Final Account

to pervade the levity of the woodwinds. “By ear,” he said.

They had already called DI Ken Blackstone, out of courtesy for intruding on his patch, and Ken had found nothing on Pamela Jeffreys in records. Hardly surprising, Banks thought, as there was no reason to suppose she was a criminal. He glanced out of the window and saw they were crossing the bridge over the River Aire and the Leeds-Liverpool Canal. The dirty, sluggish water looked especially vile in the bright sunlight.

“Do we tell her anything?” Susan asked.

“If she’s read the papers, she’ll know almost as much about Keith Rothwell’s life as we do. Whether she’ll believe it or not is another matter.”

“What do you think it’s all about?”

“I haven’t a clue. We’ll soon find out.”

Susan negotiated the large roundabout on Wellington Road. Above them, the dark, medieval fortress of Armley Jail loomed on its hill. Susan veered right at the junction with Tong Road, passed the disused Crown bingo hall, the medical center and the New Wortley Cemetery and headed toward Armley. It was an area of waste ground and boarded-up shopfronts, with the high black spire of St. Bartholomew’s visible above the decay. She slowed to look at the street names, found Wesley Road, turned right, then right again and looked for the address Pamela Jeffreys had given.

“This is it, sir,” she said finally, pulling into a street of terraced back-to-backs, nicely done up, each with a postage-stamp lawn behind a privet hedge, some with new frosted-glass or wood-panel doors and dormer windows. “Number twenty, twenty-four… Here it is.” She pulled up outside number twenty-eight.

The row of houses stood across the street from some allotments behind a low stone wall, where a number of retired or unemployed men worked their patches, stopping now and then to chat. Someone had rested a transistor radio on the wall, and Banks could hear the preamble to the Cup Final commentary. Not far down the street was an old chapel which, according to the sign, had been converted into a Sikh temple. They walked down the path to number twenty-eight and rang the doorbell.

The woman who opened the door had clearly been crying, but it didn’t mar her looks one bit, Banks thought. Perhaps the whites of her almond eyes were a little too red and the glossy blue-black hair could have done with a good brushing, but there was no denying that she was a woman of exceptional beauty.

Northern Indian, Banks guessed, or perhaps from Bangladesh or Pakistan, she had skin the color of burnished gold, with high cheekbones, full, finely drawn lips and a figure that wouldn’t be out of place in Playboy, revealed to great advantage by skin-tight ice-blue jeans and a jade-green T-shirt tucked in at her narrow waist. Around her neck, she wore a necklace of many-colored glass beads. She also wore a gold stud in her left nostril. She looked to be in her mid-twenties.

Her fingers, Banks noticed as she raised her hand to push the door shut, were long and tapered, with clear nails cut very short. A spiral gold bracelet slipped down her slim wrist over her forearm. On the other wrist, she wore a simple Timex with a black plastic strap. She had only one ring, and that was a gold band on the middle finger of her right hand. Light down covered her bare brown arms.

The living room was arranged for comfort. A small three-piece suite with burgundy velour upholstery formed a semi-circle around a thick glass coffee-table in front of the fireplace, which may once have housed a real coal fire but now was given over to an electric one with three elements and a fake flaming-coals effect. On the coffee-table, the new Mary Wesley paperback lay open face down beside a copy of the Radio Times and an earthenware mug half full of milky tea.

A few family photographs in gilt frames stood on the mantelpiece. On the wall above the fire hung a print of Ganesh, the elephant god, in a brightly colored primitive style. In the corner by the front window stood a television with a video on a shelf underneath. The only other furniture in the room was a mini stereo system and several racks of compact discs, a glass-fronted cabinet of crystalware and a small bookcase mostly full of modern fiction and books about music.

But it was the far end of the room that caught Banks’s interest, for there stood a music stand with some sheet music on it, and beside that, on a chair, lay what he first took to be an oversized violin, but quickly recognized as a viola.

The woman sat on the sofa, curling her legs up beside her, and Banks and Susan took the armchairs.

“Are you a musician?” Banks asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“Professional?”

“Uh-huh. I’m with the Northern Philharmonia, and I do a bit of chamber work on the side. Why?”

“Just curious.” Banks was impressed. The English Northern Philharmonia played for Opera North, among other things, and was widely regarded as one of the best opera orchestras in the country. He had been to see Opera North’s superb production of La Boheme recently and must have heard Pamela Jeffreys play.

“Ms. Jeffreys,” he began, after a brief silence. “I must admit that your phone call has us a bit confused.”

“Not half as much as that rubbish in the newspaper has me confused.” She had no Indian accent at all, just West Yorkshire with a cultured, university edge.

Banks slipped a recent good-quality photograph of Keith Rothwell from his briefcase and passed it to her. “Is this the man we’re talking about?”

“Yes. I think this is Robert, though he looks a bit stiff here.” She handed it back. “There’s a mistake, isn’t there? It must be someone who looks just like him, that’s it.”

“What exactly was your relationship?”

She fiddled with her necklace. “We’re friends. Maybe we were more than that at one time, but now we’re just friends.”

“Were you lovers?”

“Yes. For a while.”

“For how long?”

“Three or four months.”

“Until when?”

“Six months ago.”

“So you’ve known him for about ten months altogether?”

“Yes.”

“How did you meet?”

“In a pub. The Boulevard, on Westgate actually. I was with some friends. Robert was by himself. We just got talking, like you do.”

“Have you seen him since you stopped being lovers?”

“Yes. I told you. We remained friends. We don’t see each other as often, of course, but we still go out every now and then, purely Platonic. I like Robert. He’s good fun to be with, even when we stopped being lovers. Look, what’s all this in-”

“When did you last see him, Ms. Jeffreys?”

“Pamela. Please call me Pamela. Let me see… it must have been a month or more ago. Look, is this some mistake, or what?”

“We don’t know yet, Pamela,” Susan Gay said. “We really don’t, love. You’ll help us best get it sorted out if you answer Chief Inspector Banks’s questions.”

Pamela nodded.

“Was there anything unusual about Mr… about Robert the last time you saw him?” Banks asked.

“No.”

“He didn’t say anything, tell you about anything that was worrying him?”

“No. Robert never seemed to worry about anything. Except he hated being called Bob.”

“So there was nothing at all different about him?”