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the way it started out, me needing to prove he was dead, but what I mean is if I found him alive I wouldn’t want him to be killed…’
    ‘Just as well, missus,’ interrupted Dalziel. ‘’Cos I need to know folk really well afore I start doing favours like that.’
    That stemmed the flow. Her hands stopped their movement and she looked him straight in the face. Then she smiled weakly.
    ‘I’m gabbling, aren’t I? It’s just that I didn’t think I was going to have to start at the start, so to speak.’
    ‘Because Mick Purdy would have put me in the picture, right? OK, let’s see if I can get you on track with a couple of questions. First, who’s Alex?’
    ‘Of course. Sorry. Alex Wolfe. My husband.’
    ‘And he left you?’
    ‘Yes. Well, no, I suppose strictly speaking I left him. But not really. I never
abandoned
him… I never thought of it as permanent… things had just got so bad that I needed space… we both did. And in a sense, he’d left me a long time before…’
    ‘Whoa!’ said Dalziel. ‘Lots of things I need to get straight afore we get into the blame game. Where was this? When was this? What did Alex Wolfe do for a living? Why did you leave him? I think that’ll do for starters.’
    ‘It was in Ilford, we lived in Ilford. I still do. That’s part of the problem… sorry. What did Alex do? He was like you. A policeman. Not as important. A detective inspector.’
    Ilford. He’d heard of Ilford. It was in Essex. DI Mick Purdy had been with the Essex division of the Met. And Alex the walkabout husband had been a cop. Things were beginning to join up, but he was still a lot of lines short of a picture.
    ‘And you leaving him? What was that about? A woman?’
    ‘No! That would have been easy. Easier. It was a very bad time. For both of us. We lost… there was a bereavement… our daughter, Lucy…’
    He could feel the effort she was making to keep herself together. Oh shit, he thought, me and my big boots. He’d have known about this presumably if he’d listened to Purdy on the phone.
    On the other hand, not knowing meant he was getting everything up front, no pre-judgments.
    He said, ‘I’m sorry, luv. Didn’t know. Must have been terrible.’
    She said with unconvincing matter-of-factness, ‘Yes. Terrible just about sums it up. Certainly not the best of times to have this other stuff at work start up. Not that it seemed to bother Alex. He just didn’t seem to care. About anything. I got angry with him. I needed someone, but all he wanted was to be left alone. So I left him alone. I didn’t abandon him… we were in it together… except we weren’t… so I thought if left him alone… no I didn’t think that, I didn’t really think anything. I just had to be with people who would listen to me talking, and going into a room where Alex was felt like going into an empty room…’
    She was off again. Dalziel could only see one thing in this turmoil that might have anything to do with him. If it helped the woman to focus, that would be a plus too.
    ‘This work stuff, what was that about?’ he interrupted.
    She stopped talking and took a deep breath. Refocusing from her bereavement to her husband’s work problems seemed to bring a measure of genuine control. Her voice was stronger, less tremulous as she said, ‘They called it a leak enquiry, but it was actually about corruption. Alex was second in charge of a team targeting this businessman. It was called Operation Macavity. That was a joke. From T.S. Eliot’s poem. You know,
Cats
, the musical.’
    Dalziel was untroubled by the presumption that the only way he was likely to have heard of Eliot was via
Cats
. There were a lot of smart people spending a lot of hard time behind bars because they’d made similar presumptions.
    ‘Yeah, loved it,’ he said. ‘Because he was never there, right?’
    ‘Yes. But this time they had high hopes of getting to the man. It didn’t work out. I don’t know any details, but he always