“Please,” Linda said, laughing. “No more, or your foot will be so far down your throat you’ll choke. I know what you mean. It was a joke.”

“Anyway, I know about the new book. I bought it in Leeds the other day. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet.”

“I’m glad you didn’t buy this one, then.”

“Mnemosyne,” said Banks. “Isn’t that memory?”

“Indeed. Consort of Zeus, mother of the Muses.”

Banks opened the book and saw that it had been signed on the title page: “To Alan Banks, the copper who quoted Wordsworth.” He’d never had a book inscribed to him before. “Thank you,” he said, feeling a little embarrassed. Then he hesitated, not sure whether to share his current enthusiasm, then decided what the hell. “Actually, I’ve been working my way through an anthology of English poetry. I read Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ this morning.”

“More titles than you can shake a stick at,” said Linda. “What did you think of it?”

“Interesting. I liked it, the tone, the sentiment, I suppose. I must confess, though, I sometimes have trouble understanding what’s being said. Maybe it’s the language, or maybe I’m just thick.”

She smiled. “‘A poem should not mean but be.’ Someone said that once. I can’t remember who. But I always find it useful to fall back on when I fail to understand something. Wait till you get to the Romantics. Or you could skip forward to them.”

“That would be cheating.”

“Then cheat. So what? Be a devil. I don’t think reading in chronological order contributes a great deal to the love or understanding of poetry. You could even chuck a few translations in the mix. Rilke, Baudelaire, Akhmatova.”

Banks tapped her book. “Well, maybe I’ll cheat and jump forward to this,” he said.

She toyed with the stem of her wineglass.

“I wanted to talk to you again about the other man,” Banks hurried on. “It could be important. You say you think you saw a photo of him sometime after you’d reported what happened?”

“Yes. I just can’t remember where.”

“Did you read many newspapers in those days?”

“At that age? No, I read Jackie and Melody Maker and Photoplay.”

“You liked going to the pictures?”