For the moment, he put back the box and pulled out another one, this one full mostly of old toys. There were model airplanes – Spitfires, Wellingtons, Junkers and a Messerschmitt with a broken wing – a couple of Dinky Toys, a Dan Dare Rocket Gun, and a small clockwork Dalek that said “Ex-ter-min-ate! Ex-ter-min-ate!” as it rolled along like an upturned dustbin. There were a few old annuals, too – The Saint, Danger Man and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. – along with what had once been his pride and joy, a pocket-size Philips transistor radio. Maybe if he put in some new batteries, he could even get it working.
The third box he opened was full of old school reports, magazines, letters and exercise books. He had sometimes wondered over the years what had happened to all this stuff and assumed, if anything, that his parents had chucked it out when they figured he wouldn’t need it anymore. Not so. It had been hiding away in the wardrobe all this time. There they were: Beatles Monthly, Fabulous, Record Song Book and The Radio Luxembourg Book of Record Stars.
Banks pulled out a handful of the small notebooks and found they were his old diaries. Some were plain Letts’ diaries, with a little slot for a pencil down the spine, and some were special-themed, illustrated ones, such as pop star, television or sports diaries. The one that was of most immediate interest to him, though, was a Photoplay diary with a stiff, laminated cover and a color photo of Sean Connery and Honor Blackman from 1964’s Bond film, Goldfinger, on the front. Inside, a photo of a different film star faced each page of dates. The first was Brigitte Bardot, for the week starting Sunday, December 27, 1964, the first full week of his diary for 1965, the year Graham disappeared.
Michelle took off her reading glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose, where she sensed a headache beginning to form between her eyes. She suffered from headaches frequently these days, and while her doctor assured her there was nothing seriously wrong – no brain tumor or neurological disease – and her psychiatrist told her that it was probably just stress and “coping,” she couldn’t help but worry.
The air quality in the archives office didn’t help either. Instead of signing the heavier boxes out and carrying them up to her office, Michelle had decided she might as well look through the material down there. The reading room was just a glassed-in alcove with a desk and chair. It stood at the entrance to several parallel aisles of old papers, some of which went back to the late-nineteenth century. If the environment had been a little more comfortable, she might have considered having a browse around the archives. There was bound to be some fascinating stuff.
For the moment, 1965 would have to do. Michelle wanted to get a general idea of the crimes occurring around the time of Graham’s disappearance, to see if she could come up with any links to Banks’s mysterious stranger, and Mrs. Metcalfe had directed her to the logbooks that indexed and recorded all complaints and actions taken, day by day. It made for interesting reading, most of it not relevant to what she was looking for. Many of the calls listed went no further – missing pets, some domestic complaints – but the lists gave her a good impression of what daily life must have been like for a copper back then.
In May, for example, a man had been arrested in connection with an assault on a fourteen-year-old girl, who had accepted a lift with him near the A1, but he bore no resemblance whatsoever to Banks’s description of the man by the river. Also in May there had been a major jewelry robbery at a city center shop, netting the thieves eighteen thousand pounds. In June, a number of youths had gone on the rampage and slashed tires on about thirty cars in the city center; in the same month, a twenty-one-year-old man had been stabbed outside The Rose and Crown, on Bridge Street, after an argument over a girl. In August, two alleged homosexuals had been questioned in connection with lewd goings-on at the country mansion of a local bigwig, Rupert Mandeville, but the anonymous informant couldn’t be located, and all charges had later been dismissed for lack of evidence. Hard to believe that it was a crime to be gay, Michelle thought, but 1965 was back in the Dark Ages, before homosexuality had been legalized in 1967.
There were certainly plenty of incidents before and after Graham Marshall’s disappearance, Michelle was fast discovering, but none of them seemed to have anything remotely to do with Banks’s riverbank adventure. She read on. In July, police had investigated complaints about a local protection racket modeled on the East London Kray gang operation, allegedly led by a man called Carlo Fiorino, but no charges were brought.
The more she read, the more Michelle realized what a vast chasm yawned between 1965 and today. She had, in fact, been born in 1961, but she was damned if she was going to admit that to Banks. Her own teenage years had been spent in what Banks would no doubt call a musical wasteland made up of The Bay City Rollers, Elton John and Hot Chocolate, not to mention Saturday Night Fever and Grease. Punk came along when she was about fifteen, but Michelle was far too conservative to join in with that crowd. If truth be told, the punks scared her with their torn clothes, spiky hair and safety pins in their ears. And the music just sounded like noise to her.
Not that Michelle had had a great deal of time for pop music; she had been a studious child, lamenting that it always seemed to take her so long to finish her homework when others were done and out on the town. Her mother said she was too much of a perfectionist to let something be and have done with it, and perhaps that was true. Painstaking. Perfectionist. These were labels she had come to know and hate from friends, family and the teachers at school. Why not just say pedestrian and plodding and have done with it, if that was what they meant? she sometimes wondered.
She hadn’t done brilliantly at school, despite all her hard work, but she had managed to pass enough O- and A-Levels to get into a poly – again cramming through all the concerts and parties her fellow students went to – where she had studied business and management techniques before deciding on the police as a career. On those rare occasions when she did have time to go out, late in the seventies, she liked to dance. For that, reggae or two-tone was her music of choice: Bob Marley, The Specials, Madness, UB40.
Michelle had always hated nostalgia snobs, as she called them, and in her experience, the sixties ones were the worst of the lot. She suspected that Banks was one. To hear them talk, you’d think paradise had been lost or the seventh seal broken now that so many of the great rock icons were dead, geriatric, or gaga, and nobody wore beads and caftans anymore, and you’d also think that drug-taking was an innocent way to spend a few hours relaxing, or a means of reaching some exalted spiritual state, instead of a waste of lives and a source of money for evil, unscrupulous dealers.
The archives office was quiet except for the buzzing of the fluorescent light. Silence is a rare thing in a police station, where everyone is pushed together in open-plan offices, but down here Michelle could even hear her watch ticking. After five. Time for a break soon, some fresh air perhaps, and then back down to it.
Reading the crime reports for August, she sensed rather than heard someone approaching the office, and when she looked up, she saw it was Detective Superintendent Benjamin Shaw.