‘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 days. Then you can tell me what it is Mick would have told me if I’d answered my phone.’

She sat by his side. Though not quite recovered to his full fighting weight, his flesh still overspread the limits of the chair and he could feel the warmth of her thigh against his. She was wearing a perfume that would probably have got her burned during the Reformation.