It was a sort of special occasion, he told himself, as his mind raced through the spaces between the notes to contemplate his forthcoming birthday with a mixture of awe and sheer terror. True, he was in good shape for a man of his age—especially a man of his tastes and habits. He had stopped smoking years ago, and though he didn’t go to a gym or jog, let alone have a personal trainer, he did enjoy long walks in the Dales as often as he could get out there. He would have been the first to admit that he probably drank too much and didn’t give a tinker’s toss about units and calories, but he also knew when to stop, most of the time. His only real ailments were slightly high blood pressure, which he took care of with pills from the doctor, and a nagging ache in his right hip after the longer walks. Statins had lowered his cholesterol to an acceptable level.

His mental health probably wasn’t so great. The “black dog” of depression had been visiting more frequently and biting more viciously of late. Some days he just didn’t want to get out of bed. It wasn’t the old teenage laziness coming back, but rather that he didn’t want to face the world and felt no interest in the things he usually cared about, even music or work. Sometimes, too, he felt on the verge of tears for no reason at all and suffered from guilt-inducing bouts of self-pity. At work he often felt like Sisyphus pushing that bloody rock up the hill only to have it roll back down again.

He was also alone. There was no one special in his life, as they say, no significant other. He had family, of course—a distant ex-wife and two grown-up children very much preoccupied with their own lives and concerns: Brian with his band the Blue Lamps, and Tracy, his beloved daughter Tracy, about to get married at last, in her thirties. And he had friends. Not only work colleagues like Annie, Winsome, Gerry, Ken Blackstone and “Dirty Dick” Burgess, but outsiders, like Linda Palmer, the poet; folk singer Penny Cartwright; Annie’s father, the artist Ray Cabbot; along with his partner Zelda, too, now, and psychologist Jenny Fuller. Even Joanna MacDonald. But he had no lover. No companion. No one with whom to share his highs and lows, his successes and failures.

The spaces between the notes seemed to grow longer. Banks sighed and refilled his glass. He wasn’t depressed—there was no black dog in sight—but if he went on thinking about his forthcoming birthday he might well end up that way.

He turned his mind to the case, the murdered boy. No money, no identification, nothing but a small wrap of cocaine in his pocket. Had someone emptied his pockets? Or was it the opposite? Had someone planted the coke there to misdirect the police? Was the killing nothing to do with drugs, after all? Both Annie and Gerry had suggested other possible reasons at the meeting this morning. The thing was, none of them really grabbed him. He could accept that there might have been another motive, but he could not, at the moment, imagine what it might be.