“I did that to protect Luke.”
“I understand why you did it, but it was still a lie. Maybe you can see how complicated our job becomes when you take all the lies into account. The lies of the innocent, especially. As I said, we don’t take things, or people, at face value, and like it or not, every murder investigation begins close to home, then moves outward. Now, if you don’t mind, we’ll take a look at Luke’s room.”
Michelle had been joking when she told Banks she was getting paranoid, but she was beginning to think that every time she visited the archives, Mrs. Metcalfe rang Detective Superintendent Shaw. Here he was again, preceded by the dark chill of his shadow, on the threshold of the tiny room.
“Any progress?” he asked, leaning against the door.
“I’m not sure,” said Michelle. “I’ve been going over the old crime reports for 1965 looking for some sort of connection with Graham’s disappearance.”
“And have you found any?”
“Not directly, no.”
“I told you you were wasting your time.”
“Maybe not entirely.”
“What do you mean?”
Michelle paused. She had to be careful what she said because she didn’t want Shaw to know that Banks had tipped her off to the Kray connection. That would send him into a tantrum she could well do without. “I was reading over the reports and statements on a protection racket investigation in July 1965, and Graham’s dad’s name came up.”
“So? Where’s the connection?”
“A club on Church Street called Le Phonographe.”
“I remember that place. It was a discotheque.”
Michelle frowned. “I thought disco was in the seventies, not the sixties.”
“I’m not talking about the music, but the establishment itself. Clubs like Le Phonographe offered memberships and served meals, usually an inedible beef burger, if my memory serves me well, so they could sell alcohol legally after regular closing time. They’d stay open till three in the morning, or so. There’d be music and dancing, too, but it was usually Motown or soul.”
“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 mustache, 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 under way he turned Le Phonographe into a more up-market 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-whiskey 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 center 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 inquiry 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.”