“So why kill Luke, then?”

“No idea. We’ll have to ask them.”

“If we find them.”

“Oh, we’ll find them, all right.”

“When the girl sees her picture in the paper she might go to ground, change her appearance.”

“We’ll find them. The only thing is…” Banks said, letting the words trail off as he reached for another cigarette.

“Yes?”

“That we need to keep an open mind as regards other lines of inquiry.”

“Such as?”

“I’m not sure yet. There might be something even closer to home. I want to talk to a couple of teachers who knew Luke fairly well. Someone should talk to the Battys again, too. Then there’s all the people we know he came into contact with the day he disappeared. Put a list together and get DCs Jackman and Templeton to help with it. We’ve still got a long way to go.”

“Shit,” said Annie, getting to her feet. She had remembered the task that had been eluding her all evening.

“What?”

“Just something I should have checked out before.” She looked at her watch and waved good-bye. “Maybe it’s not too late. See you later.”

Michelle sat back in her seat and watched the fields drift by under a gray sky, rain streaking the dirty window. Every time she took a train she felt as if she were on holiday. This evening, the train was full. Sometimes she forgot just how close Peterborough was to London – only eighty miles or so, about a fifty-minute train ride – and how many people made the journey every day. That was, after all, what the new town expansion had been about. Basildon, Bracknell, Hemel Hempstead, Hatfield, Stevenage, Harlow, Crawley, Welwyn Garden City, Milton Keynes, all in a belt around London, even closer than Peterborough, catchment areas for an overflowing capital, where it was fast becoming too expensive for many to live. She hadn’t been around back then, of course, but she knew that the population of Peterborough had risen from about 62,000 in 1961 to 134,000 in 1981.

Unable to concentrate on The Profession of Violence, which she had to remember to post back to Banks, she thought back to her lunch with Ex-Detective Inspector Robert Lancaster. He had quite a few years on Ben Shaw, but they were both very much cut from the same cloth. Oh, no doubt about it, Shaw was ruder, more sarcastic, a far more unpleasant personality, but underneath they were the same kind of copper. Not necessarily bent – Michelle took Lancaster’s word on that – but not above turning a blind eye if it was to their advantage, and not above fraternizing with villains. As Lancaster had also pointed out, he had grown up shoulder to shoulder with criminals like the Krays and smaller fry like Billy Marshall, and when it came to future career choices it was often very much a matter of “There but for the grace of God go I.”

It was interesting what he had said about Graham Marshall, she thought. Interesting that he should even remember the boy at all. She had never considered that it might have been Graham’s own criminal activities that got him killed, and even now she found it hard to swallow. Not that fourteen-year-olds were immune to criminal activity. Far from it, especially these days. But if Graham Marshall had been involved in something that was likely to get him killed, wouldn’t somebody have known and come forward? Surely Jet Harris or Reg Proctor would have picked up the scent?

The real problem, though, was how she could gather any more information about Graham. She could go through the statements again, read the investigating detectives’ notebooks and check all the actions allocated, but if none of them focused on Graham himself as a possible line of inquiry, then she would get no further.

The train slowed down for no apparent reason. It was an InterCity, not a local train, so Michelle went to the buffet car and bought herself a coffee. The paper cup was far too hot, even when she used three or four serviettes to hold it. If she took the top off, it would spill when the train started moving again, so she tore a small hole in the plastic top and decided to wait a little while till it cooled.

Michelle looked at her watch. After eight o’clock. Getting dark outside. She had spent a couple of hours shopping on Oxford Street after parting with Lancaster, and she felt a little guilty that she had spent over a hundred pounds on a dress. Perhaps she was turning into a shopaholic? Like the drinking, the spending had to stop. She’d never get a chance to wear the damn thing anyway, as it was a party dress, elegant, strapless and stylish, and she never went to any parties. What could she have been thinking of?

When the train started up again half an hour later, with no explanation for the delay, Michelle realized that if Graham had been involved in anything untoward, there was one person who might know something, even if he didn’t know he did: Banks. And thinking of him made her once again regret the way she had left him at Starbucks the other day. True, she had resented his intrusion into what she regarded as her private life, a life she kept very guarded indeed, but she had perhaps overreacted a tad. After all, he had only asked her if she was married; a perfectly innocent question in its way, and one you might ask a stranger over a coffee. It didn’t have to mean anything, but it was such a raw nerve point with her, such a no-go area, that she had behaved rudely, and now she regretted it.

Well, she wasn’t married; that was certainly the truth. Melissa had died because she and Ted got their wires crossed. She was on surveillance and thought he was picking up their daughter after school; he had an afternoon meeting and thought she was going to do it. Possibly no marriage could survive that amount of trauma – the guilt, blame, grief and anger – and theirs hadn’t. Almost six months to the day after Melissa’s funeral they had agreed to separate, and Michelle had begun her years of wandering from county to county trying to put the past behind her. Succeeding to a large extent, but still haunted, still in some ways maimed by what had happened.

She hadn’t had either the time or the inclination for men, and that was another thing about Banks that bothered her. He was the only man, beyond her immediate colleagues on the job, with whom she had spent any time in years, and she liked him, found him attractive. Michelle knew that she had been nicknamed the Ice Queen at more than one station over the past five years, but it had only amused her because it couldn’t be farther from the truth. She was, she knew, deep down, a warm and sensual person, as she had been with Ted, though that was a part of her nature she had neglected for a long time, perhaps even suppressed, out of punishment, being more preoccupied with self-blame.

She didn’t know if Banks was married or not, though she had noticed that he didn’t wear a ring. And he had asked her if she was married. In addition to being an intrusion, that had seemed like a come-on line at the time, too, and maybe it was. The problem was that part of her wanted him, against all her common sense and all the barriers she had built inside, and the result flustered and confused her almost beyond bearing. Banks might be one of the few people who could help her reconstruct Graham Marshall’s past, but could she bear to face Banks again in the flesh?

She would have no choice, she realized as the train pulled up and she reached for her briefcase. Graham Marshall’s memorial service would be taking place in a matter of days, and she had promised to call and let him know about it.

It was almost dark when Banks turned into the laneway that ran in front of his small cottage, and he was tired. Annie had left by the time he got back to headquarters after finishing his beer, so he stuck around for an hour or so picking away at the pile of paperwork, then decided to call it a day. Whatever it was she was after, she’d tell him after the weekend.