Final Account

by Peter Robinson

  Banks felt Waltham turn and stare at him. If Judd had seen Banks and Susan visit Pamela Jeffreys on Saturday, then he obviously didn’t miss much—morning, afternoon or evening. Banks thanked him.

  “We’ll get someone to take a statement soon, Mr Judd,” said Waltham.

  “All right, son,” said the old man, turning back to his allotment. “I won’t be going anywhere except my final resting place, and that’ll be a few months off, God willing. I only wish I could have been more help.”

  “You did fine,” said Banks.

  “What the bloody hell was all that about, sir?” Waltham asked as they walked away. “You didn’t tell me you’d been here before.”

  Banks noticed Ken Blackstone getting out of a dark blue Peugeot opposite the Sikh Temple. “Didn’t have time,” he said to Waltham, moving away. “Later, Sergeant. I’ll explain it all later.”

  II

  Banks and Blackstone sat in an Indian restaurant near Woodhouse Moor, a short drive across the Aire valley from Pamela Jeffreys’s house, drinking lager and nibbling at pakoras and onion bhaji as they waited for their main courses. Being close to the university, the place was full of students. The aroma was tantalizing—cumin, coriander, cloves, cinnamon, mingled with other spices Banks couldn’t put a name to. “Not exactly the Shabab,” Blackstone had said, “but not bad.” A Yorkshire compliment.

  In the brief time they had been there, Banks had explained as succinctly as he could what the hell was going on—at least to the extent that he understood it himself.

  “So why do you think they beat up the girl?” Blackstone asked.

  “They must have thought she knew where Daniel Clegg was, or that she was hiding something for him. They ripped her place up pretty thoroughly.”

  “And you think they’re working for Martin Churchill?”

  “Burgess thinks so. It’s possible.”

  “Do you think it was the same two who visited Clegg’s secretary and his ex-wife?”

  “Yes. I’m certain of it.”

  “But they didn’t beat up either of them, or search their places. Why not?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they were getting desperate by the time they got to Pamela. Let’s face it, they’d found out nothing so far. They must have been frustrated. They felt they’d done enough pussyfooting around and it was time for business. Either that or they phoned their boss and he told them to push harder. They also probably thought she was lying or holding out on them for some reason, maybe something in her manner. I don’t know. Perhaps they’re just racists.”

  Banks shook his head, feeling a sudden ache and rage. He couldn’t seem to banish the image of Pamela Jeffreys at the hands of her torturers: her terror, her agony, the smashed viola. And would her broken fingers ever heal enough for her to play again? But he didn’t know Blackstone well enough to talk openly about his feelings. “They’d been polite but pushy earlier,” he said. “Maybe they just ran out of patience.”

  The main course arrived: a plate of steaming chapatis, chicken bhuna and goat vindaloo, along with a selection of chutneys and raita. They shared out the dishes and started to eat, using the chapatis to shovel mouthfuls of food and mop up the sauce. Blackstone ordered a couple more lagers and a jug of ice water.

  “There is another explanation,” Blackstone said between mouthfuls.

  “What?”

  “That she did know something. That she was involved in the double-cross, or whatever it was. From the quick look I got at her house, I’d agree there’s no doubt they were looking for something. DS Waltham suggested the same thing.”

  “Don’t think I haven’t considered it,” Banks said, carefully piling a heap of the hot vindaloo on a scrap of chapati. “But I’m sure she didn’t even know Clegg.”

  “That’s only what she told you, remember.”

  “Nobody else contradicted her, Ken. Not Melissa Clegg, not the secretary, not even Mr Judd.”

  “Oh, come on, Alan. The old man can’t have seen everything. Nor could the secretary or the ex-wife have known everything. Maybe Clegg never visited her at her home. They could have had some clandestine relationship, met in secret.”

  “Why the need for secrecy? Neither of them was married.”

  “Perhaps because they were involved in some funny business— not necessarily of a sexual nature—and it wouldn’t be good to be seen together. Maybe she was involved in whatever scam Clegg and Rothwell had going?”

  Banks shook his head. “Clegg was a lawyer, Rothwell a financial whiz-kid and Pamela Jeffreys is a classical musician. It just doesn’t fit.”

  “They could have had business interests in common, though.”

  “True. Anything’s possible. But remember, Pamela Jeffreys knew Robert Calvert. She told me they met by chance in a pub. She’d never heard of Keith Rothwell until after his murder, when his photo appeared in the papers. She had no reason to lie. She was even putting herself in an awkward situation by calling us. She needn’t have done so. We hadn’t heard of Robert Calvert and might never have done if it weren’t for her. Usually people want to stay as far away from a murder investigation as they can get. You know that, Ken. Until we find out differently, we have to assume that Calvert was a persona invented by Rothwell, with Clegg’s help, solely for pleasure.”

  Blackstone swallowed a mouthful of bhuna. “I sometimes think I could do with one of those myself,” he said.

  Banks laughed. “Calvert helped Rothwell express another side of his nature, a side he couldn’t indulge at home. Or perhaps it helped him be the way he used to be, relive something he’d lost. As Calvert, he’d have fun gambling and womanizing, and probably subsidizing himself with his illicit earnings from the money-laundering. And Pamela Jeffreys wasn’t his only conquest, you know. There were no doubt others before her, and she was convinced that he’d met someone else, someone he’d really fallen for.”

  “That would upset the apple-cart, wouldn’t it?” said Blackstone.

  Banks stopped chewing for a moment.

  “Alan?” Blackstone said. “Alan, are you all right? I know the curry’s hot, but …”

  “What? Oh, yes. It was just something you said, that’s all. I’m surprised I never thought of it before.”

  “What?”

  “If Calvert really did do it, you know, fall in love, the real thing, with all the bells and whistles, then what would happen to Rothwell?”

  “I don’t get you. It’s the same person, isn’t it?”

  “Yes and no. What I mean is, how could he go on living his Rothwell life, the one we assumed was his real life, at Arkbeck Farm with Mary, Alison and Tom. Forgive me, I’m just thinking out loud, going nowhere. It doesn’t matter.”

  “I do see what you mean,” said Blackstone. “It would bugger up everything, wouldn’t it?”

  “Hmm.” Banks finished his meal and washed away some of the spicy heat with a swig of watery lager. His lips still burned, though, and he felt prickles of sweat on his scalp. The signs of a good curry.

  “Did the suspects in the Jeffreys beating know about Rothwell?” Blackstone asked.

  Banks shook his head. “Don’t know. They haven’t been seen locally, and they certainly don’t match the daughter’s description of his killers.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Alison? Fifteen.”

  “She didn’t see their faces. Could she be wrong?”

  “It’s possible, but not that wrong, I don’t think. Nothing matches.”

  “Just a thought. I mean, if Rothwell and Clegg were in the laundering business together, and whoever they were working for sent a couple of goons to find Clegg and whatever money he’s made off with, you’d think they’d start with Rothwell’s family, wouldn’t you?”

  “Perhaps. But we’ve been keeping too close a watch. They wouldn’t dare show up within twenty miles of Arkbeck Farm.”

  “And another thing: if they killed Rothwell, why did they use different people to chase down Clegg? It seems a bit excessiv
e, doesn’t it?”

  “Again,” said Banks, “I can only guess. I think some of what’s been happening took them by surprise. It’s possible that they asked Clegg to get rid of Rothwell and he hired his own men. As you know, we’re looking into what connections he might have had with criminal types.”

  Blackstone nodded. “I see,” he said. “Then Clegg became a problem and they had to send their own men?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Makes sense. Clegg was a bit of a ladies’ man, you know, according to my DC who talked to his colleagues,” Blackstone said.

  “Yes. His estranged wife, Melissa, suggested as much. Did he have a girlfriend?”

  “Yes. Apparently nothing serious since he split up with his wife. Prefers to play the field. Recently he’s been seeing a receptionist from Norwich Insurance. Name of Marci Lapwing, if you can believe that. Aspiring actress. DC Gaitskill had a word with her this morning. Says she’s a bit of a bimbo with obvious attractions. But he’s a bit of an arsehole himself, is Gaitskill, so I’d take it with a pinch of salt. Anyway, they saw each other the Saturday before Clegg’s disappearance. They went for dinner, then to a nightclub in Harehills. She spent the night with him and he took her home—that’s Seacroft—after a pub lunch out at the Red Lion in Burnsall on Sunday afternoon. She hasn’t seen or heard from him since.”

  “Is she telling the truth?”

  “Gaitskill says so. I’d trust him on that.”

  “Okay. Thanks, Ken.”

  “Clegg had a reserved parking space at the back of the Court Centre. According to what we could find out, he used to eat at a little trattoria on The Headrow after work on Thursdays. The waiters there remember him, all right. Nothing odd about his behaviour. He left about six-thirty or a quarter to seven last Thursday, heading west, towards where his car was parked, and that’s the last sighting we have.”

  “The car?”

  “Red Jag. Gone. We’ve put it out over the PNC along with this.” Blackstone took a photograph from his briefcase and slid it over the tablecloth. It showed the head and shoulders of a man in his early forties, with determined blue eyes, a slightly crooked nose, fair hair and a mouth that had a cruel twist to its left side.

  “Clegg?”

  Blackstone nodded and put the photograph back in his brief-case. “We’ve also been through Clegg’s house in Chapel Allerton. Nothing. Whatever he was up to, he kept it at the office.”

  “Anything on Hamilton and the other car?”

  “The boffins are still working on the car. I pulled Hamilton’s record myself and we had another chat with him at the station this afternoon.” He shook his head. “I can’t see it, Alan. The man’s as thick as two short planks. I don’t think he’s even heard of St Corona, and he’s strictly small fry on the drugs scene. By the time he gets his stuff to sell, it’s been stepped on by just about every dealer in the city.”

  “It was just a thought. Thanks for giving it a try.”

  “No problem. We’ll have another shot in a day or two, just in case. And we’ll keep a discreet eye on him. Look, back to what I was saying before. How do you think the goons knew about Pamela Jeffreys if she wasn’t involved?”

  Banks felt the anger flare up inside him again, but he held it in check. “That’s all too easy,” he said. “Remember, they were also following me around yesterday. I think they started at Clegg’s office first thing yesterday morning and one, or both of them, stayed on my tail until I spotted them outside Calvert’s flat that evening. They didn’t know who the hell I was, and the only other person I met that they hadn’t talked to already was Pamela Jeffreys. They must have thought we were in it together. I met her near the hall where she was rehearsing, and either one of them hung around to follow her home, or they found out some other way who she was and where she lived.

  “She must have looked like their best lead so far. They thought she had some connection with Clegg and that she knew where he was or was holding something for him. Clegg has obviously got something they want. Most likely money. If he was laundering for their boss, then it looks like he might have skipped with a bundle. Either that or he’s got some sort of evidence for blackmail—books, bank account records. And that’s probably what they were looking for when they tore her place apart. Back to square one. The goons worked Pamela over because they thought she knew something, or had something of theirs. She didn’t. And I blame myself. I should have bloody well known I was putting her at risk.”

  “Come off it, Alan. How could you know?”

  Banks shrugged and tapped out a cigarette. He was the only smoker in the entire restaurant and had to ask the waiter specially for an ashtray. It was getting like that these days, he noted glumly. He’d have to stop sometime soon; he knew he was only postponing the inevitable. He had thought about getting a nicotine patch, then quickly dismissed the idea. It was the feel of the cigarette between his fingers he wanted, the sharp intake of tobacco smoke into the lungs, not some slow oozing of poison through his skin into his blood. Pity about the health problems.

  He felt rather like St Augustine must have felt when he wrote in his Confessions: “Give me chastity and continency—but not yet!”

  “You know what really pisses me off?” Banks said after he had lit the cigarette. “Dirty Dick Burgess was following me around that day, too, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he’d seen them outside Melissa Clegg’s shop.”

  “How would he know who they are?”

  “Oh, I think he knows them, all right.”

  “Even so, what could he have done? They hadn’t broken any laws.”

  Banks shrugged. “I suppose not. It’s too bloody late now, anyway,” he said. “Let’s just hope they don’t go back to see Betty Moorhead and Melissa Clegg.”

  “Don’t worry. Charlie Waltham will have them both covered by now. He’s a good bloke, Alan. And he’ll have descriptions of Mutt and Jeff out, too. They won’t get far.”

  “I hope not,” said Banks. “I bloody hope not. I’d like a few minutes alone with them in a quiet cell.”

  III

  Back at the hotel, Banks felt caged. Anger burned inside him like the hot Indian spices, but it would take more than Rennies to quell it. What a bloody fool he’d been to do nothing when he realized he had been followed. He had practically signed Pamela Jeffreys’s death warrant, and it was through no virtue of his that she had survived her ordeal. So far.

  He poured himself a shot of Bell’s and turned on the television. Nothing but a nature programme, a silly comedy, an interview with a has-been politician and an old Dirty Harry movie. He watched Clint Eastwood for a while. He had never much enjoyed cop films or cop programmes on television, but watching right here and now, he could identify with Dirty Harry tracking down the villains and dealing with them his own way. He had meant what he said to Blackstone. A few minutes alone with Pamela Jeffreys’s attackers and they would know what police brutality was all about.

  But he hated himself when he felt that way. Luckily, it was rare. After all, policemen are only human, he reminded himself. They have their loyalties, their lusts, their prejudices, their agonies, their tempers. The problem was that they have to keep these emotions in check to do their jobs properly.

  “You go home and puke in your own time if you want to get anywhere in this job, lad,” one of his early mentors had told him at a grisly crime scene. “You don’t do it all over the corpse. And you go home and punch holes in your own wall, not in the child molester’s face.”

  Unable to concentrate, even on Dirty Harry, he turned off the television. He couldn’t stand up, couldn’t sit down, didn’t know what he wanted to do. And all the time, the anger and pain churned inside him, and he couldn’t find a way to get them out.

  He picked up the phone and dialled the code for Eastvale, then put it down before he started dialling his own number. He wanted to talk to Sandra, but he didn’t think he could explain his feelings to her right now, especially the way they’d been drifti
ng apart of late. God knew, under normal circumstances she was an understanding wife, but this would be pushing it a bit far: a woman he had lusted after, fantasized about, gets beaten within a hair’s breadth of her life, and he’s whipping himself over it. No, he couldn’t explain that to Sandra.

  And it wasn’t just a fantasy. Had things turned out differently, he would have phoned Pamela Jeffreys again and would probably be having dinner or drinks with her right now, plucking up the courage to ask her up to his hotel room, Bell’s at the ready. Well, he would never know the outcome now; his virtue hadn’t even been put to the test. Hadn’t St Augustine said something about that, too, or was that someone else?

  He phoned the hospital, and after a bit of officious rank-pulling, actually got a doctor on the line. Yes, Ms Jeffreys was stable but still in intensive care … no, she was still unconscious … there was no way of telling when or if she would come round … no idea yet if there was any permanent damage. He didn’t feel any better when he hung up.

  It was just after nine-thirty. He knocked back the rest of the glass of Scotch, grabbed his sports jacket and went out. Maybe a walk would help, or the anonymous comfort of a crowded pub, not that he expected Leeds city centre on a Tuesday evening to be the West End.

  He walked along Wellington Street past the National Express coach station and the tall Royal Mail Building to City Square, which was deserted except for the silent nymphs, who stood bearing their torches around the central statue of the Black Prince on his horse. From somewhere along Boar Lane, a drunk shouted in the night; a bottle smashed and a woman laughed loudly.

  Banks crossed City Square. He walked fast, trying to burn off some of his rage, and soon found himself in the empty Bond Street Centre with only his reflection in the shop windows he passed.

  His memories of Leeds’s city centre were vague, but he was sure that somewhere among the jungle of refurbished Victorian arcades and modern shopping centres there were a number of pubs down the dingy back alleys that riddled the heart of the old city centre.

  And he was right.

  The first one he found was an old brass, mirrors and dark wood Tetleys house with a fair-sized crowd and a jukebox at tolerable volume. He ordered a pint and stood sideways at the bar, just watching people chat and laugh. It was mostly a young crowd. Only kids seemed to venture into the city centres at night these days. Perhaps that was why their parents and grandparents stayed away. The pubs in Armley and Bramley, in Headingley and Kirkstall, would be full of locals of all age groups mixed together.