Close To Home (aka The Summer That Never Was)

“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 a 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