“Well, that’s good,” he said, trying to sound a note of encouragement when it was the opposite of what he really felt.
Not for the first time Peter was aware of a tiny pinprick of doubt on the outer edge of his consciousness. He remembered Anne lying on the sofa in the drawing room with her face knotted in pain. She didn’t look like she was about to go for a walk, but perhaps she felt the air would clear her head. Peter fought down his momentary feeling of unease almost without thinking.
“I won’t need you again today, John,” he said to the chauffeur as he helped his wife out of the car. “Lady Greta and I will be staying in tonight.”
“Very good, sir,” said the chauffeur, touching his peaked cap. Peter could not read his expressionless features. Perhaps he was looking for another job. Scandal does not sit well with men in high places.
Later, lying in bed, Peter could not sleep. Greta was turned away from him with her knees brought up almost to her stomach. She had slept in this fetal position for weeks now, and he could feel the tension in her back even without touching her. Sometimes she cried out strange words and names that made no sense, and he would be struck with how little he really knew his wife. She seemed to have no real friends or relatives; just the half-disabled mother in Manchester that she traveled up to visit every few weeks. Greta’s solitude in the world made Peter even more painfully protective toward her than he might otherwise have been. The trial made him feel that he was letting her down even though he knew that there was nothing he could have done to prevent it. He contrasted the way in which Greta had helped him over the years with his inability to help her now.
He closed his eyes and remembered how she had been there for him when Anne died. It had been just about this time — eleven at night — when the telephone had rung beside the bed and he had answered it, waking blearily from sleep to hear the news that shattered his life. The same telephone was there now less than a yard from his outstretched hand sitting pale and silent in the half darkness.
It was Hearns who made the call. He must have been standing in the drawing room where Peter had been sitting with his wife only four hours before.
“You don’t know me, sir. I’m Detective Sergeant Hearns of the Ipswich Police. I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news. It’s your wife…”
Peter could still remember the exact words Hearns had used. It was like a tape recorder had been turned on in Peter’s brain when he answered the telephone. He could remember Hearns’s tone too. The intrusive, pressing quality of it that he later got to know so well as the policeman pulled his net around Greta, although he couldn’t have closed it without Thomas. Nothing would have happened without Thomas, thought his father bitterly.
Disbelief was the first thing he’d felt after talking to Hearns. Peter remembered how the news seemed to bear no relation to reality. There was no violence in the ordered bedroom where he was standing in a pair of clean pajamas. There were no shouts or screams coming from the quiet street below. Everything was normal, and yet 130 miles away this event had happened. There would have been no call if it hadn’t. He dialed the House of the Four Winds and a policeman answered. Another policeman. Peter put the phone down and felt the panic beginning in his chest, spreading down into his legs as the news seeped through into his brain, overwhelming the pathetic defenses that it had tried to throw up against the horror.
Peter sat down on the end of the bed. He did not cry, but his upper body shuddered convulsively. As he steeled himself against these tremors, a thought came into his mind. It was the thought of Greta. He needed help, he needed not to be alone. He picked up the telephone again and dialed her number.
“Please hold. The person you are calling knows you are waiting,” said the operator’s mechanical voice, once, twice, three times. He put the phone down and the shudders began again. Two minutes later she called him back.
After that it was a blur. He didn’t remember getting dressed or much of how he told Greta or of her reaction. He remembered that her phone had been engaged, though, and he wondered not for the first time who she’d been talking to so late at night.
She’d brought the Range Rover round to the front of the house and insisted on driving. It didn’t seem as if they’d even discussed whether or not she should go; he had just assumed it.
At the last moment he got out of the car and went back into the house, returning a minute later with a half-drunk bottle of whisky. It was almost empty by the time they passed through Carmouth at quarter to two. The little seaside town was deserted, but the lights were on in the police station.
A uniformed policeman with a flashlight stood outside the front gate of the House of the Four Winds. Not that he needed the flashlight. The house was ablaze with lights and Peter could also see spotlights set up away to his left by the north gate and over on the north lawn. There were men in white overalls moving back and forth.
All this, however, was at a distance, seen through the bars of the gate where Greta and he were told to wait. They sat saying nothing, gazing up at the house and the six old yew trees standing in front of it like sentinels. Ineffectual sentinels they had proved to be, Peter thought bitterly.
Two minutes passed and he got out to remonstrate with the policeman.
“I’m sorry, sir. I’ve got orders not to let anyone in. I’ve told Detective Sergeant Hearns you’re here. He won’t be long.”
Peter was too exhausted to be angry. He was just a young man doing his job.
“Where’s my wife? Can you tell me that?” he asked, trying to summon up the voice that he used at work, the voice of a man used to getting his way.
“We’ve moved her, sir. She’s gone to Rowston. You can see her tonight if you want to. I can phone ahead.”
Sergeant Hearns’s voice came out of the darkness beyond the gate, followed immediately by the man himself. He was dressed in a cheap suit that was too small for him. Peter was aware of the stomach pressing against the belt and the sweat from the constricted underarms trickling down the inside of the polyester shirt into the detective’s clammy palms. Peter felt it transmitted onto his skin as he shook Hearns’s hand, and he resisted a sudden urge to wipe his palm on the side of his trousers.
“I’m sorry to meet you under such distressing circumstances,” continued Hearns in the same soft but insistent voice that was already grating on Peter’s overstretched nerves. He had questions himself — he was overflowing with them — but the detective seemed to give him no chance to speak.
They walked back to the open passenger door of the Range Rover and Peter sensed Hearns registering the smell of alcohol on his breath and connecting it with the empty whisky bottle on the floor. Connecting, noting, filing observations, impressions, conversations away in some dirty corner of his mind for later consideration back at the station or in whatever neat little house on the outskirts of Ipswich Hearns called home.
“Hullo, I’m Detective Sergeant Hearns, Ipswich Police,” he said, pushing his clammy hand across the vacant passenger seat in the general direction of Greta’s left breast.
She took his hand, she had no option, and he held it until she’d given him her name and explained her relationship to Peter. He looked at her quizzically for a moment, half raising his thick eyebrows as if wondering to himself why a minister of defense should want to bring his attractive personal assistant to the scene of his wife’s murder. Then he gave her a lugubrious smile that exposed two long yellow teeth in the middle of his mouth and turned back to Sir Peter.
“I’m sure that you’ll want to see your son. He’s with Mr. and Mrs. Marsh across the road. They have been very kind. He went there to raise the alarm after the…” Hearns hesitated, searching for the best word. “The men left. He has been through quite an ordeal, I’m afraid. He was hiding, you see, when they killed Lady Anne. Very unpleasant.”
Peter was trying to digest this new horrific information when he was distracted by a sudden gasp from inside the car. It was Greta. All the color had gone out of her face, and
her eyes were open wide and frightened.
“Oh my God, is he all right?” she cried. “Did they hurt him?”
“They?” repeated Hearns, making the word into a question.
“The killers. You said men a moment ago, and so I assumed there was more than one.”
“Ah,” said Sergeant Hearns. Greta’s explanation made sense. It was the need that she felt to give it that was interesting.
“No, I’m pleased to say that Thomas is physically fine,” he added. “The men didn’t know he was there. He stayed hidden while they ransacked the bedroom. They took all your wife’s jewelry, I’m afraid. His mental state I cannot, of course, answer for. Shall we go?”
Hearns addressed his invitation to Sir Peter, but Greta didn’t wait to be asked herself. She opened the door of the Range Rover and caught up with the detective and her employer by the time that they were halfway across the road.
“I know it’s a bad time, sir,” Hearns was saying, “but perhaps you could help me with just a couple of questions. It’s just so our forensic boys know to look in all the right places.”
“Very well, but make it quick,” said Sir Peter, refusing to slow his pace to match that of the detective. “I want to see my son.”
“It’s that door in the wall, sir. The one leading to that little roadway.”
“The lane.”
“That’s right. Was it locked, as far as you know, when you left?”
“Yes, Mrs. Martin would have locked it. I didn’t go through there after she left. What about you, Greta?”
“No.”
“Thank you, sir. Just one other question. The windows in the study. Did you happen to leave one of them open before you left?”
“No, I was in the drawing room with my wife. Why?”
“It’s just that your son has told us that he found one of them open when he came home at about eight-thirty.”
“Well, it wasn’t me. It could’ve been Greta, I suppose. She was working in there, I think. Wait a minute. I’ll ask her.”
Greta had walked on ahead, and Peter quickened his pace to catch up to her. She was almost at the Marshes’ front door.
“Greta, did you leave the study window open before we left? The detective needs to know.”
She turned around to face him. She looked terrible, he suddenly thought. As if the full force of the tragedy had only just hit her. It was the detective who pressed the question in the insistent voice that Peter found so grating.
“Can you help us, Miss Grahame?” he asked.
She looked cornered, uncertain of what to say, and then, after a moment’s hesitation, she blurted out her answer: “I don’t know. I may have done. It was a warm evening.”
“It certainly was, madam,” said Hearns, moving past her to knock on the door. “A fine summer’s evening.”
The detective did not wait for the door to open but instead turned back toward them. It was Peter he addressed now.
“I’m going back up to the house, Sir Peter. We’re still busy with the forensics, but come and ask for me at the gate when you’re finished here. I can ring forward to the hospital at Rowston, like I said before. I’m very sorry, Sir Peter. Very sorry indeed.”
Peter walked through the open door of the cottage, but he was hardly aware of the man greeting him in the hallway. Christopher Marsh was wrapped up in a dressing gown, making inarticulate sympathetic noises. Nothing could have prepared him or his wife for what had unfolded since they had been woken from sleep four hours earlier by a terrible knocking at the door and had come down to find Thomas crying on the step.
Peter moved past his neighbor, bending at the waist to avoid hitting his head on the low lintel of the living room doorway.
He found Thomas sitting on the sofa next to Grace. She’d thrown a blanket around his shoulders even though it wasn’t cold, and he was holding a mug of tea between his shaking hands. He got awkwardly to his feet just after his father came through the door and spilled half the mug’s contents onto the hearth rug at his feet.
“Tom, I am so sorry,” Peter said, then stopped in midsentence, suddenly aware of the inadequacy of his words to match the significance of the moment in both their lives. He wanted to leap across the ten feet of carpet that separated them and take the boy in his arms, but something held him back. It was as if they didn’t know each other well enough.
And there was no time. Greta came in behind Peter. Lacking the English reserve that afflicted her employer, she took a step toward Thomas, holding her hands out as she did so.
“Oh, Tom, Tom!” she cried, and there were tears in her green eyes.
He stepped back, half falling into the sofa behind him, and then coming forward again almost immediately, he threw his mug at Greta. Perhaps he would have hit her if he hadn’t been off-balance. There was no doubt that that was what he had intended to do. As it was, the mug exploded into fragments as it smashed against the edge of the Marshes’ fireplace, and all that came into contact with Greta was a little of the warm tea splashing out of the mug as it flew past her through the air.
Peter reacted instantly, rushing forward to put himself between Greta and his son, just as he had gotten between Greta and his wife a few weeks earlier. He had no difficulty reacting to violence; it was emotion that held him back.
“Get her out! Get her out!” Thomas screamed the words over and over again, full in his father’s face. Peter felt he would have carried on until his lungs burst if Greta hadn’t backed away out of the door, edging past Christopher Marsh as she did so.
“I’m sorry, Miss Grahame,” said Christopher, following her out onto the front step. “The boy’s not himself. He’ll get over it.”
“No he won’t,” she muttered, pulling her coat up above her shoulders and turning her haggard face away as she walked out into the road. “No he won’t.”
With Greta gone, Thomas fell back onto the sofa, leaving his father standing over him. Grace had moved to the fireplace and begun picking up bits of the shattered mug. She was very fond of Thomas, whom she had known all his life, but her concern for the boy was battling with a longing for all these people to go. She was by nature a timid woman, and the boy’s act of sudden violence had terrified her. She was tired too; it was nearly two-thirty in the morning.
“Why did you do that, Thomas?” His son’s full name came far easier to Peter than the affectionate Tom that he had used when he first came into the room. He persisted when the boy did not answer. “What’s Greta got to do with it? She’s only here to help.”
“She sent that man. He killed my mother.”
“What man?”
“He’s got a scar. I saw him through the hole in the wall.”
“What wall?”
“The bookcase wall when he killed Mummy. When you were in London with her.”
“Yes, Thomas. A man has killed your mother. I don’t know what to say to you. I wish it wasn’t true. I wish I’d been here for her, and for you, but I wasn’t. I just don’t understand what it’s got to do with Greta.”
Thomas breathed deeply and then looked up at his father. It was as if he had time for one final effort at communication before he was sucked back down into the seeping black quagmire into which he’d been pushed.
“I saw the man with the scar before. In London with Greta that first night I came up with Mummy. Greta lied about it. She said she was with her mother, but she wasn’t. She was with that man. I heard them talking down in the basement. She was telling him to wait.”
“Did you see them together? Greta and this man with a scar.”
“He was standing in the street when she came upstairs. He’d have seen me if he’d turned around, but he didn’t. I saw him, though.”
“From behind?”
“That’s right. I could see the scar. And tonight she arranged for me to go and stay with Edward so Mummy would be alone, and then she left the window open. It must have been her.”
Thomas’s voice started to break just after he said his
mother’s name, and he finished speaking in a rush, his voice halfway between a cry and a scream.
“Have you told the detective all this?” asked Peter.
“No, I haven’t. I haven’t spoken to anyone at all except Christy and Grace.”
“He was too upset, Sir Peter,” said Christopher Marsh, who had come back in from outside. “The detective came to the door a couple of hours ago and wanted to know where the men went in the house. Master Thomas told me that he closed the window in the study, and I passed on that and the other details. Sergeant Hearns wanted to make sure the police were looking in all the right places. That’s what he said anyway.”
“Thank you, Christy. You and Grace have been good friends to us tonight. Thomas, I’m going to go and talk to Greta about what you’ve told me. You wait here, and try and get a hold on yourself,” Peter added as he went out of the door.
He found Greta sitting in the Range Rover. She’d moved it away from the gate of the house so that it was now parked farther up the road, away from the lights.
“I need to talk to you, Greta,” he said. They both sat looking forward into the darkness, and he felt the empty whisky bottle under his foot like a reproach. He needed a clear head now more than ever.
“Thomas says that he recognized the man who came to the house tonight. The man who shot Anne. He says that he saw you with him in London.” Peter spoke in a monotone, fastening his eyes on the dark road ahead.
“He’s wrong. It’s not true, Peter. He must have made a mistake. You know me.”
Peter felt the pressure of Greta’s hand on his arm, but he steeled himself to continue.
“Listen, Greta. I’ve got to ask you about this. Try and help me.”
“How can I help you? He’s crazy. You saw him.”
“All right, help me with this. Thomas says he saw you in London, in the house on that first night he was up there with Anne. I was in my constituency, and you had to go up and stay with your mother. Is that true, Greta? Were you in Manchester or were you in London? I need to know.”
There was silence in the car. Peter sat very still waiting for Greta to answer. When eventually she spoke, her voice was soft and sad, regretful almost.
Final Witness Page 15