“You think that’s why he was killed? Because of this girl?”

“We don’t know. It’s just one possibility we’ve been looking at. What about Lauren Anderson?”

“Miss Anderson? But she was his English teacher. You can’t think…”

“I don’t know. It’s not as if these things don’t happen. Rose Barlow?”

“Rose? The head teacher’s daughter? Well, she came round to the house once, but it was all perfectly innocent.”

“Rose Barlow came to your house? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“But it was ages ago.”

“February? March?”

“Around that time. Yes. How do you know?”

“Because somebody else noticed Luke and Rose were spending time together then, thought maybe they were going out together.”

“I don’t think so,” said Robin. “It was something to do with a school project.”

“Did she visit often?”

“Only the once.”

“And she never came back?”

“No.”

“Did Luke ever talk about her?”

“Except to say that he’d ended up doing most of the project himself, no. Look, I don’t understand all this, all your questions. Don’t you think he just wandered off and someone kidnapped him?”

“No,” said Annie. “I don’t think that’s what happened at all.”

“Then what?”

Annie stood up to leave. “Give me a little more time,” she said. “I’m getting there.”

Michelle had made three important discoveries before lunch that day, and it seemed a nice goal to set oneself. Who was it, she tried to remember, who had made it a point to believe six impossible things before breakfast? Was it Alice in Through the Looking Glass?

Well, the things Michelle had discovered were far from impossible. First, she had gone back to the log book for the summer of 1965 and found the reference to the Mandeville house. On the first of August that year, an anonymous informant had telephoned the station with allegations of underage sex and homosexuality. The possibility of drug-taking was also mentioned. A young DC called Geoff Talbot had gone out to make inquiries and had arrested two men he said he found naked together in a bedroom there. After that, nothing more appeared on the case except a note that all charges were dropped and an official apology issued to Mr. Rupert Mandeville, who, she discovered from an Internet search, had served as a Conservative Member of Parliament from 1979 to 1990 and was granted a life peerage in 1994.

It took Michelle a bit longer to track Geoff Talbot down, as he had left the police force in 1970 to work as a consultant with a television company. Eventually, through a patient personnel officer, she managed to find his address in Barnet, a north London suburb. She had rung him and he had agreed to talk to her.

After that, Michelle had enlisted DC Collins’s aid and discovered through local land registry records that Donald Bradford’s shop had been owned by a company linked to Carlo Fiorino, the late but unlamented local crime kingpin. The company had also owned Le Phonographe discotheque and several other newsagents’ shops in the Peterborough area. Ownership of Bradford’s shop went to the Walkers when he sold, but many of the other shops remained under Fiorino’s control well through the new town expansion into the seventies.