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catching up. He knew how they felt.
    He said, ‘I’ve been listening to you for a quarter of an hour, luv, and I’m no closer to understanding what any of this has got to do with me. What the hell are you doing up here in Yorkshire anyway?’
    She said, ‘It’s simple. Next month it will be seven years since Alex vanished. My solicitor told me that after seven years we’d get a presumption of death on the nod. That made up my mind for me, so I said, let’s do it. And everything was going fine, then yesterday morning I got this.’
    She opened her shoulder bag and took out a C5 envelope which she passed over to Dalziel. He put his glasses on to study it. It had a Mid-York postmark and was addressed in black ink to Gina Wolfe, 28 Lombard Way, Ilford.
    The envelope contained a sheet of notepaper headed
The Keldale Hotel
, attached by a paper clip to a folded page from the September edition of
MY Life
, the glossy news, views and previews monthly magazine published by the
Mid-Yorks Evening News
.
    On the notepaper were typed the words
The General reviews his troops
.
    A good half of the page from
MY Life
was occupied by a photograph recording the recent visit of a minor royal to the city. She was shown receiving a posy of freesias from a small girl across a crush barrier during a walkabout. A thick red circle had been drawn around the head of a man just beyond the child.
    ‘This your husband?’ guessed Dalziel.
    ‘Yes.’
    The photo was very clear. It showed a man somewhere between late twenties and mid thirties, his blond hair tousled by the breeze as he observed the Royal with an expression more quizzical than enthusiastic.
    ‘You sure?’
    ‘It’s Alex or his double,’ she said.
    ‘Right,’ he said, turning his attention to the hotel notepaper.
    The Keldale was the town’s premier hotel, priding itself, with its spacious rooms, traditional menus and extensive gardens, on offering luxury in the old style.
    ‘
The General reviews his troops
,’ he read. ‘That means summat special, does it?’
    She said, ‘Alex’s family always liked to claim a family connection with General Wolfe…’
    He saw her hesitating whether she needed to explain who General Wolfe was.
    He said, ‘The one who’d rather have written Gray’s
Elegy
than whupped the Frogs, right?’
    ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Alex was rather proud of the connection and I used to make fun of him because of it, and we started playing this game… I was a plucky little trooper and he was General Wolfe reviewing his troops, and…’
    She was blushing. It became her.
    Dalziel handed back the magazine page and said, ‘Spare me the details, luv. This something your Alex would have boasted about to his mates after a couple of pints?’
    ‘No!’ she exclaimed indignantly. ‘Definitely not.’
    Dalziel noted the certainty without necessarily accepting it.
    ‘So you were convinced this was your man. What did you do?’
    ‘I rang Mick.’
    ‘Purdy? Oh aye. And what did he have to say?’
    ‘Nothing. I couldn’t get him. I knew he was going to be busy this weekend. He’s been running some big Met op, he’s a commander now. They’ve got to the arrest stage, so that probably meant all mobiles switched off. Anyway, I left him a message.’
    Dalziel digested this. Purdy a commander. The lad had done well, but he’d had the look of a high-flier back when they’d met all those year ago. More puzzling was the woman’s knowledge of him; not his promotion, that was understandable, but the details of his operational timetable.
    He said, ‘Sorry, luv, I’m not getting this. Seven years on you’re trying to get your husband declared dead, then you get his picture through the post, and the first thing you do is ring his old boss? Why not your best friend, if it’s a bit of emotional support you want? Or your solicitor, if it’s professional advice. Why dig right back into the past and come up with your man’s old boss?’
    She said, ‘Sorry, Mr Dalziel, I