Slowing to the pace of a little old lady clutching a large square volume bound in leather, its corners reinforced by brass triangles that gleamed like a set of knuckle-dusters, he leaned over to the passenger side and wound down the window.

‘How do, luv. Off to church, are you? Lovely morning for it.’

She turned, fixed him with a rheumy eye, and said, ‘My God, how desperate must you be! I’m seventy-nine. Go away, you pathetic man!’

‘Nay, luv, I just want to know what day it is,’ he protested.

‘A drunkard as well as a lecher! Go away, I say! I can defend myself.’

She took a swing at him with her brass-bound book which, had it connected, might have broken his nose. He accelerated away, but doubt was now strong enough to make him turn into the cathedral car park a hundred yards on.

A sporty red Nissan pulled in behind him. Its driver, a blonde in her late twenties, got out the same time as he did. She was wearing wrap-around shades against the autumn sunlight. She eased them forward on her nose, their eyes met and she gave him a smile. He thought of asking her what day it was but decided against it. This one might have hysterics or spray him with mace, and in any case back along the pavement the little old lady was approaching like the US cavalry. Time to talk to someone official and male.

At the cathedral’s great east door he could see a corpse-faced man in a black cassock acting as commissionaire. No backward collar, so a verger maybe. Or a cross-dressing vampire.

Dalziel moved towards him. As he entered the shadow of the great building his mind drifted back to a time when he’d been hauled along this street as God on top of a medieval pageant wagon and something like an angel had come floating down from the looming tower…

He pushed the disturbing memory from his mind as he reached the holy doorman.

‘So what’s on this morning, mate?’ he asked breezily.

The man gave him a slightly puzzled look as he replied, ‘Holy Communion now, matins at ten.’

Meant nothing, he reassured himself without conviction. The God-squad had services every day, even if all the congregation they could muster was a couple of geriatrics and a church mouse.

‘Owt special?’ he said. ‘I mean, is it a special Sunday, twenty-second afore Pancake Tuesday or summat?’

He hoped to hear something like, ‘Sunday? You must have had a good weekend. This is Monday!’ But he no longer expected it.

‘No, nothing special, sir. If you want it spelled out, it’s the twentieth after Trinity in Ordinary Time. Are you coming in?’

Rather unexpectedly, Dalziel found he was.

Partly because his route back to the car would mean passing the old lady with the knuckle-duster prayer book, but mainly because his legs and his mind were sending from their opposite poles the message that he needed to sit down somewhere quiet and commune with his inner self.

He passed through the cathedral porch and had to pause to let his eyes adjust from the morning brightness outside to the rich gloom of the interior. Its vastness dwindled the waiting worshippers from a significant number to a mere handful, concentrated towards the western end. He turned off the central aisle and found himself a seat in the lee of an ancient tomb topped with what were presumably life-sized effigies of its inmates. Must have been a bit disconcerting for the family to see Mam and Dad lying there every time they came to church, thought Dalziel. Particularly if the sculptor had caught a good likeness, which a very lively looking little dog at their feet suggested he might have done.

His mind was trying to avoid the unattractive mental task that lay before him. But he hadn’t got wherever he’d got by turning aside when the path turned clarty.

He closed his eyes, rested his head on his hands as if in prayer, and focused on one of the great philosophical questions of the twenty-first century.

Didn’t matter if it was Ordinary Time or Extraordinary Time, the question was, how the fuck had he managed to misplace a whole sodding day?

Gina Wolfe watched the bowed, still figure with envy.

He no longer looked fat; the cathedral’s vastness had dwindled him to frail mortal flesh like her own.

She did not know what pain had brought him here, but she knew about pain. What she did not know was how to find comfort and help in a place like this.

She hadn’t been inside a church since the funeral. That was seven years ago. And seven years before that she’d been at the same church for her wedding.

Patterns. Could they mean something? Or were they like crop circles, just some joker having a laugh?

At some point during the funeral her mind had started overlaying the two ceremonies. One of her wedding presents had been a vacuum cleaner, beautifully packaged in a gleaming white box. The small white coffin reminded her of this, and as the service progressed she found herself obsessed by the notion that they were burying her Hoover. She tried to tell Alex this, to assure him it was all right, it was just a vacuum cleaner they’d lost, but the face he turned on her did more than anything the words and the music and the place could do to reassert the dreadful reality.

Neither of them had cried, she remembered that. The church had been full of weeping, but they had moved beyond tears. She had knelt when invited to kneel but no prayer had come. She had stood for the hymns but she had not sung. The words that formed in her mind weren’t the words on the page before her, they were words she had seen when she was seventeen and still at school.

It had been a pre-A-level exercise. Compare and contrast the following two poems. One was Milton ’s ‘On the Death of a Fair Infant’, the other Edwin Muir’s ‘The Child Dying’.

She’d had great fun mocking the classical formality of the earlier poem.

It began with child-abuse, she wrote, with the God of Winter’s chilly embrace giving the Fair Infant the cough that killed her. And it ended with an attempt at consolation so naff it was almost comic.

Think what a present thou to God hast sent.

Any mother finding comfort in this, she’d written, must have been a touch disappointed it hadn’t been triplets.

Perhaps her pathetic confusion of the coffin and the wedding gift box was a late payback for this mockery.

The other poem, viewing death through a child’s eyes, she’d been much more taken with. In fact the Scot, Muir, had become one of her favourite poets, though now her love for him, sparked by ‘The Child Dying’, seemed peculiarly ill-omened.

Back then its opening lines-Unfriendly friendly universe, I pack your stars into my purse, And bid you, bid you so farewell- had struck her as being at the same time touchingly child-like and cosmically resonant. But she knew now she had been delighting in the skill of the poet rather than the power of his poem.

Then she had been admiring the resonance from outside; now it was in her being.

I did not know death was so strange.

Now she knew.

And she was sure that the Fair Infant’s mother, Milton ’s sister, must have known this too, must have felt the cold blast of that air blown from the far side of despair.

But did she wisely learn to curb her sorrows wild? Had she been able to draw warmth from her brother’s poem and wrap herself in its formality? Find support in those stiff folds of words?

Had she been able to sit in a church and bury her grief in these rituals of faith?

If she had, Gina Wolfe envied her. She’d found no such comforts to turn to.

At least she hadn’t fled. Unlike Alex. She had found the strength to stay, to endure, to rebuild.

But was it strength? For years her first thought on waking and her last thought before sleeping had been of lost Lucy. And then it wasn’t. Did a day pass when she didn’t think of her daughter? She couldn’t swear to it. That first time she’d given herself to Mick, she’d pendulum’d between joy and guilt. But later, when they holidayed together in Spain, she recalled the extremes as contentment and ecstasy with never a gap for a ghost to creep through.