Final Account Read Free Page B

my mouth … I just couldn’t make a sound …” She ran her sleeve across her eyes again and sniffled. Banks gestured to PC Weaver, who found a box of tissues on the window-sill and brought them over.
    â€œThank you,” Alison said. “I’m sorry.”
    â€œYou don’t have to go on if you don’t want,” Banks said. “It can wait till tomorrow.”
    â€œNo. I’ve started. I want to. Besides, there’s not much more to tell. They tied Mum up the same as me and we sat there facing each other. Then they went outside with Dad. Then we heard the bang.”
    â€œHow long between the time they went out and the shot?”
    Alison shook her head dreamily. She held the mug up close to her throat. The sleeves of her sweatshirt had slipped down, and Banks could see the raw, red lines where the rope had cut into her flesh. “I don’t know. It seemed like a long time. But all I can remember is we just sat looking at each other, Mum and me, and we didn’t know what was happening. I remember a night-bird calling somewhere. Not a curlew. I don’t know what it was. And it seemed like forever, like time just stretched out and Mum and I got really scared now looking at one another not knowing what was going on. Then we heard the explosion and … and it was like it all snapped and I saw something die in Mum’s eyes, it was so, so …” Alison droppedthe mug, which clipped the corner of the table then fell and spilled without breaking on the floor. The sobs seemed to start deep inside her, then she began to shake and wail.
    Banks went over and put his arms around her, and she clung onto him for dear life, sobbing against his chest.
    III
    â€œIt looks like his office,” Banks said, when Gristhorpe turned on the light in the last upstairs room.
    Two large desks formed an L-shape. On one of them stood a computer and a laser printer, and on a small table next to them stood a fax machine with a basket attached at the front for collecting the cut-off sheets. At the back of the computer desk, a hutch stood against the wall. The compartments were full of boxes of disks and software manuals, mostly for word-processing, spreadsheets and accounting programmes, along with some for standard utilities.
    The other desk stood in front of the window, which framed a view of the farmyard. Scene-of-Crime officers were still going about their business down there: taking samples of just about everything in sight, measuring distances, trying to get casts of footprints, sifting soil. In the barn, their bright arc lamps had replaced Darby’s roving light.
    This was the desk where Rothwell dealt with handwritten correspondence and phone calls, Banks guessed. There was a blotter, which looked new—no handy wrong-way-around clues scrawled there—a jam-jar full of pens and pencils, a blank scratch-pad, an electronic adding machine of the kind that produces a printed tape of its calculations and an appointment calendar open at the day of the murder, 12th May.
    The only things written there were “Dr Hunter” beside the 10:00 A . M . slot, “Make dinner reservation: Mario’s, 8:30 P . M .” Below that, and written in capitals all across the afternoon, “FLOWERS?” Banks had noticed a vase full of fresh flowers in the living-room. An anniversary present? Sad when touching gestures like that outlive the giver. He thought of Sandra again, and suddenly he wanted very much to be near her, to bridge the distance that had grown between them, to hold her and feel her warmth. He shivered.
    â€œAll right, Alan?” Gristhorpe asked.
    â€œFine. Someone just walked over my grave.”
    â€œLook at all this.” Gristhorpe pointed to the two metal filing cabinets and the heavy-duty shelves that took up the room’s only long, unbroken wall. “Business records, by the looks of it. Someone’s going to have to sift through it.” He