Over the first pint, they had caught up with one another to the extent that Banks knew Dave, as his father had said, still worked as a mechanic in a garage in Dorchester and was still married to Ellie, whereas Paul was cheerfully unemployed and gay as the day is long. Coming hot on the heels of his hearing Mrs. Gifford’s revelations about Jet Harris over the phone from Michelle, this last discovery shocked Banks only because he had never spotted any signs of it back when they were kids. Not that he would have recognized them. Paul had seemed to leer over the porn just as much as the others, laugh at the jokes about poofs, and Banks was sure he remembered him having a steady girlfriend at one point.

Still, back in 1965, people denied, pretended, tried to “pass” for straight. Even after legalization, there was so much stigma attached to it, especially on the more macho working-class estates where they had all lived. And in the police force. Banks wondered how hard it had been for Paul to come to terms with himself and come out. Clearly Jet Harris had never been able to do so. And Banks was willing to bet a pound to a penny that someone had known about it, and that someone had used the knowledge to advantage. Jet Harris hadn’t been bent; he’d been blackmailed.

As Dave prattled on about how gobsmacked he was to find out Paul had turned into an “arse-bandit,” Banks’s thoughts returned to the photo he had found in Graham’s guitar. He hadn’t told Mr. or Mrs. Marshall, hadn’t told anyone except Michelle, over his mobile phone, when he took the photo up to his room before meeting the others in The Wheatsheaf. What did it mean, and why was it there? Graham must have put it there, Banks assumed, and he did so because he wanted to hide it. But why did he have it in his possession, why had he posed for it, who took it, and where was it taken? The fireplace looked distinctive enough. Adam, Banks guessed, and you didn’t find those just anywhere.

Banks could begin to formulate a few answers to his questions, but he didn’t have enough pieces yet to make a complete pattern. Two things he and Michelle had agreed on for certain during their phone conversation: the photo was in some way connected with Graham’s murder, and Donald Bradford and Jet Harris were involved in whatever nasty business had been going on. Maybe Carlo Fiorino and Bill Marshall, too. But there were still a few pieces missing.

They carried the drinks back to the table, where Paul sat glancing around the room. “Remember the old jukebox?” he said.

Banks nodded. The Wheatsheaf used to have a great jukebox for a provincial pub outside the city center, he remembered, and they spent almost as much money on that as they did on beer. The sixties of familiar, if sentimental, memory was in full bloom then, when they were sixteen: Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” the Flowerpot Men singing “Let’s go to San Francisco,” The Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour.”