Final Witness

by Simon Tolkien

  Matthew and Thomas searched through every Rose that had gotten married in Great Britain in every one of the previous fourteen years, but there was not one who had married a Grahame in Manchester or anywhere else. There were John Roses and Jonathan Roses, who had married a variety of names, but none bore any resemblance to Grahame.

  They searched again and again without success until Thomas got careless and knocked one of the huge index books off a high desk onto the floor. It fell with a great crash, and suddenly there was silence in the records room. Everyone in their vicinity turned around to look at the culprits. They were all old and Thomas and Matthew were young. “Old people wouldn’t drop precious index books on the floor,” they seemed to be saying. “Old people would be more careful.”

  “Come on,” said Matthew, beckoning Thomas to follow him into the black section. They took shelter in an obscure corner of the great room housing Deaths 1860–1868. Behind them the thud-silence-thud noise of the index books hitting shelves and tables began again.

  “It’s no good, Matthew,” said Thomas in a depressed voice. “There’s no point in looking anymore. We’re not going to find anything. It was a long shot anyway. She could easily have been his Greta Rose without being married to him.”

  “Welcome to Death Row,” said Matthew, relating their present surroundings to Thomas’s mood of resignation.

  “What did you say?” asked Thomas, suddenly alert.

  “Death Row — or Death Row H to be precise,” said Matthew, reading a notice on the wall.

  “Leading to Death Row I. Put the two together and you’ve got Death Rows H and I.”

  “What are you talking about, Thomas? It was a joke but it wasn’t that funny.”

  “Rows. Don’t you get it, Matthew? There are other ways of spelling Rose. We need to check those out too.”

  They went back to the front of the marriages section where they had been before, braving the disapproving glances that met them on their way, and started to search again. They found what they were looking for quite quickly. There were no Rows, but one or two bridegrooms did have the surname Rowes, and a Jonathan B. Rowes had married a Grahame in Liverpool in 1989.

  “It’s them!” said Matthew excitedly. “It’s got to be. It’s just the right date. She’d have been eighteen. That’s when Pierre told you she went off the rails.”

  “The date’s all right but the city’s not,” said Thomas. “Greta was in Manchester, remember. Not Liverpool.”

  “They’re both towns in the north though, aren’t they? Not everyone gets married in their hometown. Maybe they didn’t want anyone to know about it.”

  “Maybe. I’m not saying it’s not them. I’m just saying that there isn’t enough to know one way or another. We couldn’t take this to anyone; we’d need the proper certificate. That gives dates of birth and stuff like that, doesn’t it?”

  “No. Just the ages on marriage certificates,” said Matthew. “I remember that. They have the fathers’ names though, and their occupations. Greta can’t pretend it’s not her if the father’s name on the marriage certificate is the same as that on her birth certificate. We’ll have her then.”

  “If it’s her and if we get the certificate in time and if we get them to the right people before the evidence is over. We’ve got nothing at the minute,” said Thomas. Underneath his cautious exterior he was as excited as Matthew. It was just that he was determined to keep control of himself. He didn’t want to repeat his experience of the day before with the birth certificate.

  Matthew refused to share his friend’s somber mood.

  “But we’ve got hope, which is more than we had twenty minutes ago,” he said. “We ought to get on and order the certificates now. They take twenty-four hours if you make a priority application. That’s what it says on that notice over there.”

  Thomas filled out the application forms and handed them in. The bored young woman at the desk by the door had been replaced by a bored young man, who glanced at his watch before writing the collection time on Thomas’s receipt — 12:21 on Thursday. Thomas wondered, as he went down the steps of the records building, whether he might find himself tomorrow with the crucial evidence in his hand at last, when it was already too late to use it.

  Chapter 25

  The Family Records Office opened at ten o’clock on Thursday morning, and by five past ten Thomas was already well embarked on an argument with a cadaverous young man wearing a plastic badge on his lapel identifying him as Andrew, Applications Clerk. Thomas seemed completely unaware of Matthew’s efforts to calm him down and of the disapproving impatience of the people queuing for priority collections behind him.

  “I know it’s ten-oh-five and the receipt says twelve twenty-one,” said Thomas, allowing his exasperation to increase the volume of his voice still further. “I know that. I’m just asking you as a special favor to see if my certificates are ready. Maybe they are, maybe they’re not, but it won’t hurt you to try, will it, Andy?”

  “I’m not Andy, I’m Andrew,” said the clerk.

  “I’m sorry,” said Thomas. “Really I am. I didn’t mean to offend you, Andrew. Won’t you just do me this favor?”

  “I can’t help you, sir,” said Andrew for the third time. “You’ll simply have to wait like everyone else.”

  “Can’t or won’t?” shouted Thomas, losing his temper. “You government employees are all the same. Everything’s got to be by the bloody rule book, and meanwhile justice goes down the drain.”

  “All right, Thomas, calm down,” said Matthew, pulling his friend away from the counter. He’d noticed Andrew’s hand straying toward a buzzer on the side of his desk and feared ejection would follow any minute at the hands of the two burly security guards whom they had passed at the front of the building.

  “I’m sorry about all this,” Matthew said to Andrew. “He’s got big problems with his family. We’ll come back later.”

  “Twelve twenty-one,” said Andrew mechanically, ignoring the explanation.

  “Twelve twenty-one,” agreed Matthew as he shepherded Thomas toward the door to the cafeteria.

  The court sat late on Thursday morning. It was eleven o’clock when Greta resumed her place in the witness box and Sparling started his cross-examination. The reporters had divided eleven to three in favor of Greta at the end of the prosecution case. Even the three still holding out for a conviction had agreed that Miles Lambert had gotten the better of Thomas. They all thought that the victim’s son had made up at least some of his evidence in order to strengthen the case against his stepmother.

  The jurors were hard to read. The Italian man in the designer suit had seemed to be a sure vote for Greta from the start, and the reporters had noticed that at least three of the other male jurors appeared to have been won over to the defendant’s charms in the last couple of days. The Mrs. Thatcher look-alike sitting in the foreperson’s position looked more furious with each passing day, and the general view among the press was that this was due to the growing number of her colleagues deserting the prosecution’s side as the case unfolded. A single vote for a guilty verdict wouldn’t be enough to stop Greta from being acquitted after the judge had given a majority direction. It wouldn’t matter in those circumstances if the single voter was forewoman of the jury or not.

  Miles Lambert had taken Greta gently through her evidence on the previous afternoon, and now she stood with a soft smile on her pretty face, waiting for Sparling to do his worst. Her air of confidence irritated the old barrister, making him launch into his cross-examination with more aggression than he might otherwise have chosen to use.

  “You told this jury yesterday that you got on reasonably well with Lady Anne,” he said. “Did you really mean that?”

  “We had a few arguments, but I’d say that was inevitable when I was in her house so often over a period of years. By and large, we got on quite well.”

  “Didn’t you mind when she called you lower-class and told you that you didn’t belong in her house?”<
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  “Yes, I was hurt, but then she came and apologized and I forgave her.”

  “It was that easy, was it?”

  “Yes, she was genuinely sorry. I admired her for coming to talk to me. It can’t have been easy for her to do that.”

  “No. And it can’t surely have been as easy for you to forgive Lady Anne as you say. She told you that you were poisonous like a snake, didn’t she?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And it made you say, ‘You’ve fucking had it now, Mrs. Posh.’ Isn’t that right?”

  “No, it’s not. That’s a fabrication.”

  “Just like it’s a fabrication by Thomas that he overheard you referring to your employer’s wife as Mrs. Posh in the basement of the house in Chelsea?”

  “Yes.”

  “It seems to be something of a coincidence, wouldn’t you say, Lady Robinson?”

  “Yes, I would, Mr. Sparling, and not an accidental coincidence I should say either.”

  “Oh?”

  “They’ve put their heads together and came up with this Mrs. Posh phrase. It’s not one I would ever use.”

  “Even when Lady Anne was insulting you for being lower-class?”

  “She apologized.”

  “Yes, and you admired her for doing so. Isn’t that what you said?”

  “Yes. She didn’t need to say sorry. It was her house.”

  “You’d admired Lady Anne for a long time, hadn’t you? Even when you were a girl living in Manchester, you admired her.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Just like you admired all those fashionable aristocratic women whose pictures you cut out of those magazines and put in your scrapbooks. I think Sergeant Hearns told us they contained more than two thousand pictures.”

  “I’ve always liked fashion. Is it so very wrong to have interests when you’re young?”

  “No, not at all. But does an interest in fashion justify trying on someone else’s clothes without their permission?”

  “No, it doesn’t. I shouldn’t have done that. I just couldn’t afford those kinds of clothes, and I wanted to see what they looked like on me.”

  “There was only one way that you could afford them, wasn’t there? To become Lady Robinson yourself.”

  “What are you suggesting, Mr. Sparling? That I murdered Lady Anne for money? There’s no evidence for that, you know. Nothing’s gone into my bank account. You’ve got the records. Whoever’s got those jewels has got nothing to do with me.”

  “I wasn’t asking you about the jewels, Lady Robinson. I was suggesting that you wanted what Lady Anne had: her title, her husband, and her husband’s money.”

  “But not her jewels.”

  “Please don’t argue with counsel, Lady Robinson,” said the judge, intervening for the first time in the morning. “Just try to answer his questions.”

  “I’m sorry, my Lord,” said Greta, bestowing one of her most winning smiles on the old judge.

  “That’s all right. Please carry on, Mr. Sparling.”

  The barrister turned a page of his notes and changed tack.

  “What were you talking to your midnight visitor about in your basement apartment in April of last year?” he asked.

  “Money. It was a man I owed money to. I was asking for more time to pay.”

  “So it was in the nature of a business meeting. Why were you conducting business in the middle of the night, Lady Robinson?”

  “I wasn’t. We went out earlier, and then he came back to my flat and stayed late. I thought that an evening’s entertainment might make him more…”

  “More compliant?”

  “Yes. More willing to give me more time.”

  “Were you right? Was he more willing?”

  “Yes. He agreed to wait.”

  “How much money did you owe this man, Lady Robinson?”

  “About ten thousand pounds.”

  “And have you repaid it now?”

  “Most of it.”

  “How?”

  “I saved money, and my husband has helped me a bit.”

  “Even though you lied to him about meeting this man. You’ve already admitted that in your interview. You told your husband that you were with your mother in Manchester.”

  “I lied because I was ashamed of owing the money.”

  “You lied because you didn’t want anyone to know that you had been meeting the man who was going to kill Lady Anne. That’s the truth, isn’t it?” Sparling’s accusation came accompanied with a sudden aggression of voice and gesture, but neither seemed to have any effect on Greta. She smiled at Sparling before answering his question slowly and deliberately.

  “No, it’s not the truth, Mr. Sparling. I lied because I was ashamed of being in debt. I did not want Sir Peter or Lady Anne to think badly of me.”

  “Did you say to your visitor, ‘Can’t you see I haven’t got him yet’?”

  “No, I would never have said that. I would’ve said: ‘Can’t you see I haven’t got it yet,’ about the money. If you recall, Mr. Sparling, Thomas couldn’t be sure if I said ‘him’ or ‘it.’ I’m sure it’ll be in your notes.”

  “So you weren’t referring to not yet having secured Sir Peter. Is that right?”

  “I was talking about the money.”

  “Your visitor was the man who killed Lady Anne, I suggest. Thomas recognized him as such.”

  “He saw a man from behind. And that man can’t have been the man in my flat anyway.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the front door of the basement was locked when I went up to the main house via the internal staircase. I always kept it locked from the inside because of burglars.”

  “Why couldn’t your visitor have unlocked it?”

  “Because I had the key.”

  “You never mentioned this in your interview, Lady Robinson. Why not?”

  “Because I didn’t think of it.”

  “And that’s not all you failed to mention, was it? Sergeant Hearns asked you again and again to give the name of your visitor. Again and again you refused to provide it. Why? What had you got to hide?”

  “I had nothing to hide. The man’s name is Andrew Relton.”

  Sparling stopped, momentarily taken aback. He hadn’t expected Greta’s reply, and he had never heard this name before. But it took no more than a second or two for him to regain his composure and return to the attack.

  “You tell us now when your trial’s almost over and so the information’s useless,” he said. “Why wouldn’t you tell the police when you were interviewed? That’s when it mattered.”

  There was a pause, and then Sparling went on as if Greta’s silence was exactly what he had expected.

  “You aren’t answering because you haven’t got an answer, have you, Lady Robinson? You didn’t name this man to the police because you didn’t want them to investigate your story.”

  “No, I didn’t want Andrew dragged into all this, and what’s wrong with that?” said Greta angrily. “My debts are my own affair. They’ve got nothing to do with this trial. Nothing at all.”

  “You didn’t want to name your visitor because he’s the man who murdered Lady Anne. That’s the truth, isn’t it?” Sparling had drawn himself up to his full height as if to emphasize his accusation.

  “No, it’s not,” said Greta with equal emphasis.

  “The same man who went back to deal with Thomas just before your trial.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “The man whom his friend called Rosie.”

  “I don’t know anyone called Rosie or Rose,” said Greta firmly. “Man or woman. It’s a ridiculous name.”

  Immediately Sparling regretted asking about the murderer’s return to the House of the Four Winds the previous week. He’d thrown away the advantage gained by highlighting Greta’s evasiveness with the police and instead concentrated the jury’s attention on the weakest part of his case. Now he had no choice but to continue.

  �
�He referred to you by name. He said you were the one who showed him how the hiding place worked.”

  “No, he didn’t. Thomas has made that up. It’s pretty convenient, isn’t it, that this Rosie character should mention me by name just when he could be sure that Thomas would overhear?”

  “Please just answer the questions, Lady Robinson,” said Sparling in an effort to keep control of his cross-examination. But he was being beaten back and he knew it. He’d noticed out of the corner of his eye how several of the jurors had nodded in agreement immediately after Greta’s last observation. Sparling was in fact half relieved when the judge chose this moment for a ten-minute midmorning adjournment.

  At the very moment that Judge Granger was sitting back in his easy chair in the privacy of his chambers inhaling the smoke from his first cigarette of the day, Thomas and Matthew were sitting at a table in the cafeteria of the Family Records Office with an array of half-drunk cups of coffee and empty soft-drink cans in front of them. They’d just returned from a third unsuccessful attempt to persuade Andrew the applications clerk to expedite their application.

  “Bastard, officious bastard.” Thomas spat out the words while giving further expression to his feelings by crushing an empty Coke can in his hand.

  “I know,” said Matthew. “But if you’d carried on, we’d probably have gotten thrown out and then we wouldn’t get the certificates at all.”