“I’d like to talk to him when he gets back, if that’s all right.”
“Certainly. But why?”
“We like to follow up on these matters. Just routine.”
Robin stood up and folded her arms, making it clear that she wanted Annie to leave. “I’ll let you know the minute he’s back.”
Annie remained seated. “Mrs. Armitage, you told me yesterday that Luke said he needed some space. Do you know why?”
“Why?”
“Yes. You told me he’s a normal teenager, and there’s nothing wrong in the family, so why would he run off like that, worry the two of you half to death?”
“I hardly think that’s relevant now, do you, Detective Inspector Cabbot?” Annie turned to see Martin Armitage standing in the doorway, briefcase in hand. “Why are you here? What is it?” Despite his commanding presence, he seemed edgy to Annie, like his wife, shifting his weight from foot to foot as he stood there, as if he had to go to the toilet.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just a friendly visit.”
“I see. Well, thank you for your efforts and your concern. We really do appreciate it, but I can see no point in your coming and badgering us with more questions now that Luke’s safe and sound, can you?”
Interesting choice of words, badgering, Annie thought. Most families wouldn’t see it that way, not with their son missing.
He glanced at his watch. “Anyway, I’m afraid I have to hurry off to a business meeting. It’s been nice to see you again, Inspector, and thank you again.”
“Yes, thank you,” echoed Robin.
Dismissed. Annie knew when she was beaten. “I was just leaving,” she said. “I only wanted to make sure everything was okay. I didn’t mean to cause offense.”
“Well, as you can see,” said Martin, “everything’s fine. Luke will be back home this evening, and it will be as if none of this ever happened.”
Annie smiled. “Well, don’t be too hard on him.”
Martin managed a tight smile, which didn’t reach his eyes. “I was young once myself. I know what it’s like.”
“Oh, just one more thing.” Annie paused in the doorway.
“Yes?”
“You said Luke rang you last night.”
“Yes. And immediately afterward my wife rang you.”
Annie glanced at Robin, then back at Martin. “Yes, I appreciate that,” she said. “But I’m wondering why Luke’s call wasn’t intercepted. After all, the technician had set everything up, and we picked up your wife’s call to me.”
“That’s easy,” said Martin. “He called me on my mobile.”
“Did he usually do that?”
“We were supposed to be going out for dinner,” Martin explained. “As it was, we ended up canceling, but Luke wasn’t to know that.”
“Ah, I see,” said Annie. “Problem solved. Good-bye, then.”
They both bade her a perfunctory good-bye and she left. At the end of the drive, she turned right, toward Relton, and parked in lay-by just around the corner from the Armitages’ drive, where she took out her mobile and discovered that there was, indeed, a signal in the area. So Martin Armitage hadn’t been lying about that. What was it, then, that had given her the unmistakable feeling that something was wrong?
Annie sat for a moment in her car trying to figure out the meaning of the tension she had sensed in the room, not just between her and Robin, but between Robin and Martin. Something was going on; Annie only wished she knew what. Neither Robin nor Martin had behaved like a couple who had just heard that the son whose life they feared for was now safe and would soon be home.
When Martin Armitage’s Beemer shot out of the driveway spraying gravel a minute or two later, Annie had an idea. It was rare that she got to think or act spontaneously, as so much police work was governed by procedure, rules and regulations, but Annie was feeling reckless this morning, and the situation called for some initiative on her part.
As far as she knew, Martin Armitage had no idea what make or color car she drove, so he would hardly be suspicious that a purple Astra was following him at a respectable distance.
As Banks drove down the A1 and entered the landscape of bright new shopping centers, electronics warehouses and housing estates that had replaced the old coal mines, pit-wheels and slag heaps of West Yorkshire, he thought about the way the country had changed since Graham’s disappearance.
1965. Winston Churchill’s funeral. The Wilson Era. The end of capital punishment. The Kray trial. Carnaby Street. The Moors Murders. The first U.S. space walk. Help! Mods and Rockers. It was a time of possibility, of hope for the future, the fulcrum of the sixties. Only weeks after Graham disappeared, the sexy, leather-clad Emma Peel debuted in The Avengers, Jeremy Sandford’s documentary-style TV play about a homeless mother and her children, Cathy Come Home, caused a major stir, and The Who were singing about “My Generation.” Soon, young people were taking to the streets to protest against war, famine and anything else they could think of, shouting “Make love, not war,” smoking dope and dropping acid. Everything seemed on the verge of blossoming into some new sort of order, and Graham, who had seemed so forward-looking, so cool in so many ways, should have been there to see it, but he wasn’t.
And what came between then and Blair’s Britain? Mostly Margaret Thatcher, who dismantled the country’s manufacturing base, emasculated the trade unions, and demoralized the workingman, leaving the north, especially, a ghost land of empty factories, thrift shops and decaying council estates, where those growing up had no hope of a job. In their idleness and hopelessness, many turned to crime and vandalism; car theft became commonplace; and the police became the enemy of the people. Today, without doubt, it was a softer, easier, more middle-of-the-road Britain, and a much more American one, with McDonald’s, Pizza Huts and shopping malls springing up all over the place. Most people seemed to have what they wanted, but what they wanted was mostly of a material nature – a new car, a DVD player, a pair of Nike trainers – and people were being mugged, even murdered, for their mobile phones.
But were things so very different back in the mid-sixties? Banks asked himself. Wasn’t consumerism just as rife back then? That Monday evening in August 1965, when the knock came at their door, the Banks family was settling down to watch Coronation Street on their brand-new television set, bought on hire purchase just the previous week. Banks’s father was in work then, at the sheet-metal factory, and if anyone had predicted that he would be made redundant seventeen years later, he’d have laughed in their face.
Coronation Street was one of those rituals every Monday and Wednesday when, tea over, dishes washed and put away, homework and odd jobs done, the family sat down to watch television together. So it was an unexpected disruption when someone knocked at the door. No one ever did that. As far as the Bankses were concerned, everyone on the street – everyone they knew, at any rate – watched Coronation Street and would no more think of interrupting that than… well, Ida Banks was lost for words. Arthur Banks answered the door, prepared to send the commercial traveler and his suitcase of goods packing.
The one thing that entered nobody’s mind when he did this, because it was such a disturbance of the normal routine, was that Joey, Banks’s pet budgie, was out of his cage, having his evening constitutional, and when Arthur Banks opened the front door to admit the two detectives, he left the living room door open, too. Joey seized the moment and flew away. No doubt he thought he was flying to the freedom of the open sky, but Banks knew, even at his young age, that such a pretty colored thing wouldn’t survive a day among the winged predators out there. When they realized what had happened, everyone dashed out in the garden looking to see where he had gone, but there wasn’t a trace. Joey had vanished, never to return.