She said, ‘Last year.’
‘Yes.’
‘You were in the street…late one night…’
‘Very late. I’d arrived earlier in the evening. No one was in. I waited. I needed to see…how things were…’
‘And you saw me and Mick. You saw us embracing. You saw me take him into the house.’
‘Yes.’
‘How did that make you feel?’
He didn’t answer and she said impatiently, ‘It must have made you feel something.’
Interrogation. Take control, set the agenda. Mick had said that. Or was it Alex? Did it matter? Somehow it felt that it did.
He said, ‘It made me feel relieved. It confirmed who I was, where I was.’
He turned his head now and looked straight at her.
‘I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt you.’
‘Not hurt me?’ she cried incredulously. ‘You disappeared. All those years without a sound. And suddenly you feel you don’t want to hurt me!’
He shook his head and said, ‘Back then, to start with I knew nothing, I was nothing. I didn’t think about hurting you because I didn’t know anything about you. Or about anything. Even when things started coming back, they had nothing to do with feelings. For a long time I was just a sackful of fragments trying to learn how best to reassemble itself.’
Take control, set the agenda. Well, that didn’t last long, she mocked herself.
‘Fragments?’ she echoed.
‘I was in pieces. I didn’t just run away and hide from you, Gina. I hid from myself. You have to believe that.’
‘Of course I believed that,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t let myself think you’d simply abandoned me without a word. I told myself it had to be something in your mind, or…’
‘Or?’
‘Or you were dead. I didn’t think that at first. It took me a long time to come round to that. But after so many years of nothing, that became the easiest thing to believe.’
‘So Mick was…’
‘A long time after I gave up on you. Not until I was sure you were never coming back. You know what made me sure? It was seeing you that night in the street. For a moment you were so real I knew you had to be an illusion. Does that make sense?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, because seeing you, and Mick, made me realize that to me, the new me, you were an illusion too.’
She wanted to scream, But I was there! I hadn’t run away! You could have stepped out of the shadows and spoken to me, how the hell dare you say that I was an illusion too?
Instead she said, ‘And that’s why you were relieved. Because you decided I was…what? Unreal? Unimportant? What?’
‘You were with Mick. You’d moved on. You weren’t letting the past rule your life. We had nothing to give each other except pain. Better for both of us that we ceased to exist to each other.’
They sat in silence for a moment, their eyes averted, then she burst out, ‘So why are you here now, Alex? What’s going on? You say you decided we had nothing to give each other but pain. So why the hell are we sitting here now?’
He turned his head to meet her gaze once more.
‘Not to hurt you, believe me,’ he said. ‘I’m truly sorry…’
‘Forget it,’ she interrupted him. ‘Just tell me what happened, what’s happening, tell it straight. We’ll save the apologies and recriminations for later.’
He looked relieved and settled back in his seat.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Except telling it straight isn’t easy because of the gaps. All I can do is say what I know, or think I know. I was at home. Then I wasn’t at home, I didn’t know where home was, I didn’t know who I was, or rather I suppose I knew I didn’t want to know. Does that make sense? What I mean is, I knew I was lost, but I never felt an urge to go and ask anyone for help in finding me.’
‘That sounds more like hiding than lost,’ she said.
‘Maybe. I had a lot to hide from.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning Lucy’s death.’
Someone had to say it. She was glad it was him. She’d always thought of herself as the stronger one, but seven years on it was Alex who had the strength to say it. She’d have thought this mention of her daughter’s name would be the trigger to open the floodgates, but instead it seemed to give her the strength to maintain her control.
‘And not just that, though that was at the centre of everything,’ he went on. ‘Once I knew she was ill, everything shifted, perspectives changed, I changed, you changed too I daresay, though I was too absorbed in my own pain to really see that. I thought that you were strong, that you had the strength to be resigned, but I see now that all that was just a different way of dealing with the pain.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Alex, this corruption thing, were you guilty?’
He looked at her impatiently, as if this were a diversion from the important stuff.
‘Of course I was. You must have known that.’
She shook her head. Somehow this felt like the biggest shock of all, not because it was more important than anything else but because, amidst all the debris of their shattered lives, she’d always clung to the certainty of his innocence.
She said, ‘I thought…I thought…’
‘Come on!’ he said. ‘We needed the money. From the start we knew the good old NHS was only with us so far along the way. If we wanted the newest and the best treatment, we went looking for it, remember? Here, there, everywhere, chasing a hope. Hope doesn’t come cheap. Where did you think the money was coming from?’
‘You got a bank loan, you were applying for a mortgage on the house…’
‘The loan went nowhere, mean bastards. And they were making me jump through all kinds of bureaucratic hoops to get a mortgage, then Gidman made his offer. There it was: instant money, no strings attached. I wasn’t gong to refuse.’
‘No strings? Except your job!’
He laughed and said, ‘I can’t remember much, but one thing I do remember is how utterly unimportant the job seemed. Everything except Lucy was shadowy, unreal. The rest of the world was illusion. I could have seen it fall into ruin without a pang.’
‘And then?’
‘And then she died and I was left alone in this illusory world.’
‘Alone? You weren’t alone!’ she cried. ‘I was there.’
‘No. You were alone too in your own world. It was a world I wasn’t strong enough to join you in. I had nothing to stay for, everything to flee from.’
‘Including the internal investigation,’ she said, feeling a sudden urge to hurt him. ‘Might have been illusory, but I daresay the prospect of being jailed as a bent cop must have played a small part in your decision.’
He shook his head violently.
‘I told you, there wasn’t any decision. What I did had nothing to do with the threats, not the rat pack’s at the Yard, not Goldie Gidman’s either…’
‘He threatened you too, did he?’ she mocked. ‘What was he going to do? Beat you up? Break a few bones? Pain or prison? No wonder you ran!’
It was proving hard to stick to her own proposal that apologies and recriminations should be saved for later. In her heart she believed he had vanished because he had no choice, but all that pain he had caused her surely deserved some punishment?
He didn’t react to her mockery but said quietly, ‘I felt threatened, certainly. Not long after the investigation started, I was opening the garage door one morning. A car pulled up at the gate and a woman got out and called to me. She said she’d heard the house was up for sale, I told her it wasn’t, and she looked up at the house and said it didn’t matter anyway, now she’d seen it, she thought the property looked as if it might be a fire hazard. She’d known a lot of houses like this go up in flames, everyone inside burnt to death, just because the owner was careless. She hoped I wasn’t a careless owner.’
‘You’re saying she was from Gidman?’
‘His name was never mentioned, but oh yes, I knew she
was from Gidman. I felt angry, but there was a man sitting in the car, watching us. He didn’t look the kind of guy I wanted to see getting out of the car, so I said I wasn’t the careless type. I was just about past caring then, but you were still at home.’
‘So you were thinking of me?’ she said. ‘What do you want me to do now? Swoon with gratitude?’
‘I was almost at a point where I wasn’t thinking of anyone,’ he said. ‘What I did had nothing to do with you or anyone. I did it because I couldn’t help it. It was like teleporting in the space movies. I was there, I wasn’t there. I was now, I was years in the future.’
She felt drained. She didn’t know how long she’d be able to go on with this, couldn’t imagine where it was going to end. Her throat felt very dry. She coughed and glanced out of the window towards the pub.
She said, ‘I could do with a drink.’
‘Better we’re not seen together in there. They know me. Here–’
He produced a bottle of water from the glove compartment. She opened it and took a swig. It was lukewarm but it eased her throat and renewed her strength.
‘So that’s what took you away,’ she said. ‘What brought you back?’
‘Nothing. I mean, lots of things. I mean it wasn’t just a blinding revelation: Oh, I’m ex-DCI Alex Wolfe, I must have lost my memory. It was gradual, confused. You see, I was really settled in my new life, I had a job, I had friends.’
‘A job? Friends? Lucky you. What kind of job?’
‘Casual work, to start with. In fact I started here at the Lost Traveller.’
‘The what?’
‘It’s the name of the pub. I must have come here for a drink and seen the advert. Maybe it was the name that attracted me.’
‘Oh yes? Might have made more sense if it had been called the Running Man.’
That came out more sharply than she’d intended, but she’d been provoked by the hint of pathos in what he’d said.
His reaction was a faint smile, the first lightness she’d seen in his features.
He said, ‘Whatever, it helped me survive. I collected glasses and served behind the bar to start with. I was casual labour, money in hand, nothing in the books, so no questions to answer. Just as well, as I had no answers to give.’
‘You must have had a name. They must have called you something.’
‘Yes, they did ask me. I told them my name was Ed. Ed Muir. I’d no idea why, it just came into my head. For all I knew then it was my real name.’
She stared hard at him, looking for signs that he was mocking her, but found none as he went on: ‘Later, when it started coming back to me, I realized where it came from. Back about a year before I got put on Macavity, I was on the team investigating that Hackney benefits scam. Way it worked, someone in the local social security office had to be involved, so I was delegated to go along and sign on to try and get a lead. I needed a name, so I called myself Edwin Muir. Remember? That Scottish poet you were so fond of? I’d just bought you a fancy edition of his collected works for your birthday.’
She said very quietly, ‘I remember. You couldn’t see what I saw in him, right?’
‘That’s right, but his name stuck and it came in really useful. Not only when I was working casual, but later, when things started coming back to me. I’d started doing a bit in the kitchen at the pub. I always enjoyed cooking, remember?’
Suddenly she didn’t want to do any more shared memories, not at this level, not like a couple of old school friends who’d run into each other by chance.
She said, ‘So you became a cook, is that what you’re saying?’
‘To start with. And as I stopped being casual, I needed a real back story. That’s where Ed Muir came in handy. Way back then, I’d picked up a lot of tricks about how to manipulate social security. Turned out there were still some traces of Ed Muir on file from the Hackney op, so it wasn’t too hard for me to build up the identity, particularly as I wasn’t trying to get money out of them. In fact, they’ve probably got me in their books as a success story. Layabout turns the corner, gets a permanent job, starts contributing.’
Feeling his evident pleasure in his own smartness like a pain, she said abruptly, ‘Do you still work here, at this pub?’
‘No. Sometimes I come back to give a hand if they’ve anything big on. But I moved on. I’m in charge of a fair-sized catering operation now.’
He spoke with a quiet pride, but he didn’t offer any details.
She said dully, ‘So you got your memory back. And you decided you preferred your new life to your old one. Great.’
‘It wasn’t as simple as that,’ he urged. ‘At first, it didn’t feel like recovering my memory, more like losing my mind. Then I met someone…’
‘A woman, you mean.’
‘Yes. We got together. I suppose, for me anyway, at first it was as much for comfort and warmth as…anything. But then she got pregnant. That was a waking point. Not the final one, perhaps, but a huge lurch back to reality; two realities, the one I wanted, which was here, and the other one that I’d escaped from but knew I’d have to deal with if I was to take my second chance.’
‘Second chance?’ she said. ‘That how you saw it?’
‘Oh yes,’ he said seriously. ‘I’d lost everything. Now I was getting it all back. How else should I see it?’
This was too much. Second chance! In all the joy of moving into a steady relationship with Mick, she had never ever thought of it as a second chance, an opportunity to replace what she had lost. Seven years of watching and helping her daughter grow, how could they ever be replaced?
‘And me? What about my loss?’ she cried.
‘I told you,’ he said patiently. ‘I went back to check you out. I had to know what damage I’d caused. When I saw that you and Purdy…well, I knew that I couldn’t change what had happened, couldn’t offer any kind of reparation. All I would do if I showed myself was cause even more damage.’
‘That was a very handy conclusion to reach, wasn’t it?’ she sneered. ‘Gave you the excuse to do exactly what you wanted to do.’
‘That too,’ he agreed. ‘We’d both repaired ourselves, started new lives. It made sense not to risk shattering both of them again, didn’t it?’
‘Maybe. In which case, why are we sitting here?’ she demanded.
He shifted in his seat and she could feel his relief at this step away from what had bound them together in the past to what had brought them together in the present.
‘I know why I’m sitting here,’ he said. ‘I heard something breaking on the terrace at the Keldale and I looked up and found myself looking straight at you. The real question is, what are you doing here? This photo you mentioned, have you got it with you?’
‘No. I gave it to the police, to the man I was having lunch with. His name’s Dalziel. He’s head of the local CID.’
‘I’ve heard of him,’ he said. ‘And this was a picture of me in MY Life?’
‘Yes. In the crowd, during the royal visit last week.’
‘And that didn’t strike you as odd? You know I wouldn’t bother to cross the street to see a member of our clapped-out royal family.’
‘That was the old you. What do I know about the new model, this happy relaxed guy with a good job in the catering industry? Listen. It was definitely you in the picture.’
‘Looking like I look now?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘It was like you as you used to be.’
‘Anything else? Why did you choose to stay at the Keldale, for instance?’
‘There was a message with the photo. On Keldale notepaper. I thought it might signify something. I had nothing else.’
‘What did the message say?’
‘The General reviews his troops. Remember?’
‘Of course I remember,’ he said with a reminiscent smile that made her want to hit him.
‘But you’re saying you didn’t send the message or the photo?’ she said.
‘Why would I?’
‘Why would anyone?’ she snapped.
He stared at her gloomily for a moment, then said, ‘I can only think of one reason. I’ve been a fucking idiot.’
‘Why does that not surprise me? I’m sorry, I mean, how? What have you done?’
He took the water bottle from her and downed an inch.
‘I told you, there’s been a period–in fact, it’s only come to an end today–like when you wake up in the morning but you’re not really fully awake. I knew who I was again, but I wasn’t yet totally back in the real world. I can’t have been, otherwise I wouldn’t have done it. But it seemed harmless. In fact it seemed stupid not to, like turning down a gift from the gods.’
‘What the hell are you talking about, Alex?’
‘I needed money. It seemed important to give her the best possible start, to show everyone how proud I was, to show God how grateful I was…’
‘Who? Who are you talking about?’
‘My daughter,’ he said. ‘I wanted to throw her a really splendid christening party.’
She looked at him with realization dawning, though perhaps the realization was that she had known this all along, but hadn’t wanted to admit it.
She said with a calmness that frightened her, ‘That’s why you were in the garden. The christening party. It was yours.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘For your daughter.’
‘Yes.’
‘What have you called her.’
‘Lucinda.’
That was when at last she started crying.
18.10–18.15
Peter Pascoe entered the Keldale at a speed just short of a run and shouldered aside a middle-aged woman at the reception desk.
The receptionist didn’t wait for him to speak but said, ‘Room number 36.’
Pascoe was on his way up the stairs before the displaced guest had time to finish saying, ‘What a rude man!’
Upstairs he saw the door marked 36 was open.
As he rushed towards it, the thought occurred that he was doing exactly what he’d tried to tell Dalziel not to do. But he did it all the same.
Midnight Fugue Page 25