Final Witness

by Simon Tolkien

  “Yes, Peter, I lied. I wanted to keep it a secret from you, but I shouldn’t have done. I see that now.”

  “Keep what a secret?”

  Peter turned to look at Greta, but she kept her eyes fixed on the darkness ahead.

  “When I was at school in Manchester I met some bad people. I wasn’t like I am now. I’d lived with my parents all those years, and I wanted excitement. I wanted to test things, see how far they would go. I did something I shouldn’t have done, something I feel ashamed of.”

  “What was it?”

  “I don’t want to tell you, Peter. You wouldn’t respect me anymore if I did, and I couldn’t bear that.”

  “That’s crazy, Greta. I wouldn’t turn my back on you because of something that happened in the past, before you knew me. What do you take me for?”

  “A good man. You’re a good man, Peter. I’m not saying you’d turn your back on me; it’s just you wouldn’t like me anymore. You don’t know how important you are to me.”

  Peter wanted to give in. He was tired and half drunk, and he longed for unconsciousness, some time when he wouldn’t have to feel this pain inside. It was under his ribs, trying to get out. But he couldn’t leave it: not after what Thomas had said. Not with his wife dead, lying in a hospital mortuary under a white sheet. Dried blood and the cold, fierce light of the postmortem; the gleam of the pathologist’s scalpel and the photographer waiting in the corner with the witnesses: all these images and more flashed across Peter’s brain and made him go on.

  “You’ve got to tell me, Greta. My wife is dead and I have to know.”

  “You don’t know what you’re asking.”

  Peter could feel Greta’s tension. Her knuckles were white where her hands gripped the steering wheel.

  “No, I don’t know, but you still have to tell me. Was it something criminal?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could it have something to do with what happened here tonight?”

  “No!” Greta’s voice exploded in the car like a pistol shot. “What do you take me for?”

  “I don’t mean you sent the man. Just that he might have found out about the house, about the jewelry, through you. That’s all.”

  “How could you think that? I’ve never talked to anyone about the jewelry, and besides, I don’t know any man who would do a thing like this.”

  “So who were you with in London? Thomas said he heard you talking with a man in your flat. Late at night.”

  “He’s blackmailing me. I’ve been paying him for years. I saw him because he wanted more money. I shouldn’t have done it, I see that now.”

  “Blackmailing you over what? You have to tell me, Greta.”

  “Over what happened after I left school. He’s the only one who knows about it.”

  “About what?”

  “If I tell you, I’ll be in your power. Do you want that, Peter? Do you want that responsibility?”

  Greta spoke as if she were playing her last card, making her last appeal, but Peter had gone too far down the road with her to stop now.

  “I have to know. There’s no choice.”

  “All right,” said Greta. Her voice was dull, and she had slumped back into her seat. It was as if all the fight had finally been knocked out of her.

  “I’ll tell you but only if you promise to say nothing, to do nothing, to keep it to yourself.”

  Peter was silent thinking of his wife lying on the sofa as she had been only eight hours earlier. She had had her slippers on, he remembered. Little gold slippers that looked like dancing shoes. He hadn’t kissed her properly when he left.

  He felt Greta’s hand on his arm, her breath on his cheek requiring complicity.

  “If it has nothing to do with Anne, I promise,” he said. “You’ll have to satisfy me of that.”

  “All right, that’s fair,” she said, releasing him. “It’s simple, really. Most bad things are, I suppose. I took drugs. Everyone did then. I even got a conviction for it. I couldn’t afford to buy enough, and so I sold them too. Only a few times, but that was enough. I sold some pills to a girl and she died. I didn’t know they were bad. I swear I didn’t.”

  There was bitterness in Greta’s voice, and she spoke quickly, allowing no time for Peter to respond.

  “This man was with her. He felt he had a claim over me.”

  “A claim?”

  “He wanted me. Sexually.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I let him a few times. It was only sex, and I thought it didn’t matter, but then I realized it did.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the girl had died. Because I hadn’t. I stopped taking the drugs, and it cleared my head.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I refused to do it anymore. We fought, but he seemed to accept it in the end. He took money instead, and then I didn’t hear from him for a while. Not until recently. He’d seen my picture in the paper, coming out of a restaurant in London with you, and he wanted more money, a lot more. I had to give him some. I had no choice. He kept threatening to go to the police. He said he’d tell you too.”

  “Bastard,” said Peter. “You should have told me, Greta.”

  “No, I didn’t want to. I didn’t want you to know. I arranged for him to come to the flat when I was sure that you would be away. I didn’t know that Anne and Thomas were coming until it was too late, too late to put him off. I showed him what I earned — pay slips and everything. I told him I couldn’t pay him all he wanted, and then he wanted to touch me. I don’t know what got him going; maybe it was me being P.A. to a minister and being in your house, but it made him start all that up again.”

  “Did he?” Peter could hardly get his question out. There were too many burning emotions inside of him fighting for release. The grief and the guilt and now anger against this unknown stranger demanding money, pawing at Greta in his house. Beneath the anger was another unacknowledged emotion: Peter was gripped by sexual jealousy. He felt it in his loins.

  “Did he what?”

  “Have sex with you?”

  Peter blurted the words out. His heart was beating painfully inside his rib cage, and pictures flooded into his exhausted mind that he could not control. His wife dead, Greta naked with this man above her. He wanted to take hold of her, feel her full breasts encompassed in his wide hands. He thought of them like they were life when all around him was death and emptiness. In the early-morning darkness a cold breeze was blowing off the sea.

  “No, I wouldn’t let him,” she said. “He’s frightened of me when I’m angry. It’s strange; it’s like he always wants to get me to that point, and then he backs away.”

  Peter sighed. The constriction in his chest lifted, and Thomas’s accusations blew back into his consciousness.

  “Greta, I understand about this man, and why you invited him. Thomas said that he heard you telling him to wait, and so that makes sense, given you were talking about the money. But that wasn’t all he told me. He said he recognized the man, that he was here tonight, that he killed Anne. Killed my wife, Greta.”

  “It’s not the same man. I swear it isn’t. He knows nothing about this house, and even if he did, he wouldn’t do it. He’s a sneak, not a murderer.”

  “Thomas says he saw him in the street outside the house when you came upstairs.”

  “So he didn’t see him with me?”

  “No.”

  “Well, he could just have been a pedestrian then, couldn’t he?”

  “Standing outside the house at midnight?”

  “Why not? Was he looking in the house?”

  “No, Thomas says he wasn’t. The man had his back to him.”

  “How can he be sure it was the same man then?”

  “I don’t know. He said he had a scar.”

  There was doubt now in Peter’s voice, and Greta pressed home her advantage.

  “That’s not enough. You know it’s not enough, Peter. Anyway, the man that was in my flat had no scar. Thomas has t
oo much imagination; that’s the trouble. He’s heard me tell a lie and he’s seen a man in the street, the back of a man in the street, I should say. After dark. And now he’s crazy with shock and grief and he’s decided it’s the same man because he wants to blame me for what happened.”

  “Why should he do that?”

  “Because he knows Anne and I never got on. Because he feels guilty about liking me when his mother didn’t want him to. Because he has to make someone responsible other than himself.”

  “What do you mean? How can Thomas be responsible?”

  “He’s not. Of course he’s not. He just feels it like you do. He probably feels it because he was there and you feel it because you weren’t.”

  It made sense. Peter wanted it to make sense, and so it did make sense. It was like when Greta tried on Anne’s clothes. He talked to her about it, and afterward he felt closer to her. It made him feel responsible for her, and he did not forget what she had said to him on the beach. There wasn’t anyone else in the world who loved him, who understood him like Greta did, now that Annie was dead.

  Annie was dead. The words came unbidden into Peter’s mind. He had tried to keep them at bay, but now he was suddenly confronting the terrible reality of what had happened. She was no longer in the world. Her life had not been as happy as it should have been because he had let her down. Insisted on his career and his life in London. Not been the father to Thomas that she wanted him to be. Not been the husband that she deserved.

  Peter did not know how he could cope with all this. He needed strength, he needed help, he needed Greta.

  As if in answer to his unspoken thoughts, she leaned over and kissed him chastely on the cheek where the bristly early-morning hair was beginning to grow.

  “Go and talk to Thomas,” she said. “He needs you. I’ll wait for you here.”

  Chapter 16

  They got to Rowston with the dawn. It was the hour when the tint of the sky changes subtly with every minute, and the birds had begun to chatter haltingly overhead. Peter felt feverish and wound down the window to let the cold morning air into the car. Greta drove without saying anything, staring into the new day, which was taking her away from Flyte forever.

  In his head Peter could hear voices, a commotion of voices from yesterday and today all talking to him at once: Thomas yelling, “Get her out!” and Greta whispering secrets about a past that seemed to bear no relation to who she was. The grating, insistent voice of Sergeant Hearns: “Please let us know where you are both going to be,” with the emphasis on “both” containing just enough insinuation not to be offensive. Then Thomas’s voice again when he had gone back to the Marshes’ cottage. No words this time. Just screams, terrible screams, until the boy had finally fallen asleep and Jane Martin had arrived from Woodbridge to take care of him. Peter wished that the Marshes had called her earlier; the boy needed somebody he felt comfortable with, but he couldn’t criticize them. Christy and Grace had been good neighbors, the best.

  There was one other soft voice asking to be heard that Peter still kept blocked out of his conscious mind. He would hear it soon enough. At the bottom of the road Rowston Hospital came into view: a silver-and-glass building glimmering in the first rays of the June sunshine like an alien arrival. Outside the entrance a police car was waiting. Arrangements had already been made for the first ceremony of the murdered dead: the identification of the body.

  “Do you want me to come with you?” asked Greta.

  “No,” he almost shouted. Anne and Greta had to be kept apart, he saw that clearly. He needed Greta more than ever, but outside this horror, somewhere distant where he could go when it was over. After the hospital she would go back to London on the train and wait for him there while he did what had to be done.

  “I’m sorry, Greta,” he added after a moment, speaking softly now, tenderly even. “You’ve helped me more than I can say, but this is something I have to do alone.”

  Inside the hospital he followed the policeman’s heavy-duty shoes as they beat a tattoo on the linoleum floors of the corridors. Turning right and left a dozen times, guided by black signs on white walls, they came eventually to a pair of doors that did not swing open like the others. Knocking was required here at these gates of the modern underworld.

  While they waited, Peter noticed that the bottoms of the doors were scuffed, no doubt by hospital orderlies kicking them open so that they could bring in the dead. They could do with a lick of paint, Peter found himself thinking irrelevantly just before they opened.

  At least they did it properly, Peter thought afterward. There was no drawer pulled out of a high steel filing cabinet and no row of silver metal tables to walk down while the doctor counted until he reached the right number. Instead he was taken to a room marked PRIVATE with a picture of a watery blue landscape on the wall and a vase of carnations on the windowsill. Peter wondered if they were real, but he didn’t touch them to find out.

  “This won’t take a moment, sir,” said the policeman. “Just the identification and then you can have time alone with your wife.”

  There was a kindness in the man’s voice that Peter was grateful for. He appreciated the description of the body under the white sheet as being his wife rather than the deceased or some other impersonal medical term, and when the mortuary attendant pulled back the sheet, he had no difficulty in recognizing her. The second bullet had done its damage at the side of the head, not the front.

  It was Anne, but he didn’t feel she was there at all. It was her absence that hurt. The dead body made him realize its permanence. He wanted to say he was sorry, to make amends, but Anne was not there to hear his confession, to forgive him his sins. She was gone somewhere he could not follow, and he was left with this empty face wearing an expression that he couldn’t read. There was fear there but also something else; it almost looked like joy.

  Peter felt heartbroken. He thought of all the times that he had stayed in London, the gentle reproach with which she had spoken to him so often on the telephone and the way she’d looked up at him from the sofa in the drawing room when he had gotten up to leave the evening before: “Do you have to go so soon, Peter? It’s like you’ve barely arrived.”

  That was what she’d said. He couldn’t remember if he’d replied, done more than kiss her lightly on the cheek on his way upstairs to pack.

  It was just after he’d bent down to place the last ritual kiss on his wife’s cold brow, just after he’d turned away from her that the memory came floating unbidden into his numbed mind. He thought of it later as Anne’s last gift to him, and he tried to remember it whenever he thought of her afterward.

  It was a summer’s morning just like this one that he remembered, but it was fifteen years ago and he was waking in their bed at home. Thomas was two or three months old, and Peter had been up with him in the night. The baby wouldn’t stop crying, and so he’d walked him up and down in the corridor at the top of the stairs singing some silly song that he remembered from his own childhood. Now he reached out toward Anne and found her gone, even though the bed was still warm where she had been sleeping with Thomas beside her in his cot.

  Peter opened his eyes, blinking against the sunlight flooding into the room through the high open windows. To the east was the sea breaking blue and white on the sandy beach below the house, and to the south were Annie’s roses, multitudes of them staked out in the gardens and climbing on the old perimeter wall up toward the sun.

  Standing in the south window looking out were Peter’s wife and son. Thomas’s hair was curly and golden, and his cheeks were fat and red and round above a little dimpled chin. His unbelievably tiny fingers were twined in his mother’s long, brown hair, and he seemed to gurgle with delight as she held him up to the light. Peter smiled at his son, and just at that moment Anne turned to him with eyes that were liquid blue and sparkling.

  “Oh, Peter,” she said. “I am so happy. I can’t tell you how happy I am.”

  Peter dropped Greta at the railway sta
tion and watched the first train of the morning take her off into the distance. Then he drove the Range Rover slowly back to Flyte and took a room at the Anchor Inn. He was more exhausted than he had ever been in his life, and he fell on the bed without bothering to undress and slept until the afternoon.

  He woke because the phone was ringing. It stopped and then began again, on and on until he finally answered. It was Thomas, but his voice sounded different. There was a desperate determination in it that Peter had never heard before.

  “I need to speak to you, Dad. Aunt Jane does too.”

  “Where are you? Are you all right?”

  “We’re in Woodbridge. At Mary’s house.”

  “Whose?”

  “Aunt Jane’s sister. It’s twenty-eight Harbour Street. Will you come?”

  “Yes, of course I will. I’m glad Jane’s taken you there. I should have thought of it myself.” Then, just as Peter was about to replace the receiver, Thomas’s voice came again.

  “Has she gone, Dad? You have to be alone. I can’t see you otherwise.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m alone,” said Peter, and hung up. He’d said no more than the truth; he’d never felt more alone than he did now.

  “What are you going to do, Dad?”

  “About what?”

  “About Greta. She killed my mother.”

  “No, she didn’t. She had nothing to do with it, Thomas. You’ve got this fixation in your mind, and it’s doing neither of us any good.”

  They were sitting in the front room of the little house in Harbour Street surrounded by a lifetime’s collection of bric-a-brac. Coronation mugs and ships in bottles jostled for space with china cats and dogs. Their owner, Jane’s sister Mary, had made them cups of milky tea and then left them sitting around a heavy 1930s oak dining table — Jane and Thomas on one side and Peter on the other.

  Part of Peter realized that all this was wrong. He should be the one with his arm around his son, not the old housekeeper, but Thomas’s obsession with Greta divided them and Peter felt powerless to do anything about it.