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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 stu
The records here represented the begi
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 a
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 Co
Michelle took off her reading glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose, where she sensed a headache begi
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 co