Midnight Fugue (12 page)

12.00–12.15

Shirley Novello had not been convinced by her boss’s assurance that scruffy was the new smart.

Refreshed by an hour’s sleep followed by an alternating scalding freezing shower that left her skin glowing like a sun-ripened apricot, she had dressed with care. She didn’t overdo it. When you were on a surveillance job it was daft to draw attention to yourself by wearing your shortest skirt and tightest top. But she certainly looked good enough to make the young man checking lunchers on to the Keldale terrace return her smile with more than professional enthusiasm.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Table for two, please.’

One
meant you were either a hooker or just sad.

‘Have to be on the upper terrace,’ he said in a rather sexy Italian accent. ‘Garden terrace she is all booked up. Sorry.’

The terrace was on two levels, the upper one protected from the weather by an awning, the lower open to the skies. Today, with little breeze and lots of warm autumn sunshine, it was the al fresco area that was most popular. Already, just after twelve, most of the tables here were occupied. At one of them, in the right-hand corner overlooking the gardens, sat a striking blonde wearing a frock that looked like it would have cost Novello a month’s pay and sunglasses that would have eaten up another week’s. Fat Andy knew how to pick them!

‘That’s fine,’ said Novello, checking the empty tables on the upper terrace. ‘Could I have that one there?’

‘Sure,’ he said, smiling. She smiled back, full beam. His name tag read Pietro, and he was fairly dishy in a Med kind of way. Bit too slender for her taste, but no harm in being friendly.

He led her to her chosen table, which was right at the edge of the upper terrace. From here she had a good view of both levels.

He said, ‘I’ll keep an eye open for your friend, Miss…?’

‘Smith,’ she said. ‘Yes, she shouldn’t be long.’

She opted for
she
because when no one else appeared she didn’t want him thinking she’d been stood up. A girl has her pride, even a WDC on an op!

A glance at the menu told her Dalziel was right about the prices. She felt quite hungry, but it was probably best to go through the motions of waiting for her imaginary friend and when a waitress approached a moment later, all she ordered was a Bacardi Breezer.

On the lower terrace, the blonde was still by herself. There was a water jug on the table from which she topped up her glass from time to time. Maybe she wanted to keep her head clear for the encounter to come. The only table close enough to permit meaningful eavesdropping was occupied by two couples engaged in a conversation so animated it verged on the raucous. Novello let her gaze slide over the other tables. Apart from the blonde there were no solitaries on the lower terrace and only one besides herself on the upper, a brawny gingery man, yawning his way through one of the Sunday Supplements. As she watched he was joined by a woman who, tight blonde curls apart, looked like the other half of a matched set.

Of course no reason why watchers shouldn’t come in pairs. In fact, Sunday lunchtime, it was solitaries like herself that were going to stick out.

It was nearly ten past twelve when Andy Dalziel swept past her table without the slightest flicker in her direction.

There was something different about him. Like herself, he had smartened up. This morning he had been decently dressed but with little care for colour coordination or the location of creases, and though his face had been in recent contact with a razor, the effect had been that of a badly mown lawn. Now his drumlin chins were smooth as a bowling green and he wore a dazzling white shirt tucked into pale green slacks whose crease fell like a plumb-line on to matching deck shoes.

Novello made a bet with herself that everything below the waist at least had been bought by the Fat Man’s partner, Cap Marvell. She wasn’t quite so confident that Cap would know, or approve, the occasion of what looked like their first airing.

She watched carefully to see how Dalziel greeted the blonde. Disappointingly (not that she bore Cap Marvell any malice, but what a story it could have made!) there was no embrace, not even the airiest of air kisses. So his decision to smarten himself up didn’t seem to be sexually based. In any case, he’d hardly have invited a subordinate to witness the encounter. Unless of course he didn’t trust himself and she was really there as a kind of chaperone…

She grounded these flights of fancy and once again checked out possible watchers over her Breezer.

Dalziel had attracted a few glances as he made his way across the terrace, but that was only to be expected. He had never been one of Mid-Yorkshire’s blushing violets and his close brush with death in the Mill Street terrorist explosion had got most of the local media trailing their prepared obituaries. But none of the lunchers showed any sign of continued interest.

Pietro passed by, ushering a middle-aged couple to a nearby table. The man, hook-nosed and balding, protested that he’d asked for a table overlooking the gardens. Pietro apologized profusely saying there must have been a mix-up but now, alas, all the al fresco tables were booked. Hook-nose, who gave the impression of a man used to getting his way, looked ready to make an issue out of it, but his companion, slightly younger though that might have been down to her make-up, uttered soothing noises and gave him a consoling stroke of the crotch area which, in view of their advanced years, Novello assumed was the result of age-related myopia rather than erotic targeting. But when she observed that under the table the man was responding in kind, Novello closed her eyes in horror. They had to be over fifty, for God’s sake!

‘No sign of your friend then?’

She opened her eyes. Pietro, having disposed of the lusty geriatrics, had paused alongside her.

‘No. Typical. Maybe I’ll start without her. What’re the open prawns like?’

‘Opened fresh every day! I’ll order one for you, shall I? Such a shame a good-looking girl should have to eat alone though.’

‘You trying to wangle an invite to join me?’ she said, smiling.

‘Love to, but I’d get fired,’ he said. ‘Don’t work all the time though… sorry, got to go.’

He headed back to his station where some new arrivals were waiting impatiently.

Doesn’t work all the time, she thought. Unlike me and all the rest of us sailing on the Good Ship Dalziel.

Mind you, she could do with a lot of work like this. The sun was shining, she had the Fat Bastard’s money in her purse, there was even some music drifting up from the garden; not the kind of music she’d have dreamt of listening to normally, but here in this place it fell very pleasantly on the ear.

She found herself wondering what time Pietro got off, then pulled herself together.

He wasn’t her type, and she had a job to do.

Once more she started checking off the other lunchers, one by one.

Result as before. No one suspicious.

Now she let her gaze return to Dalziel and the blonde, and then beyond them to the source of the garden music.

There seemed to be some kind of buffet party going on, with tables set up on a square of lawn at the centre of which stood a gazebo that held the musicians. Occasionally a cork popped; everyone seemed to be having a good time. She felt quite envious. Being a cop could be a lonely business.

Then she saw someone who wasn’t entering into the swing of things. A guy standing on the edge of the lawn. Maybe he just didn’t like that kind of music either. Or that kind of drink. He had ’phones on his ears, a bottle of lager in his hand, and he was nodding his head so that his black Zapata moustache and his matching shag of hair bounced up and down as though in time to a beat from his MP3.

Hard to tell precisely what he was looking at as he was wearing big reflective sunglasses, but he was facing the hotel and there was an uninterrupted line of sight between him and Dalziel’s table on the lower terrace, a distance of twenty or thirty yards.

Maybe she was being over-cautious, but those ’phones were a bit too big for the general air of
cool
the guy seemed to be trying to project. And the Zapata moustache was a bit
démodé
too.

She took out her mobile, brought up her phone book and selected Dalziel.

12.10–12.20

Dalziel was not a religious man but he felt grateful to
something
that a day that had started so badly had taken a distinct turn for the better.

Certainly, sitting in the sun with a good-looking young woman opposite you and the prospect of a tasty meal ahead of you was not the worst way to spend a Sunday lunchtime, not unless you were his old Scots granny, of course. She wouldn’t even have given him brownie points for his visit to the cathedral. A kirk should be small and homely. Those overblown buildings said more about man’s vanity than God’s greatness.

Well, it were twenty years since she’d gone to her long home, so now she’d know for sure if she’d been right. Which she probably had been, according to the eschatological model Dalziel sometimes liked to propound at the end of a long night in the Black Bull. In the Gospel according to St Andy, after death,
everybody
discovers they’ve been right. In other words, we all get the afterlife we believe in, whether it’s eternal harping or eternal oblivion. Even suicide bombers, except that in their case when they find themselves exploded into the midst of their seventy-two doe-eyed virgins, they find the one bit missing after the reassembly process is their dicks.

But for all his mockery of formal religion, today it somehow felt as if his brief unplanned visit to the cathedral had won him the reward of this lunchtime.

It was tempting just to relax and enjoy it, but how much he could relax rather depended on whether he was working or not. If, as he suspected, someone had been in his house, and if that intrusion had anything to do with this woman, then certainly he was working. But if the phone thing had just been a technical glitch…

Gina said, ‘So did I check out?’

‘Eh?’

‘Come on. Since we talked, you’ll have checked me out to make sure I haven’t been sent by Professor Moriarty to bewitch you into a compromising situation. If you haven’t, then I can’t see you being much good to me.’

Clearly she was completely back in control.

‘Fair enough. Aye, you checked out, more’s the pity.’

‘Why do you say that?’

He gave her his best leer and said, ‘It’s a long while since I’ve been bewitched into a compromising situation. Bothered and bewildered, yes, all the time. Like now. But bewitched doesn’t come round as often as it once did.’

‘I know the feeling. But I know you’ve spoken to Mick. He rang me afterwards. I’m sure he filled out the picture. So why should you feel bewildered and bothered?’

‘I’m a cop, Mrs Wolfe,’ said Dalziel heavily. ‘I catch criminals. Nowt criminal going off here, according to you and Mick. Unless you know something I don’t.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as Alex, your dear departed husband, was definitely on Goldie Gidman’s payroll and getting reunited with him might also reunite you with some large sums of dirty money only he knows the location of.’

He’d seen the vulnerable emotional side of her, now let’s take a look at how she stood up to a bit of rough and tumble.

She regarded him steadily for a moment then said, ‘And if that was my motive, why on earth would I be sitting here talking to the local king of the cops?’

‘Wasn’t your idea to contact me, luv. It was Mick Purdy’s.’

‘So I’m keeping stuff from Mick too?’

Dalziel shrugged and said, ‘All women keep stuff from their men. And vice versa. As you found out. Usually doesn’t matter. No, the big test will come if you find Alex and get faced with the choice: do I take off with the bad cop who’s got the big bucks, or do I stay true to the good cop who’s just got his pension to look forward to.’

‘Is that what you really think might happen, Mr Dalziel?’ she said.

‘How should I know? This show’s been running for seven years and I’ve just strayed in from the wings.’

A waitress who had been hovering said, ‘Are you ready to order yet, or would you like a little more time?’

Gina said, ‘I’m fine. I’ll just have the beef carpaccio with a green salad.’

‘I’ll have beef as well, luv,’ said Dalziel. ‘But I’ll have mine roast with Yorkshire pud and lots of spuds. And we’ll have a bottle of Barolo to wash that down.’

‘Actually I’d prefer a white, a Montana sauvignon blanc, perhaps,’ said Gina.

‘Fair enough. We’ll have one of them too,’ said Dalziel.

They sat in silence for a while after the waitress had gone. There was a buffet party going on in the gardens. The chatter reached them, not loud enough to be distracting, more like a treeful of birds or the babbling of a brook. And there was music, too; classical but tuneful with it and live not canned — this was, after all, the Keldale. He traced its source to a small group playing in the pagoda.

‘That Bach?’ he said.

‘Mozart,’ she said. ‘Mr Dalziel, let’s talk straight. One way and another I know cops. I reckon a good police technique here would be to start with a bit of provocation to see if it would shake anything out of me. Then lull me with a bit of idle chit-chat about music, say. Then try to catch me with some more provocation. Eventually, over coffee, we might get down to some constructive talk. Good technique, perhaps, but it won’t make for a very enjoyable lunch.’

Dalziel’s mobile rang. He took it out of his pocket, glanced at the display then put it to his ear and said, ‘Yeah?’

He listened for a moment then said, ‘Thanks for that. Just keep a close eye on him OK? A very close eye.’

He replaced the phone and smiled at the blonde.

‘You don’t look the shakeable type to me,’ he said. ‘So let’s drink to constructive talk.’

He picked up the heavy crystal water jug and topped her glass up, then did the same with his own. There was still some water left in the vessel, but he raised it above his head and waggled it at a waitress who was serving a nearby table and called, ‘Refill here, luv, when you’re ready.’