Final Account

1

Banks sat at a tavérna by the quayside sipping an ice-cold Beck’s and smoking a duty-free Benson and Hedges Special Mild. When he had finished his cigarette, he popped a dolmáde into his mouth and followed it with a black olive. One or two of the locals, mostly mustachioed and sun-leathered fishermen, occasionally glanced his way during a pause in their conversation.

It was a small island, just one village built up the central hillside, and though it got its share of tourists in season, none of the big cruise ships came. Banks had arrived half an hour ago on a regular ferry service from Piraeus and he needed a while to collect his thoughts and get his land-legs back again. He had a difficult interview ahead of him, he suspected. He had already contacted the Greek police. Help had been offered, and the legal machinery was ready to grind into action at a word. But Banks had something else he wanted to try first.

By Christ, it was hot, even in the shade. The sun beat down from a clear sky, a more intense, more saturated blue than Banks had ever seen, especially in contrast to the white houses, shops and tavérnas along the quayside. A couple of sailboats and a few fishing craft were moored in the small harbor, bobbing gently on the calm water. It was hard to describe the sea’s color; certainly there were shades of green and blue in it, aquamarine, ultramarine, but in places it was a kind of inky blue, too, almost purple. Maybe Homer was right when he called it “wine-dark,” Banks thought, remembering his conversation with Superintendent Gristhorpe before the trip. Banks had never read The Odyssey, but he probably would when he got back.

He paid for his food and drink and walked out into the sun. On his way, he popped into the local police station in the square near the harbor, as promised, then set off along the dirt track up the hill.

The main street itself was narrow enough, but every few yards a side-street branched off, narrower still, all white, cubist, flat-roofed houses with painted shutters, mostly blue. Some of the houses had red pantile roofs, like the ones in Whitby. Many people had put hanging baskets of flowers out on the small balconies, a profusion of purple, pink, red and blue, and lines of washing hung over the narrow streets. By the roadside were poppies and delicate lavender flowers that looked like morning glories.

Mingled with the scents of the flowers were the smells of tobacco and wild herbs. Banks thought he recognized thyme and rosemary. Insects with red bodies and transparent wings flew around him. The sun beat relentlessly. Before Banks had walked twenty yards, his white cotton shirt stuck to his back. He wished he had worn shorts instead of jeans.

Banks looked ahead. Where the white houses ended halfway up the hillside, scrub and rocky outcrops took over. The house he wanted, he had been told, was on his right, a large one with a high-gated white wall and a shaded courtyard. It wasn’t difficult to spot, now about fifty yards ahead, almost three-quarters of the length of the road.

He finally made it. The ochre gate was unlocked, and beyond it, Banks found a courtyard full of saplings, pots of herbs and hanging plants by a krokalia pathway of black and white pebbles winding up to the door. Expensive, definitely. The door was slightly ajar, and he could hear voices inside. By the plummy tones, it sounded like the BBC World Service news. He paused a moment for breath, then walked up to the door and knocked.

He heard a movement inside, the voices stopped, and in a few seconds someone opened the door. Banks looked into the face that he had thought for so long had been blown to smithereens.

“Mr. Rothwell?” he said, slipping his card out of his wallet and holding it up. “Mr. Keith Rothwell?”

2

“You’ve come, then?” Rothwell said simply.

“Yes.”

He looked over Banks’s shoulder. “Alone?”

“Yes.”

“You’d better come in.”

Banks followed Rothwell into a bright room where a ceiling fan spun and a light breeze blew through the open blue shutters. It was sparsely furnished. The walls were plastered white, the floor was flagged, covered here and there by rugs, and the ceiling was panelled with dark wood. Outside, he could hear birds singing; he didn’t know what kind.

He sat down in the wicker chair Rothwell offered, surprised to be able to see the sea down below through the window. Now he was at the end of his journey, he felt bone weary and more than a little dizzy. It had been a long way from Eastvale and a long uphill walk in the sun. Sweat dribbled from his eyebrows into his eyes and made them sting. He wiped it away with his forearm. At least it was cooler inside the room.

Rothwell noticed his discomfort. “Hot, isn’t it?” he said. “Can I get you something?”

Banks nodded. “Thanks. Anything as long as it’s cold.”

Rothwell went to the kitchen door and turned, with a smile, just as he opened it. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t run away.”

“There’s nowhere to run,” replied Banks.

A minute or so later he came back with a glass of ice water and a bottle of Grölsch lager. “I’d drink the water first,” he advised. “You look a bit dehydrated.”

Banks drained the glass then opened the metal gizmo on the beer. It tasted good. Imported, of course. But Rothwell could afford it. Banks looked at him. The receding sandy hair, forming a slight widow’s peak, had bleached in the sun. He had a good tan for such a fair-skinned person. Behind wire-rimmed glasses, his steady gray eyes looked out calmly, not giving away any indication as to his state of mind. He had a slightly prissy mouth, a girl’s mouth, and his lips were pale pink. He looked nothing at all like the photograph of Daniel Clegg.

He wore a peach short-sleeve shirt, white shorts and brown leather sandals. His toenails needed cutting. He was an inch or so taller than Banks, slim and in good shape – about all he did have in common with Clegg, apart from the color of his hair, his blood group and the appendicitis scar. When he went to get the drinks, Banks noticed, he moved with an athlete’s grace and economy. There was nothing of the sedentary penpusher about his bearing.

“Anyone else here?” Banks asked.

“Julia’s gone to the shops,” he said, glancing at his watch. “She shouldn’t be long.”

“I’d like to meet her.”

“How did you find me?” Rothwell asked, sitting opposite, opening a tin of Pepsi. The gas hissed out and liquid frothed over the edge. Rothwell held it at arm’s length until it had stopped fizzing, then wiped the tin with a tissue from a box on the table beside him.

“It wasn’t that difficult,” said Banks. “Once I knew who I was looking for. We found you partly through Julia.” He shrugged. “After that it was a matter of routine police work, mostly boring footwork. We checked travel agents, then we contacted the local police through Interpol. It didn’t take that long to get word back about two English strangers who resembled your descriptions taking a lease on a captain’s house here. Did you really believe we wouldn’t find you eventually?”

“I suppose I must have,” said Rothwell. “Foolish of me, but there it is. There are always variables, loose ends, but I thought I’d left enough red herrings and covered my tracks pretty well. I planned it all very carefully.”

“Do you have any idea what you’ve done to your family?”

Rothwell’s lips tightened. “It wasn’t a family. It was a sham. A lie. A façade. We played at happy families. I couldn’t stand it anymore. There was no love in the house. Mary and I hadn’t slept together in years and Tom… well… ”

Banks let Tom pass for the moment. “Why not get a divorce like anyone else? Why this elaborate scheme?”

“I assume, seeing as you’re here, you know most of it?”

“Humor me.”

Rothwell squinted at Banks. “Look,” he said. “I can’t see where you’d have any room to hide one, but you’re not ‘wired’ as the Americans say, are you?”

Banks shook his head. “You have my word on that.”

“This is just between you and me? Off the record?”

“For the moment. I am here officially, though.”

Rothwell sipped some Pepsi then rubbed the can between his palms. “I might have asked Mary for a divorce eventually,” he said, “but it was still all very new to me, the freedom, the taste of another life. I’m not even sure she would have let me go that easily. The way things turned out, though, I had to appear dead. If he thinks I’m alive, there’ll be no peace, no escape anywhere.”

“Martin Churchill?”

“Yes. He found out I was taking rather more than I was entitled to.”

“How did you find out he knew?”

“A close source. When you play the kind of games I did, Mr. Banks, it pays to have as much information as you can get. Let’s say someone on the island tipped me that Churchill knew and that he was pressuring Daniel Clegg to do something about it.”

“Is that how it happened?”

“Yes. And it made sense. I’d noticed that Daniel had been behaving oddly lately. He was nervous about something. Wouldn’t look me in the eye. Now I had an explanation. The bastard was planning to have me executed.”

“So you had him killed instead?”

Rothwell gazed out of the window at the sea and the mountainside in silence for a moment. “Yes. It was him or me. I beat him to it, that’s all. Someone had to die violently, someone who could pass for me under certain circumstances. We looked enough alike.”

“Without a face, you mean?”

“I… I didn’t look… in the garage… I couldn’t.”

“I’ll bet you couldn’t. Go on.”

“We were about the same age and build, same hair color. I knew he’d had his appendix out. I even knew his blood group was ‘O,’ the same as mine.”

“How did you know that?”

“He told me. We were talking once about blood tainted by the HIV virus. He wondered if he had a greater chance of catching it from a transfusion because he shared his blood group with over forty percent of the male population.”

“What did you do once you had the idea of passing him off as you?”

“There was this man we’d both met in the Eagle a couple of times, down there for the Ed O’Donnell Band on a Sunday lunch-time, and he’d boasted about being a mercenary and doing anything for money. Arthur Jameson was his name. He was a walking mass of contradictions. He loved animals and nature, but he liked hunting and duck-shooting, and he didn’t seem to give a damn for human life. I found him fascinating. Fascinating and a little frightening.

“It was perfect. Daniel knew him, too, of course, and he told me that Jameson had even approached him for some legal help once, shortly after we met. I thought if you found out anything, that would be it. He might have had something in his files. You know how lawyers hoard every scrap of paper. But there was nothing linking Jameson to me. It would only reinforce what you suspected already, that Daniel had had me killed instead of the other way round. You weren’t to know that I was with Daniel the day we met Jameson, or that I’d chatted with Jameson on a number of subsequent occasions.”

“So you and Clegg were pals? Socialized together, did you?”

Rothwell paused. A muscle by his jaw twitched. “No. It wasn’t quite like that,” he said quietly. “Daniel had a hold over me, but sometimes he seemed to want to play at being boozing buddies. I didn’t understand it, but at least for a while we could bury our differences and have a good time. The next day it would usually be back to cold formality. At bottom, Daniel was a terrible snob. Been to Cambridge, you know.”

“How much did you pay Jameson?”

“Fifty thousand pounds and a plane ticket to Rio. I know it’s a lot, but I thought the more I paid him the more likely he’d be to disappear for good with it and not get caught.”

“First mistake.”

“How did it happen?”

Banks told him about the wadding and about Jameson’s attitude to the world beyond Calais. Rothwell laughed, then stared at the sea again. “I knew it was a risk,” he said. “I suppose I should have known, the way he used to go on about the Irish and the Frogs sometimes. But if you have a dream you have to take risks for it, pay a price, don’t you?”

“You needn’t try to justify your actions to me,” said Banks, finally feeling steady and cool enough to light a cigarette. He offered one to Rothwell, who accepted. “I was the one left to clean up your mess. And Jameson killed one policeman and seriously wounded another trying to escape.” The fan drew their smoke up to it, then pushed it toward the windows.

“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 Grölsch?” 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 point of all that bloody money.

“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 Grölsch 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. The Economist, I believe.”

“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 Brontë, 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 weeks. After all, that’s what I do best. I’ve laundered and hidden millions for Churchill and his wife.”

“How much for yourself?”

“Three or four million,” he said with a shrug. “I don’t know exactly. Enough, anyway, to last us our lifetime. And there was plenty left in Eastvale for my family. They’re well provided for in the will and by the life insurance. I made sure of that. Believe me, they’ll be better off without me.”

“What about Daniel Clegg? What about Pamela Jeffreys?”

“Pamela? What about her?”

Banks told him.

He put his head in his hands. “Oh, my God,” he said. “I would never have hurt Pamela… It wasn’t meant to be like that.”

“How did you meet her?”

Rothwell sipped some more Pepsi and rubbed the back of his hand across his brow. “I told you the Calvert thing felt very strange at first. Mostly, I just used to walk around Leeds in my jeans and sweatshirt. I’d drop in at a pub now and then and enjoy being someone else. Occasionally, I got chatting to people, the way you do in pubs. I’ll never forget how frightening and how exciting it was the first time someone asked me my name and I said ‘Robert Calvert.’ I knew it was still me – you have to understand that – we’re not really talking about a split personality here. I was Keith Rothwell, all right, just playing a part, or trying to find himself, perhaps. It gave me an exhilarating sense of freedom.

“Anyway, as I said, I used to drop in at pubs now and then, mostly in the city center or up in Headingley, near the flat. One night I saw Pamela in The Boulevard – you know, the tarted-up Jubilee Hotel on The Headrow. It seemed a likely place to meet women. They stay open till midnight on weekends and they’ve got a small dance-floor. Pamela was with some friends. They’d been doing something at the Town Hall, a Handel oratorio, or something like that. Anyway, something happened, some spark. We caught one another’s eye.

“She wasn’t with anyone in particular. I mean, she didn’t seem to have a boyfriend with her. The next time she was at the bar, I made sure I got there, too, next to her, and we got chatting. I wasn’t a great fan of classical music, but Pamela’s a down-to-earth sort of person, not a highbrow snob or anything. I asked her to dance. She said yes. We just got on, that’s all. We slept together now and then, but both of us knew it was just a casual relationship really. I don’t mean to denigrate it by saying that. We had a wonderful time. I was astounded she fancied me. Flattered. It was the first time in my entire marriage that I’d been with another woman, and the hell of it was that I didn’t feel guilty at all. She was fun to be with, and we had a great time, but we weren’t in love.”

“What came between you?”

“What? Well, we stayed friends, really. At least, I like to think we did. There was her work, of course. It’s very demanding and between us we couldn’t always be sure we could make time to get together. And Pamela was more outgoing. She wanted more of a social life. She wanted me to meet her friends, and she wanted to meet mine.”

“But you didn’t have any?”

“Exactly. And I didn’t want to get too well known around the place. It was a risk, playing Calvert, always a risk.”

“Go on. What happened next?”

“I met Julia.”

“How?”

“We met on a bus, would you believe? It had been raining, one of those sudden showers, and I was out walking without an umbrella. So I jumped on a bus into town. Then the rain stopped and the sun came out. I’d been looking at her out of the corner of my eye. She was so beautiful, like a model, such delicate, fragile, sculpted features. I imagined she was probably stuck-up and wouldn’t talk to the likes of me. Anyway, she left her umbrella. I saw it, grabbed it, and dashed after her. When I caught her up she seemed startled at first, then I gave it to her and she blushed. She seemed flustered, so I asked her if she wanted to go for a coffee. She said yes. She was very shy. It was hard to get her talking at first, but slowly I found out she was a teacher and she lived in Adel and she adored Greek history and literature.

“Do you believe in love at first sight, Mr. Banks? Do you? Because that’s what this is all about, really. It’s not just about money. It’s not just about leaving my old life behind and seeking novelty. I fell in love with Julia the moment I saw her, and that’s the truth. It might sound foolish and sentimental to you, but I have never in my life felt that way before. Bells ringing, earth moving, all the cliches. And it’s mutual. She’s everything I’ve ever wanted. When I met Julia, nothing else mattered. I knew we had to get away, find our Eden, if you like, our paradise. I had to get a new life, a new identity. Everything was in such a mess, falling apart. No one was supposed to get hurt.”

“Except Daniel Clegg.”

Rothwell banged on his chair arm with his fist. “I told you! That wasn’t my fault. I had to appear to have been violently murdered. By Daniel himself, or by someone he’d hired. And that’s exactly the way it would have been, too, if I hadn’t been tipped off and made other plans. But Julia knew nothing of that. She’s a complete innocent. She knows nothing of the things we’ve just been talking about.”

“So you invited Clegg over to the Calvert flat to get his fingerprints there? Am I right?”

“Yes. On the Monday. I said I had some business to discuss that couldn’t wait and he came over. I showed him around, had him touch things. I’d cleaned the place thoroughly. Daniel was a touchy-feely kind of person. Anything he saw, he’d pick it up and have a look: compact discs, wallet, credit cards in Calvert’s name, coins, books, you name it. He’d even let his fingers rest on surfaces as if he were claiming them or something. He handled just about everything in the place. I was much more careful to make mine blurred.” Rothwell laughed quietly. “He really was a fool, you know. Every time I got him to help me with something illegal, like setting up the Calvert bank account and credit card, for example, he thought he was getting more power over me.”

“So you must have known we’d find out about the Calvert identity, about Pamela, about Clegg and the money-laundering?”

“Of course. As I said earlier, I had to leave Calvert behind. It was part of my plan that you should find out about him. Another dead end. But please believe me, Pamela wasn’t meant to be a part of it, except maybe to confirm the Calvert identity. I mean, I thought she might get in touch with the police if she saw my picture in the papers. Or someone else might, someone who thought they recognized me. It was meant to confuse you, that’s all. I left a careful trail for you. I thought it led the wrong way. I knew the police would be able to unlock and interpret the data on my computer eventually, that they would realize I’d been laundering money for Martin Churchill. I also left a letter for Daniel Clegg in a locked file. I knew you’d get at that eventually, too.”

“That was one of the things that bothered me,” Banks said. “In retrospect, it was all too easy. And we never found a copy of the letter among his papers. He could have destroyed it, of course, but it was just one of those little niggling details. Lawyers tend to hang onto things.”

“I never sent it,” said Rothwell. “I just created the file so you’d get onto Daniel if you hadn’t already. It was a way of telling you his name, but I couldn’t make it too easy. Then you’d assume he’d had me killed and disappeared with the money.”

“Oh, we did,” said Banks. “We did.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because I’m a persistent bastard, among other things. There were too many loose ends. They worried me. Two different sets of thugs roaming the country, for a start. They could be explained, of course, but it still seemed odd. And we couldn’t find any trace of Clegg, no matter how hard we tried. His ex-wife said he fancied Tahiti, but we had no luck there. We had no luck anywhere else, either. Of course we didn’t. We were looking for the wrong person. But mostly, I think, it was the connection with Julia that really did you in.”

“How did you find out about her?”

“Pamela Jeffreys mentioned her first. She said she thought you were in love. Just a feeling she had, you understand. Then I began to wonder how it would upset the apple-cart if you fell in love as Robert Calvert. How would you handle it? Then Tom came back from America for your funeral.”

“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 Grölsch 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, there’s still the money-laundering and the rest.”

Rothwell looked around the room, mouth set firmly. “I’m not going back,” he said. “You can’t make me. I know there are European extradition treaties. Procedures to follow. They take time. You can’t just take me in like some bounty hunter.”

“Of course I can’t,” said Banks. “That was never my intention.” He heard the gate open and walked over to the window.

A pale, beautiful woman in a yellow sun-dress, red-blonde hair piled and knotted high on her head, had walked into the courtyard and paused to check on the flowers and potted plants. She carried a basket of fresh bread and other foodstuffs in the crook of her arm. She put out her free hand and bent to hold a purple blossom gently between her fingers for a moment, then inspected the herbs. The sun brought out the blonde highlights in her hair. “It looks like Julia’s back,” Banks said. “Doesn’t tan well, does she?”

Rothwell jumped up and looked out. “Julia knows nothing,” he said quickly, speaking quietly so she couldn’t hear him. “You have to believe that. I told her I had business problems, that I had to burn a lot of bridges if we were to be together, that we’d be well set up for life but we couldn’t go back. Ever. She agreed. I don’t know if you can understand this or not, but I love her, Banks, more than anyone or anything I’ve ever loved in my life. I mean it. It’s the first time I’ve ever… I already told you. I love her. She knows nothing. You can do what you want with me, but leave her alone.”

Banks kept quiet.

“You’ll never be able to prove anything,” Rothwell added.

“Maybe I don’t even want to take that risk,” said Banks. By now they could both see Julia and hear her humming softly as she rubbed the leaves on a pot of basil and sniffed her fingers. “Maybe I’d rather you made a clean breast of it,” he went on, keeping his voice low. “A confession. It might even go in your favor, you never know. Especially the love bit. Juries love lovers.”

Julia stood up. Some of her piled tresses had come loose and trailed over her cheeks. She was flushed from the walk and some of the hairs stuck to her face, dampened with sweat.

“You must be mad if you think I’d give all this up willingly,” Rothwell said.

“You can’t buy paradise with blood, Keith,” said Banks. “Come on home. Tell us everything about Martin Churchill’s finances, everything you know about the bastard. Let’s go public, make plenty of noise, sing louder than a male-voice choir. We can make sure he never sets foot in the country even if he turns up looking like Mr. Bean. We could offer you protection, then perhaps another identity, another new life. You’d do some time, of course, but I’m willing to bet that by the time you got out, Martin Churchill would be just another of history’s unpleasant footnotes, and Julia would be still waiting.”

“You’re insane, do you know that? I’d kill you before I’d do what you’re suggesting.”

“No, you wouldn’t, Keith. Besides, there’d be others after me.”

Rothwell paused on his way to the door and stared at Banks, eyes wide open and wild, no longer calm and steady. “Do you know what will happen if I go home?”

“It might not be half as bad as what will happen if I let Churchill know you’re still alive,” said Banks. “They say he has a long reach and a nasty line in revenge.” Julia had almost reached the door. “It wouldn’t stop at you,” Banks said.

Rothwell froze. “You wouldn’t. No. Not even you would do a thing like that.”

At that moment, Banks hated himself probably more than at any other time in his life. He felt sorry for Rothwell, and he found himself on the verge of relenting.

Then he remembered Mary Rothwell, living in a haze of tranquillizers; Alison, burying her head deep in her books and fast losing touch with the real world; and Tom, flailing around in his own private mire of guilt and confusion. Rothwell could have helped these people. Then he thought of Pamela Jeffreys, just out of hospital, physically okay, but still afraid of every knock at her door and unsure whether she would get back the confidence to play her viola again.

For this man’s gamble on paradise, Daniel Clegg lay in his grave with his head blown off, Barry Miller had died on a wet road at midnight, and Grant Everett might have to spend the next few years of his life relearning how to walk and talk. Even Arthur Jameson and Donald Pembroke were Rothwell’s victims, in a way.

And, much farther away but no less implicated, was a dictator who got fat while his people starved, a man who liked to watch people eat glass, a man who, now, if Banks could help it, would never enjoy a peaceful retirement in the English countryside, no matter what he had on some powerful members of the establishment.

And the more Banks thought about these people, victims and predators alike, the less able he was to feel sorry for the fallen lovers.

“Try me,” he said.

Rothwell glared at him, then all the life seemed to drain out of him until he resembled nothing more than a tired, middle-aged accountant. Banks still felt dirty and miserable, and despite his resolve, he wasn’t certain he could go through with his threat. But Rothwell believed him now, and that was all that mattered. This bastard had caused enough trouble already. There was no more room for pity. Banks felt his pulse race, his jaw clench. Then the door opened and Julia drifted in, all blonde and yellow, with a big smile for Rothwell.

“Hello, darling! Oh,” she said, noticing Banks. “We’ve got company. How nice.”