“Bye. See you soon.”

Banks hung up and felt the emptiness he always experienced after long-distance phone calls. They seemed to magnify the distance rather than shorten it. But he was glad Brian had phoned him with the news. That was a turn-up for the book. There’d be a lot of disappointed fans out there. But Brian seemed genuinely happy with the decision. Relieved. Which made Banks wonder about what big changes might be coming his own way in the near future.

The original guitar works ended, and next came Takemitsu’s arrangements of popular western songs, starting with “Londonderry Air,” which was odd to hear after the Japanese style of the other pieces, but no less enjoyable.

“Somewhere Over the Rainbow” came next, and Banks started to feel buoyed by the whisky, Brian’s phone call and the music, happy to leave his cares behind for a while. Then “Summertime” came on, and he knew it would be a while before he dragged himself upstairs to bed. He would have to dig out Billie Holiday’s version first.

5

“GOOD MORNING, SUPERINTENDENT.”

“Good morning, Dr. Galway. You seem quite chipper this morning.”

“You know what they say. A healthy mind and a healthy body.”

Banks grunted. He still felt tired. It had been a late night. The Takemitsu guitar arrangement of “Summertime” had indeed led inevitably to Billie Holiday, which led to a drop more Macallan, and so on. He went to bed well after one o’clock, and despite Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, which usually transported him most pleasurably to the Land of Nod—no insult to the composer intended—he hadn’t been able to get to sleep for ages thinking about Brian and the Blue Lamps, and the old days he himself had spent as a wannabe rock star with the short-lived Jimson Weed.

“Been for your morning run already, have you?” he asked.

“Uh-huh. Ten k.”

“No wonder you’re so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

Dr. Galway laughed and said in her melodic Irish accent, “That’s all right. Never apologize, never explain. That only gets you into more trouble. And once you open the linguistic can of worms . . . well . . . what can I say?”

Dr. Galway’s face sported a healthy glow from the run, and she had most of her slightly graying hair tucked under a cap. She was an attractive woman, but perhaps better described as handsome rather than pretty or beautiful, Banks thought, pondering on what the differences and distinctions were. She had serious green eyes, in which her intelligence was clear to see, strong features, a rather large nose, thin, tight lips, and a high, domed forehead. Her fingers were long and tapered, her hands smooth and flawless as a young girl’s. As far as Banks knew, she was in her mid-forties, married with two daughters approaching university age, and she clearly kept herself in good shape.

She turned to the boy’s naked body on the slab, his head supported by a padded block. “It’s odd,” she said, “but the stab wounds hardly look lethal now, do they? Nothing more than the sort of minor cuts any young lad might get climbing a tree or whatever they do these days.”