This was not the language of a deferential 2 i.c. to his superior. This was angry and imperious.
He brought up Pascoe’s number.
‘OK, lad,’ he said. ‘What’s all the panic? Forgot where I keep the key to the stationery cupboard? It had better be good-this is my day off, remember?’
If he’d hoped by his bluster to fend off bad news, he was disappointed.
Pascoe said, ‘Andy, thank God. Listen, it’s Novello. Someone’s bashed her over the head and she’s in Intensive Care. It gets worse. She was found lying next to a man’s body. He’s had his face shot off!’
‘Oh Christ. Found where?’
He knew the answer before he heard it.
‘Loudwater Villas. Number 39. Wieldy says he ran a number plate for you this lunchtime and that was the address. Andy, what the hell’s going on?’
‘You there now?’ said Dalziel, ignoring the question because he couldn’t answer it.
‘Of course I bloody well am!’
‘I’m on my way.’
He set off, passing en route without a glance Pietro bearing a silver tray on which rested a pot of tea and a freshly baked parkin.
It had been a crazy day, thought the young waiter. This was the third time someone had ordered then rushed off without touching a thing!
But at least the good-looking young woman who’d abandoned her prawn sandwich had said she’d be back. Pietro prided himself on recognizing genuine interest when he saw it.
Oh yes, he told himself complacently.
That one would definitely be back.
14.45-15.35
As Maggie Pinchbeck drove away after dropping Gidman, she hadn’t been happy.
Normally she might have been as dismissive of Gwyn Jones’s unexpected appearance as her employer had appeared to be. Journalists spent much of their time chasing will-o’-the-wisps. The only sin was to miss a story, and if that meant spending tedious hours exploring dead-ends, that was the price they had to pay.
In newspaper circles it was generally agreed that Goldie Gidman was fireproof. Some cynics averred this meant he had to be dirty because nobody could be so clean, but majority opinion held that if there really had been any dirt to be found, the combined excavatory skills of the police and the press would surely have dug it up years ago. Of course it was potentially such a great story, conjuring up the prospect of bringing the Tory’s new Icarus crashing to earth, that it would never entirely die. Great truths may burn eternally, but great lies too retain a heat in their embers that stubbornly refuses to be quenched.
So Jones had probably caught a fragment of a whisper, half overheard and wholly misinterpreted. Being a dedicated Gidman-baiter, he’d tossed it into the water and stood back to see if anything surfaced.
Disregardable then, thought Maggie. If it hadn’t been for Tris Shandy’s party.
Tristram Shandy (real name Ernie Moonie) was a former Irish boy-band singer who had survived changing fashion, waning hair and waxing waist with a flexibility worthy of the Vicar of Bray. In turns record producer, Celebrity-Up-the-Creek winner, comic novelist, Live Aid activist, panel game player, soap star and confessional autobiographer, he was now, rising fifty, revelling in his latest metamorphosis as chairman of Truce! this season’s mega-successful TV show. Its ostensible aim was to bring together warring parties ranging from quarrelling neighbours, divorcing couples, kids at odds with parents, and families divided by wills, to individuals in dispute with corporate bodies such as supermarkets, estate agents, manufactures, hospitals, lawyers, politicians.
The resulting melange of glutinous sentimentality when disputants were reconciled, and blood on the carpet when they weren’t, was so much to the depraved taste of twenty-first-century Britain that Shandy had now joined the crowded ranks of those minutely talented, monstrously ego’d ‘media personalities’ whose contracts were worth millions.
Maggie knew that today he was spending some of his loose change on a luncheon party on the Shah-Boat, the former Shah of Persia’s luxury yacht, found rusting in a remote backwater of the Black Sea by a Russian oil millionaire, restored to its previous opulence, and towed to its present location on Victoria Embankment where it had rapidly become the location of choice for those who liked to combine the maximum of privacy for their parties with the maximum of publicity for their personal wealth.
Anybody with pretensions to being somebody would have been invited. Beanie the Bitch certainly fell into that category, and presumably, as her current server, Gwyn Jones too.
So whatever it was that had brought the journalist to the Centre opening had been worth missing the party of the week for, as well as presumably pissing off the Bitch.
If something was brewing that might affect her employer, Maggie Pinchbeck wanted to know. The potentially most fruitful line of enquiry had to be via Beanie Sample. Of course she might know nothing, but if she did, there were two reasons why she might be persuaded to share it.
The first was that Jones’s defection had probably left her feeling seriously irritated, and the Bitch was famous for not getting mad but getting even.
The second was that she owed Maggie Pinchbeck.
At an early age Maggie had looked at herself, accepted that she was insignificant and turned insignificance into an art form. Raising funds for ChildSave had been her training ground. ‘She’s like a bloody pickpocket,’ one Captain of Industry had said wonderingly. ‘You hardly notice she’s around, then a bit later on, you realize your wallet’s disappeared!’ Working for Dave in that twilight zone where politics meets the media, she’d soon discovered that shadowiness got you places that brashness couldn’t reach. Thus it was that Maggie, seated unnoticed in the corner of a Fleet Street pub much favoured by the press before the great migration south, found herself listening to an alcoholic conversation between three old journalists haunting the place where whatever honour they’d ever possessed had probably died.
Their subject was the Bitch, who had clearly trodden on each of them at some point with more than usual violence. Their theme was revenge. Their proposed method was to put in her way a young man possessing all those attributes guaranteed to set her juices flowing. He, armed with the very latest surveillance gear, would make a detailed audio-visual record of their encounters. No journal with any sense would touch this stuff, but the Internet has neither fears nor loyalties, and the knowledge that everyone she knew was revelling in these images must, the trio felt, pierce even the Bitch’s famous defences.
Stage One, Maggie gathered, had been successful. The bait was on display. The Bitch was showing interest. But she was a wily old tigress who knew better than to pounce on any tethered goat. She would do a lot of checking first and the merry threesome were congratulating themselves on the thoroughness of their preparation, which they were sure would soothe even the most suppurating doubts.
Maggie debated what to do, but not for long. She knew Beanie Sample only by reputation and didn’t much like what she’d heard. But she’d been fostered in infancy, and though treated by her foster parents with much kindness, her two foster sisters had never let her forget her status. The result had been a sensitivity to injustice on a par with Jane Eyre’s.
She rang the Bitch at home. Getting through to her at work, though not impossible, would have taken a lot of time and effort. It was easier to extract her unlisted number from a common acquaintance who also owed Maggie a big favour.
To start with, Beanie’s sole concern was to discover how Maggie had come by her home number, which she dispensed like an oenophile sharing a 2001 Yquem. Ignoring this, Maggie stated the facts baldly as she had overheard them and rang off.
She then dropped the matter from her consciousness until it resurfaced a week later when the Bitch appeared at her flat with a huge bouquet of roses and a magnum of Mumm. They talked, but not for long. Both were too realistic not to face the fact that they didn’t warm to each other. But as the Bitch left, she’d said, ‘Remember, I owe you.’
‘You’ve paid me,’ said Maggie.
