Final Account

by Peter Robinson

  Banks reached for his pint. “To what do I owe the honour?” he asked. He had never dignified Burgess with the “sir” his rank demanded, and he was damned if he was about to start now.

  Burgess swigged some lager, swished it around his mouth and swallowed.

  “Well?” said Banks. “Enough bloody theatrics, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d believe me if I said I’d missed you?”

  “Get on with it.”

  “Right. Thought not. Ever heard of a place called St Corona?”

  “Of course. It’s a Caribbean island, been in the news a bit lately.”

  “Clever boy. That’s the one. Population about four point eight million. Area about seven thousand square miles. Chief resources: bauxite, limestone, aluminium, sugar cane, plus various fruits and spices, fish and a bit of gold, silver and nickel. A lot of tourism, too, or there used to be.”

  “So you’ve been studying Whitaker’s Almanac,” said Banks. “Now what the bloody hell is this all about?”

  A tipsy youth bumped into the table and spilled some of Burgess’s lager. The youth stopped to apologize, but the look Burgess gave him sent him stumbling off into the bright afternoon sunlight before he could get the words out.

  “Fucking lager lout,” Burgess muttered, wiping the beer off the table-top with a handkerchief. “Gone to the dogs, this country. Where was I? Oh, yes. St Corona. Imports just about everything you need to live, including the machinery to make it. Lots of television sets, radios, fridges, washing machines.” He paused and whistled between his teeth as a young redhead in a mini-skirt walked by. “Now that’s not bad,” he said. “Which reminds me, have you rogered that young redhead in Eastvale yet? You know, the psychologist.” He flicked the stub of his cigar towards the gutter; it hit the wall just above with a shower of sparks.

  Burgess meant Jenny Fuller, as he knew damn well. Banks managed a smile, remembering what happened the last time those two met. “St Corona,” he said. “You were saying?”

  Burgess pouted. “You’re no fun. Know who the president is?”

  “What is this, bloody ‘Mastermind’? Martin Churchill. Now, if you’ve got something to tell me, get it off your chest and let me go home. It’s been a long day.”

  “Back to that lovely wife of yours, eh? Sandra, isn’t it? All right, all right. St Corona is a republic, and you’re right, Martin Churchill is president for life. Good name for the job, don’t you think?”

  “I’ve read about him.”

  “Yes, well, the poor sod’s a bit beleaguered these days, what with the opposition parties raking up the muck and the independence and liberation movements going from strength to strength.” He sighed. “I don’t know. It seems people just don’t believe in a good old benevolent dictatorship any more.”

  “Benevolent, my arse,” said Banks. “He’s been bleeding the country dry for ten years and now they’re closing in on him. What am I supposed to do, cry?”

  Burgess glared at Banks through squinting eyes. “Still the bloody pinko, huh? Still the limp-wristed, knee-jerking liberal?” He sighed. “Somehow, Banks, I hadn’t expected you to change. That’s partly why I’m here. Anyway, whatever you or I might think about it, the powers that be decided it was a good idea to have a stable government in that part of the world, someone we could trust. Of course, it doesn’t seem quite so important now, with the Russkies swapping their rusty old atomic warheads for turnips, but other threats exist. Anyway, Britain, France, Canada, the States and a few others pumped millions into St Corona over the years, so you can estimate how important it is to us.”

  Banks listened intently. There could be no rushing Burgess; he would get where he was going in his own sweet time.

  “Churchill’s finished,” Burgess went on with a sweeping hand gesture. “It’s just a matter of time. Weeks … months. He knows it. We know it. The only thing now is for him to get out alive with his family while he still can and take up life in exile.”

  “And he wants to come here?”

  Burgess looked around at the chess players and The Headrow. “Well, I don’t think he’s got the north of England in mind specifically, but you’re on the right track. Maybe a nice little retirement villa in Devon or Cornwall, the English Riviera. Somewhere where the weather’s nice. Cultivate his herbaceous borders. Live out his days in the contemplation of nature. Prepare himself for the life hereafter. Make his peace with the Almighty. That kind of thing. Somewhere he won’t do any more harm.”

  Burgess lit another little cigar and spat out a flake of loose tobacco. “The Yanks have said no, but then they’ve got a good record of turning their backs on their mates. The French are dithering and jabbering and waving their arms about, as usual. They’d probably sneak him in the back door like the good little hypocrites they are, if they had any real incentive left. And the Canadians … well, they’re just too fucking moral for their own good. The bottom line, Banks, is that there’s a lot of pressure on our government to take him in, as quietly as possible, of course.”

  “Sneak him in the back door, you mean, like the hypocritical French?”

  “If you like.”

  “His human rights record is appalling,” Banks said. “The infant mortality rate in St Corona is over fifteen per cent, for a start. Life expectancy isn’t much more than fifty for a man and sixty for a woman.”

  “Oh, dear, dear. You’ve been reading The Guardian again, haven’t you, Banks?”

  “And other papers. The story’s the same.”

  “Well, you should know better than to believe all you read in the papers, shouldn’t you?” Burgess looked around conspiratorially and lowered his voice. Nobody seemed in the least bit interested in them. Laughter and fragments of conversation filled the air. “Have you ever wondered,” he said, “why women always seem to have a higher life expectancy rate than men? Don’t they have as many bad habits as we do? Maybe they just don’t work as hard, don’t suffer as much stress? Maybe it’s all that slimming and aerobics, eh? Maybe there’s something in it.

  “Anyway, back to Mr Churchill’s predicament. And this is classified, by the way. There are some people in power who want him here, who feel we owe him, and there are some who don’t, who feel he’s a low-life scumbag and deserves to die as slowly and painfully as possible.” As usual, Burgess liked to show off his American slang. He went to the States often, on “courses.”

  “Oh, come off it,” said Banks. “If they want him here it’s not out of any sense of duty, it’s because he’s got something they want, or because he’s got something on them.”

  Burgess scratched his cheek. “Cynic,” he said. “But you’re partly right. He’s not a nice man. As far as I can gather he’s a glutton, a boor, a murderer and a rapist, sodomy preferred. But that’s not the issue at all. The problem is that we educated him, made him what he is. Eton and Cambridge. He read law there. Did you know that? He went through school and university with a lot of important people, Banks. Cabinet ministers, bankers, power brokers, back-room boys. You know how people can behave indiscreetly when they’re young? Do things they wouldn’t want to come back and haunt them when they’re in the public eye? And we’re talking about people who have the power to loosen the government purse strings now and then, whenever St Corona asks for more aid. And rumour has it that he’s also got quite a nice little savings account that won’t do our economy any harm at all.”

  “Let me guess,” said Banks. “Laundered money?”

  Burgess raised his eyebrows. “Well, of course. Which brings me to the murder of Keith Rothwell. You are senior field investigator, I understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s why I thought I’d better deal with you in person. I know you, Banks. You’re still a pinko liberal, as you’ve proved time and time again. In fact, as soon as they told me you were on the case, I thought, ‘Oh, fuck we’re in trouble.’ You’ve no respect for the venerable institutions of government, or for the necessity of secrecy in some
of their workings. You’ve got no respect for tradition and you don’t give a toss about preserving the natural order of things. You probably don’t even stand up for ‘God Save the Queen.’ In short, you’re a bloody bolshie troublemaker and a menace to national security.”

  Banks smiled. “Thanks for the compliment,” he said. “But I wouldn’t go quite that far.”

  Burgess grinned. “Maybe I exaggerate. But you get my point?”

  “Loud and clear.”

  “Good. That’s why I’m going to tell you something very, very important and very, very secret, and I’m going to trust you with it. We’ve been keeping an eye on the St Corona situation, and anything that could possibly have to do with Martin Churchill gets flagged. Now, we just got a report from your Fraud Squad late yesterday evening that they found something on Keith Rothwell’s computer that indicates he may have been laundering money for Martin Churchill. Lots of trips to the Channel Islands and the Caribbean. Some very dodgy bank accounts. Some very dodgy banks, too, for that matter. Anyway, there’s a pattern and a time period that matches exactly the sort of thing we’ve been looking for. We’ve known this was going on for some time, but until now we hadn’t a clue who was doing it. There’s no proof it was Rothwell, yet—the Fraud Squad still has a lot of work to do, chasing down transactions and what have you—but if I’m right, then we’re talking about a lot of money. Something in the region of thirty or forty million pounds over three or four years. Mostly money that was originally provided as aid by leading western nations. It’s the same kind of thing Baby Doc did in Haiti.”

  “And you think this might have something to do with Rothwell’s murder?”

  Burgess shook his head. “I don’t really know, but the odds are that there’s some kind of connection, don’t you think? Especially considering the way he was killed. I mean, it was hardly a domestic, was it?”

  “Possibly,” Banks agreed. “Do you have any leads on the killers?”

  “No more than you. I’m only suggesting that Churchill might be behind them.”

  “And if he is?”

  “Watch your back.”

  Banks thought about that for a moment. He wasn’t sure who constituted the greatest threat to his exposed back, Churchill or Burgess. “I must say this is pretty quick work on your part,” he said.

  Burgess shrugged. “Like I said, orders to flag. When I called your station, Superintendent Gristhorpe told me where you were. I missed you at the solicitor’s office, but the secretary told me you were coming here.”

  “What’s Daniel Clegg’s connection with all this?”

  “We don’t know yet. We don’t even know if there is one. I only just found out about his disappearance. It’s early days yet.”

  “Two other men have been looking for him, too. One black, one white. Are they your lot?”

  Burgess frowned. “No, they’re nothing to do with me.”

  “Know anything about them?”

  “No.”

  He was lying, Banks was certain. “So why are you here?” he asked. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Nothing. Just carry on as normal. I simply wanted to warn you to tread very carefully, that’s all, that things might be more complicated than they appear on the surface. And to let you know there’s help available if you want it, of course. Naturally, if you get close to uncovering the killers’ identities, I’d be interested in talking to them.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m interested in everything to do with Martin Churchill, as I told you.” Burgess looked at his watch. “Good lord, is that the time already?” he said, then knocked back the rest of his pint, winked and stood up. “Got to be off now. Be seeing you.” And he strutted off over the square towards Park Row.

  Banks lit a cigarette and brooded over the meeting as he finished his pint, wondering what the hell the bastard was up to. He didn’t trust Burgess as far as he could throw him, and he was convinced that all that stuff about offering help and giving a friendly warning was rubbish. Burgess was up to something.

  At a guess, he wanted to be one of the first to get to the killers so he could find a way of hushing them up. The last thing he would want was a big story about Churchill hiring assassins to murder a Yorkshire accountant splashed all over the press. Churchill might well be up to much worse things on St Corona, but this was England, after all.

  Still, no matter what Burgess suspected, and whether or not Martin Churchill was behind it all, Banks still had two killers to find, locals by the sound of them, and he wasn’t going to do that by sitting around in Stumps fretting about Dirty Dick Burgess.

  IV

  Banks didn’t expect to find anything new in Calvert’s Headingley flat, but for some reason he felt the need to revisit the place after he had picked up the Khachaturian compact disc.

  West Yorkshire police had talked to the other tenants, who all said they knew nothing about Mr Calvert or Keith Rothwell: they never really saw much of him; he was out a lot; and, yes, now you mention it, there was a resemblance, but it was only a newspaper photo and Mr Calvert didn’t look quite the same; besides, Calvert wasn’t an Eastvale accountant, was he? He lived in Leeds. Couldn’t argue with that. Banks headed upstairs.

  The only immediate difference he noticed was the thin layer of fingerprint powder on surfaces of metal or glass: around the gas fireplace, on the glass-topped coffee-table and the TV set.

  This time, Banks examined the books more closely. There weren’t many, and most of them were the usual best-seller list paperbacks: Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler, Ken Follett, Robert Ludlum. There was also some espionage fiction—Len Deighton, John le Carré, Adam Hall, Ian Fleming—plus a couple of Agatha Christies and an oddly out-of-place copy of Middlemarch, which looked unread. Hardly surprising, Banks thought, having given up on even the television adaptation. The only other books were Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, the first part of William Manchester’s Churchill biography and a Concise Oxford Dictionary.

  The small compact disc collection concentrated entirely on jazz, mostly Kenny Ball, Acker Bilk and a few collections of big-band music. Banks noticed some decent stuff: Louis, Bix, Johnny Dodds, Bud Powell. On the whole, though, judging from the Monet print over the fireplace, the Palgrave and the music, Robert Calvert had agreed with Philip Larkin about the evils of Parker, Pound and Picasso.

  In the bedroom, all the papers had been removed from the desk, as had the wallet with the Calvert identification and credit card. The Fraud Squad would be working already on Calvert’s financial profile, now they knew that he and Rothwell were one and the same. The magazines and coins were still there, the bed still unmade.

  Why had Rothwell needed Calvert? Banks wondered. Simple escapism? According to what everyone said, he was a different person altogether at Arkbeck Farm and in the wider community of Swainsdale. Most people there spoke of him as a rather dull chap, maybe a bit henpecked.

  Then there was Robert Calvert, the dancing, gambling, laughing, fun-loving Lothario and dreamer. The man who had attracted and bedded the beautiful Pamela Jeffreys. The man who squeezed his toothpaste tube in the middle.

  So which was the real Keith Rothwell? Both or neither? In a sense, Banks guessed, he needed both worlds. Did that make him a Jekyll and Hyde figure? Did it mean he was mad? Banks didn’t think so.

  He remembered Susan’s account of her interview with Laurence Pratt, in which Pratt had indicated that Rothwell had changed over the years, cut himself off, penned himself in. Perhaps he had once been the kind of person who liked gambling, dancing and drinking. Then he had been pushed into marriage with the boss’s daughter, and marriage had changed him. It happened often enough; people settled down. But, for some reason, Rothwell had felt the need for an outlet, one that would not interfere with his family life, or with his local image as a respectable, decent citizen.

  Banks could think of one good reason why it was important for Rothwell to maintain this fiction: Rothwell was a crook. He certainly didn’t want to draw
attention to himself by high living. As Calvert, he could relive his youth as much as he wished and enjoy the proceeds of his money-laundering. Perfect.

  Did Mary Rothwell know about her husband’s other life? She had probably suspected something was wrong time and time again over the last few years, but denied and repressed the suspicions in order to maintain the illusion of happy, affluent family values in the community. She probably needed to believe in the lies as much as her husband needed to live them.

  But you can only maintain an illusion for so long, Banks thought, then cracks appear and the truth seeps in. You can ignore that for a long time, too, but ultimately the wound begins to fester and infect everything. That’s when the bad things start to happen. Did Alison know? Or Tom? It would be interesting to meet the lad.

  He looked through the wardrobe and dresser drawers again. Most of Calvert’s clothes were still there, though the condoms had gone. Genuine scientific testing, Banks wondered, or a Scene-of-Crime Officer with a hot date and no time to get to the chemist’s?

  He looked under chairs, under the bed, on top of the wardrobe, in the cistern, and in all the usual hiding places before he realized that Vic Manson and his lads had probably already done most of that, even though the flat wasn’t a crime scene per se, and that he didn’t know what he was looking for anyway. He paused by the front window, which looked out onto a tree-lined side-street off Otley Road.

  Fool, he told himself. He had been looking for Keith Rothwell in Robert Calvert’s flat. But he wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere; he was just a slab of chilled meat waiting for a man with his collar on the wrong way around to chant a few meaningless words that might just ease the living’s fear of death until the next time it touched too close to home for comfort.