Final Account

“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 harbor looking for fish. “Another Grölsch?” he asked.

There was still an inch left in the bottle. “No,” said Banks. “Not yet.”

Rothwell sighed. “You have to go back about eighteen months to understand, to when I first started using the Robert Calvert identity. Daniel and I were doing fine laundering Churchill’s money, and he allowed us a decent percentage for doing so. I was getting rich quick. I suppose I should have been happy, but I wasn’t. I don’t know exactly when I first became aware of it, but life just seemed to have lost its savor, its sweetness. Things started to oppress me. I felt like I was shrivelling up inside, dying, old before my time. Call it mid-life crisis, I suppose, but I couldn’t see the point of all that bloody money.

“All Mary wanted was her bridge club, more renovations, additions to the house, jewelry, expensive holidays. Christ, I should have known better than to marry the boss’s daughter, even if I did get her pregnant. One simple mistake, that and my own bloody weakness. What was it the philosopher said about the erect penis knowing no conscience? That may be so, but it certainly understands penitence, regret, remorse. One bloody miserable, uncomfortable screw in the back of an Escort halfway up Crow Scar set me on a course straight to hell. I’m not exaggerating. Twenty-one years. After that long, my wife hated me, my children hated me, and I was begi

Banks noticed that Rothwell had picked up the empty Pepsi tin and started to squeeze until it buckled in his grip.

“Then I realized I was handling millions of pounds – literally, millions – and that my job was essentially to clean it and hide it ready for future use. It wasn’t difficult to find a few hiding places of my own. Small amounts at first, then, when no one seemed to miss it, more and more. Shell companies, numbered accounts, dummy corporations, property. I liked what I was doing. The manipulation of large sums of money intrigued me and excited me like nothing else, or almost nothing else. Just for the sake of it, much of the time. Like art for art’s sake.

“I began to spend more time away from home on ‘business.’ Nobody cared one way or another. They never asked me where I’d been. They only asked for more money for a new kitchen or a sun-porch or a bloody gazebo. When I was home, I walked around like a zombie – the dull, boring accountant, I suppose – and mostly kept to my office or nipped out to the pub for a smoke and a jar occasionally. I had plenty of time to look back on my life, and though I didn’t like a lot of what I saw, I remembered I hadn’t always been so bloody bored or boring. I used to go dancing, believe it or not. I used to like a flutter on the horses now and then. I had friends. Once in a while, I liked to have too much to drink with the lads and stagger home singing, happy as a lark. That was before life came to resemble an accounts ledger – debits and credits, profit and loss, with far too much on the loss side.” He sighed. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like another beer?”

“Go on, then,” Banks said. His bottle was empty now.

Rothwell brought back a Pepsi for himself and another Grölsch for Banks. His glasses had slipped down over the bridge of his nose and he pushed them back.

“So I invented Robert Calvert,” Rothwell said after a sip of Pepsi.

“Where did you get the name?”

“Picked it from a magazine I was reading at the time. With a pin. The Economist, I believe.”

“Go on.”

“I rented the flat, bought new clothes, more casual. God, you’ve no idea how strange it felt at first. Good, but strange. There were moments when I really did believe I was going mad, turning into a split personality. It became a kind of compulsion, an addiction, like smoking. I’d go to the bookie’s and put bets on, spend a day at the races, go listen to trad jazz in smoky pubs – the Adelphi, the George, the Duck and Drake – something I hadn’t done since my early twenties. I’d go around in jeans and sweatshirts. And nobody back at Arkbeck Farm ever asked where I’d been, what I’d been doing, as long I turned up every now and then in my business suit and the money kept coming in for a new freezer, a first edition Brontë, a Christmas trip to Hawaii. After a while I realized I wasn’t going mad, I was just becoming myself, returning to the way I was before I let life grind me down.

“And, sure enough, the money kept coming in. I had tapped into an endless supply, or so I thought. So I played the family role part of the time, and I started exploring my real self as Robert Calvert. I had no idea where it would lead, not then. I was just trying out ways of escape. I told Daniel Clegg one night when we’d had a few, and he thought it was a wild idea. I had to tell someone and I couldn’t tell my family or Pratt or anyone local, so why not tell my blackmailer, my confidant? He helped me get a bank account and credit card as Calvert, which he thought gave him an even stronger hold over me. He could always claim he’d been deceived, you see.”

“What about the escape?”

“You’re jumping ahead a bit, but as I’d already created Robert Calvert successfully enough, it wasn’t very difficult to go on from there and create a third identity: David Norcliffe. As you no doubt know, seeing as you’re here. Rothwell was dead, and I couldn’t go as Calvert. I had to leave him behind; that was part of the plan. So I shuffled more money into various bank accounts in various places over a period of several weeks. After all, that’s what I do best. I’ve laundered and hidden millions for Churchill and his wife.”

“How much for yourself?”

“Three or four million,” he said with a shrug. “I don’t know exactly. Enough, anyway, to last us our lifetime. And there was plenty left in Eastvale for my family. They’re well provided for in the will and by the life insurance. I made sure of that. Believe me, they’ll be better off without me.”

“What about Daniel Clegg? What about Pamela Jeffreys?”

“Pamela? What about her?”

Banks told him.

He put his head in his hands. “Oh, my God,” he said. “I would never have hurt Pamela… It wasn’t meant to be like that.”

“How did you meet her?”

Rothwell sipped some more Pepsi and rubbed the back of his hand across his brow. “I told you the Calvert thing felt very strange at first. Mostly, I just used to walk around Leeds in my jeans and sweatshirt. I’d drop in at a pub now and then and enjoy being someone else. Occasionally, I got chatting to people, the way you do in pubs. I’ll never forget how frightening and how exciting it was the first time someone asked me my name and I said ‘Robert Calvert.’ I knew it was still me – you have to understand that – we’re not really talking about a split personality here. I was Keith Rothwell, all right, just playing a part, or trying to find himself, perhaps. It gave me an exhilarating sense of freedom.

“Anyway, as I said, I used to drop in at pubs now and then, mostly in the city center or up in Headingley, near the flat. One night I saw Pamela in The Boulevard – you know, the tarted-up Jubilee Hotel on The Headrow. It seemed a likely place to meet women. They stay open till midnight on weekends and they’ve got a small dance-floor. Pamela was with some friends. They’d been doing something at the Town Hall, a Handel oratorio, or something like that. Anyway, something happened, some spark. We caught one another’s eye.

“She wasn’t with anyone in particular. I mean, she didn’t seem to have a boyfriend with her. The next time she was at the bar, I made sure I got there, too, next to her, and we got chatting. I wasn’t a great fan of classical music, but Pamela’s a down-to-earth sort of person, not a highbrow snob or anything. I asked her to dance. She said yes. We just got on, that’s all. We slept together now and then, but both of us knew it was just a casual relationship really. I don’t mean to denigrate it by saying that. We had a wonderful time. I was astounded she fancied me. Flattered. It was the first time in my entire marriage that I’d been with another woman, and the hell of it was that I didn’t feel guilty at all. She was fun to be with, and we had a great time, but we weren’t in love.”