The Summer That Never Was Read Online Free PDF Page A

the time nor the inclination to keep up with pop music these days. She remembered reading that Robin and Neil had a baby out of wedlock about fifteen years ago. Luke . Then they split up, and Neil Byrd committed suicide while the child was still very young.
    “Oh, shit, indeed,” said Gristhorpe. “I’d not like to think we give better service to the rich and famous than to the poor, Annie, but perhaps you could go and try to set the parents at ease. The kid’s probably gone gallivanting off with his mates, run away to London or something, but you know what people’s imaginations can get up to.”
    “Where did he disappear from, sir?”
    “We don’t know for certain. He’d been into town yesterday afternoon, and when he didn’t come home for tea they started to get worried. At first they thought he might have met up with some mates, but when it got dark and he still wasn’t home they started to get worried. By this morning, they were frantic, of course. Turns out the lad carried a mobile with him, so they’re sure he would have rung if anything came up.”
    Annie frowned. “That does sound odd. Have they tried ringing him?”
    “No signal. They say his phone’s switched off.”
    Annie stood up and reached for her umbrella. “I’ll go over there and talk to them now.”
    “And Annie?”
    “Yes, sir?”
    “You hardly need me to tell you this, but try to keep as low a profile as possible. The last thing we want is the local press on the case.”
    “Softly, softly, sir.”
    Gristhorpe nodded. “Good.”
    Annie walked towards the door.
    “Nice boots,” said Gristhorpe from behind her.
     
    Banks remembered the days surrounding Graham Marshall’s disappearance more clearly than he remembered most days that long ago, he realized as he closed his eyes and settled back in the airplane seat, though memory, he found, tended to take more of a cavalier view of the past than an accurate one; it conflated, condensed and transposed. It metamorphosed , as Alex had said last night.
    Weeks, months, years were spread out in his mind’s eye, but not necessarily in chronological order. The emotions and incidents might be easy enough to relocate and remember, but sometimes, as in police work, you have to rely on external evidence to reconstruct the true sequence. Whether he had got caught shoplifting in Woolworth’s in 1963 or 1965, for example, he couldn’t remember, though he recollected with absolute clarity the sense of fear and helplessness in that cramped triangular room under the escalator, the cloying smell of Old Spice aftershave and the way the two dark-suited shop detectives laughed as they pushed him about and made him empty his pockets. But when he thought about it more, he remembered it was also the same day he had bought the brand-new With the Beatles LP, which was released in late November, 1963.
    And that was the way it often happened. Remember one small thing–a smell, a piece of music, the weather, a fragment of conversation–then scrutinize it, question it from every angle, and before you know it, there’s another piece of information you thought you’d forgotten. And another. It didn’t always work, but sometimes when he did this, Banks ended up creating a film of his own past, a film which he was both watching and acting in at the same time. He could see what clothes he was wearing, knew what he was feeling, what people were saying, how warm or cold it was. Sometimes the sheer reality of the memory terrified him and he had to snap himself out of it in a cold sweat.
    Just over a week after he had returned from a holiday in Blackpool with the Banks family, Graham Marshall had disappeared during his Sunday morning paper round, out of Donald Bradford’s newsagent’s shop across the main road, a round he had been walking for about six months, and one that Banks himself had walked a year or so earlier, when Mr. Thackeray owned the shop. At first, of course, nobody knew anything about what had