Midnight Fugue

misterioso

PRELUDE

She says I’m pregnant.

The words bring such an explosion of joy that it shatters the barriers his mind had built against pain.

She sees only the pain and turns away.

But he turns with her, and now she sees the joy, and it’s so great that in a moment she thinks she must have imagined the pain.

He knows once more who he is…no, not is…he knows who he was, for now the nowhere existence in which he had felt himself shadowy, insubstantial, has sent out roots and will grow like the seed in her belly, while that other existence in that other world of pain proves to be the world of shades, inhabited by ghosts, himself nothing more than ghost when he visits it.

He knows he has to visit it, for that ghost of himself needs to be laid. So he descends into the shadowland to seek his old love, and when he sees her there, safe and secure in another shade’s arms, he turns away and climbs back to the light, not fearing to look over his shoulder because he knows she will not be following.

His new love waits for him, radiant to see him return, not questioning where he has been for no doubt lies between them, and he tells her no lies for how can a man lie about a world that no longer exists?

He feels the new world of her ripening belly under his hands.

Lucinda, he says.

What did you say?

Lucinda. That’s her name.

But we don’t even know that we’ll have a girl!

Yes we do, he says with the smiling certainty of one who knows that that other existence had been but a dress rehearsal whose disasters were a necessary prelude to a triumphant and lengthy run. And her name will be Lucinda. And from the moment she is born, she shall have nothing but the best.

So easily in joy and love a man plots his own betrayal.

13.45-14.50

Gwyn Jones left the community centre without troubling the buffet. When he had the scent of a story in his nose, he lost all other appetite. Also his unexpected presence had aroused unwelcome curiosity from some other journalists. Bumping Gem Huntley off the assignment hadn’t been a problem. Not long up from the provinces, she was still eager to please. Very eager. He’d taken advantage of her eagerness in the traditional style only last week when Beanie was out of town for a couple of nights. She wasn’t bad looking, in a peasant kind of way; carrying a bit too much flesh perhaps, but it was young flesh, and while a man might grow tired of such a plain diet every night, she was touchingly eager to learn. It had made a pleasant change from the Bitch’s cordon bleu menu. So a squeeze of her buttock and a promise that he would meet up with her later to explain everything had been enough to get her out of the way.

The others were more of a problem, the trouble being that his antipathy for Gidman was so well known that his presence at such a bland public relations affair was bound to spark interest.

The groundwork for his dislike had been laid on his first arrival in London six years before. His mother, the one person from whom he’d hidden his delight at leaving Llufwwadog, had been worried that her eldest son might not survive the inevitable pangs of homesickness he must feel alone in a great foreign city. So before parting she extracted a solemn oath from him that, as soon as he settled in, he would make contact with her cousin (twice removed) Owen Mathias. Owen, she averred, being a recently retired policeman, would be able to provide good sound advice as well as a reminder of his beloved home country.

When, after much maternal cajoling, Jones finally travelled out to Ealing to pay his respects, he saw at a 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 &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 Complaints Authority.

Nothing from either source. No unexplained increase in bank balances. No sudden trips to faraway places. No untraceable phone calls. Nothing suspicious. She was either totally innocent or a consummate actress.

His mobile rang. He picked it up, expecting it would be Gareth. But the caller screen read Paul, which was just as good.

Paul was one of the sympathetic Met officers he’d encountered at Owen’s sickbed. An investigative journalist is only as good as his contacts and he’d worked particularly hard on this relationship over the past few years. Paul was a chief inspector, not all that high on the police totem pole, but he worked in the communications centre and what he didn’t overhear, he could usually find out. Jones had rung him on his way to ambush Gidman and asked him to check the current status of Gina Wolfe to see if there was any continuing interest in her.

Paul had laughed when he understood the link to the Gidmans. It amused him considerably to think that Jones had inherited the Mathias obsession. But it didn’t prevent him from doing a good job, though unfortunately it was pretty negative.

‘Had to go way back to find any mention at all,’ he said.

He then proceeded to give Jones the stuff he already had, though, of course, the journalist made sure that neither Paul nor any other policeman was aware of this breach of security.

So if there was nothing since, this presumably meant she was rated lily-white.

‘One thing, though,’ Paul continued. ‘The name rang a bell, I’d heard it recently, so I asked around. Probably nothing, but it seems one of our commanders, Mick Purdy, has got something going with this Gina Wolfe. I checked and it’s definitely the same one. Maybe she just likes cops.’

‘Maybe. Thanks, Paul.’

He fed the new name into his laptop, told it to search the Gidman file.

It came up twice. Thirty years ago, Owen Mathias, newly promoted to sergeant and not long arrived in the Met, had investigated an allegation of assault against Goldie. A DC Purdy had interviewed one of Gidman’s employees who’d been cited as a witness. Result, negative, and despite Mathias’s conviction that the man was guilty, no case was brought.

The second time was more interesting. Purdy, now a DCI, had been interviewed in the course of the internal investigation into Alex Wolfe. It seemed to have been merely a background interview. Purdy had been Wolfe’s boss during his early years with the Met and the investigators were checking to see if there’d been any previous doubts as to his reliability. Purdy had given him a glowing testimonial.

Now, seven years later, Purdy and Gina Wolfe were an item.

Significant? Probably not, but he added a note to the file. By indirections find directions out. A favourite quote of an old English teacher who fancied himself as a Richard Burton manqué.

What to do now? He tried Gareth’s number again. Still nothing. Probably needed a top-up. How many times had he told the stupid sod that his mobile was a tool of the trade?

So all he had was what his brother had told him. Not a lot, and when he’d tried to bluff it into something bigger, Dave the Turd had been puzzled rather than alarmed. He certainly hadn’t reacted like a guilty thing surprised. It was Goldie he should have gone for. No doubt young David would be hurrying to complain to Daddy that a big boy had hit him then run away. Perhaps it had been a mistake to gate-crash the Centre opening.

But it was done now. And the question remained-what next?

He couldn’t let it go. He liked the smell of this, and he’d learned to trust his nose. But he doubted if he would find anyone else at the Messenger who shared that trust, not when the name Gidman was mentioned.

So keep it to yourself till you’ve got something concrete. The advice he’d pumped at Gareth-Don’t tell a soul your story till you’re sure you’ve got a story to tell- still held good.

But it was pointless hanging around here. If there were to be any action, it was going to be up in Mid-Yorkshire.

He started tossing a few essentials into a small grip. As he did so he debated how to deal with Beanie. The key to her luxurious apartment nestling in his pocket wasn’t something to give up easily and, despite her efforts to appear indifferent, he’d seen she was seriously irritated by his defection from Shandy’s party. Returning home to find he’d taken off into the wild blue yonder could seriously piss her off. He’d need to think of a really good story; family emergency, maybe. She knew that Gareth had rung, so that could provide a firm basis. It was always best to have enough truth in your lies to hold them together. Old gran dying would probably sound too corny not to be true!

But not a note. A phone call. A besotted admirer had once told him he had the kind of vibrator voice that could sell bacon futures to an ayatollah. His old English teacher wasn’t the only Burton manqué.

As if issuing a challenge, ‘Cwm Rhondda’ played. He checked the name: Gem Huntley. He’d promised to meet up with her later. No time for that now. He couldn’t be bothered to talk to the girl, but he’d better not leave her totally disconnected. For one thing, she’d be expecting some feedback from the opening to put into her piece. Not that she’d be getting more than a couple of paras.

The phone stopped ringing. He thought for a moment then tapped out a message on his laptop.

Hotlips, hi! Opening went fine. Gidman made moving speech about his family’s origins, said his father felt affection and loyalty towards the community as did he etc etc. Universal applause. Centre a joy to behold. Sorry, something’s come up, family emergency, gran about to snuff it but won’t go without seeing me first, so need to head west. Look forward to catching up with you soon as I get back. Anticipate I’ll be emotionally vulnerable and in need of a lot of TLC! Love G x

There, that should keep her on hold. One excuse fits all. The economy of genius!

He sent the message, closed the laptop, began to put it into its case, then changed his mind.

Nowadays there were computers wherever you went. Lugging a pricey bit of kit like this around was a liability. Up there in the frozen north they lifted everything that wasn’t nailed down. He had no fears about leaving it here. Marina Tower had better security than Westminster Palace and another thing he certainly hadn’t shared with Beanie was his access code.

He stuck the laptop at the back of the top shelf of the wardrobe and headed down to his car.

As he drove away he felt that surge of excitement that always accompanied the start of a trail. This was what made him the success he was. Brought up in a strict nonconformist socialist tradition, it was easy, and useful, to claim a moral imperative for what he did. Sometimes he almost believed it himself. But this time he revelled in acknowledging to himself at least that it was completely personal.

Getting some dirt on Goldie Gidman and making sure it spread out wide enough to hit his son would be a real pleasure.

He selected one of the discs in his CD player, found the track he wanted, pressed the play button.

The tremendous opening bars of ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ thrilled out.

The image it brought to his mind had nothing to do with buxom divas and grand opera, which he disliked almost as much as male voice choirs. It was the helicopter squadron in Apocalypse Now signalling its devastating approach to the Vietnamese villagers.

Whatever was going on up there in the frozen north, the bastards were in for a real shock when they realized who it was that had them in his sights.

He turned the music up full blast.

‘Here I come, ready or not!’ he cried.

12.25-15.00

Ellie Pascoe wasn’t happy with the way her Sunday had gone and she blamed Dalziel.

The explosion of glass that proclaimed his imminence to the pastoral idyll of baby Lucinda’s christening party should have warned her. This was a promise of disruption as clear as thunder on an east wind. But bathed in the golden glow of the autumn sun, not to mention the golden glow of the Keldale’s champagne, she had refused to let it dissipate her feelings of mellow fruitfulness. Peter had never looked more attractive and the afternoon stretched out before them like a fair field over which they would wander to that most private corner of their garden where a suburban Adam and Eve could imparadise themselves in one another’s arms with no witness other than the lusty sun.

But things started to go downhill thereafter, slowly at first, then with gathering momentum.

The baby grew fractious, a condition that spread rapidly to his parents with an interesting role reversal in that it was the anxious dad urging that the best place for little Lucinda was home and the laid-back mum retorting that this was nonsense, babies were like viola players, they cried to get attention, but if you left them alone, they usually fell asleep.

Whoever said that music has charms to soothe a savage breast clearly hadn’t heard the clarinet duet now played by Rosie Pascoe and a stout young woman called Cilla who had been less abstemious than her partner. All went well till Cilla was assailed by a sforzando set of hiccoughs which might in less musically sensitive company have passed for an amusing experiment in syncopation. Baby Lucinda, who had shown signs of nodding off, came back to screaming life and a vengeful violist observed loudly that if these were Ali’s primas, he would not care to hear her secondas. The duet limped to its end with Rosie winning by several bars. Cilla left the pagoda in tears, Rosie in a rage.

When her parents caught up with her, she refused to be consoled, declaring her conviction that this must inevitably signal the end not only of Ali’s friendship but of her tuition, in acknowledgement of which she threatened to break her clarinet across her knee, prompting Pascoe, who’d found the duet quite hilarious, to say brightly, ‘Not all bad then,’ which did nothing to improve the moment. Nor did it help that the Sinfonietta quartet who were back in the pagoda now broke into a schmalzy rendering of ‘The Last Rose of Summer’.

It had taken the direct intervention of Ali Wintershine to lift the girl from the depths of despair, for which Ellie was grateful. But her gratitude grew somewhat dusty when Rosie, now revelling in her role as justified sinner, demanded yet one more reassurance that she was truly forgiven and Ali said, ‘A few of my very dearest friends are coming to the house for a cup of tea after we finish here. Why don’t you join us, Rosie? And your mum and dad, too, of course.’

Refusal would clearly have tipped the girl back into the depths, so Ellie had put mellow fruitfulness on hold, gritted her teeth, and said brightly, ‘That would be nice.’

Pascoe had taken the diversion fairly philosophically. Though looking forward with much enthusiasm to the promised bliss awaiting him at home, the afternoon was young, not yet half past two, and he didn’t mind a brief interval of tea and cake to neutralize the side-effects of too much champagne.

It was quickly apparent to Ellie that the alleged tea-party was little more than a ruse to complete Rosie’s restoration. There were only two very dearest friends there: a timpanist with a roving eye and a habit of testing all surfaces he encountered for resonance, including, whenever he got the chance, those of the other musical friend, a bassoonist too intoxicated to know her Arne from her Elgar. Ed Muir, perhaps thinking of the large cost of what hadn’t turned out to be a totally successful celebration, appeared somewhat distracted, provoking a sotto voce reproof from his partner, who clearly felt he wasn’t pulling his weight as co-host. Only Rosie looked unequivocally delighted. Getting her out of there, Ellie realized, was not going to be easy.

At this stage, though already feeling Dalziel’s unexpected appearance as augurous, she was still far from ascribing to him full responsibility for the day’s divagations.

Then Pascoe’s mobile rang.

Ellie sometimes claimed there was a ring tone undetectable by ordinary people. Only a policeman’s wife could catch it, and she heard it now.

He looked at the display, mouthed ‘Wieldy’ at her apologetically, and left the room at the same time as Ed Muir who’d vanished a little earlier re-entered to tell Ali there was a small catering crisis at the Arts Centre that required his presence. Ali started demanding details and there was no saying where this debate may have led if Pascoe hadn’t appeared in the doorway looking distracted and said, ‘Ellie, sorry, I’ve got to go. Can you get a taxi?’

‘Yes, sure,’ she replied instantly. She knew it had to be serious stuff to bring the afternoon to such a sudden conclusion.

Ali, sensing this too, backed off her confrontation with her partner, who said, ‘I can drop Ellie and Rosie off.’

‘But it’s out of your way,’ said Ellie. ‘We live north. You’ll be driving into the town centre.’

This seemed to nonplus him for a moment, then he said, ‘No problem,’ reinforcing his assurance with a rare smile.

‘Then thank you very much, Ed,’ Ellie replied, returning his smile. Generally she found him reserved to the point of diffidence, but as she got to know him better, she was beginning to see what Ali saw in him. And his tranquillity provided the perfect foil for Ali’s usual ebullience.

Ellie followed Pascoe out into the hall.

‘What’s happened?’ she murmured.

‘There’s been a shooting. Someone dead. Shirley Novello hurt.’

‘Oh shit. Not again.’

A few years earlier she’d actually been present when Novello was shot.

‘How bad?’ she asked.

‘Don’t have too many details, but it doesn’t sound good.’

Ellie felt all the residual warmth of the day fade from her body. She and Novello weren’t best buddies, but for a policeman’s wife, hearing of a serious injury to any officer is like a rehearsal of that moment when the bad news will be yours alone.

‘Was it an op?’ she asked.

He hesitated then said, ‘Nothing I knew about. Wieldy thinks Andy might have been using her for something.’

This was untypically vague.

‘Why don’t you ask him?’

‘We will, when we can raise him,’ he said neutrally. ‘Wieldy’s tried. He’s not answering his mobile.’

Many questions were buzzing through her head. Already these uncertain references to Dalziel were shifting his role from ominous apparition to guilty first mover.

‘You mean the fat bastard’s up to his old tricks?’ she said. ‘Need-to-know rules, except he’s usually the only one who needs to know?’

‘Could be,’ he said. ‘Look, I’ve got to go.’

‘I know. Come here!’

She put her arms around him and drew him close, crushing him against her body. This had nothing to do with mellow fruitfulness. This came out of the dreadful awareness that only when she had him in her grasp like this could she be sure of him. Out of her sight he was at the mercy of whatever malignant Fate cared to hurl. She would never forget, could never forget, the moment they had come to tell her that he’d been caught in the same explosion that comatized Andy Dalziel.

‘Careful,’ he said. ‘Or I may have to do you for perverting the course of justice.’

‘Do me any which perverted way you like, so long as you come back safe,’ she said.

He broke away and went out of the front door. Without his supporting strength she felt faint and dizzy.

How much easier life would be without love, she thought. The Holy Joes are forever preaching that it’s love that makes the world go round. It isn’t. It’s love that stops the world in its tracks. Be faithful in love, they tell us, and all will be well. Travel with love in your heart, and you’ll never walk alone.

They’re right. You’ll have a shadowy companion, invisible only at the moments of greatest ecstasy, but otherwise constantly present. His names are fear and loss and pain.

One way or another, love always betrays.

13.35-15.25

By the time Fleur Delay got back to the hotel, she was close to collapse.

The adrenalin rush of having to deal with the aftermath of Vince’s violence had kept her going till they reached the car. Then she’d said, ‘You drive,’ and sank into the passenger seat.

Vince said anxiously, ‘You OK, sis?’

‘Yes, sure, I just banged my head.’

She put her hand to her brow and looked in the rear-view mirror. There was a small cut there with a trickle of blood which she wiped away with a tissue.

Vince, reassured, drove carefully away from Loudwater Villas. He was normally a flashy driver, but he knew that his sister would get seriously pissed if he did anything that drew attention.

Sometimes Fleur felt it as a blessing that he was so easy to fool. Sometimes it filled her with fury and resentment. Anyone else living as close to her as he did would have been aware for a couple of months at least that there was something seriously wrong. There had been times after the fatal diagnosis when she had come close to telling him that she hadn’t been away from home for a minor woman’s operation, that the drugs he sometimes saw her taking couldn’t be bought over the counter at the local chemist’s, that the wigs she’d started wearing weren’t a belated fashion statement in reaction against the onset of middle age. If she could have hoped for loving support and comfort, she might have given way to the temptation. But she knew that when the time came to say, ‘Vince, I’ve got news for you. I have an inoperable brain tumour and I’m going to die,’ the support and comfort would be all one way.

She wanted to have him safe and secure when she told him, she wanted him to be a long way away from London, and most of all she wanted him to be a long way away from Goldie Gidman. Spain wasn’t all that far, but it was as far as she could hope to remove Vince, and even then she had found it hard to get him to share her enthusiasm for the idea of buying a villa on the Costa del Sol and settling down there. For a holiday it suited him very well with its sunny beaches, cheap booze, and unending supply of succulent bimbos who’d left their inhibitions behind at Luton Airport. But as for living there…!

She’d countered with economic arguments. This was the perfect opportunity for them to invest some of their hard-earned savings in a bit of truly palatial real estate. The Spanish property boom had gone into a nose-dive as the credit squeeze left lots of ex-pats unable to keep up payments. Making a sale even at a substantial loss was better than repossession and for someone with Fleur’s long experience of the economics of distress it had been easy to snap up a real bargain: four bedrooms, sea views, private garden, swimming pool, games room, all mod cons, at just over half the price the owners had paid three years ago.

The deal was close to completion, but the way she’d felt over the past few days, the sooner it was done the better.

‘We’re here, sis,’ said Vince.

She opened her eyes. They were in the Keldale car park.

In the next row she spotted the red Nissan, so that was all right.

She said to Vince, ‘Take the laptop up to your room. You can keep a check on her in case she goes out again.’

‘Me?’ said Vince dubiously. Like following Blondie and Tubby into the cathedral, this wasn’t the kind of task he was usually given. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to get cleaned up, then I’ll take a close look at the stuff I took off that guy you shot, and then I’ll report in to The Man. That OK with you, Vince?’

She spoke sharply. She’d always felt the need to be firm with Vince, but lately firmness had drifted into irritability.

‘No need to get in a strop,’ he said. ‘All I meant was, how long will you be? If the guy I offed is our man, we’ll be heading for home, right?’

He sounded hopeful.

She said, ‘Maybe.’

She checked herself in the mirror. She looked a bit pale, but the cut on her forehead had stopped bleeding. Taking a deep breath, she got out of the car and willed herself to walk steadily towards the hotel.

It seemed to take an age, but finally she was in her room with the Do not disturb sign on her door. She kicked her shoes off, went into the bathroom and bathed her face in cold water. Then she took a couple of tablets. How many had she taken today? She couldn’t remember.

Back in the bedroom she looked longingly at the bed. It invited her to lie on it. Instead she spread across the duvet the trophies she’d brought with her from Loudwater Villas. A hip wallet, a mini recorder, and a phone.

First she examined the contents of the wallet.

A few pounds. A pack of condoms. Cards in the name of Gareth Jones.

Jones. Not Watkins. Was that good or bad?

Then she listened to the conversation on the recorder.

Nothing she heard there surprised her.

Finally she checked the incoming and outgoing numbers on his phone, wrote them down, accessed his messages, checked out his phone book and made notes.

She tried to make sense of what she’d found, or rather make of it the kind of sense she wanted to make. It was no use. No way she was going to sell this to The Man as job done. Best she could look for was damage limitation.

She took out her phone and rang Goldie Gidman.

When he answered she gave no name but started straight in with her report, editing out all references to timings and her collapse, and editing in a version of events that made Vince’s reaction absolutely essential. She was as selective as she dared to be with the details of the contents of the wallet and the info she’d gleaned from the phone, but she needn’t have bothered. He’d always had the knack of smashing through no matter how thick a coating of verbiage to the essential truth of thing. At least he wasn’t close enough to reinforce the process with a hammer.

‘It’s not the guy,’ he said.

‘Probably not,’ she agreed wearily. ‘So what shall I do now?’

There was a long pause. In her mind’s eye she could see him sitting there, the phone in his hand, staring into space. His mind would be checking over the known facts, formulating the possible outcomes. Eventually he would reach a decision about the best course of action. She’d known the process to take several minutes. She’d learned early not to interrupt with speech or movement, not even if your bladder was bursting or the ciggie in your fingers had burnt down to the skin.

He said, ‘Where’s the woman?’

‘In her room. Vince is keeping an eye on her.’

‘Let’s hope he doesn’t decide to shoot her.’

A joke, or serious? Without a video phone, she couldn’t tell. The plus was, he couldn’t see her sitting here, bald as a snooker ball.

If he was waiting for a laugh, he was disappointed.

He said, ‘Question is, if it wasn’t Wolfe, why the fuck was he bugging Gina?’

‘Don’t know, Goldie.’

‘Makes no odds, I still need Wolfe. And fast. Don’t let the wife out of your sight.’

The phone went dead.

She looked in the dressing-table mirror and saw that the dome of her head was beaded with sweat.

‘You look like you just landed from Mars,’ she told herself. ‘Pity you don’t have a return ticket.’

She had a sense of things falling apart, but when you felt like that the only thing to do was stick with the plan. Not that there was much of a plan. Follow the woman. If Vince saw the tracker moving on the laptop screen he’d bang on the door. Fleur hoped to hell the blonde cow stayed put for another hour at least. She needed the rest.

She swept the Jones/Watkins trophies to the floor, fell across the bed, rolled over to wrap the duvet round her, and closed her eyes.

In the room next door Vince had obediently set up the laptop. He realized he didn’t have its mains lead. That would be in Fleur’s room, but he didn’t want to risk worsening her mood by disturbing her. It wasn’t that he was scared of his sister, but no denying she could be scary! There was plenty of juice in the batteries anyway, so it didn’t matter.

The pulsating green dot that showed the Nissan’s position remained steady in the car park. He turned his TV set on, keeping the sound low. There was nothing on the sports channels that he wanted to watch, so he checked out the hotel’s entertainment channel and accessed an adult movie. Its title promised a lot more than it gave. A few nice boobs, no pubes, and the kind of simulated passion that wouldn’t have fooled a myopic nun; all it did was put him in the mood for something that was really for grown-ups! After ten minutes of grunt and groan, he switched the set off and turned his attention to the laptop. The green dot was still in the car park.

Most likely the blonde tart was in her room, sitting on Tubby’s face, he told himself. The thought did more for him than the movie had, and he ran his fingers over the keyboard and a few moments later he was into one of his favourite sites. He rose, went to the interconnecting door between his room and Fleur’s and made sure it was bolted. Then he stripped his clothes off and lay on the bed with the laptop to enjoy the fun.

Over the next ninety minutes, he fetched himself off three times. The first had been an almost spontaneous reaction to the images on the screen, the second came after a long languorous build-up as he navigated his way through progressively more extreme sites, and the third time had been pretty mechanical to confirm that his recovery speed was as good as ever. Shooting that guy in the face had really turned him on; stuff like that usually did. Some hotels he knew, he could have come back and whistled up a woman, but the Keldale didn’t feel like it offered that kind of service, particularly on a Sunday afternoon. Anyway, with Fleur next door and likely to come calling, it was out of the question, so it had to be DIY time.

He glanced at his watch. Coming up to half three. Rest a bit then go for number four? No, this movie stuff was all right and often provided some instructive tutorials, but it didn’t come close to a real woman. Blondie now, he wouldn’t mind an hour of grunt and groan and maybe a bit of slap and scream with her.

The thought reminded him he was supposed to be watching the tracker screen.

He exited his porn site and there it was, the green spot pulsating merrily in the car park. Probably still trying to coax Tubby into his first orgasm, he thought complacently. Might appreciate a real man.

But no point thinking about that with Fleur calling the shots. Bit of a prude, old Fleur. He assumed she must have had it, because on the streets he grew up in, he’d never met any tart over fourteen who hadn’t. But where or who with he had no idea. Maybe The Man had given her one. He certainly wasn’t going to ask.

He rolled off the bed and went into the bathroom. Nice refreshing shower, then downstairs for a cup of tea and a club sandwich. He sang ‘Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner’ as he soaped himself. He felt surprisingly happy. And why shouldn’t he be?

Soon, with a bit of luck, they’d be out of this godawful town heading back to the civilized south where people knew who he was and showed him respect and didn’t speak like a bunch of fucking sheep with hiccoughs.

And one thing was certain.

Like with prison, once he was out of fucking Yorkshire, no way he was ever going back in!

14.45-15.45

Every time David Gidman the Third tried to prise himself away from the new community centre, someone got in his way. Several times he’d thrown Maggie Pinchbeck a desperate glance, appealing for rescue. All he got in return was an encouraging nod of the head.

But at last he made it to the car. The charming smile with which he said farewell to his civic escort did not flicker till Maggie had driven beyond the range of prying eyes, then it broadened into a huge yawn.

‘God, that was mega boring,’ he said.

‘I noticed. Let’s hope no one else did.’

Exaggerating his sulkiness because he feared he couldn’t altogether hide it, he said, ‘OK, sharp-eyes, on a scale of ten, how did I do?’

‘Six out of ten, six point five, maybe,’ she said promptly.

He chewed on this for a while, then said, ‘Why do you imagine that relentless honesty makes your job more secure than fulsome flattery?’

‘I don’t. But if it doesn’t, I don’t want to work for you anyway.’

He gave her a smile which if it had been any tighter might have cracked his teeth.

OK, she was never going to give him the kind of comforts the two-metre model could provide, but at least she might do the occasional bit of ego-stroking.

He said accusingly, ‘You didn’t warn me Jones was going to be there.’

‘That’s because I didn’t know. He wasn’t in church. In fact, I’m sure I saw Gem Huntley there, but she vanished afterwards. Not feeling well, he said.’

‘Yeah. You believe him?’

‘No.’

She waited to see if he’d follow it up, but he didn’t.

She drove in silence for a while then said casually, ‘That stuff Jones was spouting about wolves from the past biting you, what do you think that was all about?’

He wasn’t surprised she’d latched on to it. She had a very sensitive radar.

He said, ‘How the hell should I know? Probably came along for the free sandwiches. Why does the bastard hate me so much? I never did anything to harm him.’

Maggie let this pass. After a moment she said, ‘Still, it’s strange. And he did give the impression he thought he was on to something.’

‘Part of his trade,’ he said dismissively. ‘The others call him Nine Ten. Knows more about tomorrow than he does about today. And he’s probably rattled his brain to jelly shagging Beanie the Bitch.’

He closed his eyes and pretended to doze for the rest of the journey to his Holborn flat. You should live in the constituency, Maggie had advised. Not fucking likely, he’d replied. Holborn was a concession.

As he got out, Maggie said, ‘Shall I come in? There’s stuff we need to go through for tomorrow.’

‘Later,’ he said. ‘I’m knackered. Think I’ll get my head down.’

Not on Sophie Harbott you won’t, thought Maggie, who’d arrived early enough that morning to see the woman departing in what looked like high dudgeon. It was a liaison Maggie disapproved of more than most of her boss’s adventures. If the tabloids got a sniff he was shagging the wife of the Labour spokesman on religious affairs, they would fall over themselves to top each other’s headline: WHO’S CONVERTING WHO?…CROSS-BENCHING MODERN STYLE…COALITION COITION…the possibilities were endless.

But that was, literally, Gidman’s affair. She’d made it clear that, so far as his love-life was concerned, she wasn’t getting involved in either arrangements or clean-up.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Six thirty? Seven?’

‘Whatever. By the way, did you get hold of the Chuckle Brothers?’

This was the term he used for Kuba and Drugi, the two young Poles who’d done the work on his shower that had completed the cooling of Sophie’s ardour. They had been recommended by Maggie, who said she’d met them when working for ChildSave on immigrant families. Gidman had not been altogether displeased to have been able to complain about an arrangement made by his usually tediously efficient PA.

‘They’ll be there tomorrow,’ she promised.

‘Meanwhile I’ll just have to take a cold shower, I suppose,’ he grumbled.

‘Might do you good,’ she said. ‘See you later.’

David the Third watched her drive away, then went up to his flat. For once he had time on his hands. He could do a bit of work on a speech he was making next week. Or read a book, watch a bit of telly, or even ring Sophie, see if she’d be interested in taking up where they’d left off. Probably not. Anyway, he didn’t feel much interested himself, in that or any of the other options. Jones the Mess had really got to him, he realized. What he needed were answers, and there was only one place to get them.

Ten minutes later he was in his Audi A8 heading north. There are no good times for moving through London outside the small hours, but Sunday afternoon comes close and it wasn’t yet half three when he came to a halt before the high gates of Windrush House.

The camera on the gate column viewed him for a moment then the metal gates swung silently open and he sent the car moving slowly forward up the long drive, careful as always not to provoke his father’s wrath by spraying gravel over the manicured lawns.

As Gidman went up the steps to the front door, it was opened by a young black man dressed in immaculately creased burgundy slacks, a beautifully cut suede jacket and a white shirt so bright it made you blink.

He said, ‘Hello, Mr Gidman, sir. You’re looking well.’

‘Hello, Dean. And you look like you’ve got something really special lined up.’

Dean grinned. He and Dave the Third had identified a common interest in the pursuit of love. He said, ‘Yes, sir. Another hour and I’m off duty, then I’m driving out to Romford to pick up this new gal I met last week, real looker, training to be a hairdresser. We’re heading up West, got a table booked for a nice meal, do a club, then it’s all in the lap of the gods.’

‘The only thing in the lap of the gods is a divine dong,’ said Gidman, smiling. ‘Sounds like yours is ready for action.’

‘Hello there, young Davey!’

He looked round to see another much older black man who suddenly flung a left hook at him which he only just managed to fend off with his right forearm.

‘Nearly got you! You come down the gym after you done your homework, we’ll soon sharpen you up.’

‘I’ll look forward to that, Sling,’ said Gidman.

Milton Slingsby had been part of his life since childhood. As well as the boxing, Sling had always been on hand to play cricket and football with, to drive him to school, to pick him up when he’d been out with his friends in the evening. The precise role he played in Goldie’s affairs had never been quite clear to Dave. He’d heard him described at various times as driver, handyman, even personal trainer. Nowadays he was never far away from Goldie who, if asked, would probably say, ‘He’s my old friend.’ If pressed to explain exactly what he did, Dave had heard his father reply, ‘Any damn thing I ask him to,’ with a laugh to signal a joke, though Dave wasn’t certain he was joking.

Just how much Sling’s treatment of Dave as a schoolboy was a joke and how much down to his mild dementia, Gidman hadn’t worked out. Certainly his mental condition would have been a lot worse if it hadn’t been for Goldie. ‘Your pappy bought my contract,’ Sling often told Dave. ‘And he say to me, “From now on in, no more boxing rings. From now on you fight only for me.”’

By one of the little jokes that time likes to play on its subjects, as Sling’s brain paid the penalty for those early rattlings, his body aged in quite a different way. No flat-nosed, cauliflower-eared, punch-drunk pugilist this; long and lean, with silver-grey hair and an academic stoop, he could have been a retired professor whose occasional abstractions were the mark of a mind voyaging through strange seas of thought alone.

‘Where’s Pappy, Sling?’ asked Dave as he moved into the house.

‘Upstairs with Jimi. You home for the holidays now, young Dave?’

‘That’s right, Sling. Home for the holidays. I wish,’ said Gidman. ‘Dean, have a great night!’

The young man gave him a thumbs-up and went back into the security control room. It sometimes bothered Dave that Sling and Dean were all the household staff there were, but his mother was adamant she didn’t want help cluttering up the place. Goldie acknowledged his wife’s domestic authority with a meekness that would have amazed those who knew him only through business. Couldn’t hire a better cook, he’d say. Which makes it all the worse she got me on a lunchtime diet!

As for security, Dave Gidman knew the alarm system was state of the art.

He ran up the stairs to a darkened first-floor room set up as a home cinema. Here he found his father watching a video of Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock. It was a taste they didn’t share. Another was the pungent Havana cigars which Flo had decreed could only be smoked in this one room.

Goldie didn’t take his eyes off the screen where the great rocker was deep into ‘Message to Love’, but raised his right hand in the imperious gesture which those around him had learned meant stand still, don’t speak, I’ll get round to you when I’m ready.

A wave of resentment surged up in his son. One thing to be seen as a school kid by Sling’s defocused gaze, quite another to be fossilized in that role by his father.

Out in the world he was the golden boy, expecting and receiving deference, even from those who disliked him. Why make an enemy of a man who was the hottest long-term bet for Downing Street in the last fifty years?

It was only those most intimately linked to his political career who refused to defer. Like Cameron and his attendant clones. And Maggie bloody Pinchbeck, who tried to control him like a performing dog. At least he could sack her. Maybe.

But his father was the worst offender. Sometimes the appellation David Gidman the Third sounded more pecking order than genealogy. OK, he couldn’t sack Goldie, but maybe it was time he understood that the wide and glittering world of political power into which he’d launched his son didn’t end at his mansion gates.

He picked up the remote and stopped Hendrix in mid-syllable.

‘OK, Pappy,’ he said, already appalled at his own boldness. ‘I need to know what the fuck’s going on.’

Goldie Gidman turned his head and regarded his son blankly. Inside he wasn’t displeased at this show of spirit. Life had given him only two things he wouldn’t ruthlessly discard in the interests of his own comfort and security. One was Flo, his wife, and the other was his son. He’d kept them at a very long arm’s length from the world he’d grown up in, a world where you learned to survive by being harder than those trying to survive around you. With Flo, it had been easy, despite the fact that she was by his side almost from the beginning. Her love was unconditional, she saw nothing he did not invite her to see, asked no questions, passed no comments.

Dave the Third was harder. Brought up to a life of privilege, it was simple to put a firewall between him and his father’s colourful past. But protection was no protection if it weakened what you were trying to protect. In the career he was launched on, he would need the same skills as his father-a nose for danger, an eye for the main chance, and a ruthless instinct for survival at no matter what cost to others.

By this small act of defiance he was showing himself flesh of Goldie’s flesh, blood of his blood, and that was good.

On the other hand, he needed to be reminded from time to time that, whatever power he now wielded and would in the future wield in the great world out there, in his father’s world he was and must remain a cipher.

He said, ‘What you talking about, son?’

‘I’m talking about Gwyn Jones ambushing me at the opening.’

‘Jones?’ He could see he’d caught his father’s attention. ‘That Jones the Mess?’

‘The same. The last guy a politician wants to see at his door if he’s got anything he needs to keep hidden. Have I got anything I need to keep hidden, Pappy?’

‘Just tell me what this Jones fellow said. I mean, the words he used.’

Dave Gidman had a power of recall that came in very useful in the House and he was able to repeat the journalist’s words almost verbatim.

When he finished, Goldie said, ‘What did Maggie say about this?’

Dave felt hugely irritated. The degree of respect, indeed of affection, both his parents showed to Pinchbeck really pissed him off.

He said, ‘Nothing. Why the fuck should she say anything?’

‘It got you worried, son. Anything you see, Maggie would see two minutes earlier, that’s for sure. Now go and see your mammy. Tell her you’ll be staying for supper.’

‘Is that it?’ demanded Dave, incensed by the implication that his PA was brighter than he was.

‘Yeah, that’s it. Nothing for you to worry your head about. You just concentrate on kicking them government bastards while they’re down.’

Dave the Third took a step closer to his father and glared down at him. Goldie stared back up at him with a lack of expression that those who had received the hammer treatment in his youth might have recognized. It felt like a defining moment.

Which in a way it was.

It was the younger man who broke off eye contact first and stalked out of the room.

Goldie felt almost disappointed but not quite. Now wasn’t a good time for young Dave to be rocking the boat. Way things were going, it would take a steady hand on the wheel and a clear eye at the helm.

Maybe, he thought, I should have left this alone.

But all his life he’d dealt with stuff as it came along. Tidy up behind you and you didn’t leave a trail.

Except sometimes, if things didn’t fall right, the trail could be the tidying-up.

Long way from that here, and anyway, he thought confidently, he’d got friends in high places who’d make sure the trail got brushed out long before it reached him.

Politics was a lot like fucking. Same rule about relationships applied here that he’d tried to drum into young Dave after the business with his tell-tale PA. Always make sure the woman you’re boning has got more to lose than you have if you get found out.

It had taken a conversation with Fleur Delay to show that would-be blabbermouth, Nikki the Knockers, just how much she had to lose. In the world of politics and finance, you got heavy in a different way, but it came to the same thing in the end. Over the past few years he’d made sure that Westminster and the City were full of folk who would shit bricks if they thought that Goldie Gidman was running into trouble. Couple at the Yard too. And his lunch today with that poncy peer had reinforced his protection. So he was fire-proof.

Not young Dave, though. A political career was like a delicate flower. Leave the wrong door open and a cold draught could kill it off overnight.

He’d sent Fleur Delay up to the frozen north to close a door. No one he trusted more than Fleur. So there’d been a glitch. Despite her efforts to cover for him in her phone call, it was clear that the glitch had been down to that dickhead brother of hers. But you could rely on Fleur. She always came through in a crisis. And if she didn’t, well, all relationships that aren’t blood relationships come to an end.

How did Jones the Mess play here?

No way to know yet.

Jones. The name might mean something, might not. Like young Dave had said, every second fucker in Wales is called Jones.

Time would tell.

He picked up the remote and pressed the start button. On the screen Hendrix sprang once more to noisy life.

As always when he watched this video, his mind drifted back to the sixties. He’d started them as a skinny teenager, subject to all the conflicting impulses of the time and of the times. Change had been in the air, particularly for the young. He’d wanted to be part of it, but wanted even more to be able to afford all the new goodies on offer. He’d known one or two kids who’d actually made it to the States, been at Woodstock. By ’69 he could have afforded to fly over there first class. But of course he hadn’t. Too much business to look after, too much wheeling and dealing to be done, too many people to keep in line. What the hell, those kids probably ended up in dead-end jobs, were sitting even now in some shitty little house, seeing their grandchildren yawn as they started to reminisce about Woodstock.

But watching the video, listening to Jimi, it always felt like an opportunity missed.

One thing was certain, his boy was never going to look back on missed opportunities. The world was his inheritance and his father was going to make sure he got it.

And if that long-gone loser, Wolfe, really had come crawling out of the past to threaten young Dave’s future, he’d quickly find that Goldie Gidman could still wield a mean hammer!

He pushed these thought from his mind and settled back to enjoy the music.

15.20-15.30

Andy Dalziel opened his eyes.

His old sleeping patterns had taken some time to re-establish themselves after his long sojourn in the strange never-never-land of coma, of which he had no memories but which occasionally sent him brief visionary flashes.

He wondered if he was having one now, but it seemed more than a flash. Perhaps he had suffered a complete relapse?

He was lying beneath a silky smooth feather-light duvet with his head buried deep in a mountain of soft pillows. The air was sweetly perfumed, there was music sounding in his ears and through the dim religious light surrounding him moved a lovely blonde angel in a diaphanously revealing negligee.

He applied his mind to a cool consideration of the possibilities.

Did he wake or sleep?

Was he dreaming or dead?

The angel dropped something on to his face.

It bounced off his nose. He said, ‘Ouch.’

‘At last,’ she said. ‘This thing’s been ringing ever since I got back. I’d have chucked a bucket of water over you if it hadn’t been my bed.’

Her bed. Slowly it came back to him. By the end of the meal he’d felt definitely languorous. Coffee had had no restorative effect. Mebbe the fact that it was accompanied by a large malt hadn’t helped. As they left the terrace, he checked his watch. Their early start meant it was only just after half past one.

‘You got any plans for this afternoon?’ he’d asked.

‘Plans?’ she said, as if not recognizing the word. ‘Why?’

‘Just that I could do with getting me head down for half an hour afore I set off driving. Snoring in the lounge might be a bother. Some people are funny. So I wondered, any chance of crashing out on your bed?’

‘As long as I’m not in it,’ she said. ‘And as long as you’re out of it in half an hour.’

‘Cub’s honour,’ he said gravely.

Only he’d never been a cub.

But he really had thought that his internal clock would wake him after thirty minutes. It always had in the past. Instead, he realized as he stared blearily at his watch, he’d been sleeping for nigh on two hours.

‘I’m now going to have a shower,’ said Gina. ‘When I come out, I definitely don’t expect to find you still here.’

She drifted out of his line of vision.

He sat up and threw back the duvet, realizing as he did so that, apart from his shoes and his jacket, he was fully clothed. His phone had stopped ringing so he didn’t need to bother about that.

He swung his legs off the bed and stood up.

The movement made him aware of two things. He had a bit of a headache and he needed a pee.

The headache was nothing that a breath of fresh air and a cup of strong tea wouldn’t take care of. The pee was rather more urgent.

It occurred to him that Gina Wolfe was unlikely to feel the enjoyment of her shower in any way enhanced by the arrival of a fat policemen in her bathroom, no matter how urgent his need.

He slipped his feet into his shoes and put on his jacket. There was a notepad by the room telephone. He scribbled a couple of lines on it and tucked it between the pillows on the double bed, then headed for the door.

By a great effort of will he made it to the ground-floor toilet without incident, then he headed out on to the terrace.

As he sat down, a young man he recognized as Pietro, the highly efficient restorer of order after his demolition of the water jug, appeared at his side.

‘Buon giorno, Signore Dalziel. Can I get you something?’

Remembered names too. That was good.

‘Pot of strong Yorkshire tea, thanks. And mebbe a parkin.’

‘Subito, signore.’

‘By the by, did I settle up for the lunch?’

‘No problem, sir. Signora Wolfe said to charge it to her room.’

Shit. Would a knight errant let a distressed damsel foot the bill?

Probably not. But it wouldn’t bother Rooster Cogburn.

‘Grand,’ he said. ‘Quick as you can with the tea.’

He remembered about his phone and took it and checked for messages.

There were several, the first couple from Wield asking him to ring back urgently.

Then the message repeated in Pascoe’s voice.

And finally, ‘Andy, where the hell are you? I’ve got search parties out. We’ve an emergency here. Get in touch the second you get this, understand? This is important. Don’t muck me about!’

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.

But that wasn’t really true. Being pollen allergic, she’d passed the bouquet on to the ancient lady who lived next door. As for champagne, the bubbles gave her hiccoughs and the magnum was still in her fridge.

Now as she drove back to her modest flat in Southwark, Maggie contemplated her next move.

She could ring Beanie at her apartment again, but when she would return from the party was anybody’s guess. Also she’d probably changed her number. Anyway, getting was different from giving information. For getting you wanted face-to-face.

She parked the car and climbed the stairs to her flat.

In the corner of her living room was a filing cabinet in which she kept anything she didn’t want her employer to have access to. From this she took an envelope, and out of the envelope she took an invitation to Tris Shandy’s party.

David Gidman the Third was definitely a somebody. Also, he’d appeared on Truce! to be confronted by a couple of angry constituents whom he had placated with considerable aplomb. The whole event had of course been carefully stage-managed, otherwise Maggie wouldn’t have let him anywhere near Shandy.

But the Shah-Boat party was something different. No way was Maggie going to risk seeing Dave head off from the Centre opening to such a potentially scandalous event, so she’d simply hidden the invitation.

Now it could come in useful.

She thought of changing her clothes, decided nothing in her wardrobe was going to make her look more like one of the Shandy crowd, and contented herself with adding an a to David on the invitation.

The security guards by the gangplank had clearly been chosen for their muscle rather than their political awareness. They checked her invitation against the guest list, showed no surprise that Davida should have been misprinted there as David, and even less that a female Member of Parliament should be plain and drably dressed.

On the boat the party was in such full swing that probably no one would have noticed if Captain Jack Sparrow himself had come mincing up the gangplank at the head of his band of cutthroats, but this did not stop her from taking precautions as she went in search of Beanie Sample. Moving unnoticed among crowds of people whose sole desire was to be noticed might seem an easy option, but there were dangers. She was long practised in the art of scia-mimicry, but the sight of Gidman’s shadow moving independently of Gidman might provoke someone to draw attention to her presence in order to draw attention to himself.

At one point in the main saloon she passed close to Tris Shandy and felt those shrewd Irish eyes register her. Happily before he could rummage through the bran tub of his memory for her identity, one of the three bimbos competing for his attention upped the ante by letting her left boob loose from the confines of its halter with all the subtlety of a cannon ball bursting out of a paper bag.

As Shandy, with the scholarly wit for which he was justly famous, called, ‘Fetch a warm spoon someone-better make that a shovel!’ Maggie slipped out of the saloon and found herself on a narrow walkway on the seaward side of the boat. Her luck was in, for there was the Bitch in all her flesh-flaunting finery, talking to a pretty black man Maggie recognized as a premiere league star. Coming between the goddess and her prey was not a good idea, and Maggie was preparing herself for a long wait when from the other direction arrived a young woman who clearly had no such inhibitions. Bearing all the episematic markings of the WAG, she shouldered Beanie aside with the gentle courtesy of Wayne Rooney on a bad day and bore her man along the walkway, filling his ear with the sedimentary vowels of estuary-speak from which Maggie, who could interpret whispers at fifty paces in a gale, excavated the phrases old enough to be your gran and fuck knows where she’s been.

The Bitch was ready, Maggie decided. Getting no joy from the substitutes bench, she would be in no mood to feel protective about her absent Welsh striker.

Plus she owes me!

But for all that, as Beanie Sample came along the walkway towards her, Maggie felt about as confident as Androcles in the Coliseum. Just because you’d once helped a lion didn’t always mean it would be grateful next time you met.

The editor’s mood as evidenced by her greeting didn’t hold out much promise.

‘So Dave the Turd came after all, did he?’ said Beanie. ‘Rattle the swill pail, even the fattest pig comes running.’

One of the few things Maggie found to admire about the Bitch was that she’d stated publicly she’d rather bed a porcupine than a politician.

She said, ‘In fact I’m here by myself. I wanted to talk to you.’

‘Yeah? You want a job on Bitch!, hon, you’ll need to smarten yourself up.’

‘Thanks, but I’ve got a job. That’s why I’m here. I want to know what Gwyn Jones is up to.’

Beanie’s face went blank.

‘What makes you think he’s up to anything?’ she asked.

‘Because he came to the opening of the Gidman Memorial Community Centre instead of strutting his stuff here as your Stud of the Month.’

There was no point, Maggie had decided, in beating about this bush. Directness would get her what she wanted, or get her thrown overboard.

For a moment she thought the odds were on the latter.

Then a phone rang.

Beanie dived into her Vuitton bag and plucked out a mobile whose diamond-studded case matched her earrings and choker.

She checked the display then turned away from Maggie and walked out of earshot, or so she thought. But the acoustic of the walkway, plus her priceless acuity of hearing, allowed Maggie to catch Beanie’s half of the conversation.

‘Hi, honey. Where are you?’

‘Jesus! So what’s going on?’

‘Hell, that’s truly terrible. How long will it take?’

‘No, I understand. Families are important. Of course you’ve got to put them first.’

‘Yeah, it’s OK here. No fun without you, though. I probably won’t stay long.’

‘I love you too. Hope everything goes OK. You take care now. Bye.’

Her tone as she spoke was affectionate and concerned, but her expression as she made her way back to Maggie was gorgonian.

‘Bad news?’ said Maggie.

The Bitch glowered at her for a moment, then her features relaxed into a smile that would have made Jones nostalgic for Llufwwadog.

‘Not for me,’ she said. ‘You got a car? Don’t know about you, but I’m ready to abandon this rust bucket before I get sea-sick. You can drive me home and on the way we’ll have a nice little chat about Jones the Mess.’

15.50-16.15

Dalziel looked out of the window of 39 Loudwater Villas.

The view of industrial dereliction across the Trench wasn’t pretty, but it was preferable to the view inside. Even his normally cast-iron stomach had experienced a spasm as he looked down at the body. It wasn’t just the ruined head that made him queasy, it was the idea that he’d been responsible for putting Novello close to this carnage.

‘Shotgun-sawn-off, from the spread,’ said Pascoe. ‘Death instantaneous.’

‘Often is when you lose most of your head,’ said Dalziel.

It was a feeble attempt to assert control.

On arrival he’d found the street in front of the Villas had been cordoned off. This was easy to do as it was a dead-end for vehicle traffic, narrowing down within fifty yards to a rutted track following the course of the river. An incident room caravan had already arrived, reminding the Fat Man how far behind the game he was. Pascoe emerged from it as he approached. Before he could speak, Dalziel had barked, ‘What’s the news on Ivor?’

‘Still unconscious, but active signs are good. They’ll let us know soon as there’s any change. Sir…’

‘Save it, lad. Need to take a look for myself first.’

The DCI hadn’t demurred, merely produced a couple of white sterile cover-alls from the caravan and said, ‘We’ll need these. SOCO’s up there already.’

So, agreement, obedience, just what a senior officer arriving at the scene expected. But as they made their way up to the second floor, Dalziel had a sense of being escorted rather than being in charge.

The feeling had persisted in the flat. Pascoe, usually the sensitive plant when it came to gore, had taken him through the details of the fatal injury without a tremor, his gaze fixed on the Fat Man as if determined to register every reaction.

What’s he want? A confession? Dalziel asked himself. But he knew that if the circumstances were reversed he’d be doing exactly the same.

He said, ‘Who found him?’

‘Two uniforms. A neighbour called in to say she was worried, the TV set was on playing very loud but when she knocked at the door to ask Mr Watkins…’

‘Watkins?’ interrupted Dalziel. ‘That the dead man?’

‘Alun Watkins is the name of the man renting the flat,’ said Pascoe carefully. ‘As I was saying, when she couldn’t get a reply, she decided to ring the emergency services. Couple of uniforms turned up. They couldn’t get an answer either. Then one of them thought he smelled gas, which was odd as there isn’t any gas connected here…’

‘Probably the drainage,’ said Dalziel. A sensitive nose came in handy when you needed to get into premises without a warrant.

‘Whatever, it was as well they did. First thing they saw was Novello lying on the floor, bleeding from the head. They reacted by the book, one of them did what he could for her while the other called up an ambulance, told them exactly what the situation was so they came prepared. Their quick actions probably saved her life.’

‘Thank Christ we’ve got a few buggers we can trust,’ said Dalziel fervently.

‘Yes, that is a comfort, isn’t it?’ said Pascoe, looking at him pointedly.

Fuck, thought Dalziel. He’s not going to make this easy.

He made himself concentrate on the body.

He said, ‘Any identification?’

‘Nothing found. He had no ID on him.’

‘Nothing at all? No wallet. Meaning mebbe it were stolen?’

‘Possibly. So, probably Watkins, but we’ll need to wait for positive identification.’

‘You’ll not be asking his mum,’ said Dalziel, forcing himself to look unblinkingly at the ruined face.

‘Dental records should do the trick if there’s enough of his teeth,’ said Pascoe. ‘Or fingerprints maybe.’

Dalziel stooped lower.

‘Hey, look at this,’ he said. ‘I think the bugger’s wearing a rug.’

‘So it would seem,’ said Pascoe neutrally.

The Fat Man delicately tweaked the black wig to reveal the true close-cropped blond hair beneath. Then he straightened up with a sigh.

‘Pete,’ he said, ‘are you going to tell me everything you know, or are you going to play clever buggers to see if I let slip summat I couldn’t know without knowing a lot more than I’m letting on to you?’

‘Don’t think I need to play clever buggers to reach that conclusion, sir,’ said Pascoe.

‘Because of the address, you mean?’

‘That will do for starters. Why don’t we step outside and let these good people get on with their work?’

Dalziel took a last look round the room. There were signs of a search, drawers open, papers scattered, a rack of CDs emptied on to the floor. Just inside the door a body-shaped outline had been marked on the carpet. He stepped carefully over it and went out. Behind him the CSIs who had been waiting patiently recommenced their painstaking examinations.

Outside as they took off their cover-alls, they saw Ed Wield come out of the caravan. Pascoe made a beckoning sign, then opened the door of his car. Dalziel got the message. There’d be other officers in the caravan and the DCI wasn’t sure he’d want them to hear everything his boss was going to say.

He sat in the back seat with Pascoe next to him. Wield got into the front passenger seat and twisted round. At least, thought Dalziel, they haven’t locked the doors.

‘So fill me in,’ said the DCI.

Wonder what he’d do if I said, No, you go first? thought Dalziel. Arrest me? Wouldn’t put it past the bugger!

He said, ‘That woman you saw me with at the Keldale, her name’s Gina Wolfe…’

He told the story fairly straight, though he did omit his confusion about the day, and glossed over the fact that he and the woman had met in the cathedral.

His involvement of Novello in the business, his subsequent phone contact with her, the whole sequence of events at the Keldale he described in exact detail. With the lass in hospital, glossing over things wasn’t an option here, not even if they made him look foolish or irresponsible. But he found himself over-stressing that when he passed on Watkins’s address to Novello, he’d told her to find out anything she could about the man but to avoid any direct contact.

When he finished, Pascoe said peremptorily, ‘This photograph you mentioned, you’d better let me have it.’

Have it, not see it.

He took the envelope out of his inner pocket. Pascoe put his gloves back on before taking it.

‘Blond hair,’ said Pascoe. ‘But not wearing a wig. Though, if what you say about Gina Wolfe thinking she saw him watching her at the Keldale is correct, it wasn’t much of a disguise anyway. Of course we’re only guessing that Watkins is Wolfe.’

‘Same initials,’ said Dalziel.

‘Andy, Wieldy’s got the same initials as Esther Williams but that doesn’t mean you want to see him in a figure-hugging swimsuit.’

That was better. First name, a joke, altogether more relaxed. Or mebbe it was just part of the clever bugger’s technique.

He said, ‘Any road, Mick Purdy thinks this is likely a fake.’

‘But you haven’t checked yet?’ said Pascoe.

‘Not had time,’ said Dalziel defensively.

‘No, you have been rather busy. Eating and sleeping,’ murmured Pascoe.

Before the Fat Man could decide how to respond to this piece of insolence, Pascoe handed the magazine page to the sergeant and said, ‘See if you can check this out, Wieldy. Who’ve we got at HQ?’

‘Seymour’s there.’

‘Just the man. Tell him to get himself a WPC then head off to the Keldale to bring Mrs Wolfe in. And we’ll need a team to look at her stuff. Car, clothes, the lot. What was she wearing when you last saw her, Andy?’

‘A sort of negligee,’ said Dalziel. ‘I explained…’

‘I don’t mean that,’ said Pascoe. ‘Though her having a shower might be significant. So what was she wearing last time you saw her fully dressed?’

Dalziel bit back an angry response. In Pascoe’s shoes, he’d be asking the same.

He described Gina’s dress as best he could.

‘Right. Particular attention to that, Wieldy.’

‘Right,’ said the sergeant. ‘By the way, what are we going to do with the Duttas?’

‘They still here? I thought he was taking her back to his mother’s till SOCO got finished going over the corridor.’

‘She’s not keen to go. Don’t think she cares for her ma-in-law and she’s loving being at the centre of things here. I got her out of the caravan after taking their statement, but they’re still sitting round the back.’

‘I’ll have a word.’

The sergeant got out of the car and headed for the caravan.

Dalziel said, ‘Pete, I think you’re barking up the wrong tree about Gina Wolfe…’

‘It still needs barking up,’ said Pascoe. ‘Woman’s in the middle of getting her runaway husband declared officially dead so she can inherit his estate and remarry. She thinks she sees him in or around the same place as Shirley Novello spots a man who’s bugging your table. This man is later found murdered. He is wearing a wig, presumably to disguise his appearance. The woman had possibly overheard you passing on this man’s address to Novello. What would you do, Andy?’

‘I’d want to ask her what she’d been doing all afternoon,’ admitted Dalziel.

‘Of course you would. Right, let’s go and talk to the Duttas.’

Inclusive, but not subordinate. Go with the flow, Andy, till you see where the flow is going, he told himself as he eased his bulk out of the car.

Behind the caravan they found an Asian man standing alongside a woman seated on a fold-up canvas chair. The man, dressed in a Technicolor beach shirt and off-white Nadal-style shorts, looked rather anxious, but the woman, bright-eyed and beautiful in a shot-silk kaftan under which she was heavily pregnant, could have been relaxing in a holiday caravan park.

‘Mr and Mrs Dutta, this is my colleague Detective Superintendent Dalziel,’ said Pascoe. ‘Perhaps you could tell him what you told me earlier. Excuse me, Andy, I’ll be back in a minute.’

The cunning bastard’s leaving me stuck with this lot while he gets on with God knows what! thought the Fat Man. But he wanted to hear it anyway.

Mr Dutta began to speak rapidly.

‘Yes, on Sundays we go to have lunch with my mother. She lives in Bagley Street near the post office, and usually we would stay there all afternoon, sometimes into the evening, but Devi was not feeling so good when we arrived, so we hardly had any lunch at all and came home early only for all this to happen and I am very worried about Devi who should not be put under any strain because of her condition as you can see.’

Devi, from Dalziel’s observation, did not look to be suffering from anything other than a keen desire to find out what was going on and a certain amount of excitement at being at the centre of it. His guess was she was milking her condition for all it was worth to minimize contact with her mother-in-law.

He said, ‘Right, we’ll keep it short then. Tell me about Mr Watkins. Did you know him well?’

‘Not very well,’ began Ravi Dutta.

‘Not very well?’ his wife cut in. ‘I think I’ve seen him once! Number 39 was empty when we moved in six months ago; we looked at it because the rent was much cheaper than our flat, but that was because it is so small, and we needed the extra room with baby on the way, and Ravi has a good job so we can afford it even though his mammy did not want us to leave-we used to live with her, you see, and that was bad enough when there were just the two of us but soon as I knew I was carrying, I said to Ravi, this will not do at all…’

Dalziel said, ‘So how long has number 39 been occupied?’

‘I am not precisely sure…’ began Ravi.

‘Four months ago I started hearing noises, television and radio, the walls are very thin, but not so loud I needed to complain,’ said Devi. ‘In any case, it was not every day; a lot of the time there did not seem to be anyone there, then I would hear the TV again, then another few days or a week and nothing. I thought he must travel a lot…’

‘So tell me what happened today.’

Now Mr Dutta got a short innings. To save his wife the walk, he had gone to get the car, which he kept in a lock-up a minute’s walk away. He’d expected to find her waiting outside the Villas. When she wasn’t there, he had gone back inside to fetch her.

‘See anyone hanging around outside?’ asked Dalziel.

‘No, I do not think so. Though I think someone came into the building behind me.’

Now Devi took over again.

‘There was noise from the TV next door, it was a movie, it sounded an exciting movie, lots of shouting and shooting and loud music, and I was thinking how nice it would be to sit and watch a movie this afternoon instead of making a visit, and then there was a noise like someone falling and a big bang and voices and suddenly the music and everything got much louder, and I said to Ravi, What is that? And he said, It is the television, come on we are late, and I said, It sounded different from the movie, but he was so anxious not to be late at his mammy’s that I did not have time to knock on the door and ask if everything was all right.’

Lucky you, thought Dalziel.

‘But when we came back early because I was not feeling well, while Ravi was parking the car, I went up to the flat and the TV next door was still playing as loud as ever, so I knocked at the door but no one came, and when Ravi came up he knocked too, but still no one come, so I said, Now we must tell someone. Ravi did not want to cause a row but I said, No, this we cannot put up with, in any case maybe Mr Watkins is ill, so I went into our flat and rang 999. Soon your men came, they made us stay in our flat then they brought us out here. What is happening, Superintendent? Is Mr Watkins dead? Did he attack the lady they carried out? When shall we…’

‘Hold on, luv,’ said Dalziel. ‘What you’re saying is very important, I think mebbe we need to get you down to our headquarters so you can make a proper recorded statement. Excuse me.’

He walked away and climbed into the caravan.

Pascoe and Wield were standing together looking at a creased and soiled copy of MY Times open at the page containing the picture of the loyal citizens cheering the royal visitor.

‘By God, Wieldy that were quick,’ said Dalziel admiringly.

‘There’s some recycle dumpsters round the side of the building,’ said the sergeant. ‘I set a couple of lads to go through the paper skip. Take a look, sir.’

He held it up alongside the page that Gina Wolfe had received through the post to show that, in the genuine copy, the face in the space occupied by Alex Wolfe was that of a balding middle-aged man.

‘Mick were right then,’ said Dalziel.

‘Why would someone go to all the trouble of faking this?’ wondered Pascoe.

‘Not much trouble,’ said Wield dismissively. ‘Kid could do it with a decent scanner and printer.’

‘Purdy reckons someone might be wanting to have a pop at him,’ said Dalziel.

‘Blowing a man’s face off and putting a cop in hospital’s a bit more than a pop,’ said Pascoe. ‘I think it’s time to have a long chat with Mrs Wolfe.’

A phone rang. The constable who answered it called, ‘Sarge-Seymour for you.’

‘So what do you make of the Duttas, Andy?’ asked Pascoe.

‘You got a problem. Keep them here and they’ll drive you mad and she’ll be into everything. Turn ’em loose and she’ll be on every channel, spilling everything she’s seen and heard. I’d get her taken down to HQ and let her talk her head off to some poor sod. Paddy Ireland’s a good listener. With a bit of luck, eventually she’ll go into labour, then we’ll be shut of her for a while.’

‘Andy, you’re all heart. But it’s not a bad idea. I’ll get Wieldy to sort it.’

But the sergeant had other things on his mind as he rejoined them.

‘That were Seymour from the Keldale,’ he said. ‘Seems Mrs Wolfe checked out half an hour back.’

Pascoe turned on Dalziel.

‘Well, Andy,’ he said. ‘How’s your instinct feeling now?’

‘Bearing up,’ said the Fat Man. ‘Likely it means nowt. Decided she wanted to get out of reach of everyone to consider her options.’

It sounded so feeble he almost smiled apologetically as he said it.

Pascoe said, ‘Wieldy, put out a call. You should be able to get the details of her car from the hotel…’

‘No need,’ said Wield. ‘Call’s out. I knew the details already. Super asked me to check them this morning.’

‘So he did. Lucky to have him around, aren’t we?’ said Pascoe savagely.

But this chunk of heavy irony fell short of its mark.

Dalziel had moved away and was talking urgently into his mobile.

‘Mick,’ he said. ‘When you get this, don’t care if you’re saving the fucking universe from aliens, ring me!’

13.35-17.30

Finding Dalziel still in her room when she returned had been a serious disappointment to Gina Wolfe.

She hadn’t expected a senior police officer to drop everything and devote himself totally to her concerns, but the degree of interest shown by the Fat Man over lunch had given her hope that he’d do everything in his power to help. Lying in her bed, sleeping off an excess of booze, did not strike her as a very promising start.

Her mood had not been improved by her afternoon. She’d gone out into the Keldale garden and rung Mick Purdy to give him a progress report. His phone was switched off so she left him a message. She sat for a couple of minutes longer, trying to work out if she was any further forward. Then her phone rang. It was Mick.

He said, ‘Sorry. Still at my desk, tying up loose ends.’

He sounded very tired, not surprising as she guessed he hadn’t had much sleep for the best part of two days. But he listened very carefully to her account of what had happened, constantly interrupting with questions, till in the end she got a strong impression that he had a better understanding of what was going on than she did. Maybe he was able to put himself in Dalziel’s place and create a whole picture out of disconnected fragments.

In the end she got rather annoyed with his insistent questioning and said, ‘Look, Mick, I’m not in one of your interview rooms, OK? I’ve told you what happened and the net result, so far as I can see, is that I’ve got another boozed-up cop snoring in my bed!’

‘You’ve never complained before,’ he said.

‘That’s not funny.’

‘No. Sorry. Listen, I’ll talk to Andy when he wakes up…’

‘To get a truly professional picture, you mean? The things I’ve missed, or maybe the things he’s not telling me?’

‘Hey, don’t be so sensitive. We’re cops, we speak the same language, that’s all. Listen, what are you doing now?’

‘I’m sitting in the hotel garden talking to you on my phone.’

‘That’s fine. Good idea to stay there, don’t go wandering off. Look, I need to finish stuff here, than I’ll get back to you…’

‘No need. I’m perfectly capable of managing myself. And you sound like you could do with getting your head down for a couple of hours at least.’

‘Couple of days would be better. Listen, keep in touch. And remember what I say. Until we’re sure what’s going off here, be careful. Don’t go wandering off by yourself.’

Maybe she should have been touched by his concern, but all it did was irritate her.

What right did he have to start dishing out instructions? So he was worried on her behalf. How much more worried would he have been if she’d told him about her several sightings of Alex, both the obviously fallacious ones this morning, and especially the much more powerful image she’d glimpsed just before Dalziel dropped the water jug.

This was one of the reasons she’d come into the garden, to stare at the space the image had briefly occupied in hope of recreating it.

It didn’t work. She looked at her watch. Two o’clock. The christening party looked as if it was breaking up. Dalziel would soon have had his half-hour, but she suspected he might need a little more. Dissatisfied with herself and also with the tone of her conversation with Mick she rose from the bench she was sitting on and headed for the car park. Aimlessly driving around wasn’t going to advance matters but at least it was doing something in a world where men expected her to do nothing without their imprimatur.

It was of course totally non-productive. This time she didn’t even imagine she’d spotted Alex. So finally at half past three she’d returned to her room, not in the mood to make any allowances whatsoever if she found the fat slob still in her bed, which of course he was.

The shower soothed her bodily and mentally. As she was towelling herself down she heard the phone ringing in the bedroom. Checking first that the Fat Man had definitely gone, she picked up the receiver and said, ‘Hello?’

There was no reply, just a faint sound of breathing.

She said, ‘Room 25, who is this, please?’

Distantly a voice said, ‘Gina?’

She froze.

After a while the voice said, ‘Gina, you there?’

She managed to relax her throat muscles sufficiently to say, ‘Alex, is that you?’

Now it was the caller’s turn to pause. When he finally spoke, he said, ‘Yes, it’s me,’ but hesitantly, like a witness whose certainties begin to crumble in the witness box.

Gina heard the doubt and forced herself to restrain the torrent of questions welling up in her head.

She said, ‘Alex, it’s so good to hear your voice. Where are you? Can we meet?’

Another long silence made her wonder if even that had been a question too far, then the voice said, ‘Why are you here?’

She said, ‘Someone sent me the photo of you in MY Life magazine.’

‘Photo? Which photo?’ He sounded puzzled, with a faint note of alarm.

She said reassuringly, ‘The photo of you in the crowd during the royal visit last week. I thought it might be you who’d sent it. You were right at the front, I knew at once it was you. Like I did when I saw you today, in the garden at the Keldale.’

Silence. Am I losing him? she wondered. Again.

Then he spoke and for the first time the voice was that of the man she’d married: alert, positive, forceful.

‘Gina, what are you driving?’

‘A Nissan 350Z. Red.’

‘Give me your mobile number.’

She obeyed.

‘Now get out of there. Check out and leave. Drive north. Leave your phone switched on. I’ll be in touch. Gina, don’t hang about!’

The phone went dead.

She sat on the bed because her legs had lost all strength. Despite everything she’d done since getting the photo, everything she’d said to Mick and to Dalziel, in her heart she’d refused to believe that Alex could really be alive. Even all those ‘sightings’ of him had been good. The ones she knew for certain were false reinforced the chances that the ones that were doubtful were false too.

And now she’d heard his voice. Could that be a delusion too? She wanted it to be. Over the past seven years she’d built up a barrier against all the pain of that time of loss, she’d buried it as deep, so she thought, as the small white coffin. But now she knew-had known as soon as she saw the photo-that the barrier she’d built wasn’t the sturdy bulwark clad in tempered steel of adamantean proof she’d imagined, but a rice-paper wall a dead child could poke a finger through.

She felt herself on the edge of the state of shock, but she must not succumb, not while there was still doubt. There were questions to ask. Questions were good. They forced the mind to work at seeking answers.

First, was it really Alex?

Every instinct told her it was. The voice was his.

He had offered no proof of identity, but even that was a kind of proof.

Yet he didn’t seem to know anything about the photo.

So that was a maybe.

Second, why had he told her to check out?

She recalled Dalziel’s suggestion that maybe someone else had a reason for getting her up here. She hadn’t taken it all that seriously, but now…

That might explain Alex’s alarm, his desire to get her out of there.

Or could it be that someone else was keen to get her out in the open?

She thought of ringing Mick, but what good would that do? She could formulate his response without bothering with the conversation. Don’t so anything, stay put, contact Andy Dalziel, he’ll know what to do.

Perhaps he would. But she didn’t need external input into her decision. Which in fact wasn’t a decision.

She didn’t have a choice.

She had never been a subservient wife. She’d once told Alex, if he wanted instant obedience, he should have become a dog-handler. But now she saw no way forward but to assume it was his voice she’d heard and to obey his instructions. The only way to settle all doubts was to see him face to face. To do anything that might drive him back into his hidey-hole, whether it were mental or physical, was not an option. She’d lived through uncertainty into certainty once. It had been a slow painful journey and it wasn’t one that she wanted to have to start making again.

She rang Reception, told them she was checking out and asked them to charge everything to the credit card they’d swiped on her arrival. Then she got dressed, bundled the rest of her stuff into her case and headed out, descending by the service lift that deposited her next to a door opening on to the car park.

She slotted her mobile into the Bluetooth connection and drove away from the hotel. He’d said drive north so she turned right to keep the sun on her left. At last her Brownie days were coming in useful!

After a few minutes the phone rang.

‘Where are you?’ he said.

It was Alex. She was sure of it. Wasn’t she?

She said, ‘I’m on the outskirts of town. There’s a roundabout ahead. Left is Leeds and Harrogate, right Scarborough, straight on Middlesbrough.’

‘Carry straight on. Don’t disconnect.’

Other instructions followed at regular intervals. Soon she was off the main highway into a maze of narrow country roads passing through hamlets whose names meant nothing to her. She would have been completely lost had not her Brownie fix on the sun told her she was now to the east of her starting point and heading south. Finally after three quarters of an hour she was told to turn west on to a road which ran arrow-straight between low hedges of burnished hawthorn. By her rough geographical calculations, if she carried on in this direction for four or five miles, she would intersect with the main north-south motorway she’d started out on. She’d worked out that the purpose of all this meandering was to shake off any possible pursuit. Well, she hadn’t seen another car either in front or behind for miles, so perhaps now he was simply directing her back to town.

A mile or so ahead the narrow road breasted a steep hill on whose summit silhouetted against the declining sun she could see a building. As she got nearer she could see an inn sign swaying in a gentle breeze.

At the foot of the hill he told her to stop and wait.

She obeyed.

Time passed. Five minutes. Ten. Half an hour. Nothing happened. No traffic overtook her, none came towards her. With each passing minute her certainty that it was Alex’s voice faded. She wound down the window. There was no sound except for the call of a single bird, far away, repeating the same phrase over and over again. She tried to analyse it musically but it defied annotation. It had no connection with humanity. It belonged in a world where all the humans were dead. She felt totally alone. Abandoned.

It hadn’t been Alex. It was nobody. And nobody was going to call.

She would sit here till it got dark, and then she would…

She didn’t know what she would do.

16.35-16.41

Once more Andy Dalziel drove into the car park of the Keldale Hotel but this time his mood was very different. Last time he’d been anticipating a leisurely al fresco lunch with a good-looking woman who’d presented him with an intriguing little mystery, just the right size to take his mind off his own troubles.

He’d felt completely justified in keeping the whole daft business to himself. Involving an off-duty Novello had seemed harmless enough. Of all his DCs, she was the one whose discretion he most trusted. She was very ambitious and therefore unlikely to risk his wrath by shooting her mouth off. The same could be said of the lads, when sober, but after a few jars down the Black Bull he wouldn’t trust any of them to keep their mouths shut about their boss’s dalliance with a beddable blonde!

Before the bomb, it wouldn’t have bothered him. A man with a hide like a rhinoceros doesn’t fear pinpricks of laughter. A rhino might look a bit comic wandering around among all them elegant antelopes, but let him turn his sagacious eye in your direction, and you soon stop smiling.

On his return to work, however, he found that Mid-Yorkshire, which had once stretched around him like the wild savannah, had contracted to an enclosure at the zoo. People were now looking at the beast with curiosity, or, worse, with pity.

So they had to be re-educated.

Back to basics first; keep them guessing what you’re up to, make them jump a bit, remind them you’re answerable to nobody but yourself. Respect! Wasn’t that the cant word these days? Get some respect!

After this morning’s visit to the Station, he felt he’d taken a good stride in the right direction. He’d come to the Keldale at midday feeling more like his old self than he had for a long time.

And now as he drove into the car park, he felt like a petty recidivist crook returning to the scene of his pathetic crime.

Pascoe was certainly treating it as a crime scene. He’d upgraded the search of Gina Wolfe’s room to full SOCO examination.

‘You sort that, Wieldy,’ he’d commanded as if his commanding officer were not present. ‘But first off, get on to Seymour and tell him to make sure Mrs Wolfe’s room is left untouched. Don’t want a chambermaid getting in there and stripping the bed, do we?’

Stripping the bed? Was that a crack? wondered Dalziel.

‘You’re still giving the room the once-over, are you, Pete?’ he said. ‘Mebbe I should take a look first afore SOCO gets to work.’

‘Why’s that, Andy?’

‘Because I’ve been there, remember? Could be I’d spot summat.’

It had sounded weak and Pascoe hadn’t bothered to try and smooth over the fact.

‘Oh, I see. Maybe you’d notice a subtle change out of the corner of your eye, some slight discrepancy that would eventually turn out to be the clue that cracks the case, like in one of Agatha’s novels? No, I think on the whole it might be best for all our sakes if you weren’t around when the CSIs start poking about.’

Best for all our sakes? That was definitely a crack!

‘Why? What do you think they’re going to find? Semen stains on the sheets?’

Pascoe shrugged and said, ‘I just need to be sure there’s nothing to find, OK?’

‘Listen,’ said Dalziel, ‘I told you, I were knackered. Not fit to drive. I dossed down by myself. For Christ’s sake, if Gina had been there, whatever else I gave her, I’d have given her an alibi, wouldn’t I? And you’d not be wasting time with this daft notion that she might have blown Watkins’s face off and put Novello in hospital.’

Pascoe had looked at him with half a smile and said, ‘No need to get your knickers in a twist. All right, if you’re so desperate to go back, let’s go. Wieldy, you keep an eye on things here, OK? Anything comes up, ring me.’

‘As opposed to keeping it all to myself, you mean?’ said the sergeant ironically.

‘Why not? Seems to be in fashion nowadays,’ said Pascoe.

They weren’t going to leave it alone, thought Dalziel. And he couldn’t complain, he had it coming.

Pascoe, who’d parked alongside him, was out of his car already and opening his boss’s door for him.

‘Come on, Andy,’ he said impatiently. ‘Work to do.’

This was too much. Pascoe had followed him to the hotel. Followed, not led the way, thought Dalziel. Like he was scared I was going to do a runner. Time he had a little reminder of the divine order of things.

God seemed to agree. Even as the Fat Man looked for a way to slow things to his own pace, the good Lord sent him one.

‘Here,’ he said, looking across the car park to where a man was putting a suitcase into a BMW X5, ‘I know yon face.’

He set off with Pascoe in close attendance. As they approached, the man straightened up and looked round. He was an imposing figure, broad-shouldered, grey-haired, with a Roman emperor’s head and a nose to match.

‘How do, Hooky!’ boomed Dalziel. ‘Long time no see!’

Pascoe was a good reader of reaction and it struck him that this Roman emperor was reacting to Dalziel’s approach as if he’d just noticed Alaric the Visigoth trotting up the Appian Way.

Conclusion: he was a crook whose acquaintance with the Fat Man was purely professional. Question: what kind of crook was he, and could his presence here have anything to do with Gina Wolfe?

But even as the question formed in his mind he was revising his conclusion as Dalziel took the man by the hand and shook it vigorously.

‘So what are you doing here, Hooky? Bit off your patch. Can’t be official, else we’d have baked a cake or summat.’

The man managed a wan smile and said, ‘No, just a visit. Old chum’s daughter got married.’

‘Oh aye? Job, is he?’

‘No, no. Some of us do have friends outside the Force,’ said the man, his eyes straying to Pascoe, who coughed in the Fat Man’s ear.

‘Oh aye, I’m forgetting me manners. Hooky, this is Peter Pascoe, my DCI. Pete, drop a curtsey, this is Nye Glendower, king of the Cambrian cops!’

‘Good to meet you, sir,’ said Pascoe. ‘I’ve heard of you, of course.’

Aneurin Glendower, Chief Constable of the Cambrian Force. Not a household name outside of Wales, but one well known in police circles as a man of strong views who might rise even higher if he could find a PM on the same wavelength.

They shook hands and Glendower said, ‘You boys got something going on here? I noticed a bit of activity in the hotel.’

Seymour and a WPC. They couldn’t have caused much of a stir, but you didn’t get to be CC without having well-tuned sensors, thought Dalziel. He opened his mouth to reply, but Pascoe cut in.

‘Just a little local difficulty,’ he said breezily. ‘But we’d better get it sorted. Good to meet you, sir. Andy, when you’re ready…’

The bugger’s worried in case I shoot my mouth off! thought the Fat Man indignantly.

He said, ‘With you in a minute, lad. Us old buggers need the young ’uns to keep us on our toes, eh, Hooky? Sorry I didn’t know you were here. We could have cracked a bottle and had a chat about the good old days when we mattered.’

‘Yes. Would have been nice, Andy-not that I had much spare time. Got to shoot off now and burn a bit of midnight oil when I get home so that I’m up to speed when I hit the desk in the morning. Good to see you. Nice to meet you, too, Pascoe.’

He slammed his boot, got into the X5 and accelerated out of the car park.

‘He’s in a hurry to get home,’ said Pascoe.

‘Well, it’s Wales,’ said Dalziel. ‘Probably shuts at half past seven. Here, watch out!’

He pulled Pascoe out of the way of a white Mondeo backing out of its parking spot at speed. The middle-aged woman driver scowled at them, then sped off towards the exit.

‘Bloody women drivers,’ said the Fat Man, shaking his fist after it. ‘Most on ’em couldn’t push a pram straight.’

Racist and sexist in the same ten seconds, thought Pascoe. Nothing new there then, except it came across rather mechanically, as if the old sod were becoming a parody of himself. And all that stuff about the good old days when he mattered! He really should have taken a few more weeks convalescent leave. Or maybe months.

Or am I just behaving like Henry the Fifth looking for arguments to invade France?

But Glendower’s reaction had certainly contained something of the embarrassment of the successful man on meeting the one-time equal he’d left behind. In the past their leader’s national reputation had always been a source of pride to his colleagues in Mid-Yorkshire CID. Could the truth really be that he was regarded as a bit of a joke by the upwardly mobile, a cop who’d found his relatively low level, a grampus puffing his way around a small provincial pond?

Pascoe shook away the disloyal thoughts.

‘Let’s find Seymour,’ he said.

16.35-17.05

It had been a funny kind of day, thought Edgar Wield.

The unexpected appearance of Dalziel early that morning should have rung a warning bell. Looking back now, it seemed that there had been something a touch manic about the fat sod’s speech and demeanour, and there was that business about the old lady, Mrs Esmé Sheridan, ringing in with a complaint about a kerb-crawler, and giving a car number and description that pointed the finger at the Fat Man. But on the whole Wield had been happy to accept his arrival as evidence that normal service was about to be resumed.

That the superintendent had come back too early from convalescent leave the sergeant did not doubt. But when others, including Pascoe, had expressed concern as to whether the great man could ever truly get back to where he had been before, Wield had kept his counsel. In his eyes it was just a matter of time. The others saw it in terms of a champion boxer trying to make a come-back. He saw it in terms of Odysseus come to reclaim his kingdom.

He had sufficient self-awareness to acknowledge he might be emotionally biased.

Pascoe was very close to the Fat Man. Romantics-there are a few of those even in the modern police force-analysed this as a vicarious father/son relationship. Dalziel had no children, or at least none he acknowledged, and years ago Pascoe’s father had confirmed the distance between himself and his son by opting to emigrate to Australia with his eldest daughter and her family.

The Romantic analysis of the D and P relationship went something like this: as initial distrust and dislike had moderated, via reluctant acknowledgement of detective skill and technique, to mutual respect and even affection, the residual ability to get up one another’s noses had been rendered innocuous by subsumption into a quasi-familial mode. You may at times loathe your parents or kids, but that doesn’t get in the way of loving them.

Wield felt it was maybe a bit more complicated than that. What he was certain of was that he owed his own progress, perhaps even survival, to the Fat Man. He had congratulated himself for many years on the skill with which he’d concealed his gayness from his institutionally homophobic employers. It was only late on, around the time he decided-without marking the occasion with a ticker-tape parade-to come out, that he realized he’d never fooled Andy Dalziel. Looking back, he began to understand how much he’d benefited from the Fat Man’s protection. Nothing obvious involving civil rights and liberal declarations and such. Just an invisible circle drawn round him which said, He’s in here with me, touch him at your peril.

He’d never said thank you because he knew if he had, all he’d have got back was, For what? And indeed, for what? The right to function like any other copper? Surely he had that anyway. So, no thank yous. But what he did give the Fat Man was unconditional trust that, whatever he was, so would he always be.

Trust was one thing, reality another. There was no getting away from it, the way things had turned out today meant there was a big dark cloud hanging over Dalziel, and Wield doubted it was about to burst in blessings on his head. Nowt he could do but get on with his job.

He had disposed of the Duttas as the superintendent had suggested and now he was sitting collating statements from the other Loudwater Villas tenants.

The sound of a rackety engine caught his ears and he looked out of the caravan window to see a dusty white Bedford van pull up in front of the building.

A young man got out, early twenties, dressed in baggy jeans and a red T-shirt. He stretched his arms and yawned, then pulled a grip off the passenger seat and headed into the Villas.

Wield frowned. He’d set up a checkpoint on the approach road. They couldn’t keep people out who had a genuine reason for going in, such as, they lived here. But where there was doubt, the officer on duty would ring in to check; and where there was no cause for doubt, he would make a note and ring in with the details to indicate there was somebody new to interview.

None of the caravan phones had sounded in the last five minutes.

The sergeant said, ‘Smiler, who’s on the checkpoint?’

The constable so addressed, glanced at a list and said, ‘It’s Hector, Sarge. Everyone got called in for this one.’

The last sentence was significant.

In a case of murder accompanied by a serious assault on an officer, everyone was expected to turn out and help. Indeed, everyone wanted to turn out and help. But if Wield had been consulted, he’d have advised that the best way Police Constable Hector could help was to continue to devote himself to whatever unimaginable activity occupied his mind on his day off.

The sergeant rose and opened the caravan door. From this elevated position he could see down to the checkpoint quite clearly.

There was no one there.

The air was very still and a distant splash drew his attention down to the river bank. There he was, that unmistakable figure, lanky and skinny, with a head set slightly beneath the level of the shoulders, as though like a terrapin’s it could fully retract in time of trouble.

He was throwing stones into the water. No, on closer observation of the throwing style, it seemed likely he was trying to make stones skip across the surface of the water, only they never rose out of the initial splash.

This time I’ll kill him, thought Wield. But that pleasure would have to wait.

He jumped down from the caravan and headed into the building.

As he ran up the stairs he could hear raised voices drifting down from above.

He found their source on the second floor outside number 39.

The young man from the white van was having a row with PC Jennison, who was on guard outside the fatal flat. The SOCO team had finished and now its sole occupant was the faceless corpse waiting to be bagged and transported to the morgue. Joker Jennison had risked a peep and wished he hadn’t. Now the door was firmly closed and he was concentrating on his appointed task of keeping unauthorized personnel out.

At sixteen and a half stone, he formed a pretty effective barrier, but while he was winning the battle he was clearly being worn down by the argument and he spotted Wield’s arrival with relief.

‘Sarge,’ he called. ‘This gent says he wants to go inside and he won’t take no for an answer.’

‘No, I bloody well won’t!’ exclaimed the man, turning. ‘You in charge here? Then tell your pet ape to let me in.’

He had a lilting Welsh accent and a fiery Welsh tone.

‘I’ll do what I can, sir, but first why don’t we calm things down a touch, and take a close look at this thing together?’ said Wield.

His words were softly spoken and would have won plaudits in a bedside manner contest. But he knew it wasn’t his soft answers that turned away wrath but the agate-hard face they came out of.

‘Yes, all right, it’ll be good to talk to somebody who’s got two penn’orth of sense for a change,’ said the man, shooting a twelve-bore glance at Jennison.

He allowed himself to be led away to the far end of the corridor.

‘Now, sir, I’m Detective Sergeant Wield of Mid-Yorkshire CID,’ said Wield, producing his ID.

He let the man study it for a moment, then put it away and took out his notebook and pen, by these small rituals providing a space for the more volatile vapours of anger to dissipate.

‘OK, sir,’ he said, pen poised. ‘Could you start by giving me your full name and address, and then explain why you want to get into number 39?’

The man let out a long sigh, but his voice was relatively calm as he answered.

‘My name is Alun Gruffud Watkins,’ he said. ‘My address is Flat 39, Loudwater Villas. And I want to get inside because that’s where I bloody well live!’

16.00-16.30

Maybe I ought to play the lottery today, thought Maggie Pinchbeck. Clearly I’m on a roll.

Her first stroke of good fortune had been the timely phone call from Gwyn Jones.

The reasons for the Bitch’s anger had been made clear on the journey from the Shah-Boat to Marina Towers.

‘Family fucking emergency! His old gran seriously ill. Got to go back to fucking Wales to help sort things out. God, you could almost hear the tears in his voice! And all the time he’s heading up to Yorkshire chasing a story! Bastard! There’s got to be trust, hon. Once a man starts treating you like an idiot, that’s finito.’

Maggie noted that it wasn’t the lie that bothered her, it was the assumption she wasn’t smart enough to spot it.

It had been an easy job for Beanie to get Gareth Jones to repeat a full account of what he’d overheard when bugging the terrace table, almost as easy as it was for Maggie to get the Bitch to repeat the story.

‘Like any kid, he really wants to impress big brother,’ said Beanie, ‘and knowing that Gwyn’s got this thing about Dave the Turd, soon as he heard the name Gidman, he couldn’t wait to pass the info on to Gwyn.’

In fact there wasn’t all that much to pass on, and from what Beanie relayed to her, Maggie wasn’t any clearer why the possible resurfacing of an amnesiac cop should have got Gwyn Jones salivating. From Dave the Third’s reaction, she was pretty convinced the name Wolfe didn’t mean a lot to him either. She didn’t anticipate getting much more from Beanie Sample, but she was presently her only link to what was going on in Yorkshire. So when they got to Marina Tower, and the Bitch got out of the car still talking, Maggie followed her up to her apartment.

Inside, Beanie poured herself a large vodka and invited Maggie to help herself. She matched the size of Beanie’s drink but hers was mostly soda.

The Bitch went wandering off. Maggie followed her into a palatial bedroom.

She was noticing a change in the tone of Beanie’s complaint. The initial fury had died away and though the descriptive language used about Jones was just as colourful, the target area of complaint seemed to be shifting from his demeaning attempt at deception to the fact that he hadn’t shared a possible scoop with her.

‘Shit, I was breaking front-page stories before his balls had dropped,’ she declared. ‘I could have run things down here for him while he was pissing about up in Yorkshire. Cover your back, hon, that’s rule number one. No fucker’s a fucking island.’

She’d pressed a button that set the doors of a wall-length closet sliding silently open.

‘Look at that,’ she said, indicating the few hangers from which men’s garments hung. ‘Some women cut up their guy’s clothes when he pisses them off. This fucker, I’d be doing him a favour. Only decent things he’s got are a jacket and shirt I bought him, and the cunt’s wearing those.’

She reached up and took a gleaming silver laptop off a shelf.

‘Let’s see if he’s got anything in here to show what he thinks he’s up to,’ she said.

‘That’s Gwyn’s laptop?’ asked Maggie as the woman opened it and turned it on.

‘Right,’ said Beanie as the screen lit up and invited her to enter a password.

Without hesitation she hit the keyboard.

‘He gave you his password?’ said Maggie incredulously.

‘Not so’s he noticed,’ said Beanie, smiling. ‘But when I invite a man into my house, I expect him to give me everything. Now let’s see. No, not you, hon. He may be a creep, but he’s my creep and even a creep’s got right to some privacy.’

She turned the computer so Maggie couldn’t see the screen. This wasn’t a good sign, possibly signalling a further softening of her attitude to her lover that could make her regret sharing her initial anger with an interested stranger.

Well, unless she tries to silence me by chucking me out of the window, it’s too late to do anything about it now! thought Maggie as she admired the view. To see the sky out of her own bedroom window, you had to open it and lean out backwards. She didn’t envy Beanie much, but this she certainly envied.

Behind her she heard a hiss of rage.

She turned to see that the relatively mellow mood into which the woman had been drifting had vanished like March sunshine.

‘Oh, the lousy bastard. It’s not his fucking clothes I’ll take the scissors to. The bastard!’

Maggie moved forward quickly and looked at the screen.

It contained an email. And this, she instantly realized, might be her second stroke of fortune.

Hi lover, sorry to hear about gran. Yes I’ll be ready with the TLC when you get back tho not sure what it means. Try Licking my Cunny maybe?!!! C u soon Gem xxxxx

She picked up the laptop and moved out of Beanie’s reach. The Bitch looked ready to hurl it through the window if she got her hands on it.

‘Can you believe it? I give him a key to my apartment and he’s doing this to me! Who the fuck is this Gem, you got any idea?’

She glared at Maggie so accusingly that she found herself answering, ‘There’s a junior on the Messenger staff called Gemma Huntley…’

‘A junior? You mean he’s humping some kid then coming here to stick his cock into me? Jesus, I need another drink!’

She stormed out of the bedroom. Maggie didn’t waste time. While she doubted there’d be an early restoration of sympathy for Gwyn Jones, it seemed wise not to take the risk. Within a matter of seconds she’d located a folder marked Gidman, typed in her email address, attached the folder, and sent it.

It was still being downloaded when Beanie returned.

‘What you doing there, hon?’ she asked.

‘There was some stuff here about the Gidmans that I’m sending to my computer. That OK with you?’ said Maggie, thinking that if she kept the woman talking just a few minutes longer it wouldn’t matter if it were all right with her or not.

She needn’t have worried.

‘You get all you want. Anything you can do to stiff Jones is all right by me. And when you’re done, I’m going to send little Miss Gem a reply that will put her off playing with the big girls forever!’

16.30-18.05

Fleur Delay woke out of a dream in which she saw a man get shot in the face by her brother.

But when she stooped to look at the body, the ruined features belonged to Vince.

And when she turned to look at the gunman, it was her own pale face she saw.

She rolled off the bed and staggered into the bathroom to pee. Then she removed her clothes and got into the shower, letting it run cold then hot then cold again. Dried off, she got dressed in fresh clothes, disguised her pallor as best she could with make-up, adjusted her wig carefully, then tried the door that communicated with her brother’s room. When she realized it was locked, she tapped on it gently, then hard.

There was no reply.

She took out her mobile and thumbed in Vince’s number.

‘Hi, sis,’ he said.

‘Where are you?’

‘Downstairs having a sandwich.’

She didn’t reply, but switched off and hurried down the stairs.

Vince saw her before she spotted him. He was in the spacious lobby, settled deep in the kind of armchair whose soft leather upholstery embraced you like a good woman. Seeing the look on his sister’s face confirmed his feeling that he’d rather be rolling around on a thin mattress with a bad woman as long as the action was taking place two hundred miles south of here.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Like a club sandwich? They know their meat here, got to give them that.’

‘How long have you been down here?’

‘Half an hour, maybe,’ he said vaguely.

‘Where’s the woman?’

‘Her car’s still in the car park,’ he assured her. ‘No way she can come down the stairs or out of the lift without I see her. I reckon she’s got Tubby in her room, trying to give him a heart attack.’

She sat down next to him. He was right, he did have a good line of vision on the staircase and lift.

‘So what’s The Man say?’ he asked.

‘He’s thinking about it,’ she prevaricated.

Vince frowned.

‘What’s to think?’

‘He needs to be certain it was Wolfe.’

Vince said, ‘Makes no difference. You always say, you down a guy, you should put space between you and the body soon as you can. So why’re we hanging around?’

‘Because I say so,’ she snapped. ‘I’ve told you before, Vince. Just do as you’re told and we’ll be all right. And no one told you to off that guy.’

‘I only shot him ’cos he was hurting you,’ he protested.

‘Yeah? Don’t think I’m not grateful, ’cos I’m not,’ she retorted.

They sat in separate silences for a while, hers irritated, his hurt.

Fleur thought, Box clever, girl. This is getting us nowhere. If I want him to be able to look after himself, I’ve got to stop putting him down.

She forced a smile and said, ‘Fancy a ciggie?’

‘What about the woman?’ he said, still sulky.

‘We’ll just be outside.’

They went out of the French window on to the terrace, then down the steps into the garden. There were several other addicts there already, their progress along the gravelled walks marked by clouds of tobacco smoke. They lit up and joined the parade. After a while they sat down on an elegant rustic bench and talked as they smoked. As usual, Fleur chose the topic, and as usual it was their Spanish villa.

For once Vince seemed genuinely enthused. Normally he started yawning whenever Spain was mentioned. OK, it was great for holidays, but he couldn’t understand his sister’s desire to move out there permanently.

What he did understand, however, was that when he and she disagreed, almost inevitably events proved her right. Not that he went in for statistical analysis. He just knew that submitting wholly to her judgment had kept him out of jail for well over a decade, which compared very favourably with the year and a half that was his previous longest non-custodial period since leaving school.

Sitting here, listening to her rattling on about her plans for their life together, gave him a sense of continuity, of family, that his early upbringing had lacked. And being marooned in this grotty northern town made the prospect of retirement to Spain with its bars and beaches and clubs and dark-eyed senoritas seem very attractive.

So he responded with more interest than he’d ever shown before. For Fleur, it was one of the pleasantest times she’d ever spent with her brother. So enthusiastic did he sound about the villa that all her doubts vanished and her plans for their future, or more precisely, Vince’s future, seemed perfectly feasible.

Time flew by and it wasn’t till she glanced at her watch that she realized nearly an hour had passed.

‘Better get back in,’ she said.

‘Yeah, I’m feeling pretty hungry,’ said Vince. ‘That sandwich was OK, but I need a real meal or I may faint.’

‘Always thinking of your belly,’ she said, regarding him fondly. ‘I want to pick up my jacket from the car.’

They walked round the side of the hotel to the car park.

As she opened the car door and reached inside for her jacket, she glanced at the next row to check on the red Nissan.

It wasn’t there.

Panic starting in her stomach, she ran her eyes over the other cars in case she’d misremembered its location.

Finally there was no doubt. It had definitely gone.

Vince was untroubled.

‘So she’s gone for a drive again,’ he said.

‘How come you didn’t notice her?’

‘She probably went out while we were in the garden,’ he said. ‘So she can’t be far. We’ll pick her up on the laptop. Come on, sis. Don’t always be looking for trouble!’

He led the way up to his room. Fleur followed, thinking, Sometimes he gets it right. It might do me good to listen to him for a change. Maybe then I can stop lying awake wondering what’s going to become of him.

The laptop was on the bedside table where he’d left it, but the screen was blank, not even a screensaver.

He tapped a key. Nothing happened.

‘What’s up?’ demanded Fleur.

‘Nothing. Must have gone into hibernation,’ said Vince.

‘Let me see.’

She touched a couple of keys, frowned, picked up the laptop and shook it in his face.

‘You’re on battery and you’ve run the batteries flat. Why didn’t you plug it in, for God’s sake?’

‘The mains lead’s in your room and I didn’t want to disturb you,’ he explained. ‘I was just being thoughtful.’

‘No you weren’t. Thoughtful means being full of thought. How come the batteries have run flat anyway? Should have lasted another hour at least, just checking the tracker. What the hell have you been doing, Vince? Have you been downloading your mucky videos again?’

‘No,’ he denied unconvincingly. ‘Maybe I did do a bit of surfing for a couple of minutes; it gets boring just looking at that green blob all the time, especially when it isn’t moving…’

‘It’ll be moving now!’ she screamed at him. ‘Only we can’t see it.’

‘Hey, I’m sorry…’

She wasn’t listening. She unlocked the communicating door, went through into her own room and returned with the mains lead. Stooping, she dragged the bedside lamp out of its socket and inserted the plug. Then she connected the other end to the computer.

It glowed back into life. She went online, entered the tracker code.

The sat-map came up. The green dot was stationary.

‘There,’ said Vince triumphantly. ‘No problem. She’s stopped.’

‘And that’s not a problem?’ said Fleur, studying the screen closely. ‘Why do you think she’s stopped, Vince?’

‘Run out of petrol? Needs a slash?’

‘How about she’s stopped because she’s met up with her long-lost husband and they’re sitting in her car, having a nice heart-to-heart?’

She went into her room again, this time returning with an OS map.

‘Now let’s see exactly where they are. Got you! Come on, it’s going to take us about twenty minutes, half an hour, depending on traffic. Let’s hope she doesn’t move off before we get there!’

‘No problem,’ said Vince. ‘We can track her through the laptop.’

‘And how are we going to manage that, Vince? You ran the battery flat, remember? It won’t work in the car.’

‘It’s working here,’ objected Vince.

‘Great. So all we’ve got to do is find a way of moving the hotel! Come on!’

‘So I shan’t bring the laptop then?’

She felt an urge to scream at him, but what was the point?

‘Shove it under the bed out of the way. Leave it switched on. At least it’ll be charging up the battery while we’re out. Though let’s hope we get there quick enough not to need it again.’

She led the way out of the door. Vince followed. They didn’t wait for the lift but hurried down the stairs, not the main stairway but a service stair that would bring them out at the rear of the hotel, near the car-park entrance.

Of course, thought Fleur, if Gina Wolfe had come down this way, she wouldn’t have passed across Vince’s line of vision. Why hadn’t she thought of that earlier? Why had she sat in the garden, smoking and babbling on about Spain, instead of heading straight out into the car park to confirm the Nissan was still there?

Because you’re sick, she answered herself. Because you’re losing the capacity to think straight. Or to walk straight, for that matter, she thought, staggering a little as she hurried towards the VW.

Behind her, Vince noticed the stagger. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen it. Not so nimble on her pegs as she used to be, he thought. With anyone else he’d have suspected too much booze, but not Fleur. Probably her age; she was in her forties now. Probably a woman’s thing, that stuff that happened when they stopped having their periods.

It would pass, he told himself confidently. One thing you could be sure of with Fleur, she wouldn’t go funny with it like some women did. No, not good old Fleur. She’d deal with it, take it in her stride. He hadn’t learned much in his life, but one thing he had learned.

No matter what shit came at him, he could always rely on Fleur.

16.41-17.15

When Dalziel and Pascoe entered the Keldale, they found Seymour waiting for them.

Clearly not certain who he should be reporting to, he diplomatically aimed at a spot midway between their heads and said, ‘It’s Room 25, sir. I’ve got it sealed off like you said till the SOCO team gets here. Talking of which, the manager would like a word. Think he’s a bit worried about SOCO worrying the guests.’

‘You’d best see to that, Pete,’ said Dalziel. This was ambiguous, both deferring and commanding. It was also suspicious as Lionel Lee, the manager, was, like most men in charge of premises licensed to sell intoxicating liquor, a close acquaintance of the Fat Man’s. But the suspicion didn’t really surface till Pascoe emerged from Lee’s office to find Seymour alone.

‘Where is he?’ he demanded.

‘The Super took the key and said he’d go on up,’ explained the DC nervously. The Dalziel/Pascoe relationship was a much-favoured subject for analysis among the intellectuals of the locker room, but the favoured conclusion was they didn’t know what the fuck was going on.

Pascoe bit back an irritated response. How could he expect a lowly DC to exert control where chief constables had failed? A moment later he was glad of his restraint when Seymour said, ‘By the way, sir, when I did a quick check round the room, I came across this tucked behind the pillows.’

He took a small evidence bag out of his pocket and handed it over, his face a mask of studied neutrality.

Pascoe examined it for a moment then said, ‘Thanks, Dennis. You wait in the car park for SOCO. Take them up in the service lift; let’s keep the management happy, eh? I may want to buy you a drink here some day.’

Which, interpreted, meant, You’ve done well, but this is between us, OK?

He found Dalziel standing in Gina Wolfe’s room looking pensively at the bed.

Pascoe said, ‘No, she didn’t find it, Andy. Seymour did.’

He held up the plastic bag.

It contained a note scrawled in a hand as familiar to members of Mid-Yorkshire CID as their own.

It read Sorry to pass out on you, put it down to old age. Next time I’ll try to stay awake! I’ll be in touch. A.

‘I did wonder,’ said Dalziel, apparently unfazed. ‘Was a time when Dennis would have handed it over to me.’

‘Tempora mutantur,’ said Pascoe, who often armoured himself with pedantry in anticipation of a verbal skirmish with the Fat Man. ‘So you thought you’d get up here first just in case it was still lying around. And your exquisite reason, knight?’

‘Nowt that you’d call exquisite, but reason enough,’ said Dalziel. ‘It’s nothing to do with the case, but it could be misinterpreted.’

The two men stood and looked at each other. Dalziel was not used to feeling vulnerable but he felt vulnerable now. That his unofficial activities might have put a junior officer at risk was bad enough. The fact that he admitted to sleeping off an excessively vinous lunch in a suspect’s hotel room made matters worse. But the inference drawable from the note that he had passed out as he attempted to have sex with Gina, still giving her the time to head out to Loudwater Villas and confront her errant husband, added an element of black farce that he might find hard to survive both personally and professionally.

To a ruthless rival to his throne, this was a perfect opportunity to achieve his goal with the gentlest of pushes. Even someone as upright and decent as Peter Pascoe had to do nothing but play things by the book to make his boss’s position very difficult.

Pascoe put the bag back in his pocket and said wearily, ‘From now on, just talk to me, Andy, OK? One more time I’m left not knowing what’s going on will be one time too many. Now bugger off out of here. I’ll see you downstairs.’

Dalziel left. He felt good, not because of what he’d done-nothing to feel good about there-but because of his part in making Pascoe what he’d become. It was going to be hard, but it was time to let go. Not step aside, that would be too easy. And in any case, he was far from ready to step aside. This too would pass and the tempora would bloody well mutantur back again! But his first task once he was safely back on the throne must be to make sure his loyal lieutenant got lift-off.

Meanwhile he was a cop and he was still on the case.

He went downstairs to reception and asked the woman on duty to get hold of the car-park security video for that afternoon. While she was sorting that, he checked the record of incoming phone calls and made a couple of notes. The receptionist then took him into her inner office where she’d linked the car-park video to her computer. It was a good system. When they’d had their bit of bother a year back, he’d read the riot act to Lionel Lee. ‘You’d not give your guests nylon sheets and scratchy bog-paper, would you? So why sell ’em short with cheap security?’ It was a message Lee had taken to heart. There’d been an attempt to break into the hotel office only last weekend, but it had been thwarted by the new levels of security installed since Dalziel’s lecture.

First he checked the period immediately after Gina had thrown him out of her bedroom. It didn’t take long to spot her departure less than thirty minutes after he’d left. Then he went right back to lunchtime and studied what he found there with great interest.

‘Anything else I can help you with, just ask, won’t you?’ murmured the receptionist in his ear. She was keen to know what was going on.

‘Can I print some stills from this video?’ he asked.

‘Of course. Like me to do it for you?’

She leaned over him, her soft bosom resting on his broad shoulder.

‘There,’ she said huskily. ‘Anything else you want?’

She were either very nosy or she liked the cut of his rig. Odds on the former, but he didn’t have time to find out.

‘Aye,’ said Dalziel. ‘That lad, Pietro, who were in charge of the terrace this lunchtime, he still around?’

While the woman was checking that, he helped himself to the guest registration book. One thing he found there made him laugh out loud, causing the receptionist to glance at him curiously. Get a grip! he admonished himself. This is serious business.

Pietro arrived and Dalziel sat down with him in the reception lounge. As he sank into the chair, his elephantine buttocks obliterated the imprint left by Vince Delay a little time before.

‘Right,’ said the Fat Man. ‘I’ve got a lot of questions and not much time, so let’s not bugger about. Answer me straight and you and me will stay friends, and I’m a good friend to a likely lad. But fuck me around and tha’ll be on an early boat back home to sunny Italy, OK?’

‘Bus, sir.’

‘Eh?’

‘It ’ud be a bus back home to ’uddersfield.’

His accent had changed from Mediterranean mandolin to Yorkshire tuba.

Dalziel laughed out loud.

‘I think thee and me are going to get along famously,’ he said. ‘First, who does the table selection on the terrace at lunchtime?’

‘That would be me, sir. Guests state their preference and I try to oblige them.’

‘So how come I got the best table overlooking the garden even though it weren’t booked till this morning?’

‘That were Mr Lee, the manager. He told me to change it.’

‘That must have meant you bumping some poor sod.’

‘Yes, sir. A Mr and Mrs Williams. They’re staying at the hotel.’

Dalziel nodded, unsurprised, and said, ‘Take a look at these pictures. Recognize any of ’em?’

He showed him the photos he’d printed from the security video.

Pietro picked out three faces he recognized as belonging to hotel guests.

‘Any of them on the terrace at lunchtime?’

‘The only one I can be sure of is Mr Delay,’ said Pietro. ‘Him and his sister.’

‘Have they been staying here long?’

‘A week, I think.’

‘Oh aye?’ said the Fat Man, rather disappointed. ‘But they were definitely around at lunchtime?’

‘Yes, sir. On the upper terrace. They left without having their puddings.’

‘More fools them, Notice a young lass by herself? Brown hair, nice knockers.’

Pietro grinned.

‘Yes, I did. She were another one who shot off before her order came.’

They spoke a little longer, after which Dalziel took out his mobile and began making calls.

When Pascoe joined him a few minutes later, Dalziel said, ‘Gina Wolfe had a call fifteen minutes after I left. I’ve checked the number. Unregistered pay-as-you-go. A few minutes later she rang down to say she were leaving. She used their express check-out which meant she didn’t have to come down to the desk. Security video shows her in the car park at twenty past four. She seems to be checking around like she’s worried someone might be watching her. Then she drives away.’

‘But where to? No word that she’s been spotted yet?’

‘If she stays on the main roads, we’ll soon have her,’ said Dalziel confidently.

‘Fine. Anything else?’

‘Mebbe.’

Pascoe gave him his more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger look and the Fat Man said, ‘Nay, lad, I’m not holding out on you. Just I don’t want to waste time chatting about stuff that may be owt or nowt till I’m sure of it.’

Pascoe was saved from having to decide whether to make a stand or not by his phone ringing.

He looked at the display and saw it was Wield.

‘Pete,’ said the sergeant, ‘we’ve got a problem.’

Pascoe listened for a while, then said, ‘He’s talking, you say?’

‘Real gabby. It’s shutting him up that’s going to be hard.’

‘Let him talk all he wants. I’ll be back soon as I can.’

He switched off and said, ‘We’re needed back at Loudwater. It looks like our corpse is neither Watkins, the flat tenant, who has appeared on the scene, nor indeed a Wolfe in borrowed hair. Andy, have you been practising not looking surprised?’

‘No. Just comes natural, specially when I’m not.’

‘Is that so? I thought we’d entered on a new era of transparency.’

‘Nay, lad,’ protested the Fat Man, ‘I’m not holding owt back. I can’t help it if occasionally I make a lucky guess.’

‘And in this case, what might your guess be?’

‘About the dead ’un? I’d say, Welsh and a journalist. Nay, don’t lose your rag, Pete. You know me, always a lucky guesser.’

‘I’ll tell you one thing, Andy, much more of this and your luck is really going to run out,’ said Pascoe in a low, hard voice.

‘Pete, trust me. I’ll never keep owt from you that I think you need to know, OK? Now you’ll be wanting to get back there quick to talk to this Watkins. I’ll join you soon as I can. Couple of things I need to check first. OK?’

‘OK,’ said Pascoe reluctantly. ‘But don’t make me come looking for you, Andy.’

The two men stood staring at each other for a long moment.

It was Dalziel who turned away.

16.42-18.05

Nye Glendower drove westward along the roads of Mid-Yorkshire at a moderate speed in keeping with his standing as a respected Chief Constable and pillar of a community that expected its pillars to be strong and upright and based on good Welsh granite. After a few minutes his mirror showed him a white Mondeo coming up fast behind him.

He gave a wave and for an hour they drove in close convoy. Finally, with the Yorkshire border behind him and the declining sun beginning to be a trouble to his eyes, he signalled left to pull into a lay-by separated from the main road by a line of scrubby trees.

The Mondeo drew in behind him. Its driver got out. Glendower followed suit and stood by the X5 as she came towards him.

Myfanwy Baugh, Chief Executive of the Cambrian NHS Trust, a solidly built woman in her early fifties with a natural authority and unbending will that made many a man who’d tasted the sadness of her might say grudgingly, ‘That Myfanwy, she’s got balls.’

But Nye Glendower knew she hadn’t.

She opened her mouth to speak. He took her in his arms and stopped her tongue with his.

After a long moment she pushed him away and said, ‘Somebody might see us.’

‘All racing home,’ he said, indicating the traffic flashing past beyond the trees. ‘Anyway, who’s to know who we are round here?’

‘That fat slob you were talking to, for one. It was that cop who ruined our lunch, wasn’t it?’

‘The same. Bad luck he should have been in the car park just then. Could have been worse, though. He could have seen the two of us together. You did well to hang back, Myfi.’

‘Is that meant to flatter me? Nye, the point of going to that dump was that nobody knew either of us there and we’d be able to relax for a change. Instead of which we end up doing a runner like a couple of petty crooks!’

‘Hey, we didn’t do a runner, I paid the bill, girl!’ he laughed. ‘Listen, there’s nothing to worry about. Just a precaution once I got a sniff there was some sort of op going on round the hotel. Anyway, the fat bastard’s just filling in time till he gets his pension, so forget him. Point is, we’ve still got a night in hand. I was thinking maybe head down into the Peak District? Should get in somewhere nice, Sunday evening, lot of weekenders will have checked out. And it’s on our way home, more or less.’

She was shaking her head emphatically.

‘I think we should head home now, Nye. We’ve got away with one close encounter. Let’s not push our luck.’

He didn’t argue. Myfanwy Baugh hadn’t got where she was without being able to signal when she’d made up her mind and wasn’t to be budged.

But he too had had to fight his way up the rocky promotion mountain, and he hadn’t got to the top without learning that the way to deal with immoveable obstacles was to push them in a new direction.

He opened the rear door of the X5.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘But get in. Let’s at least say goodbye properly.’

She said, ‘Here? You must be mad!’

But she wasn’t resisting as he put his arms round her thighs, lifted her up and laid her across the back seat, in the process forcing her short skirt up around her buttocks.

He said, ‘See you’re wearing my favourites, girl. You know what the red silk does to me. What were you thinking when you put them on, eh?’

‘For God’s sake get in and close the door,’ she said hoarsely. ‘And we’ll have to make it quick.’

He smiled as he pulled the door to behind him. He knew his Myfi. Once they got started, goodbye caution. She’d want it to last as long as he could make it last.

For a brief moment his mind went back to his meeting with Andy Dalziel. They were of an age and there had been a time when Dalziel was regarded as the sharpest knife in the box, the man with the starry future. But you never knew what time was going to do to a man. It had been a shock to see what he’d become-a grampus puffing around in a very small pond, a ready-to-be superannuated superintendent who let himself be bossed around by his pushy young DCI. What a contrast with his own continuing rise to the stellar heights! What pain it must have caused Dalziel to come across his contemporary in the car park of a posh hotel, stacking designer luggage into an expensive car, and looking at least a decade younger than the poor fat sod!

And if he could see me now, he thought triumphantly, still getting it on in the back seat with a sexually rampant woman, he’d probably have a heart attack!

Then the red silk panties slid down to Myfi’s ankles and Aneurin Glendower erased all thought of Andy Dalziel from his mind forever.

Or at least for a minute and a half.

For it can’t have been much longer than that before the rear door was pulled open and a polite but forceful cough halted him in mid-stroke with Myfanwy’s legs round his neck, one of her feet waving the red panties like a May Day banner.

He turned his head, not without difficulty-she was a strong woman-and managed to bring one angry eye to bear on the intruder.

He saw a uniformed constable standing to attention, his gaze firmly fixed somewhere above the car roof. Behind him alongside a police Range Rover stood another constable, his face bearing the emotionless unfocused look that can only be put there by a waxwork sculptor, or by the awareness that, if you let it relax for a millisec, you will collapse to the ground and roll around in fits of ungovernable laughter.

‘Chief Constable Glendower, sir?’ said the first constable in a broad Lancashire accent. ‘Sorry to bother you, sir, but there’s an urgent message from Detective Superintendent Dalziel of Mid-Yorkshire CID. He’d like for you to ring him. As soon as it’s at all convenient. I’ve got his number here. If you’ve got a pen handy. Sir.’

Behind him the other constable gave up, did a smart right turn and marched away, stuffing his fist into his mouth. Out of the gathering dusk came a noise like the hoarse barking of a hyena.

At last Glendower found his voice.

‘Shut…the…fucking…door!’ he said.

17.35-17.55

When Mrs Esmé Sheridan opened her door, the sight that met her eyes made her recoil in shock. But indignation triumphed over fear and, pausing only to select a walking stick from the elephant-foot umbrella stand in her hallway, she began to advance, crying, ‘You vile creature. Not content with making our pavements unsafe to walk along, you now dare to defile our very doorsteps! Go away or I shall summon the constabulary.’

‘Madam, I am the constabulary,’ boomed Andy Dalziel, holding his warrant card before him like a talisman. ‘I’ve been sent by the Chief Constable to thank you personally and explain to you exactly what’s going on.’

It took several more minutes to convince her that this wasn’t simply a cunning masquerade to gain admittance to her house and have his wicked way with her, and even when she finally allowed him in, she insisted on leaving the front door wide open.

‘Now the thing is this, Esmé…can I call you Esmé?’

‘No, you may not,’ she said emphatically. ‘I deplore this instant familiarity which is not the least of the evils America has infected us with.’

‘Sorry, luv…I mean, Mrs Sheridan. Like I were saying, this morning when you saw me I were on an op-that’s an operation…’

‘Yes, yes, I know what an op is. Just because I deplore many modern trends does not mean I am out of touch. I feel it is my duty to keep up with what transpires in the world about me, even if it means watching plays and films of dubious artistic merit and ambiguous moral import.’

Dalziel had noted the 42-inch HD plasma screen that struck a rather jarring note in the stolidly Victorian décor of the room. God knows what she’d been watching the previous night to stimulate her lively imagination into identifying him as a kerb-crawler at half past eight this morning!

‘Nay, that’s my point,’ said Dalziel. ‘Bright as a button, that’s how they described you after you called in at the nick…that’s the…well, tha’ll likely know what it is. And that’s why I’m here. This morning, like I say, I were undercover following a suspect and somehow or other they got behind me…’

‘As in Bullitt,’ she said. ‘Though, now I come to think of it, in that case it was the policeman being followed who managed to get behind the criminals.’

She looked at him dubiously as if her earlier fears were reasserting themselves, and he said quickly, ‘Aye, likely he were a lot sharper than me.’

Now she nodded as if this were a persuasive argument and said, ‘So because of your incompetence, the op went pear-shaped. You see I’m completely au fait with the argot, Superintendent. And now you are here to ask for my assistance, am I right?’

‘Aye, spot on. They were right. Bright as a button. Down the nick, as well as giving them a fair description of me and my car, you mentioned that I weren’t the only one to cause you concern in Holyclerk Street this morning, and I wondered if mebbe you could be as precise about some of the others.’

She said, ‘Well, you of course were the only one who actually accosted me…why did you accost me, by the way?’

‘Playing for time,’ replied Dalziel, ‘while I collected me thoughts. Sorry if I alarmed you. I were in disguise, of course, because of being under cover.’

She let out a little incredulous snort, then went on, ‘But there were two other cars behind you. The first was bright red, low slung, of oriental manufacture, I would say. The driver was a woman. Blonde but not tarty. Behind her was a dark blue Volkswagen Golf-my nephew Justin drives a similar vehicle. Also driven by a woman, though it may have been a man in drab…’

‘I think you mean drag,’ corrected Dalziel daringly.

‘Drag? Are you sure? Why should it be drag? Drab in its sense of slattern or whore has some kind of logical link. I think you may be misinformed there, Superintendent. Which would hardly surprise me. Where was I? Yes, the driver had a square, distinctly masculine cast of feature, but it was the passenger who caught my attention. He peered out at me through the open window and if ever I read the mind’s construction in a face, there was evil intent in those grotesque features.’

‘You’d know him again then?’

‘Oh yes. Just as I was instantly able to recognize you, Superintendent.’

Deciding it was neither timely nor useful to protest this comparison, Dalziel reached into his inner pocket and drew out the envelope into which he’d put the stills from the Keldale car-park video.

Mrs Sheridan glanced at the pictures and pointed straight away at one of them.

‘Yes, that’s him,’ she said. ‘No doubt about it.’

‘That’s grand, Mrs Sheridan,’ he said. ‘You’ve been a great help.’

With any other little old lady he might have expressed his delight by giving her a hug and a smacking kiss on the forehead, but in this case his courage failed him and he contented himself with an effusion of thanks and flattery as he headed for the door.

‘Pulled your irons out of the fire, have I?’ she said, not without complacency when he was safely over the threshold. ‘Good. Now I suggest you go home and remove the rest of your disguise before you spread any more despondency and alarm in the neighbourhood, Superintendent.’

The door closed firmly in his face.

They don’t make ’em like that any more, thought Dalziel as he returned to his car. More’s the pity!

He slid on to the driver’s seat. He was getting somewhere at last. He had a face and he had a name. He didn’t yet have any direct connection between their owner and his lass, Ivor, lying in hospital with her head cracked open, but if there were a connection he reckoned he knew half a dozen not very subtle ways of finding it.

He realized he was gripping the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles were white. Deep breath, Andy, he admonished himself. This could still be owt or nowt. Deep breath, then drive back sedately to the Keldale.

But first he’d better bring Pascoe up to speed as promised, else the lad might go into one of his strops.

He took out his phone, but before he could thumb in the number, it rang again.

For a moment he was tempted to hurl it out of the window.

The bloody things had their uses, but sometimes they got on his wick end!

He bellowed, ‘What?’ into it, listened, then said, ‘Mick, where the hell have you been? We got problems.’

17.40-17.55

Mick Purdy awoke with a start. The room was almost totally dark, but that meant nothing. In a job that turned night into day, the wise detective quickly learned to buy curtains that turned day into night.

He turned his head so he could see the digital read-out on his bedside alarm.

He’d been asleep for nearly two hours.

The deputy assistant commissioner who was his immediate boss had come into his office and found him slumped at his desk, his eyes open but clearly not focused on the file that lay open before him.

‘Mick, what the fuck are you trying to do? It’s been a very successful weekend and I don’t want it ruined by having my main man drop dead of exhaustion. You’ve done all that was asked of you, now it’s up to those plonkers at the CPS. You’re out of here, and that’s an order.’

It was nice to feel appreciated even if he’d hardly turned a page of the file since Gina had rung him.

His mind had chased round and round her account of her lunch with Dalziel. What was the fat bastard up to? All that stuff about dropping a water jug and getting lots of phone calls, what was that all about? Purdy knew what he’d have done in Dalziel’s shoes. Was he still the sharp knife he’d been when they met nine years ago or had time and his recent explosive experience blunted his edge? Drinking so much that he had to lie down suggested the latter. Back on the Bramshill course, he’d amazed everybody by the amount he could put away without the least visible reaction. Or maybe this present debility had been a ruse to get access to Gina’s room. Maybe as soon as she left him there alone, he’d been rifling through her stuff.

His attempts at analysis, as non-productive as the efforts of a hamster on a wheel, only added to his sense of exhaustion, and he was almost comatose when the AC had intervened.

He’d come home and fallen on to his bed. His two hours’ sleep felt like two minutes and he woke to find his mind still trapped on the hamster wheel.

He switched on a bedside lamp and checked his mobile, hoping to find Gina might have rung again.

There was a message, but not from her.

Andy Dalziel.

He listened.

‘Don’t care if you’re saving the fucking universe from aliens, ring me!’

Not a friendly chat then, not a simple progress report. One thing he was certain of was that the Fat Man didn’t do pointless hysteria. Something had happened. He tried Gina’s number without any expectation of a reply. When he got the answer service, he said, ‘Ring me. Please. Soon as you can.’

Then he accessed Dalziel’s message again, but he didn’t press the hash key to return the call. Between sensing and knowing disaster there’s a space where a man can linger, can even imagine he might be able to take a backward step and press the delete button.

He wished his head were clearer. He went to the bathroom and threw handfuls of cold water over his face. God, how great it must be to have a job that didn’t leave you constantly fatigued. It wasn’t just the bastards you were working against but the bastards you were working with that demanded your total concentration. Sleep and someone would fuck you! Practise and a steady supply of Provigil had minimized his rest needs and helped his nimble progress up the main-mast of promotion. With luck-and luck was what it came down to when you got within striking distance of the top-one day soon he might be able to haul himself into the secure crow’s nest of deputy assistant commissioner level.

But sometimes when the seas got rough and your fingers got cold, the deck below became a small round mouth seductively inviting you to fall.

Jesus! Where did that come from? he asked himself. It’s all them books Gina has cluttering up the place. You’ll be writing poetry next!

He’d managed to push Gina to the back of that space for a nanosecond, but here she was again. There was nowhere to escape to. He needed to know what was going on, and there was only one way to find out.

He went back into his messages, listened to Dalziel again, then pressed hash.

After a moment a familiar voice boomed, ‘What?’

‘Andy, it’s Mick.’

‘Mick, where the hell have you been? We’ve got problems.’

‘Problems? Has something happened to Gina?’

His voice on a rising scale.

‘Don’t get your knickers in a twist, lad,’ said Dalziel. ‘She’s checked out of her hotel, that’s all. When did you last talk to her, Mick?’

‘This afternoon. She said you’d crashed out on her bed. Jesus, Andy, I thought you were having lunch with her to get on the case, not to get pissed!’

‘I wasn’t pissed,’ retorted Dalziel defensively. ‘And I was on the case-and a funny fucking case it’s turning out to be. Let me tell you about it. I’d set one of my WDCs to watch us, and what she spotted was some sod bugging us.’

‘Bugging? You sure?’

‘Of course I’m bloody sure. You think I’m playing games? Just listen to what happened next and then tell me I’m playing games! When the bugger left, my girl went after him. An hour or so later, the pair of them were found in his flat, her with her head cracked open, him with half of his face blown off. In the meantime, Gina checked out of the hotel and took off.’

‘Oh Christ,’ said Purdy. Suddenly that space between guessing and knowing seemed very attractive. This was worse than his worst imaginings.

‘Mick, you still there?’

‘Yes,’ he said, trying to keep his voice controlled and professional. ‘Listen, have you put a call out on Gina?’

‘Now why should we do that, Mick? Presumably she’s on her way home.’

Purdy tried to sound casual, wasn’t sure if he succeeded.

‘I just thought you’d want to talk to her, in connection with this case of yours.’

‘The murder? You mean in case the dead man turns out to be Alex Wolfe? You want us to put out a call on her as a suspect?’

Is he taking the piss? thought Purdy.

‘Don’t be stupid. Of course it’s not Alex. I mean, why should it be?’

‘No reason. Oh, by the way, Mick. Does the name Delay mean owt to you? Brother and sister, Fleur and Vincent?’

There was a long pause necessary for him to make sure the panic he felt surging up his gut didn’t leak out through his larynx. Then he said, in a tone so controlled it was probably a bigger giveaway than panic, ‘Why do you ask? Are they up there?’

‘Aye, Been staying at the Keldale for a week now. So you do know them then?’

‘Know of them. There’s a Fleur Delay used to work for Goldie Gidman. Looked after his finances for years, both the stuff he let the taxman see and the stuff he didn’t. As he got bigger and went legit, Fleur dropped out of the picture. Spending more time with her family, to coin a phrase.’

‘Her family being this Vince?’

‘That’s right. Got a lot of form, but nothing recently to my knowledge. Listen, Andy, if they’re around, could just be coincidence, but I’d give them a pull. Keep them close. But you’ve probably got that organized anyway, haven’t you?’

He found he couldn’t-in fact no longer wanted to-keep the deep concern out of his voice.

‘Don’t worry, lad,’ said Dalziel. ‘We’ve got ’em in our sights.’

‘Good. And listen, Andy, do me a favour. Put out that call on Gina anyway. Please.’

‘OK, no need to get on your knees. I’ll make sure my lads are out there looking for her. If you make contact first, be sure to let me know, all right?’

‘Straight away. And you’ll get in touch with me, right?’

Of course I will. First on my list. OK, Mick, got to go now. Unless there’s anything else you want to tell me…?’

‘I don’t think so. Andy, thanks for putting me in the picture. I’ll not forget it.’

‘I’ll not let you. And I’ll try to keep you posted. But, Mick, remember this is official now, so at some point we may need to talk to you officially. You hear what I’m saying? Get your act together. Cheers.’

The line went dead.

Purdy switched off, hurled the phone on to his bed, and let out a sobbing, snarling cry that contained all the doubt, anger and fear that had been repressed during the conversation. It made him feel better, but not much.

He retrieved the phone and tried Gina’s number again. Still nothing. He brought up another name and looked at it for a while before cancelling.

Some things needed to be done face to face.

He went back into the bathroom, turned the shower on cold and stripped off. From the wall cabinet he took a small plastic bottle, shook a couple of Provigils into his hand, tossed them into his mouth then stepped under the jets, his head thrown back to let the icy water drive the tablets down his throat.

Until this lot got sorted, until he knew where Gina was and that she was safe, sleep wasn’t an option.

17.10-17.55

Edgar Wield was not a man who boasted about his skills, but he took a quiet pride in his ability to get the best out of a witness. Dalziel’s analysis of his success was typically direct.

‘The bugger’s got a head start, hasn’t he? Seeing yon face t’other side of the table is like being shown the torture kit in the Tower of London. It doesn’t half loosen the tongue!’

After viewing the documentation produced by the new arrival to prove that he was in fact Alun Gruffud Watkins of 39 Loudwater Villas, Wield had rung Pascoe then settled down to extract a detailed statement. The trouble was that, after learning what had happened in his apartment, Watkins’s tongue was not so much loosened as liberated. It was hard to get him to stop talking, which might not have been so bad if he hadn’t moved rapidly from offering answers to requiring them. His favourite, most frequently iterated question was, ‘Why will you not let me see the body?’ and he grew progressively more irritated each time Wield steered him away from the topic.

He was seated in the caravan, Wield facing him, his back to the window, which any fan of crime fiction knows is the approved interrogation set-up with the interrogator’s face in shadow and the light streaming into the interrogatee’s eyes.

It has the disadvantage that the latter can see out of the window while the former can’t. So it was that over the sergeant’s shoulder, Watkins saw an ambulance arrive and two paramedics enter the building, bearing a stretcher.

He stood up, saying, ‘I need a breath of air,’ went to the door, jumped down from the caravan, and then he was off and running towards the Villas.

Wield was fit and had the high muscular tone of a sprinter, but even moving at full speed he didn’t get the man in his sights till he burst through on to the second floor and saw him vanishing into his apartment behind the stretcher bearers.

Jennison was inside, holding the door open, so he couldn’t be blamed for not bringing Watkins to a halt. But once in the room, no human agency was needed.

The sight of the near faceless body lying on the floor stopped him in his tracks.

‘Oh Christ,’ he said. ‘Oh Christ.’

His legs were buckling and Wield and Jennison had to practically carry him back down the stairs and out into the open air, which he drew into his lungs in great rasping gulps.

A constable came hurrying from the caravan.

‘Sarge,’ he said, ‘there’s a TV crew turned up at the barrier.’

It was bound to happen sooner or later, thought Wield. Sooner, if Mrs Dutta had anything to do with it. Thank God he’d ordered the tape to be replaced by a metal barrier and removed Hector from duty. He’d have probably waved the TV van through!

But even from a distance their cameras would be nosing up close.

He said, ‘Let’s get you back into the caravan, sir. What you need is a cup of hot sweet tea. Give him a hand, lad.’

By the time Pascoe arrived a few minutes later, the Welshman was looking a lot better, but he hadn’t spoken another word. Wield had seen this kind of reaction before-imminence to tragedy triggering logorrhoea, sight of a bloody corpse producing lingual paralysis. But Wield’s skill at plucking relevant facts from a flood of verbiage meant he already had plenty of information to offer the DCI.

The two policemen stood outside the caravan. It had a door at the back as well as at the side, so they were able to descend unseen by the inquisitive media cameras. Sunset was over an hour away, but the day was clearly in decline. A light mist rising from the river turned the derelict mills on the far side into romantic ruins. The air still retained something of its earlier warmth but there was in it a hint of a chilly night to come.

Pascoe said, ‘Right, Wieldy, so now it looks like we’ve got ourselves a dead journalist. Let’s have the grisly detail.’

Wield said, ‘Like I told you, the guy in the caravan is this Alun Gruffud Watkins the Duttas told us about. Age twenty-three, he works as a rep for Infield-Centurion, the agricultural supplies company. The dead man, subject to forensic confirmation, seems likely to be Gareth Jones, nineteen, a reporter with the Mid-Wales Examiner. He has been staying with Mr Watkins since Friday last.’

He paused, seeing that Pascoe had a question. He knew what the question was going to be, but he also knew that, whether dealing with superiors or suspects, it generally paid to give the impression of genuine dialogue.

Pascoe said, ‘This Watkins, how’s he look?’

Not an enquiry after the man’s health but his status. Witness or suspect.

Wield said, ‘Mr Watkins has been working this weekend. He left on Friday lunchtime and has not been back since. I have the address of the farm he claims to have been visiting this afternoon. It’s just south of Darlington. I’ve got the locals taking a statement, but a telephone call has confirmed Mr Watkins’ story that he was there from two until four thirty, which takes him out of the frame.

‘He was here when Jones arrived on Friday morning. The young man’s old banger just made it and Watkins got a local garage to send someone round to check it. They took one look and said they would need to take it in, start work on it straight away and hopefully finish on Monday morning. Mr Watkins didn’t want to leave his friend without transport so he offered him the use of the Yamaha which he normally takes with him in the back of his van on his trips.’

‘So we’ve got Watkins out of the frame,’ said Pascoe. ‘And we know how Jones came to be riding his bike. But why, if his friend was coming for the weekend, did Watkins take off and leave him?’

‘Because Jones invited himself,’ said the sergeant. ‘He rang up mid-week to say he had to be in Mid-Yorkshire at the weekend and asked if he could doss down on Watkins’s floor. Watkins said he could do better than that, Jones was welcome to his bed as he was going to be away. I asked him if he knew why his friend was coming here. He said Jones indicated he was working on a story. No details and he didn’t press.’

Pascoe said sceptically, ‘Didn’t press? And him an old mate?’

Wield said, ‘Seems that Jones’s older brother, Gwyn, is an investigative reporter…’

He paused to see if this rang a bell.

Pascoe said, ‘Gwyn Jones, you mean, on the Daily Messenger?’

‘That’s the one,’ said Wield. ‘Mr Watkins knows the Jones family well, he’s from the same village, three years younger than Gwyn and the same older than Gareth. When Gwyn started in journalism, he was always quoting some famous reporter who said, Never tell your story till it’s ready to be told. That became Gareth’s motto too when he started following in big brother’s footsteps. So Watkins reckoned asking questions was pointless. Also, he was in a hurry.’

‘Does he work a lot at weekends then?’ asked Pascoe.

‘Business and pleasure, I gathered. Farming’s a seven-day job, so the farmers don’t mind. And I’d guess he’s got at least a couple of girlfriends scattered around the county that he likes to keep happy. He’s a bit of a chancer, I’d say. That so-called apartment’s pretty basic, and he’s got a camp bed in the back of his van. But when I was checking his laptop, I found he’d got templates for the letterheads and account invoices of good class hotels all over the North, plus several local garages. Looking at the expense claims he makes to Infield-Centurion could be instructive.’

‘Perhaps, but not to us. Not unless we need something to put a bit of pressure on the guy,’ said Pascoe. ‘Let’s concentrate on making sense of what we’ve got, which appears to be a young journalist come all the way from Wales to snoop around this woman, Gina Wolfe. Does that make sense to you?’

‘Mebbe. Snooping around’s what journalists do, isn’t it?’ said Wield.

‘I can’t see how there’s anything here to interest the readers of the Mid-Wales Examiner,’ retorted Pascoe.

‘What if he weren’t working for his local rag? What if he were doing a bit of moonlighting on brother Gwyn’s behalf?’ said Wield. ‘Something to do with the Gidmans, for instance? That would really get the Messenger’s sensors twitching.’

‘Maybe,’ said Pascoe thoughtfully. ‘I’ve got a feeling we need to tread carefully here, Wieldy.’

‘Not worried about treading on someone’s toes, are you?’ said the sergeant, regarding him doubtfully.

‘No, but I’m worried about being warned off anyone’s toes before I’ve had the chance to give them a good treading,’ grinned Pascoe. ‘Didn’t you say that when you started digging for info about Macavity, you felt things had been very carefully tidied up? From what I’ve read about him, this Goldie Gidman wields a lot of influence now. Any whiff of a scandal touching him, them buggers in London will be covering themselves like tarts in a raided brothel!’

Wield hid a smile. There were times when Pete sounded so like the Fat Man it was hard to tell the difference.

‘What?’ demanded Pascoe, eyeing him sharply.

This was another area where they’d grown together, thought the sergeant. Was a time when only Dalziel came close to being able to read his face, but now the DCI was starting to get the knack.

As he opened his mouth to prevaricate, the caravan door burst open and DC Bowler jumped down the steps, his face split by a huge smile.

‘Just had a bulletin from the hospital, sir. Seems Shirley’s woken up and they say she knows who she is and where she is and everything. Probably too woozy to answer questions before tomorrow, but she’s definitely off the critical list. She’s going to be all right, sir!’

It was good to see his pleasure. Bowler and Novello were fierce rivals in their work, each determined to be the leader in the race for advancement. But when it came to mutual support and comfort in times of trouble, neither had ever been found wanting.

‘Great news, Hat,’ said Pascoe. ‘Spread it around, will you.’

‘The Super will be mighty relieved to hear that,’ said Wield after the DC had gone back into the caravan.

‘Yes. I must remember to tell him,’ said Pascoe, but not in a tone which suggested putting the Fat Man out of his misery was a high priority.

Oh dear, thought the sergeant. He’s really got it in for Andy at the moment. OK, so the fat sod has it coming to him, but the sooner these two get themselves sorted, the better it will be for all of us.

As he mused on how he might contribute to establishing peace in our time, Pascoe’s phone rang.

‘Talk of the devil,’ he said, glancing at it. ‘Hi, Andy. How’s it going?’

Friendly informal, or familiar impertinent? wondered Wield.

Then he saw Pascoe’s expression change as he listened, and he knew it didn’t matter which.

‘No, Andy, for God’s sake, wait for me to…Andy? Andy!’

He took the phone from his ear and said, ‘The bastard’s rung off.’

‘What did he say?’ demanded Wield.

‘He said he thinks he knows who killed Jones and attacked Novello, and the guy’s staying at the Keldale, and he’s on his way there now. He rang off before I could tell him to stay put till I whistled up an Armed Response Unit. You know what that means, Wieldy!’

‘He’s being John Wayne again,’ said the sergeant. ‘I’ll organize the ARU and look after things here. You’ll want to get back to the Keldale quick as you can, Pete.’

Sometimes you didn’t have the time to wait and let them speak for themselves.

‘Right, Wieldy. Thanks. I’ll keep you posted.’

He headed off towards his car, trying not to look in too much of a hurry in case that aroused the watching journalists’ interest.

‘Hey, Pete, don’t forget to tell him Novello’s on the mend,’ Wield called after him.

Over his shoulder Pascoe rasped, ‘I’ll do better than that, Wieldy. I’ll maybe put him in the next bed so he can find out for himself.’

17.00-18.00

Maggie Pinchbeck sat in her flat, which in total occupied about the same space as Beanie Sample’s bedroom, and downloaded Gwyn Jones’s folder on Goldie Gidman. The greater part of it consisted of confidential police intelligence reports. It occurred to her that you’d probably get a longer sentence for having this stuff on your computer than you would for downloading child pornography.

She had her own file on Gidman, compiled when putting in her application for the post of Dave’s PA. She had confronted the man himself and been impressed by the way he answered her questions. Subsequently she had found much to admire in him and she’d become really fond of his wife, Flo. Personal feelings apart, she knew that, when he became a donor, the Millbank mandarins would have sent in their most experienced investigators to run their beady eyes over him. They would probably have seen everything in Gwyn Jones’s Gidman file and found nothing that came close to usable evidence of wrong-doing.

Nor did Maggie.

Yet underpinning everything in the folder was the unswerving certainty on the part of at least one policeman, Owen Mathias, that Goldie Gidman was a villain. Operation Macavity had been Mathias’s last throw of the dice before Gidman moved lock stock and barrel away from his shadowy beginnings into the sunlit uplands of the commercial Establishment.

And Macavity failed. Either because there was nothing to find, or because someone had been keeping Goldie two steps ahead of the investigation.

Mathias, naturally, had gone for the latter option. Internal Investigations had looked for the man most likely and picked on DI Alex Wolfe, although there did not seem to have been a scrap of real evidence against the man. Even his disappearance was less suggestive than it might have been when you considered the tragic circumstances of his family life.

She Googled Mathias. He had retired from the Met a year after the failure of Macavity. Perhaps that had contributed to his going. Or it might have been ill health as he died just a year later.

She guessed that he had been the source of all these confidential files in Jones’s folder. And from him also she presumed Jones had inherited his strong antipathy towards the Gidmans, père et fils.

Not that it mattered why Jones was so obsessed. What mattered was where his investigation was going to lead.

She started reading again, this time selectively, making notes.

What she ended up with was just one name to put alongside that of Alex Wolfe.

Mick Purdy.

Purdy’s name occurred only three times.

Thirty-odd years ago DC Purdy, no initial, had taken a witness statement-or rather an alleged witness statement, as the alleged witness denied having seen anything.

Forward a couple of decades and it’s DCI Purdy now answering the questions from Internal Investigations and giving DI Alex Wolfe a glowing testimonial.

Jump to the present and Commander Mick Purdy is in a close relationship with Gina Wolfe, wife or, as she probably imagined until recently, widow of Alex Wolfe, tragic father and/or bent copper, who vanished without trace seven years back.

Did it mean anything? She knew from study and observation that many of the great political scandals arose because someone got spooked into believing that something meant something it didn’t. And by the time the error was realized, it was too late, the hounds were loose, and they were not going to let themselves be whipped back into their kennel before they’d torn something to pieces.

Another chance to quiz Goldie might be helpful, but she could hardly ring him up and demand an interview.

She sipped on a can of orange juice and nibbled at a wedge of cheddar. It seemed a long time since she’d had a real meal. Coffee and a stale muffin for breakfast had been supplemented by a snatched half-sandwich at the Centre opening. She thought of ordering in a pizza. Then her phone rang.

It was Dave Gidman.

‘Maggie, that stuff you said we should do tonight. Is it urgent?’

‘Pretty urgent. Why?’

‘Thing is, I’m not at home. I’m at Windrush House. Thought I’d probably spend the night here, make an early start in the morning. That way I can really explore Pappy’s disgustingly expensive cellar. And I don’t have to worry that my shower is suddenly going to freeze my bollocks off. You’re sure the Chuckle Brothers are coming to fix it in the morning?’

‘Yes, they’ll be there, don’t worry,’ said Maggie. ‘I can come up to Windrush now, if you like. Best we get things done before you start popping corks.’

‘If you’re sure it won’t keep,’ said Dave, without a great deal of enthusiasm.

‘Unlike Goldie’s wine, it certainly won’t improve with keeping,’ said Maggie. ‘I’ll be there about half six.’

She sat still for a moment after the call. Her earlier feeling that she was on some kind of lucky roll had evaporated. Or rather it had changed into a sense of being pushed towards some place she might not want to be. First the lying call from Jones just before she spoke to Beanie on the Shah-Boat. Then the email from Gem Huntley stoking up the Bitch’s resentment again and giving her access to the Goldie folder.

And now, just when she’d been thinking another chat with Goldie Gidman would be useful to clear things up, Dave had given her the chance to revisit Windrush House.

Perhaps the wise move would be to delete the computer folder, ring Dave and say the morning would do after all, and settle down to a night with the telly.

Except she had a job to do, and she’d decided a long time ago that doing your chosen job was the only thing that made sense out of life.

Correction.

The only thing that might for some portion of three score years and ten delude you into thinking life made any sense at all.