'Why?'

'Well, his girl-friend murdered and the police visiting him twice daily.'

'Oh aye,' said Dalziel doubtfully. He glanced at his watch. 'Well, I'll tell you what we'll do,' he said. 'How's your missus?'

Pascoe's wife, Ellie, was five months gone with their first child.

'Fine, she's fine.'

'Grand,' said Dalziel. 'That's what you need, Peter. A babby around the house. Steady you down a bit.'

He nodded with the tried virtue of a medieval bishop remonstrating with a wild young squire.

'So if she's all right, and my watch is all right, the Black Bull's open and I'll let you buy me a pint.'

'A pleasure, sir,' said Pascoe. 'But just the one.'

'Don't be shy. You can buy me as many as you like,' said Dalziel.

As he passed Wield, he dug a finger into his ribs and said, 'You'd best come too, sergeant, in case we move on to spirits.'

He went chuckling through the door.

Pascoe and Wield shared a moment of silent pain and then followed him.

Chapter 2

Brenda Sorby was the third murder victim in less than four weeks.

The first had been Mary Dinwoodie, aged forty, a widow. Disaster had come in the traditional three instalments to Mrs Dinwoodie. Less than a year earlier she and her husband and their seventeen-year-old daughter had been happily and profitably running the Linden Garden Centre in Shafton, a pleasant dormer village a few miles east of town. Then in a macabre accident at the Mid-Yorkshire Agricultural Show, during a parade of old steam traction engines, one of the drivers had suffered a stroke, his machine had turned into the spectators, Dinwoodie had slipped and next thing his crushed and lifeless body was lying on the turf. Five months later, his daughter too was crushed to death in a car accident on an icy Scottish road.