‘That would be inevitable, I think,’ she said. ‘If I’m right. But I think you may also suspect that much already.’
‘I still need to hear it from you. If it helps, you’re right, I do think I know most of it already.’
‘A reward for your persistence?’
‘A ghost to be laid. A festering wound to be cleansed.’
‘If only.’ She stared out at the view again.
‘I’m still only guessing at this point, but I think Oliver Litton is your son. Am I right?’
Lady Chalmers said nothing for a long time. Banks saw a muscle tic beside her jaw. In the end, she inclined her head in the slightest of nods. ‘How do you know?’
‘I said it was a guess, and it was. Mostly. I spotted a resemblance when I examined some old photos of Joe Jarvis, back in his political firebrand days. It was just a little thing, hardly realised consciously, but it stuck in my mind. There were the photos of you and Oliver together on your screen saver, as well, the last time we talked. There wasn’t such a strong resemblance — he takes mostly after his father — but you and your sister were alike, and there was definitely something in his looks that made me think of her. Or you. And there was definitely something about the way you looked standing together that felt like more than just aunt and nephew. It just sort of snagged in my memory.’ Banks remembered a similar photograph of his mother and his late brother Roy that had that same indefinable quality of mother and son. Pride, definitely, a sort of ‘I made this’ expression.
‘Then I did the maths,’ Banks went on. ‘When I heard that you went down to Buxton for Oliver’s birthday on such a miserable night, I wondered why, and when I found out that Oliver was indeed born in November 1972, which meant that he was conceived in January or February, I became even more convinced that I might be on to something. That was when Joe Jarvis and the South Yorkshire miners were in residence at Rayleigh. And when my colleague then discovered that you didn’t return to the University of Essex for your second year until December, two months into the first term, that did it for me. It could be easily proven, of course, by DNA tests.’
‘There’s no need for that,’ Lady Chalmers said.
‘What happened? How did Gavin Miller find out?’
‘Mostly doing the maths, I should imagine. But he had a lot more than you to go on to start with. I think he always knew, or suspected. Don’t forget: he was there. He walked in on me and Joe once.’
‘I know about that.’
‘Well, Gavin was a bit of a pest, to be honest, following me about and such. We did go out for a while, but I broke it off with him at the end of the first term, before Christmas. He didn’t want to take no for an answer. Nothing violent or anything, just a constant, irritating presence. He may well have followed me to Buxton and spied on me over the summer. I thought I saw him on the one or two rare occasions I ventured into town.’
‘That was while you were pregnant?’
‘Yes, but before I was showing. I was lucky, I suppose, in that my “baby bump”, as they call them these days, was easy to cover up with loose clothing for quite a long time into the pregnancy. As you have probably guessed, I didn’t want the baby, but the idea of abortion was abhorrent to me. I knew that Tony and Fran had been trying for a baby for ages without any success, so it seemed the perfect solution. Fran and I were very close. When I got pregnant, I ran crying to her and told her everything. But I didn’t want anyone else to know, not my parents, not anyone except the three of us.’
‘And that was how it stayed?’
‘That was how it stayed. I finished out the first year, then I went to stay at Buxton for the “confinement”. And, believe me, it was a confinement. We couldn’t go through official channels, of course, but Tony was a practising gynaecologist. He took care of everything. He so wanted a son. We simply made out that my sister was pregnant, and that I was there to be with her. Everyone knew we were close. Neither of us went out much at all during that last month or two. It was hot, too, but no bikinis in the garden. If Fran ever went out, she shoved a cushion down her front. It was so funny. She was terrified someone would ask if they could touch her tummy and feel the baby move. But people didn’t do that so much back then, at least not in our circles. It would have been considered vulgar.’
‘It seems like a complicated way to go about things, hiding one pregnancy and faking another. If they wanted a baby so much, what about IVF, or straightforward official adoption?’
‘IVF wasn’t available then. That didn’t come in until the late seventies. Tony actually worked on it in the early days, but they decided once they had Oliver that it wasn’t for them. Oliver was enough, and they certainly didn’t want the risk of triplets or quadruplets. And as for official adoption, that would have involved the authorities. None of us wanted that. I didn’t want my parents to know I’d had a baby, for a start.’
‘But why not?’
‘You don’t understand. You didn’t know them. I’d caused them enough... they’d have disowned me. I didn’t want that. I was very confused.’
‘OK,’ said Banks.
‘And Tony and Fran didn’t want even the slightest risk of losing the child. Fran also loved the idea of the baby being mine, family. It was the next best thing to having her own. And you know as well as I do that things can easily go wrong once you bring the social services into anything.’
‘So you brought it off.’
‘With ease. Oliver went to full term and I went back to Essex in December. By then, of course, Fran and Tony were already the proud parents of a fine baby boy. And that’s how it stayed.’
‘Why did Gavin Miller leave it so long to approach you?’
Lady Chalmers adjusted the shawl around her shoulders. Banks looked down on the square and saw the local bus bouncing its way over the cobbles. ‘You have to understand, Mr Banks, that Gavin Miller wasn’t a bad person. Not by his nature. He did what he did because he was desperate. He wasn’t a habitual criminal, and he clearly wasn’t very good at it. He told me that he had always suspected from the evidence at the time, because he paid such close attention to me. He could probably even tell when I came back in December, when term had already begun, that I’d had a baby, because, as you said, the timing was right, and what possible reason could I have for missing the first two months of my second year? I also didn’t have my usual slim figure back by then, of course, so I still wore loose clothing. That wasn’t so odd in itself. Most people were neither interested nor particularly suspicious — lots of girls wore loose clothing and it meant nothing — but Gavin was still something of a stalker, though we didn’t call them that back then. But the real reason Gavin called when he did is a simple one. Oliver is tipped to be the next Home Secretary in the forthcoming cabinet reshuffle, as you know. And even if he doesn’t get the position this time around, everyone knows he’s set for great things in the future. He has the perfect image, him and his lovely wife Tania, their two beautiful children Miles and Primrose. Imagine how it would go down if it suddenly came out that he was the bastard son of a spoiled little Marxist rich girl and a striking coal miner, with connections to the Communist Party, once suspected of being a Russian spy? You see, I’ve followed Joe’s career closely.’
‘I still don’t see how it’s worthy of blackmail,’ said Banks. ‘Surely nobody would care about Joe Jarvis’s politics these days? He’s hardly a force to be reckoned with. Those communist connections came later, anyway, after you had parted. And none of it is Oliver’s fault. There’s no wrongdoing on his part in any of this.’
‘What do they say? No smoke without fire? Dirt sticks? All the clichés apply. It’s not so much the politics, not in isolation. You must know even better than I do what sort of spin an unscrupulous journalist would put on a story like that. And let’s not forget that Fran and Tony broke the law in passing Oliver off as their own son without going through the proper adoption process. Me, too, perhaps, by letting them. I didn’t want anyone to know I’d had a baby, and they wanted the world to think they had. And imagine the effect on poor Oliver, himself, after all this time.’ She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t let it happen. I’d never forgive myself. Perhaps Tony and I are the only ones left who know the secret, but Tony never showed that he realised how much Oliver meant to me. I was his mother. I took as much pride as Tony and Fran in his achievements. I loved him every bit as much as they did, only I could never say so, never show it. Not to him. Not to anyone.’ She sniffed and rummaged for a handkerchief somewhere inside her shawl. ‘I’m sorry.’