Dying Fall

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 theinsistence 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. Afriend 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