7

The Coach and Horses, about a hundred yards along the main road, had changed over the years, Banks noticed, but not as much as some pubs. The large public bar had always housed a diverse group, mixed generations drinking there together, and today it was no different, though the racial mix had changed. Now, among the white faces, there were Pakistanis and Sikhs, and, according to Arthur Banks, a group of Kosovan asylum-seekers, who lived on the estate, also drank there.

Noisy machines with flashing lights had replaced the old bar-billiards area, the scarred wooden benches had been replaced with padded ones, perhaps the wallpaper had been redone and the light fixtures modernized, but that was about all. The brewery had forked out for this minor facelift some time in the eighties, Banks’s father had told him, hoping to pull in a younger, freer-spending crowd. But it didn’t take. The people who drank at the Coach and Horses had, for the most part, been drinking there most of their lives. And their fathers before them. Banks had drunk his first legal pint here with his father on his eighteenth birthday, though he had been knocking them back with his mates at the Wheatsheaf, about a mile away, since he was sixteen. The last time he had been in the Coach and Horses, he had played one of the earliest pub video games, that silly machine where you bounced the tennis ball back and forth across a green phosphorous screen.

Though there were few young people to be seen there, the Coach and Horses still managed to be a warm and lively place, Banks noticed as he walked in with his father just after eight o’clock that night, his mother’s steamed pudding and custard–the proper food he was supposed to be eating–still weighing heavy in his stomach. His father had managed the walk without too much puffing and wheezing, which he put down to having stopped smoking two years ago. Banks had tapped his own jacket pocket rather guiltily for his cigarettes as they went out of the door.

This was Arthur Banks’s local. He had been coming here almost every day for forty years, and so had his cronies, Harry Finnegan, Jock McFall and Norman Grenfell, Dave’s father. Here, Arthur was respected. Here, he could escape the clutches of his ailments and the shame of his redundancy, at least for an hour or two, as he drank, laughed, and told lies with the men with whom he felt most comfortable. For the Coach and Horses was, by and large, a men’s pub, despite the occasional couple and groups of women dropping by after work. When Arthur took Ida out for a drink, as he did on Fridays, they went to the Duck and Drake or the Duke of Wellington, where Ida Banks caught up on the local gossip and they took part in trivia quizzes and laughed at people making fools of themselves in the karaoke sessions.

But there was none of that at the Coach and Horses, and the piped sixties pop music was turned down low enough so that old men could hear each other talk. At the moment, the Kinks were singing “Waterloo Sunset,” one of Banks’s favourites. After Banks and his father had settled themselves at the table, pints in front of them, and with introductions made, Arthur Banks first lamented Jock McFall’s absence due to hospitalization for a prostate operation, then Norman Grenfell started the ball rolling.

“We were just saying, before you got here, Alan, what a terrible thing it is about the Marshall boy. I remember you and our David used to play with him.”

“Yes. How is Dave, by the way?”

“He’s doing fine,” said Norman. “He and Ellie still live in Dorchester. The kids have grown up now, of course.”

“They’re still together?” Ellie Hatcher was, Banks remembered, Dave’s first real girlfriend; they must have started going out together around 1968.

“Some couples stick it out,” muttered Arthur Banks.

Banks ignored the remark and asked Norman to pass on his regards to Dave next time they spoke. Unlike Jock and Harry, Banks remembered, both of whom had worked with Arthur at the sheet-metal factory, Norman had worked in a clothing shop on Midgate, where he could sometimes get his mates a discount on a duffel coat, a pair of jeans or Tuff shoes. Norman drank halves instead of pints and smoked a pipe, which made him different, almost genteel, compared to the rough factory workers. He also had a hobby–he read and collected everything to do with steam trains and had an entire room of his small house devoted to clockwork models–and that set him even further apart from the beer, sport and telly crowd. Yet Norman Grenfell had always been as much a part of the group as Jock or Harry or Arthur himself, though he didn’t share that ineffable bond that working men have, of having toiled under the same lousy conditions for the same lousy bosses and faced the same dangers day in, day out, for the same lousy pay. Maybe, Banks wondered, Graham had been a bit like that, too: set apart by his background, by his being a newcomer, by his London cool, yet still a part of the gang. The quiet one. The George Harrison of the group.

“Well,” Banks said, raising his glass. “Here’s to Graham. In the long run, I suppose it’s best they found him. At least his parents can lay his bones to rest now.”

“True enough,” said Harry.

“Amen,” said Norman.

“Didn’t Graham’s father used to drink here?” Banks asked.

Arthur Banks laughed. “He did. He was a rum customer, Bill Marshall, isn’t that right, Harry?”

“A rum customer, indeed. And a couple of bricks short of a full hod, too, if you ask me.”

They all laughed.

“In what way was he rum?” Banks asked.

Harry nudged Banks’s father. “Always the copper, your lad, hey?”

Arthur’s brow darkened. Banks knew damn well that his father had never approved of his choice of career, and that no matter how well he did, how successful he was, to his father he would always be a traitor to the working class, who traditionally feared and despised coppers. As far as Arthur Banks was concerned, his son was employed by the middle and upper classes to protect their interests and their property. Never mind that most coppers of Arthur’s own generation came from the working classes, unlike today, when many were middle-class university graduates and management types. The two of them had never resolved this problem, and Banks could see even now that his father was bothered by Harry Finnegan’s little dig.

“Graham was a friend of mine,” Banks went on quickly, to diffuse the tension. “I was just wondering, that’s all.”

“Is that why you’re down here?” Norman asked.

“Partly, yes.”

It was the same question Mrs. Marshall had asked him. Perhaps people assumed that because he was a policeman, and because he knew Graham, he would be assigned to this particular case. “I don’t know how much I can help,” Banks said, glancing sideways at his father, who was working on his beer. He had never told either of his parents about what had happened down by the river, and he wasn’t about to do so now. It might come out, of course, if his information led anywhere, and now he had an inkling of what the many witnesses who lied to avoid disclosing a shameful secret had to be anxious about. “It’s just that, well, I’ve wondered about Graham and what happened on and off over the years, and I just thought I ought to come and try to help, that’s all.”

“I can understand that,” said Norman, relighting his pipe. “I think it’s been a bit of a shock to the system for all of us, one way or another.”

“You were saying about Graham’s father, Dad?”

Arthur Banks glanced at his son. “Was I?”

“You said he was strange. I didn’t know him well. I never really talked to him.”

“Course not,” said Arthur. “You were just a kid.”

“That’s why I’m asking you.”

There was a pause, then Arthur Banks looked over at Harry Finnegan. “He was shifty, wouldn’t you say so, Harry?”

“He was indeed. Always an eye for a fiddle, and not above a bit of strong-arm stuff. I wouldn’t have trusted him as far as I could throw him. And he was a big talker, too.”

“What do you mean?” Banks asked.

“Well,” his father said. “You know the family came up from London?”

“Yes.”

“Bill Marshall worked as a bricklayer, and he was a good one, too, but when he’d had a drink or two he’d start letting things slip about some of his other activities in London.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“He was a fit bloke, Bill. Strong. Big hands, powerful upper body. Comes from carrying those hods around the building sites.”

“He used to get into fights?”

“You could say that.”

“What your Dad’s saying,” explained Harry, leaning forward, “is that Bill Marshall let slip he used to act as an enforcer for gangsters down the Smoke. Protection rackets, that sort of thing.”

The Smoke? Banks hadn’t heard that term for London in years. “He did?” Banks shook his head. It was hard to imagine the old man in the chair as having been some sort of gang enforcer, but it might help explain the fear Banks remembered feeling in his presence all those years ago, the threat of violence. “I’d never have–”

“How could you?” his father cut in. “Like I said, you were just a kid. You couldn’t understand things like that.”

The music had changed, Banks noticed. Herb Alpert and his bloody Tijuana Brass, just finishing, thank God. Banks had hated them back then and he hated them now. Next came the Bachelors, “Marie.” Mum-and-Dad music. “Did you tell the police?” he asked.

The men looked at one another, then Arthur looked back at Banks, his lip curling. “What do you think?”

“But he could–”

“Listen. Bill Marshall might have been a big talker, but he had nothing to do with his son’s disappearance.”

“How can you know that?”

Arthur Banks snorted. “You police. All the bloody same, you are. Just because a man might be a bit dodgy in one area, you’re ready to fit him up with anything.”

“I’ve never fitted anyone up in my life,” said Banks.

“What I’m saying is that Bill Marshall might have been a bit of a wild man, but he didn’t go around killing young lads, especially not his own son.”

“I didn’t say I thought he did it,” Banks said, noticing that the others were watching him and his father now, as if they were the evening’s entertainment.

“Then what did you mean?”

“Look, Dad,” Banks said, reaching for a cigarette. He had determined not to smoke in front of his father, mostly because of the old man’s health, but not smoking in the Coach and Horses was as pointless as swimming in the no-pissing section of a swimming pool, if such a section were ever to exist. “If there was any truth in what Bill Marshall said about his criminal background in London, then isn’t it possible that something he’d done there came back to haunt him?”

“But nobody hurt Bill.”

“Doesn’t matter, Dad. These people often have more devious ways of getting back at their enemies. Believe me. I’ve come across more than a few of them in my time. Did he ever mention any names?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean in London. The people he worked for. Did he ever mention any names?”

Harry Finnegan gave a nervous laugh. Arthur shot him a glance and he shut up. “As a matter of fact,” said Arthur, pausing dramatically, “he did.”

“Who?”

“The Twins. Reggie and Ronnie Kray.”

“Bloody hell!”

Arthur Banks’s eyes shone with triumph. “Now do you see why we just thought he had a big mouth on him?”

 

For the second time that day, Annie turned up at Swainsdale Hall, only this time she felt the butterflies in the pit of her stomach. People like Martin Armitage were difficult enough to deal with in the first place, and he wouldn’t like what she had to say. Still, she thought, for all his tough bluster, he hadn’t done much but kick a ball around most of his life. Robin was another matter. Annie sensed that she might feel relieved to have someone else to share her fears with, and that underneath her accommodating exterior and her air of vulnerability, there was a strong woman who was capable of standing up to her husband.

Josie answered the door, as usual, holding a barking Miata by the collar. Annie wanted to talk to Josie and her husband, Calvin, but they could wait. For the moment, the fewer people who knew what was going on, the better.

Robin and Martin were both out in the garden sitting at a wrought-iron table under a striped umbrella. It was a warm evening, and the back garden faced south, so there was plenty of honey-tinted sunlight and dark shadows cast by tree branches. Annie felt like reaching for her sketch pad. Beyond the high drystone wall that marked the property boundary, the daleside stretched up in a patchwork of uneven fields, green until the sere bareness of the higher slopes, where it rose more steeply to merge into the wild stretch of heather moorland that separated the dales.

Neither Martin nor Robin seemed to be enjoying the beautiful evening or the long, cool drinks that sat in front of them. Both seemed pale, tense and preoccupied, and the mobile perched on the table like an unexploded bomb.

“What are you doing here?” Martin Armitage said. “I told you Luke was on his way home and I’d be in touch when he got here.”

“I take it he’s not arrived yet?”

“No.”

“Heard from him again?”

“No.”

Annie sighed and sat down without being invited.

“I didn’t ask you to–”

Annie raised her hand to quiet Martin down. “Look,” she said, “there’s no point pissing about any more. I know what’s going on.”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“Come off it, Mr. Armitage. I followed you.”

“You did what?”

“I followed you. After I left this morning I waited in a lay-by and followed you to the shepherd’s shelter. What were you doing there?”

“None of your bloody business. Why, what are you going to do? Charge me with disobeying government regulations?”

“Let me tell you what you were doing, Mr. Armitage. You were leaving a briefcase full of money. Old bills. Tens and twenties for the most part. Around ten thousand pounds, at a guess, maybe fifteen.”

Armitage was red in the face. Still, Annie pressed on. “And now let me tell you what happened. They got in touch with you last night on your mobile, said they’d got Luke and you were to hand over the money. You told them you couldn’t lay your hands on that much cash until the banks were open, so they gave you until this morning to leave it at the pre-arranged drop.” Which means they know something about the area, Annie realized, or that they’ve been watching, scouting for some time. Maybe someone had noticed them. Strangers usually stood out around these parts, especially as the tourist numbers were down. “How am I doing so far?”

“You’ve got imagination, I’ll certainly give you that.”

“They said no police, which is why my arrival scared the living daylights out of you.”

“I’ve told you–”

“Martin.” Robin Armitage spoke for the first time, and though her voice was soft and kindly, it was authoritative enough to command her husband’s attention. “Can’t you see?” She went on. “She knows. I must admit that I, for one, feel rather relieved.”

“But he said–”

“They don’t know who I am,” said Annie. “And I’m pretty certain they didn’t see me around Mortsett this morning.”

“Pretty certain?”

Annie looked him in the eye. “I’d be a liar if I said I was a hundred per cent certain.” Birds in the trees filled in the silence that followed, and a light breeze ruffled Annie’s hair. She held Martin Armitage’s gaze until she saw it waver and finally wane into defeat. His shoulders slumped. Robin leaned over and put her arm around him. “It’s all right, darling,” she said. “The police will know what to do. They’ll be discreet.” Robin looked at Annie as she spoke, as if daring her to disagree. Annie didn’t. Martin ran the backs of his hands across his eyes and nodded.

“I’m sorry about what’s happened,” Annie said, “but Mrs. Armitage is right.”

“Robin. Please. As we’re involved in such an intimate matter, at least you can call me by my first name. My husband, too.”

“Okay. Robin. Look, I have to tell you that I’m not a negotiator. This isn’t my area of expertise. We have people specially trained to deal with kidnappers and their demands.”

“But he said no police,” Martin repeated. “He said if we brought in the police he’d kill Luke.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him I’d already reported Luke missing.”

“And what did he say to that?”

“He was quiet for a moment, as if he was thinking, like.”

“Or consulting with someone else?”

“He could have been, but I didn’t hear anyone. Anyway, when he came back on he said that was fine, but to make sure I told you Luke had rung and said that he was coming home. Which I did.”

“It was a man who made the call, then?”

“Yes.”

“What time?”

“About half past nine. Just before Robin rang you.”

“How much did he ask for?”

“Ten thousand.”

“Accent?”

“None, really.”

“He didn’t sound local?”

“He could’ve been, but he didn’t have a strong accent. Sort of bland.”

“And his voice?”

“What do you mean?”

“High or low? Husky, reedy, whatever?”

“Just ordinary. I’m sorry, I’m not good at this sort of thing, especially recognizing voices on the telephone.”

Annie favoured him with a smile. “Not many people are. Think about it, though. It could be important. If there’s anything at all you remember about the voice.”

“Yes. I’ll think about it.”

“Did he let you speak to Luke?”

“No.”

“Did you ask?”

“Yes, but he said Luke was being kept somewhere else.”

“And he called you on your mobile?”

“Yes.”

“Who knows the number?”

“Family. Close friends. Business colleagues. I suppose it would be easy enough to find out. Luke, of course. He has it programmed into the electronic phone book of his own mobile. At first, I thought it was him because his name was displayed when the call came.”

“So the kidnapper used Luke’s mobile to call you?”

“I suppose so. Why does it matter?”

“At least it tells us he’s in an area where there’s a signal. Or he was when he made the call. Also, if he’s used it at other times, we’ll be able to get information from the phone company. It might help us pinpoint him. Of course, it would be better if he left it switched on, but he’s not going to make things that easy for us.”

“Tell me,” said Robin. “In your experience, in how many cases do they…how many times do the victims…”

“I don’t have any statistics offhand,” Annie admitted. “But if it makes you feel any better, kidnappers are essentially businesspeople. They’re in it for the money, not to hurt anyone. There’s every chance that this will be resolved and that you’ll see Luke back here safe and sound.” Annie could feel her nose growing as she talked. Too much time had passed, she suspected, for a happy ending, though she hoped she was wrong. “In the meantime, while appearing to go along with his demands and not alarming him in any way, we want to make sure that in addition to getting Luke home safely we take every opportunity to discover the kidnapper’s identity and bring him to justice.”

“How can we help?’ asked Robin.

“You don’t have to do anything,” said Annie. “You’ve already played your part. Just leave the rest to us.”

“Maybe you’ve scared him off,” Martin said. “Luke should be back by now. It’s been hours.”

“Sometimes they wait a long time just to make sure nobody’s watching. He’s probably waiting till dark.”

“But you can’t be certain, can you?” Robin said.

“Nothing’s certain in this world, Mrs. Armitage.”

“Robin. I told you. Oh, how rude of me!” She got to her feet. “All this time and I haven’t offered you anything to drink.” She was wearing denim shorts, Annie noticed, cut high on her long, smooth legs. There weren’t many women who could get away with the bare midriff look at her age, either, Annie thought. She wouldn’t even think of it herself, though she was only thirty-four, but what she could see of Robin’s stomach looked flat and taut, with a ring of some sort glinting in her navel.

“No,” she said. “Really. I’m not stopping long.” There wasn’t much else Annie could do for Luke except wait, and she had promised herself a nice pint of bitter at the Black Sheep in Relton, where she could sit in peace and mull things over before calling it a day. “I just want to make certain that you’ll report any future communications, if there are any, straight to me. You’ve got the numbers where I can be reached?”

Both Martin and Robin nodded.

“And, of course, you’ll let me know the second Luke turns up.”

“We will,” said Robin. “I just hope and pray that he does come home soon.”

“Me too,” said Annie, getting up. “There’s one more thing that puzzles me.”

“What?” asked Robin.

“Last night, when you rang to tell me you’d heard from Luke, you said he would be back tonight.”

“That’s what he told Martin. The kidnapper. He said that if we left the money this morning, then Luke would be home unharmed by tonight.”

“And you knew that I wanted to see Luke as soon as he got back, to talk to him?”

“Yes.”

“So how were you going to explain everything?” asked Annie. “I’m curious.”

Robin looked over at her husband, who answered, “We were going to persuade Luke to tell you what we said happened in the first place, that he’d run away and phoned us the night before to say he was coming back.”

“Who thought of this?”

“The kidnapper suggested it.”

“Sounds like the perfect crime,” said Annie. “Only you two, Luke, and the kidnapper would ever know that it had been committed, and none of you would be likely to talk.”

Martin looked down at his drink.

“He would have done that?” Annie went on. “Luke would have lied to the police?”

“He would have done it for me,” said Robin.

Annie looked at her, nodded and left.

 

The Krays, Banks thought as he lay in his narrow bed that night. Reggie and Ronnie. He didn’t remember the exact dates, of course, but he had an idea that they were flying high in the mid-sixties, part of the swinging London scene, mixing with celebrities, pop stars and politicians.

It had always intrigued him the way gangsters became celebrities: Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, John Dillinger, Dutch Schultz, Bugsy Malone. Figures of legend. He had known a few of the lesser ones in his time, and they almost always rubbed shoulders with the rich and famous, as if celebrity recognized only itself and was blind to all else–morality, decency, honour–and they never lacked for beautiful women to run around with, the kind who were attracted by danger and the aura of violence. There seemed to be a glamour and mystique attached to making one’s money out of running prostitutes, supplying drugs and threatening to destroy people’s livelihoods if they didn’t pay protection, and it was more than likely that most film stars, sports personalities and pop stars were addle-brained enough to fall for it, the glamour of violence. Or was it the violence of glamour?

The Krays were no exception. They knew how to manipulate the media, and being photographed with a famous actress, an MP, or a peer of the realm made it less likely that the truth about their real activities would come out. There was a trial in 1965, Banks remembered, and they came out of that more fireproof than they went in.

It was hard to believe that Graham Marshall’s dad had anything to do with them, though, and Banks had to admit that his father was probably right; it had just been the beer talking.

Why, though? Why even hint at something like that if there wasn’t a scrap of truth in it? Maybe Bill Marshall was a pathological liar. But over his years as a copper, Banks had learned that the old cliché “there’s no smoke without fire” had a great deal to recommend it. And there were two other things: the Marshalls came from the East End of London, Kray territory in the mid-sixties, and Banks now remembered feeling afraid around Mr. Marshall.

He already knew a bit about the Krays, most of it picked up when he was on the Met years ago, but he could dig deeper. There were plenty of books about them, though he doubted that any mentioned Bill Marshall. If he had done anything for them, it had obviously been low-level, going round the customers and exuding physical menace, maybe clobbering the occasional informer or double-dealer in a dark alley.

He would have to tell DI Hart. Michelle. She had left a message with Banks’s mother while he was out asking him to drop by Thorpe Wood at 9:00 a.m. the following morning. It was her case, after all. If there was a connection, though, he was surprised that it hadn’t come out in the investigation. Usually the parents come under very close scrutiny in missing-child cases, no matter how grief-stricken they appear. Banks had once come across a young couple he had believed to be genuinely grieving the loss of their child, only to find the poor kid strangled for crying too loud and stuffed in the downstairs freezer. No, you couldn’t trust surfaces in police work; you had to dig, if only to make certain you weren’t having the wool pulled over your eyes.

Banks picked up his old transistor radio. He had bought a battery earlier and wondered if it would still work after all these years. Probably not, but it was worth the price of a battery to find out. He unclipped the back, connected the battery and put the earpiece in his ear. It was just a single unit, like an old hearing-aid. No stereo radio back then. When he turned it on, he was thrilled to find that the old trannie actually worked. Banks could hardly believe it. As he tuned the dial, though, he soon began to feel disappointed. The sound quality was poor, but it wasn’t only that. The radio received all the local stations, Classic FM, and Radios 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, just like any modern radio, but Banks realized he had been half-expecting to go back in time. The idea that this was a magic radio that still received the Light Programme, Radio Luxembourg and the pirates, Radio Caroline and Radio London, was lodged somewhere in his mind. He had expected to be listening to John Peel’s The Perfumed Garden, to relive those magical few months in the spring of 1967, when he should have been studying for his O levels but spent half the night with the radio plugged in his ear, hearing Captain Beefheart, the Incredible String Band and Tyrannosaurus Rex for the first time.

Banks switched off the radio and turned to his Photoplay diary. At least he had a bedside light in his room now and didn’t have to hide under the sheets with a torch. Beside each week was a full-page photograph of an actor or actress popular at the time, usually an actress, or star-let, chosen because of pulchritude rather than acting ability, and more often than not appearing in a risqué pose, bra and panties, the carefully placed bed sheet, the off-the-shoulder strap. He flipped through the pages and there they all were: Natalie Wood, Catherine Deneuve, Martine Beswick, Ursula Andress. Cleavage abounded. The 15th to the 21st August was accompanied by a photo of Shirley Eaton in a low-cut dress.

As he flipped through the diary, Banks discovered that he had hardly been voluminous or in the least bit analytical; he had simply noted events, adventures and excursions, often in a very cryptic manner. In a way, it was a perfect model for the policeman’s notebook he was to keep later. Still, the pages were small, divided into seven sections, with room for a little fact or piece of cinema history at the bottom. If any of the dates happened to be a star’s birthday, as many did, a portion of the available space was taken up with that, too. Given the restrictions, he had done a decent enough job, he thought, deciphering the miniature scrawl. He had certainly been to see a lot of films, listing all of them in his diary, along with his terse opinions, which varied from “Crap” and “Boring” through “Okay” to “Fantastic!” A typical entry might read, “Went to the Odeon with Dave and Graham to see Doctor Who and the Daleks. Okay,” “Played cricket on the rec. Scored 32 not out,” or, “Rained. Stopped in and read Casino Royale. Fantastic!”

He flipped to the Saturday before Graham disappeared, the 21st. “Went into town with Graham. Bought Help! with Uncle Ken’s record token.” It was the same LP they had listened to at Paul’s the next day. That was all he had written, nothing unusual about Graham’s state or mind. On Friday he had watched the Animals, one of his favourite groups, on Ready, Steady, Go!

On Sunday, he had written, probably while in bed that night, “Played records at Paul’s place. New Bob Dylan LP. Saw police car go to Graham’s house.” On Monday, “Graham’s run away from home. Police came. Joey flew away.”

Interesting he should assume that Graham had run away from home. But of course he would, at that age. What else? The alternatives would have been too horrific for a fourteen-year-old boy to contemplate. He flipped back to late June, around the time he thought the event on the riverbank had occurred. It was a Tuesday, he noticed. He hadn’t written much about it, simply, “Skived off school and played by river this afternoon. A strange man tried to push me in.”

Tired, Banks put the diary aside, rubbed his eyes, and turned out the light. It felt odd to be back in the same bed he had slept in during his teenage years, the same bed where he had had his first sexual experience, with Kay Summerville, while his parents were out visiting his grandparents one Saturday. It hadn’t been very good for either Banks or Kay, but they had persevered and got a lot better with practice.

Kay Summerville. He wondered where she was, what she was doing now. Probably married with kids, the same way he had been until recently. She’d been a beauty, though, had Kay: long blond hair, slender waist, long legs, a mouth like Marianne Faithfull’s, firm tits with hard little nipples and hair like spun gold between her legs. Christ, Banks, he told himself, enough with the adolescent fantasies.

He put on his headphones and turned on his portable CD player, listening to Vaughan Williams’s second string quartet, and settled back to more pleasant thoughts of Kay Summerville. But as he approached the edge of sleep, his thoughts jumbled, mixing memory with dream. It was cold and dark, and Banks and Graham were walking across a rugby field, goalposts silhouetted by the moon, cracking spider-web patterns in the ice as they walked, their breath misting the air. Banks must have said something about the Krays being arrested–was he interested in criminals, even then?–and Graham just laughed, saying the law could never touch people like them. Banks asked him how he knew, and Graham said he used to live near them. “They were kings,” he said.

Puzzled by the memory, or dream, Banks turned the bedside light on again and picked up the diary. If what he had just imagined had any basis in reality, then it had happened in winter. He glanced through his entries for January and February, 1965: Samantha Eggar, Yvonne Romain, Elke Sommer…But no mention of the Krays until 9th March, when he had written, “Krays went to trial today. Graham laughed and said they’d get off easy.” So Graham had mentioned them. It was flimsy, but a start.

He turned off the light again, and this time he drifted off to sleep without further thoughts of either Graham or Kay Summerville.