Final Account

1

A night’s sleep is supposed to refresh you, not make you feel as if you’re recovering from a bloody anesthetic, thought Banks miserably on Saturday morning.

Never a morning person at the best of times, he sat over his second cup of black coffee and a slice of whole wheat toast and Seville marmalade, newspaper propped up in front of him, trying to muster enough energy to get going. As a background to the radio traffic reports, he could hear Sandra having a shower upstairs. Banks hated the contraption – he always seemed to get a lukewarm dribble rather than a hot shower – but Sandra and Tracy swore by it. Banks preferred a long, hot bath with a little quiet background music and a good book.

After catching up with paperwork, he hadn’t got home until almost eleven the previous night. He wished Sandra had been angry that they’d had to miss the claret, the Chopin and the candlelight, but she hadn’t seemed to care. He didn’t know whether she was pretending or she really didn’t care. In fact, she said she’d just got back from a reception at the community center herself. It was getting to be par for the course. They had seen so little of one another lately that they were fast becoming strangers. It seemed to Banks that what had been a strength in their relationship – their natural independence – was quickly becoming a threat.

And while Sandra had slept like a log, Banks had tossed and turned all night beside her, worried about the Rothwell case, with only brief, fitful periods of sleep full of shifting images: the pornographic wadding, the headless corpse. Now it was eight-thirty the next morning, and his eyes felt like sandpaper, his brain stuffed with cotton wool.

The national dailies and radio news carried stories on the Keith Rothwell killing – sandwiched between a bloodthirsty put-down of riots on a Caribbean island, where another dictator was nearing the end of his reign of terror, and a male Member of Parliament caught in flagrante with a sixteen-year-old rent-boy on Clapham Common. It probably wouldn’t even have made the papers if it had happened somewhere a bit more up-market, like Hampstead Heath, Banks thought.

The Rothwell murder would be on television too, no doubt, amidst all the speculation on that afternoon’s Cup Final, but Banks had never been able to bring himself to turn the thing on during daylight hours.

Now, hints were appearing in the media that the killing was more than a run-of-the-mill domestic disagreement or a burglary gone wrong. According to the radio, Scotland Yard, Interpol and the FBI had been called in. That, Banks reflected, was a slight exaggeration. The Americans had been asked to help trace Tom Rothwell, though as far as Banks knew it was the Florida State Police, not the FBI. Interpol was something the reporters always threw in for good measure, these days, and Scotland Yard was an outright lie.

Banks scanned the Yorkshire Post and The Independent reports to see if either newspaper knew more than the police. Sometimes they did, and it could be damned embarrassing all round. Not this time, though. To them, Rothwell was as much the “quiet, unassuming local accountant and businessman” as he was to the rest of the world.

“More coffee?”

Banks looked up to see Sandra standing at the machine in her navy-blue bathrobe, wet hair hanging over the terry-cloth at her shoulders. He hadn’t heard her come down.

“Please.” He held his cup out.

Sandra poured, then put some bread in the toaster and picked up the Yorkshire Post. After she had read about Rothwell, she whistled. “Is this what kept you out so late last night?”

“Hmm,” murmured Banks.

The toast popped up. Sandra put the paper down and went to see to it. “I’ve met her a couple of times, you know,” she said over her shoulder, buttering toast.

Banks folded The Independent and looked at Sandra’s profile. When it was wet, her hair looked darker, of course, but one of the things Banks found attractive about her was the contrast between her blonde hair and black eyebrows. This time, when he looked at her, he felt an ache deep inside. “Who?” he asked.

“Mrs. Rothwell. Mary Rothwell.”

“How on earth did you come across her?”

“At the gallery.”

Sandra ran the local gallery in the Eastvale community center, where she organized art and photography exhibitions.

“I didn’t know she was the artistic type.”

“She’s not really. I think for her it was just the thing to do. Women’s Institute sort of stuff, you know, organize cultural outings.” Sandra sat down with her toast and wrinkled her nose.

Banks laughed, sensing a definite thaw in the cold war. “Snob.”

“What! Me?” She hit him lightly with the folded newspaper.

“Anyway,” Banks said, “the poor woman’s on tranquilizers. Both she and her daughter saw Rothwell’s body before they called us, and you can take my word for it, that’s enough to give anyone the heebie-jeebies.”

“How’s the daughter?”

“Alison? Not quite so bad, at least not on the surface.” Banks shrugged. “More resilient, maybe, or she could just be repressing it more. Tina Smithies says she’s worried they’re both losing touch.” He looked at his watch. “I’d better go.”

Sandra followed him to the door and leaned against the bannister. She nibbled her toast as she watched him put on his light gray sports jacket and pick up his briefcase. “I can’t say I know her well enough to get any kind of impression,” she said, holding her dressing-gown at the collar when Banks opened the door, “but I did sense that she’s the kind who… well, she puts on a few airs and graces. Not so much as to be a complete pseud, but you can tell there’s a touch of the Lady Muck about her. Imperious. And she likes people to know she’s not short of a bob or two. You know, she flashes her rings, jewelry, stuff like that. She also struck me as being a very cold woman, I don’t know why. All sharp edges, like a drawer full of kitchen knives.”

Banks leaned against the door jamb. “It’s a bloody strange family altogether,” he said.

Sandra shrugged. “Just thought I’d put in my two pen-n’orth. I don’t suppose you know when you’ll be back?”

“No. Sorry, got to dash.” Banks risked a quick kiss on the lips. They tasted of strawberry jam.

“Can you leave me the car, today?” Sandra called after him. “There’s a water-color exhibition I want to see in Ripon. One of our locals is exhibiting. I don’t know when I’ll be back, either.”

“Okay,” said Banks, wincing at the barb. He could always sign a car out of the pool if he needed one. It wouldn’t have a cassette deck, but then this was hardly the best of all possible worlds, was it? At least it should have a radio. He set off determined, after a miserable night, not to let things get him down.

It was a beautiful morning. Calendar weather. May, as he knew it, had finally arrived. The sky was a cloudless blue, apart from a few high milky swirls, and even this early in the morning the temperature seemed to have risen a few notches since yesterday. Banks wouldn’t be surprised if it were shirtsleeves weather before the day was out.

As he walked, he plugged in his earphones and switched on the Walkman in his briefcase. The tape started at the jazzy “Forlane” section of Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin. Not bad for a walk to work on a fine spring morning.

It was only about a mile to the station along Market Street, and Banks liked the way the townscape changed almost yard by yard as he walked. At his end of town, the road was broad, and the area was much like the outer part of any town center: the main road with its garage, supermarket, school, zebra crossings and roundabouts, surrounded by residential streets of tall Victorian houses, most of them converted to student flats, all with names like Mafeking Avenue, Sebastopol Terrace, Crimea Close and Waterloo Road, and a strong smell of petrol and diesel fumes pervading the air.

But the closer Market Street got to the actual marketplace, the more it narrowed and turned into a tourist attraction with its overhanging first-floor bays, where people could almost shake hands with someone across the street; the magnifying-glass windows of twee souvenir shops; an expensive walkers’ gear shop with orange Gore-tex clothing hanging by the doorway and a stand of walking-sticks out on the pavement; a Waterstone’s Bookshop, the street’s most recent addition; the mingled aromas from Hambleton’s Tea and Coffee Emporium and Farleigh’s bakery across the street; an Oddbins wine shop; the Golden Grill café; and a newsagent’s with a rack of newspapers out front, some of them folded over at Rothwell’s grainy photograph, and a display of local guides and Ordnance Survey maps in the window. This narrow part of Market Street was always jammed with honking traffic, too – mostly visitors and delivery vans.

Halfway through the “Menuet” section, Banks arrived at the station, a three-story, Tudor-fronted building facing the market square. First he called in at the Murder Room and talked to Phil Richmond. The Florida State Police had tracked down the car rental company Tom Rothwell had used at Tampa airport. At least it was a start. Now the police had a license number to look for among the millions of cars parked at the thousands of Florida hotels, motels and beach clubs.

The PNC reported nothing doing on the use of pornographic wadding at other crime scenes.

Gristhorpe was in a meeting with Inspector Macmillan of the Fraud Squad, and Susan Gay was in her hutch phoning around the list of Rothwell’s clients Laurence Pratt had given her. Banks poured a coffee and went to his office.

He opened his window and sniffed the air, then lit a cigarette and stood looking down on the early tourists in their bright anoraks and cagoules milling about the cobbled square. It was ten past nine on a Saturday morning, market-day in Eastvale, and the vendors at their canvas-covered stalls, like the old wild-west wagon trains, hawked everything from flat caps and multipocketed fishing jackets to burglar alarms, spark plugs and non-stick ovenware. The cheese van was there, as usual, and Banks thought he might nip out and buy a wedge of Coverdale or Wensleydale Blue if he got the chance. If.

Banks mulled over what Sandra had told him about Mary Rothwell. So far, he had an impression of her as an ostentatious and overbearing woman who put too much value on appearances, and of Keith Rothwell as an unassuming, yet sly and greedy, man, easily prey to temptation. Greed, as Susan Gay had remarked, is often a way of making dangerous enemies, and a habit of secrecy is a damn good way of making things difficult for the police. But did the greed originate in Rothwell himself, or had he felt pushed into it by the demands of his wife?

There had certainly been hints in what both Ian Falkland and Larry Grafton had said that Rothwell had been something of a henpecked husband, escaping to the pub for a half-pint and a quiet smoke whenever he could.

In Banks’s experience, such people often developed rich and secret fantasy lives, which sometimes imposed on reality with messy and unpredictable results. Keith Rothwell had supplied his wife and children with all the conveniences and many of the luxuries they wanted. What did he get out of it? What did he have going for himself? Nobody seemed to know or care what made him tick.

Banks moved away from the window and stubbed out his cigarette. There was at least one thing he could do right now, he thought, reaching for a pen and notepad. “WANTED,” he wrote, “male Caucasian, about five feet nine, slight paunch, large wet brown eyes, commonly described as ‘spaniel’ or ‘puppy dog’ eyes, fondness for shotguns, can’t keep his hands off young girls and probably has a taste for pornography of the shaved pussy variety.” He could just imagine the laughter and the nudge-nudges in police stations around the country as that went out over the PNC.

Just as he was about to start working on a revised version, the phone rang and Sergeant Rowe put him through to a distraught woman asking for the ubiquitous “someone in charge.”

“Can I help you?” Banks asked her.

“They said they’d put me through to someone in charge. Are you in charge?”

“Depends what you mean,” said Banks. “In charge of what? What’s it about?”

“The man in the paper this morning, the one who was killed.”

Suddenly Banks pricked up his ears. Was he mistaken, or was she sobbing as she spoke? “Yes,” he said. “Go on.”

“I knew him.”

“You knew Keith Rothwell?”

“No, no-” She sobbed again then came back on the line. “You’ve got it wrong. That’s not his name. His name is Robert. Robert Calvert. That’s who he is. You’ve got it all wrong. Is Robert really dead?”

The back of his neck tingling, Banks gripped his pen tight between his fingers. “I think we’d better have a talk, love,” he said. “The sooner, the better. Would you like to give me your name and address?”

2

Susan Gay drove the unmarked police Fiesta to Leeds, with Banks beside her tapping his fingers on his knees. It wasn’t because of her driving. Ordinarily, he would enjoy such a trip and take his time if there were no rush, but today he was anxious to interview the woman who had phoned, Pamela Jeffreys.

He wasn’t smoking, either, and that also made him jittery. He refrained in deference to Susan, though she magnanimously said it was okay if he opened the windows. There wasn’t much worse, in his experience, than trying to enjoy a cigarette in a car next to a non-smoker with a force nine gale blowing all around you, no matter how good the weather.

As Banks had hoped, though the car had no cassette player, it did have a radio, and he was able to lose himself in a Poulenc chamber concert on Radio Three as he considered the implications of what he had just heard.

“How are we going to play this, sir?” Susan asked as she turned onto the Inner Ring Road and went into the yellow-lit tunnel.

Banks dragged himself out of a passage in the “Sextet” where a sense of sadness seemed 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 Bohème 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?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say that.”

“Oh?”

“It’s just a guess, like.”

“What was it?”

“I think he’d met someone else. Another woman. I think he was in love.”

Banks swallowed, hardly able to believe what he was hearing. This couldn’t be dull, dry, mild-mannered Keith Rothwell. Surely Rothwell wasn’t the kind of man to have a wife and children in Swainsdale and a beautiful girlfriend like Pamela Jeffreys in Leeds, whom he could simply dump for yet another woman?

“Don’t get me wrong,” Pamela went on. “I’m not bitter or anything. We had a good time, and it was never anything more. We didn’t lie to each other. Neither of us wanted to get too involved. And one thing Robert doesn’t do is mess you around. That’s why we can still be friends. But he made it clear it was over between us – at least in that way – and I got the impression it was because he’d found someone else.”

“Did you ever see this woman?”

“No.”

“Did he ever speak of her?”

“No. I just knew. A woman can tell about these things, that’s all.”

“Did you ask him about her?”

“I broached the subject once or twice.”

“What happened?”

“He changed it.” She smiled. “He has a way.”

“How often did you see each other?”

“When we were going out?”

“Yes.”

“Just once or twice a week. Mostly late in the week, weekends sometimes. He travels a lot on business. Anyway, he’s usually at home every week at some time, at least for a day or two.”

“What’s his business?”

“Dunno. That’s another thing he never said much about. I can’t say I was really that interested, either. I mean, it’s boring, isn’t it, talking about business. I liked going out with Robert because he was fun. He could leave his work at home.”

“Did he smoke?”

“What an odd question. Yes, as a matter of fact. Not much, though.”

“What brand?”

“Benson and Hedges. I don’t mind people smoking.”

Encouraged, Banks slipped his Silk Cut out of his pocket. Pamela smiled and brought him a glass ashtray. “What was he like?” Banks asked. “What kind of things did you used to do together?”

Pamela looked at Banks with a glint of naughty humor in her eyes and raised her eyebrows. Banks felt himself flush. “I mean where did you used to go?” he said quickly.

“Yeah, I know. Hmmm… Well, we’d go out for dinner about once a week. Brasserie 44 – you know, down by the river – or La Grillade, until it moved. He likes good food. Let’s see… sometimes we’d go to concerts at the Town Hall, if I wasn’t playing, of course, but he’s not very fond of classical music, to be honest. Prefers that dreadful trad jazz. And sometimes we’d just stay in, order a pizza or a curry and watch telly if there was something good on. Or rent a video. He likes oldies. Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, that kind of thing. So do I. Let me see… we’d go to Napoleon’s every once in a while-”

“Napoleon’s?”

“Yeah. You know, the casino. And he took me to the races a couple of times – once at Pontefract and once at Doncaster. That’s about it, really. Oh, and we went dancing now and then. Quite fleet on his feet is Robert.”

Banks coughed and stubbed out his cigarette. “Dancing? The casino?”

“Yes. He loves a flutter, does Robert. It worried me sometimes the way he’d go through a hundred or more some nights.” She shrugged. “But it wasn’t my place to say, was it? I mean it wasn’t as if we were married or anything, or even living together. And he seemed to have plenty of money. Not that that’s what interested me about him.” She pulled at her necklace again. “Can’t you tell me what’s going on, Chief Inspector? It’s not the same person that was murdered, is it? I was so upset when I saw the paper this morning. Tell me it’s a case of mistaken identity.”

Banks shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe he had a double. Did he ever say anything about being married?”

“No, never.”

“Did he have an appendix scar?”

This time, Pamela blushed. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, he did. But so do lots of other people. I had mine out when I was sixteen.”

“When you spent time together,” Banks said, “did he always come here, to your house? Didn’t you ever visit him at his hotel?”

She frowned. “Hotel? What hotel?”

“The one he stayed at when he was in town, I assume. Did you always meet here?”

“Of course not. Sometimes he came here, certainly. I’ve nothing to be ashamed of, and I don’t care what the neighbors say. Bloody racists, some of them. You know, my mum and dad came over to Shipley to work in the woollen mills in 1952. Nineteen fifty-two. They even changed their name from Jaffrey to Jeffreys because it sounded more English. Can you believe it? I was born here, brought up here, went to school and university here, and some of them still call me a bleeding Paki.” She shrugged. “What can you do? Anyway, you were saying?”

“I was asking why you never saw him at his hotel.”

“Oh, that’s easy. I don’t know what you’re talking about. You see, it can’t be the same person, can it? That proves it.” She leaned forward quickly and clapped her hands. The bracelet spiralled. “You see, Robert didn’t stay at any hotel. Sometimes he came here, yes, but not always. Other times I went to his place. His flat. He’s got a flat in Headingley.”

3

Banks turned the Yale key in the lock and the three of them stood on the threshold of Robert Calvert’s Headingley flat. It was in the nice part of Headingley, more West Park, Banks noted, not the scruffy part around Hyde Park that was honeycombed with student bedsits.

It hadn’t been easy getting in. Pamela Jeffreys didn’t have a key, so they had to ask one of the tenants in the building to direct them to the agency that handled rentals. Naturally, it was closed at four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, so then they had to get hold of one of the staff at home and arrange for her to come in, grumbling all the way, open up the office and give them a spare key.

And no, she told them, she had never met Robert Calvert. The man was a model tenant; he paid his rent on time, and that was all that mattered. One of the secretaries probably handed him the key, but he’d had the place about eighteen months and turnover in secretaries was pretty high. However, if Banks wanted to come back on Monday morning… Still, Banks reflected as they stood at the front door, all in all it had taken only about an hour and a half from the first time they had heard of the place, so that wasn’t bad going.

“Better not touch anything,” Banks said as they stood in the hallway. “Which is the living room?” he asked Pamela.

“That one, on the left.”

The door was ajar and Banks nudged it open with his elbow. The bottom of the door rubbed over the fitted beige carpet. Susan Gay and Pamela walked in behind him.

“There’s only this room, a bedroom, kitchen and bathroom,” Pamela said. “It’s not very big, but it’s cozy.”

The living room was certainly not the kind of place Banks could imagine Mary Rothwell caring much for. Equipped with all the usual stuff – TV, video, stereo, a few jazz compact discs, books, armchairs, gas fireplace – it smelled of stale smoke and had that comfortable, lived-in feel Banks had never sensed at Arkbeck Farm. Perhaps it was something to do with the old magazines – mostly jazz and racing – strewn over the scratched coffee-table, the overflowing ashtray, the worn upholstery on the armchair by the fire, or the framed photographs of a younger-looking Rothwell on the mantelpiece. On the wall hung a framed print of Monet’s “Waterloo Bridge, Grey Day.”

They went into the bedroom and found the same mess. The bed was unmade, and discarded socks, underpants and shirts lay on the floor beside it.

There was also a small desk against one wall, on which stood a jar of pens and pencils, a roll of Sellotape and a stapler, in addition to several sheets of paper, some of them scrawled all over with numbers. “Is this the kind of thing you’re looking for?” Pamela asked.

Carefully, Banks opened the drawer and found a wallet. Without disturbing anything, he could see, through the transparent plastic holder inside, credit cards in the name of Robert Calvert. He put it back.

A couple of suits hung in the wardrobe, along with shirts, ties, casual jackets and trousers. Banks felt in the pockets and found nothing but pennies, sales slips, a couple of felt-tip pens, matches, betting slips and some fluff.

As wood doesn’t usually yield fingerprints, he didn’t have to be too careful opening cupboards and drawers. Calvert’s dresser contained the usual jumble of jeans, jumpers, socks and underwear. A packet of condoms lay forlornly next to a passport and a selection of Dutch, French, Greek and Swiss small change in the drawer of the bedside table. The passport was in the name of Robert Calvert. There were no entry or exit stamps, but then there wouldn’t be if he did most of his travelling in Europe, as the coins seemed to indicate. On the bedside table was a shaded reading lamp and a copy of The Economist.

The kitchen was certainly compact, and by the sparsity of the fridge’s contents, it looked as if Calvert did most of his eating out. A small wine-rack stood on the counter. Banks checked the contents: a white Burgundy, Veuve Clicquot Champagne, a Rioja.

Calvert’s bathroom was clean and tidy. His medicine cabinet revealed only the barest of essentials: paracetamol tablets, Aspro, Milk of Magnesia, Alka Seltzer, Fisherman’s Friend, Elastoplast, cotton swabs, hydrogen peroxide, Old Spice deodorant and shaving cream, a packet of orange disposable razors, toothbrush and a half-used tube of Colgate. Calvert had squeezed it in the middle, Banks noticed, not from bottom to top. Could this be the same man who returned his used matches to the box?

“Come on,” Banks said. “We’d better use a call-box. I don’t want to risk smudging any prints there may be on the telephone.”

“What’s going on?” Pamela asked as they walked down the street.

“I’m sorry,” Susan said to her. “We really don’t know. We’re not just putting you off. We’re as confused as you are. If we can find some of Robert’s fingerprints in the flat, then we can check them against our files and find out once and for all if it’s the same man.”

“But it just can’t be,” Pamela said. “I’m sure of it.”

A pub on the main road advertised a beer garden at the back, and as they were all thirsty, Banks suggested he might as well make the call from there.

He phoned the station and Phil Richmond said he would arrange to get Vic Manson to the flat as soon as possible.

That done, he ordered the drinks and discovered from the barman that Arsenal had won the FA Cup. Good for them, Banks thought. When he had lived in London, he had been an Arsenal supporter, though he always had a soft spot for Peterborough United, his home-town team, struggling as they were near the bottom of the First Division.

The beer garden was quiet. They sat at a heavy wooden bench beside a bowling green and sipped their drinks. Two old men in white were playing on the green, and occasionally the clack of the bowls disturbed the silence. Banks and Susan shared salted roast peanuts and cheese-and-onion crisps, as neither had eaten since breakfast. The sun felt warm on the back of Banks’s neck.

“You can go home whenever you want,” Banks told Pamela as she took off the tan suede jacket she had put on to go out. “We have to stay here, but we’ll pay for a taxi. I’m sorry we had to ruin your day for you.”

Pamela squinted in the sun, reached into her bag and pulled out a pair of large pink-rimmed sunglasses. “It’s all right,” she said, picking up her gin and tonic. “I know it wasn’t Robert they were talking about in the paper. Who was this man, this Keith Rothwell?”

“He was an accountant who got murdered,” Banks told her. “We can’t really say much more than that. Did you ever hear the name before?”

Pamela shook her head. “The papers said he was married.”

“Yes.”

“Robert didn’t act like a married man.”

“What do you mean?”

“Guilt. Secrecy. Fleeting visits. Furtive phone calls. The usual stuff. There was none of that with Robert. We went about quite openly. He wasn’t tied down. He was a dreamer. Besides, you just know.” She took her glasses off and squinted at Banks. “I’ll bet you’re married, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” said Banks, and saw, he hoped, a hint of disappointment in her eyes.

“Told you.” She put her sunglasses on again.

Banks noticed Susan grinning behind her glass of lemonade. He gave her a dirty look. A clack of bowls came from the green and one of the old men did a little dance of victory.

“So, you see,” Pamela went on. “It can’t be the same man. If I’m sure of one thing, it’s that Robert Calvert definitely wasn’t a married man with a family.”

Banks picked up his pint and raised it in a toast. “I hope you’re right,” he said, looking at her brave smile and remembering the scene in Rothwell’s garage only two nights ago. “I sincerely hope you’re right.”