Читать книгу Midnight Fugue - Reginald Hill - Страница 19

Fleur Delay watched the fat guy come out of the cathedral.

No sign of Vince.

She guessed he’d be suffering an agony of indecision about whether to follow the man or stick with the woman. Vince didn’t do structured thinking. Rationalizing his way to a choice was like walking across hot coals.

What he might be now if she hadn’t finally decided that taking her big brother in hand was a full-time job didn’t bear thinking of. Looking back, it seemed as if she’d been training for it the whole of her life, or at least since the age of nine when their father left.

To start with there’d been a lot of self-interest here. If the family fell apart, the only route for herself was into care. Someone had to hold things together, and she didn’t need to be told that neither her mother nor her brother was up to the job. By the time she left school and got her job with The Man, she’d become expert at dealing with social workers who expressed doubts about the set-up. An hour in Fleur’s company saw them persuaded, not without relief, that she was much better qualified than they were to save her mother from the worst consequences of her own excesses while at the same time trying with diminishing success to keep her brother out of jail and making sure he had a home to return to on release.

She’d been working for Gidman for nine years when her mother finally succumbed to a cocktail of alcohol and chemicals. Not long after the funeral, the other half of her family responsibility was put on hold by a judge deciding short sharp shocks were clearly having no effect on Vince and sending him down for a ten stretch.

His behaviour inside ensured he did the full term and, as his release date approached, Fleur found herself having to work out a strategy for the future not only for her brother but herself.

During her twenty years working for The Man her reliability and ingenuity had won golden opinions and rapid advancement. But Goldie Gidman’s career horizons had widened considerably too.

Fleur’s career running The Man’s financial affairs had begun shortly before Margaret Thatcher began to run the country’s. During the Thatcher years Goldie Gidman had come to see that this brave new world of free market enterprise offered opportunities to become stinking rich that did not involve the use of a hammer. Though the implement had changed, the principle was one he was very familiar with. Human need and greed left people vulnerable. Looking west out of the East End into the City he saw a feeding frenzy that made his own localized pickings seem very Lenten fare. And so began the moves, both geographical and commercial, that were to turn him into a financial giant.

But changes of direction can be dangerous.

It was Fleur who had pointed out to him the paradox that going completely legit left him much more exposed than staying completely bent. The movement from crookedness to cleanliness meant abandoning a lot of old associates whose faces and attitudes were at odds with the new glossy picture of himself and his activities he was preparing for the world. The trick was to make sure that, as new doors opened before him, the old doors were firmly locked and double barred behind. Fortunately he’d always tidied up as he went along and those who knew enough to do him active harm were few and far between. Now once more he scrutinized them very carefully and those he had any doubts about got visited by his long-time associate and enforcer, Milton Slingsby.

No one knew more about The Man’s affairs than Fleur Delay. Her record should have made her invulnerable. But the trouble was that her professional usefulness had more or less come to an end. Her talent for manipulative accountancy had been invaluable in the days when his main financial enemies were local tax inspectors and VAT men, and she had been helpful during the early moves into legitimate areas of speculation. But as Goldie prospered, he had turned more and more to the specialized tax accountants without whom a man could sink without trace in the mazy morass of the modern markets. In their company she was like an abacus among computers, but an abacus whose database was very computer-like. While she did not believe she was in imminent danger of a visit from Sling, she knew that Goldie valued people in proportion to their usefulness, and to have dangerous knowledge but no positive function was potentially a fatal combination.

As Vince’s release date approached, she saw a way to solve both her problems.

The key was Milton Slingsby.

Sling’s great merit was total loyalty. Whatever Goldie told him to do, he did. But he was nearly ten years older than Goldie and his early years in the boxing ring, where he was renowned for blocking his opponents’ punches with his head, were starting to take their toll. With Goldie by his side telling him what to do he could function as well as ever. But now the new respectable Goldie wanted to be as far away as possible from the kind of thing he usually told Sling to do.

So Fleur brought up the subject of her brother with The Man, not as her problem, but as his opportunity. Vince, she averred, would do the heavy work. She would do the planning, guaranteeing speed, discretion, and absolutely no lines back to The Man.

To employ someone like Vince Delay directly wasn’t an option for Goldie. Such men were by their very nature likely to prove as unreliable as the unreliables they were seeing off. But the prospect of having someone as heavy as Vince under the control of someone he still trusted as implicitly as Fleur was not unattractive.

He agreed to a trial run. Three days later the designated target fell while out walking his dog and cracked his skull against a fence post with fatal results.

That had been thirteen years ago and up till now neither party had had occasion to complain about the arrangement. Rapidly the Delays’ reputation for reliability and discretion drew in offers from elsewhere, some of which Fleur accepted, though as a Gidman pensioner, she had sufficient income to permit her to be choosy. But on the increasingly rare occasions The Man put work their way, she dropped everything else and came running.

It was important to please The Man, partly for pride, principally for preservation.

Her policy of keeping Vince as ignorant of the fine detail of their jobs as possible seemed to work. As a notorious ex-con, he got pulled in from time to time when the police had nothing better to do. Silence underpinned by ignorance and bolstered by the rapid arrival of a top-class brief had kept him safe. She used these occasions to point out to The Man just how ignorant Vince was. She felt pretty certain that as long as she was around and functioning efficiently, there would be no problem.

But take her out of the picture, and she knew beyond doubt that Goldie Gidman would be running his cold eyes over her brother.

She ran her own eyes over him as finally he emerged from the cathedral and headed towards the VW.

The fat guy was already getting into his ancient Rover.

Vince slid into the passenger seat beside his sister.

‘What’s happening?’ she asked. ‘Where’s the woman?’

‘Don’t get your knickers in a twist,’ he said. ‘She’s still inside. They’re meeting up later for lunch at the hotel. Twelve o’clock. I heard them fixing it.’

The Rover was nosing its way out of the car park. She started the VW and followed it out into Holyclerk Street.

‘We not tailing Blondie any more then?’ asked Vince.

‘We’ll let the bug do that for us. If she stops anywhere, we can check it out. You keep an eye on the laptop. Now tell me exactly what you saw and heard in the cathedral.’

When he finished, she squeezed his arm and said, ‘You done well, Vince.’

He basked in the glow of pleasure that praise from Fleur always gave him.

They had left the cathedral area behind them and were approaching the main urban highway. The Rover signalled left towards the town centre. Fleur signalled right.

‘We not going to see where’s he’s heading?’ said Vince, puzzled.

‘I’m starting to have a good idea where he’s heading,’ said Fleur. ‘What I want to see is where he’s coming from.’