“Did you hear anything more?”
“No.” The chair scraped along the stone flags as she stood up. “I’ve got to go, really. Me mum’ll kill me.” And she hurried back behind the bar with surprising agility.
3
“Vic Manson matched prints from the Calvert flat with the ones from the body,” Gristhorpe explained back at the station later that afternoon. “There were a couple of other sets, too, mostly smudged, not on file.”
It was hot, and Banks was standing by the open window of his office. Gristhorpe sat with his feet up on the desk.
“So Rothwell was Calvert and Calvert was Rothwell,” Banks said.
“It certainly looks that way, aye.”
Banks leaned against the window frame and shook his head. “I still can’t believe it. All right, so we know Rothwell had a secretive side to his nature, and he was greedy, or desperate for cash, to the point of dishonesty once. But this Calvert sounds to me like some sort of playboy. If you could have heard Pamela Jeffreys. Casinos, races, dancing… bloody hell. And you should have seen her, the one he chucked over.”
“So you’ve told me already, two or three times at least,” Gristhorpe said with a smile. “A proper bobby-dazzler by the sound of her. I’ll take your word for it.”
“Well, she dazzled this bobby, anyway,” said Banks, sitting opposite Gristhorpe. He sighed. “I suppose we just have to accept it: Rothwell led a double life. Like Alec Guinness in that film about the ship’s captain.”
“The Captain’s Paradise?”
“That’s the one. The question we have to ask ourselves now is what, if anything, does that fact have to do with his murder?”
“Has the girlfriend dazzled you so much you haven’t considered she might have a part to play?”
“The thought’s crossed my mind once or twice, yes. I just can’t see how. Apparently Roth… Calvert found another woman five or six months ago. Pamela Jeffreys seemed to think he’d fallen in love. It’s her we need to find, but she hasn’t come forward yet.”
“There’s always jealousy as a motive, then.”
“I don’t think so. It’s possible, though. Maybe Mary Rothwell found out about him and arranged a hit.”
“I was thinking more about this Pamela Jeffreys.”
“Couldn’t afford it. She’s a classical musician. Besides, she didn’t really strike me as the jealous type. She said Calvert was just fun to be with. They never made any commitments.”
“She could be lying.”
“I suppose so.”
“And don’t forget the possible porn connection. If Rothwell was mixed up with beautiful women, even under another identity, who knows?”
Banks couldn’t believe it, but he didn’t bother protesting to Gristhorpe. “I’ll have to talk to her again anyway,” he said.
“Poor you.”
“What did the Fraud Squad have to say?”
Gristhorpe scratched his hooked nose. “Funny lot, aren’t they?” he said. “I spent a good part of this morning with DI Macmillan. Used to be in banking. Boring little bugger, but you should have seen his eyes light up when he heard about the locked files. Anyway, they’ve had a quick look at the stuff from Arkbeck Farm, and Macmillan and I had another chat about an hour ago. They haven’t much to go on, yet, of course, and they’re as anxious as young Phil for that by-pass software, but Macmillan’s even more excited now.”
“Where has the software got to, by the way?”
“On its way, according to Phil. Apparently they were out of stock but they managed to scrounge around.”
“Sorry. What did Macmillan have to say?”
“Well, he said he won’t know anything for certain until they manage to open some of those locked directories. He thinks that’s where the really interesting stuff is. But even some of the written documents in the filing cabinets gave him enough to suspect Rothwell was heavily into money-laundering or abetting tax evasion. Apparently, there was a fair bit of cryptic correspondence with foreign banks: Liechtenstein, Netherlands Antilles, Jersey, Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, among others. Dead giveaway, Macmillan said.”
“Tax havens,” said Banks. “Isn’t that what they are?”
Gristhorpe held up a finger. “Aha! That was my first thought, too. But they’re only tax havens because they have strict secrecy policies and a very flexible attitude toward whom they take on as their clients.”
“In other words,” offered Banks, “if you want to deposit a lot of money with them, they’ll take it, no questions asked?”
“That’s about it, aye. Within the law, of course. They do insist that they verify the money’s source is legal. When it comes down to it, though, banks are basically run on greed, aren’t they?”
“I won’t argue with that. So Keith Rothwell was putting a lot of money in foreign banks?”
“Macmillan thought he might have been acting for a third party. He could hardly have made that much money himself. It’s a very complicated business. As I said, either he was involved in aiding and abetting some pretty serious tax evasion, or he was part of a money-laundering scheme. There are still more questions than answers.”
“Did Macmillan tell you how this money-laundering business works?” Banks asked.
“Aye, a bit. According to him, it’s basically simple. It’s only in the application it gets complicated. What happens is that somebody gets hold of a lot of money illegally, and he wants it to look legal so he can live off it without raising any suspicions.” Gristhorpe paused.
“Go on,” Banks urged.
Gristhorpe ran his hand through his hair. “Well, that’s about it, really. I told you it was basically simple. Macmillan said it would take forever to explain all the technicalities of doing it. As far as legal money is concerned, he said, you can either earn it, borrow it or receive it as a gift. When you’ve laundered your dirty money, it has to look like it came to you one of those ways.”
“I assume we’re talking about drug money here,” Banks said. “Or the profits from some sort of organized crime – prostitution, pornography, loan sharks?”
Gristhorpe nodded. “You know as well as I do, Alan, that the top cats in the drug trade pull in enormous wads of cash every day. You can’t just walk into a showroom and buy a Rolls in cash without raising a few eyebrows, and the last thing you want is any attention from the police or the Inland Revenue.”
Banks walked over to the window again and lit a cigarette. Most of the cars were gone from the cobbled square now and the hush of an early Sunday evening had fallen over the town. A young woman in jeans and a red T-shirt struck a pose by the ancient market cross as her male companion took a photograph, then they got into a blue Nissan Micra and drove off.