Close to Home by Peter Robinson Page A

Hazels from an area of older houses, soon to be demolished. It was at the T-junction between Wilmer and Hazel Crescent that Graham had delivered his last newspaper, a News of the World, to Mr. and Mrs. Halloran, who lived in the corner house.
    The next delivery was supposed to be to one of the houses across the road, but the Lintons there said they never received their Observer that day. Nobody else on the other side of Wilmer Road received a newspaper that morning, either.
    The anonymous mapmaker had also calculated that it would have been around 6:30 A . M . when Graham, who started at 6 A . M ., got to that part of his round—daylight at that time of year, but still very early in the morning for any sort of traffic, including pedestrian. It was a Sunday, after all, the traditional morning for a lie-in after the excesses of Saturday night, and most of the customers said they were still in bed when their papers arrived.
    Michelle looked at the old black-and-white photos. They depicted a very different scene from the one she had visited yesterday, after she had talked to the Marshalls. In 1965, across Wilmer Road, there had been a grim row of old shops, all boarded up and ready for demolition, but today a modern DIY center stood next to the new estate, which had replaced the old houses. The derelict shops looked like just the sort of place a kid might want to explore. Michelle checked the file to see if they had been searched. Of course they had. Dogs brought in, too. Not a trace.
    Michelle tucked some strands of blond hair, which had been tickling her cheek, behind her ears and chewed at the end of her pen as she read over transcripts of the initial interviews. Nearly everything was typed, of course, except some of the documents that were handwritten, and the results looked strange, with the uneven pressure of the keys and the occasional blob of a deformed e or g . Such distinguishing features used to be very handy for identifying which machine a note had been typed on, Michelle reflected, before the anonymity of laser printers. Some of the papers were carbon copies, faint and often hard to read. Occasionally, illegible amendments had been made in pen or pencil between the lines, the original words scratched out. All in all, not a promising start.
    Detective Superintendent Benjamin Shaw, now one of the senior officers at Thorpe Wood, was named once or twice as a detective constable on the case. Michelle knew that Shaw had started his career in Peterborough and had recently returned from six years with the Lincolnshire Constabulary,but it still surprised her to see his name in connection with something that happened so long ago. Maybe she could have a word with him, see if he had any theories that hadn’t made it into the files.
    It seemed that the first person to miss Graham Marshall was his employer, Donald Bradford, owner of the newsagent’s shop. Bradford lived some distance away from the shop and employed a local woman to open up, not arriving himself until eight o’clock. According to Bradford’s statement, when Graham hadn’t returned by eight-fifteen that Sunday, half an hour late for his second round on a neighboring estate, Bradford drove around the Wilmer Road Estate in search of him. He found nothing. Whatever had happened to Graham, his papers and his canvas bag were missing, too. Michelle was willing to bet that some of those scraps of cloth found with the bones came from Graham’s newspaper sack.
    After that, Donald Bradford called at Graham’s house to see if the lad had become ill and hurried home without stopping to report in. He hadn’t. Graham’s parents, now also worried, searched the estate for their son and found nothing. With news of the Manchester child abductions still fresh in the public eye, both Bradford and the Marshalls were soon concerned enough to call in the police, and a short while after that, the official investigation began. Preliminary inquiries