Peter Robinson - Children of the Revolution

‘I thought you’d come,’ she said. It wasn’t an accusation or a complaint, just a weary statement of fact.

Banks sat down. ‘Will you tell me what happened?’

Lady Chalmers gazed at the view below, the cobbled market square, the castle on its hill, the formal gardens leading down to the river, the old church in the foreground, the constant background noise of the terraced falls. The shadows, where there were any, were lengthening as the winter sun was setting fast. ‘I’d like to tell you,’ she said. ‘It’s tearing me apart. I feel if I don’t tell someone soon, I’ll... I don’t know what. But it’s so hard. You see, I’ve never told anyone. Not Jem, not Francesca, not Sam or Angelina, not Oriana. Not anyone.’

‘Not even Joe Jarvis?’

She looked at Banks, just a hint of surprise in her expression. ‘Not even Joe. You’ve talked to him?’

‘Yes.’

‘I should have known you’d find out about him. How is he?’

‘Not so good.’ Banks stopped short of going into detail. ‘He’s very ill, in fact.’

It was as if a cloud passed over her face. ‘I’m sorry to hear that. I haven’t seen or heard from him in over forty years, but I’m still sorry to hear that.’ She put her hand over her heart. ‘Do you understand that?’

‘I think so.’

‘I love my family, Mr Banks. I’d do anything to protect them. I think you know that, too.’

‘That’s not always possible, but if it’s me you’re worried about, you needn’t be. All I want is the person who killed Gavin Miller. I’m not in the business of spilling family secrets.’

‘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.’