'Even after retirement, she remained at the centre of things, as a school governor, a member of innumerable committees, and a tireless campaigner in the corridors of power and on the pavements of protest.'

Now he was really motoring! Great phrase, that was. Even though getting the rhythm right meant a solecistic drift from the nounal trochee to the verbal iamb. How old Ada would have rapped his knuckles. The crem. super too looked close to physical violence. Big finish!

'I doubt if she went gentle into her good night, but gone she has, and the world is a sadder place for her going. But she left it a better place than she found it, and that would have been the only epitaph she wished.'

Big finish nothing. Big cop-out was more like it. Ada had had no illusions about progress. Watching the telly peepshow of famine and disaster and war, she used to rage, 'They've learned nothing. Absolutely nothing!' Oh well. At least he'd taken his poppy out.

Time for the final music. Myra had gone for Elgar's Enigma which to Ada's tin ear probably sounded like bovine eructation. The crem.'s alternatives were all just as classically solemn. Then Pascoe had recalled the one time Ada ever talked about her father, the day he found the photo in the secretaire, and he'd rummaged through the tapes in his car and come up with Scott Joplin. He saw the shock on Myra's face as 'The Strenuous Life' came floating out of the speakers. He'd explain later, sharing his secret knowledge that Ada's sole recollection of her father – indeed her first recollection of anything – had been of a shadowy figure sitting at an upright piano picking out a ragtime melody.

So the circle closes… so the circle closes. iv

'At his grandmother's funeral?' said Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel. 'You'd think a bugger wi' letters after his name could come up with a better excuse than that.'