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.