Final Account

by Peter Robinson

  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 multi-pocketed 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?”

  II

  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 centre and the New Wortley Cemetery and headed towards 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 colour 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-coloured 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 hav
e 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 coloured, 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 humour 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 neighbours 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.”

  III

  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.