“How’s it going?” he asked after he sat down.

“Fine,” said Annie.

“How’s Ray doing?”

“Good, as far as I know. He’s over in America at the moment, wheeling and dealing.”

“And Zelda?”

“I’m sure she’s just fine,” Annie said, a slight chill in her voice. “I haven’t seen her for a while.”

“Did she ever tell you anything more about her search for Phil Keane?”

“No,” said Annie. “I just assumed it had fizzled out. Why?”

“I don’t know. I just got the impression she was holding something back, that’s all. She was pretty quiet the last time we were over there for dinner.”

“Can’t say as I noticed.” Annie sipped some latte and wiped away the moustache with her napkin. “Anyway, tell me what you’ve got from the post-mortem.”

Banks told her, especially about the evidence of previous malnutrition and the scar that Dr. Galway thought might have been caused by a bullet or a piece of shrapnel.

Annie whistled through her teeth. “So the thinking now is that he might have been a migrant?”

“It looks that way. Dr. Galway says he was no older than fourteen, maybe even as young as twelve, and we’ve had no reports of anyone matching his description gone missing, and no hint of worried parents, despite all our appeals. That would seem to indicate that he came over alone and hasn’t been processed in any way.”

“Illegal?”

“That would be my guess.”

“But what was he doing up here? I mean, if he came by boat he’d have landed on the south coast, wouldn’t he? Kent, Hampshire, somewhere like that. It’s a bloody long way up here, and I doubt he had a wallet full of money with him.”

“There’s not a lot of people who arrive here by boat, and they’ve usually come from France. He may have traveled by an overland route, or via Ireland, say. Besides, it’s hardly as far from Kent to Yorkshire as it is from Iraq, or wherever he came from, to Kent. Anyway, Dr. Galway said he’d probably been stabbed about an hour to an hour and a half before his body was dumped in the bin, so he could have been driven here from as far away as Newcastle or Leeds. Maybe even Manchester, at a pinch.”

“Hardly,” said Annie. “You’d never get across the bloody M62 that fast, even on a Sunday night.”

Banks smiled. “Maybe you’re right. Anyway, the point is, we know he’s not local, and he could have come from anywhere within the radius of about an hour’s drive.”

“That includes Blaydon’s house.”

“Outside Harrogate?”

“Yes. It’s all well and good thinking of them coming up here to find and kill the lad, but what if that wasn’t the reason? What if something happened at Blaydon’s house that led to his death, and they came up to dump the body?”

“Nice theory, but it doesn’t really work with the timing, Annie. As far as we know, they arrived at Le Coq d’Or around seven-thirty and left about eleven. If they had kept the body in the car boot all that time, the hypostasis would have been advanced to the point of being observable to the naked eye. And fixed. It wasn’t.”