Though there were few young people to be seen there, The Coach and Horses still managed to be a warm and lively place, Banks noticed as he walked in with his father just after eight o’clock that night, his mother’s steamed pudding and custard – the proper food he was supposed to be eating – still weighing heavy in his stomach. His father had managed the walk without too much puffing and wheezing, which he put down to having stopped smoking two years ago. Banks had tapped his own jacket pocket rather guiltily for his cigarettes as they went out of the door.
This was Arthur Banks’s local. He had been coming here almost every day for forty years, and so had his cronies, Harry Finnegan, Jock McFall and Norman Grenfell, Dave’s father. Here, Arthur was respected. Here, he could escape the clutches of his ailments and the shame of his redundancy, at least for an hour or two, as he drank, laughed and told lies with the men with whom he felt most comfortable. For The Coach and Horses was, by and large, a men’s pub, despite the occasional couple and groups of women dropping by after work. When Arthur took Ida out for a drink, as he did on Fridays, they went to The Duck and Drake or The Duke of Wellington, where Ida Banks caught up on the local gossip and they took part in trivia quizzes and laughed at people making fools of themselves in the karaoke sessions.
But there was none of that at The Coach and Horses, and the piped sixties pop music was turned down low enough so that old men could hear one another talk. At the moment, The Kinks were singing “Waterloo Sunset,” one of Banks’s favorites. After Banks and his father had settled themselves at the table, pints in front of them, and introductions had been made, Arthur Banks first lamented Jock McFall’s absence due to hospitalization for a prostate operation, then Norman Grenfell started the ball rolling.
“We were just saying, before you got here, Alan, what a terrible thing it is about the Marshall boy. I remember you and our David used to play with him.”
“Yes. How is Dave, by the way?”
“He’s doing fine,” said Norman. “He and Ellie still live in Dorchester. The kids have grown up now, of course.”
“They’re still together?” Ellie Hatcher was, Banks remembered, Dave’s first real girlfriend; they must have started going out together around 1968.
“Some couples stick it out,” muttered Arthur Banks.
Banks ignored the remark and asked Norman to pass on his regards to Dave next time they spoke. Unlike Jock and Harry, Banks remembered, both of whom had worked with Arthur at the sheet-metal factory, Norman had worked in a clothing shop on Midgate, where he could sometimes get his mates a discount on a duffel coat, a pair of jeans or Tuf shoes. Norman drank halves instead of pints and smoked a pipe, which made him different, almost genteel, compared to the rough factory workers. He also had a hobby – he read and collected everything to do with steam trains and had an entire room of his small house devoted to clockwork models – and that set him even farther apart from the beer, sport and telly crowd. Yet Norman Grenfell had always been as much a part of the group as Jock or Harry or Arthur himself, though he didn’t share that ineffable bond that workingmen have, of having toiled under the same lousy conditions for the same lousy bosses and faced the same dangers day in, day out, for the same lousy pay. Maybe, Banks wondered, Graham had been a bit like that, too: set apart by his background, by his being a newcomer, by his London cool, yet still a part of the gang. The quiet one. The George Harrison of the group.
“Well,” Banks said, raising his glass, “here’s to Graham. In the long run, I suppose it’s best they found him. At least his parents can lay his bones to rest now.”
“True enough,” said Harry.
“Amen,” said Norman.
“Didn’t Graham’s father use to drink here?” Banks asked.
Arthur Banks laughed. “He did. He was a rum customer, Bill Marshall, isn’t that right, Harry?”
“A rum customer, indeed. And a couple of bricks short of a full hod, too, if you ask me.”
They all laughed.
“In what way was he rum?” Banks asked.
Harry nudged Banks’s father. “Always the copper, your lad, hey?”
Arthur’s brow darkened. Banks knew damn well that his father had never approved of his choice of career, and that no matter how well he did, how successful he was, to his father he would always be a traitor to the working class, who traditionally feared and despised coppers. As far as Arthur Banks was concerned, his son was employed by the middle and upper classes to protect their interests and their property. Never mind that most coppers of Arthur’s own generation came from the working classes, unlike today, when many were middle-class university graduates and management types. The two of them had never resolved this problem, and Banks could see even now that his father was bothered by Harry Finnegan’s little dig.
“Graham was a friend of mine,” Banks went on quickly, to diffuse the tension. “I was just wondering, that’s all.”
“Is that why you’re down here?” Norman asked.
“Partly, yes.”
It was the same question Mrs. Marshall had asked him. Perhaps people assumed that because he was a policeman, and because he knew Graham, he would be assigned to this particular case. “I don’t know how much I can help,” Banks said, glancing sideways at his father, who was working on his beer. He had never told either of his parents about what had happened down by the river, and he wasn’t about to do so now. It might come out, of course, if his information led anywhere, and now he had an inkling of what the many witnesses who lied to avoid disclosing a shameful secret had to be anxious about. “It’s just that, well, I’ve thought about Graham and what happened on and off over the years, and I just thought I ought to come and try to help, that’s all.”
“I can understand that,” said Norman, relighting his pipe. “I think it’s been a bit of a shock to the system for all of us, one way or another.”
“You were saying about Graham’s father, Dad?”
Arthur Banks glanced at his son. “Was I?”
“You said he was strange. I didn’t know him well. I never really talked to him.”
“Course not,” said Arthur. “You were just a kid.”
“That’s why I’m asking you.”
There was a pause, then Arthur Banks looked over at Harry Finnegan. “He was shifty, wouldn’t you say so, Harry?”
“He was indeed. Always an eye for a fiddle, and not above a bit of strong-arm stuff. I wouldn’t have trusted him as far as I could throw him. And he was a big talker, too.”
“What do you mean?” Banks asked.
“Well,” his father said. “You know the family came up from London?”
“Yes.”
“Bill Marshall worked as a bricklayer, and he was a good one, too, but when he’d had a drink or two he’d start letting things slip about some of his other activities in London.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“He was a fit bloke, Bill. Strong. Big hands, powerful upper body. Comes from carrying those hods around the building sites.”
“He used to get into fights?”
“You could say that.”
“What your dad’s saying,” explained Harry, leaning forward, “is that Bill Marshall let slip he used to act as an enforcer for gangsters down the Smoke. Protection rackets, that sort of thing.”
The Smoke? Banks hadn’t heard that term for London for years. “He did?” Banks shook his head. It was hard to imagine the old man in the chair as having been some sort of gang enforcer, but it might help explain the fear Banks remembered feeling in his presence all those years ago, the threat of violence. “I’d never have-”