Midnight Fugue

by Reginald Hill

  He passed through the cathedral porch and had to pause to let his eyes adjust from the morning brightness outside to the rich gloom of the interior. Its vastness dwindled the waiting worshippers from a significant number to a mere handful, concentrated towards the western end. He turned off the central aisle and found himself a seat in the lee of an ancient tomb topped with what were presumably life-sized effigies of its inmates. Must have been a bit disconcerting for the family to see Mam and Dad lying there every time they came to church, thought Dalziel. Particularly if the sculptor had caught a good likeness, which a very lively looking little dog at their feet suggested he might have done.

  His mind was trying to avoid the unattractive mental task that lay before him. But he hadn’t got wherever he’d got by turning aside when the path turned clarty.

  He closed his eyes, rested his head on his hands as if in prayer, and focused on one of the great philosophical questions of the twenty-first century.

  Didn’t matter if it was Ordinary Time or Extraordinary Time, the question was, how the fuck had he managed to misplace a whole sodding day?

  08.25–08.40

  Gina Wolfe watched the bowed, still figure with envy.

  He no longer looked fat; the cathedral’s vastness had dwindled him to frail mortal flesh like her own.

  She did not know what pain had brought him here, but she knew about pain. What she did not know was how to find comfort and help in a place like this.

  She hadn’t been inside a church since the funeral. That was seven years ago. And seven years before that she’d been at the same church for her wedding.

  Patterns. Could they mean something? Or were they like crop circles, just some joker having a laugh?

  At some point during the funeral her mind had started overlaying the two ceremonies. One of her wedding presents had been a vacuum cleaner, beautifully packaged in a gleaming white box. The small white coffin reminded her of this, and as the service progressed she found herself obsessed by the notion that they were burying her Hoover. She tried to tell Alex this, to assure him it was all right, it was just a vacuum cleaner they’d lost, but the face he turned on her did more than anything the words and the music and the place could do to reassert the dreadful reality.

  Neither of them had cried, she remembered that. The church had been full of weeping, but they had moved beyond tears. She had knelt when invited to kneel but no prayer had come. She had stood for the hymns but she had not sung. The words that formed in her mind weren’t the words on the page before her, they were words she had seen when she was seventeen and still at school.

  It had been a pre-A-level exercise. Compare and contrast the following two poems. One was Milton’s ‘On the Death of a Fair Infant’, the other Edwin Muir’s ‘The Child Dying’.

  She’d had great fun mocking the classical formality of the earlier poem.

  It began with child-abuse, she wrote, with the God of Winter’s chilly embrace giving the Fair Infant the cough that killed her. And it ended with an attempt at consolation so naff it was almost comic.

  Think what a present thou to God hast sent.

  Any mother finding comfort in this, she’d written, must have been a touch disappointed it hadn’t been triplets.

  Perhaps her pathetic confusion of the coffin and the wedding gift box was a late payback for this mockery.

  The other poem, viewing death through a child’s eyes, she’d been much more taken with. In fact the Scot, Muir, had become one of her favourite poets, though now her love for him, sparked by ‘The Child Dying’, seemed peculiarly ill-omened.

  Back then its opening lines–Unfriendly friendly universe, I pack your stars into my purse, And bid you, bid you so farewell– had struck her as being at the same time touchingly child-like and cosmically resonant. But she knew now she had been delighting in the skill of the poet rather than the power of his poem.

  Then she had been admiring the resonance from outside; now it was in her being.

  I did not know death was so strange.

  Now she knew.

  And she was sure that the Fair Infant’s mother, Milton’s sister, must have known this too, must have felt the cold blast of that air blown from the far side of despair.

  But did she wisely learn to curb her sorrows wild? Had she been able to draw warmth from her brother’s poem and wrap herself in its formality? Find support in those stiff folds of words?

  Had she been able to sit in a church and bury her grief in these rituals of faith?

  If she had, Gina Wolfe envied her. She’d found no such comforts to turn to.

  At least she hadn’t fled. Unlike Alex. She had found the strength to stay, to endure, to rebuild.

  But was it strength? For years her first thought on waking and her last thought before sleeping had been of lost Lucy. And then it wasn’t. Did a day pass when she didn’t think of her daughter? She couldn’t swear to it. That first time she’d given herself to Mick, she’d pendulum’d between joy and guilt. But later, when they holidayed together in Spain, she recalled the extremes as contentment and ecstasy with never a gap for a ghost to creep through.

  Perhaps this meant that Alex had loved so much he could only survive the loss by losing himself, whereas she…

  She pushed the thought away. She could do that.

  Was that strength?

  Alex couldn’t. The thought pushed him away.

  Was that weakness?

  These were questions beyond her puzzling.

  Maybe that portly figure two rows ahead, sitting as still as the statues on the tomb above him, would have the answers.

  08.25–08.40

  Fleur Delay watched her brother disappear into the cathedral then opened her bag and from it took a small pack of tablets. She slipped one into her mouth and washed it down with a swig of water from a bottle in the door pocket.

  Letting Vince loose in a cathedral was not normally an option, but it had seemed marginally better than collapsing in the car park.

  She took another tablet. After a while she began to feel a little better. All the car windows were wide open to admit the morning air. Now she closed them and took out her mobile phone. There was no one in hearing distance but minimizing risk was an instinct so deep ingrained it had ceased to be a thought process.

  She speed-dialled a number. It took a long time for it to be answered.

  ‘Buenos días, señor,’ she said. ‘Soy Señora Delay.’

  She listened to the response for a while then interrupted in English.

  ‘Yes, I know it’s Sunday and I know it’s early, but I don’t know where it says in our very expensive agreement that you stop working for me at weekends or before nine o clock. I’ll write it in if you like, but I’ll cut your fee by half, comprende usted?’

  She listened again, cut in again.

  ‘OK, no need to grovel. I just want a progress report. And before you start on with the crappy reasons why things move so slowly over there, you ought to know I’m looking to move in a bit earlier than planned. Four weeks, tops. That means not a day longer than four weeks, OK?’

  After she’d finished her call, she opened the windows again and took another drink of water.

  This had not been a good idea, but turning down The Man could have been a worse one.

  She leaned back in her seat and relaxed. She didn’t fall asleep but drifted into a state of waking reverie that was becoming more and more common as her medication increased proportionately to her illness. The past would come and sit next to her. She could see the world as it was at present with the great cathedral towering over her, but it floated on her retina like a mirage. It was the images nudging her memory that felt like reality.

  Among them she could see her father quite clearly, his eyes a shade of blue that was almost green, his lips permanently curved into the promise of a smile, his forefinger flicking his nose as he said, ‘Cheerio, my darlings, keep your noses clean,’ that last sunny day when he strolled out of the house and never came back
.

  She’d been nine, Vincent twelve.

  It had taken her five long years to accept that her father was gone for good.

  Their feckless mother had done her poor best, but as she slid down a spiral of substance abuse and bad partner choice, she had little time or will to give her children the attention they needed. Vince readily came to accept that it was his young sister he had to look to for the basics of hot food and clean clothing. And once he got launched on what to a neutral observer looked like a dedicated effort to become the most inefficient criminal of the age, it was Fleur, masquerading as his elder sister, who visited him inside and was waiting for him outside the many prisons he spent a large proportion of his young manhood in.

  At sixteen Fleur left school. She could have stayed on. She was a bright girl with a real talent for mathematics, but she’d had enough of classrooms.

  Her mother’s current boyfriend, a small-time pimp, offered to find her a job. He and the girl got on quite well, so instead of telling him to take a hike, she thanked him politely and explained she would prefer to earn her money on her bum rather than on her back. He became quite indignant and assured her that he wasn’t inviting her to join his team; her brain was too sharp and her body too shapeless for that. Instead he recommended her for a clerking job in the office of a local finance company.

  That sounded almost as dull as school. But she knew the company he referred to and she knew it was run by The Man.

  On the appointed day she went along to the company offices, located in what had once been a pet shop in a dingy street north of East India Dock Road. Determined to make a good impression she got there nice and early. The shop space still smelled of animal piss, but there was no sign of human presence. Then she thought she heard voices beyond a door at the back.

  As she pushed it open, the voices died or rather disappeared beneath a loud crash and a louder scream.

  She was looking into a small office occupied by three men, two black, one white. Or rather, grey.

  The grey-faced man was sitting on a chair before a desk. The reason for the greyness and for the scream was that the older of the two black men, standing beside him, was holding his hand flat on the desktop, while the other black man, seated behind the desk, had just smashed the knuckle of his right forefinger with a claw hammer.

  She knew who the black men were. The older one was Milton Slingsby, known as Sling, a small-time pro boxer who’d found more profitable employment for his skills as the chief lieutenant of the younger black man who was of course Goldie Gidman, The Man.

  Gidman regarded her expressionlessly then made a gesture with the hammer.

  Slingsby pulled the grey man upright and dragged him towards the door. As he passed Fleur, he turned his gaze upon her, his eyes wide in pleading or maybe just in pain. She realized she knew him too, at least by sight. His name was Janowski and he ran a small tailoring business just a couple of streets away. Then Slingsby thrust him through the door and heeled it shut behind them.

  ‘Why’d you not run, girl?’ asked The Man.

  He was probably in his thirties but looked younger till you saw his eyes. Good looking, slim, medium build, he wore a pristine white shirt that accentuated the deep black of his skin against which glowed a heavy golden necklet, gold rings on his fingers and a gold bracelet on either wrist.

  ‘I’m Fleur Delay,’ she said. ‘I’ve come for the interview.’

  The hammer made another gesture, and she subsided on to the grey man’s seat. Her eyes took in the desk’s nearer edge. A series of small craters suggested that grey man was not the first to have sat here. She didn’t feel safe, but she felt safer than she would have done running.

  The craters vanished beneath a sheet of paper bearing a column of about twenty sums of money ranging from the teens to the thousands.

  ‘Add it up,’ said The Man. The hammer, she was glad to observe, had vanished.

  She took her time. Something told her that accuracy was more important than speed.

  ‘Nineteen thousand five hundred and sixty-two pounds fourteen pence,’ she said.

  ‘So you can add up,’ said The Man, pulling the sheet out of her fingers. ‘But can you shut up? The guy who was sitting there when you came in–’

  ‘What guy?’ she interrupted.

  He stared at her with a blankness that could have concealed anything.

  ‘You know who I am?’ he asked after a while.

  ‘Never seen you before in my life, Mr Gidman,’ she said.

  Slowly the blankness dissolved into a grin, then The Man laughed out loud.

  ‘Tomorrow, eight thirty, sharp,’ he said.

  She stood up and as she reached the door found the courage to say, ‘What about wages?’

  ‘Let’s wait and see what you’re worth, why don’t we?’ he replied.

  At the end of a week what she got wasn’t much more than she could have earned stacking shelves in a supermarket, but she didn’t complain.

  A few days later a policeman who didn’t look much older than herself came to her home. Mr Janowski was laying a charge of assault against The Man. He claimed she had been a witness to the assault. He was mistaken, she assured the cop. She knew vaguely who Mr Janowski was, wasn’t sure she’d recognize him if she met him in the street, and certainly had never seen Mr Gidman assault him.

  ‘That’s OK then,’ said the constable, who had a local accent and a cheeky grin.

  ‘So I won’t have to go to court?’ she said.

  ‘Shouldn’t think so, darling. Though maybe Sergeant Mathias will want to talk to you himself. Just tell him what you told me, you’ll be all right.’

  Mathias turned up later the same day.

  Unlike the constable, the sergeant had a funny accent, like somebody taking the piss out of a Pakki. ‘So what you’re saying is you wouldn’t recognize Mr Janowski if you met him on the street, right? In that case, miss, how can you be sure you never saw Mr Gidman assault him?’

  ‘Because,’ she retorted, ‘I’ve never seen Mr Gidman assault anyone, that’s how.’

  The sergeant looked as if he’d have liked to give her a good shaking, but she saw the young constable hide a grin behind his hand, and as he left he gave her a big wink.

  She said nothing of this to Gidman but presumably someone did, for next pay-day her wage packet tripled and stayed tripled.

  One night not long after, a fire broke out in Mr Janowski’s workshop, quickly spreading to the flat above where the tailor lived with his wife and infant daughter. The firemen fought their way through the blaze to the smoke-filled bathroom where they found the Janowskis crouched over the bath. The mother was already dead through smoke inhalation. Janowski, who had third-degree burns, died four days later. But under a dampened blanket stretched across the bathtub, they found the child unburnt and still breathing.

  At least, thought Fleur, she wouldn’t have to face the pains and problems parents could inflict on their growing daughters.

  Whether she would be spared the pains and problems life itself inflicted on most women was another matter.

  She was feeling much better now. The past dwindled into its proper space, the cathedral descended from the sky and took its rightful place at ground level, still huge but now firmly anchored to the earth.

  God’s house they called it. If there were a God, then it was presumably Him who did all that inflicting, she thought. Maybe I should go inside and have a quiet word, let Him know I’ve decided to change his plans a bit.

  But He probably got the message when He saw Vince taking a seat.

  What was going on in there? she wondered.

  Like so much of life, there was nothing to do but wait.

  08.25–08.55

  For a few seconds Andy Dalziel had felt his mind going into free fall as he contemplated his temporal aberration.

  Thoughts of Alzheimer’s, brain tumours, even, God help him, post-traumatic stress disorder, shrieked like bats around the tower of his understanding and the e
asiest solution seemed to be to jump off into the welcoming darkness.

  Jesus! he told himself. It’s this place putting them daft thoughts into your mind. You’re a detective. Detect! Doesn’t matter what you find, so long as you’re strong enough not to run away from it.

  First things first. This morning he’d woken up. He tried to reconstruct the waking process. It had seemed pretty normal, the mind surfacing from sleep’s dark depths, thrashing around on the surface for a few moments, grabbing at flotsam and jetsam from pre-sleep memory, identifying them as belonging to such and such a day…

  That’s where it had started to go wrong.

  Somehow he’d assembled these shards of memory not into the Saturday they belonged to, but into a Sunday that hadn’t yet happened!

  Had he simply made it up then? He tried to project himself back a day, found clear-cut details hard to come by. Instead, cloudy images of sitting around, doing nothing, going nowhere floated across his mind.

  That felt like Sunday all right, but a Sunday from extremely auld lang syne, the sort of Sunday he’d sometimes experienced on childhood holidays with his Scottish cousins. They’d been really happy days, most of them. His dad’s family knew how to treat kids–feed them jam pieces and mutton pies till they come out of their ears, then turn them loose to roam at will, confident that they’ll find their way home for the next meal. But it all stopped on Sundays. Here the will of Granny Dalziel ruled supreme. Here the bairns were expected to keep the Sabbath as she had kept it back in the mists of time. Faces scrubbed, hair slicked, bound in the strait jacket of best clothes, they were marched to the kirk in the morning and sat around with an improving book, seen and definitely not heard, for the rest of the endless day.

  And that had been his Sunday…no, that had been his Saturday, his yesterday! Or something like it.

  But why? He needed to dig deeper, go back further.