The Summer That Never Was Read Free

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 centre 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. Michellelooked 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 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 colourful 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 severalyears. 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 with 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 harbour. 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 had 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,