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calm the mind. And now, he told himself with the assurance of one who believed in a practical, positive and usually physical response to most of life's problems, all he needed to complete this repair of normality was a platterful of egg, sausage, bacon, tomatoes and fried bread. Bitter experience had taught him in the years since his wife's departure to eschew home catering. It wasn't that a basic cuisine was beyond his grasp; it was the cleaning up afterwards that defeated him. And while a man could live with a broken curtain rail, only a beast would tolerate fat-congealed frying-pans. Fortunately the police canteen did an excellent breakfast. Gourmet cooking they might not provide, but what did that matter to a man who - for Pascoe's benefit anyway - affected to believe that cordon bleu was a French road-block? And a slight blackening round the edge of a fry-up was to a resurrected copper what the crust on old port was to a wine connoisseur - a sign of readiness.
    His ponderous jowls shaved to danger point, his few sad last grey hairs brushed to a high gloss, his heavy frame clad in an angel-white shirt and an undertaker-black suit, with knife-edge creases breaking on mirror-bright shoes, he set off at a stately though deceptively rapid pace towards the city centre.
    He was, of course, carless. His reason for being carless he continued to keep carefully out of his mind. Nor did he in any way appear to register the momentary lull in noise as he entered the canteen. To Edna, the weary siren behind the counter, he said, 'Full house, love.'
    Under his approving gaze, she filled his personal willow-patterned plate till the pattern disappeared. Seizing a bottle of tomato sauce from the counter, he made for an empty table, sat down and began to eat.
    It was here that George Headingley found him. He sat down on the opposite side of the table, himself a large man, but dwarfed by Dalziel, an effect intensified by something in his demeanour of the schoolboy waiting to be noticed before the headmaster's desk.
    'Sir,' he said.
    "Morning, George,' said Dalziel. 'This murder in Welfare Lane - Deeks, is it? - how're we doing?'
    'Well, Pascoe's handling that, sir,' said Headingley, slightly taken aback. Of course, Dalziel had been in the station for an hour or so last night, but he hadn't given the impression he was taking anything in.
    'So you said. What made you dig him out? Weren't it his lassie's birthday yesterday?'
    Headingley decided that straightforward was the best route.
    'The DCC's just come in, sir. He'd like a word if you don't mind.'
    'Is that what he said? If I don't mind?' said Dalziel disbelievingly.
    'Well, not exactly,' admitted Headingley.
    'Oh aye. Well, you go and tell him, George; you tell him . . .'
    Dalziel paused, attempted to spear a rasher of bacon, was defeated by its adamantine crispness and had to scoop it up and crunch it whole: 'You tell him I'll be along right away.'
    Three minutes later, his plate clean and his mouth scoured with another cup of red-hot tea, he made his way upstairs.
    The Deputy Chief Constable was not a man he liked. It was Dalziel's not inaudibly expressed view that he couldn't solve a kiddies' crossword puzzle and had only been promoted out of Traffic because he couldn't master the difference between left and right. More heinously, he rarely dispensed drink and when he did it tended to be dry sherry in glasses so narrow that it was like reading a thermometer looking for the bloody stuff, which in any case Dalziel regarded as Spanish goat-piss.
    'Andy!' said the DCC heartily. 'Come you in. Sit you down. Look, I'm sorry, thing is this, we have got ourselves a bit of a problem.'
    This recently developed speech style, modelled on that of a Tory cabinet minister being interviewed on telly, was taken by many as confirmation of rumours of the DCC's political ambition. A desirable stepping-stone to becoming first a personality, then a candidate, was the acquisition of the office of Chief