Certain that no one would mind, Banks sat down on a hard-backed chair and took the guitar out of its case. Graham had been so proud of it, he remembered. Of course, he had wanted an electric one, a Rickenbacker like the one John Lennon played, but he had been chuffed to death with the secondhand acoustic his parents had bought him for Christmas 1964.

Banks remembered the fingering, even after so long, and strummed a C chord. Way out of tune. He grimaced. Tuning it would be too much of a job for the moment. He wondered if Mrs. Marshall wanted to keep it as a memento, or if she would consider selling it. If she would, he’d be glad to buy it from her. He strummed an out-of-tune G seventh, then moved to put the guitar back in its case. As he did so, he thought he heard something slip around inside it. Gently, he shook the guitar, and there it was again: something scraping inside.

Curious, Banks loosened the strings so that he could slip his hand inside. With a bit of juggling and shaking he managed to grab hold of what felt like a piece of stiff, rolled-up paper. Carefully he pulled it out, noticing the dried Sellotape Graham had used to stick it to the inside of the guitar. That made it something he had tried to hide.

And when Banks unrolled it, he saw why.

It was a photograph: Graham sprawled on a sheepskin rug in front of a large, ornate fireplace, arms behind him, hands propping him up, legs stretched out in front. He was smiling at the camera in a flirtatious and knowing manner.

And he was absolutely stark naked.

Michelle was lucky to find a parking spot about a hundred yards from the former Mrs. Harris’s pretentious pile of mock Tudor on Long Road, Cambridge, opposite the grounds of Long Road Sixth Form College. It was still drizzling outside, so she took the umbrella from the back of her car.

It hadn’t been too hard to track down Jet Harris’s ex-wife. The biographical pamphlet told Michelle that her maiden name was Edith Dalton and that she had been married to Harris for twenty-three years, from 1950 to 1973, and that she was ten years his junior. A few discreet inquiries around the office yielded the information that a retired civilian employee, Margery Jenkins, visited her occasionally, and she was happy to give Michelle the address. She also told her that the former Mrs. Harris had remarried and was now called Mrs. Gifford. Michelle hoped that the nature of her inquiries didn’t get back to Shaw before she got the information she needed, whatever that was. She wasn’t even sure what Mrs. Gifford could, or would, tell her.

A slim, elegantly dressed gray-haired woman answered the door, and Michelle introduced herself. With a puzzled but interested expression Mrs. Gifford led Michelle to her large living room. There was no clutter, just a white three-piece suite, various antique cabinets stuffed with crystal, and a large sideboard against the wall. Mrs. Gifford offered nothing in the way of refreshments but sat, legs crossed, and lit a cigarette from a gold lighter. She had a calculating look about her, Michelle noticed—around the eyes, in the eyes themselves, in the strict set of her jaw and sharp angles of her cheeks. She was also very well-preserved for her seventy-plus years and had a deep tan, the sort she couldn’t have got in England so far this summer.