Reginald Hill - Midnight Fugue

‘Maggie…that you?’ he says.

It takes real effort to produce the words, like squeezing toothpaste from a nearly empty tube. What the hell’s wrong with him? OK, he’d drunk a bit more than he did when Flo was around, and he’d taken a sleeping pill like he usually did when she wasn’t, but no way could that account for feeling like he was swimming in gumbo.

‘What’s…going…on? Something…happened…to…Dave?…crashed…that…fucking…car…?’

Maggie Pinchbeck says, ‘No, Dave’s quite well, far as I know. Should be back from Broadstairs now. Hope he goes straight to bed and gets a bit of sleep before the police wake him up.’

‘Why…police…wake…him?’ asks Goldie Gidman, clinging to the fragile structure of conversation like a drowning man.

‘To tell him about the fire, of course.’

‘…fire…?’

‘The one at Windrush House that killed you, Goldie. That fire.’

It is both a comfort and a pain that in some remote part of his mind his thought processes seem to be working at normal levels of efficiency. So the nightmare continues, he comforts himself. All those years of sleeping sound while he was doing all that dodgy stuff, and suddenly a little crisis brings on the night sweats! Maybe he’d hit the rum even more than he recalled last night.

You been living too soft, man! he admonishes himself. Let this be a warning.

He tries closing his eyes again, hoping to slip back into sleep. A sharp prick in his left arm brings him back upright. One of the men is stooping over him with a hypodermic needle in his hand. The other is filling the tumbler on the bedside table with rum. His hands are gloved.

‘Don’t worry,’ says Maggie. ‘Just a little Temezepam. Drugi here lives up to his name, I’m sorry to say. Knows how to get his hands on all kinds of shit. You’ve already taken a bit more Restoril than you thought. Think of it as a kindness. You should be out of it when the flames really take hold. But who knows, Goldie? Who knows?’

‘Maggie, what…the…fuck…you…talking…about? Sling! Sling!’

He tries to kick off the duvet but doesn’t have the strength and in any case the man with the hypodermic has no problem holding him down with one hand. Maggie Pinchbeck comes round the bed, picks up the TV remote from the bedside table. On the wall the flat-screen fills with colour.

‘Say goodbye to Jimi,’ she says, turning the sound down. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll turn him up full blast before we leave.’

‘Sling! Where…are…you…man? SLING!’

‘He’s outside, Goldie. But he’ll be in here with you before you go. Faithful retainer makes brave attempt to rescue his old friend and master, breaks down locked door with axe, but the smoke gets to him and they perish together. The tabs will love it.’

‘Why…you…doing…this…?’ he asks, terror fighting against the drowsiness spreading through his veins. Now the deep sleep he had so desired to slip into just a few moments earlier looms like the mouth of a volcano. ‘You men…what…she’s…paying…I’ll…double…’

‘Come on, Goldie!’ she admonishes. ‘Double? You’re a billionaire, for God’s sake. You can do better than that. This is your life we’re talking about here. What’s it worth? How much did Mr Janowski owe you? Five hundred, was it? A thousand maybe? Surely your life’s worth a lot more than a Polish tailor’s?’

‘What’s…he…got…to…do…with…?’

‘Let’s give you a clue. Say hello to the boys. That’s Drugi who gave you your injection, and this is Kuba. Drugi’s a plumber, Kuba’s an electrician. He’s fixed your smoke detector, by the way. They’re brothers. Very strong sense of family. Have you guessed what family that is? That’s right, the Janowski family. My family, Goldie. When you checked me out, that didn’t come up, did it? Maggie Pinchbeck is the name I grew up with. But the name I was christened, the name I had before I was adopted, was Magdalena Janowski. I’m that baby girl you and Sling tried to burn to death with my mother and father, all because he complained that you’d crushed his fingers with a hammer over a little debt.’

‘Not…true…not…true…’

‘Yes, I found it hard to believe when I first heard it. That wasn’t till fairly recently. I didn’t find out I was adopted till I was eighteen, after Mum and Dad-that’s my second Mum and Dad-got burnt to death in a car crash. I’m sure they were going to tell me, but they left it too late. Maybe that’s what started me working with ChildSave. It wasn’t till seven or eight years later I felt able to start digging deeper and found I hadn’t been abandoned. I was Magdalena Janowski and my real parents had died in a fire too. Oh yes, Goldie. Some things they say you can’t experience twice. But thanks to you, I managed to be orphaned twice, both times by fire. That’s one for the Guinness Book of Records, don’t you think?’

She smiles, bitterly, humourlessly.

Goldie Gidman is fighting to keep his eyes open. The man called Kuba pours rum out of the bottle on to the duvet, then replaces the bottle on the table. There is a cigar case lying alongside it. Drugi takes a cigar out, carefully cuts off the end, looks at Maggie questioningly.

‘Soon,’ she says. ‘So, Goldie, naturally I tried to find out more about my real parents. The street they lived in had long since been redeveloped-one of your projects, I think-and it was hard finding anyone who remembered them. I had better luck tracking down family connections in Poland. Hence my dear cousins, Drugi and Kuba.’

The men smile in acknowledgement of their names and she smiles back at them.

‘I didn’t revert to my original name because I didn’t want to make my family history public business. But I did start taking a particular interest in the problems of immigrant children. Then quite by chance during the course of my work I met this old woman running a boarding house in Poplar. Not a very nice old lady; she was ripping off her mainly immigrant tenants something awful. But it turned out she’d lived in the same street as my parents. And when I mentioned their name, you know what she said, Goldie?’

Gidman forces his eyelids to stay open, as if by keeping them open he can keep her talking forever.

The two men look at each other, concerned that this is taking too long, wondering if Maggie is having doubts and is talking to put off the fatal moment.

Unperturbed she continues.

‘She said, “Oh yes, Janowski, the little Polak tailor that Goldie Gidman set on fire.” Just like that. Naturally I asked questions. She couldn’t tell me anything else, just said it was common knowledge that Goldie Gidman had arranged the fire. She was a nasty, malicious old woman, so I wasn’t going to take anything she said on trust. But I started asking around. Discreetly, of course; I can be very discreet. And you know what, Goldie? I couldn’t find another soul to corroborate what she’d said.’

She shakes her head in disbelief.

‘Not a soul. When you clear up after yourself, Goldie, you really do clear up, don’t you? But I was able to establish that my father had made a complaint against you and Mr Slingsby. It came to nothing, of course. No evidence. And I did notice that from time to time some of the papers, the Messenger in particular, would make a few sly cracks about your early business methods. Again, not a scrap of evidence. In fact, there was so little evidence that you’d ever done anything but spread sweetness and light, that I began to think, I must meet this guy and check him out for myself.’

Kuba looks at his watch and says, ‘Maggie, we have been here too long.’

‘I know. I’m sorry. I’m nearly finished. Goldie, you still listening?’