Had he simply made it up then? He tried to project himself back a day, found clear-cut details hard to come by. Instead, cloudy images of sitting around, doing nothing, going nowhere floated across his mind.

That felt like Sunday all right, but a Sunday from extremely auld lang syne, the sort of Sunday he’d sometimes experienced on childhood holidays with his Scottish cousins. They’d been really happy days, most of them. His dad’s family knew how to treat kids-feed them jam pieces and mutton pies till they come out of their ears, then turn them loose to roam at will, confident that they’ll find their way home for the next meal. But it all stopped on Sundays. Here the will of Granny Dalziel ruled supreme. Here the bairns were expected to keep the Sabbath as she had kept it back in the mists of time. Faces scrubbed, hair slicked, bound in the strait jacket of best clothes, they were marched to the kirk in the morning and sat around with an improving book, seen and definitely not heard, for the rest of the endless day.

And that had been his Sunday…no, that had been his Saturday, his yesterday! Or something like it.

But why? He needed to dig deeper, go back further.

He’d returned to work a week earlier, at his own insistence and against medical and domestic advice. But he’d insisted angrily that he felt fine and was more than ready to pick up the traces where he’d dropped them over three months ago.

He hadn’t been lying. Trouble was, the traces weren’t there any more.

If anywhere, they were in Peter Pascoe’s hands, and it had taken him a couple of days to realize the DCI’s reluctance to hand them over immediately was as much protective as presumptuous.

Things had changed, both externally and internally. There might have been a sharp intake of breath across Mid-Yorkshire when he was admitted comatose to hospital, but it clearly hadn’t been held for long. The old truism was true. Life went on. Criminal life certainly did, and nature abhors a vacuum.