Banks nodded. “Yes.”

Hatchley mimicked picking up a telephone. “Good morning, Crime Management here, madam. How can we help you? Not enough crime in your neighborhood. Dear, dear. Well, yes, I’m certain there’s some to spare on the East Side Estate. Yes, I’ll look into it right away and see if I can get some sent over by this afternoon. Bye-bye, madam.”

Banks laughed.

“I mean, really,” Hatchley went on. “If this goes on they’ll be calling you a Senior Crime Consultant next.”

The door opened and WPC Sexton walked over to them. Hatchley nudged Banks and pointed. “Here she is. The belle of Eastvale Divisional.”

“Fuck off, Sarge,” she said, then turned to Banks. “Sir, we just got an urgent message from a DS Cabbot in Harkside. She wants you to get down there as soon as you can. She said a lad named Adam Kelly has something he wants to tell you.”

The telegram, in its unmistakable orange cover, came to the shop, for some reason. I remember the date; it was Palm Sunday, the eighteenth of April, 1943, and Mother and I had just got back from church. Gloria was working that day, so, heart thumping and heavy, I had to leave Mother to her tears and run up to Top Hill Farm. Though it was a chilly afternoon, the sweat was pouring off me by the time I got there.

I found Gloria collecting eggs in the chicken shack. She had one in her palm and she held it out to show me. “It’s so warm,” she said. “Freshly laid. But what are you doing here, Gwen? You look out of breath. Your eyes. Have you been crying?”

Panting, I handed over the telegram to her. She read it, her face turned ashen and she sagged back against the flimsy wooden wall. A nail squealed in the wood and the chickens squawked. The sheet of paper fluttered from her tiny hand to the dirt floor. She didn’t cry right there and then, but a soft moan came from her mouth. “Oh, no,” she said. “No.” Almost as if she had been expecting it. Then her whole body started to tremble. I wanted to go to her, but somehow I knew that I mustn’t. Not just yet, not until she had let the first pangs of grief shake her and rip through her alone.

She closed her hand by her side and the egg broke. Bright yellow yolk stained her dainty fingers, and long strings of viscous glair trailed down toward the straw-covered earth.

The Kellys’ house stood in the middle of a terrace block on the B-road east of Harkside. There was an infants’ school across the road, and next to that a Pay ’n’ Display car park to encourage tourists not to clog the village center. Beyond the car park, a meadow full of buttercups and clover descended eastward to the West Yorkshire border and the banks of Linwood Reservoir.

Mrs. Kelly answered the door and asked them in. Banks could sense the tension immediately. The aftermath of a scolding; it was a familiar childhood sensation of his, and the scoldings were usually dished out by his mother. Though it was never openly admitted, Banks knew his father believed that household discipline was a woman’s job. Only if Banks cheeked her off or tried to resist did his father step in and sort things out with his belt.

“He won’t say owt,” Mrs. Kelly said. She was a plain, harried-looking woman in her early thirties, old before her time, with limp, tired hair and a drawn face. “I challenged him on it when he came home for his lunch, and he ran off up to his room. He wouldn’t go back to school and he won’t come down.”

“Challenged him on what, Mrs. Kelly?” Banks asked.

“What he stole.”

“Stole?”

“Yes. I found it when I were cleaning his room. From that… that there skeleton. I left it where I found it. I didn’t want to touch it. Anyone would think I haven’t brought him up right. It’s not easy when you’re on your own.”

“Calm down, Mrs. Kelly,” Annie said, stepping forward and resting her hand on her arm. “Nobody’s blaming you for anything. Or Adam. We just want to get to the bottom of it, that’s all.”

The room was hot and a woman on television was explaining how to make the perfect soufflé. Because it was late afternoon and they were facing east, there was very little light. Banks was already beginning to feel claustrophobic.

“May I go up and talk to him?” he asked.

“You’ll get nowt out of him. Clammed up, he has.”

“May I try?”

“Suit yourself. Left at the top of the stairs.”

Banks glanced at Annie, who tried to settle Mrs. Kelly in an armchair, then he made his way up the narrow carpeted stairway. He knocked first on Adam’s door and, getting no response, opened it a short way and stuck his head around. “Adam?” he said. “It’s Mr. Banks. Remember me?”

Adam lay on his side on the single bed. He turned slowly, wiped his forearm across his eyes and said, “You’ve not come to arrest me, have you? I don’t want to go to jail.”

“Nobody’s going to take you to jail, Adam.”

“I didn’t mean nothing, honest I didn’t.”

“Why don’t you just calm down and tell me what happened. We’ll get it sorted. Can I come in?”

Adam sat up on the bed. He was a fair-haired kid with thick glasses, freckles and sticking-out ears, the kind who is often teased at school and develops an active fantasy life to escape. The kind Banks used to defend from bullies, perhaps. His eyes were red with crying. “Suppose so,” he said.

Banks went inside the small bedroom. There were no chairs, so he sat on the edge of the bed, at the bottom. Posters of muscular sword-and-sorcery heroes wielding enormous broadswords hung on the walls. A small computer sat on a desk, and a pile of old comic books stood by the bedside. That was about all there was room for. Banks left the door open.

“Why don’t you tell me about it?” he asked.

“I thought it were magic,” Adam said. “The Talisman. That’s why I went there.”

“Went where?”

“Hobb’s End. It’s a magic place. It were destroyed in a battle between good and evil, but there’s still magic buried there. I thought it would make me invisible.”

“He reads too many of them comic books,” a voice said accusingly. Banks turned to see Mrs. Kelly standing in the doorway. Annie came up beside her. “Head in the clouds, he has,” Adam’s mother went on. “Dungeons and dragons, Conan the Barbarian. Myst. Riven. Stephen King and Clive Barker. Well, he’s gone too far this time.”

Banks turned. “Mrs. Kelly,” he said, “will you let me talk to Adam alone for a few minutes?”

She stood in the doorway, arms folded, then made a sound of disgust and walked off.

“Sorry,” Annie mouthed to Banks, following her.

Banks turned. “Right, Adam,” he said. “So you’re a magician, are you?”

Adam looked at him suspiciously. “I know a bit about it.”

“Would you tell me what happened at Hobb’s End that day, when you fell?”

“I’ve already told you.”

“The whole story.”

Adam chewed his lower lip.

“You found something, didn’t you?”

Adam nodded.

“Will you show it to me?”

The boy paused, then reached under his pillow and pulled out a small round object. He hesitated, then passed it to Banks. It was a metal button, by the look of it. Corroded, still encrusted with dirt, but clearly a button of some sort.

“Where did you find this, Adam?”

“It fell into my hand, honest.”

Banks turned away to hide his smile. If he had a penny for every time he’d heard that from an accused thief, he’d be a rich man by now. “All right,” he said. “What were you doing when it fell into your hand?”

“Pulling the hand out.”

“It was in the skeleton’s hand?”

“Must’ve been, mustn’t it?”

“As if the victim had been holding it in her palm?”

“You what?”

“Never mind. Why didn’t you tell us about it sooner?”

“I thought it were what I’d gone there for. The Talisman. It’s not easy to get. You have to pass through the veil to the Seventh Level. There’s sacrifice and fear to overcome.”