Big of you! You get invited to spend the night alone in complete strangers' houses all the time! And now you've looked and found nothing, what are you going to do? Tell him just on the off-chance?'
'I didn't say I'd found nothing,' said Dalziel.
Pascoe stared at him.
'But you said there'd be no action!' he said.
'Right,' said Dalziel. 'I mean it. I think we've just got to sit back and wait for Fletcher, to fall into our laps. Or be pushed. What I did find was a little anonymous letter telling Eliot what his wife was up to. Your mate knows, Peter. From the postmark he's known for a few weeks. He's a careful man, accountants usually are. And I'm sure he'd do a bit of checking first before taking action. It was just a week later that my telephone rang and that awful disguised voice told me to check on Fletcher. Asked for me personally. I dare say you've mentioned my name to Eliot, haven't you, Peter?'
He looked at the carpet modestly.
'Everyone's heard of you, sir,' said Pascoe. 'So what happens now?'
'Like I say. Nothing. We sit and wait for the next call. It should be a bit more detailed this time, I reckon. I mean, Eliot must have realized that his first tip-off isn't getting results and now his wife's moved back into town to be on Fletcher's doorstep again, he's got every incentive.'
Pascoe looked at him in surprise.
'You mean the ghosts…'
'Nice imaginative girl, that Giselle! Not only does she invent a haunting to save herself a two hours' drive for her kicks, but she cons a pair of thick bobbies into losing their sleep over it. I bet Fletcher fell about laughing! Well I'm losing no more! It'll take all the hounds of hell to keep me awake.'
He yawned and stretched. In mid-stretch there came a terrible scratching noise and the fat man froze like a woodcut of Lethargy on an allegorical frieze.
Then he laughed and opened the door.
The black cat looked up at him warily but her kittens had no such inhibitions and tumbled in, heading towards the fire with cries of delight.
'I think your mates have got more trouble than they know,' said Dalziel.
Next morning Pascoe rose early and stiffly after a night spent on a sofa before the fire. Dalziel had disappeared upstairs to find himself a bed and Pascoe assumed he would still be stretched out on it. But when he looked out of the living-room window he saw he was wrong.
The sun was just beginning to rise behind the orchard and the fat man was standing in front of the house watching the dawn.
A romantic at heart, thought Pascoe sourly.
A glint of light flickered between the trunks of the orchard trees, flamed into a ray and began to move across the frosty lawn towards the waiting man. He watched its progress, striking sparks off the ice-hard grass. And when it reached his feet he stepped aside.
Pascoe joined him a few minutes later.
'Morning, sir,' he said. 'I've made some coffee. You're up bright and early.'
'Yes,' said Dalziel, scratching his gut vigorously. 'I think I've picked up a flea from those bloody cats.'
'Oh,' said Pascoe. 'I thought you'd come to check on the human sacrifice at dawn. I saw you getting out of the way of the sun's first ray.'
'Bollocks!' said Dalziel, looking towards the house, which the sun was now staining the gentle pink of blood in a basin of water.
'Why bollocks?' wondered Pascoe. 'You've seen one ghost. Why not another?'
'One ghost?'
'Yes. The mill-girl. That story you told me last night. Your first case.'
Dalziel looked at him closely.
'I told you that, did I? I must have been supping well.'
Pascoe, who knew that drink had never made Dalziel forget a thing in his life, nodded vigorously.
'Yes, sir. You told me that. You and your ghost.'
Dalziel shook his head as though at a memory of ancient foolishness and began to laugh.
'Aye, lad. My ghost! It really is my ghost in a way. The ghost of what I am now, any road! That Jenny Pocklington, she were a right grand lass! She had an imagination like your Giselle!'
'I don't follow,' said Pascoe. But he was beginning to.
'Believe it or not, lad,' said Dalziel. 'In them days I was pretty slim. Slim and supple. Even then I had to be like a ghost to get through that bloody window! But if Bert Pocklington had caught me, I really would have been one! Aye, that's right. When I heard that scream, I was coming out of the alley, not going into it!'
And shaking with laughter the fat man headed across the lacy grass towards the old stone farmhouse where the hungry kittens were crying imperiously for their breakfast.
ONE SMALL STEP
to the original edition, published in 1990
We've been together now for twenty years. That's a lot of blood under the bridge. Sometimes 1970 seems like last weekend, sometimes it seems like ancient history. Famous men died – Forster who we thought already had, and de Gaulle who we imagined never would; Heath toppled Wilson, Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Tony Jacklin won the US Open, and in September, Collins published A Clubbable Woman.
All right, so it wasn't the year's most earth-shaking event, but it meant a lot to me. And it must have meant a little to dial hard core of loyal readers who kept on asking for more.
And of course to Andy Dalziel and Peter Pascoe, it meant the difference between life and death!
If time moves so erratically for me, how must it seem to that intermittently synchronous being, the series character? I mused on this the other day as I walked in the fells near my home. I'm not one of those writers who explain the creative process by saying, 'Then the characters take over.' On the page I'm a tyrant, but in my mind I let them run free, and as I walked I imagined I heard the dull thunder of Dalziel's voice, like a beer keg rolling down a cellar ramp.
'It's all right for him, poncing around up here, feeling all poetic about time and stuff. But what about us, eh? Just how old are we supposed to be anyway? I mean, if I were as old as it felt twenty years back when this lot started, how come I'm not getting meals-on-wheels and a free bus pass?'
'You're right,' answered Peter Pascoe's voice, higher, lighter, but just as querulous. 'Look at me. When A Clubbable Woman came out, I was a whizzkid sergeant, graduate entrant, potential high-flier. Twenty years on, I've just made chief inspector. That's not what I call whizzing, that's a long way from stratospheric!'
It was time to remind them what they were, figments of my imagination, paper and printers' ink not flesh and blood, and I started to formulate a few elegant phrases about the creative artist's use of a dual chronology.
'You mean,' interrupted Peter Pascoe, 'that we should regard historical time, i.e. your time, and fictive time, i.e. our time, as passenger trains running on parallel lines but at different speeds?'
'I couldn't have put it better myself,' I said. 'A perfect analogy to express the chronic dualism of serial literature.'
'Chronic's the bloody word,' growled Dalziel.
'Oh, do be quiet,' said Pascoe, with more courage than I ever gave him. 'Look, this is all very well, but analogies must be consistent. Parallel lines cannot converge in time, can they?'
'No, but they can pass through the same station, can't they?' I replied.
'You mean, as in Under World, where the references to the recent miners' stride clearly set the book in 1985?'
'Or 1986. I think I avoided that kind of specificity,' I said.
'You think so? Then what about Bones and Silence in which I return to work the February after I got injured in
