Free When the Music's Over by Peter Robinson Page A

The sands. I remember I missed dinner and everyone was angry with me. I just told them I’d been walking around and lost track of the time. I said I didn’t feel very well and went to bed early.”
    â€œNow think carefully,” said Banks. “You say you’d never seen this other man before, but did you ever see him again?”
    â€œThat’s where it gets unclear,” said Linda, a tone of regret and desperation in her voice. “I honestly can’t remember. I think I did, but I was a zombie for weeks, months after. I put on a good-enough show. But inside. I don’t have much recall of the aftermath.”
    â€œOK,” said Banks. “Calm down, Linda. There’s no hurry, no pressure.”
    â€œI just have this memory of seeing a picture of him sometime after he raped me, but it’s not clear where, or even if I really did. It might have been in a newspaper or something. It might even have been an image in a dream. Or a nightmare. I had plenty of those.”
    â€œA magazine, perhaps? Or a billboard? Was he also famous?”
    â€œNo. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t. At least, I’d have known if I’d seen him on TV or anything. No, if it really happened, it was just a fleeting glimpse, half forgotten. Most likely a newspaper. Half created, half perceived, perhaps.”
    â€œWordsworth,” said Banks.
    Linda’s eyes widened. “You know poetry?”
    â€œNo, but we did ‘Tintern Abbey’ at school. Even went on a school trip there. It was one of the few I liked, a big favorite of our English teacher’s—he was very big on the Romantic imagination—and I’ve never forgotten those lines, or at least the paraphrase. It’s something that comes up a lot in my job.”
    â€œâ€˜Of all the mighty world / Of eye and ear,—both what they half create, / And what perceive.’ Yes, that’s what it’s like, really, trying to think back to that . . . that day. I don’t know how much I perceived or how much I’m making up, filling in, when I try to remember it.”
    She had just about put her finger on the whole problem of historical abuse cases, Banks thought—or Wordsworth had. No real evidence, just a mix of fact and fiction. But there had to be a way to crack it, to crack Danny Caxton. Linda wasn’t the only victim, and in these cases there was strength in numbers, in independent, believable testimony. When it came right down to it, most people had no reason to lie about something like that; the only problem was getting their memories as clear as possible. Even then, Banks knew, you could ask five people to describe an event they had all witnessed together and you’d get five different accounts.
    â€œYou mentioned a newspaper,” Banks said. “Is that where you might have seen his picture?”
    â€œIt’s what comes to mind. You know, passing a rack of papers at the newsagent’s, a quick glance at someone’s paper getting on or off a bus. It feels like it was that sort of flash.”
    â€œHow long after the assault?”
    â€œI can’t remember exactly. It wasn’t all that long, though. After summer but before winter. October, maybe. As I said, I was in bad shape for a few months, maybe a year, though I still managed to function. School, and all that. I was just jumpy, and I got depressed sometimes. I lost interest in things. Reading. Songs. Hockey. Hanging out with my friends. They started to think I was weird and ignore me. My marks went down, of course. My mother took me to a child psychologist, but I don’t really think that did any good. The same doctorwho’d given me the tonic before gave me some more pills, but I only pretended to take them after the first few made everything even more fuzzy. I suppose they were all just trying to help. I was probably behaving like a real brat.”
    â€œBut you never sought the photograph out later,