Final Account

“Ah, Tom. My Achilles heel.”

“Oh, he didn’t realize the significance of it. But you made him angry. He followed you to Leeds once. He saw you have lunch with a woman. Julia Marshall. You didn’t know that, did you? But Tom couldn’t imagine the scale of your plans. He’s just a kid who caught his father with another woman. He was already angry, mixed up and confused at the way you treated him. He was after getting his own back, but what he saw upset him so much that all he could do was keep it to himself.”

“Christ,” he muttered. “I didn’t know that. He didn’t tell Mary?”

“No. He wanted to protect her.”

“My God.” Rothwell ran his hand over the side of his face. “Maybe you think I reacted too harshly, Chief Inspector? I know we’re living in liberal times, where anything goes. I know it’s old-fashioned of me, but I still happen to believe that homosexuality is an aberration, an abomination of nature, and not just an ‘alternative lifestyle,’ as the liberals would have it. And to find out that my own son… ”

“So you decided it would be best to send Tom away?”

“Yes. It seemed best for both of us if he went away, a long way away. He was well provided for. As it turned out, he wanted to go travelling in America and try to get into film school there. By then I knew I had to get away, too, so it seemed best to let him go. At least he had a good chance. I might have abhorred his homosexuality, but I’m not a tyrant. He was still my son, after all.”

“Tom gave us an accurate description of Julia,” Banks went on. “He’s a very observant young man. We ran the artist’s impression in the Yorkshire Post and a woman called Barbara Ledward came forward, a colleague of Julia’s, then Julia’s family. Nobody lives in a vacuum. When we followed up on their phone calls, we found out that Julia had resigned from her teaching job suddenly and told everyone she was going away, that she had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity abroad but couldn’t divulge the details. She said she’d be in touch, then she simply disappeared about three days before your apparent murder. Her family and friends were worried about her. She didn’t usually behave so irresponsibly. But they didn’t report her as a missing person because she had told them she was going away.

“We might have been a bit slow on the uptake, but we’re not stupid. All Julia’s friends and colleagues mentioned how fascinated she was by the ancient Greeks. She even tried to teach the kids about the classics at school, though I’m told it didn’t go down well with the head. He wanted them to study computers and car maintenance instead. We had to assume you didn’t think we’d find out about Julia. Oh, you might have suspected we’d find out there was someone, but you didn’t think we’d try to find her, did you?”

“No,” said Rothwell. “After all, why should you want to? No more than I thought you would waste time and money doing tests to see if it really was my body in the garage. Another risk. I was clearly dead, executed because of my involvement in international crime. What did it matter if I, or Calvert, had a girlfriend? I never thought for a moment you’d look very closely at the rest of my private life.”

“Then you shouldn’t have revealed the Calvert identity to us,” Banks said. “If it hadn’t been for that, we might have gone on thinking you were a dull, mild-mannered accountant who just happened to get into something beyond his depth. But Calvert showed imagination. Calvert showed a dimension to your character I had to take into account. And I had to ask myself, what if Calvert fell in love?”

“I couldn’t get rid of Calvert,” said Rothwell. “You know that. I didn’t have time. Too many people had seen him. I had to figure out a way to make him work to my advantage quickly. I thought he’d be a dead end.”

“Your mistake. Poor judgment.”

“Obviously. But I had no choice. What else could I do?”

“So how did you handle the killing?”

“Another drink?”

“Please.”

Banks stared out over the pink and purple flowers in the window box at the barren hillside and the blue sea below. Rothwell’s mention of the forensic tests galled him. He knew they should have tried to establish the identity of the deceased beyond doubt. Forensics should have reconstructed the teeth and checked dental records. That was an oversight. It was understandable, given the way Rothwell had apparently been assassinated, and given the state the teeth were in, but it was an oversight, nevertheless.

Of course, the lab had been as burdened with work as usual, and tests cost money. Then, when the fingerprints at Calvert’s flat matched the corpse’s, they didn’t think they needed to look any further. After all, they had the pasta meal, the appendix scar and the right blood group, and Mary Rothwell had identified the dead man’s clothing, watch and pocket contents.

A red flying insect settled on his bare arm. He brushed it off gently. When Rothwell came back with a Grolsch and a Pepsi, he was not moving with quite the same confidence and grace as he had before.

“I gave Jameson instructions to hold Alison until we got back,” he began, “but not to harm her in any way.”

“That’s considerate of you. He didn’t. What about his accomplice, Donald Pembroke?”

Rothwell shook his head. He held the Pepsi against his shorts. The tin was beaded with moisture and Banks watched the damp patch spread through the white cotton. “I never met him. That was Jameson’s business. He said he needed someone to help and I left it to him, getting guarantees of discretion, of course. I never even knew the man’s name, and that’s the truth. Pembroke, you say? What happened to him?”

Banks told him.

Rothwell sighed. “I suppose fate catches up with us all in the end, doesn’t it? What is it the eastern religions call it? Karma?”

“Back to the murder.”

Rothwell paused a moment, then went on. “They held Alison, then when Mary and I got home, they tied her up, too, and took me out to the garage. They had instructions to pick Clegg up after dinner. I knew he didn’t like to cook for himself and on Thursdays he always dropped by a trattoria near the office for a quick pasta before going home. That’s why I chose that day. I knew Mary and I would be going out for the annual anniversary dinner, and I arranged for us to eat at Mario’s. You see, I thought of everything. Even the stomach contents would match.

“They’d already knocked Clegg out and secured him earlier. I even made sure to tell Jameson to use loose handcuffs to avoid rope burns on Clegg’s wrists. We got him into my clothes as quickly as possible. He was starting to come round. He was on his hands and knees, I remember, shaking his head as if he was groggy, just waking up, then Jameson put the shotgun to the back of his head. I… I turned away. There was a terrible explosion and a smell. Then we went through the woods and they drove me to Leeds. I drove Clegg’s Jaguar to Heathrow, wearing gloves, of course. Then I left the country as David Norcliffe. I already had a passport and bank accounts set up in that name. I joined Julia here. It was all pre-arranged. It had to be so elaborate because I was supposed to be murdered. I’d read about a similar murder in the papers a while back and it seemed one worth imitating.”

“Well, you know what the poet said. ‘The best laid plans… ’”

“But you can’t prove anything,” said Rothwell.

“Don’t be an idiot. Of course we can. We can prove that you’re alive and Daniel Clegg was murdered in your garage.”

“But you can’t prove I was there. It’s only your word against mine. I could say they were taking me out to kill both of us. I managed to get away and I ran and hid here. They killed Daniel, but I escaped.”

“They killed him in your clothes?” Banks shook his head slowly. “It won’t wash, Keith.”

“But it’s all circumstantial. Jameson and Pembroke are both dead. A good lawyer could get me off, and you know it.”

“You’re dreaming. Say you do beat the murder conspiracy charge, which I think is unlikely,