“Are you saying that John Harris ordered the boy’s death, because—”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I’d say it was Fiorino, or Mandeville, but Harris had to know about it in order to misdirect the investigation. And that makes him just as guilty in my book.”

Shaw closed his eyes and shook his head. “Not John. No. Maybe he didn’t always play by the rules, maybe he did turn a blind eye to one or two things, but not murder. Not a dead kid.”

“You have to accept it,” Banks went on. “It’s the only thing that makes sense of later events.”

“What later events?”

“The botched investigation and the missing notebooks and actions. I don’t know who got rid of them—you, Harris or Reg Proctor, but one of you did.”

“It wasn’t me. All I’ve done was discourage DI Hart here from digging too deeply into the past.”

“And set Wayman on me.”

“You won’t get me to admit to that.”

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” said Banks. “So Harris took them himself when he left. That makes sense. It wasn’t his finest hour, and he wouldn’t want the evidence hanging around for anyone to see if Graham’s body ever did turn up. Insurance. Cast your mind back. You were there in the summer of 1965. You and Reg Proctor covered the estate. What did you find out?”

“Nobody knew anything.”

“I’ll bet that’s not true,” said Banks. “I’ll bet there were one or two references to ‘Dirty Don’ in your notebooks. One of my old mates remembered referring to him that way. And I’ll bet there was a rumor or two about porn.”

“Rumors, maybe,” said Shaw, looking away, “but that’s all they were.”

“How do you know?”

Shaw scowled at him.

“Exactly,” said Banks. “You only know because Harris told you so. Remember, you were just a young DC back then. You didn’t question your superior officers. If anything showed up in your interviews that pointed you in the right direction—Bradford, Fiorino, Mandeville—then Harris ignored it, dismissed it as mere rumor, a dead end. You just skimmed the surface, exactly as he wanted it. That’s why the action allocations are missing, too. Harris was in charge of the investigation. He’d have issued the actions. And we’d have found out what direction they all pointed in—the passing pedophile theory, later made more credible by Brady’s and Hindley’s arrest—and, what’s more important, what they pointed away from. The truth.”

“It’s still all theory,” said Shaw.

“Yes,” Banks admitted. “But you know it’s true. We’ve got the photo of Graham, taken at Mandeville’s house, Bradford’s connection with the porn business and the possible murder weapon, and the missing notebooks. Go ahead, see if it adds up any other way.”

Shaw sighed. “I just can’t believe John would do something like that. I know he gave Fiorino a lot of leeway, but I thought at the time that he got his reward in information. Fair exchange. That’s all I was trying to protect. A bit of tit for tat. All those years I knew him…and I still can’t fucking believe it.”