Gerry admitted that she had lost track of his movements during the four-year period after he graduated from Simon Fraser from 1979 to 1983 — the ‘lost years’ — and she needed to contact consulates and immigration sources, registrars and administrative assistants. It was a time-consuming job, even if you were looking for fresh information. Miller turned up again at home in Banbury in 1983. He would have been pushing thirty by then, Banks calculated, and this was not an era when the children stayed at home as long as they do these days.
So far, Gavin Miller seemed like so many others, a young man who had not quite fulfilled his potential, or hadn’t had as much potential to fulfill as he thought he did. He also didn’t seem to have grown up, in some ways, but remained stuck in the interests and tastes of his youth. Even though he was fifty-nine, his small cottage was full of existentialist philosophy books and shelves of psychedelic vinyl from an earlier time.
The rain had stopped now, though it still streaked the windows. A fine day was promised for the start of tomorrow, but you could never trust the weather forecasts these days. The only thing you could be certain of was that rain would come again, sooner rather than later.
The Grateful Dead were singing ‘Ripple’, which Banks thought might be the kind of song he would like to have played at his funeral. Its airy mysticism rather appealed to him, the idea of life as a ripple in still water, when no pebble has been tossed into it. And the melody and harmonies were beautiful. He sighed. Enough thoughts of death and rain and ripples in undisturbed water. What was it about today that had sent his mind spinning in such a direction?
He realised that it was probably something to do with the similarities between himself and Gavin Miller. But just how alike were they? True, they had shared some tastes in music and films, much of it the same as they had enjoyed in their youth, but was that so strange? They were close to the same age, had grown up in with the same pop culture — the Beatles, James Bond, the Saint, Bob Dylan, and so on. Banks’s dad still listened to Henry Hall, Nat Gonella and Glenn Miller, music he had first heard during the war. There was nothing odd about a taste for the past. Some people still enjoyed Abba and the Bay City Rollers.
Banks also had to admit that he often preferred stopping in, drinking wine and listening to music alone to going down to the local on a Saturday night. So what did that make him?
Newhope Cottage might be bigger and better furnished than the signalman’s cottage Miller had lived in, Banks thought, but it was just as isolated, and Banks had deliberately chosen to live there after his divorce from Sandra. Had Miller been running away from something, too, and had it caught up with him? He could have simply been running away from himself, of course, and when he found he couldn’t, had committed suicide. But Banks doubted it. Something didn’t sit right about his choice of method, not when there were more than enough pills in his bathroom cabinet to do the job, and five thousand pounds in his pocket when he died.
Banks returned to what little remained of DC Masterson’s notes. Almost a year after he had returned from Canada, Miller had begun a series of jobs in local colleges, where he had toiled away in obscurity for twenty years or more, teaching general arts, media studies, film and English literature in such places as Exeter, Grantham and Barrow-in-Furness, never staying in any one place for any length of time, until he arrived at Eastvale College in 2006.
Miller left the college in 2009, gave up his rented flat in Eastvale and made a down payment on the signalman’s cottage near Coverton. It didn’t appear that he had attempted to find another job. Gerry had noted that the person she talked to on the telephone at the college, Trevor Lomax, head of the department in which Miller had taught, seemed a little cagey when he found out who she wanted to talk about. He made a mental note to get someone to go out there and talk to Lomax the following morning.
Miller had married only once, as far as Gerry could discover, and that had lasted six years and had ended in 1996. His wife had remarried two years later and gone to live in New Zealand. Gavin’s father had died three years ago, and his mother had entered a private care home near Oxford, which took up the money from the sale of the cottage outside Banbury, and more or less all the savings that the Millers had accumulated over the years. When Miller died, he had been unable to meet his last two mortgage payments, the utility companies had been hammering at his door and his credit card was maxed out to the limit.
The desperate financial straits Gavin Miller had been in towards the end of his life also made Banks think there might be something more to the drugs angle. People often saw drugs as a quick way of making a big return on an investment. Someone so desperate for money might turn to crime. Five thousand pounds was a lot of money to a man in Miller’s position, and it would have got him out of the immediate hole he was in, at the very least, with even a little left over.
Blackmail was another possibility, of course, but most victims don’t kill their blackmailers, who have usually set things up in such a way that if anything happens to them, the cat gets let out of the bag anyway. No one had broken into Miller’s house, for example, to see if there was anything incriminating left behind there. If Miller had been blackmailing someone, it was hardly likely that he would hand over all his evidence for five thousand pounds. Blackmailers always have something in hand, and they always come back for more.
Putting the file aside, Banks massaged his temples and rubbed his eyes. It was getting late. American Beauty had finished some time ago, and the silence was all-embracing. Once in a while, he heard a light breeze sough through the trees, or a distant car on the Helmthorpe road, but apart from that, nothing. He topped up his glass, went into the entertainment room to put on Live Dead, and went outside. There was a little bulge in the wall beside the beck, and he enjoyed standing there, or even sitting on the wall when it was dry, to contemplate the night and enjoy his last drink of the evening. In the old days, he used to love having a smoke out there, too, but those days were long gone.
Already there were stars showing between the grey rags of cloud, and the air was full of that lovely fresh earth smell you get after a good country rainfall. It was still a little chilly, but he wouldn’t be staying out for long. He walked over to the wall beside Gratly Beck and leaned at his usual spot overlooking the terraced falls, all the way down the daleside to the slate roofs of Helmthorpe High Street and the church tower below the old mill, the fields and the cemetery. The water was high, and the beck had turned into quite a torrent after the rains. The falls were fast and noisy, filling the air with a fine cool spray. Banks often enjoyed falling asleep to the sound of the rushing water as he lay in bed.
To his left stretched the dark woods, raindrops dropping from leaves as the wind shook them, and tapping on the leaves below. The River Swain was a silvery squiggle along the flat valley bottom about a mile away. The strains of Garcia’s lyrical guitar playing on ‘Dark Star’ wove into the sounds of the beck and the dripping leaves as Banks leaned there thinking how much he loved the place, and how retirement might be not such a bad idea after all.
He thought about Gavin Miller for a while longer, the haggard and broken body that looked like that of an old man, then tossed down the rest of his wine, shivered and went back inside.