Cold Is The Grave

“It is.”

“I’m all ears.”

“First, we have to go back a while. Believe it or not, my father was a vicar. He’s retired now, of course. I grew up in the vicarage in a small village in Kent, an only child, and my childhood was relatively uneventful. I don’t mean that it was bad in any way. I did all the normal things kids do. I was happy. It was just unexceptional. Dull, even. Like the way Philip Larkin described his in that poem. Then, in the mid-seventies, when I was sixteen, we moved to a parish out Ealing way. Oh, it was a very nice area – none of that inner-city stuff – and the parishioners were for the most part law-abiding, reasonably affluent citizens.”

“But?”

“But it was near the tube. You can’t imagine what wonderful new worlds that opened up to an impressionable sixteen-year-old.”

Banks thought he could. When he moved from Peterborough to Notting Hill at the age of eighteen, his life had changed in many ways. He had met Jem across the hall from his bed-sit, for a start, and had lurked at the fringes of the sixties scene – which stretched well into the early seventies – enjoying the music more than the drugs. There was an excitement and vibrancy about the capital that was missing from Peterborough, and would certainly have been missing from a vicarage in Kent.

“Let me guess: The vicar’s daughter went a little wild?”

“I was born in 1959. It was November 1975, when we moved to Ealing. While everyone else was listening to Queen, Abba and Hot Chocolate, me and my friends were taking the tube into town to listen to The Sex Pistols. This was right at the start, before anyone really knew anything about them. They’d just played their first gig the day after Bonfire Night at Saint Martin’s College of Art, and one of the girls at my new school was there. She couldn’t talk about anything else for weeks. Next time they played, she took me with her. It was fantastic.”

Punk. Banks remembered those days. He was older than Rosalind, though, and identified more closely with sixties music than that of the seventies. When he had lived in London his favorites had been Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and the various local blues bands that seemed to form and split up with amazing regularity. Still, he had responded to the angry energy of some of the punk music – especially The Clash, by far the best of the bunch in his opinion – but not enough to buy any of their records. Also, as he had been a probationary police constable back then, he had experienced the violence of punk first-hand, from the other side, and that, too, had put him off.

“Pretty soon,” Rosalind went on, becoming more animated as she relived her memories, “it was in full swing. The look. The music. The attitude. Everything. My parents didn’t know me anymore. We saw The Clash, The Damned, The Stranglers, The Jam. You name them. Mostly in small clubs. We Pogoed, we hurled ourselves into one another, and we spat at each other. We dyed out hair weird colors. We wore torn clothes, safety pins in our ears and…” She paused and pulled up the sleeve of her jumper. Banks could see a number of more or less round white marks, like old scars. “We stubbed cigarettes out on ourselves.”

Banks raised an eyebrow. “How on earth did you explain all that to your husband?”

“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.”