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 one another talk. At the moment, The Kinks were singing “Waterloo Sunset,” one of Banks’s favorites. After Banks and his father had settled themselves at the table, pints in front of them, and introductions had been 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 Tuf 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 farther 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 workingmen 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 use 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 thought 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 for 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 been 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?”