The Krays were no exception. They knew how to manipulate the media, and being photographed with a famous actress, an MP, or a peer of the realm made it less likely that the truth about their real activities would come out. There was a trial in 1965, Banks remembered, and they came out of that more fireproof than they went in.

It was hard to believe that Graham Marshall’s dad had had anything to do with them, though, and Banks had to admit that his father was probably right; it had just been the beer talking.

Why, though? Why even hint at something like that if there wasn’t a scrap of truth in it? Maybe Bill Marshall was a pathological liar. But over his years as a copper, Banks had learned that the old cliché “There’s no smoke without fire” had a great deal to recommend it. And there were two other things: The Marshalls came from the East End of London, Kray territory in the mid-sixties, and Banks now remembered feeling afraid around Mr. Marshall.

He already knew a bit about the Krays, most of it picked up when he was on the Met years ago, but he could dig deeper. There were plenty of books about them, though he doubted that any mentioned Bill Marshall. If he had done anything for them, it had obviously been low-level, going round the customers and exuding physical menace, maybe clobbering the occasional informer or double-dealer in a dark alley.

He would have to tell DI Hart. Michelle. She had left a message with Banks’s mother while he was out, asking him to drop by Thorpe Wood at 9 A.M. the following morning. It was her case, after all. If there was a connection, though, he was surprised that it hadn’t come out in the investigation. Usually the parents come under very close scrutiny in missing child cases, no matter how grief-stricken they appear. Banks had once come across a young couple he had believed to be genuinely grieving the loss of their child, only to find the poor kid strangled for crying too loud and stuffed in the downstairs freezer. No, you couldn’t trust surfaces in police work; you had to dig, if only to make certain you weren’t having the wool pulled over your eyes.

Banks picked up his old transistor radio. He had bought a battery earlier and wondered if it would still work after all these years. Probably not, but it was worth the price of a battery to find out. He unclipped the back, connected the battery and put the earpiece in his ear. It was just a single unit, like an old hearing aid. No stereo radio back then. When he turned it on, he was thrilled to find that the old trannie actually worked. Banks could hardly believe it. As he tuned the dial, though, he soon began to feel disappointed. The sound quality was poor, but it wasn’t only that. The radio received all the local stations, Classic FM and Radios 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, just like any modern radio, but Banks realized he had been half-expecting to go back in time. The idea that this was a magic radio that still received the Light Programme, Radio Luxembourg and the pirates, Radio Caroline and Radio London, was lodged somewhere in his mind. He had expected to be listening to John Peel’s The Perfumed Garden, to relive those magical few months in the spring of 1967, when he should have been studying for his O-Levels but spent half the night with the radio plugged in his ear, hearing Captain Beefheart, the Incredible String Band and Tyrannosaurus Rex for the first time.