Dying Fall

really cared about Dan. I was going to ask – were any of them at his funeral?’
    Caz pauses, pine nuts in hand. ‘I think so. There was a man and a blonde woman. She seemed very upset. I remember wondering if she was a girlfriend. She didn’t come back to the hotel with the rest of us. I wondered if she didn’t want to meet Dan’s ex-wife.’
    Guy and Elaine, thinks Ruth. Or Sam and Elaine. Was Elaine Dan’s girlfriend? It’s possible, she is glamorous enough in a hard-faced way. That might explain her attitude towards Ruth and her rather brittle behaviour at the party. At any rate, she at least had been sad at the funeral. And what about Guy? Where does he fit in? He seemed very close to Elaine, rushing over to comfort herwhen she was crying. Is he her boyfriend or just a devoted follower?
    ‘What about the man? What was he like?’
    ‘Medium height. Sandy hair. He seemed nice.’
    Sam Elliot. So neither Guy nor Clayton Henry had been at Dan’s funeral. So much for the whole department being heartbroken. And despite Clayton’s claim that Dan ‘didn’t have an enemy in the world’, the police think that someone murdered him. She decides not to say any of this to Caz.
    ‘That’s looks delicious,’ she says. ‘Can I do anything to help?’
    *
    Sandy McLeod and Harry Nelson are together again. They are Starsky and Hutch, Bodie and Doyle, the Sweeney, the good-looking ones from
The Bill
. Or rather, they are two middle-aged men driving too fast in a Ford Mondeo. When Sandy asked Nelson if he’d like to go with him to interview Professor Henry from the university, Nelson had jumped at the chance. He wanted to find out what happened to Ruth’s friend and he liked the thought of spending some time with Sandy, but more than anything, he was desperate to get away from Maureen.
    ‘Asking you to work in your holiday,’ said Maureen. ‘What a cheek.’
    ‘All part of the job,’ said Nelson, waiting by the door so that he could be away as soon as Sandy drew up outside. The last thing he wanted was for Maureen to lure him in for a cup of tea.
    ‘You’ll miss our trip to the Trough of Bowland.’
    ‘I know. I’m that disappointed.’
    Michelle looked sceptically at her husband. She had heard him on the phone to Sandy and the word ‘disappointed’ hadn’t come up once.
    Now Sandy and Nelson are bowling along the A583 to Kirkham. Nelson approves of Sandy’s driving style. So many young PCs these days have done advanced driving courses and drive like old ladies in hats but Sandy has a fine disregard for speed limits. ‘There’s not a traffic cop in the area would dare pull me in,’ he boasts. Nelson would like to say the same but he’s afraid that the uniforms (like the WPCs) are not as amenable in Norfolk. He is starting to wish that he’d stayed in Blackpool and become a fully fledged rule-breaking chauvinist. The move south has emasculated him.
    ‘Who’s this bloke we’re going to see?’ he asks as they bounce merrily over a mini roundabout.
    ‘Head of the history department at the university,’ says Sandy. ‘He was Dan Golding’s boss. He ought to know if there was any funny business going on. Mind you, most of these academic types are on a bloody different planet half the time.’
    Nelson thinks of Ruth Galloway, who is definitely an ‘academic type’. Is she on a different planet? It’s true that sometimes their priorities don’t coincide – Ruth has, for example, signed Katie up with a library but hasn’t yet even thought about schools – but, for the most part, Ruth is definitely of this world. What’s more annoying, she’scurrently in
his
part of the world. What the hell is she doing in Lytham? She knows that Dan’s death is being treated as suspicious, how dare she bring Katie anywhere near a murder enquiry? He fumes silently, watching the countryside fly past.
    The windmill takes them both by surprise.
    ‘Bloody hell,’ says Sandy, as they screech to a halt on the gravelled drive. ‘Does he actually live in this thing?’
    ‘It’s like something from a crazy golf course,’ says Nelson, who played this particular game yesterday with his older sister Grainne and her family.
    ‘Must be worth a pretty packet,’ says Sandy. ‘How much do these lecturers earn?’
    ‘Not much,’ says Nelson, thinking of Ruth and her poky cottage on the edge of nowhere. ‘He must be a closet pop star or something.’
    But Clayton Henry, who comes bustling bare-footed across