08.25–08.55

      For a few seconds Andy Dalziel had felt his mind going into free fall as he contemplated his temporal aberration.

      Thoughts of Alzheimer’s, brain tumours, even, God help him, post-traumatic stress disorder, shrieked like bats around the tower of his understanding and the easiest solution seemed to be to jump off into the welcoming darkness.

      Jesus! he told himself. It’s this place putting them daft thoughts into your mind. You’re a detective. Detect! Doesn’t matter what you find, so long as you’re strong enough not to run away from it.

      First things first. This morning he’d woken up. He tried to reconstruct the waking process. It had seemed pretty normal, the mind surfacing from sleep’s dark depths, thrashing around on the surface for a few moments, grabbing at flotsam and jetsam from pre-sleep memory, identifying them as belonging to such and such a day…

      That’s where it had started to go wrong.

      Somehow he’d assembled these shards of memory not into the Saturday they belonged to, but into a Sunday that hadn’t yet happened!

      Had he simply made it up then? He tried to project himself back a day, found clear-cut details hard to come by. Instead, cloudy images of sitting around, doing nothing, going nowhere floated across his mind.

      That felt like Sunday all right, but a Sunday from extremely auld lang syne, the sort of Sunday he’d sometimes experienced on childhood holidays with his Scottish cousins. They’d been really happy days, most of them. His dad’s family knew how to treat kids–feed them jam pieces and mutton pies till they come out of their ears, then turn them loose to roam at will, confident that they’ll find their way home for the next meal. But it all stopped on Sundays. Here the will of Granny Dalziel ruled supreme. Here the bairns were expected to keep the Sabbath as she had kept it back in the mists of time. Faces scrubbed, hair slicked, bound in the strait jacket of best clothes, they were marched to the kirk in the morning and sat around with an improving book, seen and definitely not heard, for the rest of the endless day.

      And that had been his Sunday…no, that had been his Saturday, his yesterday! Or something like it.

      But why? He needed to dig deeper, go back further.

      He’d returned to work a week earlier, at his own insistence and against medical and domestic advice. But he’d insisted angrily that he felt fine and was more than ready to pick up the traces where he’d dropped them over three months ago.

      He hadn’t been lying. Trouble was, the traces weren’t there any more.

      If anywhere, they were in Peter Pascoe’s hands, and it had taken him a couple of days to realize the DCI’s reluctance to hand them over immediately was as much protective as presumptuous.

      Things had changed, both externally and internally. There might have been a sharp intake of breath across Mid-Yorkshire when he was admitted comatose to hospital, but it clearly hadn’t been held for long. The old truism was true. Life went on. Criminal life certainly did, and nature abhors a vacuum.

      He no longer had his finger on the pulse of things. He had a deal of catching up to do, not just in knowledge but in reputation. His famed omniscience depended on an extensive web of information and influence spun over many years, and in a couple of months this had fallen into serious disrepair. His underlings still tiptoed around him, but now their deference struck him as therapeutic rather than theocentric. He realized he was going to have to work hard to get back to where he’d been before the big bang, when he could have breezed in late to the case-review meeting, supremely confident of being able to prove yet again, as he’d once overheard Pascoe say with mingled admiration and irritation, that, like God, the Fat Man was always in the squad!

      Not now. And as well as the shock of realizing how out of touch he was, he’d been dismayed to find himself completely knackered after three or four hours on the job. When Pascoe had assured him that a new roster system imposed from above required that he should have the forthcoming weekend off, he hadn’t resisted. Cap Marvell, his non-live-in partner, was away that weekend, but no matter. Saturday was an easy day to fill. Long lie-in, then off down the rugger club to see some old mates. Couple of pints of lunch, watch the match in the afternoon, couple more pints after, then mebbe wander into town with a few convivial chums for a curry. Perfect.

      Except the day had dawned wet and windy. Everything seemed an effort, even though everything consisted of next to nothing. Noon arrived and he was still wandering round his house, undressed and unshaven. Going out to stand in wind and rain to shout at thirty young men wrestling in mud seemed pointless. There was a match on the telly he could watch. He fell asleep shortly after kick-off and woke to find the screen full of speedway bikes. Wasn’t worth getting dressed now. He summoned up the energy to put a mug of soup in the microwave and scalded his lip. Even that didn’t jerk him out of his trance-like state. In fact his chosen remedy, the litre bottle of Highland Park he’d found empty on his pillow this morning, had sucked him in deeper.

      And so the long hours had dragged by. Granny Dalziel would have been outraged by his dress and his demeanour, but her strict Sabbatarianism could not have faulted his state of mind. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.

      And there was the explanation. This morning his mind, recalling the previous day as a long, vacuous, will-to-live-sapping Scots Sabbath and unwilling to thole the notion of enduring such another, had decided it had to be Monday.

      Simple. Dead logical, really. Nowt to worry about there.

      Except that things like that didn’t happen to him. To other men maybe. There were a lot of weak, woolly, wobbly, wanked-out losers in the world, their minds in such a whirl they didn’t know their arses from their elbows. But not Andy Dalziel. It had taken half a ton of Semtex to put him on his back and he’d risen up again, shaken himself down, and returned to the fray, a bit bruised and battered and mud-bespattered, but ready and able to play out the rest of the game till the ref called no side!

      At least he hadn’t made it to the Station this morning. He shuddered to think what his colleagues would have made of the mighty Dalziel turning up for Monday’s meeting twenty-four hours early! They never come back, that’s what popular wisdom said about champion boxers. They try, they sometimes flatter to deceive, but they never really come back. He was going to prove them wrong, wasn’t he? He was going to delight his friends, scatter his enemies, and leave all the dismal doubters with enough egg on their faces to make a Spanish omelette.

      He’d been vaguely aware of a continuo of faint religious murmuring beneath his thoughts, but now it stopped and was replaced by the sound of footsteps as the worshippers, unburdened of their sins, tripped lightly back down the long aisle. Service must be over already. Mebbe in this age of Fast Food and Speed Dating, the Church had brought in Quick Confession and Accelerated Absolution.

      More likely, his thought processes had just slowed to a crawl.

      The footsteps receded, finally there was silence, and then the organ started playing. He wasn’t a great fan of organ music, something a little ponderous about it, something too diffused to cut to the emotional heart of a good tune. But here in the great cathedral, whose dim and vast prismoids of space felt as if they might have been imported from beyond the stars, it was easy to think of it as the voice of God.

      He straightened up and the voice spoke.

      ‘Mr Dalziel?’

      He rolled his eyes upward. What was it going to be–the blinding light, or just a shower of dove crap?

      ‘I’m