Close To Home (aka The Summer That Never Was)

Chapter 1

Trevor Dickinson was hungover and bad-tempered when he turned up for work on Monday morning. His mouth tasted like the bottom of a birdcage, his head was throbbing like the speakers at a heavy metal concert, and his stomach was lurching like a car with a dirty carburetor. He had already drunk half a bottle of Milk of Magnesia and swallowed four extra-strength paracetamol, with no noticeable effect.

When he arrived at the site, Trevor found he had to wait until the police had cleared away the last of the demonstrators before he could start work. There were five left, all sitting cross-legged in the field. Environmentalists. One was a little gray-haired old lady. Ought to be ashamed of herself, Trevor thought, a woman of her age squatting down on the grass with a bunch of bloody Marxist homosexual tree-huggers.

He looked around for some clue as to why anyone would want to save those particular few acres. The fields belonged to a farmer who had recently been put out of business by a combination of mad-cow disease and foot-and-mouth. As far as Trevor knew, there weren’t any rare pink-nippled fart warblers that couldn’t nest anywhere else in the entire country; nor were there any ivy-leafed lark’s-turds lurking in the hedgerows. There weren’t even any trees, unless you counted the shabby row of poplars that grew between the fields and the A1, stunted and choked from years of exhaust fumes.

The police cleared away the demonstrators – including the old lady – by picking them up bodily and carting them off to a nearby van, then they gave the go-ahead to Trevor and his fellow workers. The weekend’s rain had muddied the ground, which made maneuvering more difficult than usual, but Trevor was a skilled operator, and he soon got his dipper shovel well below the topsoil, hoisting his loads high and dumping them into the waiting lorry. He handled the levers with an innate dexterity, directing the complex system of clutches, gears, shafts and winch drums like a conductor, scooping as much as the power shovel could hold, then straightening it so as not to spill any when he lifted it up and over to the lorry.

Trevor had been at work for well over two hours when he thought he saw something sticking out of the dirt.

Leaning forward from his seat and rubbing condensation from the inside window of the cab, he squinted to see what it was, and when he saw, it took his breath away. He was looking at a human skull, and what was worse was that it seemed to be looking right back at him.

Alan Banks didn’t feel in the least bit hungover, but he knew he’d drunk too much ouzo the night before when he saw that he had left the television on. The only channels it received were Greek, and he never watched it when he was sober.

Banks groaned, stretched and made some of the strong Greek coffee he had become so attached to during his first week on the island. While the coffee was brewing, he put on a CD of Mozart arias, picked up one of last week’s newspapers he hadn’t read yet, and walked out on the balcony. Though he had brought his Discman, he felt fortunate that the small time-share flat had a mini stereo system with a CD player. He had brought a stack of his favorite CDs with him, including Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Schubert, Walton, The Grateful Dead and Led Zeppelin.

He stood by the iron railings listening to “Parto, ma tu, ben mio” and looking down at the sea beyond the jumbled terraces of rooftops and walls, a cubist composition of intersecting blue and white planes. The sun was shining in a perfect blue sky, the way it had done every day since he had arrived. He could smell wild lavender and rosemary in the air. A cruise ship had just dropped anchor, and the first launches of the day were carrying their loads of excited camera-bearing tourists to the harbor, gulls squawking in their wake.

Banks went to pour himself some coffee, then came out again and sat down. His white wooden chair scraped against the terra cotta tiles, scaring the small lizardlike creature that had been basking in the morning sun.

After looking at the old newspaper and perhaps reading a little more of Homer’s Odyssey, Banks thought he would walk down to the village for a long lunch, maybe have a glass or two of wine, pick up some fresh bread, olives and goat cheese, then come back for a nap and a little music before spending his evening at the taverna on the quayside playing chess with Alexandros, as had been his habit since his second day.

There was nothing much that interested him in the newspapers except the sports and arts pages. Rain had stopped play in the third test match at Old Trafford, which was hardly news; England had won an important World Cup qualifying match; and it wasn’t the right day of the week for the book or record reviews. He did, however, notice a brief report on a skeleton uncovered by a construction worker at the site of a new shopping center by the A1, not far from Peterborough. He only noticed it because he had spent a good part of his early life in Peterborough, and his parents still lived there.

He put the newspaper aside and watched the gulls swoop and circle. They looked as if they were drifting on waves of Mozart’s music. Drifting, just like him. He thought back to his second conversation with Alexandros. During their game of chess, Alex had paused, looked seriously at Banks and said, “You seem like a man with many secrets, Alan, a very sad man. What is it you are running from?”

Banks had thought about that a lot. Was he running? Yes, in a way. Running from a failed marriage and a botched romance, and from a job that had threatened, for the second time in his life, to send him over the edge with its conflicting demands, its proximity to violent death and all that was worst in people. He was seeking a temporary escape, at least.

Or did it go deeper than that? Was he trying to run away from himself, from what he was, or from what he had become? He had sat there pondering the question and answered only, “I wish I knew,” before making a rash move and putting his queen in jeopardy.

He had managed to avoid affairs of the heart during his brief stay. Andrea, the waitress at Philippe’s taverna, flirted with him, but that was all. Occasionally, one of the women from the cruise ships would give him that certain kind of wistful look which led only to one place if you let it, but he hadn’t let it. He had found himself a place where he didn’t have to confront crime on a daily basis, more particularly a place where he didn’t have to go down into cellars stuffed with the violated bodies of teenage girls, a scene from his last case that still, even here on this peaceful island, haunted his dreams.

So he had achieved his goal – run away from a messy life and found paradise of a kind. Why was it, then, that he still felt so damn restless?

Detective Inspector Michelle Hart of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary, Northern Division, entered the forensic anthropology department of the District Hospital. She was looking forward to this morning. Usually at postmortems she found herself disturbed not so much by the cutting and probing itself as by the contrast between the bright reflective surfaces of utilitarian tile and steel and the messy slosh of stomach contents, the dribbles of blackish blood running into the polished gutters, between the smell of disinfectant and the stench of a punctured bowel. But this morning, none of that was going to happen. This morning, all that Dr. Wendy Cooper, the forensic anthropologist, had to examine was bones.

Michelle had worked with her just over a month ago – her first case in her new posting – on some remains that had turned out to be Anglo-Saxon, not unusual in those parts, and they had got on well enough. The only thing she found hard to take was Dr. Cooper’s predilection for playing country-and-western music while she worked. She said it helped her concentrate, but Loretta Lynn had quite the opposite effect on Michelle.

Dr. Cooper and her graduate-student assistant, David Roberts, were bent over the partial skeleton arranging the small bones of the hands and feet in the correct order. It must be a difficult task, Michelle realized from the one brief anatomy course she had attended, and how you told one rib or one knuckle from another was quite beyond her. Dr. Cooper seemed to be doing well enough. She was in her early fifties, a rather stout figure with very short gray hair, silver-rimmed glasses and a no-nonsense manner.

“Do you know how many bones there are in a human hand?” Dr. Cooper asked without looking away from the skeleton.

“A lot?” Michelle answered.

“Twenty-six,” said Dr. Cooper. “Twenty-six. And awkward little buggers to make out, some of them.”

“Got anything for me yet?” Michelle took out her notebook.

“A little bit. As you can see, we’re still trying to put him back together again.”

“Him?”

“Oh, yes. You can take my word for that. The skull and pubis bear it out. Northern European, too, I’d say.” She turned the skull sideways. “See that straight facial profile, the narrow nasal aperture? All signs. There are others, of course: the high cranium, the eye sockets. But you don’t want a lesson in ethnic anthropology, do you?”

“I suppose not,” said Michelle, who actually found the subject quite interesting. Sometimes she thought she might have chosen the wrong career and should instead have become an anthropologist. Or perhaps a doctor. “Not very tall, though, is he?”

Dr. Cooper looked at the bones laid out on the steel trolley. “Tall enough for his age, I’d say.”

“Don’t tell me you know his age.”

“Of course. Only a rough guess, mind you. By measuring the long bones and applying the appropriate formula, we’ve calculated his height at around five foot six. That’s somewhere between a hundred and sixty-seven and a hundred and sixty-eight centimeters.”

“A kid, then?”

Dr. Cooper nodded and touched the shoulder with her pen. “The medial clavicular epiphysis – collarbone to you – is the last epiphysis in the body to fuse, normally in the mid-twenties, though it can occur anytime between fifteen and thirty-two. His hasn’t fused yet. Also, I’ve examined the rib ends and vertebrae. In an older person, you’d expect not only signs of wear and tear, but sharper ends and more scalloping on the ribs. His rib ends are flat and smoothly rounded, only slightly undulating, and the vertebrae show no epiphyseal rings at all. Also the fusion of ilium, ischium and pubis is in its early stages. That process usually takes place between the ages of twelve and seventeen.”

“So you’re saying he’s how old?”

“In my business it doesn’t pay to go out on a limb, but I’ll say between twelve and fifteen. Allow a couple of years either way as a fair margin of error. The databases we get these figures from aren’t always complete, and sometimes they’re out of date.”

“Anything else?”

“The teeth. Of course, you’ll have to bring in the odontologist to examine the roots and check the levels of fluoride, if there is any – it wasn’t introduced in toothpaste here until 1959 – but I can tell you three things right now. First off, there are no deciduous teeth left – that’s baby teeth – and the second molar has erupted. That means he’s aged around twelve, again give or take a couple of years, and I’d hazard a guess, given the other evidence, that he’s older rather than younger.”

“And the third thing?”

“A bit less scientific, I’m afraid, but judging by the general state of his teeth and the look of all these metal fillings in the posterior teeth, I’d guess vintage-school dentist.”

“How long ago was he buried there?”

“Impossible to say. There’s no remaining soft tissue or ligaments, the bones are discolored, and there’s some flaking, so I’d say more than a decade or two, but beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess until I’ve done more rigorous tests.”

“Any sign of cause of death?”

“Not yet. I need to get the bones cleaned up. Sometimes you can’t see knife marks, for example, because of the encrusted dirt.”

“What about that hole in the skull?”

Dr. Cooper ran her finger around the jagged hole. “Must have occurred during excavation. It’s definitely postmortem.”

“How can you tell?”

“If it had happened before death, there’d be signs of healing. This is a clean break.”

“But what if it was the cause of death?”

Dr. Cooper sighed as if she were talking to a dense undergraduate. Michelle noticed David Roberts grin, and he blushed when he saw her watching him. “If that were the case,” the doctor went on, “you’d expect a very different shape. Fresh bones break in a different way from old bones. And look at that.” She pointed to the hole. “What do you see?”

Michelle peered closely. “The edges,” she said. “They’re not the same color as the surrounding bone.”

“Very good. That means it’s a recent break. If it had happened around the time of death, you’d expect the edges to have stained the same color as the rest of the skull, wouldn’t you?”

“I suppose so,” said Michelle. “Simple, isn’t it?”

“If you know what you’re looking for. There’s a fractured humerus, too, right arm, but that’s healed, so I’d say it happened while he was alive. And do you see this?” She pointed to the left arm. “It’s slightly longer than his right arm, which may indicate left-handedness. Of course, it could be due to the fracture, but I doubt it. There are differences in the scapulae that also support my hypothesis.”

Michelle made some notes, then turned back to Dr. Cooper. “We know he was most likely buried where he was found,” she said, “because the remains were about three or four feet underground, but is there any way of knowing whether he died there or was moved there later?”

Dr. Cooper shook her head. “Any evidence of that was destroyed in the same way the skull and some of the other bones were damaged. By the bulldozer.”

“Where’s the stuff we found with the body?”

Dr. Cooper gestured toward the bench that ran the length of the far wall and turned back to the bones. David Roberts spoke for the first time. He had a habit of keeping his head down when he spoke to Michelle, and of mumbling, so she couldn’t always hear what he was saying. He seemed embarrassed in her presence, as if he fancied her. She knew that her combination of blond hair and green eyes had a captivating effect on some men, but this was ridiculous. Michelle had just turned forty and David couldn’t be more than twenty-two.

She followed him over to the bench, where he pointed to a number of barely recognizable objects. “We can’t say for certain that they’re his,” he said, “but all these were gathered within a short radius of the body.” When she looked more closely, Michelle thought she could make out scraps of material, perhaps fragments of clothing, a belt buckle, coins, a pen knife, a round-edged triangle of plastic, shoe leather, lace eyelets and several round objects. “What are those?” she asked.

“Marbles.” David rubbed one of them with a cloth and handed it to her.

It felt smooth to Michelle’s touch, and inside the heavy glass sphere was a double helix of blue. “Summer, then,” she said, almost to herself.

“Beg your pardon?”

She looked up at David. “Oh, sorry. I said summer. Boys usually played marbles in summer. Outdoors, when the weather was good. What about the coins?”

“A few pennies, half a crown, sixpence, a threepenny bit.”

“All old coinage?”

“Before decimalization, at any rate.”

“So that’s pre- 1971.” She picked up a flat, triangular object with rounded edges. “What’s this?”

David polished away some of the grime and revealed a tortoiseshell pattern. “I think it’s a plectrum,” he said. “You know, for a guitar.”

“A musician, then?” Michelle picked up a chain bracelet of some sort, crusted and corroded, with a flat, elongated oval at its center and something written on it.

Dr. Cooper came over. “Yes, I thought that was interesting,” she said. “You know what it is?”

“A bracelet of some kind?”

“Yes. I think it’s an identity bracelet. They became very popular with teenage boys during the mid-sixties. I remember my brother had one. David was able to clean this one up a bit. All the silver plating’s gone, of course, but luckily the engraver’s drill went deep into the alloy underneath. You can read part of the name if you look very closely. Here, use this.” She passed Michelle a magnifying glass. Michelle looked through it and was able to make out the faint edges of some of the engraved letters: GR-HA-. That was all.

“Graham, I’d guess,” said Dr. Cooper.

Michelle looked at the collection of bones, trying to imagine the warm living, breathing human being that they had once formed. A boy. “Graham,” she whispered. “Pity he didn’t have his last name engraved, too. It’d make our job a lot simpler.”

Dr. Cooper put her hands on her ample hips and laughed. “To be honest, my dear,” she said, “I don’t think you can have it much simpler than this, can you? If I’m right so far, you’re looking for a left-handed boy named Graham, aged between, say twelve and fifteen, who once broke his upper right arm and went missing at least twenty or thirty years ago, maybe in summer. Oh, and he played marbles and the guitar. Am I forgetting anything? I’ll bet there can’t be too many matching that description in your files.”

Banks walked down the hill and through the winding streets of the village at about seven every evening. He loved the quality of the light at that time of day, the way the small white houses with their colorful wooden steps seemed to glow, and the flowers – a profusion of purple, pink and red – seemed incandescent. The scent of gardenia mingled with thyme and oregano. Below him, the wine-dark sea stretched all the way back to the mainland, just as it had done in Homer’s day. Although it wasn’t exactly wine-dark, Banks noticed. Not all of it, anyway. Some of the areas closer to land were deep blue or green, and it only darkened to the purple of a young Greek wine much farther out.

One or two of the shopkeepers greeted him as he passed. He had been on the island for a little over two weeks now, which was longer than most tourists stayed, and while he wasn’t accepted, his presence was at least acknowledged. It was much the same as in a Yorkshire village, where you remain an incomer until you have wintered out several years. Maybe he would stay here that long, learn the language, become a mysterious hermit, merge into the rhythms of island life. He even looked a bit Greek, with his lean frame, closely cropped black hair and tanned skin.

He picked up the two-day-old English newspapers that came on the last boat of the day and carried them with him to Philippe’s quayside taverna, where he spent most of his evenings at an outside table overlooking the harbor. He would have an ouzo as an aperitif, make his mind up about what to eat, then drink retsina with dinner. He found that he’d come to enjoy the odd, oily taste of the local resinated wine.

Banks lit a cigarette and watched the tourists getting into the launch that would take them back to their cruise ship and the evening’s entertainment, probably Cheryl from Cheadle Hulme dancing the Dance of the Seven Veils, or a group of Beatles imitators from Heckmondwike. Tomorrow they would disembark on a new island, where they would buy overpriced trinkets and take photographs they wouldn’t look at more than once. A group of German tourists, who must have been staying overnight at one of the island’s few small hotels, took a table at the other side of the patio and ordered beer. They were the only other people sitting outside.

Banks sipped ouzo and nibbled on some olives and dolmades as he settled on fish à la Grecque and a green salad for dinner. The last of the tourists had returned to the cruise ship, and as soon as he had cleared away his stock, Alex would come by to play chess. In the meantime, Banks turned to the newspapers.

His attention was caught by an article on the bottom right of the front page, headed DNA CONFIRMS IDENTITY OF LONG-BURIED BODY. Intrigued, Banks read on:

A week ago the skeleton of a young boy was unearthed by workers digging the foundations of a new shopping centre next to the A1 west of Peterborough, Cambridgeshire. Information discovered at the scene and provided by forensic anthropologist Dr. Wendy Cooper led to a very narrow list of possibilities. “It was almost a gift,” Dr. Cooper told our reporter. “Usually old bones don’t tell you so much, but in this case we knew early on that he was a young boy who had broken his right arm once and was most likely left-handed.” An identity bracelet, popular with teenage boys in the mid-sixties, was found near the scene and bore a partial name. Detective Inspector Michelle Hart of the Cambridge Constabulary commented, “Dr. Cooper gave us a lot to work with. It was simply a matter of going through the files, narrowing the possibilities.” When police came up with one strong candidate, Graham Marshall, the boy’s parents were approached for DNA samples, and the testing proved positive. “It’s a relief to know they’ve found our Graham after all these years,” said Mrs. Marshall at her home. “Even though we lived in hope.” Graham Marshall disappeared on Sunday, 22nd August, 1965, at the age of 14 while walking his regular newspaper round near his council estate home in Peterborough. No trace of him has ever been found until now. “The police at the time exhausted every possible lead,” DI Hart told our reporter, “but there’s always a chance that this discovery will bring new clues.” Asked if there is likely to be a new investigation into the case, DI Hart would only state that “Missing persons are never written off until they are found, and if there’s the possibility of foul play, then justice must be pursued.” As yet, there are no clear indications of cause of death, though Dr. Cooper did point out that the boy could hardly bury himself under three feet of earth.

Banks felt his stomach clench. He put the paper down and stared out to sea, where the setting sun was sprinkling rose dust over the horizon. Everything around him began to shimmer and feel unreal. As if on cue, the tape of Greek music came to “Zorba’s Dance,” as it did every night. The taverna, the harbor, the brittle laughter all seemed to vanish into the distance, and there was only Banks with his memories and the stark words in the newspaper.

“Alan? What is it you say: A penny for them?”

Banks looked up and saw the dark, squat figure of Alex standing over him. “Alex. Sorry. Good to see you. Sit down.”

Alex sat, looking concerned. “You look as if you’ve had bad news.”

“You could say that.” Banks lit a cigarette and stared out over the darkening sea. He could smell salt and a whiff of dead fish. Alex gestured to Andrea, and in moments a bottle of ouzo appeared on the table in front of them, along with another plate of olives and dolmades. Philippe lit the lanterns that hung around the outside patio and they swayed in the breeze, casting fleeting shadows over the tables. Alex took out his portable chess set from its leather bag and arranged the pieces.

Banks knew that Alex wouldn’t press him. It was one of the things he liked about his new friend. Alex had been born on the island, and after university in Athens had traveled the world as an executive for a Greek shipping line before deciding to pack it all in ten years ago at the age of forty. Now, he made a living from tooling leather belts, which he sold to tourists on the quayside. Alex was an extremely cultured man, Banks had soon discovered, with a passion for Greek art and architecture, and his English was almost perfect. He also possessed what seemed to Banks a very deep-rooted sense of himself and a contentment with the simple life which Banks wished he could attain. Of course, he hadn’t told Alex what he did for a living, merely that he was a civil servant. He had found that telling strangers you meet on holiday that you’re a policeman tends to put them off. Either that or they have a mystery for you to solve, the way people always seem to have strange ailments to ask about when they are introduced to doctors.

“Perhaps it’s not a good idea tonight,” Alex said, and Banks noticed he was putting the chess set away. It had always been a mere backdrop to conversation, anyway, as neither was a skilled player.

“I’m sorry,” said Banks. “I just don’t seem to be in the mood. I’d only lose.”

“You usually do. But it’s all right, my friend. Clearly there is something troubling you.” Alex stood to leave, but Banks reached out and touched his arm. Oddly enough, he wanted to tell someone. “No, stay,” he said, pouring them both a generous glass of ouzo. Alex looked at him for a moment with those serious brown eyes and sat down again.

“When I was fourteen,” said Banks, looking out at the lights in the harbor and listening to the stays on the fishing boats rattle, “a close school friend of mine disappeared. He was never seen again. Nobody ever found out what happened to him. Not a trace.” He smiled and turned to look at Alex. “It’s funny because this music seemed to be playing constantly back then: ‘Zorba’s Dance.’ It was a big hit in England at the time. Marcello Minerbi. Funny, the little things you remember, isn’t it?”

Alex nodded. “Memory is indeed a mysterious process.”

“And often not to be trusted.”

“True, it seems that as things lie there, they are… strangely metamorphosed.”

“A lovely Greek word, metamorphosed.”

“It is. One thinks of Ovid, of course.”

“But it happens to the past, doesn’t it? To our memories.”

“Yes.”

“Anyway,” Banks went on, “there was a general assumption at the time that my friend, Graham was his name, had been abducted by a pedophile – another Greek word, but not so lovely – and done away with.”

“It seems a reasonable assumption, given life in the cities. But might he not have simply run away from home?”

“That was another theory, but he had no reason to, as far as anyone knew. He was happy enough, and he never talked about running off. Anyway,” Banks went on, “all attempts to find him failed and he never turned up again. The thing is, about two months earlier, I was playing down by the river when a man came and grabbed me and tried to push me in.”

“What happened?”

“I was wiry and slippery enough to wriggle my way free and run off.”

“But you never told the authorities?”

“I never even told my parents.”

“Why not?”

“You know what kids are like, Alex. I wasn’t meant to be playing down there, for a start. It was quite a long way from home. I was also playing truant. I was supposed to be at school. And I suppose I blamed myself. I just didn’t want to get into trouble.”

Alex poured more ouzo. “So when your friend disappeared, you assumed it was the same man?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve been carrying the guilt all these years?”

“I suppose so. I never really thought about it that way, but every once in a while, when I think about it, I feel… it’s like an old wound that never quite heals. I don’t know. I think it was partly why I…”

“Why you what?”

“Never mind.”

“Why you became a policeman?”

Banks looked at him in astonishment. “How did you know?”

Alex was smiling. “I’ve met a few in my time. You get to recognize the signs.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, watchfulness, curiosity, a certain way of walking and sitting. Little things.”

Banks laughed. “By the sound of it, you’d make a pretty good policeman yourself, Alex.”

“Oh, no. I think not.”

“Why?”

“I don’t think I could ever be quite certain that I was on the right side.”

“And are you now?”

“I try to be.”

“So do I,” said Banks.

“I’m sure you are a good policeman. You must remember, though, in Greece… well, we’ve had our share of regimes. But please go on.”

Banks tapped the folded newspaper. “They’ve found him,” he said. “Buried by the roadside about eight miles away from where he disappeared.”

Alex whistled between his teeth.

“They don’t know the cause of death yet,” Banks went on, “but he couldn’t have got there by himself.”

“So perhaps the assumptions were right?”

“Yes.”

“And that makes you feel bad all over again, does it?”

“Terrible. What if I was responsible, Alex? What if it was the same man? If I’d spoken up…”

“Even if you had reported what happened, it doesn’t mean he would have been caught. These men can be very clever, as I’m sure you have learned over the years.” Alex shook his head. “But I’m not foolish enough to believe that one can talk a man out of his guilt when he’s set on feeling it. Do you believe in fate?”

“I don’t know.”

“We Greeks are great believers in fate, in destiny.”

“What does it matter, anyway?”

“Because it exonerates you. Don’t you see? It’s like the Catholic Church absolving you of sin. If it’s fate, then you were meant to survive and not tell anyone, and your friend was destined to be abducted and killed and his body discovered many years later.”

“Then I don’t believe in fate.”

“Well, it was worth a try,” said Alex. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. There’s nothing I can do, really, is there? The local police will investigate, and they’ll either find out what happened, or they won’t. My bet is that after all these years they won’t.”

Alex said nothing for a moment, just toyed with his ouzo glass, then he took a long sip and sighed.

“What?” said Banks.

“I have a feeling I’m going to miss you, my friend.”

“Why? I’m not going anywhere.”

“You know the Germans occupied this island during the war?”

“Of course,” said Banks, surprised by Alex’s abrupt change of subject. “I’ve explored the old fortifications. You know I have. We talked about it. It wasn’t exactly The Guns of Navarone, but I was impressed.”

Alex waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. “You and I can only imagine what life was like under the Nazi occupation,” he said, “but my father lived through it. He once told me a story about when he was a boy, not much older than you and your friend were. The German officer in command of the island was called von Braun, and everyone thought he must have been an incompetent bastard to be sent somewhere like this. As you say, my friend, not exactly The Guns of Navarone, not exactly the most strategic position in the Mediterranean. Nevertheless, someone had to keep an eye on the populace, and von Braun was the man. It wasn’t a very exacting task, and I’m sure the soldiers posted here became very sloppy.

“One day, my father and three of his friends stole a German jeep. The roads are bad, as you can see even now, and they couldn’t drive, of course, and knew nothing beyond the rudiments, so they crashed into a boulder after they’d barely gone half a mile. Luckily, they were uninjured and ran away before the soldiers were alerted to what had happened, though apparently one soldier saw them and told von Braun there were four kids.” Alex paused and lit one of his Turkish cigarettes. Banks had once questioned him on the political correctness of a Greek smoking Turkish tobacco, but all he’d said was that it tasted better.

“Anyway,” Alex went on, expelling a plume of smoke, “whatever the reason, von Braun took it upon himself to seek retribution, make an example, in the same way the Nazis did in many occupied villages. He probably wanted to prove that he wasn’t just some soft, incompetent idiot sent to the middle of nowhere to keep him out of harm’s way. He rounded up four teenage boys – the same number the soldier had counted – and had them shot just over there.” Alex pointed to where the main street met the quayside. “Two of them had actually been involved; the other two were innocent. None of them was my father.”

The German tourists laughed at something one of the women had said and called Andrea to order more beer. They were already pretty drunk in Banks’s opinion, and there’s not much worse than a drunken German, unless it’s a drunken English football fan.

Alex ignored them and went on. “My father was guilt-stricken for not speaking up, as was his friend, but what could they have done? The Nazis would probably have shot them in addition to the four others they had chosen. It was what the Americans call a no-win situation. He carried that shame and that guilt with him all his life.”

“Is he still alive?”

“He’s been dead for years now. But the point is, von Braun was one of the minor war criminals tried after the war, and do you know what? My father went to the trial. He’d never left the island before in his life, except for one visit to Athens to have his appendix removed, but he had to go. To bear witness.”

Banks felt oppressed by Alex’s story and the weight of history, felt as if there was nothing he could say that would not be inappropriately light. Finally, he found his voice. “Are you trying to tell me you think I ought to go back?”

Alex looked at him and smiled sadly. “I’m not the one who thinks you ought to go back.”

“Ah, shit.” Banks lit a cigarette and tilted the ouzo bottle again. It was nearly empty.

“Am I right?” Alex persisted.

Banks looked out at the sea, dark now, twisting the lights reflected on its shimmering surface, and nodded. There was nothing he could do tonight, of course, but Alex was right; he would have to go. He had been carrying his guilty secret around for so long now that it had become a part of him, and he could no more put the discovery of Graham Marshall’s bones out of his mind than he could all the other things he had thought he’d left behind: Sandra and her pregnancy, Annie Cabbot, the Job.

He watched a pair of young lovers, arms around each other, stroll along the quayside and felt terribly sad because he knew it was all over now, this brief sojourn in paradise, knew that this would be the last time he and Alex spent a companionable evening together in the Greek warmth, with the waves lapping against the ancient stone quay and the smell of Turkish tobacco and salt and rosemary in the air. He knew that tomorrow he had to go down to the harbor early, take the morning ferry to Piraeus and get on the first flight home. And he wished to hell he didn’t.