At least, thought Fleur, she wouldnt have to face the pains and problems parents could inflict on their growing daughters.
Whether she would be spared the pains and problems life itself inflicted on most women was another matter.
She was feeling much better now. The past dwindled into its proper space, the cathedral descended from the sky and took its rightful place at ground level, still huge but now firmly anchored to the earth.
Gods house they called it. If there were a God, then it was presumably Him who did all that inflicting, she thought. Maybe I should go inside and have a quiet word, let Him know Ive decided to change his plans a bit.
But He probably got the message when He saw Vince taking a seat.
What was going on in there? she wondered.
Like so much of life, there was nothing to do but wait.
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 Alzheimers, 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. Its this place putting them daft thoughts into your mind. Youre a detective. Detect! Doesnt matter what you find, so long as youre strong enough not to run away from it.
First things first. This morning hed woken up. He tried to reconstruct the waking process. It had seemed pretty normal, the mind surfacing from sleeps 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
Thats where it had started to go wrong.
Somehow hed assembled these shards of memory not into the Saturday they belonged to, but into a Sunday that hadnt 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 hed sometimes experienced on childhood holidays with his Scottish cousins. Theyd been really happy days, most of them. His dads 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 theyll 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 Sundayno, that had been his Saturday, his yesterday! Or something like it.
But why? He needed to dig deeper, go back further.
Hed returned to work a week earlier, at his own insistence and against medical and domestic advice. But hed insisted angrily that he felt fine and was more than ready to pick up the traces where hed dropped them over three months ago.
He hadnt been lying. Trouble was, the traces werent there any more.
If anywhere, they were in Peter Pascoes hands, and it had taken him a couple of days to realize the DCIs 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 hadnt 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 hed 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 hed 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, hed 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 hadnt 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. Wasnt worth getting dressed now. He summoned up the energy to put a mug of soup in the microwave and scalded his lip. Even that didnt jerk him out of his trance-like state. In fact his chosen remedy, the litre bottle of Highland Park hed 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 didnt 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 didnt 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 hed 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 hadnt made it to the Station this morning. He shuddered to think what his colleagues would have made of the mighty Dalziel turning up for Mondays meeting twenty-four hours early! They never come back, thats 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, wasnt 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.
Hed 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 wasnt 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?
Im sorry to bother you, said the voice of God. Im Gina Wolfe.
That God should be female didnt surprise him. That she, or She, should be called Gina did.
He turned his head to the right and found himself looking at the blonde from the red Nissan. Would God drive Japanese? He didnt think so. This was flesh and blood, and very nice flesh and blood at that.
Gina Wolfe? she repeated with a faintly interrogative inflexion, as if anticipating the name would mean something to him.
To the best of his recollection, hed never seen her before in his life.
On the other hand, a man whose recollection could dump whole days on a whim couldnt be too dogmatic. Best to box clever till he worked out the circumstances and degree of their acquaintance.
Nice to see you again, Gina Wolfe, he said, thinking by the use of the whole name to cover all possible gradations of intimacy.
Her expression told him hed failed before she said, Oh dear. Youve no idea who I am, have you? Im sorry. Mick Purdy said he was going to ring you
Mick? With relief he found a context for this name. Oh aye, Mick! He did ring, just afore I came out this morning, left a message. I were in a bit of a hurry.
I noticed. I really had to put my foot down to keep up with you. Look, Im sorry to interrupt your devotions. If you like, I can wait for you outside.
Dalziel was pleased to feel his mind clicking back into gear, not top maybe but a good third, which was enough to extrapolate two slightly disturbing pieces of information from what shed just said.
The first was, shed been following him.
The second, and more worrying, was she thought hed been in a hurry to get to the cathedral to pray. Couldnt have her telling Mick Purdy that. Important operational information could vanish without trace in the mazy communications network that allegedly linked the regional police forces. But news that Andy Dalziel had got religion would be disseminated with the speed of light.