Far fewer people owned cars in 1965, Michelle realized, and that made her think again about Banks’s statement. Banks said he had been assaulted by a dirty, scruffy “Rasputin-like” stranger on the riverside near the city center. But Graham Marshall had been abducted, along with a heavy canvas bag full of newspapers, two months later, from a council estate several miles away. The MOs were different. It didn’t look as if Graham had put up a struggle, for example, which he certainly would have done, as Banks had, if he’d been attacked by this frightening stranger and felt that he had been fighting for his life. Besides, the man who assaulted Banks had been on foot, and Graham hadn’t walked all the way to his burial site. It was possible that the mysterious stranger had a car somewhere, but not very likely. Given Banks’s description, Michelle would have guessed the man was homeless and poor, perhaps a tramp. The passing tramp. Cliché of so many detective stories.

The problem was that she still couldn’t see any logical connection between the event Banks had described and the disappearance of Graham Marshall. She thought that Banks’s sense of guilt might, over the years, have warped his judgment in the matter. It happened; she’d seen it before. But could it have happened that way? Who was this man?

There was a good chance, Michelle realized, that she might not find out anything about him in the police files. Not everyone had a file, despite what the antipolice groups seemed to think. She might have to dig in the newspaper morgue or perhaps the local mental hospital archives. The man sounded disturbed, and there was a chance he had sought treatment at some time. Of course, there was also every possibility that he wasn’t a local. Michelle had no idea exactly where the River Nene started, but she thought it was somewhere down Northampton way, and she knew that it flowed all the way to The Wash. Maybe he was walking the riverbank from town to town.

She flipped through file after file and tossed them aside in frustration. Finally, as her eyes were starting to tire, she struck gold.

Chapter 7

The Coach and Horses, about a hundred yards along the main road, had changed over the years, Banks noticed, but not as much as some pubs. The large public bar had always housed a diverse group, mixed generations drinking there together, and today it was no different, though the racial mix had changed. Now, among the white faces, there were Pakistanis and Sikhs, and, according to Arthur Banks, a group of Kosovan asylum-seekers, who lived on the estate, also drank there.

Noisy machines with flashing lights had replaced the old bar-billiards area, the scarred wooden benches had been replaced with padded ones, perhaps the wallpaper had been redone and the light fixtures modernized, but that was about all. The brewery had forked out for this minor face-lift sometime in the eighties, Banks’s father had told him, hoping to pull in a younger, freer-spending crowd. But it didn’t take. The people who drank at The Coach and Horses had, for the most part, been drinking there most of their lives. And their fathers before them. Banks had drunk his first legal pint there, with his father on his eighteenth birthday, though he had been knocking them back with his mates at The Wheatsheaf, about a mile away, since he was sixteen. The last time he had been in The Coach and Horses, he had played one of the earliest pub video games, that silly machine where you bounced the tennis ball back and forth across a green phosphorous screen.