“I’m sorry.”
“I’ll bet you are.”
“It wasn’t my fault, what Jameson did, was it? You can’t blame me.”
“Can’t I? Let’s get back to your relationship with Daniel Clegg. How did you get involved?”
“We met in the George Hotel, on Great George Street. It was about four years ago. A year or so after I left Hatchard and Pratt, anyway. Expenses were high, what with renovations to Arkbeck and everything else, and business wasn’t exactly booming, though I wasn’t doing too badly. They have jazz at the George on Thursdays, and as I was in Leeds on business, I thought I’d drop by rather than watch television in the hotel room. It turns out we were both jazz fans. We just got talking, that’s all.
“I didn’t tell him very much at first, except that I was a freelance financial consultant. He seemed interested. Anyway, we exchanged business cards and he put a bit of work my way, off-shore banking, that sort of thing. Turns out some of it was a bit shady, though I wasn’t aware at the time – not that I mightn’t have done it, anyway, mind you – and he brought that up later, in conversation.”
“He put pressure on you?”
“Oh, yes.” Rothwell paused and looked Banks in the eye. “A smooth blackmailer, was Danny-boy. I suppose you know about my bit of bad luck at Hatchard and Pratt’s, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“That was five years ago. We’d just moved into Arkbeck then and we couldn’t really afford it. Not that the mortgage itself was so high, but the place had been neglected for so long. There was so much needed doing, and I’m no DIY expert. But Mary wanted to live there, so live there we did. The upshot was that I had to pad the expenses a little. If I hadn’t been married to the boss’s daughter, and if Laurence Pratt hadn’t been a good friend, things could have gone very badly for me at the firm then. As it was, after I left I didn’t have a lot of work at first, and Mary… well, that’s another story. Let’s just say she doesn’t have a forgiving nature. One night, in my cups, I hinted to Daniel about what had happened, how I had parted company with Hatchard and Pratt.
“Anyway, later, Daniel used what he knew about me as leverage to get me involved when his old college friend Martin Churchill first made enquiries about rearranging his finances. That was a little over three years back. See, he knew he couldn’t handle the task by himself, that he needed my expertise. He told me he could still report me to the board, that it wasn’t too late. Well, maybe they would have listened to him, and maybe they wouldn’t. Who knows now? Quite frankly, I didn’t care. I already knew a bit about money-laundering, and it looked to me like a license to print money. Why wouldn’t I want in? I think Daniel just enjoyed manipulating people, having power over them, so I didn’t spoil his illusion. But he really wasn’t terribly bright, wasn’t Danny-boy, despite Cambridge.”
“A bit like Frankenstein and the monster, isn’t it?”
Rothwell smiled. “Yes, perhaps. And I suppose you’d have to say that the monster far outstripped his creator, though you could hardly say the good doctor himself was without sin.”
“How did you arrange it all? The murder, the escape?”
Rothwell emptied his tin, put it on the table and leaned back. The chair creaked. Outside, gulls cried as they circled the harbor looking for fish. “Another Grolsch?” he asked.
There was still an inch left in the bottle. “No,” said Banks. “Not yet.”
Rothwell sighed. “You have to go back about eighteen months to understand, to when I first started using the Robert Calvert identity. Daniel and I were doing fine laundering Churchill’s money, and he allowed us a decent percentage for doing so. I was getting rich quick. I suppose I should have been happy, but I wasn’t. I don’t know exactly when I first became aware of it, but life just seemed to have lost its savor, its sweetness. Things started to oppress me. I felt like I was shrivelling up inside, dying, old before my time. Call it mid-life crisis, I suppose, but I couldn’t see the
“All Mary wanted was her bridge club, more renovations, additions to the house, jewelry, expensive holidays. Christ, I should have known better than to marry the boss’s daughter, even if I did get her pregnant. One simple mistake, that and my own bloody weakness. What was it the philosopher said about the erect penis knowing no conscience? That may be so, but it certainly understands penitence, regret, remorse. One bloody miserable, uncomfortable screw in the back of an Escort halfway up Crow Scar set me on a course straight to hell. I’m not exaggerating. Twenty-one years. After that long, my wife hated me, my children hated me, and I was beginning to hate myself.”
Banks noticed that Rothwell had picked up the empty Pepsi tin and started to squeeze until it buckled in his grip.
“Then I realized I was handling millions of pounds – literally, millions – and that my job was essentially to clean it and hide it ready for future use. It wasn’t difficult to find a few hiding places of my own. Small amounts at first, then, when no one seemed to miss it, more and more. Shell companies, numbered accounts, dummy corporations, property. I liked what I was doing. The manipulation of large sums of money intrigued me and excited me like nothing else, or almost nothing else. Just for the sake of it, much of the time. Like art for art’s sake.
“I began to spend more time away from home on ‘business.’ Nobody cared one way or another. They never asked me where I’d been. They only asked for more money for a new kitchen or a sun-porch or a bloody gazebo. When I was home, I walked around like a zombie – the dull, boring accountant, I suppose – and mostly kept to my office or nipped out to the pub for a smoke and a jar occasionally. I had plenty of time to look back on my life, and though I didn’t like a lot of what I saw, I remembered I hadn’t always been so bloody bored or boring. I used to go dancing, believe it or not. I used to like a flutter on the horses now and then. I had friends. Once in a while, I liked to have too much to drink with the lads and stagger home singing, happy as a lark. That was before life came to resemble an accounts ledger – debits and credits, profit and loss, with far too much on the loss side.” He sighed. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like another beer?”
“Go on, then,” Banks said. His bottle was empty now.
Rothwell brought back a Pepsi for himself and another Grolsch for Banks. His glasses had slipped down over the bridge of his nose and he pushed them back.
“So I invented Robert Calvert,” Rothwell said after a sip of Pepsi.
“Where did you get the name?”
“Picked it from a magazine I was reading at the time. With a pin.
“Go on.”
“I rented the flat, bought new clothes, more casual. God, you’ve no idea how strange it felt at first. Good, but strange. There were moments when I really did believe I was going mad, turning into a split personality. It became a kind of compulsion, an addiction, like smoking. I’d go to the bookie’s and put bets on, spend a day at the races, go listen to trad jazz in smoky pubs – the Adelphi, the George, the Duck and Drake – something I hadn’t done since my early twenties. I’d go around in jeans and sweatshirts. And nobody back at Arkbeck Farm ever asked where I’d been, what I’d been doing, as long I turned up every now and then in my business suit and the money kept coming in for a new freezer, a first edition Bronte, a Christmas trip to Hawaii. After a while I realized I wasn’t going mad, I was just becoming myself, returning to the way I was before I let life grind me down.
“And, sure enough, the money kept coming in. I had tapped into an endless supply, or so I thought. So I played the family role part of the time, and I started exploring my real self as Robert Calvert. I had no idea where it would lead, not then. I was just trying out ways of escape. I told Daniel Clegg one night when we’d had a few, and he thought it was a wild idea. I had to tell someone and I couldn’t tell my family or Pratt or anyone local, so why not tell my blackmailer, my confidant? He helped me get a bank account and credit card as Calvert, which he thought gave him an even stronger hold over me. He could always claim he’d been deceived, you see.”
“What about the escape?”
“You’re jumping ahead a bit, but as I’d already created Robert Calvert successfully enough, it wasn’t very difficult to go on from there and create a third identity: David Norcliffe. As you no doubt know, seeing as you’re here. Rothwell was dead, and I couldn’t go as Calvert. I had to leave him behind; that was part of the plan. So I shuffled more money into various bank accounts in various places over a period of several
