She glanced at the answering machine, but no light flashed. It never did. She wondered why she bothered to keep the thing. Work, of course. After a quick blitz on the dishes in the sink and a run around with the Hoover, she felt ready to sit down and watch The Krays. But she was hungry. As usual, there was nothing in the fridge, at least nothing edible, so she went around the corner to the Indian take-away and got some prawn curry and rice. Sitting with a tray on her lap and a bottle of South African Merlot beside her, she pressed the remote and the video began.

When it had finished, Michelle didn’t feel she knew much more about the Kray twins than before it had begun. Yes, theirs was a violent world and you’d better not cross them. Yes, they seemed to have plenty of money and spend most of their time in ritzy clubs. But what exactly did they do? Apart from vague battles with the Maltese and meetings with American gangsters, the exact nature of their businesses was left unexplained. And, as far as the film was concerned, coppers might as well have not even existed.

She turned to the news, still feeling a little queasy from the violence. Or was it from the curry and wine? She didn’t really believe that the Krays had anything to do with Graham Marshall’s murder, no more than she believed Brady and Hindley had, and she could imagine how Shaw would laugh if he heard her suggest such a thing.

If Bill Marshall had any serious criminal aspirations, they hadn’t done him much good. He never got out of the council house, though the Marshalls had bought it for four thousand pounds in 1984.

Perhaps he swore off crime. Michelle had checked subsequent police records and found no further mention of him, so he had gone either straight or uncaught. She would guess at the former, given his standard of living. Graham’s disappearance must have shaken him, then. Maybe he sensed a connection to the world he had been involved in, so he severed all ties. She would have to find time to have an even closer look at the old crime reports, dig out old action books and the notebooks of the detectives involved. But that could wait until after the weekend.

She turned on her computer and tried to put her thoughts and theories into some kind of order, the way she usually did last thing at night, then she played a couple of games of Freecell and lost.

It got dark. Michelle turned off her computer, cleared away the detritus of her lonely dinner, found there wasn’t enough wine left in the bottle worth saving, so topped up her glass. As it so often did around bedtime, the depression seemed to close in on her like a dense fog. She sipped her wine and listened to rain tapping against her window. God, how she missed Melissa, even after all this time. She missed Ted, too, sometimes, but mostly she missed Melissa.