The grey sky threatened more rain, but it had held off so far. The waterlogged garden had seen better days, and the front door needed a new coat of paint, but other than that, the house, both inside and out, was well maintained and sparkling clean. The furnishings in the living room appeared to be new, though they weren’t quite to Gerry’s taste. The maroon three-piece suite looked as if it came from that dreadful place they kept advertising on ITV just when you were settling into a good detective drama. Gerry sat on the sofa, as directed, and made herself comfortable. Tea wasn’t long in coming, along with a plate of digestive biscuits and custard creams. Bad for her figure and her complexion, she knew, but she took one, anyway, just to be polite.
Judy Sallis was a stout woman of about sixty, with a rather long nose and a recent perm. She kept her head constantly thrust forward, hen-like, as if she were always on the verge of saying something of import, or offering encouragement. Solicitous, some people would call it. Unnerving, more like, Gerry thought. From her research, she knew that Judy Sallis was a retired schoolteacher, had been retired for five years now, divorced for eight; she had lived in Stockton most of her life after university. She had two children, both far away, with families of their own to raise.
‘What can I do for you, love?’ she said, sitting down opposite Gerry in an armchair and smoothing her skirt. ‘Only you were a bit vague on the telephone.’
‘Sorry,’ said Gerry. ‘Force of habit, I suppose. It’s just that when the police come calling, people often don’t want to get involved.’
‘Well, my conscience is clean. And to be honest, I could do with a bit of excitement in my life.’
Gerry smiled. ‘I’m sorry to let you down, but what I want to talk to you about is hardly exciting.’
‘You’d be surprised what passes for excitement for me these days, love. You mentioned the university days, my old residence. Rayleigh Tower. That’s enough to make my day, for a start. I haven’t thought of that place in ages.’
‘Good times?’
‘Oh, yes. Mostly. Some hard work, too.’
‘Well, I’ve been trying to find people who lived there at the time you did, and you’re about the first person I’ve been able to trace who was willing or able to talk to me.’
‘Depends what you want to know. What they said about the sixties applies to the early seventies, too, you know. If you can remember it, you weren’t there.’
‘But not as much, surely?’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t be too sure about that.’
Gerry opened her notebook. ‘I was wondering if you remembered anyone from those days, two people in particular?’
‘Try me.’
‘Ronnie Bellamy and Gavin Miller.’
‘I knew them both,’ said Judy. ‘Not very well. But it wasn’t a large university at the time. And Gavin was in English, like me. We were even in the same tutorial group that first year. I read about what happened to him in the paper. It’s terrible. Poor Gavin. Suspicious death, they said. Does that mean murder?’
‘Or manslaughter,’ said Gerry. ‘We think so.’
‘You don’t think Ronnie Bellamy did it, do you?’
‘No,’ said Gerry, with more conviction than she felt. ‘It’s just that we’re finding out as much about his university background as we can, and her name came up from those days.’
‘Yes, it would. Ronnie was around. She’s someone else now, of course, isn’t she? A famous writer.’
‘That’s right,’ said Gerry. ‘Charlotte Summers. She lives in Eastvale.’
‘I like her books. I went to one of her book signings at Waterstones a few years ago. She didn’t remember me. But then she always was a bit aloof, despite the leftist politics and all. Or maybe because of them. Of course, she’s a real Lady now, too. There was an article about her in the D&S a couple of years ago. Or was it the Northern Echo?’
There had been profiles of Lady Chalmers/Charlotte Summers in the Guardian, The Sunday Times and the Independent recently, according to Gerry’s research, but she gathered that, up here in Stockton, you haven’t really made it until you are written up in the Darlington and Stockton Times or the Northern Echo. ‘Ronnie Bellamy was involved in campus politics back then, wasn’t she?’
‘Yes. More than just campus politics. Ronnie was very political. Dyed-in-the-wool communist. Demos and sit-ins and up the revolution and all that. All over the place, too. London. Manchester. Birmingham. She wanted to change the world. She was some sort of bigwig in the Marxist Society, I recollect. I know that sounds odd, that they’re all supposed to be equal and all that, but it really didn’t work that way. The strong, devious and ambitious will always rise to the top in any political system, won’t they? It’s only whether they trample on the masses or try to help them once they’ve climbed up the greasy pole that makes any difference. Look at the unions. Who did they ever want to help or protect except their own members? Not that you can blame them, mind you. Nobody else was going to do it for them.’
‘Was Ronnie Bellamy strong, devious and ambitious?’
‘Probably. I mean, look where she is now. Married a lord, didn’t she?’
Not quite, Gerry thought, but there was no point correcting Judy Sallis on the point. ‘And you? Were you in the Marxist Society?’
‘Me? Good Lord, no. As you can probably guess, I’ve no time for politics or politicians. Hadn’t then, and I haven’t now. You have to remember, though, those were very stormy days. The Heath government. Strikes. The three-day work week. People thought the country was coming apart at the seams. We even had striking miners all over campus. Chaos it was. But exciting, too.’
‘I would imagine so.’ Gerry took another custard cream, just to be sociable. ‘How well did you know Ronnie Bellamy?’
‘I knew who she was, saw her around the place. Not socially, like, she was in with a different crowd, but I heard her speak at rallies a couple of times. I just went out of curiosity, really, and for something to do. Rabble-rousing stuff about the workers’ revolution, mostly. She was a bit of a personality.’
‘Do you remember anything about the crowd she went about with, her friends, boyfriends, that sort of thing?’
‘Oh, she wasn’t short of boyfriends. She was quite beautiful, I remember, even as a revolutionary. No peasant skirts and hairy legs for her. A Gucci socialist all the way. Designer jeans before designer jeans were invented. Usually flared, with fancy embroidery on the bum, if I remember right. Of course, we all wore them. It was the fashion at the time. But hers always seemed more expensive, more elegant.’ Judy paused. ‘Maybe it was just her bum,’ she added wistfully. ‘She was a bit like that woman popular in films at the time. Her in Straw Dogs. Susan George.’
Gerry had never heard of Straw Dogs or Susan George, so she remained in the dark on the matter of Veronica Bellamy’s looks, except from the pictures she had come across in her research. ‘Were there any boyfriends in particular?’
‘No, none that come to mind. It’s funny, though, you should mention Gavin. I knew him. We had a few lectures together, and sometimes a group of us would get together for a coffee, or maybe even go to the union bar for a few drinks on an evening. Gavin was often around. He was quite a fit lad, but a bit shy, a bit bookish, a bit introverted. Wrote poetry, as I remember.’
‘Did Gavin have anything to do with the Marxist Society?’
‘Gavin? No. He was with the other lot. The dopers.’
‘What do you mean? He took drugs?’
‘Well, yes. Of course. This was the early seventies after all, love. Not much different from the late sixties. There were very distinct groups at university, especially back then. There were the straights, of course, who went to all the lectures and wrote their essays, or whatever, and had nothing to do with the world around them. There were the politicos, usually left-wing, who abhorred bourgeois individualism, personal emotion and, of course, anything like the sort of navel-gazing you got from acid trips or smoking some really good Afghani black or Moroccan red. Those were the dopers. They were too into mysticism, the occult and Eastern religion to give a damn about the workers or the revolution. Poets and dreamers, all of them. Some of them were so introspective they disappeared up their own arseholes. They’d sit around in someone’s flat and smoke joints and listen to the Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd or Stockhausen and make cryptic comments about life, the universe and everything. They could listen to John Cage’s four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence for hours on end and not get bored.’