'That's my Maudie. A rare orchid, Andy. She'll need looking out for if anything ever happens to me. You'll do that for me, won't you, lad? Do I have your word on that?' Dalziel had given his word gladly, but in the event, when Tallantire died of a heart attack shortly before he was due to retire, Maudie proved quite capable of looking out for herself. Within a year she'd moved back to her native Skipton and quickly gathered up the threads of her young life, broken when she'd moved from West to Mid-Yorkshire all those years ago.

Dalziel visited regularly for a while, then intermittently, and in recent years hardly at all. But when he saw the Kohler press conference on the telly, he knew the time had come for another visit.

He'd been going to suggest that Maudie might like to think about staying with friends for a couple of days just in case the Press came prying, but he wasn't a man to waste breath. Instead he ran his video back a little way, restarted it, and pressed the freeze button when he reached the shot of the corridor through the open door. 'That fellow there remind you of anyone, Maudie?' 'The tall one?' she said looking at the two men touched by his broad forefinger. 'He's a bit like Raymond Massey.' 'No. Someone you know. And I mean the other one. I know who the tall fellow is. Chap called Sempernel. He came sniffing around at the time. Said he were Home Office but he were a funny bugger, no question. You'd not have seen him. But the other one, the skinny runt, remind you of anyone? And don't say Mickey Rooney, luv!'

'He doesn't look a bit like Mickey Rooney,' said the woman, examining the man closely. 'He doesn't really look like anybody, but he does look familiar.' 'Remember a sergeant called Hiller? Adolf, we used to call him? Wally didn't care for him and got shut of him.' 'Vaguely,' she said.