3
“It looks like his office,” Banks said, when Gristhorpe turned on the light in the last upstairs room.
Two large desks formed an L-shape. On one of them stood a computer and a laser printer, and on a small table next to them stood a fax machine with a basket attached at the front for collecting the cut-off sheets. At the back of the computer desk, a hutch stood against the wall. The compartments were full of boxes of disks and software manuals, mostly for word processing, spreadsheets and accounting programs, along with some for standard utilities.
The other desk stood in front of the window, which framed a view of the farmyard. Scene-of-Crime Officers were still going about their business down there taking samples of just about everything in sight, measuring distances, trying to get casts of footprints, sifting soil. In the barn, their bright arc lamps had replaced Darby’s roving light.
This was the desk where Rothwell dealt with handwritten correspondence and phone calls, Banks guessed. There was a blotter, which looked new – no handy wrong-way-around clues scrawled there – a jam-jar full of pens and pencils, a blank scratch-pad, an electronic adding machine of the kind that produces a printed tape of its calculations, and an appointment calendar open at the day of the murder, May 12.
The only things written there were “Dr. Hunter” beside the 10:00 a.m. slot, “Make dinner reservation: Mario’s, 8:30 p.m.” Below that, and written in capitals all across the afternoon, “FLOWERS?” Banks had noticed a vase full of fresh flowers in the living room. An anniversary present? Sad when touching gestures like that outlive the giver. He thought of Sandra again, and suddenly he wanted very much to be near her, to bridge the distance that had grown between them, to hold her and feel her warmth. He shivered.
“All right, Alan?” Gristhorpe asked.
“Fine. Someone just walked over my grave.”
“Look at all this.” Gristhorpe pointed to the two metal filing cabinets and the heavy-duty shelves that took up the room’s only long, unbroken wall. “Business records, by the looks of it. Someone’s going to have to sift through it.” He looked toward the computer and grimaced. “We’d better get Phil to have a look at this lot tomorrow,” he said. “I wouldn’t trust myself to turn the bloody thing on without blowing it up.”
Banks grinned. He was aware of Gristhorpe’s Luddite attitude toward computers. He quite liked them, himself. Of course, he had only the most rudimentary skills and never seemed to be able to do anything right, but Phil Richmond, “Phil the Hacker” as he was known around the station, ought to be able to tell them a thing or two about Rothwell’s system.
Finding nothing else of immediate interest in the office, they walked out to the rear of the house, which faced north, and stood in the back garden, the hems of their trousers damp with dew. It was after five now, close to dawn. A pale sun was slowly rising in the east behind a veil of thin cloud that had appeared over the last couple of hours, mauve on the horizon, but giving the rest of the sky a light gray wash and the landscape the look of a water-color. A few birds sang, and occasionally the sound of a farm vehicle starting up broke the silence. The air smelled moist and fresh.
It was certainly a
The village of Fortford, about a mile down the hillside, was just waking up. Below the exposed foundations of the Roman fort on its knoll to the east, the cottages with their flagstone roofs huddled around the green and the square-towered church. Already, smoke drifted from some of the chimneys as farm laborers and shopkeepers prepared themselves for the coming day. Country folk were early risers.
The whitewashed front of the sixteenth-century Rose and Crown glowed pink in the early light. Even in there, someone would soon be in the kitchen, making bacon and eggs for the paying guests, especially for the ramblers, who liked to be off early. At the thought of food, his stomach rumbled. He knew Ian Falkland, the landlord of the Rose and Crown, and thought it might not be a bad idea to have a chat with him about Keith Rothwell. Though he was an expatriate Londoner, like Banks, Ian knew most of the local dalesfolk, and, given his line of work, he picked up a fair amount of gossip.
Finally, Banks turned to Gristhorpe and broke the silence. “They certainly seemed to know what was what, didn’t they?” he said. “I don’t imagine it was a lucky guess that the girl was in the house alone.”
“You’re thinking along the same lines as I am, aren’t you, Alan?” said Gristhorpe. “An execution. A hit. Call it what you will.”
Banks nodded. “I can’t see any other lines to think along yet. Everything points to it. The way they came in and waited, the position of the body, the coolness, the professionalism of it all. Even the way one of them said touching the girl wasn’t part of the deal. It was all planned. Yes, I think it was an execution. It certainly wasn’t a robbery or a random killing. They hadn’t been through the house, as far as we could tell. Everything seems in order. And if it was a robbery, they’d no need to kill him, especially that way. The question is why? Why should anyone want to execute an accountant?”
“Hmm,” said Gristhorpe. “Unhappy client, maybe? Someone he turned in to the Inland Revenue?” Nearby, a peewit sensed their closeness to its ground nest and started buzzing them, piping its high- pitched call. “One of the things we have to do is find out how
“Sir?”
At that moment, one of the SOC officers came into the garden through the back door.
Gristhorpe turned. “Yes?”
“We’ve found something, sir. In the garage. I think you’d both better come and have a look for yourselves.”
4
They followed the officer back to the brightly lit garage. Rothwell’s body had, mercifully, been taken to the morgue, where Dr. Glendenning, the Home Office pathologist, would get to work on it as soon as he could. Two men from the SOC team stood by the barn door. One was holding something with a pair of tweezers and the other was peering at it closely.
“What is it?” Banks asked.
“It’s wadding, sir. From the shotgun,” said the SOCO with the tweezers. “You see, sir, you can buy commercially made shotgun cartridges, but you can also reload the shells at home. Plenty of farmers and recreational shooters do it. Saves money.”
“Is that what this bloke did?” Banks asked.
“Looks like it, sir.”
“To save money? Typical Yorkshireman. Like a Scotsman stripped of his generosity.”
“Cheeky southern bastard,” said Gristhorpe, then turned to the SOCO. “Go on, lad.”
“Well, sir, I don’t know how much you know about shotguns, but they take cartridges, not bullets.”
Banks knew that much, at least, and he suspected that Gristhorpe, from Dales farming
