In May, for example, a man had been arrested in connection with an assault on a fourteen-year-old girl, who had accepted a lift with him near the A1, but he bore no resemblance whatsoever to Banks’s description of the man by the river. Also in May there had been a major jewelry robbery at a city center shop, netting the thieves eighteen thousand pounds. In June, a number of youths had gone on the rampage and slashed tires on about thirty cars in the city center; in the same month, a twenty-one-year-old man had been stabbed outside The Rose and Crown, on Bridge Street, after an argument over a girl. In August, two alleged homosexuals had been questioned in connection with lewd goings-on at the country mansion of a local bigwig, Rupert Mandeville, but the anonymous informant couldn’t be located, and all charges had later been dismissed for lack of evidence. Hard to believe that it was a crime to be gay, Michelle thought, but 1965 was back in the Dark Ages, before homosexuality had been legalized in 1967.

There were certainly plenty of incidents before and after Graham Marshall’s disappearance, Michelle was fast discovering, but none of them seemed to have anything remotely to do with Banks’s riverbank adventure. She read on. In July, police had investigated complaints about a local protection racket modeled on the East London Kray gang operation, allegedly led by a man called Carlo Fiorino, but no charges were brought.

The more she read, the more Michelle realized what a vast chasm yawned between 1965 and today. She had, in fact, been born in 1961, but she was damned if she was going to admit that to Banks. Her own teenage years had been spent in what Banks would no doubt call a musical wasteland made up of The Bay City Rollers, Elton John and Hot Chocolate, not to mention Saturday Night Fever and Grease. Punk came along when she was about fifteen, but Michelle was far too conservative to join in with that crowd. If truth be told, the punks scared her with their torn clothes, spiky hair and safety pins in their ears. And the music just sounded like noise to her.

Not that Michelle had had a great deal of time for pop music; she had been a studious child, lamenting that it always seemed to take her so long to finish her homework when others were done and out on the town. Her mother said she was too much of a perfectionist to let something be and have done with it, and perhaps that was true. Painstaking. Perfectionist. These were labels she had come to know and hate from friends, family and the teachers at school. Why not just say pedestrian and plodding and have done with it, if that was what they meant? she sometimes wondered.

She hadn’t done brilliantly at school, despite all her hard work, but she had managed to pass enough O- and A-Levels to get into a poly—again cramming through all the concerts and parties her fellow students went to—where she had studied business and management techniques before deciding on the police as a career. On those rare occasions when she did have time to go out, late in the seventies, she liked to dance. For that, reggae or two-tone was her music of choice: Bob Marley, The Specials, Madness, UB40.