Children of the Revolution

by Peter Robinson

  ‘I wouldn’t have recognised him if I had seen him. Look, Mr Banks, we slept together for a few weeks a long time ago. I’m sure it was very nice, but I don’t remember it. We were kids. We were stoned most of the time. I don’t even remember seeing him around during the rest of my time at Essex, to tell the truth. Why would I know him here forty years later? It’s not as if we moved in the same circles, and I don’t mean to sound snobbish by saying that, but it’s true. And I certainly had nothing to do with his death.’

  Banks imagined she might be telling the truth, or something close to it. By the time Ronnie Bellamy and Gavin Miller had ended up in Eastvale, they had both changed a great deal, and both had moved on. Ronnie Bellamy even had a new name, two if you counted her pseudonym. She was no longer the lovely young activist, Ronnie Bellamy, but Lady Chalmers, wife of multimillionaire Broadway and West End producer. Perhaps Gavin Miller had seen her about town and recognised her. It was possible. He was the one who had been in love, after all, and the unrequited lover has an entirely different perspective on the affair. But he certainly hadn’t had the courage or desire to approach her, and she had probably not recognised him, as she claimed, even if she had seen him. Perhaps that was the end of the story, if only Banks’s scar wasn’t itching, and he wasn’t convinced there was something he was missing.

  Though Banks had told the truth about not sleeping with a lot of girls at college, there were still old girlfriends he wouldn’t recognise if he saw them in the street. So why did he find it so hard to accept that Lady Chalmers and Gavin Miller had managed to live in the same town for nearly three years or so without one knowing of the other’s existence? Miller’s grand passion had been a young man’s infatuation, no doubt quickly burned out once he had been rejected. Gerry had told him that even Judy Sallis had said Gavin had moved on to someone else fairly quickly. And Lady Chalmers hadn’t given a thought to the whole thing since. Why should she? She never had any shortage of suitors. Miller had simply been one in a long list of conquests.

  So let it go, he told himself. You have your answers.

  But he couldn’t. Because if Gavin Miller’s phone call was as innocent as Lady Chalmers made it out to be, why had she been so troubled for the whole of the following week, as Oriana had said she was? And why did she also appear to be frightened of something after Gavin Miller had been murdered? Because when he looked at her, even now, with the Valium or whatever it was dulling her anxieties, he could still see that she was troubled, and he realised that whatever she had told him, however much it had cost her pride, it was all calculated to get rid of him as soon as possible. She had told him nothing he didn’t already know. ‘What are you frightened of, Ronnie?’ he asked, staring into her cloudy green eyes.

  She held his gaze for several moments, holding her head high, but obviously with difficulty. ‘Nothing,’ she said finally, turning away. ‘Now, I think you should go. I’ve told you everything you need to know. As far as I’m concerned, this whole business is over. I won’t say anything about this conversation to anyone. I’m sure you know what I mean. But if you keep pestering me, things might be different.’

  Banks nodded. Dismissed, then. Behind her, on the screen, Oriana in a bikini came around again, but the real Oriana wasn’t around to show him to the door.

  Just as Banks was about to get into his car, a silver E-Type Jaguar pulled into the drive and blocked his way. A man got out and walked towards him. Even without the clue of the customized JEM 1 number plate, Banks knew who he was. He got that sinking feeling. Shit. Still, he supposed, he would have to talk to him sometime.

  ‘Are you Banks?’ Sir Jeremy said.

  Banks reached for his warrant card.

  ‘No need for that. Are you Banks?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Sir Jeremy gestured with his thumb to the passenger side of his car. ‘Get in.’

  Annie and Gerry Masterson didn’t talk much on the way to Leeds. Gerry kept her attention on the road, especially when they got close to the city itself, and they half-listened to talk shows on local radio. Annie said it was a relief not to have to suffer Banks’s musical tastes for a change. Gerry admitted that she didn’t understand half the pop-culture references he made. Annie said it was an age thing.

  They had settled their differences the previous evening, when Gerry had given Annie a lift home from Newhope Cottage, both of them ending up laughing over what they imagined Banks’s reaction would be when they’d left. A sigh of relief, no doubt, Annie had guessed, probably followed by a large Laphroaig and some loud atonal music. Annie had apologised for getting too steamed up over the Lady Chalmers investigation, and the things she had said, and Gerry had apologised for losing her temper and getting personal. Secretly, Annie had been glad to see a spark of fire in Gerry, whom she had thought rather insipid until then, but she wasn’t going to tell her that. She was also dismayed to find out that the whole station knew about her and Banks, but she realised she should have expected that, given that the place had more grapevines than a vineyard.

  Gerry drove through Otley, then on through Bramhope and Lawnswood towards Headingley. It was difficult finding somewhere to park near the university, but she managed to find a spot just large enough to squeeze the Ford Focus into on a side street of dark old brick houses with basements and dormers, all converted into student bedsits. They would have lunch in Leeds before going back, Annie said. Somewhere nice like that little Italian restaurant she remembered from a previous visit with Banks. Or even a nice country pub on the way home. That was one of the perks of a day out in the field. They might not be able to recoup expenses for it, but what the hell.

  Annie had visited the University of Leeds campus before, though she couldn’t profess to know her way around. They walked down Woodhouse Lane and entered the university beside the broad steps of the Parkinson Building, below the tall white tower of the Brotherton Library. It was a very open campus, Annie had always thought, built on split levels, with a great deal of outdoor space, trees, little patches of green, a mix of old brick buildings and houses and sixties concrete and glass buildings in the style of Le Corbusier.

  She stopped and asked directions from a passing student, who told her that the Social Sciences Building was the modern one just a little further ahead, on their left. After that, it was easy enough to find Dr Mandy Parsons’ office, a pleasant enough space, though cluttered, like most academic offices Annie had ever seen. It wasn’t quite as messy as Trevor Lomax’s, Annie thought, but she still had to clear a pile of student essays from the third chair before they could all sit down. The office smelled vaguely of cigar smoke under the veneer of air-freshener.

  Annie’s patience was wearing thin after her dealings with Lomax and Cooper, and the prospects of sitting in yet another messy office listening to erudite witticisms didn’t appeal to her at all. These academics seemed to live in a rarefied world that she didn’t quite understand. Annie was no philistine, and she had done well in university herself, but she also believed that unless you got out there and really got your hands dirty, you couldn’t have much of an idea what life was all about. That was what all the best artists did, anyway; they stared at the world, took it apart and rearranged it just for the sake of it, or to understand it better, to make some sort of statement about what it was, could be or should be. Most academics only dreamed of somebody else rearranging it for them. Maybe Dr Mandy Parsons would turn out to be different, with her feminist and Marxist beliefs, but Annie doubted it. Anyway, she felt prickly even before the questions began. She would have to watch herself, let Gerry do most of the asking. After all, it was Gerry who had tracked her down.

  ‘Thanks for agreeing to see us at such short notice,’ said Gerry, proffering her hand.

  ‘It was you who called?’

  ‘Yes. This is my colleague, DI Annie Cabbot.’

  Annie and Dr Parson shook hands. ‘I’d hardly have thought it would take two of you to handle me,’ Dr Parsons joked. ‘What am I supposed to have done?’r />
  ‘You?’ said Annie. ‘Nothing, as far as we know.’

  ‘Oh, that’s a pity. I do still try so hard to be a fly in the ointment.’

  ‘And I’m sure you are,’ Annie said. Mandy Parsons was tall and slim, with almost no hips or bust. She wore dark trousers and a plain pink shirt, and her cropped hair was shot through with grey. Black-rimmed glasses perched on the bridge of her slightly hooked nose.

  ‘Tell me,’ Dr Parsons said, tapping her pen against the desk. ‘It must be difficult for a woman to get on in the police force, even today. After all, it’s still very much a male domain, isn’t it?’

  ‘Very much so,’ said Annie. ‘But we’ve made a few inroads, as you can see. There are two of us right here in your office as proof. Our area commander is a woman, too.’

  ‘Then there’s Winsome,’ Gerry reminded her.

  ‘Yes. There’s a black woman we work with, too. A detective sergeant. She’s very good. So that’s gold stars all round on the gender and race employment stats. In fact, I sometimes feel sorry for poor old DCI Alan Banks. But we’ve got him trained, haven’t we, Gerry? He’s well outnumbered. Only got young Harry Potter for solidarity.’

  Dr Parsons seemed puzzled, and perhaps annoyed, but all she said was, ‘I take it that a DCI is higher in rank than a DI? So there’s still a long way to go?’

  ‘There’s always still a long way to go, isn’t there?’ Annie said.

  ‘But what about the sexist attitudes? I mean, don’t you come in for a lot of crude sexist jokes, the sort of thing that’s demeaning to women? There must still be a lot of policemen around who don’t think a woman’s place is in the police force at all.’

  ‘More than a few,’ said Annie, thinking back to the time she was raped by a colleague she had thought she could trust. ‘But we’re managing to whittle their numbers down slowly. We don’t want to take up too much of your time, but my colleague and I would like to have a chat with you about your years at the University of Essex, if that’s all right?’

  Dr Parsons leaned back in her chair, put her pen down and linked her hands on the desk in front of her. She had large knuckles and long fingers, adorned with a few chunky rings, Annie noticed. ‘Perfectly fine with me.’

  Gerry picked up the questioning. ‘Your name was given to us by another alumnus, Judy Sallis.’

  Dr Parsons frowned. ‘I don’t remember knowing anyone by that name.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. You probably didn’t know her. But she remembered you. Something in the papers jogged her memory recently. Something about female asylum seekers.’

  ‘Ah, yes, a hobby horse of mine, I’m afraid. The problem of female circumcision is—’

  ‘And she said you were head of the Marxist Society at Essex in the early seventies. Something like that.’

  Dr Parsons paused, perhaps deciding whether to be annoyed by Gerry’s riding roughshod over her comment, then said, ‘Well, we didn’t exactly have a head, as such. That would be leaning far too close to the cult of the leader. I did a lot of the organisation, though, from writing to printing out pamphlets and manifestos – I think we had an old spirit duplicator back then, a Banda. You made a “spirit master” first, which I always found a slightly mystical and disturbing term, like something out of a horror novel. They came out purple. Remember that smell of spirit alcohol, the wet sheets? No, of course you wouldn’t. You’re too young. Anyway, we shared tasks at all levels. It seemed the only non-discriminating way to go about it.’

  ‘But weren’t some people better at doing some things than others?’ Gerry asked.

  Dr Parsons gave her a long-suffering look. ‘Of course. But anybody can run off a few copies, hand them out on the street, sweep a floor, wash the dishes, can’t they, and there’s no reason why everybody shouldn’t have to do menial work like that, is there?’

  ‘I suppose not. Unless their time could be better spent doing something more valuable that nobody else could do as well.’

  ‘I can see you need a bit of re-education.’

  ‘Did you know a woman called Ronnie Bellamy?’

  Dr Parsons clapped her hands together. ‘Ronnie Bellamy? Of course I did. She was one of our most capable members. Why do you ask?’

  ‘When did she join?’

  ‘Shortly after she started at the university,’ said Dr Parsons. ‘Perhaps November, December 1971. She was in her first year. Couldn’t wait to get cracking. I was already in my second year then, so I’d been around a while. I was able to show her the ropes and all.’

  ‘How to use the spirit duplicator?’

  Dr Parsons laughed. ‘Yes. That as well. But Ronnie’s real skill was being able to write a coherent pamphlet, get across our ideas and persuade people to believe. It must have been all that expensive schooling, but her way with language was almost magical. She was a good speaker, too, and she had a lot of energy, but I must say that I often thought her looks rather got in the way of her delivery.’

  ‘I understand she was a very attractive young woman,’ Gerry said. ‘Nicely dressed, too.’

  ‘The kind of student casual elegance that costs a packet, yes. You see far more of it today then you did then, of course. Most of us were hardly walking adverts for the fashion industry. But you’re right. It could sometimes be a bit of a distraction for the male members of the society, or the men who attended our meetings in general.’

  ‘What? Beauty a distraction from Marxist ideology?’ Annie butted in. ‘Well, slap me around the head with a copy of Das Kapital.’ She knew she shouldn’t have interrupted but she couldn’t help herself.

  Dr Parsons laughed, but it sounded hollow. ‘I take your point, DI Cabbot,’ she said. Then she leaned forward and clasped her hands again, elbows on the desk. ‘But this was a time of great struggle, and we were very sincere and very serious about what we were doing. We wanted a fairer society, and we believed that meant a socialist society. We thought that by getting rid of the capitalist system, we could bring about the end of famine, war, unemployment, pollution. You name it. All the evils of the world. Marx and Marxism seemed to offer an essential analysis of the capitalist society we lived in, and until we understood it, we could hardly go about dismantling it and changing it. Remember, we were students, young, full of idealism and vigour. We were also academics in training. Lenin said, “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary action.” We believed him.’ She turned thoughtful for a moment. ‘Mind you, he also said, “Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.” ’

  Gerry laughed. ‘But what about Stalin?’ she asked. ‘Where does he come in? How do you explain him?’

  Dr Parsons smiled indulgently, as if she had been asked this question many times before. ‘We didn’t have to explain Stalin. He was an aberration. It wasn’t about the cult of the leader for us. Or even about the expansion of the Soviet empire. If anything, we were against colonialism. We had enough of that in our past. It was the workers’ revolution that interested us. Yes, we wanted to spread the socialist doctrine, and hopefully the socialist system, to all corners of the world, but we were starting out in our little corner. That was all that counted. Overthrowing the capitalist system for a fairer, more equal one. The overthrow of the ruling class and the ascent of the workers to power. A true workers’ state.’

  ‘But wouldn’t it require some rather drastic measures?’

  ‘It would mean a rebuilding not only of the state as we knew it, but of the human social being. It wouldn’t be a time for the personal and the sensual, that’s for certain.’

  ‘Do you still believe in it?’

  ‘Unfashionable as it is today, I do, to some extent.’

  ‘You said Ronnie Bellamy was a good propagandist.’

  Dr Parsons narrowed her eyes. ‘I don’t recollect using the word “propagandist”. That’s a capitalist euphemism for
anything they don’t want to hear. But yes. She was good with language, and she was an efficient mobiliser of people, a very persuasive dialectician.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘You have to consider the times,’ Dr Parsons went on. ‘It was a period of great social upheaval here. All over Europe, in fact. Remember, the Paris student demos and the Prague Spring weren’t so far in the past, and the Americans still had Nixon and Vietnam. And Watergate wasn’t so far in the future. At the time we’re talking about, though, late 1971 and early 1972, the miners’ strike was the biggest issue for us. It almost brought down the government. I don’t know if you know much about it, but one of the tactics the miners used was flying pickets. Groups of workers that could be transported quickly to bolster picket lines and blockade ports and power stations and such all over the country.’

  ‘It sounds like war,’ said Gerry.

  ‘It was. Class war. Them against us. Anyway, the point is, or one point is, that by late January 1972 we had over a thousand South Yorkshire miners allocated to help with flying pickets in East Anglia. Essex was a pretty volatile place politically at the time. We had Marxists, Trotskyists and International Socialists all over the place, and we agreed to offer accommodation in campus residences to as many miners as we could. Solidarity was important to us. The unity of theory and practice, ideology and action. We got away with it for a while, too, until the bloody university authorities threatened to take out a High Court injunction.’

  ‘And Ronnie Bellamy was involved in all this?’ said Gerry. ‘It’s hard to believe.’

  ‘Not at all. She was one of the powers behind the accommodation movement, almost got herself kicked out over it. And she was also one of the ones who got first dibs, you could say, though that hardly sounds very egalitarian, does it?’

  ‘What do you mean, first dibs?’ Gerry asked.

  ‘The miners, dear. Hunks. Right?’

  Annie was confused. She had never thought of miners as hunks. Drunks, more like. She had assumed they were all rather grimy and coarse and mostly drunk when they weren’t underground. Not that she had ever met one. A distant great-uncle on her mother’s side had been a miner, but he had died before she was born. She didn’t think he was a hunk, though.