Banks opened the gate. He noticed that his mother had planted some colorful flowers and kept the small patch of lawn neatly trimmed. This was the only garden she had ever had, and she always had been proud of her little patch of earth. He walked up the flagstone path and knocked at the door. He saw his mother approach through the frosted glass pane. She opened the door, rubbed her hands together as if drying them, and gave him a hug. “Alan,” she said. “Lovely to see you. Come on in.”

Banks dropped his overnight bag in the hall and followed his mother through to the living room. The wallpaper was a sort of wispy autumn-leaves pattern, the three-piece suite a matching brown velveteen, and there was a sentimental autumnal landscape hanging over the electric fire. He didn’t remember this theme from his previous visit, about a year ago, but he couldn’t be certain that it hadn’t been there, either. So much for the observant detective and the dutiful son.

His father was sitting in his usual armchair, the one with the best straight-on view of the television. He didn’t get up, only grunted, “Son. How you doing?”

“Not bad, Dad. You?”

“Mustn’t complain.” Arthur Banks had been suffering from mild angina and an assortment of less specified chronic illnesses for years, ever since he’d been made redundant from the sheet-metal factory, and they seemed to get neither better nor worse as the years went on. He took pills occasionally for the chest pains. Other than that, and the damage booze and fags had wreaked on his liver and lungs over the years, he had always been fit as a fiddle. Short, skinny and hollow-chested, he still had a head of thick dark hair with hardly a trace of gray. He wore it slicked back with lashings of Brylcreem.

Banks’s mother, plump and nervy, with pouchy chipmunk cheeks and a haze of blue-gray hair hovering around her skull, fussed about how thin Banks was looking. “I don’t suppose you’ve been eating properly since Sandra left, have you?” she said.

“You know how it is,” said Banks. “I manage to gulp down the occasional Big Mac and fries now and then, if I’ve got time to spare.”

“Don’t be cheeky. Besides, you need proper food. In for tea?”

“I suppose so,” Banks said. He hadn’t thought about what he was going to do once he actually got home. If truth be told, he had imagined that the local police—in the lovely form of DI Michelle Hart—would find his offer of help invaluable and give him an office at Thorpe Wood. But that clearly was not to be. Fair enough, he thought; it’s her case, after all. “I’ll just take my bag up,” he said, heading for the stairs.

Though Banks hadn’t stayed overnight since he had first left for London, somehow he knew that his room would be just as it always had been. And he was right. Almost. It was the same wardrobe, the same small bookcase, the same narrow bed he had slept in as a teenager, sneaking his transistor radio under the covers to listen to Radio Luxembourg, or reading a book by the light of a flashlight. The only thing different was the wallpaper. Gone were the sports-car images of his adolescence, replaced by pink and green stripes. He stood on the threshold for a few moments allowing it all to flow back, allowing the emotion that he felt nudging at the boundaries of his consciousness. It wasn’t quite nostalgia, nor was it loss, but something in between.