Final Account

“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 pla

“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 anymore. 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?”

“Humor 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 pla

“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 color. 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 percent 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’Do

“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 toward 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 Da

“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 enquiries 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 license 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 Da