‘Where The Snow Lay Dinted’ 
REGINALD HILL

OFFICER: Chief Superintendent Andrew Dalziel 
FORCE: Yorkshire CID 
TIME: 1993

CASES: ‘A Clubbable Woman’ (1970), ‘An April Shroud’ (1975), ‘Deadheads’ (1983), ‘Child’s Play’ (1987), ‘Under World’ (1989) etc.

PROFILE: Fat, coarse Chief Superintendent Andy Dalziel (pronounced ‘Dee-ell’) is inseparable from his thin, intellectual right-hand man, Detective Inspector Peter Pascoe, which has caused some admirers of their exploits to refer to them as the ‘Laurel and Hardy of detection’. The label is made doubly apt by the opening sentence spoken by Dalziel to Pascoe in ‘Under World’ where he exclaims, ‘Another fine mess you’ve got me into!’ Described as having a broad slab of a face, Dalziel is blunt and vulgar, a lifetime policeman now in late middle age who brings an earthy common sense to every case he tackles. Pascoe, on the other hand, is a former sociology graduate who has advanced quickly in the force by way of sergeant to inspector, although along the way has lost quite a few of his liberal attitudes and illusions. Despite their obvious differences, the pair complement each other quite well and through triumph and adversity have come to respect one another. Dalziel does, though, like to try and score points off his younger aide, and the pair have a habit of finding themselves in situations which demand a sense of humour. Black comedy, in fact, is an essential ingredient in many of their cases, and critic Joanne Hayne has observed that their stories ‘combine something of the bawdiness of Joyce Porter’s Inspector Dover books’.

CREATOR: Reginald Hill (b. 1936) is a North Countryman who was previously a schoolteacher in Essex and an English lecturer in Yorkshire before making his mark as an innovative voice in crime fiction, where his success enabled him to devote himself fulltime to writing. He initially wrote a number of books under different pen names and in different genres, before achieving international recognition with the Dalziel and Pascoe series and winning the Gold Dagger Award for best crime novel of the year from the Crime Writers’ Association, and also their Carrier Diamond Dagger for his outstanding contribution to the genre. Hill has also been described by H. R. F. Keating as ‘one of the most consistently interesting crime writers of his generation’, although he himself likes to keep a low profile and lives quietly in Cumbria with, he says, ‘my cats and my conscience’. The books about the brash head of Yorkshire CID and his high-flier assistant, with their layers of plot, character, humour and drama, have inspired two television series: the first rather ill-advisedly featuring the comedians Hale and Pace, but subsequently with great success starring Warren Clarke as Dalziel and Colin Buchanan as Pascoe. ‘Where The Snow Lay Dinted’ is making its first anthology appearance here, and in it a very hungover Chief Superintendent finds himself unexpectedly caught up in a most baffling case of disappearance.

THE STORY:

Dalziel awoke. He knew nothing, remembered nothing, and felt neither the desire nor the will to activate cognition.
He lay unmoving and might have so continued for an indefinite period had not a physical sensation finally forced itself upon his embryonic consciousness.
His bollocks were cold.
Time to make contact with the waking world. Nothing rash, minimum risk. He opened his left eye just sufficiently to admit light in the smallest measure known to man, which is a single Scotch in an English pub.
Jesus wept!
Light poured in, white and blinding as if someone had indeed poured n glass of whisky on to his eyeball. He squeezed the eyelid shut and lay still till the dancing white patina had faded from his retina.
Sight no good, so try the other senses...
Touch... cold, he’d already established that...
Sound... voices, gently murmuring...
Smell... antiseptic...
Taste... blood!
Oh God, I’m being operated on and the anaesthetic hasn’t took!
‘Nobody move!’ he bellowed, sitting bolt upright and opening both eyes wide.
In a huge dressing-table mirror he saw a naked fat man with a split lip sitting up in a four-poster bed. On a bedside table stood a half-empty bottle of whisky and a half-full bottle of TCP. Through a tall open window drifted a chilling draught, a blinding white light, and a murmur of voices.
He rolled off the bed on to the floor, landing on a spoor of damp clothes which ran from the doorway to the bedside. After a while he pushed himself to his knees. When his head didn’t fall off, he rose fully upright, took three uncertain steps towards the window and, catching hold of the pelmet to maintain verticality, he looked out. And knew at last where, and when, and why he was.
He was in the Hirtledale Arms Hotel on the Yorkshire Moors, it was Boxing Day morning, and it had snowed hard during the night.
It was a scene to touch even the done-over heart of a hungover cop. The sky was delft blue and the still-low rays of the morning sun were gilding the horizoned hills, lending the curves and hollows the sensuous quality of female limbs in repose. Where the foothills gave way to pastureland, the varicosed lines formed by drystone walls were all that marked one field from another. Small trees and bushes sagged beneath the weight of their temporary blossom, while beech and oak and elm stood upright as judges in their wigs of white. About a mile away, the small village of Hirtledale had all but vanished under the sealing snow, but nearer still the fairytale turrets of Hirtledale Castle floated like something imagined by Walt Disney over the icing-sugared battlements.
Dalziel let his gaze drift down to the square of perfect lawn which was the pride and joy of Giles Hartley-Pulman, the hotel’s owner. At its centre stood a bronze statue of little St Agnes clutching a lamb, saved from dereliction in Rome (according to the hotel brochure) by a nineteenth-century Lord Hirtledale, and planted here when the hotel building had still been the castle’s dower house.
The perfect lawn was now of course a blanket of perfect white, and this seemed to be the focus of attention of the several guests standing on the terrace immediately below Dalziel’s window and whose soft conversation he had mistaken for the blasé chit-chat of heartless surgeons.
So what was so interesting? wondered Dalziel.
He returned his attention to the lawn and as his eyes adjusted to the dazzling light, he saw that its surface was not perfect after all.
From the feet of the statue ran a set of small animal hoofprints. The trail swung in a wide circle round the lawn, though always staying well clear of its edges, before returning to the base of the statue.
‘Bugger me,’ said Andy Dalziel.
His exclamation drew the attention of the watchers below to his presence. They looked up at him with expressions ranging from the amused to the amazed. Among them, he spotted Peter and Ellie Pascoe, who maintained the neutral faces of people who’d seen it all before. If so, they were seeing it all again, for it suddenly occurred to Dalziel that he was stark naked.
Time for retreat. Any road, miracles shouldn’t be taken on an empty stomach.
He belched gently, gave a little wave, and called, ‘See you at breakfast, I’m fair clemmed.’
As he showered and shaved, memory struggled back into his mind like the sea up a long shallow beach.
At low tide level, things were pretty clear. This time last week, he’d had no plans for Christmas and didn’t give a toss. Then Peter Pascoe had let slip that he was planning to spend the break at the Hirtledale Arms, and suddenly Dalziel realised how much he’d been relying on the usual Boxing Day invitation to lunch with the Pascoes.
He must have let it show. Or perhaps Pascoe just felt guilty, because he’d started explaining.
‘Not my cup of tea, really, but Ellie’s mum, well, you know she’s not long widowed and she needs a change of scene, and it takes the pressure off Ellie...’ Then, with the expansive generosity of one who knew the hotel had long been booked solid, he’d added, ‘Look, why not join us? We’d all love to see you there.’
And God, who is a Yorkshireman, had grinned, nipped a guest in the appendix and made sure news of the cancellation reached the hotel five minutes before Dalziel rang.
When he heard the price quoted by Giles Hartley-Pulman (who immediately in Dalziel-speak became Giles Partly-Human), his Scottish/Yorkshire blood curdled. Then he’d asked himself, ‘What are you saving for? A cashmere winding sheet and a platinum coffin?’ and booked. His reward had been the discovery that one of the things the inclusive price included was wine and liqueurs with Christmas dinner. Somewhere between the turkey and the truffles he had a vague recollection of calculating that profligacy had turned into profit. And he thought he recalled starting on the liqueurs in alphabetical order, but now they sat like an oil slick on the tide of memory, turning it sluggish and opaque well short of high water. What he needed was some mental menstruum and he knew just the formula. First take a precise inch of the Macallan in a tooth glass and toss it straight down to avoid contact with your cut lip. Then add half a pound of streaky bacon, a black pudding, several eggs and a potato scone, and chew gently.
He descended to the dining-room to complete the cure.
As he entered, a voice cried. ‘Andy, good morning. Now the Great Detective is among us, the riddle of the perambulating statue will be solved in a trice. Or would you rather we all assembled in the library later?’
This was Freddie Gilmour, a young man who was something in the City and had been Christmassing at Hirtledale for many years with half a dozen like-mindless friends. They had adopted Dalziel in a way which Peter Pascoe found offensively patronising. But DalziePs huge frame was lead lined, and this imperviousness, plus his prodigious feats of consumerism, had brought these devout free-marketeers to a wondering respect.
‘Nay, Fred,’ he said. ‘I only solve real mysteries. Like if you put your hand in your pocket and found some of your own money there.’
Followed by a gust of laughter, he crossed the room and joined the Pascoes.
‘Morning,’ he said.
He couldn’t have behaved too badly last night because both Ellie and her mother gave him a welcoming smile, though the former began to fade as little Rosie Pascoe piped up eagerly, ‘Uncle Andy, did you see? The statue went for a walk last night and took her little lamb with her.’
‘I don’t think so, dear,’ said her mother who, though having nothing against flights of imagination, was a natural enemy of anything smacking of superstitious credulity. ‘I’m sure there’s some other explanation.’
‘No, they went for a walk, you can see the footprints in the snow, isn’t that right, Uncle Andy? Because anything can happen at Christmas.’
Dalziel looked from mother to daughter. The same dark, serious, unblinking gaze, the same expression of expectant certitude.
Pascoe was observing him with a faint grin which said, ‘Get out of this one!’
‘Aye. Owt can. That doesn’t say it will, but.’
Good try, but not good enough.
‘But this has happened, hasn’t it?’ insisted the girl. ‘You can see the prints.’
‘That’s right,’ agreed the Fat Man. ‘What I can’t see is anyone to serve me breakfast.’
‘I get the impression there’s some sort of crisis in the kitchen,’ said Pascoe.
‘If there’s not, there soon will be,’ said Dalziel, glad of an excuse to escape Ellie’s threatening glare.
He rose, went to the kitchen door, pushed it open and bellowed, ‘Shop!’
Giles Hartley-Pulman, deep in confabulation with his chef and three young waitresses, jumped six inches in the air. His lean ascetic face was creased with concern, but oddly when he identified the source of the sound, it relaxed ever so slightly.
There had been a moment last night when he would gladly have given half his kingdom for the privilege of never seeing Dalziel again. This had been when he bravely but foolishly attempted to slow if not stem the Fat Man’s consumption of claret. To the applause of the other guests, Dalziel had flourished the menu, stabbing with a huge finger at the words ‘Wine and Liqueurs, ad lib’, and saying, ‘Here in Yorkshire we’ve got a word for a man who’s not good as his word! We’ll try another bottle of the ‘eighty-three.’
A good hotelier knows when to withdraw. He also knows how to get even if the chance offers, and now Hartley-Pulman advanced saying, ‘Superintendent Dalziel, thank heaven. There’s been a burglary. I was about to phone the police but of course with you on the spot, it seems a shame to drag someone out in these conditions... and I should hate for the Press to get involved, asking impertinent questions about my guests...’
Meaning, I’d rather not have uniformed plods all over the place, but if I do, I’ll make sure the world knows you were pissed the far side of oblivion last night!
Dalziel considered. Hirtledale was on the northernmost fringe of his mid-Yorkshire patch, so he certainly had jurisdiction, if he cared to assert it. On the other hand, he didn’t care for Partly-Human imagining he could threaten him.
Postponing decision, he said, ‘What’s been stolen?’
‘Well,’ said Hartley-Pulman, savouring the moment. ‘It’s mainly... your breakfast.’
And in the dining-room conversation ceased as a great cry of pain and loss exploded out of the kitchen.
Five minutes later, Peter Pascoe was summoned to join his boss. It didn’t take long to put him in the picture.
‘Partly-Human’s making a list,’ Dalziel concluded. ‘You talk to the staff, lad. Use your boyish charm.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Pascoe, looking unhappily at the chef who was breaking a bowlful of eggs into a pan. He didn’t want to be involved in this, but if he was... ‘Sir, shouldn’t we seal the kitchen in case Forensic...’
‘Stuff Forensic,’ said Dalziel. ‘There’s nowt left but eggs and I need to keep me strength up.’
Sighing, Pascoe went in search of the waitresses.
Fifteen minutes later he returned to find Dalziel wiping the pattern off a plate with a slice of bread.
‘You’ve got that aren’t-I-clever look,’ said the Fat Man.
‘We’ve got a name,’ said Pascoe. ‘Remember little Billy Bream?’
‘In the frame for the Millhouse break-in, but CPS got their knickers in a twist. Still, it gave him a scare and he dropped out of sight.’
‘Hirtledale was where he dropped to. His old gran lives there. And Milly Staines, the waitress with the squint, she reckons she saw him hanging around here last night.’
‘Grand. Owt else?’
‘Maybe. Patty Strang, the pretty blonde, says she glanced out of her window just as the snow was starting and saw someone down the drive. No description except it was too big for little Billy and moving very slowly.’
‘Even Billy ‘ud move slow carrying this lot,’ said Dalziel, producing a list.
Pascoe whistled. As well as twelve pounds of sausage, fifteen pounds of bacon, forty kidneys, thirty kippers, twenty-five black puddings and a kilo of salt, a dozen bottles of champagne had gone.
‘One thing’s certain, he must have left some tracks.’
‘Let’s take a look,’ said Dalziel.
Close to the building the snow was already churned up, but a few yards down the drive they spotted two lines of footprints, one approaching, one moving away.
‘How’s your tracking, Pocahontas?’ said Dalziel. ‘Get your wellies and let’s see where these lead us.’
Before they left Pascoe had a quick word with Ellie, who rolled her eyes in not altogether mock rage and said, ‘Trouble follows the fat bastard but I don’t see that’s any reason why you should.’
‘We’re just going to look at the tracks in the snow,’ protested Pascoe.
‘Yeah? With a bit of luck he might catch pneumonia. If he does, my sympathy’s with the bacilli!’
Freddie and the Free-marketeers must have been earwigging on this exchange for, as Pascoe joined Dalziel outside the kitchen, they appeared in the doorway and struck up a rousing chorus of ‘Good King Wenceslas’.
‘Twits,’ muttered Pascoe. ‘Wouldn’t surprise me if they had something to do with this.’
‘Wouldn’t displease you, you mean,’ said Dalziel, acknowledging the carollers with a friendly two-fingered wave. ‘Where’s your festive spirit, lad?’ And joining in their song at the line ‘Mark my footsteps good, my page’, he strode off up the drive.
As Pascoe floundered behind, already feeling the cold strike through his soles, the carol’s words fell with heavy irony on his tingling ears. ‘Heat was in the very sod That the saint had printed’. No chance! You needed a saint for that and all he’d got was the very sod!
Where the drive joined the road, the prints turned towards the village and were joined by another outward set.
‘Accomplice,’ guessed Dalziel. ‘Stayed here to keep watch.’
‘Or someone who’d set out before the snow started laying,’ Pascoe contradicted sourly.
But as they walked on and he began to warm up, the enchanted silence of the snow began to work its magic on his mood. This was what Christmas was all about: not the gluttonous consumerism of the telly ads but a brief interval in which all the filth and flaws of human existence were cloaked in a mantle of purest white.
They were approaching the gothic archway marking the entrance to the castle estate. They heard the sound of a hunting horn and a merry chatter of distant voices.
‘Must be the Boxing Day meet,’ said Dalziel. ‘I could just sup a stirrup cup. Come on!’
He hurried forward, clearly with every intention of turning in to the castle grounds and inserting himself among the huntsmen. But his haste was almost his undoing for as he reached the gate, there was a drumming of hoofs mingled with shouts and laughter, and next moment a posse of red-coated riders erupted in front of them and galloped across the road into a wood. Pascoe, still in his master’s steps, was protected from the worst of the spume of slush thrown up behind them, but Dalziel took the full brunt.
‘Fuck me,’ he said coming to a halt. ‘Rigid!’
He looked, thought Pascoe, like a snowman on a Christmas card, lacking only the carrot nose and old pipe to complete the picture. It was a thought he kept to himself.
Another horseman came through the archway, moving at a more decorous pace. This was a much older man, grey hair showing beneath his black cap. He came to a halt in front of Dalziel and examined him for a moment. What might have been a glint of amusement touched his bright blue eyes but didn’t extend to his narrow patrician face as he said courteously, ‘Sorry about that. Impetuous youth. I’ll speak to them.’
‘Aye, but will the buggers listen?’ said Dalziel brushing the snow away.
‘Eventually, once they’ve ridden off all their festive excesses. No excuse, of course, but if we recall our own younger days and the tricks we got up to, perhaps we can forgive.’
This appeal seemed to strike a chord in Dalziel who said, ‘Aye, well, I’ll not die of a bit of snow. Daresay some on ‘em enjoyed themselves so much last night, they didn’t even get to bed.’
‘They were certainly still carousing when I went up,’ said the horseman. ‘I’d better get after them before they find a frozen pond to ride across. Again my apologies. And Merry Christmas to you both.’
He touched his riding crop to his cap and cantered On.
‘Know who that was?’ said Dalziel. ‘Lord Hirtledale himself.’
‘Well, roll on the revolution,’ said Pascoe. ‘Never thought you were a forelock-tugger, sir.’
‘Long time since I had one of those,’ said Dalziel equably. ‘Thought you’d have been all for his lordship. Doesn’t he chair that Bosnian relief gang your missus collects for? Cost me a fiver last time she rattled her can!’
‘I don’t see how that entitles him to prance around the countryside, slaughtering foxes.’
‘Nay, lad, you’d best put that one to the Pope next time you write. Too deep for me. I just hunt villains. Tally ho!’
They had no difficulty in refinding the trail beyond the hoofprints, but when they reached the cobbles of the village High Street, it vanished completely.
‘What now?’ asked Pascoe. 
Dalziel didn’t answer straight away but thrust his great head forward and moved it slowly this way and that, like an old bear checking out the scents of the forest on waking from hibernation.
Then showing his teeth in a hungry smile, he said, ‘I reckon I’ll follow my nose up here. You sniff around further along.’
He vanished down the side of a tiny grey cottage, leaving Pascoe to continue up the street, still scanning the trodden snow in search of the vanished spoor. But the combination of cobbled surface and the fact that people had clearly been out and about in the village made it an impossible task. Only on the doorsteps of some of the cottages fronting the street did the snow lay even enough to take a good print, and all you got here were the perfect circles left by milk bottles.
He turned to cross the street to see if he had any better luck on the other side. And halted abruptly as a puzzling thought came into his mind.
Surely even out here in the country where some trace of old-fashioned standards of service still remained, there was unlikely to be a milk delivery on Boxing Day?
Behind him a door opened. Something hard and cylindrical rammed into his spine making him squeak with pain. And a harsh Yorkshire voice grated, ‘Stand still, mister, and state thy business. Now!’
Dalziel meanwhile was pushing open a kitchen door, his nostrils flaring wide.
He found himself looking into the surprised eyes of a slightly built young man sitting at a scarred oak table, topping up a pint pot with Veuve Clicquot. In front of him was a huge plate piled high with the delicious freight of the full English breakfast.
‘Morning, Billy,’ said the Fat Man genially. ‘Cansta spare a sausage?’
Ten minutes later he emerged, chewing pensively. Looking down the street he spotted Peter Pascoe sitting on the wall running round the churchyard, cradling a large plastic carrier bag.
‘You look knackered,’ said Dalziel as he approached. ‘Should take more exercise.’
‘Fails my heart I know not how,’ said Pascoe. ‘What are you eating?’
‘Kidney. Billy Bream’s back there stuffing his face and washing it all down with bubbly.’
‘So why’s he not here in handcuffs?’ asked Pascoe without much passion.
‘He says he found it all on his gran’s doorstep this morning when he got back from the hotel.’
‘And what had he been doing at the hotel that kept him all night?’
‘You recall yon bonny waitress, Patty Strang? That’s what he says he was doing at the hotel that kept him all night.’
‘And you believe him?’
‘Well, she looks a healthy young animal,’ said Dalziel. ‘Still, I admit that normally I’d have had him in for questioning so quick he’d have got indigestion. But when I opened my mouth to give him the caution, I found myself putting another sausage in. Peter, I think maybe I took a knock on the head last night and it’s left me concussed. I’ve started imagining some very strange things. Tell me to get a grip on myself, then pop back in there and arrest Billy Bream, and I’ll give you a big wet kiss.’
Pascoe smiled wanly and said, ‘Sorry, sir, not even for such an inducement. You see, I’ve been having a strange encounter of my own too. With Miss Drusilla Earnshaw of this parish, age eighty-three, vegetarian and devout Methodist, who poked her walking stick in my back and didn’t take it away till she’d seen my warrant and my library card. Then she told me a very strange story indeed.’
‘I don’t think I want to hear it,’ said Dalziel.
‘I don’t imagine you do,’ said Pascoe. ‘Seems she was woken by a noise outside her cottage not long after midnight. She got up, took hold of her stick and flung open her front door. A man was crouching on the step.’
‘Description?’ said Dalziel desperately.
‘Her eyes are bad. Big, broad and brutish, is the best she can do. But her hearing’s fine. To her question, “Who are you?” he replied, “Never fret yourself, luv. It’s only Good King Wenceslas.” Upon which, she hit him in the mouth with her stick and slammed the door. When she opened it again this morning, she found these on her step.’
He opened the carrier to reveal a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, five sausages and a kipper. Dalziel looked at them, shivered, and touched his wounded lip as the tide of memory finally broke clear of the slick of liqueurs and ran clear and high, and oh, so very cold.
He let his gaze rise to meet Pascoe’s. And spoke.
‘Well, here it is at last, lad. Your big moment. Ring the Chief Constable, alert the Home Office, call out the SAS, and get yourself put in charge of a nationwide hunt for a well-built man with a cut lip and a bedroom floor covered with damp clothes who might be staying at the Hirtledale Arms Hotel. Could be the making of you.’
‘No thanks,’ said Pascoe standing upright with sudden decision. ‘I’m made already, I reckon. But here’s what I do suggest. You go back to the hotel, get in your car, and head for town. I’ll say you’ve been called away on an urgent case. But first I’ll go round the village and collect as much of the stuff as I can find. I’ll tell Partly-Human that we lost the trail but are ninety per cent sure it was some local lads, having a bit of a joke . . .’
Dalziel was shaking his head.
‘Nay, lad. Good try but it won’t work. Local lads means yobs and poachers to the likes of Partly-Human. Vermin. He really would want to call in the SAS to flush ‘em out.’
‘So what do you suggest?’ demanded Pascoe, exasperated.
‘Well, first off, I’m not going to take advantage of your loyalty to get me off the hook. But I’m touched, lad. Deeply touched.’
His voice broke and he gave a choking cough.
‘Please,’ said Pascoe. ‘No need...’
‘Nay, I’m right. Bit of kidney got stuck, that’s all. No, there are times when a man’s got to face up to consequences. What is it I’m always telling you?’
Pascoe thought. None of the things that Dalziel was always telling him, such as he should eat more red meat, or that a university degree was what any convict could get between jerking off and sewing mailbags, seemed to apply.
‘Can’t think, sir,’ he said. ‘What is it you’re always telling me?’
‘Speak the truth and the truth will set you free!’
Pascoe couldn’t believe his ears.
‘You’ve never told me that in your life!’ he cried. ‘Besides, in this instance, it’s rubbish. The truth will lock you up. You’ve got too many enemies, starting with Partly-Human...’
‘Peter, you always think the worst of people,’ remonstrated Dalziel. ‘There’s good in everyone, especially this time of year. Remember the carol.’
Seeking the tune, he began to intone, ‘”Wherefore Christian men be sure, Wealth or rank possessing...”’
‘You won’t have any rank,’ insisted Pascoe. ‘And precious little wealth. Andy, it’s your career...’
But Dalziel was away down the street, the words now bursting out in a thunderous baritone.
‘”Ye who now do bless the poor Shall yourselves find blessing!”’

Fifteen minutes after his return, he emerged from Hartley-Pulman’s office looking solemn. Pascoe, waiting anxiously, cried, ‘What did he say? What did you tell him?’
‘I told him the truth,’ said the Fat Man. ‘And it’s OK, lad. Like the decent chap he is, he listened, he understood, he forgave and now he’s starting to forget. And I’m off down to the kitchen. All this confessing don’t half make you hungry! And it’s a shame to waste yon stuff you rescued from the old lady.’
He walked away smiling. He loved Pascoe dearly, but it did his heart good to see those intelligent sensitive features gobsmacked from time to time. Not that he hadn’t been touched by the lad’s willingness to cover up for him. But why tell lies when the truth was good enough?
And in his dealing with Partly-Human he’d spoken nowt but gospel truth.
Of course what most folk forget is, there are four versions of the Gospel.
He’d said, man to man, ‘I followed them tracks as far as the castle where I came across Lord Hirtledale and some of his young guests. High spirited lads, but no harm in them. His Lordship and I spoke briefly-man with a mind like that doesn’t need things spelt out-and he apologised sincerely for any inconvenience his young friends may have caused. He said... but I reckon a chap like you doesn’t need things spelt out either. Suffice to say, if you can see your way to keeping this business under your bonnet, you’d be highly obligating someone not a million miles away. No names, no pack drill. In fact the only name you need bother with is mine, ‘cos that’s the one that’ll be on the cheque covering your losses. And I’ll tell you, I’ll be proud to sign it. What do you say? Draw a line under this lot? It won’t be forgotten, I promise.’
Partly-Human was looking at him as if the Michelin guide had just awarded him three stars.
‘Well, naturally, in those circumstances, I’m only too happy to oblige. And I must say I’m pleasurably surprised by your part in this, Superintendent.’
‘Andy,’ said Dalziel. ‘Well, it ‘ud be a sad world if them as are born to rule it couldn’t sow a few wild oats. Tell you what, I bet his lordship ‘ud be really chuffed if half the damages went to his Bosnian relief fund, eh, Giles?’
And Partly-Human to his credit hardly blanched as he said, ‘I think that’s a lovely idea, Andy.’

Driving home the next day, Dalziel grinned at the memory. All right, it had cost him, but he’d really enjoyed his break.
Best of all, though, had been the delight on Rosie’s face, not to mention the dismay on her mother’s, as they’d all stood on the terrace together before they left and examined the mysterious footprints still visible on the lawn.
‘You see, the statue did walk, mum,’ insisted the little girl. ‘Because it’s Christmas. Isn’t that right, Uncle Andy?’
‘That’s right,’ said Dalziel winking broadly at Ellie. ‘Everyone gets what they want at Christmas. That’s what it’s all about.’
Everyone who had an Uncle Andy anyway. It was funny, all these clever buggers like Pascoe, and not one of them had thought to speculate why the kitchen thief should have included a kilo of salt in his swag. But the salt had been the first and principal object of the raid. The Wenceslas idea had been an afterthought.
He’d trotted round the still snow-free lawn, marking out the trail of footsteps and hoofprints in salt. On the rest of the frost-hard surface, the big flakes had soon started to settle but for a while those that hit the salt melted away. And when the white coverlet was complete, the spoor of prints remained to baffle the adults and delight the little girl.
Andrew Dalziel threw back his head and laughed long and loud, and God, who is a Yorkshireman, looked fondly down on him and laughed too.

Rosie Pascoe, drowsy by her gran’s side in the back of her dad’s car, was also looking back on Christmas with much pleasure. Of course, any time spent in the close company of adults was bound to have its baffling elements. Like did her mum and dad really like Uncle Andy or not? She liked him, because he was funny, and kind, and never worried about being rude. Also, because he was a bit sad sometimes.
She recalled Christmas night when she couldn’t get to sleep because of all the day’s excitements. Finally she’d got up and looked out of the window. There on the lawn, she’d seen him, Uncle Andy, lumbering around like an old dancing bear with the snowflakes whirling like moths round his great grey head. He’d been pouring something on to the grass, she didn’t know what. But she didn’t doubt next morning that it had something to do with the statue’s supposed footprints.
Now, why Uncle Andy should want people to think the statue had walked, she didn’t know. It was silly really. Statues couldn’t walk, everyone knew that. But it was what he wanted, and that was enough for her to give him her total uncritical support.
Everyone gets what they want at Christmas... even Uncle Andy...
She fell asleep with her head on her grandmother’s lap.