Interesting he should assume that Graham had run away from home. But of course he would, at that age. What else? The alternatives would have been too horrific for a fourteen-year-old boy to contemplate. He flipped back to late June, around the time he thought the event on the riverbank had occurred. It was a Tuesday, he noticed. He hadn’t written much about it, simply, “Skived off school and played by river this afternoon. A strange man tried to push me in.”
Tired, Banks put the diary aside, rubbed his eyes and turned out the light. It felt odd to be back in the same bed he had slept in during his teenage years, the same bed where he had had his first sexual experience, with Kay Summerville, while his parents were out visiting his grandparents one Saturday. It hadn’t been very good for either Banks or Kay, but they had persevered and got a lot better with practice.
Kay Summerville. He wondered where she was, what she was doing now. Probably married with kids, the same way he had been until recently. She’d been a beauty, though, had Kay: long blond hair, slender waist, long legs, a mouth like Marianne Faithfull’s, firm tits with hard little nipples and hair like spun gold between her legs. Christ, Banks, he told himself, enough with the adolescent fantasies.
He put on his headphones and turned on his portable CD player, listening to Vaughan Williams’s Second String Quartet, and settled back to more pleasant thoughts of Kay Summerville. But as he approached the edge of sleep, his thoughts jumbled, mixing memory with dream. It was cold and dark, and Banks and Graham were walking across a rugby field, goalposts silhouetted by the moon, cracking spiderweb patterns in the ice as they walked, their breath misting the air. Banks must have said something about the Krays having been arrested – was he interested in criminals, even then? – and Graham just laughed, saying the law could never touch people like them. Banks asked him how he knew, and Graham said he used to live near them. “They were kings,” he said.
Puzzled by the memory, or dream, Banks turned the bedside light on again and picked up the diary. If what he had just imagined had any basis in reality, then it had happened in winter. He glanced through his entries for January and February 1965: Samantha Eggar, Yvonne Romain, Elke Sommer… But no mention of the Krays until the ninth of March, when he had written, “Krays went to trial today. Graham laughed and said they’d get off easy.” So Graham had mentioned them. It was flimsy, but a start.
He turned off the light again, and this time he drifted off to sleep without further thoughts of either Graham or Kay Summerville.
Chapter 8
When Banks arrived at Thorpe Wood the following morning and asked to see Detective Inspector Hart, he was surprised when a man came down to greet him. The telephone call that his mother had told him about when he got back from the pub had been from Michelle.
“Mr. Banks, or should I say DCI Banks? Come with me, please, if you would.” He stood aside and gestured for Banks to enter.
“And you are?”
“Detective Superintendent Shaw. We’ll talk in my office.”
Shaw looked familiar, but Banks couldn’t place him. It was possible they had met on a course, or even on a case, years ago, and he had forgotten, but he usually had a good memory for faces.
They didn’t speak on their way to Shaw’s office, and as soon as they got there Shaw disappeared, saying he’d be back in a couple of minutes. Old copper’s trick, Banks knew. And Shaw knew he knew.
There wasn’t likely to be anything of interest in the office if Shaw was willing to leave Banks there alone, but he had a poke around nonetheless. Second nature. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but just looking for the sake of it. The filing cabinets were locked, as were the desk drawers, and the computer required a password. It began to seem very much as if Shaw expected Banks to nose about.
There was an interesting framed photograph on the wall, quite a few years old by the look of it, showing a younger Shaw and Jet Harris standing by an unmarked Rover looking for all the world like John Thaw and Dennis Waterman in The Sweeney. Or was it Morse and Lewis? Is that how Shaw saw himself, as Sergeant Lewis to Harris’s Chief Inspector Morse?
The bookcase held mostly binders and back issues of the Police Review. Mixed in were a few legal texts and an American textbook called Practical Homicide Investigation. Banks was browsing through this and trying not to look at the gruesome color illustrations when, after half an hour, Shaw came back, followed by a rather embarrassed-looking DI Michelle Hart.
“Sorry about that,” said Shaw, sitting down opposite Banks. “Something came up. You know how it is.” Michelle sat to one side looking uncomfortable.
“I know.” Banks put the book aside and reached for a cigarette.
“There’s no smoking in here,” said Shaw. “Not anywhere in the building, not for any of us, these days. Maybe you’re still a bit behind the times back up in Yorkshire?”
Banks had known that he probably couldn’t smoke, though Shaw had the nicotine-stained fingers of a heavy smoker, but he thought it at least worth a try. Obviously, though, this was going to be played the hard way, even though they had done him the courtesy of conducting the interview in the superintendent’s office rather than in a dingy interview room. He didn’t feel nervous, just puzzled and pissed off. What was going on?
“So, what can I do for you, Superintendent Shaw?”
“You don’t remember me, do you?”
Shaw stared at Banks, and Banks searched through his store of faces for a match. The ginger hair was thin on top, one long side strand combed over to hide the bald patch, but not fooling anyone; hardly any eyebrows; freckles, pale blue eyes, the face filled out and jowly; the fleshy, red-veined nose of a seasoned drinker. He was familiar, but there was something different about him. Then Banks knew.
“You’ve had your ears fixed,” he said. “The wonders of modern medicine.”
Shaw reddened. “So you do remember me.”
“You were the baby DC who came to our house after Graham disappeared.” It was hard to believe, but Shaw would have been about twenty-one at the time, only seven years older than Banks, yet he had seemed an adult, someone from another world.
“Tell me,” said Shaw, leaning forward across the table so Banks could smell the minty breath of a man who drinks his breakfast. “I’ve always wondered. Did you ever get your budgie back?”
Banks leaned back in his chair. “Well, now we’ve got all the pleasantries out of the way, why don’t we get on with it?”
Shaw jerked his head at Michelle, who slid a photograph across the desk to Banks. She looked serious with her reading glasses on. Sexy, too, Banks thought. “Is this the man?” she asked.
Banks stared at the black-and-white photo and felt a rush of blood to his brain, ears buzzing and vision clouding. It all flooded back, those few moments of claustrophobia and terror in the stranger’s grip, the moments he had thought were his last.
“Are you all right?”
It was Michelle who spoke, a concerned look on her face.
“I’m fine,” he said.
“You look pale. Would you like a drink of water?”
“No, thank you,” said Banks. “It’s him.”
“Are you certain?”
“After all this time I can’t be a hundred percent positive, but I’m as certain as I’ll ever be.”
Shaw nodded, and Michelle took the picture back.
“Why?” Banks asked, looking from one to the other. “What is it?”
“James Francis McCallum,” Michelle said. “He went missing from a mental institution near Wisbech on Thursday, June seventeenth, 1965.”
“That would be about right,” said Banks.
“McCallum hadn’t been involved in any violent activity, but the doctors told us that the possibility always existed, and that he might be dangerous.”