Dry Bones That Dream, page 29
‘No, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.’
‘They left the gun in his hand for me to see. Procedure is that you disarm a suspect first thing, whether you think he’s dead or not.’
‘Well, hurray for you, Sherlock. Don’t you think they might have got careless in the heat of the moment?’
‘No. Not with their training.’
‘But it doesn’t matter, does it? You weren’t there, officially, were you? In fact you were ordered to stay on the ground floor. Anyway, I don’t think we need to go into all that tiresome stuff, do we? Do you really want me to have to pull rank? Believe it or not, I like you, Banks. Life would be a lot duller without you. I wouldn’t want to see you throw your career down the tubes over this. Take my word for it, nobody will take kindly to your rocking the boat. The official verdict is the only one that counts.’
‘Not to me.’
‘Leave it alone, Banks. It’s over.’
‘Why does everyone keep telling me that?’
‘Because it’s true. One more thing. And don’t interrupt me. We found an address book in Jameson’s stuff and it led us to an old ex-army crony of his called Donald Pembroke. Ring any bells?’
‘No.’
‘Anyway, it seems this Pembroke just inherited a lot of money, according to his neighbour. The first thing he did was buy a fast sports car, cash down according to the salesman. Two days later he lost control on a B road in Kent – doing eighty or ninety by all accounts – and ran it into a tree.’
‘And?’
‘And he’s dead, isn’t he? What’s more, there’s no way you can put it down to me. So don’t say there’s no justice in the world, Banks. Goodbye. Have a good life.’ Burgess hung up abruptly, leaving Banks to glare into the receiver. He slammed it down so hard that Sergeant Rowe popped his head around the door. ‘Everything all right, sir?’
‘Yes, fine,’ said Banks. He took a deep breath and ran his hand through his short hair. ‘Everything’s just bloody fine and dandy.’ He sat in the empty office gaining control of his breathing. Susan’s words echoed in his mind. ‘It’s not over yet, is it, sir?’ No, it bloody well wasn’t.
17
ONE
Banks sat at a taverna by the quayside sipping an ice-cold Beck’s and smoking a duty-free Benson and Hedges Special Mild. When he had finished his cigarette, he popped a dolmas into his mouth and followed it with a black olive. One or two of the locals, mostly mustachioed and sun-leathered fishermen, occasionally glanced his way during a pause in their conversation.
It was a small island, just one village built up the central hillside, and though it got its share of tourists in season, none of the big cruise ships came. Banks had arrived half an hour ago on a regular ferry service from Piraeus and he needed a while to collect his thoughts and get his land-legs back again. He had a difficult interview ahead of him, he suspected. He had already contacted the Greek police. Help had been offered, and the legal machinery was ready to grind into action at a word. But Banks had something else he wanted to try first.
By Christ, it was hot, even in the shade. The sun beat down from a clear sky, a more intense, more saturated blue than Banks had ever seen, especially in contrast to the white houses, shops and tavernas along the quayside. A couple of sailboats and a few fishing craft were moored in the small harbour, bobbing gently on the calm water. It was hard to describe the sea’s colour; certainly there were shades of green and blue in it, aquamarine, ultramarine, but in places it was a kind of inky blue, too, almost purple. Maybe Homer was right when he called it ‘wine-dark’, Banks thought, remembering his conversation with Superintendent Gristhorpe before the trip. Banks had never read The Odyssey, but he probably would when he got back.
He paid for his food and drink and walked out into the sun. On his way, he popped into the local police station in the square near the harbour, as promised, then set off along the dirt track up the hill.
The main street itself was narrow enough, but every few yards a side street branched off, narrower still, all white, cubist, flat-roofed houses with painted shutters, mostly blue. Some of the houses had red pantile roofs, like the ones in Whitby. Many people had put hanging baskets of flowers out on the small balconies, a profusion of purple, pink, red and blue, and lines of washing hung over the narrow streets. By the roadside were poppies and delicate lavender flowers that looked like morning glories.
Mingled with the scents of the flowers were the smells of tobacco and wild herbs. Banks thought he recognized thyme and rosemary. Insects with red bodies and transparent wings flew around him. The sun beat relentlessly. Before Banks had walked twenty yards, his white cotton shirt stuck to his back. He wished he had worn shorts instead of jeans.
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?’
TWO
‘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 iced water and a bottle of Grolsch 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 grey 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 colour 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 pen-pusher 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 any more. 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?’
‘Humour 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 colour. 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 per cent 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 lunchtime, 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.
‘It was perfect. Daniel knew him, too, of course, and he told me that Jameson had even approached him for some legal help once, shortly after we met. I thought if you found out anything, that would be it. He might have had something in his files. You know how lawyers hoard every scrap of paper. But there was nothing linking Jameson to me. It would only reinforce what you suspected already, that Daniel had had me killed instead of the other way round. You weren’t to know that I was with Daniel the day we met Jameson, or that I’d chatted with Jameson on a number of subsequent occasions.’
‘So you and Clegg were pals? Socialized together, did you?’
Rothwell paused. A muscle by his jaw twitched. ‘No. It wasn’t quite like that,’ he said quietly. ‘Daniel had a hold over me, but sometimes he seemed to want to play at being boozing buddies. I didn’t understand it, but at least for a while we could bury our differences and have a good time. The next day it would usually be back to cold formality. At bottom, Daniel was a terrible snob. Been to Cambridge, you know.’
‘How much did you pay Jameson?’
‘Fifty thousand pounds and a plane ticket to Rio. I know it’s a lot, but I thought the more I paid him the more likely he’d be to disappear for good with it and not get caught.’
‘First mistake.’
‘How did it happen?’
Banks told him about the wadding and about Jameson’s attitude to the world beyond Calais. Rothwell laughed, then stared at the sea again. ‘I knew it was a risk,’ he said. ‘I suppose I should have known, the way he used to go on about the Irish and the Frogs sometimes. But if you have a dream you have to take risks for it, pay a price, don’t you?’
‘You needn’t try to justify your actions to me,’ said Banks, finally feeling steady and cool enough to light a cigarette. He offered one to Rothwell, who accepted. ‘I was the one left to clean up your mess. And Jameson killed one policeman and seriously wounded another trying to escape.’ The fan drew their smoke up to it, then pushed it towards the windows.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’ll bet you are.’
‘It wasn’t my fault, what Jameson did, was it? You can’t blame me.’
‘Can’t I? Let’s get back to your relationship with Daniel Clegg. How did you get involved?’
‘We met in the George Hotel, on Great George Street. It was about four years ago. A year or so after I left Hatchard and Pratt, anyway. Expenses were high, what with renovations to Arkbeck and everything else, and business wasn’t exactly booming, though I wasn’t doing too badly. They have jazz at the George on Thursdays, and as I was in Leeds on business, I thought I’d drop by rather than watch television in the hotel room. It turns out we were both jazz fans. We just got talking, that’s all.
‘I didn’t tell him very much at first, except that I was a freelance financial consultant. He seemed interested. Anyway, we exchanged business cards and he put a bit of work my way, off-shore banking, that sort of thing. Turns out some of it was a bit shady, though I wasn’t aware at the time – not that I mightn’t have done it, anyway, mind you – and he brought that up later, in conversation.’
‘He put pressure on you?’
‘Oh, yes.’ Rothwell paused and looked Banks in the eye. ‘A smooth blackmailer, was Danny-boy. I suppose you know about my bit of bad luck at Hatchard and Pratt’s, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘That was five years ago. We’d just moved into Arkbeck then and we couldn’t really afford it. Not that the mortgage itself was so high, but the place had been neglected for so long. There was so much needed doing, and I’m no DIY expert. But Mary wanted to live there, so live there we did. The upshot was that I had to pad the expenses a little. If I hadn’t been married to the boss’s daughter, and if Laurence Pratt hadn’t been a good friend, things could have gone very badly for me at the firm then. As it was, after I left I didn’t have a lot of work at first, and Mary . . . well, that’s another story. Let’s just say she doesn’t have a forgiving nature. One night, in my cups, I hinted to Daniel about what had happened, how I had parted company with Hatchard and Pratt.
‘Anyway, later, Daniel used what he knew about me as leverage to get me involved when his old college friend Martin Churchill first made inquiries about rearranging his finances. That was a little over three years back. See, he knew he couldn’t handle the task by himself, that he needed my expertise. He told me he could still report me to the board, that it wasn’t too late. Well, maybe they would have listened to him, and maybe they wouldn’t. Who knows now? Quite frankly, I didn’t care. I already knew a bit about money-laundering, and it looked to me like a licence to print money. Why wouldn’t I want in? I think Daniel just enjoyed manipulating people, having power over them, so I didn’t spoil his illusion. But he really wasn’t terribly bright, wasn’t Danny-boy, despite Cambridge.’
‘A bit like Frankenstein and the monster, isn’t it?’
Rothwell smiled. ‘Yes, perhaps. And I suppose you’d have to say that the monster far outstripped his creator, though you could hardly say the good doctor himself was without sin.’
‘How did you arrange it all? The murder, the escape?’
Rothwell emptied his tin, put it on the table and leaned back. The chair creaked. Outside, gulls cried as they circled the harbour looking for fish. ‘Another Grolsch?’ he asked.
There was still an inch left in the bottle. ‘No,’ said Banks. ‘Not yet.’
