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.