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cheaper, healthier and the beer's better. Do you never read the ads?'
    'Everyone's talking smart today and putting me down,' said Pascoe. 'Time for another?'
    'Hang on,' said Crabtree. 'I'll phone in.'
    He returned with another four halves.
    'Plenty of time,' he said. 'It's been put back again.'
    'When to?'
    'Next week.'
    'Oh shit,' said Pascoe.
    He regarded the half-pints dubiously, then went and rang Ellie again. There was no reply. Perhaps after all she had rung an old boy-friend.
    'Left you, has she?' said Crabtree. 'Wise girl. Now, what do you fancy - drown your sorrows or a bit of spare?'
     
    He arrived home at midnight to find a strange car in his drive and a strange man drinking his whisky. Closer examination revealed it was not a strange man but one of Ellie's colleagues, Arthur Halfdane, a historian and once a sort of rival for Ellie's favours.
    'I didn't recognize you,' said Pascoe. 'You look younger.'
    'Well thanks,' said Halfdane in a mid-Atlantic drawl.
    'On second thoughts,' said Pascoe belligerently, 'you don't look younger. It's your clothes that look younger.'
    Halfdane glanced down at his denim suit, looked ironically at Pascoe's crumpled worsted, and smiled at Ellie.
    'Time to go, I think,' he said, rising.
    Perhaps I should punch him on the nose, thought Pascoe. Man alone with my wife at midnight . . . I'm entitled.
    When Ellie returned from the front door Pascoe essayed a smile.
    'You're drunk,' she said.
    'I've had a couple.'
    'I thought you were at a meeting.'
    'It was cancelled,’ he said. 'I rang you. You were out. So I made a night of it.'
    'Me too,' she said.
    'Difference was, my companion was a man,' said Pascoe heavily.
    'No difference,' said Ellie. 'So was mine.'
    'Oh,' said Pascoe, a little nonplussed. 'Have a good evening, did you?'
    'Yes. Very sexy.'
    'What?'
    'Sexy. We went to see your dirty film. Our interest was socio-historical, of course.'
    'He took you to the Calli?' said Pascoe indignantly. 'Well, bugger me!'
    'It was all right,' said Ellie sweetly. 'Full of respectable people. You know who I saw there? Mr Godfrey Blengdale, no less. So it must be all right.'
    'He shouldn't have taken you,' said Pascoe, feeling absurd and incoherent and nevertheless right.
    'Get it straight, Peter,' said Ellie coldly. 'Dalziel may have got you trained like a retriever, but I still make my own decisions.'
    'Oh yes,' sneered Pascoe. 'It's working in that elephants' graveyard that does it. All that rational discourse where the failed intellectuals go to die. The sooner they close that stately pleasure-dome down and dump you back in reality, the better!'
    'You've got the infection,' she said sadly. 'Workin a leper colony and in the end you start falling to bits.'
    'Schweitzer worked with lepers,’ countered Pascoe.
    'Yes. And he was a fascist too.'
    He looked at her hopelessly. There were other planets somewhere with life-forms he had more chance of understanding and making understand.
    'It's your failures I put in gaol,’ he said.
    'So, blame education, is that it? All right, but how can it work with kids when intelligent adults can still be so thick!' she demanded.
    'I didn't mean that,' he said. He suddenly saw in his mind's eye the girl in the film. The face fell apart under the massive blow. It might all be special effects but the reality beneath the image was valid none the less. If only it could be explained . . .
    'There is still, well, evil,' he essayed.
    'Oh God. Religion, is it, now? The last refuge of egocentricity. I'm off to bed. I'm driving down to Lincolnshire tomorrow, so I should prefer to pass the night undisturbed.'
    She stalked from the room.
    'So should I,’ shouted Pascoe after her.
    Their wishes went unanswered.
    At five o'clock in the morning he was roused from the unmade-up spare bed by Ellie pulling his hair and demanding that he answer the bloody telephone.
    It was the station.
    There had been a break-in at Wilkinson House, premises of the Calliope Kinema Club. The