When Martin Armitage’s Beemer shot out of the driveway spraying gravel a minute or two later, Annie had an idea. It was rare that she got to think or act spontaneously, as so much police work was governed by procedure, rules and regulations, but Annie was feeling reckless this morning, and the situation called for some initiative on her part.

As far as she knew, Martin Armitage had no idea what make or color car she drove, so he would hardly be suspicious that a purple Astra was following him at a respectable distance.

As Banks drove down the A1 and entered the landscape of bright new shopping centers, electronics warehouses and housing estates that had replaced the old coal mines, pit-wheels and slag heaps of West Yorkshire, he thought about the way the country had changed since Graham’s disappearance.

1965. Winston Churchill’s funeral. The Wilson Era. The end of capital punishment. The Kray trial. Carnaby Street. The Moors Murders. The first U.S. space walk. Help! Mods and Rockers. It was a time of possibility, of hope for the future, the fulcrum of the sixties. Only weeks after Graham disappeared, the sexy, leather-clad Emma Peel debuted in The Avengers, Jeremy Sandford’s documentary-style TV play about a homeless mother and her children, Cathy Come Home, caused a major stir, and The Who were singing about “My Generation.” Soon, young people were taking to the streets to protest against war, famine and anything else they could think of, shouting “Make love, not war,” smoking dope and dropping acid. Everything seemed on the verge of blossoming into some new sort of order, and Graham, who had seemed so forward-looking, so cool in so many ways, should have been there to see it, but he wasn’t.

And what came between then and Blair’s Britain? Mostly Margaret Thatcher, who dismantled the country’s manufacturing base, emasculated the trade unions, and demoralized the workingman, leaving the north, especially, a ghost land of empty factories, thrift shops and decaying council estates, where those growing up had no hope of a job. In their idleness and hopelessness, many turned to crime and vandalism; car theft became commonplace; and the police became the enemy of the people. Today, without doubt, it was a softer, easier, more middle-of-the-road Britain, and a much more American one, with McDonald’s, Pizza Huts and shopping malls springing up all over the place. Most people seemed to have what they wanted, but what they wanted was mostly of a material nature—a new car, a DVD player, a pair of Nike trainers—and people were being mugged, even murdered, for their mobile phones.

But were things so very different back in the mid-sixties? Banks asked himself. Wasn’t consumerism just as rife back then? That Monday evening in August 1965, when the knock came at their door, the Banks family was settling down to watch Coronation Street on their brand-new television set, bought on hire purchase just the previous week. Banks’s father was in work then, at the sheet-metal factory, and if anyone had predicted that he would be made redundant seventeen years later, he’d have laughed in their face.