LITMIR.BIZ

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But there was no sign, and in any case Tig’s nose pointed south towards the centre of town. As she followed his fixed gaze she saw a long way away a faint smudge of smoke soiling the perfect blue of the summer sky.

      Who would light a fire on a day like this?

      Tig was still barking.

      ‘Can’t you make him shut up?’ snapped Ellie.

      Her daughter looked at her in surprise, then took a biscuit off a plate and threw it across the lawn. Tig gave a farewell yap, then went in search of his reward with the complacent mien of one who has done his duty.

      Ellie felt guilty at snapping. Her irritation wasn’t with the dog, there was some other cause less definable.

      She rolled out of the hammock and said, ‘I’m too hot. Think I’ll cool down in the shower. You OK by yourself?’

      Rosie gave her a look which said without words that she hadn’t been much company anyway, so what was going to be different?

      Ellie went inside, turned on the shower and stepped under it.

      The cool water washed away her sweat but did nothing for her sense of unease.

      Still nothing definable. Or nothing that she wanted to define. Pointless thinking about it. Pointless because, if she did think about it, she might come up with the silly conclusion that the real reason she was taking this shower was that she didn’t want to be wearing her bikini if bad news came…

      Andy Dalziel’s partner, Amanda Marvell, known to her friends as Cap, was even further away when Mill Street blew up.

      With her man on duty, she had followed the crowds on the traditional migration to the coast, not, however, to join the mass bake-in on a crowded beach but to visit the sick.

      The sick in this instance took the form of her old headmistress, Dame Kitty Bagnold who for nearly forty years had ruled the famous St Dorothy’s Academy for Catholic Girls near Bakewell in Derbyshire. Cap Marvell had ultimately made life choices which ran counter to everything St Dot’s stood for. In particular, she had abandoned her religion, divorced her husband, and got herself involved in various animal rights groups whose activities teetered on the edge of legality.

      Yet throughout all this, she and Dame Kitty had remained in touch and eventually, rather to their surprise, realized they were friends. Not that the friendship made Cap feel able to address her old head by her St Dot’s sobriquet of Kitbag, and Dame Kitty would rather have blasphemed than call her ex-pupil anything but Amanda.

      A long and very active retirement had ground Dame Kitty down till ill health had finally obliged her to admit the inevitable, and two years earlier she had moved into a private nursing home that was part of the Avalon Clinic complex at Sandy-town on the Yorkshire coast.

      At her best, Dame Kitty was as bright and sharp as ever, but she tired easily and usually Cap was alert for the first signs of fatigue so that she could start ending her visit without making her friend’s condition the cause.

      This time it was the older woman who said, ‘Is everything all right, Amanda?’

      ‘What?’

      ‘You seemed to drift off. Perhaps you should sit in this absurd wheelchair while I go inside and order some more tea.’

      ‘No, no, I’m fine. Sorry. What were we saying…?’

      ‘We were discussing the merits of the govern-ment’s somewhat inchoate education policy, an argument I hoped your sudden silence indicated I had won. But I fear my victory owes more to your distraction than my reasoning. Are you sure all is well with you? No problems with this police officer of yours, whom I hope one day to meet?’

      ‘No, things are fine there, really…’

      Suddenly Cap Marvell took her mobile out.

      ‘Sorry, do you mind?’

      She was speed-dialling before Kitty could answer.

      The phone rang twice then there was an invitation to leave a message.

      She opened her mouth to speak, closed it, disconnected, and stood up.

      ‘I’m sorry, Kitty, I’ve got to go. Before the mobs start moving off the beaches…’

      This effort to offer a rational explanation produced the same sad sigh and slight upward roll of the eyes brought by feeble excuses for bad behaviour in their St Dot days.

      ‘OK, that’s not it. Sorry, I don’t know why,’ said Cap. ‘But I’ve really got to go.’

      ‘Then go, my dear. And God go with you.’

      Normally this traditional valediction would have won from Cap her equivalent of the old headmistress’s long-suffering expression, but today she just nodded, stooped to kiss her friend’s cheek, then hurried away across the lawn towards the car park.

      Dame Kitty watched her out of sight. There was trouble there. Despite the bright sun and the cloudless sky, she felt it in the air.

      She stood up out of the wheelchair which the staff insisted she should use on her excursions into the gardens, gave it a whack with her stick, and began to make her slow way back to the house.

       4 dust and ashes

      Later Peter Pascoe worked out that Dalziel had probably saved his life twice.

      The Fat Man’s car which they’d been sheltering behind was flipped into the air then deposited upside down on the pavement.

      If he hadn’t obeyed the Fat Man’s command to follow, he would have been underneath it.

      And if he hadn’t been walking in the lee of that corpulent frame when the explosion occurred…

      As it was, when some slight degree of awareness began to seep back into his brain, he felt as if every part of his body had been subjected to a good kicking. He tried to stand up but found the best he could manage was all fours.

      The air was full of dust and smoke. Like a retriever peering through the mist in search of its master’s bird, he strained to penetrate the swirling veil of motes and vapour. An amorphous area of orangey red with some consistency of base gave him the beginnings of perspective. Against it, marked by its stillness in the moving air, he made out a vague heap of something, like a pile of earth thrown up alongside a grave.

      He began to crawl forward and after a couple of yards managed to rise off his hands into a semiupright crouch. The shifting coiling colour he realized now was fire. He could feel its heat, completely unlike the gentle warmth of the sun which only an hour ago he’d been enjoying in the green seclusion of his garden. That small part of his mind still in touch with normality suggested that he ought to ring Ellie and tell her he was all right before some garbled version of events got on to local radio.

      Not that he was sure how all right he was. But a lot all righter than this still heap of something which he was now close enough to formally identify as Andy Dalziel.

      He had fallen on to his left side and his arms and legs were spread and bent like the kapok stuffed limbs of some huge teddy bear discarded by a spoilt child. His face had been shredded by shards of glass and brick, and the fine grey dust sticking to the seeping wounds made him look as if he were wearing a kabuki mask.

      There was no sign of life. But not for a second did Pascoe admit the possibility of death. Dalziel was indestructible. Dalziel is, and was, and for ever shall be, world without end, amen. Everybody knew that. Therein lay half his power. Chief constables might come and chief constables might go, but Fat Andy went on for ever.

      He rolled him over on to his back. It wasn’t easy but he did it. He brushed the dust away from his mouth and nose. He definitely wasn’t breathing. He checked the carotid pulse, thought he detected a flutter, but a combination of his dull fingers and Dalziel’s monolithic

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