Bingham and the Lost Years

On the pretext of enjoying a walking break, Bingham’s youngest son, Ben, supported by Bingham’s wife, Lina, persuades his father to investigate the case of a young man, Raymond Dowdall, who has been imprisoned fourteen years for a murder of a young woman, Janet Bawley - a murder his family and friends insist he did not commit. Troubled by the young man’s helplessness in the face of authority rather than convinced of his innocence, Bingham begins encouraging the people of Upton-on-Churnet to talk. On his first night in the small, Staffordshire town, he seeks out Raymond’s parents; walking back to the public house, where he and Ben are staying, through a fine autumnal drizzle, he is threatened. His curiosity piqued and his ever-present faith in the value of women’s gossip intact, he goes for a haircut at the local salon, where he rouses old memories, and then speaks with the young man’s employer, an estate agent. While Ben pursues their search, Bingham immerses himself in what he calls ’a sense of place’, in his view important in the search for any truth, and meets a young policewoman, Mehreen Choudhury. She offers her help, while at the same time expressing the force’s view that previous investigations merely left a bad feeling behind, reinforcing the public’s opinion that police corruption was involved, a judgement the force has found it impossible to live down.

Ben turns up a witness, a young woman police did not take seriously and who received threats to mind her own business, obliging her to move away from the town and forget what had happened. Bingham meets the murdered woman’s best friend eager to clear the town’s view of Janet’s morals, and the newspaperman, John Hayes, who has never given up on his belief that Raymond Dowdall was the victim of a miscarriage of justice. As their search progresses and memories are shaken, those powers in the community who value friendship above integrity act: Ben is run down, Lina is drawn into the fray, Bingham’s home is the target of an arson attack and the murdered woman’s husband at last opens his wife’s notebook - a book he has kept in a closed drawer since her death.

This is the eighth Bingham novel and the first in which Bingham’s youngest son plays an active role.