glance why the man had taken early retirement. Mathias, in his mid-fifties, could easily have been taken for eighty. The upside was that he showed no sign of wanting to wallow in Celtic nostalgia and proved an entertaining and generous host, so Jones was happy to accept his invitation to come back soon, much to the delight of his mother.
His reward for this filial piety was that on subsequent visits he was introduced to many of Owen’s former colleagues, young and old. True, several of them shrank away as if from a wandering leper when they heard he was a journalist, but a few showed signs of sociability which he hoped to cultivate into a mutually beneficent relationship. One thing they all did was wince and look for excuses to leave whenever the subject of Goldie Gidman came up. This man, of whom Jones had never heard, was evidently Owen’s King Charles’s head.
‘I could never lay hands on him,’ the ‘old’ man complained after they’d got to know each other better. ‘But you’re an investigative journalist, you can sort him out, boyo. You can make those blind bastards at the CPS see what’s plain to all honest men. He’s a bad job, a crook through and through.’
Scenting a possible early scoop, Jones had listened closely to the ex-policeman and mentioned Gidman in the office. There he had been warned in no uncertain terms that Gidman was off limits unless you had an absolutely water-tight story to tell.
Then within a year of their first meeting, Owen Mathias died. On learning that he had been mentioned in the will, Jones for a while had pleasant hopes of a modest legacy. What he got in the event was a box of CD-roms on to which had been downloaded so far as he could see everything in the Met’s records about Goldie Gidman and his associates.
Recognizing that possession of these probably constituted an offence under several Acts, he stashed them away behind his wardrobe. And there they remained till the famous bye-election that signalled the eruption of David Gidman the Third on the political scene.
Warned of a possible upset, Jones in company of many other journalists had been on the spot. It wasn’t till well into the victory celebration that he’d managed to get close enough to the Golden Boy to ask his questions. When he introduced himself, Gidman, not yet a finished product of the Millbank School of Charm and flushed with success and champagne, cried, ‘Jones? Why is everybody in Wales called Jones? Only way they can sort the buggers out is by calling them Dai Grocer and Nye the Nutter and so on. From the Messenger, you say? I shall think of you as Jones the Mess!’
A feeble joke in doubtful taste, but certainly more of a bird-bolt than a cannon bullet. He had smiled with the rest and carried on with his questioning. And afterwards, it had seemed to him that he was doing no more than his job when he joined the journalistic pack in digging around to see what murky secrets might lie in the new boy’s past.
When their combined efforts failed to turn up any drug convictions, dodgy dealings with right-wing extremists, or documented instances of sexual deviancy, most of his fellows gave up the chase.
But Jones found he couldn’t let it alone. Eventually he tried a bit of self-analysis. It had to be more than the initial slur. He wasn’t a professional Welshman, for God’s sake, no super-sensitive Celt eager to take umbrage at the merest sniff of an Anglo-Saxon attitude. No, there had to be something more, something chemical as much as political. Perhaps it was in the blood, perhaps he had inherited it from the same source as cousin Owen.
Whatever the cause, he came to recognize that the young MP was his Dr Fell, his heart’s abhorrence. And so began his anti-Gidman campaign.
Unable to find a weakness in the MP’s defences, he turned his attention to Goldie Gidman, and now Owen Mathias’s downloads became useful. He managed to get in a few sneers about the dubious nature of Goldie’s early financial dealings, but it was soon made very clear to him by the Messenger’s lawyers that there was a line he wasn’t going to be allowed to cross. His only success had been an article suggesting that the late David Gidman the First would have been outraged to know that his son was making substantial contributions to the Conservative Party and devastated to learn that his grandson was a Tory MP. Goldie’s briefs had huffed and puffed, but there was nothing they could do. You can’t libel the dead.
But it was the living he wanted to get in his sights.
And then the rumour reached him that Gidman MP was banging his PA. She, it was reported, had dreams of what would have been a very lucrative marriage, but when Dave the Turd got wind of this, he made it brutally clear it wasn’t going to happen. So perhaps she might be in the market for an alternative offer…
Jones had masterminded her subornation. Not that what she had to tell was necessarily a career breaker. Since Clinton, the fact that a politician had a big dong and liked to exercise it in unusual venues was at most a peccadillo, might in some instances even be a vote-catcher. But the Messenger’s spinners and weavers had been hopeful that with a little embroidery they might be able to hint at S amp;M tendencies, Nazi sympathies, and even the possibility of security risks.
Then, on the day the deal was due to be signed, the woman’s agent announced she’d changed her mind and had no story to tell. No prizes for guessing why. The woman had got the message that, whatever the paper could offer, Goldie would top it. When Jones argued for getting into an auction, his editor ordered him to back off, adding cynically, ‘One thing we can’t offer the tart is guaranteed health insurance. Goldie can. But I never said that.’
Jones, who hadn’t been able to resist boasting among his colleagues that Dave the Turd was in for a nasty surprise, lost a lot of face. Perhaps it was this feeling of irritation that caused him to be less than diplomatic shortly afterwards when he found himself on a Question Time panel with Dave Gidman. He did not doubt that the juxtapositioning was deliberately provocative, but both he and Gidman were so determinedly polite to each other that the normally urbane chairman who’d been promised blood began to let his frustration show.
When Gidman with charming modesty refused to take seriously a suggestion by one of the other guests that he was if not yet the Tories’ heir apparent, at least their heir presumptive, the chairman reminded Jones that he’d once described the MP as a modern Icarus, soaring high on wings created by his father.
‘Did you mean to imply,’ went on the chairman with his charming smile, ‘that, like Icarus, the higher he flies, the more he will be in danger of crashing to earth?’
Jones had replied urbanely, ‘Some people might say that, but I couldn’t possibly comment.’
And then, almost as if in a dream, he’d heard himself adding, ‘Of course, as a classical scholar, you will doubtless recall that Icarus’ father, Daedalus, was mixed up in some very dodgy activities, and indeed as a young man he had been banished from Athens for murdering one of his apprentices.’
While this fell short of being actionable, it made a nice headline in many of the papers, but from his own editor it had won only a stern reproof.
‘Don’t even dream of writing anything like that in my paper, not even if it’s in fucking Welsh!’
So he’d gone quiet. But he continued to add to the police files he’d inherited from Owen anything else that came up about either of the Gidmans. Secretly he still felt that it was his mission in life to do radical chiropody on their feet of clay, but now the only person he trusted enough to share this feeling with was his young brother. The eight years between them meant there was little or no sibling rivalry, just a strong current of affection, protective from the elder and hero-worshipping from the younger. Gareth sometimes asked for advice and usually took it, occasionally asked for a loan and always took it, and if ever the chance arose to impart something that might impress his brother, he always took that too. Hearing the name Wolfe mentioned in connection with that of Goldie Gidman had sent him rushing to his phone.
Jones tried to get in touch with Gareth as he drove back to Marina Tower, but there was no response. As he’d expected, the flat was empty. Might have been nice to find that Beanie didn’t feel the Shandy party was worth going to without his company, but he’d known better than to count on it. To tell the truth, he was quite glad to have the place to himself. Beanie would have required explanations, and even in their closest moments he never forgot that she too was a journalist. You might share your body and the deep secrets of your heart with a fellow hack, but you stopped short of sharing a story.
He switched on his laptop and accessed his Gidman file. He’d already done a quick check after Gareth’s call to confirm that Wolfe was there.
Now he ran through the relevant section again. Operation Macavity. Possible leak. DI Wolfe under investigation. Nothing proved. Wolfe’s domestic troubles. Breakdown, Retirement. Disappearance. State of fugue posited by medical experts. Goldie’s involvement posited privately by Owen Mathias, but no supporting evidence whatsoever. No trace of Wolfe ever found. (Owen’s personal note read: Murdered?)
Then there was the wife. Gina Wolfe. She was looked at very carefully after her husband went walkabout, both by the police and even more so by the papers, who’d given her such a hard time, she complained to the Press
