Even at school Tracy had already suspected that she would make no one a good wife. Couldn’t sew a straight seam, couldn’t even cook a simple macaroni cheese or do hospital corners. She had a knock-out right jab though. Something that she’d discovered one hectic Saturday night of catfights and drunken brawls when a leery pair of young blokes nearly had her cornered on Boar Lane. Did her reputation as a copper a bit of good but hadn’t exactly enhanced her status as a woman. (‘Built like a brick shit-house, that Tracy Waterhouse.’)

When they eventually returned after knocking on doors everyone had gone and been replaced by Barry, a lone uniform, guarding the broken door of the flat.

‘I was told not to let anyone in,’ he said officiously. ‘Sorry.’

‘Fuck off, you big nit,’ Arkwright said, pushing past him. ‘I left my cigarettes in there.’ Tracy laughed.

‘Can you tell me what happened here?’

‘Eh?’ Arkwright said.

‘Marilyn Nettles, Yorkshire Post crime reporter.’ She flashed a card with her credentials on it. They were standing outside the entrance to the Lovell Park flats, in the cold, freezing their socks off, while Arkwright lit up. ‘Colder than a witch’s tit,’ Arkwright said. Tracy caught sight of Linda Pallister’s bike, leaning against a fence. She had travelled in the ambulance with the kiddy. It seemed unlikely that the bike would still be here when she returned for it. There was a kiddy seat on the back of it.

Tracy remembered Marilyn Nettles from somewhere but couldn’t place her until Arkwright said later, ‘She infiltrated Dick Hardwick’s leaving do.’

‘Infiltrated?’ Tracy said. ‘You mean she was in the same pub at the same time?’

‘As I said, infiltrated. She’s a nosy cow.’

‘Aren’t we all?’

Skinny, mid-thirties, dyed black hair left over from the previous decade, cut in a bob so sharp that it looked as if it would cut you if you got too close to her. She had a beaky nose that gave her a hungry look. She was the kind who would trample over the bodies of the fallen to get to the story.

‘’Fraid I can’t comment on what happened here,’ Arkwright said to her. ‘Ongoing investigation. I expect there’ll be a press conference, pet.’

Marilyn Nettles shrank from the word ‘pet’. Tracy could see her wanting to say, ‘Don’t use condescending sexist language with me, you great big ignorant police oaf,’ and having to bite down on it and say instead, ‘Neighbours are saying it was a woman called Carol Braithwaite?’

‘Couldn’t comment on that.’

‘I believe she was a known prostitute.’

‘Wouldn’t know about that either, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh come on, Constable, can’t you give me a little something?’

Marilyn Nettles did something funny with her mouth, followed up by something funny with her eyes. It took Tracy a second or two to realize that she was trying to flirt with Arkwright. She was deluded. It was like trying to flirt with a wardrobe.

‘Have you got something in your eye?’Tracy asked her innocently.

Marilyn Nettles ignored Tracy, strangely fixated on Arkwright. ‘Help a poor girl out,’ she said. She pinched her thumb and forefinger together. ‘Feed me just a little titbit? Give me something?’

With laboured slowness Arkwright delved into a pocket in his uniform and retrieved a ten-pence piece. It was over four years since Britain had gone decimal but Arkwright still referred to ‘the new money’.

‘Here, lass,’ he said to Marilyn Nettles, handing over the coin. ‘Go buy yourself a bag of chips. You need fattening up.’

She turned on her heel and stalked off in disgust towards a red Vauxhall Victor.

‘Wouldn’t like to have to get into bed with her,’ Arkwright said. ‘It would be like cuddling up to a skeleton.’ He looked at the rejected coin and spun it high in the air. He caught it on the way down and slapped it on the back of his hand.

‘Heads or tails?’ he said to Tracy.

‘You all right, lass?’ Arkwright said, draining his bitter and looking around as if he was expecting another one to materialize from nowhere.

‘Yeah,’ Tracy said.

‘Another one?’

Tracy sighed. ‘No, I’ll be off. My mum’s making her lamb hotpot.’

At least he had learned his lesson, he was not going to be the foolish prey of boredom tonight. Instead he ordered something innocuous sounding on room service, no alcohol to accompany it, and when the food arrived he stretched out on the bed with his plate and picked up the remote.

Collier. Of course. Jackson sighed. Just when you thought it was safe to switch on the TV.

Collier was a rugged but occasionally sensitive detective inspector who worked in both a gritty northern town (‘Bradthorpe’) and a green farming dale (‘Hardale’). He frequently kicked against the traces of authority in the search for the truth and was invariably vindicated at the end. He was a maverick but (as someone said at least once in the course of every programme) ‘a brilliant detective’. He was unreliable towards women but they were, nonetheless, continually charmed by him. In his own experience, Jackson had found the exact opposite to be true, the more unreliable he was (usually from no fault of his own, he would just like to point out) the less impressed women were with him.

Julia, of all people, Julia, who had ‘given up acting to concentrate on being a mother and a wife’ (a declaration that no one, particularly not Jackson, believed), had recently been cast in Collier. Jackson had presumed she would be a corpse, or, at best, a bit-part barmaid, but it turned out that she was playing a forensic pathologist. (‘A forensic pathologist?’ He had been unable to disguise the disbelief in his voice.

‘Yes, Jackson,’ she said, with exaggerated forbearance. ‘I don’t actually have to have a medical degree or conduct post-mortems. It’s called acting.’

‘Even so . . .’ Jackson murmured.)

DS Charlie Lambert, an actress called Saskia Bligh, was Vince Collier’s glamorous (tough but fair, sexy but professional) sidekick. She argued, bullied, cajoled, sprinted and karate-kicked her way through the episode. She was a thin blonde with big, slightly weepy eyes and cheekbones that you could have hung washing on (as his mother would have said). Not Jackson’s type. (He had a type? What? The woman from last night? Surely not.) Saskia Bligh looked as if she bruised easily. Jackson liked his women to be robust.

Collier and Lambert. There were just the two of them, Morse and Lewis, Holmes and Watson, a double-handed duo that could solve every murder in the district with only a smidgeon of background help from semi-anonymous techies and uniforms. Jackson would like to see the pair of them work a case in the real world. Julia, in the shape of her character, existed to provide ‘a foil for their relationship’. ‘It’s not about crime, you have to understand,’ Julia said. ‘It’s about them as people.’

‘They’re not real,’ Jackson pointed out.

‘I know that. Art renders reality.’

‘Art?’ Jackson repeated incredulously. ‘You call Collier “art”? I thought rendering was what you did to dripping.’

‘You know what I mean.’

Julia was replacing a previous pathologist, a man. The actor playing him had been caught with child pornography on his computer and had been quietly transformed into a nonce in a prison somewhere. Ironic justice, a form of jurisprudence that Jackson felt a particular fondness for. Cosmic justice was all well and good but generally its wheels took longer to grind.

Vince Collier had recently acquired a mother from nowhere (caring but nagging, sensible but anxious). One of those old actresses who had been around for ever. (‘To humanize him,’ Julia explained.) Jackson didn’t think having a mother ‘humanized’ (whatever that meant) anyone. Everyone had a mother – murderers, rapists, Hitler, Pol Pot, Margaret Thatcher. (‘Well, fiction’s stranger than truth,’ Julia said.)