'I'd like to talk with him,' said Backhouse cautiously.

‘I bet!! Anyway, what you're saying is you want Pascoe to help pin this on his mate? You're asking a bit much, aren't you?'

'It was his friends who died,' said Backhouse quietly.

'Well, he's a good lad. Is he there? I'd better have a word.'

What kind of grudging condolence did he propose? wondered Backhouse.

'He's with Miss Soper at the moment. She is badly shocked.'

'Later then. But I want him Monday. Right? I'll look for you on the telly!'

Bloody old woman, thought Dalziel as he replaced the receiver. He scratched the back of his left calf methodically from top to bottom, but derived no relief. The itches you scratch are internal, someone senior enough to dare had once told him. He looked with distaste at the mound of files on his desk. Suddenly they seemed trivial. Stupid twats who spent good money on pretty ornaments, then didn't take the trouble to look after them properly. Somewhere in that lot there was a pattern, a flawed system. There was always a flaw. A man lay at the bottom of that pile and they'd find him in the end. But today, this moment, it seemed trivial.

It was a rare feeling for him. He wasn't a man who took his work lightly. But now he stood up and went in search of someone to drink a cup of tea with and talk about football or politics.

The enormity of what had happened had not struck Ellie for some time after her return to the cottage. She had not gone into the building but made her way along the side of the white-washed garage into the garden. At the bottom of the dew-damp lawn, audible though not visible, ran a stream in a deep cutting, shaded by alders and sallows. The murmuring water, the morning-fresh garden unheated yet by the lemon sunlight, the flight of a white-browed blackbird from a richly laden apple-tree, all helped to make unreal the tableau formed by the man on his knees by the dead woman at the foot of the sundial. Only the gnomon of the dial, cutting the fragrant air like a shark's fin, seemed to be of menace.