Banks gave Annie a slightly annoyed glance, hoping to indicate that she was getting Myers’s back up too much too soon. True, he seemed a puffed-up, self-important pillock, and he did look a lot like Nigel Farage, but there were ways of treating such people in an interview. Still, Annie had been angry and sarcastic a lot lately. Banks wondered if it had anything to do with Ray and Zelda. Best leave that for the moment, he decided.

“It’s about Sunday night,” he said. “The night of the murder.”

“But I went over that with—”

“Yes, I know you told DC Masterson all you knew, but sometimes we find it’s useful to go over old ground with fresh eyes, so to speak. As you may know, we’ve been working in the park at the bottom of Elmet Hill for the past couple of days.”

“A neighbor told me,” Myers said. “I can’t imagine why.”

“I was wondering if you knew that the place was a hangout for marijuana smokers, casual sexual liaisons and other such things?”

“What? The park? That’s ridiculous. It’s not anyone from around here, I can assure you.”

“Who else, then?”

“Hollyfield.”

“Come on, there’s hardly anyone left there, Mr. Myers. No, I think your days of blaming every local evil on the Hollyfield Estate are just about over, especially now that Howard Stokes is dead.”

“What are you suggesting? That’s the old man who was found dead over there of a heroin overdose, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Howard Stokes. He lived on Hollyfield Lane for many years. Lived a perfectly normal life.”

“You can’t tell me that’s a normal life. A drug addict. Not unless you’re a bloody Guardian reader and you think everything most decent folk view as abnormal is normal, and vice versa.”

“As it happens, I do read the Guardian, Mr. Myers, but that’s by the by. A Mail man, yourself, are you?”

“Telegraph,” Myers grunted.

“Admirable. The thinking man’s Mail. Anyway, what concerns me now is the extent of the after-hours activity in the park and what you, as head of the local Neighborhood Watch, might be able to tell me about it.”

“I told you, I know nothing about it. You surely don’t think I’ve been down there smoking marijuana, do you?”

Banks laughed. “I very much doubt it. But it strikes me that you might have known what the park was being used for, and you and your colleagues might have made the occasional sweep of the area, just to discourage it. Your son, Chris, for example, was reprimanded for drugs just last year.”

“Nothing came of that,” said Myers. “Chris was completely exonerated. He had no drugs in his possession whatsoever.”

“No, but he was in a place where drugs were being consumed.”