Nobody had ever promised him it was going to be a breeze. The dark moods, depressions that settled upon him like a flock of crows, would disappear eventually; the sense of futility, the feeling that the dark pit of his despair actually had no bottom would also dissipate over time. As Brian had said when Banks had first told him about the separation from Sandra, he just had to hang in there, hang in there and make the best of what he had: the cottage, Annie, a challenging case.

An agitated curlew screeched and shrieked way up the daleside. Some animal threatening its nest, perhaps. Banks heard his phone ring again. Quickly, he stubbed out the cigarette and went back inside.

“Sorry to disturb you at this time of night, sir,” said DS Hatchley, “but I know you’re off to London in the morning.”

“What is it?” Banks looked at his watch. Half past nine. “It’s not like you to be working so late, Jim.”

“I’m not. I mean, I wasn’t. I was just over at the Queen’s Arms with a couple of mates from the rugby club, so I thought I’d pop in the station, like, and see if I’d got any answers to my inquiries.”

“And?”

“Francis Henderson. Like I said, I know you’re off down there tomorrow, so that’s why I’m calling. I’ve got an address.”

“He lives in London?”

“Dulwich.” Hatchley read the address. “What’s interesting, why it came back so quick, is he’s got form.”

Banks’s ears pricked up. “Go on.”

“According to Criminal Intelligence, Francis Henderson started working for one of the East End gangs in the sixties. Not the Krays, exactly, but that sort of thing. Mostly he dug up information for them, found people they were after, watched people they wanted watched. He developed a drug habit and started dealing to support it in the seventies. They say he’s been retired and clean for years now, at least as far as they know.”

“Sure it’s our Francis Henderson?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay. Thanks a lot for calling, Jim. Get yourself home now.”

“Don’t worry, I will.”

“And give another push on that nationwide tomorrow if you can find time.”

“Will do. Bon voyage.”

Annie was waiting on the platform at York Station looking very businesslike in a navy mid-length skirt and silver-buttoned blazer over a white blouse. She had tied her hair back so tightly it made a V on her forehead and arched her dark eyebrows. For once, though, Banks didn’t feel underdressed. He wore a lightweight cotton summer suit and, with it, a red-and-gray tie, top shirt button undone.

“Good Lord,” she said, smiling, “I feel like we’re sneaking away for a dirty weekend.”

Banks laughed. “If you play your cards right…”

The station smelled of diesel oil and ancient soot from the days of steam. Gouts of compressed air rushed out from under the trains with a deafening hiss, and pigeons flapped around the high ceiling. Announcements about late arrivals and departures echoed from the public address system.

The London train pulled out of the station only eleven minutes after the advertised departure time. Banks and Annie chatted for a while, lulled by the rattling and rocking rhythm, and Banks ascertained that whatever had been bothering Annie on the phone yesterday was no longer a problem. He had been forgiven.

Annie started reading the Guardian she had bought at the station newsstand and Banks went back to Guilty Secrets. In bed the previous evening, he had given up on The Shadow of Death when the erstwhile DI Niven arrested his first suspect, saying, “You have the right to remain silent. If you don’t have a lawyer, one will be provided for you.” So much for the realistic depiction of police procedures. Allowing that it was one of her early DI Niven books and feeling that she deserved a second chance, he started Guilty Secrets, her most recent non-series book, and had trouble putting it down to get to sleep.

The basic plot device was the kind of thing everyone has seen a dozen times on television. A man on holiday in a foreign country becomes involved in an altercation with another man in a crowded bar. He tries to calm the situation and eventually leaves, but the man pursues him outside and attacks him. Someone else, a stranger, comes to his aid, and together they get carried away and beat the attacker to death. They hide the body, then go their separate ways, and nothing more is heard of the incident.

Back in England, the first man becomes very successful in business and is poised at the edge of what promises to be an equally successful career in politics. Until the inevitable blackmailer turns up. What does he do? Pay up or kill again?

Despite the thinness of the plot, Guilty Secrets turned out to be a fascinating exploration of conscience and character. Because of the situation he finds himself in, the central character is forced to reexamine his entire life in relation to the crime he got away with, while at the same time agonizing over what to do to secure his future.

To complicate matters, killing does not come easy to this man; he is human, with a firm, if understated, belief in Christianity. At one point he considers letting it all come out so that he can pay the consequences he feels he should have paid years ago. But he also likes his life the way it is. Not without a streak of self-interest, he is ambitious, enjoys power and feels he can do the country some genuine good if he gets in the right position. He also has others to consider: family and employees who rely or depend on him for their livelihoods.

Chapter after chapter, with merciless compassion, Vivian Elmsley strips the man to his soul, lays bare his moral and spiritual dilemmas and tightens the net around him. In his time, Banks had arrested a number of men who had killed to protect their ill-gotten fame or fortune, or both, but rarely had he come across a character as complex as the one Vivian Elmsley had created here. Perhaps he just hadn’t looked deeply enough into them. A police interview room was not the best place to get to know someone, and Banks had been far more concerned with obtaining a confession than with striking up a relationship. That was where real life and fiction parted ways, he thought; one is messy and incomplete, the other ordered and finished.

Banks finished the book just before Peterborough. Annie had closed her eyes by then and was either napping or meditating. He gazed out of the window at the uninspiring landscape of his childhood: a brick factory, a red brick school, stretches of waste ground littered with weeds and rubbish. Even the spire of the beautiful Norman cathedral behind the shopping center failed to inspire him. The train squealed to a halt.

Of course, it hadn’t been so uninspiring back then; his imagination had imbued every miserable inch of the place with magical significance. The waste grounds were battlefields where the local lads reenacted the great battles of two world wars, using tree branches or sticks of wood for rifles, bayoneting opponents with great relish. Even when Banks was playing alone or fishing in the River Nene, it was easy enough for him to believe he was an Arthurian knight on a quest. Adam Kelly had been doing the same thing in Hobb’s End when the world of his imagination had suddenly become real.

As the train left Peterborough Station, Banks thought of his parents, not more than a mile away. He looked at his watch. About now, he guessed, his mother would be drinking milky instant coffee and reading her latest women’s magazine, and his father would be having his morning nap, snoring gently, feet up on the green velour pouffe, newspaper spread over his lap. Unchanging routine. It had been the same since his father was made redundant from his job as a steelworker in 1982, and his mother grew too old and tired to clean other people’s houses anymore. Banks thought of the disappointment and bitterness that had twisted their lives, problems that he had certainly contributed to, as well as Margaret Thatcher. But their disappointments had been visited on him, too, in turn. No matter how well he did, it was never good enough.