‘Oh?’
‘Aye. Have you ever read Tony Harrison?’
‘No.’
‘He’s a poet from Leeds. Read him. He understands it best. When someone like me, coming from where I come from, gets educated, he loses touch with his roots, he gets educated out of his class, and he leaves his culture behind. Abandons it for another, you might say, and he ends up in a kind of limbo. He can’t go back to what he left behind, and he isn’t accepted anywhere else.’
‘That happened to you?’
‘To some extent, aye. I fought against it, but even after Essex, when the process had barely begun, going home just wasn’t the same again. It felt like a wrench. I was restless, eager for more. Not money, but knowledge. And the more I got, the less I had in common with most of the people around me, the people I grew up with. Read Tony Harrison. You’re the son of a sheet metal worker, yourself, but you seem educated. You should understand.’
Banks did understand. Certainly being a policeman separated him from the rest of society, but even before that, his college diploma and experience of the academic life in the London of the late sixties and early seventies had also singled him out as different. It always felt jarring when he went back home to Peterborough and found his old friends doing the same things they had done before, stuck in the same old dead-end jobs, saving up for the new house, another baby on the way, a new car. Most of them would never move more than a mile from where they were born. Oh, they would travel; there would be exotic holidays — Costa Del Sol, Crete, Tunisia, Sharm-el Sheikh, even Goa, Acapulco and Orlando — but their minds would never move far from the semi in Peterborough. They took the piss out of him mercilessly for the clothes he wore, the way he talked and the thoughts and ideas he expressed. It had all happened to him, too, later, of course — wife, family, mortgage, car — and no matter how badly that had ended, he wouldn’t have had it any different for the world. But he had never stopped learning, and he knew what Joe Jarvis meant when he said education cuts you off from your class and from your roots. Perhaps it makes you free, too, but freedom can be a frightening and dangerous thing when you feel so alone. Another diesel rattled by, this one almost empty. ‘About Ronnie Bellamy,’ he said again.
Jarvis smiled, showing uneven but healthy teeth. ‘You must forgive me. I do tend to ramble sometimes. I see it as an old man’s prerogative. Especially one who doesn’t have long left.’
‘Old?’
‘I’m sixty-five. And dying, remember?’
‘You had a fling with Ronnie Bellamy at Essex during the time they put you up there in the student residence, didn’t you?’
‘How did you find out about that?’
‘That doesn’t matter. Is it true?’
Jarvis stared at him, then he got up and disappeared in the shed, returning with a half bottle of Famous Grouse and two tea mugs. ‘You’ll join me?’
Banks thought it wise to agree. Besides, he liked Famous Grouse.
Jarvis poured them each a generous measure and sat down again. ‘I don’t know what you’d call it. A fling? Maybe. A brief romance, perhaps? Whatever it was, it was all new to me. The excitement of the strike, the travel, these students with their generosity and their idealistic notions. New to them, too. They’d never seen the likes of us before. We were the reality. The true face of the working class they’d just talked about in their meetings. We swore, we farted, we sang rugby songs. We smoked, we drank, we fought. We thought Les Dawson and Bernard Manning were funny. We were what it was all about, what they’d been reading about, and here we were, in with them, ready to give the ruling classes a good working over. Suddenly the revolution was real, the workers’ state a real possibility.’
‘And Ronnie was a part of that?’
‘For me, yes. Ronnie was special. I felt some sort of spark with her the first time we met. I loved her passion, commitment and fierce intelligence, and her grasp of ideology, her ability to explain it, even to a thickie like me. I’d never even thought about most of the things we discussed. Class war, means of production, and all the rest of the Marxist dialectic. She taught me to think. And she was just a lost little rich girl trying to find herself in the world. Way out of my league, of course, but somehow that didn’t seem to matter very much. She was posh, but she never talked down. And she was a proper bobby-dazzler, as they used to say. That sweet smile, those big green eyes. Believe it or not, I was a handsome, strapping young lad back then. I suppose I was a bit of rough for her, and she was a taste of caviar and champagne for me. Yes, we did have a passionate romance. A fling, I suppose you’d have to call it, really. I don’t know if there was much real love involved, but there was certainly a powerful infatuation. Nature took its course, and for a while I was living in another world. The colliery didn’t exist. The pit. South Yorkshire didn’t exist. My life was in that bedroom, or out on the picket line, or just sitting talking in the student pub. With Ronnie. A far cry from Mexborough, I can tell you. I suppose I was dazzled by it all.’
‘I’m not here to judge your action, Mr Jarvis,’ Banks said.
‘Then why are you here, if you’re not after something and Ronnie is fine?’
‘It’s a difficult case. Sensitive. A man called Gavin Miller was found dead near Eastvale, where I work. He’s been murdered.’
‘Surely Ronnie isn’t a suspect? Believe me, she couldn’t harm anyone.’
‘Not even in the service of the revolution?’
‘We’re not all heartless murderers, Mr Banks.’
‘No. I’m sorry. We discovered that she knew him when they were both at the University of Essex in the period we’re talking about, and that they’d also been in contact recently. Were you and Ronnie inseparable during your time at Essex?’
‘Yes. Pretty much. Two weeks it lasted. Two weeks. I can remember it all as if it were yesterday. Have you talked to her lately? Have you seen her? How does she look? I’ve seen photos in the paper, of course, I know she’s famous now, but...’
‘She’s still beautiful, Mr Jarvis. You’d swear she wasn’t a day over forty.’
He nodded. ‘I knew she would be. That sort of beauty never fades.’ He paused, lost in memories. ‘She’d have a hell of a shock if she could see me now, wouldn’t she?’ He coughed again. Banks watched a barge passing slowly by on the canal and wondered if it was carrying coal.
‘How many people knew about the relationship?’ Banks asked.
Jarvis cleared his throat. ‘Nobody. Well, there’s Ronnie and me, of course, and maybe one or two of the other MS — Marxist Society — members. It’s impossible to keep something like that a complete secret, but we were discreet for the most part. And it’s not as if we were the only ones who’d paired up. It was happening all over the campus.’
‘What about her boyfriend, Gavin Miller?’
‘That’s the one who got killed?’
‘Yes.’
‘I didn’t know his name, but he obviously knew. I mean, we were stark bollock naked when he barged in once. There’s not much mistaking what’s happening in a situation like that, is there?’
Banks couldn’t help but smile. ‘I suppose not. Was anything ever said about it?’
‘No. He buggered off as soon as he saw what was what. No heroics. Ronnie told me she was finished with him, anyway. He was just still mooning after her, writing poems and whatnot. I got the impression he was becoming a bit of a nuisance, but we never really mentioned him again. I can’t believe he’d still be getting in touch with her after all these years.’
‘We think it’s possible that somebody, maybe Miller, might have been blackmailing Ronnie, and that it could have been over her affair with you. However discreet you were, it’s pretty obvious that Gavin Miller knew about it, and he’d have been easily able to follow your career over the years.’