Kelly lurched over to the sink and just made it in time. Winsome held her shoulders as the girl heaved.

“Well?” said Templeton. “Am I right?”

Soames deflated into a sad, defeated old man, all the anger drained out of him. “No,” he said, without inflection. “I didn’t kill anyone. I had no idea…” He looked at Kelly bent over the sink, tears in his eyes. “Not till now. She’s no better than her mother was,” he added bitterly.

Nobody said anything for a while. Kelly finished vomiting and Winsome poured her a glass of water. They sat down at the table again. Her father wouldn’t look at her. Finally, Templeton got to his feet. “Well, Mr. Soames,” he said. “If you change your mind, you know where to get in touch with us. And in the meantime, as they say in the movies, don’t leave town.” He pointed at Kelly. “Nor you, young lady.”

But nobody was looking at him, or paying attention. They were all lost in their own worlds of misery, pain and betrayal. That would pass, though, Templeton knew, and he’d see Kelly Soames again under better circumstances, he was certain of it.

Outside at the car, dodging the puddles and mud as best he could, Templeton turned to Winsome, rubbed his hands together and said, “Well, I think that went pretty well. What do you think, Winsome? Do you think he knew?”

Banks had a great deal of information to digest, he thought as he parked down by the Co-Op store at the inner harbor and walked toward the shops and restaurants of West Cliff. He passed a reconstruction of the yellow-and-black HMS Grand Turk, used in the Hornblower TV series, and stood for a moment admiring the sails and rigging. What a hell of a life it must have been at sea back then, he thought. Maybe not so bad if you were an officer, but for the common sailor: the bad, maggot-infested food, the floggings, the terrible wounds of battle, butchery thinly disguised as surgery. Of course, he’d got most of his ideas from Hornblower and Master and Commander, but they seemed pretty accurate to him, and if they weren’t, how would he know?

Thinking back on what Keith Enderby had just told him, he realized he would have been living in Notting Hill at around the same time as Linda Lofthouse and Tania Hutchison. He was sure he would have remembered seeing someone as beautiful as Tania, even though she wasn’t famous then, but he couldn’t. There were, he remembered, a lot of beautiful young women in colorful clothes around at the time, and he had met his fair share of them.

But Tania and Linda would have moved in very different circles. Banks didn’t know anyone in a band, for a start; he paid for all his concert tickets, like everyone else he knew. He also didn’t have the musical talent to perform in local clubs, though he often went to listen to those who did. But most of all, perhaps, was that he had always felt like an outsider, had felt, somehow, merely on the fringes of it all. He never wore his hair too long; couldn’t get much beyond wearing a flowered shirt or tie, let alone caftans and beads; couldn’t bring himself to join in the political demonstrations; and most times he found himself involved in any sort of counterculture conversation he thought it all sounded simplistic, childish and boring.

Banks leaned on the railing and watched the fishing boats bobbing at anchor in the harbor, then he walked to a café he remembered that served excellent fish and chips, one thing you could usually rely on in Whitby. He went into the café, which was almost empty, and ordered a pot of tea and jumbo haddock and chips, with bread and butter for chip butties, from a bored young waitress in a black apron and white blouse.

He sat down at the window, which looked out over the harbor to the old part of town, with its 199 steps leading up to the ruined abbey and St. Mary’s Church, where the salt wind had robbed the tombstones of their names. A group of young Goths, all black clothes, white faces and intricate silver jewelry, walked by the sheds where the fishermen unloaded their boats and sold their catch.

From what Banks had read about them, and the music he had heard, they seemed obsessed with death and suicide, as well as with the undead and the “dark side” in general, but they were passive and pacifist and concerned with social matters, such as racism and war. Banks liked Joy Division, and he had heard them described as the archetypal Goth band. On balance, he thought, Goths were no weirder than the hippies had been, with their fascination with the occult, poetry and drug-induced enlightenment.

The year 1969 was a period of great transition for Banks. After leaving school with a couple of decent A levels, he was living in a bedsit in Notting Hill and taking a course in business studies in London. He hadn’t felt much in common with his fellow students, though, so he had tended to fall in with a crowd from the art college, two of whom lived together in the same building as him, and they formed his real introduction, rather late in the day, to that strange blend of existentialism, communalism, hedonism and narcissism that was his take on late-sixties culture. They shared joints with him and Jem from across the hall, went to concerts and poetry readings, discussed squatters’ rights, Vietnam and Oz, and played “Alice’s Restaurant” over and over again.

Banks had no idea what to do with his life. His parents had made it clear that they wanted him to have a crack at a white-collar career, rather than ending up in the brick factory, or the sheet-metal factory like his father, so business studies seemed like a logical step. And he did so much need to escape the stifling provinciality of Peterborough.

He loved the music and had hitchhiked with his first real girlfriend, Kay Summerville, to the Blind Faith concert in Hyde Park the summer of that year, when he was still living at home in Peterborough, and to the Rolling Stones concert in memory of Brian Jones, at which Mick Jagger freed all the caged butterflies that hadn’t already died from the heat. He also remembered Dylan at the Isle of Wight, coming on late and singing “She Belongs to Me” and “To Ramona,” two of Banks’s favorites.

But in Peterborough, he had been fairly isolated from the trendy fashions, causes and ideologies of the times, embarrassingly ignorant of what was really happening out there. For all the hyped-up change and revolution of the decade, it was a salutary lesson to bear in mind that “Strawberry Fields Forever” was kept from reaching number one by Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Release Me,” and growing up in Peterborough, you could easily see why.

That first college year, he remembered following with horror the saga of the Manson family, eventually arrested for the murders of Sharon Tate, Leno LaBianca and others. It had all passed into the history books now, of course, but then, as the story unfolded day by day in the newspapers and on television, and as the real horrors came to light, it had a powerful impact, not least because the Manson “family” seemed a bit like hippies and quoted the Beatles and revolutionary slogans. And then there were the girls, Manson’s “love slaves,” with strange names like Patricia Krenwinkel, Squeaky Fromme and Leslie Van Houten. The way they dressed and wore their hair they might have been living in Notting Hill. The famous photo of the bearded, staring Manson had given Banks almost as many nightmares as the one of Christine Keeler sitting naked on a chair had prompted wet dreams.

Altamont had taken place in late 1969, too, he remembered, where someone was stabbed by a Hell’s Angel during the Stones’ performance. There were other things he vaguely remembered: the police charging a house in Piccadilly to evict squatters, rioting in Northern Ireland, stories of women and children murdered by American troops in My Lai, violent antiwar protests, four students shot by the National Guard at Kent State.