For the moment, he put back the box and pulled out another one, this one full mostly of old toys. There were model airplanes—Spitfires, Wellingtons, Junkers and a Messerschmitt with a broken wing—a couple of Dinky Toys, a Dan Dare Rocket Gun, and a small clockwork Dalek that said “Ex-ter-min-ate! Ex-ter-min-ate!” as it rolled along like an upturned dustbin. There were a few old annuals, too—The Saint, Danger Man and The Man From U.N.C.L.E.— along with what had once been his pride and joy, a pocket-size Philips transistor radio. Maybe if he put in some new batteries, he could even get it working.

The third box he opened was full of old school reports, magazines, letters and exercise books. He had sometimes wondered over the years what had happened to all this stuff and assumed, if anything, that his parents had chucked it out when they figured he wouldn’t need it anymore. Not so. It had been hiding away in the wardrobe all this time. There they were: Beatles Monthly, Fabulous, Record Song Book and The Radio Luxembourg Book of Record Stars.

Banks pulled out a handful of the small notebooks and found they were his old diaries. Some were plain Letts’ diaries, with a little slot for a pencil down the spine, and some were special-themed, illustrated ones, such as pop star, television or sports diaries. The one that was of most immediate interest to him, though, was a Photoplay diary with a stiff, laminated cover and a color photo of Sean Connery and Honor Blackman from 1964’s Bond film, Goldfinger, on the front. Inside, a photo of a different film star faced each page of dates. The first was Brigitte Bardot, for the week starting Sunday, December 27, 1964, the first full week of his diary for 1965, the year Graham disappeared.

Michelle took off her reading glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose, where she sensed a headache beginning to form between her eyes. She suffered from headaches frequently these days, and while her doctor assured her there was nothing seriously wrong—no brain tumor or neurological disease—and her psychiatrist told her that it was probably just stress and “coping,” she couldn’t help but worry.

The air quality in the archives office didn’t help either. Instead of signing the heavier boxes out and carrying them up to her office, Michelle had decided she might as well look through the material down there. The reading room was just a glassed-in alcove with a desk and chair. It stood at the entrance to several parallel aisles of old papers, some of which went back to the late-nineteenth century. If the environment had been a little more comfortable, she might have considered having a browse around the archives. There was bound to be some fascinating stuff.

For the moment, 1965 would have to do. Michelle wanted to get a general idea of the crimes occurring around the time of Graham’s disappearance, to see if she could come up with any links to Banks’s mysterious stranger, and Mrs. Metcalfe had directed her to the logbooks that indexed and recorded all complaints and actions taken, day by day. It made for interesting reading, most of it not relevant to what she was looking for. Many of the calls listed went no further—missing pets, some domestic complaints—but the lists gave her a good impression of what daily life must have been like for a copper back then.