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Rodge.’
    ‘OK. Now we come up-to-date. Two weeks ago, October 7, a blue Volkswagen GTi was stolen from a house in Leeds. Like the first MG, the house was broken into and the keys taken. Three evenings later a similar car, but coloured black, was hijacked from a 25-year-old man outside Marsden station. The blue car was the one involved in the RTA, Thursday morning. Saturday morning the black one was found burnt-out on the edge of Heckley park.’
    ‘They’re stealing them to order,’ someone suggested.
    ‘In pairs – his and hers,’ another added.
    ‘The MGs were probably re-plated and passed on, so why did they torch the Golf?’
    ‘Because of the accident? Maybe they thought it was too hot.’
    ‘Was he running away from anything?’
    ‘Nothing we know about,’ I replied. ‘It’d been a quiet night.’
    It was all conjecture. I told them about Dale, the money and the gun, and asked Maggie Maddison to do the honours at the mortuary with the grieving mother. ‘I don t think you’ll need the box of tissues,’ I told her when she gave me that why me ? look. ‘She actually used the words “good riddance”.’
    ‘Rodge wants to stay on this,’ I said, ‘so we need a new night ’tec. Can I have a volunteer, please?’
    The first person whose eyes I caught nodded and said: ‘I could do with a rest.’
    ‘Thanks. Maggie and John, could you work with Rodge? I’d concentrate on Dobson’s background, associates, etcetera . You know the score. Then maybe try to trace his route while things are fresh in people’s minds. People may have heard the car, or cars, go by.’
     
    The route was easier to trace than expected. There are early risers, there are insomniacs and there are people who drag themselves reluctandy out of their pit, morning after morning, year after year, to travelto some tedious job that they hate. For all of them, a car careering by at over a hundred miles per hour was a break with routine and therefore memorable. Rodger, Maggie and John worked backwards from the scene of the accident. At each junction they would take a road each and knock on doors. One of them would soon strike gold, and off they would go to the next junction. Slowly, they found themselves working their way over the tops into the outskirts of Greater Manchester. On Tuesday an appeal was made on local radio and more sightings and hearings came in. Dozens of them. By Wednesday we had the route of Dobson’s last journey, with a few gaps, marked on a map on the office wall.
    There’d been two cars, and they’d gone round in a big circle, starting and finishing at Heckley, except that Dobson didn’t quite make it all the way. They’d driven south, skirting Huddersfield and Holmfirth, then headed over Saddleworth Moor into Lancashire. We lost them in one or two places but the return journey brought them back over the tops on the Oldfield Road. Maggie took me round and it measured 45 miles.
    On the way we stopped at the crash scene to look at the flowers: spray after spray in their cellophane wrappings, stretching along the verge for fifteen yards. I don’t know if it was hay fever or the sandwich I’d had in the canteen, but I felt unwell. Itmust have been hay fever, psychosomatic perhaps, brought on by the sight of all those blooms for a man whose mother had said good riddance to. When it was my turn to shrug off this mortal coil the force would chip together to send a wreath, and that would be it. If I’d lived a while after retirement, and memories had faded, pensions branch would remind them about me.
    ‘Someone loved him,’ Maggie said, reading one of the dedications.
    ‘It looks like it,’ I replied, adding: ‘Soon as you get chance come back up and collect all the cards.’
    In the car I said: ‘So you’ve decided they were racing.’
    ‘It looks like it,’ Maggie replied. ‘Two identical cars, going nowhere, and the same thing a month ago. Early in the morning when the roads are at their quietest. The