If Tim and Abha made an unlikely-looking couple, they made an even more unlikely pair of revolutionaries. Tim had all the blond good looks of an American “preppie,” with dress sense to match. Abha, half-Indian, had golden skin, beetle-black hair, and a pearl stud through her left nostril. She was studying graphic design; Tim was in the social sciences. They embraced Marxism as the solution to the world’s inequalities, but were always quick to point out that they regarded Soviet Communism as an extreme perversion of the prophet’s truth.
Both were generally well-mannered, and not at all the type to call police pigs.
They sat on a beat-up sofa under a Che Guevara poster while Banks made himself comfortable on a secondhand office swivel chair at the desk. The cursor blinked on the screen of an Amstrad PC, and stacks of paper and books overflowed from the table to the floor and onto any spare chairs.
After getting back from Scarborough, Banks had just had time to drop in at the station and see what Special Branch
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had turned up. As usual, their files were as thin as Kojak’s hair, and gathered on premises as flimsy as a stripper’s G-string. Tim Fenton was listed because he had attended a seminar in Slough sponsored by Marxism Today, and some of the speakers there were suspected of working for the Soviets. Dennis Osmond had attracted the Branch’s attention by writing a series of violently anti-government articles for various socialist journals during the miners’
strike, and by organizing a number of political demonstrations-especially against American military presence in Europe. As Banks had suspected, their crimes against the realm hardly provided grounds for exile or execution.
Tim and Abha were, predictably, hostile and frightened after Burgess’s visit.
Banks had previously been on good terms with the two after successfully investigating a series of burglaries in student residences the previous November. Even Marxists, it appeared, valued their stereos and television sets.
But now they were cautious and guarded. It took a lot of small talk to get them to relax and open up. When Banks finally got around to the subject of the demo, they seemed to have stopped confusing him with Burgess.
“Did you see anything?” Banks asked first.
“No, we couldn’t,” Tim answered. “We were right in the thick of the crowd. One of the cops shouted something and that was that. When things went haywire we were too busy trying to protect ourselves to see what was happening to anyone else.”
“You were involved in organizing the demo, right?”
“Yes. But that doesn’t mean-“
Banks held up his hand. “I know,” he said. “And that’s not what I’m implying.
Did you get the impression that anyone involved-anyone at all-might have had more on his mind than just protesting Honoria Winstanley’s visit?”
They both shook their heads. “When we got together up at the farm,” Abha explained, “everyone was just so excited that we could organize a demo in a place as conservative as Eastvale. I know there weren’t many people there, but it seemed like a lot to us.”
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“The farm?”
“Yes. Maggie’s Farm. Do you know it?”
Banks nodded.
“They invited us up to make posters and stuff,” Tim said. “Friday afternoon.
They’re really great up there; they’ve really got it together. I mean, Seth and Mara, they’re like the old independent craftsmen, doing their own thing, making it outside the system. And Rick’s a pretty sharp Marxist.”
“I thought he was an artist.”
“He is,” Tim said, looking offended. “But he tries not to paint anything commercial. He’s against art as a saleable commodity.”
So that pretty water-colour Banks had noticed propped by the fireplace at Maggie’s Farm couldn’t have been one of Rick’s.
“What about Paul Boyd?”
“We don’t know him well,” Abha said. “And he didn’t say much. One of the oppressed, I suppose.”
“You could say that. And Zoe?”
“Oh, she’s all right,” Tim said. “She goes in for all that bourgeois spiritual crap-bit of a navel-gazer-but she’s okay underneath it all.”
“Do you know anything about their backgrounds, where they come from?”
They shook their heads. “No,” Tim said finally. “I mean, we just talk about the way things are now, how to change them, that kind of thing. And a bit of political theory. Rick’s pissed off about his divorce and all that, but that’s about as far as the personal stuff goes.”
“And you know nothing else about them?”
“No.”
“Who else was there?”
“Just us and Dennis.”
