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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:

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.”