Then, one day, he noticed that she had started wearing an engagement ring, and a few weeks later she no longer stood at the bus stop with the others, and he never saw her again.

Where was Mandy now? he wondered. She’d be in her fifties if she was still alive, older than Kay Summerville. Had she put on a lot of weight? Had her hair turned gray? Did she look old and worn after years of struggle and poverty? Had she stayed married to the same man? Had she won the lottery and gone to live on the Costa del Sol? Did she ever think of that lovestruck adolescent who used to time his visits to the shops so he could see her waiting at the bus stop? He doubted it very much. The lives we leave behind. So many people. Our paths cross for a while, even as fleetingly as his had crossed Mandy’s, and we move on. Some encounters are impressed indelibly in our memories; others slip away into the void. Of course Mandy never thought of him; he was a mere passing amusement to her, whereas she fed deeper into his adolescent dreams of sex, and in his memory she would always be standing there with her hip against the bus stop, smoking with a faraway look in her eyes, a loose lock of hair resting softly against her pale cheek, always beautiful and always eighteen.

“Two specials and chips and one fish cake.”

Banks paid for the fish and chips and set off back home carrying the paper bag. No newspaper-wrapped fish and chips anymore. Dirty. Not healthy.

“There was a telephone call for you while you were out, Alan,” his mother said when he got back.

“Who was it?”

“Same woman as called last night. Have you got a new girlfriend already?”

Already. Sandra had been gone nearly two years, was pregnant with another man’s child and about to marry him. Had Banks got a new girlfriend already?

“No, Mum,” he said. “It’s one of the local coppers. You already know that from last night. They let women on the force these days.”

“No need to be cheeky. Eat your fish and chips before they go cold.”

“What did she say?”

“To ring her back when you had a moment. I wrote down the number just in case you’d forgotten it.”

Banks’s mother rolled her eyes when he left the table and headed toward the telephone. His father didn’t notice; he had his fish and chips on the paper on his lap and was eating them with his fingers, engrossed in the one-thirty from Newmarket, glass of beer balanced precariously on the arm of the chair.

The number scribbled on the pad by the hall telephone wasn’t familiar. It certainly wasn’t Thorpe Wood. Curious, Banks dialed.

“DI Hart here. Who’s speaking?”

“Michelle? It’s me. Alan Banks.”

“Ah, DCI Banks.”

“You left a message for me to call. Is this your mobile number?”

“That’s right. Look, first off, I’m sorry about Detective Superintendent Shaw this morning.”