“Put simply,” she said, “it’s the Mad Hatters tour dates from October 1969 to May 1970.”

“But that’s eight months, and there are only six rows.”

“They didn’t tour in December or February,” Annie said. She showed Banks the printout from the web site. “I got this all from a site run by what must be their most devoted fan. The trivia some of these people put out there is amazing. Anyway, it must have been a godsend to a writer like Nick Barber.”

“But is it all accurate?”

“I’m sure there are errors,” Annie said. “After all, these web sites are unedited, and it’s easy to make a mistake. But on the whole I’d say it’s probably pretty close.”

“So the Mad Hatters were on tour the sixth, eighth, ninth, twenty-first, twenty-second, and twenty-fifth of October? That’s how it goes?”

“Yes,” said Annie. She handed him the printout. “And these were the places they played.”

“The Dome, Brighton; the Locarno Ballroom, Sunderland; the Guild-hall, Portsmouth. They got around.”

“They certainly did.”

“And the ringed dates?”

“Just three of them, as you can see,” said Annie. “The twelfth of January, the nineteenth of April and the nineteenth of May. All in 1970.”

“Any significance in those two nineteenths?”

“I haven’t figured out the significance of any of the ringed dates yet.”

“Maybe it was one of his girlfriends’ periods?”

Annie gave him a sharp nudge in the ribs. “Don’t be rude. Anyway, periods don’t come that irregularly. Not usually, at any rate.”

“So you did consider it?”

Annie ignored him and prepared to move on just as their food arrived. They took a short pause to arrange papers, plates and knives and forks, then carried on. “The first gap is three months, the second is one.”

“Drug scores?”

“Perhaps.”

“What about the venues?”

Annie consulted her notes. “On the twelfth of January, they were playing at the Top Rank Suite in Cardiff, on the nineteenth of April, they were at the Dome in Brighton, and on the nineteenth of May, they were at the Van Dyke Club in Plymouth.”

“You can’t get much more diverse than that,” said Banks. “Okay. Now we need to find out if there’s any significance at all to those dates and places.”

The owner came over to see if everything was all right. They assured him it was, and he scooted off. That kind of solicitude wouldn’t last long in Yorkshire, Annie thought, finding herself wondering if his French accent was as false as his hairpiece. “I’ll enlist Winsome’s aid after lunch,” she said. “You?”

“I think it’s time I paid another visit to Vic Greaves,” said Banks. “See if I can get any more sense out of him this time. I was thinking of taking Jenny Fuller along, but she’s off on the lecture circuit, and there’s no on else around I can really trust for that sort of thing.”

“Be careful,” said Annie. “Remember what happened to Nick Barber when he got too interested in Greaves.”

“Don’t worry. I will.”

“And good luck,” Annie added. “By the sound of him, you’ll need it.”

Banks cut off a lump of glutinous brown gristle from his steak and put it on the side of his plate. The sight of it made Annie feel vaguely queasy and very glad to be a vegetarian. “You know,” Banks said, “I still can’t decide whether Greaves is truly bonkers or just a genuine English eccentric.”

“Maybe there isn’t much of a difference,” Annie said. “Have you thought of that?”

There were plenty of cars parked on Lyndgarth’s village green early on Monday afternoon, and several groups of walkers in serious gear had assembled for briefings nearby. Banks found a spot to park near the post office and headed up the lane to Vic Greaves’s cottage. He was hoping that the man might be a bit more coherent this time and had a number of questions prepared to jog the ex-keyboard player’s memory if he needed to. Since his last visit he had come to believe that Stanley Chadwick had been seriously misguided about Patrick McGarrity’s guilt, for personal reasons, and he now knew that not only had Greaves been Linda Lofthouse’s cousin, but that Nick Barber was her son, which meant that Greaves and Barber were also related in some complicated way that Banks couldn’t quite figure out. But most important, it meant connections between the different cases, and connections always excited Banks.

He walked up the short path and knocked on the door. The front curtains were closed. No answer. He remembered the last time, how it had taken Greaves a while to answer, so he knocked again. When he still got no answer, he walked around to the back, where there was a small cobbled yard and a storage shed. He peeked through the grimy kitchen window and saw that things were in pretty much the same spotless order as they had been when he had first visited Greaves.

Curious, Banks tried the back door. It opened.

He was treading on dangerous ground now, he knew, entering a suspect’s premises alone, without a search warrant. But he thought that, if he had to, he could justify his actions. Vic Greaves was mentally unstable, and Banks feared that he might have come to some harm, or harmed himself in some way. Even so, he hoped he didn’t stumble across the one piece of vital evidence that linked Greaves inextricably with Barber’s murder, or with Linda Lofthouse’s, or he might have a hard time getting it admitted in court. What he would do, he decided, was not touch anything and return with full authorization if he had to.

As he entered, Banks felt a shiver of fear run down his spine. Annie had been right in her warning. If he indicated that he was at all close to the truth, then Greaves might lash out, as Banks thought he had done at Nick Barber. He might already know who was at his door, might be lying in wait, armed and ready to attack. Banks moved cautiously through the dim kitchen. At least all the knives were in their slots in the wooden block where Greaves kept them. Banks stood still in the doorway that led through to the living room and listened. Nothing but the wind whipping the tree branches and the distant sounds of a car starting and a dog barking.

From what he could make out in the pale light that filtered through the curtains, the living room was just as it had been, too, with newspapers and magazines piled everywhere. Banks stood at the bottom of the stairs and called out Greaves’s name again. Still no answer.

Tense and alert, he started to walk up the stairs. They creaked as he moved. Every once in a while he would pause, but still he heard nothing. He stood on the upstairs landing and listened again. Nothing. It was a small cottage, and in addition to the toilet and bathroom there were only two bedrooms. Banks checked the first and found it almost as full of newspapers and magazines as the living room. Then he went into the second, which was obviously Greaves’s bedroom.

In one corner lay a mattress heaped with sheets and blankets. It reminded Banks of nothing so much as a nest of some kind. Carefully, he poked around with his toe in the bedsheets, but no one was there, either hiding or dead. Though the sheets were piled in an untidy mess, they were clean and smelled of apples. There was nothing else in the room except a wardrobe and a dresser full of old, but clean and neatly folded, clothes and underwear.

After a cursory glance in the toilet and bathroom, which told him nothing, Banks went back downstairs into the living room. It was an ideal opportunity for him to poke around, but it didn’t seem as if Greaves had anything worth poking around for. There were no mementos, no Mad Hatters memorabilia, no photos or keepsakes of any kind. In fact, as far as Banks could tell, the cottage contained nothing but a few basic toiletries, clothes, kitchenware and newspapers.

Idly, he started looking at some of the papers on the top of the pile: Northern Echo and Darlington amp; Stockton Times, along with the Yorkshire Evening Post dating back about three years, as far as he could tell. The magazines covered just about everything from computing, though Greaves had no computer as far as Banks had seen, to coin collecting, though there were none on the subject of rock music, or music of any kind. Many of the magazines still had free gifts stuck to their covers, and some hadn’t even been removed from their cellophane wrapping.