Ruth is reading about the ravens in the Tower of London when the phone rings. For a second, she has the ridiculous idea that Dan is ringing back, calling from the realms of the lost. Her hands are shaking when she picks up the phone.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi, Ruth, it’s Caz.’

‘Oh, hi, Caz.’ Ruth watches as Kate abandons Marilyn French for the TV remote. Oh well, perhaps eighteen months old is too young to be a fully fledged feminist. Soon the soothing strains of Emmerdale fill the room. Kate snuggles on to the sofa and Flint sits beside her, though not too close.

‘I said I’d ring to tell you about the funeral.’

‘Oh, yes, it was today, wasn’t it?’

So Dan was buried on the day that she received his letter. Ruth shivers.

‘It was grim, Ruth. Only a few people. His parents, Miriam, his ex-wife.’

‘Ex-wife?’

‘Yes, apparently they were divorced a few years ago. She seemed very upset though, cried all the way through the service.’

‘Did they have children?’

‘No. Miriam said that was partly why they split up, she wanted children, he didn’t.’

‘Is Miriam married?’

‘No. She’s as stunning as ever, though.’

Ruth thinks of her friend Shona, who is also often called ‘stunning’. To stun someone – it’s quite a violent image. What must it be like to be so beautiful that looking at you is like a blow on the head? Ruth can’t imagine.

‘It was so sad, Ruth,’ Caz is saying. ‘All that promise, all that brilliance, ending in a bleak little synagogue in Blackpool. Only a handful of people to mourn him.’

‘Was anyone else from UCL there?’

‘No. I don’t know if he was in touch with anyone.’

Thinking about the letter, with its enquiries after Caz, Roly and Val, Ruth doesn’t think so. The north, it seems, was inhospitable in more ways than one.

‘I got a letter from him,’ she says. ‘Weird, isn’t it?’

‘What do you mean, you got a letter from him?’

‘Just that. It was forwarded from the university. He’d made a discovery and he wanted my opinion.’ Ruth can’t quite keep a note of pride from creeping into her voice.

‘Jesus. What an awful coincidence.’

‘Yes. It really shook me up. It sounded just like him, the letter I mean.’ She doesn’t tell Caz about the voicemail.

‘What was it, the discovery?’

‘He didn’t say.’

‘Maybe you’ll have to come up to Pendle, do some research?’

‘Maybe,’ says Ruth, without much conviction.

Things are a little sensitive here, Dan had said. Ruth somehow doesn’t think that she’ll be getting an invitation from Pendle to look at Dan’s discovery, whatever it is. But Dan was afraid. And Dan is dead.

Ruth knows that when Kate has gone to bed she will ring Nelson.

*

Detective Inspector Harry Nelson is having a bad day. It’s not the pressure of fighting crime in King’s Lynn (though that’s tougher than you’d think). Work is fine, though his best sergeant, Judy Johnson, is away on maternity leave and his other sergeant, Dave Clough, seems to be enjoying a second childhood. The team broke a drug-smuggling ring last year and are still dealing with the clean-up. Clough, who played rather a heroic role in the operation, has compensated by acting ever since as though he’s auditioning for a role in Starsky and Hutch. He has even taken to wearing woolly jumpers. He has just split up with his girlfriend Trace and is currently, if the rumours are to be believed, dating every nubile girl in the Norfolk region. ‘I’m young, free and single, boss,’ he keeps telling Nelson, who knows better than to reply. He thinks the break-up with Trace has hit Clough hard.

No, it’s not policing that’s doing his head in. It’s the insistence of his wife, Michelle, and his boss, Gerry Whitcliffe, that he go on holiday. Nelson always ends up with leave owing at the end of the year, and this time Michelle wants him to take a holiday in August, ‘when normal people go away, Harry.’ Whitcliffe keeps reminding him that he was seriously ill at the end of last year and implying that he’s still not quite up to scratch. ‘You need a break, a complete rest, recharge your batteries.’ Recharge your batteries. What the hell does that mean? Nelson prides himself on not needing batteries. He’s an old-fashioned, wind-up model.

Michelle has told him that she’ll be home early but she’s going out again with some girlfriends at eight. That’s partly why Nelson is still at the station at half-seven. He loves his wife, but now that his two children have left home they just have too much time together. Enough time, certainly, for Michelle, who’s good at getting her own way, to persuade him into some God-awful summer holiday. Memories of Lanzarote a year ago rise up in horrific Technicolor, sitting in some Tex-Mex-themed bar chatting to the most boring couple in the world about computer programming. Never again. He’d rather go to the North Pole and eat whale blubber.

So Nelson is still in his office when Ruth rings.

‘How’s Katie?’ is the first thing he says.

‘Kate’s fine.’

‘Good,’ says Nelson. Then, after a pause. ‘And you?’

‘I’m OK. A bit knackered, we’ve being doing a dig all week. Look, Nelson, I wondered if you could help me. A friend of mine died a few days ago in a house fire in Fleetwood.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ says Nelson. Then, ‘Fleetwood, Lancashire?’

‘Yes. I know that’s your … where you come from … and I wondered if you still had any contacts in the police force up there.’

‘My old mate Sandy Macleod’s the DCI at Blackpool CID.’

‘Well, I just wondered if you could find out if there were any … you know, suspicious circumstances.’

‘What makes you think there might be?’ asks Nelson.

‘I had a letter from my friend, written just before he died. He mentioned that he was afraid. I wondered if someone might have been intimidating him.’

‘I see,’ says Nelson. ‘Well, I’ll give Sandy a call. There’s probably nothing in it, mind. Just a nasty coincidence.’

‘Coincidence,’ says Ruth in an odd voice. ‘Maybe. But I’d be very grateful if you could ask around a bit.’

‘Be glad to,’ says Nelson. ‘I haven’t spoken to Sandy for years.’

*

Nelson drives home thoughtfully. Normally he manoeuvres his car as if he is being pursued by mafia hitmen but, today, lost in the past, he stops meekly at traffic lights and even allows a bus to pull out in front of him. Sandy Macleod. Just one mention of that name and it all came back. Harry and Sandy, new recruits to the Blackpool police force, patrolling the pleasure beach, interrogating tax-evading landladies in guest houses filled with plastic models of Elvis, eating chips in the squad car, the windows so steamy that every villain in Lancashire could have gone past unnoticed. Suddenly Nelson can smell the Golden Mile – chips and doughnut fat and the heady tang of the sea.

It’s not the first time recently that he has been hit by a wave of nostalgia. When, in May, Blackpool was promoted to the Premier League he had surprised himself by being close to tears as he watched the final match against Cardiff at Wembley. He had wanted to be there, in that joyous tangerine crowd. He wanted to be part of the victory parade in Blackpool, saluting the heroes who would – incredibly enough – soon be facing Manchester United and Chelsea. He has been a Seasiders fan all his life and has a tattoo (and a chip) on his shoulder to prove it. But as his wife and daughters do not share this enthusiasm he has got out of the way of going to matches, has become, in fact, a typical Southern softy armchair fan. Now, more than anything, he wants to be in Blackpool for the new season, he wants to go to Bloomfield Road and watch his team play. He turns into his drive, dreaming of Ian Holloway lifting the Premier League trophy.

Michelle is out but she has left his supper in the microwave and a tasteful array of holiday brochures on the breakfast bar. Italy, France, Portugal, the Seychelles. Nelson pushes them to one side and gets a beer from the fridge. When Michelle comes home, he is at the computer, taking a virtual ride on the Big Dipper, three empty cans at his side.