“Yes she did. Just like Aunt Jane heard her saying about Mum after Mattie died. She called her Mrs. Posh then too.”
“Did I hear that right, Thomas? Do you agree that you’ve been talking to Mrs. Martin about her evidence?”
“I talked to her about what happened after it happened. Of course I did.”
“You talked to her before she gave her evidence, compared notes. Is that what you’re saying, Thomas?”
“We talked, yes. We weren’t comparing notes. She heard what she heard and I heard what I heard.”
“And they both turned out to be the same thing. Very convenient. Now, Thomas, I want to turn to the day of your mother’s death. Let me assure you in advance that none of my questions should distress you too much — ”
“I’m glad to hear it, Mr. Lambert,” interrupted the judge. “Let’s get on and have the questions, though, shall we? We don’t need a prologue.”
This time Miles Lambert ignored the judge’s interruption. He wasn’t going to be put off his stride at this — the most important point of the trial — because of old Granger’s concern for a sixteen-year-old. Thomas was the one who had gathered the evidence that had made it possible for the prosecution to put his client in the dock. Those were hardly the actions of a vulnerable boy — more those of a determined young man. The case depended on Thomas’s credibility, and the jurors were entitled to hear a proper cross-examination of his evidence. Judge Granger’s interruptions wouldn’t stop Miles from doing his job.
“You have told us this morning that you assumed from what your mother said that the initiative for the arrangement for you to stay with your friend Edward Ball on the Monday evening came from Edward’s mother.”
“That’s right.”
“Did your mother say that the Balls had invited you?”
“I think so. I’m not sure of exactly what she said.”
“Could your mother have said that it was her idea for you to go to the Balls?”
“I don’t think so.”
“All right, is it possible that your mother didn’t say who had made the arrangement but that you just assumed that Mrs. Ball had invited you.”
“I don’t know. I suppose it’s possible.”
“Thank you. Now, you’ve given evidence that you became anxious when Mrs. Ball told you that it was in fact Greta who had arranged for you to go over there.”
“That’s right.”
“Why did you get anxious, Thomas?”
“Because that wasn’t her job. She had nothing to do with my arrangements.”
“Fair enough, but it would be different if your mother had asked her to ring up Mrs. Ball, wouldn’t it?”
“My mother would never have done that.”
“Why not? She had a headache on the Sunday afternoon when the arrangement was made, didn’t she?”
“I’m not sure. I think so.”
“So why wouldn’t she have asked Greta to do her a favor?”
“She’d have asked Aunt Jane, not Greta.”
“Mrs. Martin was out on Sunday afternoon.”
“My mother would have waited until she got back then, or rung up herself.”
“Why not ask Greta though? She was there.”
“Because my mother would never have asked Greta for anything.”
“Why not?”
“Because she didn’t like her.”
“I see. And what makes you say that, Thomas?”
“It was obvious. She avoided Greta. She never went to London because of her.”
“But she took you to London in April when you made your declaration in the taxi, and she went up for the Chelsea Flower Show four days before she died. Greta was there both times.”
“She always went to the Flower Show. She had to because of the roses.”
“I see. Did she tell you that she was avoiding London because of Greta?”
“No. I knew it though.”
“You knew it. Did she tell you that she didn’t like Greta?”
“No. She didn’t tell me but she told Greta. After Greta let my dog out and pushed me over. My mother told her that she’d turned my father against us and that she was poisonous, poisonous like a snake.”
“That wasn’t all your mother said to Greta that day though, was it, Thomas? She went into the study with you and apologized to Greta for those things that she’d said, and Greta accepted the apology. Isn’t that right, Thomas?”
“Yes. She didn’t mean it though.”
“Who didn’t mean it?”
“Greta. She hated my mother. No, that’s not it. She wanted to become her. That’s why she sent me to Edward’s. Because she wanted to save me. I was part of what she was going to get.”
“Well, thank you for giving us the benefit of your theory, Thomas, but that’s all it is, isn’t it? You haven’t got one shred of evidence to support what you’ve just said, have you?”
“I saw the way she looked at my mother. She tried on her clothes.”
“Yes, she did, but that’s not quite the same as arranging to have your mother killed, now, is it?”
“I know what she did.”
“So you say. Now, you’ve told us that you decided to come home from the Balls after you couldn’t reach your mother on the telephone. Mrs. Ball drove you home and dropped you off at the front gate. How did you get in?”
“I had keys. To the front door too.”
“About what time was this?”
“I don’t know. Sometime around half past eight.”
“How long after you made the phone call to your mother did you get home?”
“I don’t know. Twenty minutes, half an hour. I wasn’t wearing a watch.”
“Did you leave immediately after you phoned up and got no reply?”
“No, we talked about it a bit and Mrs. Ball’s husband called about something.”
“So you got home, and you’ve already told us that you closed the window that you found open in the study. Then you went upstairs and opened the window in your bedroom.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Because it was a warm evening?”
“That’s right.”
“Did you keep it open when it started raining?”
“Yes, it wasn’t a storm.”
“You were lying on your bed and your mother was asleep in her room.”
“Yes. I’d just turned my light off when I heard the car drive up. Then I saw them coming across the lawn toward the study window, and one of them was really upset that the windows were all closed.”
“‘Fuck. They’re all fucking closed.’ That’s what you told us earlier that the man said.” Miles seemed to enunciate the swear words with particular relish.
“Yes,” replied Thomas. “He was angry.”
“Did you see the man say it?”
“No. I was sitting on my bed. They were below the window.”
“So you can’t say that the man was outside the study window when he swore. He could have been by the side door or the dining room windows just as easily.”
“I suppose so.”
“He could have been talking about all the windows on that side of the house in fact.”
“Not mine, because it was open.”
“On the lower level I mean.”
“Yes, he could have been.”
“Thank you. Now I’ve got nothing else to ask you about that night at this stage. I want to concentrate instead on this locket that you found in your father’s house last October.”
Miles Lambert picked up prosecution exhibit number thirteen and held it for a moment by its clasp so that the golden heart-shaped locket swung to and fro on its chain like a hypnotist’s pendulum.
“You have told us that your mother was very fond of this locket.”
“She was.”
“Did she wear it every day?”
“Not every day, no. She wore it a lot.”
“You made no mention of the locket to the police of course until after you found it.
”
“I had no reason to.”
“No. I can see that that might make sense, but it doesn’t explain why you mentioned nothing in your first statement about Rosie bending down over your mother and then putting something gold in his pocket. That comes in your second statement, made after you found the locket.”
“I was upset when I made the first statement. My mother had just died.”
“Five days before. Your first statement is very detailed, Thomas. Sergeant Hearns and you took a lot of trouble over it. You’d think you wouldn’t leave out something as important as Rosie taking gold from your mother’s dead body.”
Thomas didn’t answer. Lambert’s brutal last words had felt like a punch in the face.
“You left the gold out of your first statement because it never happened. That’s the real explanation, isn’t it, Thomas?”
“No, it’s not. It did happen. He ripped it off her neck. That’s why they found a scratch there.”
“A small scratch. The locket wasn’t broken, though, when you found it in the desk, was it?”
“No. They could have repaired it.”
“There’s no sign of any repair on the clasp or the chain that I can see,” said Miles, making a show of carefully examining the locket as he held it up to his golden half-moon spectacles between two of his fat fingers.
“No doubt the jury will want to examine exhibit thirteen themselves when they are considering the evidence,” Miles added casually as he replaced the locket on the table in front of him.
“Now, there’s no dispute that you found the locket in the desk, Thomas. What I do have a problem with is what you say that my client said about it.”
“Which bit?”
“‘Give that to me. It’s mine.’ That bit.”
“She shouted it at me just as she tried to get hold of it — ”
“Yes, so you told us,” interrupted the barrister. “And then you pushed Greta over and you shouted at her: ‘No, it’s not. It’s my mother’s. That bastard took it from her and he gave it to you.’ That was what you told Mr. Sparling that you said when he asked you this morning. Do you agree?”
“Yes. Something like that.”
“No, not something like that. Word for word. I wrote it down when you said it this morning, and I wrote exactly the same thing down when your friend Matthew Barne told us what you said when he gave evidence yesterday. You’ve put your heads together about this, haven’t you, Thomas? You and Matthew?”
“Of course we’ve talked about it. We go to school together and he’s my best friend, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
“You both stole a paperweight at school from your headmaster, isn’t that right, Thomas?”
“It was a dare. We were going to put it back.”
“So, you found the locket and then you made your second statement to Detective Sergeant Hearns.”
“That’s right.”
“And you said in there that your mother was wearing the locket on the night of her death?”
“I saw it when I got her up. There was a V at the throat of her nightdress.”
“It seems a funny thing for you to notice at such a terrible moment. You could hear the men breaking in downstairs, isn’t that right?”
“Yes.”
“What happened is that you found that locket and then you set about concocting evidence to show that my client received it from your mother’s killer.”
“No.”
“You sat down with Matthew Barne to agree upon a false version of what was said in the drawing room before your father arrived.”
“It’s not a false version. It’s a true version.”
“You invented this story about your mother having the locket on under her nightdress and seeing the glint of gold when Rosie bent over her on the landing. Then as a final touch you got Jane Martin to say that Lady Anne was wearing the locket at lunch on the Monday.”
“I never saw it then.”
“Well, thank you for that, Thomas. You can see what I’m getting at. I suggest that you made all these things up because you’d already decided that Greta was guilty and so you had to make sure that she got charged.”
“I knew she was guilty, but that didn’t make me lie. It made me look for proof. That’s how I found the locket.”
“And yet your reasons for believing she was guilty didn’t amount to much, did they?”
“Mr. Lambert, we’ve already been over that,” said the judge irritably. “Try not to argue with the witness. Cross-examination is about asking questions.”
“Yes, my Lord,” said Miles. “Let’s move on, Thomas. Let’s talk about what happened on the fifth of July.”
Thomas shifted in his seat but otherwise did not respond. Miles did not carry on immediately but allowed a silence to build before he spoke again.
“Let’s make sure I’ve got the setting right first. Jane Martin left at six, having locked all the doors. You were in the dining room eating your dinner, with all the windows open.”
“Yes, it was a warm evening.”
“So it was. And you had your panic button next to your plate ready to call the emergency services if the need should arise?”
“No, it was in my pocket. Sergeant Hearns told me to keep it with me all the time. He’s the one who got it for me.”
“He told you there was a risk of the men coming back, the men who had killed your mother.”
“Not exactly.”
“Did he put that idea in your mind, Thomas?”
“No, he said it was better to be safe than sorry, that’s all.”
“I see. So the men came through the north door in the perimeter wall, crossed the lawn, and entered the house, and you stayed in this bench while they were looking for you?”
“Yes.”
“You can’t have been able to see very much from inside that.”
“I could see out through the holes in the eyes, like I said before.”
“Ah, yes. The holes in the eyes. They wouldn’t exactly have given you a grandstand view of what Lonny and Rosie were up to though, would they?”
“No. Not really.”
“And yet you say in your statement that ‘they looked around the rooms downstairs for a while but they didn’t touch anything.’ Were you able to watch them all the time then, see that they weren’t touching anything?”
“No. I meant that when I could see them, they weren’t touching anything. Rosie did later, though.”
“And Rosie just happened to mention my client by name.”
“That’s right. He said that she’d told him how the hiding-place mechanism works.”
“It’s very convenient, isn’t it, Thomas?”
“You don’t need to answer that, Thomas,” interrupted the judge. “Ask the witness questions; save your comments for the jury. I shouldn’t need to keep telling you that, Mr. Lambert.”
“No, my Lord.” Miles smiled affably up at the judge. Old Granger’s interruptions and instructions seemed to have no effect whatsoever on Lurid Lambert, who carried on relentlessly along his charted course, guiding the witness slowly but surely onto the rocks.
“Was it Rosie who said: ‘Fuck, they’re all fucking closed’ about the windows on the night of your mother’s murder?”
“I don’t know. I’ve thought about that a lot, but I just don’t know.”
“Yet you say in your statement about Rosie’s return that you would recognize the voice of the man with the scar.”
“Yes. If I heard it again I would, but my mother got killed a year before they came back.”
“So you can’t say if the man with the scar said the words about the windows but you remember the words clearly?”
“That’s right.”
“I see. Well, let’s go on to the end of your story. You hear the siren. Rosie stops talking in midsentence, and he and Lonny run out the front door. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“You get out of the bench and answer the intercom.”
“I buzzed the police in through the front gate.”
“Having spoken to Officer Hughes through the intercom first. Isn’t that right, Thomas?”
“I don’t remember.”
“He told us what happened when he gave evidence yesterday. He said that you asked him who he was and he identified himself as a police officer. Then you opened the gates by remote control. Do you agree with his account, Thomas?”
“I suppose so. I was in a panic. I don’t remember everything that was said.”
“Well, I’ll take that as a yes. Now, you knew from Officer Hughes that the police were at the front gate. You knew that Rosie and Lonny had parked their car in the lane. You must have assumed that they were running back to their car. You knew all that, and so why didn’t you tell Officer Hughes through the intercom to drive down to the lane and cut them off instead of buzzing him in through the front gate?”
Miles had asked his final question with a fierce directness that sparked the jury into a concentrated focus on Thomas, who didn’t answer immediately. He looked like a chess player who has suddenly seen his king exposed to a massive unforeseen attack and now looks around desperately but in vain for a move that will stave off inevitable defeat.
“I don’t know,” Thomas said eventually. “I didn’t think. Those men would have killed me if they’d found me. I suppose I wanted to feel safe.”
“But you were safe. The men had left. This was your opportunity to catch your mother’s killers.”
“I didn’t think.”
“You didn’t think. It makes no sense, Thomas. It makes no sense because none of this really happened, did it?”
“Yes, it did. I swear it did.”
“Just like it makes no sense that the police found the north door locked.”
“They must have locked it when they left because they would have known how it would look.”
“Like they’d never been there?”
“Yes.”
“It looks like that because that’s the truth, isn’t it, Thomas? You’ve made all this up. You didn’t think the locket would be enough, and so you invented Rosie’s return and a casual reference to Greta and the bookcase just to be sure of getting your stepmother convicted. Isn’t that right, Thomas?”
Final Witness Page 24