“He was never that curious. I just told him it was an old burn scar.”
“Go on.”
“You can’t imagine how exhilarating it was after the stuffy and boring childhood in a village in Kent. We went wild. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I was just seventeen, and I got pregnant. It doesn’t matter who the father was; his name was Mal, and he was long gone before I even knew myself. It happened in someone’s poky bed-sit after The Pistols did one of their gigs at the 100 Club, the summer of 1976. This is what I could never tell Jerry. He was a terrible prude, as if you didn’t know. I don’t know if he actually believed I was a virgin when we married, but I’m certain he was. If he’d ever found out, well… who can say? I kept it from him.”
Banks remembered the 100 Club well. On Oxford Street, it had been part of his patch, and he had been inside the cavernous cellar more than once trying to stop fights and help get rid of unruly customers. It turned into a jazz club some years later, he remembered. “I can understand why you might not have wanted him to know,” he said. “Even in this day and age, some people are funny about that sort of thing, and it doesn’t surprise me that Jimmy – I mean the chief constable, was. But why is that important now?”
“He knew you all called him Jimmy Riddle, you know.”
“He did? He never said anything.”
“He didn’t care. Something like that, it didn’t bother him, wasn’t even of passing interest to him. He was strangely impervious to criticism or having the piss taken. He really didn’t have much of a sense of humor, you know. Anyway, I haven’t told you the full story yet. You’ll see why it’s important.” She moved forward in her chair and clasped her hands on her knees. When she spoke, she almost whispered, as if she thought someone were eavesdropping on them. “My first thought was to have an abortion, but… I don’t know… I didn’t really know how to go about it, if you can believe that. A fully fledged punk, pregnant, but I was still a naive country girl in a lot of ways. Then there was my religious background. When it came down to it, I hadn’t the nerve to face it all by myself, and the boy, well, as I said, he was long gone. My father’s a good man. He had been preaching about grace, mercy and Christian charity all his life.”
“So you went to your parents?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“They took it well, considering. They were upset, naturally, but they were good to me. They persuaded me to have the baby, of course, as I knew they would. Father doesn’t believe in abortion. It’s not only Catholics who don’t, you know. Anyway, we did it the way they used to do it years ago. A spell with Aunt So-and-So in Tiverton for the last few months, when it started to show, a quick adoption, and it was as if nothing had ever happened. In the meantime, if I happened to get cured of punk, so much the better.”
“Did you?”
“Get cured of punk?”
“Yes.”
“By the time I’d had my baby I was about to sit my A-Levels. It was 1977. I don’t know if you remember, but punk had become very popular and the big bands were all being signed up by major labels. The whole scene had got very commercial. Now it seemed that everybody was talking about it, adopting the look. Somehow, it just wasn’t the same. They weren’t ours any more. Besides, I was older and wiser. I was a mother, even if I wasn’t a practicing one. Yes, I was cured. I spent the summer at home, and in October I went to the University of Bath to study English Literature, became an intellectual snob and switched to new wave, which I’d always secretly preferred, anyway. Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, Roxy Music, Television, Patti Smith. Art school music. I did one year of English, then changed to law.”
“There’s more, isn’t there?”
“Yes.”
“The child?”
“As you know, it’s perfectly legal now for children to track down their birth parents. I can understand it, but I have to say that in many cases it’s the cause of nothing but grief.”
“In your case?”
“She found me easily enough. Last January, it was. The Children’s Act came into effect in 1975, before she was born, as you probably know. That meant she didn’t even have to go for counseling before the Registrar General gave her the information that led her to me. It was always on the cards. She just walked into my office one day. It didn’t take her long to work out that I was terrified of her telling my husband. I don’t know what would have happened. It was bad enough that he was so prudish and possessive, and that I’d kept it from him all those years, but this also happened just as his political ambitions were getting all stirred up, and I wanted to be on that ride, too. I wanted Westminster. Jerry was always big on family values, and any hint of a family scandal – ex-punk wife of chief constable, love child tells all – well, it would have ruined everything. At least, I believed it would.”
“What did she do?”
“Asked for money.”
“Your own daughter blackmailed you?”
“I wouldn’t call it that. She just asked for help now and then.”
“Financial help?”
“Yes. I mean, I did owe her, didn’t I? Apparently, she hadn’t had such a good life with her adoptive parents. They turned out to be unsuitable, she said, though she didn’t explain why, and they didn’t have much money. Then they died in a fire just after her second year of university, and she was left all alone. She was in her last year of university at the time she found me, so every little bit helped. I didn’t really mind.”
“Did she ever threaten to tell your husband the truth if you didn’t pay up?”
“She… she hinted that she might.”
“And you paid for her continuing silence?”
Rosalind averted her eyes. “Yes.”
“Even after she left university?”
“Yes.”
“That’s blackmail,” said Banks. “Are you going to tell me who she is?”
“Does it matter?”
“It might.”
Rosalind drank some wine, then she said, “It’s Ruth. Ruth Walker.”
Banks almost choked on his drink. “Ruth Walker is your daughter? Emily’s half-sister?”
Rosalind nodded.
“My God, why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“I can’t see how it could be relevant.”
“That’s for me to judge. Did Emily know this?”
“I didn’t think so.”
“What do you mean?”
“As far as I knew at the time, they met only once. Ruth used to come to my office in Eastvale. That’s where we did all… all our business. Believe it or not, I didn’t even know her address, where she lived, except she told me she’d grown up in Salford. Once – last Easter, I think it was – Emily was there. She’d come to borrow some money from me to go shopping. Ruth walked in. I introduced my daughter and told her Ruth was there about the new computer system we were thinking of installing. They chatted a bit, about music, what school Emily was at, that sort of thing. Just polite chitchat. That was all. Or so I thought.”
“So Emily didn’t know who Ruth really was?”
“That’s what I believed at the time.”
“What changed your mind?”
“After Emily came… after you brought Emily back home, the phone rang one day. It was Ruth. I thought she was calling for me. I was angry because I’d specifically told her never to phone the house, but she asked to speak to Emily.”
“And?”
“Afterward, I asked Emily about it. Then she told me about how Ruth had phoned her a lot at school, how she’d even been down to London once for a weekend and stayed with her. How they were friends.”
“So Emily knew that Ruth was her half-sister?”
“Yes.”
“What was her reaction?”
“You knew Emily. She thought it was all rather cool, her mother having a secret past. She promised me not to say anything. She was well aware of how her father would react.”