“I suppose it’s just a mark of my frustration with the case,” Michelle admitted. “After all, it was so long ago.”

“Jet Harris always said it was them Moors Murderers, the ones who were tried the year after. He said we’d all probably have nightmares for the rest of our lives if we ever knew how many young lives they’d taken and where the bodies were buried.”

“He told you that, did he?” said Michelle. How very convenient. She was fast coming to the conclusion—or reaffirming what she had suspected earlier—that Detective Superintendent Harris had run the case with blinkers on, and Mrs. Marshall, like so many mothers, hadn’t a clue what her son was up to most of the time. She wondered if his father knew. Bill Marshall’s lopsided face gave away nothing, but Michelle fancied she could see wariness in his eyes. And something else. She couldn’t say with any certainty that it was guilt, but it looked like that to her. Michelle took a deep breath and plunged in.

“I understand your husband used to work for the Kray twins back in London.”

There was a short silence, then Mrs. Marshall said, “Bill didn’t work for them, as such. He used to spar with them down the gym. We knew them. Of course we did. We grew up in the same neighborhood. Everybody knew Reggie and Ronnie. Always polite to me, they were, no matter what anybody says about them, and I’ve heard some stories as would make your hair curl. But they were basically good lads. People don’t like it when others get a bit above their station, you know.”

Michelle could feel her jaw dropping. There was nothing more to be gained here, she realized, and if she was going to solve this case she was going to do so without the family’s help, and without Ben Shaw’s. And perhaps in peril of her life. “Remember Melissa. You could join her….” Promising again that she would be at the funeral, Michelle excused herself and hurried off.

That evening at home, Banks glanced through the evening paper over a Madras curry he’d bought earlier at Marks and Spencers, slipped Bill Evans’s Paris Concert into the CD player, poured himself a couple of fingers of Laphroaig and flopped down on the sofa with his 1965 Photoplay diary. He thought it was Oscar Wilde who had said, “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train,” but he could have been wrong. It was easy to attribute just about any witty saying to Oscar Wilde or Groucho Marx. Curious, though, he stirred himself and checked the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and found that he was right this time.

Banks’s diary was far from sensational. As he flipped the pages once again, glancing at the pretty actresses he hardly remembered—Carol Lynley, Jill St. John, Yvette Mimieux—he was struck by how many records he had bought and films he had seen. Until, just a couple of weeks from Graham’s disappearance, Banks saw that his diary did, in fact, have its moments, and as he read the trivial or cryptic entries, he was able to fill in the rest with his memory and imagination.