And so the long hours had dragged by. Granny Dalziel would have been outraged by his dress and his demeanour, but her strict sabbatarianism could not have faulted his state of mind. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.

And there was the explanation. This morning his mind, recalling the previous day as a long, vacuous, will-to-live-sapping Scots Sabbath and unwilling to thole the notion of enduring such another, had decided it had to be Monday.

Simple. Dead logical, really. Nowt to worry about there.

Except that things like that didn’t happen to him. To other men maybe. There were a lot of weak, woolly, wobbly, wanked-out losers in the world, their minds in such a whirl they didn’t know their arses from their elbows. But not Andy Dalziel. It had taken half a ton of Semtex to put him on his back and he’d risen up again, shaken himself down, and returned to the fray, a bit bruised and battered and mud-bespattered, but ready and able to play out the rest of the game till the ref called no side!

At least he hadn’t made it to the Station this morning. He shuddered to think what his colleagues would have made of the mighty Dalziel turning up for Monday’s meeting twenty-four hours early! They never come back, that’s what popular wisdom said about champion boxers. They try, they sometimes flatter to deceive, but they 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.