Peter Robinson - Final Account

“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?”

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.