Back in the early sixties, the estate was new, and Banks’s mother had been thrilled to move from their little back-to-back terrace house with the outside toilet to the new house with “all mod cons,” as they used to say. As far as Banks was concerned, the best “mod cons” were the indoor WC, a real bathroom to replace the tin tub they had had to fill from a kettle every Friday, and a room of his own. In the old house, he had shared with his brother Roy, five years younger, and like all siblings, they fought more than anything else.
The house stood near the western edge of the estate, close to the arterial road, across from an abandoned factory and a row of shops, including the newsagent’s. Banks paused for a moment and took in the weathered terraced houses – rows of five, each with a little garden, wooden gate, low wall and privet hedge. Some people had made small improvements, he noticed, and one house had an enclosed porch. The owners must have bought the place when the Conservatives sold off council houses for peanuts in the eighties. Maybe there was even a conservatory around the back, Banks thought, though it would be folly to add an extension made almost entirely of glass on an estate like this.
A knot of kids stood smoking and shoving one another in the middle of the street, some Asian, some white, clocking Banks out of the corners of their eyes. Locals were always suspicious of newcomers, and the kids had no idea who he was, that he had grown up here, too. Some of them were wearing low-slung baggy jeans and hoodies. Mangy dogs wandered up and down the street, barking at everything and nothing, shitting on the pavements, and loud rock music blasted out of an open window several houses east.
Banks opened the gate. He noticed that his mother had planted some colorful flowers and kept the small patch of lawn neatly trimmed. This was the only garden she had ever had, and she always had been proud of her little patch of earth. He walked up the flagstone path and knocked at the door. He saw his mother approach through the frosted glass pane. She opened the door, rubbed her hands together as if drying them, and gave him a hug. “Alan,” she said. “Lovely to see you. Come on in.”
Banks dropped his overnight bag in the hall and followed his mother through to the living room. The wallpaper was a sort of wispy autumn-leaves pattern, the three-piece suite a matching brown velveteen, and there was a sentimental autumnal landscape hanging over the electric fire. He didn’t remember this theme from his previous visit, about a year ago, but he couldn’t be certain that it hadn’t been there, either. So much for the observant detective and the dutiful son.
His father was sitting in his usual armchair, the one with the best straight-on view of the television. He didn’t get up, only grunted, “Son. How you doing?”
“Not bad, Dad. You?”
“Mustn’t complain.” Arthur Banks had been suffering from mild angina and an assortment of less specified chronic illnesses for years, ever since he’d been made redundant from the sheet-metal factory, and they seemed to get neither better nor worse as the years went on. He took pills occasionally for the chest pains. Other than that, and the damage booze and fags had wreaked on his liver and lungs over the years, he had always been fit as a fiddle. Short, skinny and hollow-chested, he still had a head of thick dark hair with hardly a trace of gray. He wore it slicked back with lashings of Brylcreem.
Banks’s mother, plump and nervy, with pouchy chipmunk cheeks and a haze of blue-gray hair hovering around her skull, fussed about how thin Banks was looking. “I don’t suppose you’ve been eating properly since Sandra left, have you?” she said.
“You know how it is,” said Banks. “I manage to gulp down the occasional Big Mac and fries now and then, if I’ve got time to spare.”
“Don’t be cheeky. Besides, you need proper food. In for tea?”
“I suppose so,” Banks said. He hadn’t thought about what he was going to do once he actually got home. If truth be told, he had imagined that the local police – in the lovely form of DI Michelle Hart – would find his offer of help invaluable and give him an office at Thorpe Wood. But that clearly was not to be. Fair enough, he thought; it’s her case, after all. “I’ll just take my bag up,” he said, heading for the stairs.
Though Banks hadn’t stayed overnight since he had first left for London, somehow he knew that his room would be just as it always had been. And he was right. Almost. It was the same wardrobe, the same small bookcase, the same narrow bed he had slept in as a teenager, sneaking his transistor radio under the covers to listen to Radio Luxembourg, or reading a book by the light of a flashlight. The only thing different was the wallpaper. Gone were the sports-car images of his adolescence, replaced by pink and green stripes. He stood on the threshold for a few moments allowing it all to flow back, allowing the emotion that he felt nudging at the boundaries of his consciousness. It wasn’t quite nostalgia, nor was it loss, but something in between.
The view hadn’t changed. Banks’s bedroom was the only one at the back of the house, next to the WC and bathroom, and it looked out over backyards and an alleyway, beyond which an empty field stretched a hundred yards or so to the next estate. People walked their dogs there, and sometimes the local kids gathered at night.
Banks used to do that, he remembered, with Dave, Paul, Steve and Graham, sharing Woodbines and Park Drives or, if Graham was flush, those long American tipped cigarettes, Peter Stuyvesants or Pall Malls. Later, after Graham had disappeared, Banks had sometimes been there with girlfriends. The field wasn’t square and there was a little dogleg on the other side where, if you were careful, you couldn’t be seen from the houses. He remembered well enough those long, raw-lipped snogging sessions, pushed up against the rusty corrugated iron fencing, the fervid struggles with bra hooks, safety pins or whatever other contrivances the local girls so inconsiderately used to keep themselves fastened up.
Banks dropped his bag at the bottom of the bed and stretched. It had been a long drive, and the time spent in the pub garden, the pint he had drunk with DI Hart, all conspired to make him feel tired. He thought of taking a brief nap before tea but decided it would be rude; he could at least go down and talk to his parents, as he hadn’t been in touch for so long.
First, he unpacked his shirt to hang up in the wardrobe before the creases became too permanent. The other clothes in the wardrobe were unfamiliar, but Banks noticed several cardboard boxes on the floor. He pulled one out and was stunned when he saw it contained his old records: singles, as those were all he could afford back then, when they cost 6/4 and an LP cost 32/6. Of course, he got LPs for Christmas and birthdays, often with record tokens, but they were mostly Beatles and Rolling Stones, and he had taken those to London with him.
The records here represented the beginnings of his musical interests. When he left, he had soon gone on to Cream, Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane, then later discovered jazz and, later still, classical, but these… Banks dipped his hand in and lifted out a stack, flipping through them. Here they were in all their glory: Dusty Springfield’s “Goin’ Back,” The Shadows’ “The Rise amp; Fall of Flingel Bunt,” Cilla Black’s “Anyone Who Had a Heart” and “Alfie,” “Nut Rocker” by B. Bumble and the Stingers, Sandie Shaw’s “Always Something There to Remind Me,” “House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals and “As Tears Go By” by Marianne Faithfull. There were many more, some he had forgotten, and a few really obscure artists, such as Ral Donner and Kenny Lynch, and cover versions of Del Shannon and Roy Orbison hits made by unnamed performers for Woolworth’s cheap Embassy label. What a treasure trove of nostalgia, all the stuff he listened to between the ages of about eleven and sixteen. His old record player was long gone, but his parents had a stereo downstairs, so perhaps he would play a few of the old songs while he was home.