“I can’t honestly say I see one, love.”
“If Billy did something to upset his masters, then surely-”
“If Billy Marshall had done anything to upset Reggie or Ronnie, love, he’d have been the one pushing up daisies, not the kid.”
“They wouldn’t have harmed the boy, to make a point?”
“Not their way, no. Direct, not subtle. They had their faults, and there wasn’t much they wouldn’t do if it came right down to it. But if you crossed them, it wasn’t your wife or your kid got hurt, it was you.”
“I understand Ronnie was-”
“Yes, he was. And he liked them young. But not that young.”
“Then-”
“They didn’t hurt kids. It was a man’s world. There was a code. Unwritten. But it was there. And another thing you’ve got to understand, love, is that Reggie and Ronnie were like Robin Hood, Dick Turpin and Billy the Kid all rolled into one, as far as most East Enders were concerned. Even later, you only have to look at their funerals to see that. Fucking royalty. Pardon my French. Folk heroes.”
“And you were the Sheriff of Nottingham?”
Lancaster laughed. “Hardly. I was only a DC, a mere foot soldier. But you get the picture.”
“I think so. And after the day’s battles you’d all adjourn to the local and have a jolly old drink together and talk about football.”
Lancaster laughed. “Something like that. You know, maybe you’re right. Maybe it was a bit of a game. When you nicked someone fair and square, there were no hard feelings. When they put one over on you, you just filed it away till next time. If the courts let them off, then you bought them a pint next time they came in the pub.”
“I think Billy Marshall took the game to Peterborough with him. Ever hear of a bloke called Carlo Fiorino?”
Lancaster’s bushy eyebrows knitted in a frown. “Can’t say as I have, no. But that’s way off my manor. Besides, I’ve already told you, Billy didn’t have the brains to set up an operation. He didn’t have the authority, the command, charisma, call it what you will. Billy Marshall was born to follow orders, not give them, let alone decide what they ought to be. Now that lad of his, he was another matter entirely.”
Michelle pricked up her ears. “Graham? What about him?”
“Young lad with the Beatle cut, right?”
“Sounds like him.”
“If anyone in that family was destined to go far, I’d have said it would’ve been him.”
“What do you mean? Graham was a criminal?”
“No. Well, not apart from a bit of shoplifting, but they all got into that. Me, too, when I was his age. We figured the shops factored the losses into their prices, see, so we were only taking what was rightfully ours anyway. No, it was just that he had brains – though God knows who he got them from – and he was also what they call street smart these days. Never said much, but you could tell he was taking it all in, looking for the main chance.”
“You’re saying that Graham might have been involved with the Krays?”
“Nah. Oh, he might have run an errand or two for them, but they didn’t mess around with twelve-year-old kids. Too much of a liability. Only that he watched and learned. There wasn’t much got by him. Sharp as a tack. Billy used to leave him outside the local, sitting in the street playing marbles with the other kids. It was common enough, then. And some pretty shady customers went in there. Believe me, I know. More than once, the young lad would get half a crown and a watching brief. ‘Keep an eye on that car for me, kid,’ like. Or, ‘If you see a couple of blokes in suits coming this way, stick your head around the door and give me a shout.’ No flies on young Graham Marshall, that’s for sure. I’m just sorry to hear he came to such an early end, though I can’t say as it surprises me that much.”
Dr. Glendenning was delayed in Scarborough, so the postmortem had been put off until late in the afternoon. In the meantime, Banks thought his time would be well spent talking to some of Luke’s teachers, starting with Gavin Barlow, the head teacher of Eastvale Comprehensive.
Despite the threatening sky and earth damp from an earlier shower, Barlow was weeding the garden of his North Eastvale semi, dressed in torn jeans and a dirty old shirt. A collie with a sleek coat jumped up at Banks as he entered through the garden gate, but Barlow soon brought the dog to heel, and it curled up in a corner under the lilac bush and seemed to go to sleep.
“He’s old,” Gavin Barlow said, taking off a glove, wiping his hand on his jeans and offering it. Banks shook and introduced himself.
“Yes, I’ve been expecting a visit,” said Barlow. “Terrible business. Let’s go inside. No, stay, Tristram. Stay!”
Tristram stayed and Banks followed Barlow into the bright, ordered interior of the house. He was clearly interested in antiques, and, by the looks of the gleaming sideboard and drinks cabinet, into restoring them, too. “Can I offer you a beer, or a lager perhaps? Or aren’t you supposed to drink on duty? One never knows, watching Morse and the like on telly.”
Banks smiled. “We’re not supposed to,” he said, not that it had ever stopped him. But it was far too early in the day, and he didn’t have weeding the garden as an excuse. “I’d love a coffee, if you’ve got some.”
“Only instant, I’m afraid.”
“That’s fine.”
“Come on through.”
They went into a small but well-arranged kitchen. Whoever had designed the maple cabinets over the slate-gray countertops had decided on following a pattern of horizontal grain rather than vertical, which made the room seem much more spacious. Banks sat at a breakfast nook with a red-and-white-checked tablecloth while Barlow made the coffee.
“Daddy, who’s this?”
A girl of about sixteen appeared in the doorway, all long blond hair and bare leg. She reminded Banks a bit of Kay Summerville.
“It’s a policeman come to talk about Luke Armitage, Rose. Off you go.”
Rose pouted, then made a theatrical about-turn and sashayed away, wiggling her hips. “Daughters,” said Barlow. “Have you any of your own?”
Banks told him about Tracy.
“Tracy Banks. Of course, now I remember her. I just didn’t put two and two together when I saw your identification. Tracy. Very bright girl. How is she doing?”
“Fine. She’s just finished her second year at Leeds. History.”
“Do give her my best regards when you see her. I can’t say I knew her well… so many pupils and so little time… but I do remember talking to her.”
Gavin Barlow looked a bit like Tony Blair, Banks thought. Definitely more of an Educational Unit manager than an old-style school headmaster, the way his predecessor Mr. Buxton had been. Banks remembered the old fellow who’d been in charge during the Gallows View case, when Banks had first moved up north. Buxton was the last of a dying breed, with his batlike cape and a well-thumbed copy of Cicero on his desk. Gavin Barlow probably thought “Latin” referred to a type of dance music, though maybe that was being a bit unfair. At least the radio station he was tuned in to was playing Thelonious Monk’s “Epistrophy” at eleven o’clock in the morning – a good sign.
“I’m not sure I can tell you very much about Luke,” said Gavin Barlow, bringing over two mugs of instant coffee and sitting opposite Banks. “It’s usually only the persistent troublemakers who come to my attention.”
“And Luke wasn’t a troublemaker?”
“Good heavens, no! You’d hardly know he was there if he didn’t move once in a while.”
“Any trouble at all?”
“Not really trouble. Nothing his form tutor couldn’t deal with.”
“Tell me.”
“Luke didn’t like games, and he once forged a note from his mother excusing him on the grounds of a stomach upset. It was a note the PE teacher remembered seeing a few months earlier, and Luke had traced it out with a new date. Quite a good forgery, really.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing much. Detention, a
warning to his mother. Odd, as he wasn’t bad at all.”
“Wasn’t bad at what?”
“Rugby. Luke was a decent wing three-quarters. Fast and slippery. When he could be bothered playing.”
“But he didn’t like games?”
“He had no interest in sports. He’d far rather read, or just sit in a corner and stare out the window. God only knows what was going on in that head of his half the time.”
“Did Luke have any close friends at school, any other pupils he might have confided in?”
“I really can’t say. He always seemed to be a bit of a loner. We encourage group activities, of course, but you can’t always… I mean, you can’t force people to be sociable, can you?”
Banks opened his briefcase and slipped out the artist’s impression of the girl Josie Batty had seen going to HMV with Luke. “Do you recognize this girl?” he asked, not sure of how close a likeness it was.
Barlow squinted at it, then shook his head. “No,” he said. “I can’t say as I do. I’m not saying we don’t have pupils who affect that general look, but not very many, and nobody quite like this.”
“So you’ve never seen her or anyone like her with Luke?”
“No.”
Banks returned the sketch to his briefcase. “What about his schoolwork? Did he show any promise?”
“Enormous promise. His work in math left a lot to be desired, but when it came to English and music, he was remarkably gifted.”
“What about the other subjects?”
“Good enough for university, if that’s what you mean. Especially languages and social studies. You could tell that even at his early age. Unless…”
“What?”
“Well, unless he went off the rails. I’ve seen it happen before with bright and sensitive pupils. They fall in with the wrong crowd, neglect their work… You can guess the rest.”
Banks, who had gone off the rails a bit himself after Graham’s disappearance, could. “Were there any teachers Luke was particularly close to?” he asked. “Anyone who might be able to tell me a bit more about him?”
“Yes. You might try Ms. Anderson. Lauren Anderson. She teaches English and art history. Luke was way ahead of his classmates in his appreciation of literature, and in its composition, and I believe Ms. Anderson gave him extra tutoring.”
Lauren Anderson’s name had come up in the company’s records of Luke’s cell phone calls, Banks remembered. “Is that something the school does often?”
“If the student seems likely to benefit from it, then yes, certainly. You have to understand that we get such a broad range of abilities and interests, and we have to pitch our teaching level just a little above the middle. Too high and you lose most of the class, too low and the brighter students become bored and distracted. But it’s not all as bad as they say it is in the newspapers. We’re lucky in that we have a lot of passionate and committed teachers at Eastvale Comprehensive. Ms. Anderson is one of them. Luke was also taking violin lessons after school.”
“Yes, he had a violin in his bedroom.”
“I told you, he’s not your common-or-garden pupil.” Barlow paused for a moment, staring out the window. “Wasn’t. We’ll miss him.”
“Even if you hardly knew he was there?”
“I was probably overstating the case,” Barlow said with a frown. “Luke had a certain presence. What I meant was that he just didn’t make a lot of noise or demand a lot of attention.”
“Who was giving him violin lessons?”
“Our music teacher, Alastair Ford. He’s quite a skilled player himself. Plays with a local string quartet. Strictly amateur, of course. You might have heard of them; they’re called the Aeolian Quartet. I understand they’re very good, though I must admit that my tastes edge more toward Miles than Mahler.”
The Aeolian. Banks had, indeed, heard of them. Not only that, but he had heard them. The last time was shortly after Christmas, at the community center with Annie Cabbot. They had played Schubert’s Death and the Maiden Quartet and made a very good job of it, Banks remembered.
“Is there anything else you can tell me?” he asked, standing to leave.
“I don’t think there is,” said Barlow. “All in all, Luke Armitage was a bit of a dark horse.”
As they walked through to the hall, Banks felt certain he caught a flurry of blond hair and long leg ducking through a doorway, but he could have been mistaken. Why would Rose Barlow want to listen in on their conversation, anyway?
The rain seemed to have settled in for the day after a short afternoon respite, a constant drizzle from a sky the color of dirty dishwater, when Annie did the rounds of Luke’s final ports of call. She found out nothing from the HMV staff, perhaps because they had such a high turnover and it was a large shop, hard to keep an eye on everyone. No one recognized the sketch. Besides, as one salesperson told her, many of the kids who shopped there looked pretty much the same. Black clothing wasn’t exactly unusual as far as HMV’s customers were concerned, nor was body-piercing or tattoos.
She fared little better at the computer shop on North Market Street. Gerald Kelly, the sole proprietor and staff member, remembered just about all his customers, but he had seen no one resembling the girl in black with Luke, who had always been alone on his visits to the shop.
Annie had just one last call. Norman’s Used Books was a dank, cramped space down a flight of stone steps under a bakery, one of several shops that seemed to be set right into the church walls in the market square. The books all smelled of mildew, but you could find the most obscure things sometimes. Annie herself had shopped there once or twice, looking for old art books, and had even found some decent prints among the boxes the owner kept at the back of the shop, though they were sometimes warped and discolored because of the damp.
The roof was so low and the small room so full of books – not only in cases against the walls, but piled up haphazardly on tables, ready to teeter over if you so much as breathed on them – that you had to stoop and make your way around the place very carefully. It must have been even harder for Luke, Annie thought, as he was taller and more gangly than her.
The owner himself, Norman Wells, was just a little over five feet, with thin brown hair, a bulbous sort of face and rheumy eyes. Because it was so cold and damp down there, no matter what the weather was like up above, he always wore a moth-eaten gray cardigan, woolly gloves with the fingers cut off and an old Leeds United scarf. He couldn’t make much of a living out of the little shop, Annie thought, though she doubted the overheads were very high. Even in the depths of winter a one-element electric fire was the only source of heat.
Norman Wells glanced up from the paperback he was reading and nodded in Annie’s direction. He seemed surprised when she showed her warrant card and spoke to him.
“I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?” he said, taking off his reading glasses, which hung on a piece of string around his neck.
“I’ve been here once or twice.”
“Thought so. I never forget a face. Art, isn’t it?”
“Pardon?”
“Your interest. Art.”
“Oh, yes.” Annie showed him a photograph of Luke. “Remember him?”
Wells looked alarmed. “Course I do. He’s the lad who disappeared, isn’t he? One of your lot was around the other day asking about him. I told him all I know.”
“I’m sure you did, Mr. Wells,” said Annie, “but things have changed. It’s a murder investigation now and we have to go over the ground afresh.”
“Murder? That lad?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Bloody hell. I hadn’t heard. Who’d…? He wouldn’t say boo to a goose.”
“Did you know him well, then?”
“Well? No, I wouldn’t say that. But we talked.”
“What about?”
“Books. He knew a lot more than most kids his age. His reading level was way beyond that of his contemporaries.”
“How do you know?”
“Mr. Wells?”
“Let’s just say I used to be a teacher, that’s all. I know about these things, and that lad was bordering on genius.”
“I understand he bought two books from you on his last visit.”
“Yes, like I told the other copper. Crime and Punishment and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”
“They sound a bit advanced, even for him.”
“Don’t you believe it,” Wells protested. “If I hadn’t thought him ready I wouldn’t have sold him them. He’d already been through T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, most of Camus and Dubliners. I didn’t think he was quite ready for Ulysses or Pound’s Cantos, but he could handle the Portrait, no problem.”
Annie, who had heard of these books but had read only the Eliot and a few of Joyce’s short stories at school, was impressed. So the books she had seen in Luke’s room weren’t just for show; he really did read and probably even understand them. At fifteen, she’d been reading historical sagas and sword and sorcery series, not literature with a capital L. That was reserved for school and was tedious in the extreme, thanks to Mr. Bolton, the English teacher, who made the stuff sound about as exciting as a wet Sunday in Cleethorpes.
“How often did Luke call by?” she asked.
“About once a month. Or whenever he was out of something to read.”
“He had the money. Why didn’t he go to Waterstone’s and buy them new?”
“Don’t ask me. We got chatting the first time he dropped in-”
“When was that?”
“Maybe eighteen months or so ago. Anyway, as I say, we got chatting and he came back.” He looked around at the stained ceilings, flaking plaster and tottering piles of books and smiled at Annie, showing crooked teeth. “I suppose there must have been something he liked about the place.”
“Must be the service,” Annie said.
Wells laughed. “I can tell you one thing. He liked those old Penguin Modern Classics. The old ones with the gray spines, not these modern pale-green things. Real paperbacks, not your trade size. And you can’t buy those at Waterstone’s. Same with the old Pan covers.”
Close To Home (aka The Summer That Never Was) Page 21