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“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.”
“When was he caught?” Banks asked.
Michelle glanced at Shaw before answering. He gave her a curt nod. “That’s just it,” she went on. “He wasn’t. McCallum’s body was fished out of the River Nene near Oundle on the first of July.”
Banks felt his mouth open and shut without any sound coming out. “Dead?” he managed.
“Dead,” echoed Shaw. He tapped his pen on the desk. “Nearly two months before your friend disappeared. So you see, DCI Banks, you’ve been laboring under an illusion for all these years. Now, what I’m really interested in is why you lied to me and DI Proctor in the first place.”
Banks felt numb from the shock he had just received. Dead. All these years. The guilt. And all for nothing. The man who assaulted him on the riverbank couldn’t have abducted and killed Graham. He should have felt relieved, but he only felt confused. “I didn’t lie,” he muttered.
“Call it a sin of omission, then. You didn’t tell us about McCallum.”
“Doesn’t seem as if it would have mattered, does it?”
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
“Look, I was just a kid. I hadn’t told my parents because I was scared how they’d react. I was upset and ashamed by what happened. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know, but that’s how I felt. Dirty and ashamed, as if it was somehow my fault for inviting it.”
“You should have told us. It could have been a lead.”
Banks knew that Shaw was right; he had told reluctant witnesses the same thing himself, time after time. “Well, I didn’t, and it wasn’t,” he snapped. “I’m sorry. Okay?”
But Shaw wasn’t going to be so easily put off, Banks could tell. He was enjoying himself, throwing his weight around. It was the bully mentality. To him, Banks was still the fourteen-year-old kid whose budgie had just flown out the door. “What really happened to your friend?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
Shaw scratched his chin. “I remember thinking at the time that you knew something, that you were holding something back. I’d like to have taken you to the station, had you down in the cells for an hour or so, but you were a minor, and my senior officer Reg Proctor was a bit of a softie, when it came right down to it. What really happened?”
“I don’t know. Graham just disappeared.”
“Are you sure you and your mates didn’t set on him? Maybe it was an accident, things just went too far?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m suggesting that maybe the three of you ganged up on Graham Marshall for some reason and killed him. These things happen. Then you had to get rid of the body.”
Banks folded his arms. “And tell me how we did that.”
“I don’t know,” Shaw admitted. “But I don’t have to. Maybe you stole a car.”
“None of us could drive.”
“So you say.”
“It wasn’t the way it is today, with ten-year-olds behind the wheel.”
“Is that how it happened? A fight broke out and Graham got killed? Maybe fell and smashed his skull, or broke his neck? I’m not saying you intended to kill him, but it happened, didn’t it? Why don’t you come clean with me, Banks? It’ll do you good to get it off your chest after all these years.”
“Sir?”
“Shut up, DI Hart. Well, Banks? I’m waiting.”
Banks stood up. “You’ll have a bloody long wait, then. Good-bye.” He walked toward the door. Shaw didn’t try to stop him. Just as Banks had turned the handle, he heard the superintendent speak again and turned to face him. Shaw was gri
“Bloody good job the pros did last time,” said Banks, leaving and slamming the door behind him, a
Banks cast his mind back to that hot June afternoon by the river and asked himself if McCallum would have killed him. The answer, he decided, was yes. So sod the bastard, and sod guilt. McCallum was a dangerous loony and it wasn’t Banks’s fault he’d fallen in the fucking river and drowned. Good riddance.
Turning up the volume on Cream’s “Crossroads,” he sped out of the police car park, daring one of the patrol cars to chase him. Nobody did.
They all looked tired, A
Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe sat at the head of the table and poured himself a glass of water. Also present were DCs Templeton, Rickerd and Jackman, and Detective Sergeant Jim Hatchley, still clearly uneasy with A