The Summer That Never Was (19 page)

“You sound familiar with the place, sir.”

“I was young once, DI Hart. Besides, Le Phonographe was the sort of place you kept an eye on. It was a villains’ club. Owned by a nasty piece of work called Carlo Fiorino. Used to like to pretend he was Mafia, wore the striped, wide-lapel suits, pencil-thin moustache, spats and everything–very
Untouchables
–but his father was a POW who ended up staying on after the war and marrying a local farm girl out Huntingdon way. Plenty of local villains hung out there, and you could often pick up a tip or two. And I don’t mean for the three-thirty at Kempton Park.”

“So it was a criminal hangout?”

“Back then, yes. But petty. People who liked to think they were big players.”

“Including Bill Marshall?”

“Yes.”

“So you knew about Bill Marshall’s activities?”

“Of course we did. He was strictly a minor presence. We kept an eye on him. It was routine.”

“What was this Carlo Fiorino’s game?”

“Bit of everything. Soon as the new-town expansion was well underway he turned Le Phonographe into a more upmarket club, with decent grub, a better dance floor and a casino. He also owned an escort agency. We think he also got into drugs, prostitution and pornography, but he was always clever enough to stay one step ahead, and he played both sides against the middle. Most of the time.”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“Got himself shot in a drug war with the Jamaicans in 1982.”

“But he never did time?”

“Never got charged with anything, far as I remember.”

“Doesn’t that strike you as odd, sir?”

“Odd?” Shaw seemed to snap out of his reminiscing mood and become his grumpy old self again. He stuck his face so close to hers that she could smell his tobacco-mint-and-whisky breath and see the lattice of purple veins throbbing in his bulbous nose. “I’ll tell you what’s bloody odd, DI Hart. It’s you asking these questions. That’s what’s odd. None of this can possibly have anything to do with what happened to Graham Marshall, and that’s a fact. You’re muckraking. I don’t know why, but that’s what you’re doing.”

“Sir, all I’m doing is trying to get a handle on the circumstances of the boy’s disappearance. Looking over the investigation and over other investigations around the same time seems a reasonable way of doing it to me.”

“It’s not your brief to look into the Marshall investigation, DI Hart, or any other, for that matter. Who do you think you are, Complaints and Discipline? Stick to your job.”

“But sir, Bill Marshall was one of the men interviewed in connection with this protection racket, all involved with Carlo Fiorino and Le Phonographe. Some of the city-centre shopkeepers filed a complaint, and Marshall was one of the people they named.”

“Was he charged?”

“No, sir. Only questioned. One of the original complainants ended up in hospital and the other witnesses backed off, retracted their statements. No further action.”

Shaw smirked. “Then it’s hardly relevant, is it?”

“But doesn’t it seem odd to you that no further action was taken? And that when Graham Marshall disappeared, his father never came under close scrutiny, even though he had recently been implicated in a criminal ring?”

“Why should he? Maybe he didn’t do it. Did that thought ever enter your head? And even if he was involved in some petty protection racket, it doesn’t make him a child-killer, does it? Even by your standards that’s a long stretch of the imagination.”

“Was Bill Marshall a police informer?”

“He might have let slip the odd snippet of information. That’s how we played the game back then. Tit for tat.”

“Is that why he was protected from prosecution?”

“How the hell should I know? If you’ve read your paperwork, you’ll know I wasn’t on that case.” He took a deep breath, then seemed to relax and soften his tone. “Look,” he said, “policing was different back then. There was more give and take.”

Plenty of
take
, Michelle thought. She’d heard stories of the old days, of departments, of stations and even of whole counties run wild. But she didn’t say anything.

“So we bent the rules every now and then,” Shaw continued. “Grow up. Welcome to the real world.”

Michelle made a mental note about Bill Marshall’s possible role as a police informer. If he had informed on criminals here in Peterborough, she could only imagine what the Krays might have done if he’d tried anything like
that with them and then disappeared. The South Pole wouldn’t have been far enough, let alone Peterborough. “From what I can piece together,” she went on, “the Graham Marshall investigation followed one line of enquiry and one only when it became clear that he hadn’t run away from home: a sex killing by a passing pervert.”

“Well? What’s so odd about that? It’s what the evidence pointed to.”

“Just seems a bit of a coincidence, that’s all, that some pervert should happen to be driving by a quiet street at that hour in the morning, just as Graham’s doing his paper rounds.”

“Wrong place at the wrong time. Happens often enough. Besides, do you think perverts don’t know about paper rounds? Don’t you think someone could have been watching, studying, stalking the Marshall kid, the way such perverts often do? Or didn’t they teach you that at Bramshill?”

“It’s possible, sir.”

“You think you can do better than us, do you?” said Shaw, his face turning red again. “Think you can out-detect Jet Harris?”

“I didn’t say that, sir. It’s just the advantage of hindsight, that’s all. A long perspective.”

“Look, we worked our bollocks off on that case, Jet Harris, Reg Proctor and me, not to mention dozens more DCs and uniforms. Have you any idea what that sort of investigation is like? The scope of it. How wide a net we cast. We were getting a hundred sightings a day from as far afield as Penzance and the Mull of fucking Kintyre. Now you come along with your fancy education and your Bramshill courses and you have the gall to tell me we were wrong.”

Michelle took a deep breath. “I’m not saying you were wrong, sir. Only you didn’t
solve
the case, did you? You didn’t even find a body. Look, I know you came up the hard way, and I respect that, but there are advantages to an education.”

“Yes. Accelerated promotion. They let you buggers run before you can toddle.”

“Policing has changed, sir, as you pointed out not so long ago. And crime has changed, too.”

“Sod that for a theory. Don’t spout your book-learning at me. A criminal’s a criminal. Only the coppers have got softer. Especially the ones at the top.”

Michelle sighed. Time to change tack. “You were a DC on the Graham Marshall investigation, sir. Can
you
tell me anything at all?”

“Look, if I’d known anything we’d have solved the bloody case, wouldn’t we, instead of having you point out how stupid we were?”

“I’m not trying to make anyone look stupid.”

“Aren’t you? That’s how it sounds to me. It’s easy to second-guess, given twenty-twenty hindsight. If Bill Marshall had anything to do with his son’s disappearance, believe me, we’d have had him. In the first place, he had an alibi–”

“Who, sir?”

“His wife.”

“Not the most reliable of alibis, is it?”

“She’d hardly give him an alibi for doing in her own son, now, would she? Tell me even you aren’t so twisted as to think Mrs. Marshall was involved.”

“We don’t know, sir, do we?” But Michelle remembered Mrs. Marshall, her sincerity and dignity, the need to bury her son after all these years. Certainly it was possible she was lying. Some criminals are very good actors. But Michelle didn’t think so. And she wouldn’t be getting any answers out of Bill Marshall. “Did the Marshalls own a car?”

“Yes, they did. But don’t expect me to remember the make and number. Look, Bill Marshall might have been a bit of a Jack-the-lad, but he wasn’t a child molester.”

“How do you know that was the motive behind Graham’s abduction?”

“Have some brains, woman. Why else does a fourteen-year-old boy go missing without a trace? If you ask me, I’d
still say he might have been one of Brady and Hindley’s, though we could never prove it.”

“But it’s way out of their area. A geographical profiler–”

“More benefits of a university education. Profilers? Don’t make me laugh. I’ve had enough of this. It’s about time you stopped nosing about down here and got back on the bloody job.” And he turned and stalked out.

Michelle noticed that her hand was shaking when he left, and she felt her breath held tight in her chest. She didn’t like confrontation with authority; she had always respected her bosses and the police hierarchy in general; an organization like the police couldn’t run efficiently without a quasi-military structure, she believed, orders given and obeyed, sometimes without question, if it came right down to it. But Shaw’s rage seemed out of proportion to the situation.

She got up and returned the files to their boxes and gathered together her notes. It was well after lunchtime and she was due for some fresh air, anyway. Perhaps she would make a few phone calls, find someone who’d been on the job during the Kray era and head down to London the next day.

Back in her office, she found a message slip on her desk informing her that Dr. Cooper had rung and wanted to know if she would drop by the mortuary some time that afternoon. No time like the present, she thought, telling DC Collins where she was going and heading out to her car.

The search of Luke’s room didn’t reveal much except a cassette tape marked “Songs from a Black Room,” which Banks, with Robin’s permission, slipped in his pocket to listen to later. Luke’s desktop computer contained nothing of interest. There was hardly any e-mail, which was only to be expected, and most of the Web sites he visited were connected with music. He also did a fair bit of online purchasing, mostly CDs, also to be expected from someone living in so remote a spot.

Banks was surprised at the range of Luke’s musical tastes. There was the usual stuff, of course, the CDs Annie had told him about, but also among the grunge, metal, hip hop and gothic, he had found other oddities, such as Britten’s setting of Rimbaud’s “Les Illuminations” and Miles Davis’s
In a Silent Way
. There were also several indie CDs, including, Banks was thrilled to see, his son Brian’s band’s first recording,
Blue Rain
. Not your usual listening for a fifteen-year-old. But Banks was coming to believe that Luke Armitage had been far from a typical fifteen-year-old.

He had also read some of the stories and poems Annie had collected from her previous visit, and in his humble opinion they showed real promise. They didn’t tell him anything about what might have happened to Luke, or his feelings about his father or stepfather, but they revealed a young mind preoccupied with death, war, global destruction and social alienation.

Unlike Annie, Banks wasn’t surprised by the room’s decor. Brian hadn’t painted his room black, but he had stuck posters on the walls and surrounded himself with his favourite music. And the guitar, of course, always the guitar. Annie had no children, so Banks could imagine how the black room would seem more outlandish to her. The only thing that disturbed him was Luke’s apparent obsession with dead rock stars, and with the absence of anything to do with his famous father, Neil Byrd. Something was definitely out of kilter there.

Brian had gone on to make a career of music, and now his band was on the verge of recording its first CD for a major label. After getting over the initial shock that Brian wasn’t going to follow any safe paths in life, Banks had come to feel very proud of him, a leap of faith that his own parents hadn’t seemed able to make yet. Banks wondered if Luke had been any good. Maybe the tape would tell him. From what Annie had said, and from his own first impressions, he doubted that Martin Armitage
would have been thrilled by any signs of musical ability in his stepson: physical fitness and sport seemed to be his measures of success.

Josie and Calvin Batty lived in their own small apartment upstairs at the far eastern end of Swainsdale House. There, they had a sitting room, bedroom and a small kitchen, in addition to a WC and bathroom with a power shower, all modernized by the Armitages, Josie told them as they stood with her in the kitchen while she boiled the kettle for tea. The whole place was brightly decorated in light colours, creams and pale blues, and made the best of the available light.

Josie looked as if she could be quite an attractive young woman if she made the effort, Banks thought. But as it was, her hair seemed lifeless and ill-cut, her clothes rather plain, shapeless and old-fashioned and her complexion pale and dry. Her husband was short and thickset with dark, Gypsyish colouring and heavy eyebrows that met in the middle.

“What exactly are your duties here?” Banks asked the two of them when they were settled in the living room opposite an enormous TV-and-VCR combination with a tray of tea and chocolate digestives in front of them.

“General, really. I do most of the washing, ironing, cleaning and cooking. Calvin does odd jobs, takes care of the cars and any heavy work, building repairs, garden, that sort of thing.”

“I imagine there must be a lot of that sort of thing,” Banks said, glancing at Calvin. “A big old house like this.”

“Aye,” Calvin grunted, dunking a biscuit in his tea.

“What about Luke?”

“What about him?” asked Josie.

“Did any of your duties involve taking care of him?”

“Calvin’d give him a lift to school sometimes, or bring him back if he happened to be in town. I’d make sure he was well fed if sir and madam had to go away for a few days.”

“Did they do that often?”

“Not often, no.”

“When was the last time he was left alone here?”

“Last month. They both went down to London for some fancy gala charity do.”

“What did Luke do when he was left alone in the house?”

“We didn’t spy on him,” said Calvin, “if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“Not at all,” said Banks. “But did you ever hear anything? TV? Stereo? Did he ever have his friends over? That sort of thing.”

“Music were loud enough, but he didn’t have no friends to ask over, did he?” said Calvin.