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never really come back. He was going to prove them wrong, wasn’t he? He was going to delight his friends, scatter his enemies, and leave all the dismal doubters with enough egg on their faces to make a Spanish omelette.
    He’d been vaguely aware of a continuo of faint religious murmuring beneath his thoughts, but now it stopped and was replaced by the sound of footsteps as the worshippers, unburdened of their sins, tripped lightly back down the long aisle. Service must be over already. Mebbe in this age of Fast Food and Speed Dating, the Church had brought in Quick Confession and Accelerated Absolution.
    More likely, his thought processes had just slowed to a crawl.
    The footsteps receded, finally there was silence, and then the organ started playing. He wasn’t a great fan of organ music, something a little ponderous about it, something too diffused to cut to the emotional heart of a good tune. But here in the great cathedral, whose dim and vast prismoids of space felt as if they might have been imported from beyond the stars, it was easy to think of it as the voice of God.
    He straightened up and the voice spoke.
    ‘Mr Dalziel?’
    He rolled his eyes upward. What was it going to be — the blinding light, or just a shower of dove crap?
    ‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ said the voice of God. ‘I’m Gina Wolfe.’
    That God should be female didn’t surprise him. That she, or She, should be called Gina did.
    He turned his head to the right and found himself looking at the blonde from the red Nissan. Would God drive Japanese? He didn’t think so. This was flesh and blood, and very nice flesh and blood at that.
    ‘Gina Wolfe?’ she repeated with a faintly interrogative inflexion, as if anticipating the name would mean something to him.
    To the best of his recollection, he’d never seen her before in his life.
    On the other hand, a man whose recollection could dump whole days on a whim couldn’t be too dogmatic. Best to box clever till he worked out the circumstances and degree of their acquaintance.
    ‘Nice to see you again, Gina Wolfe,’ he said, thinking by the use of the whole name to cover all possible gradations of intimacy.
    Her expression told him he’d failed before she said, ‘Oh dear. You’ve no idea who I am, have you? I’m sorry. Mick Purdy said he was going to ring you…’
    ‘Mick?’ With relief he found a context for this name. ‘Oh aye,
Mick
! He did ring, just afore I came out this morning, left a message. I were in a bit of a hurry.’
    ‘I noticed. I really had to put my foot down to keep up with you. Look, I’m sorry to interrupt your devotions. If you like, I can wait for you outside.’
    Dalziel was pleased to feel his mind clicking back into gear, not top maybe but a good third, which was enough to extrapolate two slightly disturbing pieces of information from what she’d just said.
    The first was, she’d been following him.
    The second, and more worrying, was she thought he’d been in a hurry to get to the cathedral to pray. Couldn’t have her telling Mick Purdy that. Important operational information could vanish without trace in the mazy communications network that allegedly linked the regional police forces. But news that Andy Dalziel had got religion would be disseminated with the speed of light.
    He said, ‘Nay, I weren’t devoting, luv. Just like to come here and listen to the music sometimes.’
    ‘Oh, I see,’ she said, rather doubtfully. ‘It’s Bach, isn’t it? “The Art of the Fugue”.’
    ‘Spot on,’ he said heartily. ‘Can’t get enough of them fugues, me.’
    A cop could survive worse things than a taste for the baroque. There was that hard bastard down in the Midlands who collected beetles and nobody messed with him. But get a reputation for religion and you were marked down as bonkers. Even Tony Blair knew that, though in his case mebbe he really was bonkers!
    ‘Right, luv,’ he went on. ‘Grab a pew, I mean a chair, not many pews left these