Into this scene of lazy luxury painted by Thomas’s imagination burst a younger, crueller version of the man who smiled down so benevolently from his portrait in the drawing room downstairs.
Sir Stephen was no knight then. He was plain Stephen Sackville, three years out from England, with a fortune to make and a pair of black revolvers in his pockets to secure it with. This Stephen Sackville was a young man consumed with a lust for jewels. He had listened greedily to all the travelers’ tales until his attention narrowed and became focused on the sultan’s sapphire, the gem that contained all the mystery of the subcontinent within its deep, dark blue interior. Stephen Sackville could not rest until he had made it his own.
Thomas had no idea how he knew all this, but he was nevertheless certain of what had happened on that afternoon, almost a century ago, on the other side of the world. His great-grandfather had had no right to do what he did. There had been no British interest involved. The justification for the action had been manufactured after the event, and the nawab had not been alive to contradict the lies told about him.
Thomas imagined the murder. He thought of it as a hot day with the nawab resting on his divan after lunch while two servants moved the still air with palm-tree fans. Thomas did not know if the yellow canary was singing, and he could not see the servant girls. He did not know if the nawab was asleep or just had his eyes closed in meditation, but he saw him rise up from the divan when he heard the horses’ hooves on the stones in the courtyard and the sound of shots and cries. Perhaps they were the cries of the servant girls. Thomas could only see the nawab running on his silver-slippered feet through the palace until he came face-to-face with his assassin and looked for a final moment into the cold blue eyes of Stephen Sackville of the House of the Four Winds in the county of Suffolk, come upon the King’s commission to kill and steal. Two shots and the Englishman stepped over his victim, just like the killers had stepped over Thomas’s mother as she lay on the landing, bleeding her lifeblood out onto the carpet.
The parallel did not stop there, of course. Sir Stephen had come to steal the sapphire just like the killers of Thomas’s mother had come for the Sackville jewels and had taken them all, all except the sapphire. It had remained in the drawer of the walnut desk, waiting for Thomas to find it so that the Indian’s curse could continue on down through the generations, until there were no Sackvilles left.
Thomas put the sapphire in his pocket and looked out of the high east windows of the bedroom toward the sea. It was a view of the elements — sun and sky and water stretching out to the horizon. Suddenly Thomas knew what he was going to do.
He put the letter and the other documents back in his mother’s desk. He glanced once up at the portrait of his grandmother, thinking of the conflict between her free spirit and the grasping hand of her father. Thomas wondered if she had ridden her horse on the beach below the house where he was headed now. She must have, although his mother had never told him where she met her death.
At the bottom of the stairs he paused, wondering whether to tell Aunt Jane where he was going. He could hear her voice in the kitchen. She was still talking to the policeman, who would insist on accompanying Thomas if he went outside, and Thomas needed to be alone. He grabbed a towel from the downstairs bathroom and set off across the lawn toward the north gate secure in the knowledge that he could not be seen from the kitchen windows.
He turned the key in the lock and stepped out into the lane. There was no one there, but Thomas felt suddenly vulnerable. It was the first time he had been outside the grounds in a week. The sun shone through the trees whose branches overhung the lane, creating a natural canopy, and Thomas found himself walking through dappled dancing shadows as he made his way down to the beach. The crash of the still invisible waves on the shore grew louder, and Thomas remembered how excited Barton would become by the sound, torn between the need to keep his owners in sight and his longing for the wide open spaces awaiting them beyond the final turn in the dirt road. There was no Barton now; he was buried next to little Mattie back behind the north gate, and Thomas was all alone in the world.
The sudden force of the sunlight made Thomas blink almost in pain as he came out onto the beach, and he put his free hand up over his eyes to protect them. His other hand was held deep inside his trouser pocket, clutching the sapphire ring hard in his palm.
It was one of those rare summer days when the omnipresent clouds had been chased away by the hot sun from the wide Suffolk sky, leaving it a pale blue heaven. The only sign of humanity was a high-flying airplane that drew a white pencil line across the blue as it passed overhead.
Thomas thought of his mother. She always became almost childishly excited by days like this and would bully Aunt Jane into accompanying them to the beach, where the old lady would sit on a folding chair with her long black skirt coming down to her ankles. She would make no concession to sand and sun except for a pair of rather terrifying sunglasses that made her look like a member of the Sicilian Mafia. Thomas and his mother would swim out beyond the waves and then come running back over the sand to eat the sandwiches that Aunt Jane had packed in a hamper she kept under her chair so Barton couldn’t get at them. Afterward his mother would lie in the sun and talk to Aunt Jane about the past while Thomas built sandcastles and peopled them with the knights that his mother bought for him at the toy shop in Flyte.
Thomas walked across the deserted beach and put the memories of his childhood out of his mind. Near the water’s edge he stopped and took off all his clothes, leaving them in a pile weighed down by his shoes. He stood for a moment naked under the sun before he plunged into the breaking waves, clasping the sapphire tight in his hand.
The day’s sunshine seemed to have had no effect on the temperature of the North Sea, and Thomas felt the cold water pressing against his chest like shards of ice as he stood on the sandbank just beyond the waves. He opened his palm and looked at the sapphire glowing in the sunlight. Turning it over, he read his family’s name engraved in the gold. It was a beautiful thing, a most precious stone, but it had attached itself to his family like a millstone. There was a price to be paid for what his great-grandfather had done, just as there was a price to be paid by his mother’s murderers, but their fate awaited them in the future. The Sackvilles had atoned for Sir Stephen’s sins with their blood, and now it was time to be rid of this jewel.
Thomas raised his hand in the air and threw the ring out to sea. It was gone in a second, barely disturbing the surface of the water as it was swallowed up. The sea, like the earth, was indifferent. Pebbles and precious stones were all the same. It was human beings who distinguished between them, murdering one another for the sake of small inanimate objects.
Thomas swam back to the shore filled with a sense of release. He felt the rush of a new beginning and ran across the sand forgetful of his nakedness. He thought of his daredevil grandmother galloping her horse across the beach. He felt her blood in his as he kicked up the surf and the sun shone down on his young body.
Dressed again, Thomas climbed the steep cliff path toward the house. His mother had forbidden him to go this way when he was a child as the cliff sand was crumbly and it was easy to fall. But today Thomas felt immune from danger, and he was soon at the top standing by the viewing cairn — a pile of rocks with a smooth gray central stone in the middle, on which a nineteenth-century Sackville had engraved the landmarks visible from this high point.
Behind Thomas across the sloping dunes were the east gate and the house. In front of him the North Sea stretched out as far as the horizon while to his right were the towns of Flyte and Coyne, separated by the River Flyte. Thomas could see the two church spires and between them a tiny fishing boat leaving the harbor and putting out to sea.
On Thomas’s left was the larger town of Carmouth, where the road became wider and the cars and lorries sped up on their way to London and the west. That would be the way Thomas would be going the next morning, in the back of an unmarked police car. Sergeant Hearn
s had said that they would need to leave just after six to be sure of getting to the Old Bailey on time.
Thomas’s head dropped as he felt the weight of the trial that he had done so much to bring about descend on his shoulders. With one last look at the great wide sea, he turned for home.
He let himself in through the east gate, hoping that Aunt Jane and the policeman had not noticed his absence. He had no wish to cause them anxiety if he could avoid it, but he need not have worried. They were halfway through their third cup of coffee when Thomas went into the kitchen. Aunt Jane had always been fond of the forces of law and order, but she seemed to have taken a particular shine to this policeman. He was local and shared her interest in Flyte gossip as well as providing a willing audience for her views about Greta and her barrister, which seemed to become more extreme by the day.
It was not a subject that Thomas wanted to talk about. He needed help with moving a picture out of his mother’s bedroom and hanging it in his own.
Twenty minutes later the task was done. Lady Sarah Sackville’s portrait hung on the wall of Thomas’s bedroom between the map of Suffolk shipwrecks and a photograph of his mother holding Barton.
That night Thomas looked up at his grandmother from his bed, warmed by the smile in her flashing dark eyes. It gave him strength to face the prospect of meeting the glittering green eyes of his adversary across the courtroom the next day.
Chapter 21
“Right, Mr. Lambert, remember the age of the witness and remember what I have directed about the photographs,” said Judge Granger, fixing the defense barrister with a hard look as he got to his feet to cross-examine.
It was two o’clock on Tuesday afternoon, and Thomas had already been in the witness box for more than two hours. John Sparling had finished asking him questions at five to one, and then there had been only an hour to walk the unfamiliar crowded streets around the court and try to compose himself for what was to come.
Giving evidence had so far been both better and worse than he had expected. Better because he found that he had been able to shut Greta out of his mind, even though she was sitting only a few yards away, watching him intently all the time. Worse because Sparling had made him tell the jury all the terrible details of what had happened on the landing when he was shut inside the bookcase and those men were murdering his mother on the other side. Telling it made it real and the reality had made him cry. Thomas had hated that. Crying in front of that bitch, Greta, while the little usher woman brought him a box of tissues and a glass of water. Thomas swore to himself that there would be no repeat of such emotion this afternoon, whatever Greta’s fat barrister might do to him.
“I want to start with this man Rosie,” said Miles Lambert in a friendly tone. “You say you first saw him outside your father’s house in London?”
“Yes.”
“In the dark?”
“He was standing under a streetlight.”
“With his back to you.”
“Yes.”
“And he never turned around.”
“No, he didn’t. He’d have seen me if he had.”
“So you never saw his face.”
“Not that time. No.”
“Just the back of his head where he had a scar.”
“Yes, it was long and thick too. I saw it because he had his hair in a ponytail.”
“Ah yes, the ponytail. Plenty of men have ponytails though, don’t they, Thomas? Scars too.”
“Not like that one. Somebody must have taken a knife to him to do that.”
“Very dramatic. The point I’m making, Thomas, is that you can’t possibly say that the man under the streetlight is the same as the man who murdered your mother on the basis of a view from behind.”
“I’m sure it was the same person.”
“Even though you only saw the man in your house for a few seconds through a spy hole in a bookcase?”
“I will never forget his face.”
“You saw one man from behind and the other for only a few seconds when you were beside yourself with terror and distress and you jumped to a conclusion, which was based on very weak evidence. That’s the truth, isn’t it, Thomas?”
“They were the same person.”
“You jumped to the conclusion because you wanted to blame Greta Grahame for what had happened.”
“No.”
“Because you felt guilty that you hadn’t been able to save your mother from those men when you had saved yourself, and so you needed someone to blame.” Miles went on relentlessly.
“No, it’s not true. I couldn’t have saved her. She was behind me. She pushed me forward in there. I didn’t shut the bookcase — ”
“It’s all right, Thomas,” said the judge kindly. “Try to calm down. I know this is difficult for you. Mr. Lambert, try to be less confrontational.”
“Yes, my Lord. Thomas, I’m not saying you were to blame in any way for what happened that night. That’s the last thing I’m trying to say. I’m just suggesting that you feel guilty about it. People do feel guilty even though they shouldn’t when someone close to them dies. You know what I’m saying, don’t you, Thomas?”
“Yes, I suppose so,” said Thomas reluctantly.
“And if you feel guilty, then you need someone else to blame, don’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You were upset with Greta at that time, though, weren’t you? Before your mother died.”
“In a way.”
“In a way. You were upset with her because she had rejected you.”
Thomas said nothing but he blushed deeply. He turned involuntarily to look at Greta in the dock and found her staring at him intently.
“You know what I’m talking about, don’t you, Thomas? She took you out in London, and on the way back home in a taxi you told her that she was beautiful and that you loved her, and she rejected you. She said you were too young. Isn’t that right, Thomas?”
“Yes,” said Thomas almost in a whisper.
“I can’t hear you, Thomas,” said Miles Lambert. “Was that a yes?”
“Yes.”
There was silence in the courtroom. Sparling shifted uncomfortably in his seat. This revelation had come as an unpleasant surprise. There was nothing about it in Thomas’s statement. What else had the boy left out? Sparling wondered.
Miles Lambert allowed the silence to build, and with it Thomas’s discomfort, before he asked his next question.
“All this happened less than two months before your mother’s death, didn’t it, Thomas?”
“Yes.”
“So the rejection was fresh in your memory?”
“I didn’t think about it.”
“Are you sure about that, Thomas? You told Greta that you loved her.”
“I didn’t mean it.”
“So you told her something that was untrue?”
“No. I meant it at the time, I suppose, but it was just something that happened that afternoon. It was just something that came into my head.”
“I see. Love is a strong emotion, Thomas, isn’t it? Comes up on you unawares, like hate. Are you sure you didn’t start hating Greta because she didn’t love you like you wanted her to?”
“No. It wasn’t like that.”
“But you hate her now, don’t you, Thomas?”
“I hate her for what she did to my mother.”
“Can you remember not hating her?”
“I don’t know. I suppose I didn’t hate her that afternoon in the taxi. It seems so long ago now.”
“I suggest that’s when you did start hating her, Thomas. Then a chance similarity between two men brought your hate and your guilt together, and that’s where all this started, isn’t that right?”
“Don’t answer that, Thomas,” said the judge. “Make your questions clear and direct, Mr. Lambert. We’re not here to listen to you give us a lecture on psychiatry.”
“No, my Lord,” said Miles. “Thomas, I want to take you back to the night in London w
hen you saw the man with the scar. You never saw him with Greta, did you?”
“No.”
“You can’t say that the man under the streetlight was the same as the person that Greta was talking to in the basement?”
“No. I know it was, though. They both went upstairs because they heard those creeps looking for me. Greta thought they might be burglars.”
“Did you hear Greta tell the other person in the basement to go upstairs?”
“No.”
“Did you see him go up the basement steps to the street?”
“No, I ran upstairs to get away. Like I said before.”
“And then you just saw the man standing there. You didn’t see where he’d come from.”
“I didn’t see but I knew.”
“Well, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence for your knowledge, Thomas. Let’s just go back to the man in the basement, whom we can agree about.”
But Thomas had had enough of being manipulated.
“Why? She didn’t agree about it,” he said angrily. “She lied about being down there. She said she was in Manchester. That’s what she told my father the next evening. I heard her.”
“Thomas, you’ve already given evidence about that,” said the judge. “Try just to answer Mr. Lambert’s questions.”
“You’ve told Mr. Sparling what Greta said to the man,” pursued Miles, “and I don’t have any argument about that, but I want to be quite clear about one thing. You just don’t know whether Greta said ‘Can’t you see I haven’t got it yet,’ or ‘Can’t you see I haven’t got him yet.’ Is that right?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Good. Then Greta said she was going upstairs, and you told us before lunch that she said: ‘Mrs. Posh won’t hear.’ I dispute that, Thomas. My client never called your mother Mrs. Posh.”
Final Witness Page 23