Final Account

by Peter Robinson

  Pat grunted.

  “So you didn’t really know Keith Rothwell?” Banks asked.

  “No. Nobody did.”

  “That’s right, Mr Banks,” added Larry as he stood by them to pull a pint. “He said he came for the company, what with working alone at home and all that, but I reckon as he came to get away from that there wife of his.” Then he was gone, bearing the pint.

  Banks turned to Pat. “What did he mean?”

  “Ah, take no notice of him,” Pat said with a dismissive wave in Grafton’s direction. “Mebbe he was a bit henpecked, at that. It must be hard working at home when the wife’s around all the time. Never get a minute’s peace, you wouldn’t. But Larry’s lass, Cathy, did for Mrs Rothwell now and again, like, and she says she were a bit of an interfering mistress, if you know what I mean. Standing over young Cathy while she worked and saying that weren’t done right, or that needed a bit more elbow grease. I nobbut met Mrs Rothwell once or twice, but my Grace speaks well of her, and that’s enough for me.”

  Banks thought he might have a word with Larry’s lass, Cathy. He noticed Pat’s empty glass. “Another?”

  “Oh, aye. Thank you very much.” Banks bought him a pint, but decided to forgo a second himself, much as the idea appealed. “There were one time, when I comes to think on it,” Pat said, “that Mr Rothwell seemed a bit odd.”

  “When was this?”

  “Abaht two or three weeks ago. He came in one lunch-time, as usual, like, but he must have had a couple of pints, not ’alves. Anyroad, he got quite chatty, told a couple of jokes and we all had a good chuckle, didn’t we, Larry?”

  “Aye,” shouted Larry from down the bar.

  That sounded odd to Banks. According to Mrs Rothwell, her husband had been tense and edgy over the past three weeks. If he could chat and laugh at the Black Sheep, then maybe the problem had been at home. “Is that all?” he asked.

  “All? Well, it were summat for us to see him enjoying himself for once. I’d say that were enough, wouldn’t you?”

  “Did he say anything unusual?”

  “No. He just acted like an ordinary person. An ordinary happy person.”

  “As if he’d received some good news or something?”

  “He didn’t say owt about that.”

  Banks gave up and moved on. “I know there’s been a bit of ill feeling among the hill-farmers about incomers lately,” he said. “Did any of it spill over to Mr Rothwell?”

  Pat sniffed. “You wouldn’t understand, Mr Banks,” he said softly, offering an unfiltered cigarette. Banks refused it and lit a Silk Cut. “It’s not that there’s any ill feeling, as such. We just don’t know where we stand, how to plan for the future. One day the government says this, the next day it’s something else. Agricultural Policy … Europe … grugh.” He spat on the floor to show his feelings. Either nobody noticed or the practice was perfectly welcome in the Black Sheep, another reason why people stayed away. “It needs years of experience to do it right, does hill-farming,” Pat went on. “Continuity, passed on from father to son. When too many farms fall to weekenders and holiday-makers, pasture gets abused, walls get neglected. Live and let live, that’s what I say. But we want some respect and some understanding. And right now we’re not getting any.”

  “But what about the incomers?”

  “Aye, hold thy horses, lad, I’m getting to them. We’re not bloody park-keepers, tha knows. We don’t graft for hours on end in all t’weather God sends keeping stone walls in good repair because we think they look picturesque, tha knows. They’re to keep old Harry Cobb’s sheep off my pasture and to make sure there’s no hanky-panky between his breed and mine.”

  Banks nodded. “Fair enough, Pat. But how deep did the feeling go? Keith Rothwell bought that farm five years ago, or thereabouts. I’ve seen what he’s done to it, and it’s not a farm any more.”

  “Aye, well at least Mr Rothwell’s a Swainsdale lad, even if he did come from Eastvale. Nay, there were no problems. He sold off his land—I got some of it, and so did Frank Rowbottom. If you’re thinking me or Frank did it, then …”

  “No, nothing like that,” Banks said. “I just wanted to get a sense of how Rothwell fitted in with the local scene, if he did.”

  “Well, he did and he didn’t,” said Pat. “He was here and he wasn’t, and that’s all I can tell thee. He could tell a joke well enough when he put his mind to it, though.” Pat chuckled at the memory.

  As puzzled as he was before, Banks said goodbye and went outside. On the way back, he slipped in a cassette of Busoni’s Bach transcriptions. The precise, ordered music had no influence on the chaos of his thoughts.

  II

  Back in his office, Banks first glanced at Dr Glendenning’s postmortem notes. Generally, there was no such thing as a preliminary post-mortem report, but Dr Glendenning usually condescended to send over the main points in layman’s language as quickly as possible. He also liked to appear at the scene, but this time he had been staying overnight with friends in Harrogate.

  There was nothing in the notes that Banks hadn’t expected. Rothwell hadn’t been poisoned before he was shot; the stomach contents revealed only pasta and red wine. Dr Glendenning gave cause of death as a shotgun wound to the occipital region, the back of head, most likely a contact wound given the massive damage to bone and tissue. He also noted that it was lucky they already knew who the victim was, as there wasn’t enough connected bone or tissue left to reconstruct the face, and though the tooth fragments could probably be collected and analyzed, it would take a bloody long time. The blood group was “O,” which matched that supplied by Rothwell’s doctor, as well as that of about half the population.

  Rothwell had most likely been killed in the place and position they found him, Dr Glendenning pointed out, because what blood remained had collected as purplish hypostasis around the upper chest and the ragged edges of the neck. He estimated time of death between eleven and one the previous night.

  A cadaveric spasm had caused Rothwell to grab and hold onto a handful of dust at the moment of death, and Banks thought of the T.S. Eliot quotation, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” which he had come across as the title of an Evelyn Waugh novel.

  Rothwell had been in generally good shape, Dr Glendenning said, and the only evidence of any ill health was an appendix scar. Rothwell’s doctor, Dr Hunter, was able to verify that Rothwell had had his appendix removed just over three years ago.

  When Banks had finished, he phoned Sandra to say he didn’t know when he would be home. She said that didn’t surprise her. Then he went over to the window and looked down on the cobbled market square, most of which was covered by parked cars. The gold hands against the blue face of the church clock stood at a quarter to four.

  Banks lit a cigarette and watched the local merchants taking deliveries and the tourists snapping pictures of the ancient market cross and the Norman church front. It was fine enough weather out there, sports jacket warm, but the grey wash that had come at dawn still obscured the sunshine. On Banks’s Dalesman calendar, the May photograph showed a field of brilliant pink and purple flowers below Great Shunner Fell in Swaledale. So far, the real May had been struggling against showers and cool temperatures.

  Sitting at his rattly metal desk, Banks next opened the envelope of Rothwell’s pocket contents and spread them out in front of him.

  There were a few business cards in a leather slip-case, describing Rothwell as a “Financial Consultant.” In his wallet were three credit cards, including an American Express Gold; the receipt from Mario’s on the night of his anniversary dinner; receipts from Austick’s bookshop, a computer supplies shop and two restaurants, all from Leeds, and all dated the previous week; and photos of Alison and Mary Rothwell. Happy families indeed. In cash, Rothwell had a hundred and five pounds in his wallet, in new twenties and one crumpled old fiver.

  Other pockets revealed a handkerchief, good quality silk and monogrammed “KAR,” like the cufflinks on the body,
BMW keys, house keys, a small pack of Rennies, two buttons, a gold Cross fountain pen, an empty leather-bound notebook and—horror of horrors—a packet of ten Benson and Hedges, six of which had been smoked.

  Banks felt a surge of respect for the late Keith Rothwell. But perhaps the cigarettes helped to explain something, too. Banks was certain that Mary Rothwell would never have permitted her husband to pollute the house with his filthy habit. Smoking, then, could be the main reason he liked to sneak off to the Black Sheep or the Rose and Crown every now and then. It certainly wasn’t drinking. A secret smoker, then? Or did she know? He found no gold lighter, only a sulphurous old box of Pilot matches; and Rothwell was the kind of person who put his spent matches back in the box facing the opposite direction from the live ones.

  It was almost six when the phone rang: Vic Manson calling from the forensic lab. Vic spent almost as much time with the Scene-of-Crime team from North Yorkshire Headquarters, in Northallerton, as he did at the lab, and though Banks knew Vic was a fingerprints expert, he sometimes wasn’t sure exactly what he did or where he really worked.

  “What have you got for us?” Banks asked.

  “Hold your horses.”

  “Social call, is it, then?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then what?”

  “The wadding, for a start.”

  “What about it?”

  “We managed to get some more of the paper unfolded. It wasn’t too badly burned inside. Anyway, the document analysts say it’s good magazine quality, probably German. No prints. Nothing but blurs. It’s not your common-or-garden girlie magazine, but it’s not hard-core perversion either. The fullest picture we could get seemed to be a shaved vagina with a finger touching the clitoris. Bright red nail varnish. The fingernail, that is.”

  “That must be the other side of what I saw,” said Banks. “Does it help?”

  “It might do. Apparently there are people who have a fetish about shaved vaginas. It’s something to go on, anyway.”

  Banks sighed. “Or maybe our killer’s just got a warped sense of humour. We can check with the PNC, anyway, see if there’s been any similar incidents. What about the weapon?”

  “Twelve-gauge, double-barrel. Judging by the amount of shot we’ve collected, the bastard who did it must have used both of them.”

  “Anything from the house?”

  “No prints, if that’s what you mean. They wore gloves. And there was nothing special about the rope they used to tie up the wife and daughter, either. By the way, remember one of the chairs was wet, the one overturned by the table?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was urine. The poor lass must have been so scared she pissed herself.”

  Banks swallowed. That was Alison’s chair. She was the one who had eventually made her way to the sewing basket and toppled her chair. “Any footprints?” he asked.

  “We’re still working on it, but don’t hold your breath. The ground had pretty much dried out after last week’s rain.”

  “Okay, Vic, thanks for calling. Keep at it and keep me informed, okay?”

  “Will do.”

  After he had hung up, Banks lit another cigarette and walked over to the window again. Most of the tourists were getting in their cars, removing the crook-locks and driving home. The cobbles, cross and church front looked slate grey in the dull afternoon light. At the far side of the square, the El Toro coffee bar and Joplin’s newsagent’s seemed to be doing good business.

  Banks thought of Alison, who had shown so much courage in telling them about what had happened at Arkbeck Farm. Someone had scared her so much she had sat in her own urine, probably for hours. The idea of her indignity and humiliation made him angry. He vowed he would find whoever was responsible for doing that to her and make damn sure they suffered.

  III

  The Queen’s Arms was always busy at six o’clock on a Friday, and it was only through good luck and quick reflexes that Banks and Susan Gay managed to grab a copper-topped table by the window when a party of cashiers from the NatWest Bank gathered their things and left.

  As happened so often in the Dales, the weather had changed dramatically over a very short period. A light breeze had sprung up and blown away the clouds. Now, the early evening sunlight glowed through the red and amber panes and shot bright rays though the clear ones, lighting on a foaming glass of ale and highlighting the smoke swirling in the air.

  The sunlight and smoke reminded Banks of the effect the projection camera created at the cinema when smoking was allowed there. As kids, he and his friends used to put their money together for a packet of five Woodbines, then go to the morning matinee at the Palace: a Three Stooges short, a Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon serial and a black-and-white western, maybe a Hopalong Cassidy. Slumped down in their seats, they would smoke “wild woodies” until they felt sick. He smiled at the memory and reached for a Silk Cut.

  Conversation and laughter ebbed and flowed all around them, and the general mood was ebullient. After all, it was the weekend. For most people in the pub, there would be no work until Monday morning. They could go off shopping to York or Leeds, wallpaper the bedroom, visit Aunt Maisie in Skipton or just lounge around and watch football or racing on telly. It was Cup Final day tomorrow, Banks remembered. Fat chance he’d get of watching it.

  The best he could hope was that he would get home before too late tonight and spend some time with Sandra. It was the ideal opportunity for a bit of bridge-building. Tracy was away in France on a school exchange, and Brian was at Portsmouth Polytechnic, so they had the house to themselves for once. He would be too late for a shared dinner, but maybe a nice bottle of claret, a few Chopin “Nocturnes,” candlelight … then, who knew what might follow?

  It was a nice fantasy. But right now he was waiting for Gristhorpe and Richmond, here to combine the pleasure of a pint and a steak-and-kidney pud with the business of swopping notes and fishing for leads at an informal meeting.

  Once in a while, through the laughter and the arguments, Banks heard the Rothwell case mentioned. “Did you hear about that terrible murder up near Relton … ?” “Hear about that bloke got shot out in the dale? I heard they blew his head right off his shoulders …” By now, of course, everyone had had a chance to read the Yorkshire Evening Post, and people were only too willing to embroider on the scant details the newspaper gave. Rumour and fantasy were rife. What Gristhorpe hadn’t told the media so far was that Rothwell had been executed “gangland” style, and that the weapon used was a shotgun.

  The best the press could manage so far was “LOCAL BUSINESSMAN MURDERED … Not more than a mile above the peaceful Swainsdale village of Fortford, a mild-mannered accountant was shot to death in his own garage in the early hours of this morning …” There followed an appeal for information about “two men in black” and a photograph of Keith Rothwell, looking exactly like a mild-mannered accountant, with his thinning fair hair combed back, showing the slight widow’s peak, his high forehead, slightly prissy lips and the wire-rimmed glasses. The glasses, Banks knew, had been found shattered to pieces along with the other wreckage of Rothwell’s skull.

  Banks waved to Gristhorpe and Richmond, who nudged their way through the crowd to join them at the table. While he was on his feet, Richmond went to get a round of drinks and put in the food orders.

  “At least we don’t have to worry about civilians overhearing classified information,” Gristhorpe said as he sat down and scraped his stool forward along the worn stone flagging. “I can hardly even hear myself think.”

  When Richmond got back with the tray of drinks, Gristhorpe said, “Right, Phil, tell us what you found.”

  They huddled close around the table. Richmond took a sip of his St Clements. “There are several items that have been either encrypted or assigned passwords,” he said. “Some are complete directories, and one’s just a document file in a directory. He’s called it ‘LETTER.’”

  “Can you get access?” Gristhorpe asked.

 
“Not easily, no, sir. Not unless you type the password at the prompt. Believe me, I’ve tried every trick and all I’ve got for my pains is gibberish.”

  “All right.” Gristhorpe coughed and waved away Banks’s smoke with an exaggerated gesture. “Let’s assume he had some special reason for keeping these items secret. That means we’re definitely interested. You said you couldn’t gain access easily, but is there a way?”

  Richmond cleared his throat. “Well, yes there is. Actually, there are two ways.”

  “Come on, then, lad. Don’t keep us in suspense.”

  “We could bring in an expert. I mean a real expert, like someone who writes the programmes.”

  “Aye, and the other option?”

  “Well, it’s not much known, for obvious reasons, but I went to a seminar once and the lecturer told me something that struck me as very odd.”

  “What?”

  “Well, there’s a company that sells by-pass programmes for various software security systems.”

  “That would probably be cheaper and quicker, wouldn’t it?” said Gristhorpe. “Can you get hold of a copy?”

  “Yes, sir. But it’s not cheap. Actually, it’s quite expensive.” “How much?”

  “About two hundred quid.”

  Gristhorpe whistled between his teeth, then he said, “We don’t have a lot of choice, do we? Go ahead, order one.”

  “I already have done, sir.”

  “And?”

  “They’re based in Akron, Ohio, but they told me there’s a distributor in Taunton, Devon, who has some in stock. It could take a while to get it up here.”

  “Tell the buggers to send it by courier, then. We might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. Lord knows what the DCC will have to say come accounting time.”

  “Maybe if it helps us solve the case,” Banks chipped in, “he’ll increase our budget.”

  Gristhorpe laughed. “In a pig’s arse, he will. Go on, Phil.”

  “That’s all, really,” said Richmond. “In the meantime, I’ll keep trying and see what I can do. People sometimes write their pass- words down in case they forget them. If Rothwell did, the only problem is finding out where and in what form.”