him and they kissed.

This was better and better.

‘So how shall we spend today?’ she murmured.

The bedside phone rang before he could answer.

He rolled away and grabbed the receiver.

‘Hello,’ he said.

He knew who it was before he heard the voice. Like Sunday, his PA, Maggie Pinchbeck, created her own vibes.

‘Just checking you’re awake and functioning. I’ll be round in an hour.’

‘An hour?’

‘To go over the timetable. Then at half ten I’ll drive you to St Osith’s. OK?’

‘Oh shit.’

‘You haven’t forgotten?’

‘Of course I haven’t bloody well forgotten.’

He put the phone down and turned back to the woman. An hour. Long enough, but he was no longer in the mood and anyway she was regarding him with suspicion.

‘What haven’t you forgotten?’ she demanded.

No point poncing around.

‘I’m opening a community centre this lunchtime,’ he said.

‘You’re what? I’ve cleared the whole day, remember? George is in Liverpool; a.m. in the cathedral, p.m. at a footie match.’

‘I know. Looking to get the credit if they win, eh?’

Her husband, George Harbott MP, known familiarly as Holy George, was the Labour spokesman on religious affairs.

He saw at once his joke had fallen on stony ground.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘And I’m really sorry about today. Early Alzheimer’s.’

He began to get out of bed.

‘What’s the hurry anyway?’ she queried. ‘Lunchtime’s hours away. And you could always ring them up and cancel, tell them you’ve got a cold or something. Come here and I’ll persuade you.’

‘I don’t doubt you could,’ he said, standing up out of her reach. ‘But no way I can cancel. This is my granpappy’s memorial community centre I’m opening.’

‘So? Your father’s still alive, if we can believe the Tory major contributors list. Why jump a generation? Let him open it.’

‘He says it’s a good vote-catcher for me,’ he replied. ‘And it’s not just lunchtime. I’ve got to go to church first.’

‘Church? You? Whose idea was that?’

‘Holy George’s, in a way. He rattles on so much about Christian values and getting back to the good old-fashioned Sabbath that Cameron’s getting edgy. What with your lot wallowing in Catholic converts and Scottish Presbyterianism, he feels he can’t rely on the old religious vote any more. His last newsletter stopped just short of establishing compulsory church parades. But it was Maggie who came up with this.’

‘Pinchbeck? Jesus, Dave, that woman’s got you by the pecker!’

The image itself was absurd, but he couldn’t deny its truth. Whatever his leader said, church was the last place he wanted to be on a Sunday. In fact when Maggie had suggested opening the new community centre on Sunday rather than on Monday as proposed by the council, he’d told her she must be mad.