Banks cast his mind back to that hot June afternoon by the river and asked himself if McCallum would have killed him. The answer, he decided, was yes. So sod the bastard, and sod guilt. McCallum was a dangerous loony and it wasn’t Banks’s fault he’d fallen in the fucking river and drowned. Good riddance.

Turning up the volume on Cream’s “Crossroads,” he sped out of the police car park, daring one of the patrol cars to chase him. Nobody did.

They all looked tired, Annie thought, as the Armitage team gathered in the boardroom of Western Area Headquarters late that morning. The boardroom was so called because of its long polished table, high-backed chairs and paintings of nineteenth-century cotton magnates on the walls, red-faced, eyes popping, probably because of the tight collars they were wearing, Annie thought. As works of art, the paintings were negligible, if not execrable, but they lent authority to the room.

Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe sat at the head of the table and poured himself a glass of water. Also present were DCs Templeton, Rickerd and Jackman, and Detective Sergeant Jim Hatchley, still clearly uneasy with Annie’s promotion over him. But as Banks had told Annie more than once, Jim Hatchley was born to be a sergeant, and a damn good one, too. There wasn’t much Hatchley didn’t know about the shady side of Eastvale. He had a network of informers second only to his network of pub managers and landlords, who all kept an eye on criminal comings and goings for him, and his tiredness was probably due to the fact that his wife had just given birth to their second child a couple of weeks ago. It was the three DCs who had borne the brunt of the previous night’s surveillance.

“So we’re not much further ahead,” Gristhorpe opened.

“No, sir,” said Annie, who at least had managed her quick pint in Relton, then gone home for a bath and a few hours’ sleep before arriving back at the station shortly after dawn. “Except we’ve checked with the phone company and got Luke’s records. We’ll be tracking down all the people he phoned over the last month, though there aren’t many. The ransom call to Martin Armitage was the only call made after Luke’s disappearance, the only call made that day, and it was local. Wherever Luke is, he’s not far away, or he wasn’t on Tuesday evening.”

“Anything else?”

“We’ve got a fair idea of Luke’s movements until five-thirty the day he disappeared.”

“Go ahead.”

Annie walked over to the whiteboard and listed the times and places as she mentioned them. She knew the details by heart and didn’t need to consult her notebook. “He arrived at the bus station by the Swainsdale Centre at a quarter to three. The bus driver and several of the passengers remember him. We’ve been looking at some of the closed-circuit TV footage, and he walked around the center for a while, went into W.H. Smith’s, then into HMV, but he didn’t appear to buy anything. That takes us up until half past three. He appeared in that small computer shop on North Market Street at a quarter to four, which is about right, as he was on foot. He stayed there half an hour, trying out some games, then he visited the music shop at the corner of York Road and Barton Place.”