Peter Robinson: Final Account

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?”

“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.