She shot him a sharp glance. “And what do you expect me to remember?”

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing. A local girl about your age was sexually assaulted. The incident happened in Blackpool, but she lived near you in West Leeds. She went to Brotherton House with her mother, and your father heard her complaint. It was entered in the occurrence book. Then there’s nothing more.”

“It can’t have gone anywhere, then, I suppose.”

“No. But it’s resurfaced recently, and I was wondering why it was never investigated when it was first reported.”

“Is that the Danny Caxton business I’ve seen on the news?”

“That’ll be it. Yes.”

“Bloody hell!”

“Do you remember? Did your father ever mention Caxton?”

“He was a popular name in our house.”

“Your father knew him?”

“He’d met him. But my mother was the fan. I thought he was a bit naff, myself, but I was just a precocious fourteen-year-old.”

“So was his victim.”

“Do you really think he did it?”

“Did you have any idea of the things Jimmy Savile was doing?”

“I’ve read about some of them,” said Yvonne. “You’re right. I always thought he was a creep, but I’d no idea what kind, the depths . . . Rolf Harris, too. I quite liked ‘Tie My Kangaroo Down, Sport.’ And Bill Cosby in the States. Who would have thought it?”

“So why not Danny Caxton?”

“That’s poor reasoning, Mr. Banks.”

“Alan. I didn’t mean it that way. I just meant, why should it be so unbelievable? We’re gathering evidence. The case is getting stronger. But with something like this you’ve got to build a strong, solid structure, as you can imagine.”

“I don’t know what you hope for from me. Danny Caxton never touched me.”

“Did you ever meet him?”

“Me? No.”

“We’re interested in anything you can remember, really,” said Winsome. “A word, a gesture, anything. We know it was a long time ago, but something important might have stuck in your memory about that period.”

Yvonne looked at her. “You know, love, it’s a funny thing about memory, especially as I get older. I can sometimes remember specific days, maybe even arguments Dad and I had about—oh, some boy, or some skirt I was wearing being too short, or music I was listening to being too loud. Sometimes he seemed remote and distracted—a lot of the time he was like that. I don’t ever remember him being much of a talker. Now I look back, I sometimes think it must have been his job getting him down. What a funny thing memory is.”

Banks remembered lines from another of Linda Palmer’s poems: “In no time at all, we alter what we / see—not nature, but nature exposed / to our vision.” She was right about the constant dance of memory and imagination, perception and creation, history and fiction. How easily the one was transformed into the other, or by it, sometimes to such an extent that we actually believed a thing had happened the way we remembered it, when it hadn’t happened that way at all. He gave up pursuing the thought. It wasn’t a fruitful line of inquiry for a detective.