“Yes, he had a violin in his bedroom.”

“I told you, he’s not your common-or-garden pupil.” Barlow paused for a moment, staring out the window. “Wasn’t. We’ll miss him.”

“Even if you hardly knew he was there?”

“I was probably overstating the case,” Barlow said with a frown. “Luke had a certain presence. What I meant was that he just didn’t make a lot of noise or demand a lot of attention.”

“Who was giving him violin lessons?”

“Our music teacher, Alastair Ford. He’s quite a skilled player himself. Plays with a local string quartet. Strictly amateur, of course. You might have heard of them; they’re called the Aeolian Quartet. I understand they’re very good, though I must admit that my tastes edge more toward Miles than Mahler.”

The Aeolian. Banks had, indeed, heard of them. Not only that, but he had heard them. The last time was shortly after Christmas, at the community center with Annie Cabbot. They had played Schubert’s Death and the Maiden Quartet and made a very good job of it, Banks remembered.

“Is there anything else you can tell me?” he asked, standing to leave.

“I don’t think there is,” said Barlow. “All in all, Luke Armitage was a bit of a dark horse.”

As they walked through to the hall, Banks felt certain he caught a flurry of blond hair and long leg ducking through a doorway, but he could have been mistaken. Why would Rose Barlow want to listen in on their conversation, anyway?

The rain seemed to have settled in for the day after a short afternoon respite, a constant drizzle from a sky the color of dirty dishwater, when Annie did the rounds of Luke’s final ports of call. She found out nothing from the HMV staff, perhaps because they had such a high turnover and it was a large shop, hard to keep an eye on everyone. No one recognized the sketch. Besides, as one salesperson told her, many of the kids who shopped there looked pretty much the same. Black clothing wasn’t exactly unusual as far as HMV’s customers were concerned, nor was body-piercing or tattoos.

She fared little better at the computer shop on North Market Street. Gerald Kelly, the sole proprietor and staff member, remembered just about all his customers, but he had seen no one resembling the girl in black with Luke, who had always been alone on his visits to the shop.

Annie had just one last call. Norman’s Used Books was a dank, cramped space down a flight of stone steps under a bakery, one of several shops that seemed to be set right into the church walls in the market square. The books all smelled of mildew, but you could find the most obscure things sometimes. Annie herself had shopped there once or twice, looking for old art books, and had even found some decent prints among the boxes the owner kept at the back of the shop, though they were sometimes warped and discolored because of the damp.