Final Witness (34 page)

    “All right, I was only asking,” she said. “There’s no harm in that. I’m sorry you were sick.”

    “It doesn’t sound like it,” he said.

    “Don’t be silly.”

    Greta kissed him lightly on the cheek and Peter smiled before turning with relief back to his window, where the stone wall of the Chelsea Embankment was flying past alongside the car. He looked out over the river wondering where Matthew Barne lived. He needed to ask Thomas about Rosie, but would Thomas tell him the truth? Peter felt that there was no one he could really trust. He wanted to believe in Greta, and he was almost sure he did, but asking her about Rose again, telling her about the connection, would make her think that he didn’t believe, and that would be disastrous for both of them. Peter felt that he’d already said too much. Greta was looking at him strangely again as they got out of the car.

    “I think I’ll stay here,” she said. “I don’t want you to be on your own when you’re sick. Miles will understand.”

    “No, Greta, that’s a mistake. I know it is. You’ll be rushed in the morning, watching the clock. You won’t be able to concentrate.”

    “It’s not that bad, darling,” Greta said, smiling. “Perhaps you’re right though. I’ll feel better when I’ve had a drink. Be a love and make one for me while I go and change.”

    Peter waited in the drawing room, listening to the sound of his wife’s footfalls on the stairs leading up to the top story. He eyed the telephone, feeling like a snake. It was sitting on top of the desk in which Thomas had found the locket. Greta used the bureau now, and Peter wondered if she had put anything in the secret drawer to replace the locket. For the hundredth time he tried to visualize Anne as he had seen her on the day of her death: at lunch, lying on the sofa, passing him on the stairs. He didn’t think she was wearing the locket, but he couldn’t be sure. He hadn’t known that it was the day of Anne’s death; he hadn’t known that he was looking at her alive for the last time.

    
I’m not your Greta Rose. Not anymore
. But had she been once? Peter had to know. He picked up the telephone and dialed directory assistance. Matthew Barne’s number was unlisted and Peter was about to give up when he remembered the school. He was a parent, a tuition-paying parent. Carstow would give him the number; they had no reason not to.

    Soon he was speaking to Thomas.

    “What do you want, Dad?” Thomas’s voice was wary, but at least the word
Dad
implied a recognition of a relationship between them.

    “I want to speak to you, to ask you something.”

    “About what?”

    “About Rosie.”

    There was a silence at the end of the telephone, and Peter thought for a moment that they had been disconnected.

    “Thomas, are you there?”

    “Yes, I’m here.”

    “I can’t speak for much longer. Will you meet me?”

    “I don’t know.”

    Another silence, and Peter could hear Greta coming down the stairs.

    “There’s no time. I’ll meet you on Chelsea Town Hall steps at six-thirty.”

    “Where’s that?”

    “Around the corner from the house.”

    Peter put the phone down just as Greta came into the room.

    “Who was that?”

    “Just someone from the Ministry.”

    “What’s he doing around the corner from the house?”

    “The House of Commons. That’s where I’m meeting him next week.”

    The lie slipped easily from Peter’s tongue, and Greta seemed to accept his answer. She took the drink from his hand and kissed him as she did so, allowing her lips to move over his so that he was suddenly filled with desire.

    She caught the look in his eye and moved away from him, smiling. Her power over him was still undiluted.

    “Not now, darling, or I
won’t
be able to concentrate. Besides, I’m wearing my giving-evidence dress. It’s a dry run for tomorrow. What do you think?”

    “I think it’s perfect.” Peter was being no less than honest. The black dress was of a perfect cut and length. Her breasts were high and pronounced, but there was no trace of cleavage. He had never seen Greta looking so beautiful.

    The time passed slowly. Peter’s mind was in confusion, but he tried not to show it, hiding behind government papers on the sofa. But something must have alerted Greta to his anxiety. Perhaps it was the way he kept glancing up at the carriage clock on the mantelpiece. Several times she asked him what was wrong, and several times she wondered aloud about canceling the conference with Miles Lambert.

    At five past six the bell rang and Greta gathered up her papers and went down to the car. On the doorstep she hesitated and took hold of her husband by the arm.

    “I can rely on you, Peter, can’t I?” she said.

    “Yes. Yes, of course you can.” He avoided her eyes as he spoke.

    

    

    PETER PACED the rooms after Greta had left, checking off each minute that passed on his watch. His mind was in a ferment. One moment he was certain that Greta could have nothing to do with the murder, and the next doubts flooded back as he remembered the words that he had overheard in the basement a year earlier.

    At 6:25 he left the house and walked around to the town hall. Thomas was sitting at the top of the steps. He was wearing the same outfit that he’d had on at court: a navy blazer with gold buttons, a pair of tan trousers and a pale blue Oxford shirt. The only difference was that the black loafers that had been shiny with recent polishing at court were now scuffed at the toes, as if Thomas had been using them to kick the curb in frustration. Peter was suddenly touched by the thought that Thomas would have had to decide for himself what to wear to court. He had no parents to advise him. His mother was dead, and his father had gone away. Peter felt a momentary sensation of guilt, but his nerves were too frayed for him to retain any emotion for long.

    Thomas got to his feet and came halfway down the steps toward his father. Their eyes met for a moment and then Peter looked away. In his excitement he had not realized how traumatic it would be to see his son again. The meeting called for a reconciliation, but that of course was not why Peter had asked Thomas to come. He needed answers to the questions that had been pounding in his mind for the previous two hours, but he could not pay for the answers with soft words; that would be too much of a betrayal, and so he launched straight into his questions without saying anything by way of greeting.

    “What did this Rosie say about Greta?” he asked breathlessly.

    “He said she had told him how the hiding place opened. It’s all in my statement. Haven’t you read it?” Thomas had gone back up a step and now looked down at his father angrily.

    “No, I haven’t read it,” said Peter. “I need to know about this from you.”

    “Why?” Thomas threw out the question like a challenge. It conveyed all his pent-up resentment. He’d come across the city at the bidding of his father, negotiating the subway for only the second time in his life, and his father hadn’t even bothered to say hello to him. They hadn’t properly seen each other since the day of his mother’s funeral, and now his father had nothing for him except questions about Rosie. Thomas felt he’d had enough of questions. He’d heard nothing else all day.

    “I’m asking you because you were the only other person there. You’re the only one who’s met this Rosie.”

    “Apart from your wife,” said Thomas.

    “All right, I don’t want to argue with you. I just need to know some things.”

    “What things?”

    “What else did he say about Greta?”

    “He didn’t say anything else about Greta.”

    “Are you sure he was called Rosie?”

    “That’s what Lonny called him.”

    “Could it have been Rose? Could you have heard it wrong?”

    “No, I didn’t hear it wrong. And he did say it and it did happen. I’m sick of people saying it didn’t. Sick of people not believing me. Like you. You don’t believe me.”

    It came to Peter that his son had changed in the year since the funeral. The desperation that he remembered from their interview in the little terrace house in Woodbridge had been transformed into a new, dogged determination. Thomas’s defiance was now far more than skin deep.

    “I don’t know what to believe, Thomas. That’s why I need to ask you these questions.” Peter realized immediately after he spoke how much he had betrayed Greta by his words. He felt an overwhelming self-disgust, which in turn made him angry with his son.

    Thomas, however, thought nothing of his father’s concession. He regretted coming. Seeing his father only made him realize how little the man loved him. He was better off not seeing him at all.

    “I’m going,” he said. “I wish I hadn’t come.”

    Thomas came down the steps heading for the street, and Peter instinctively put out a hand to stop him.

    “One more question,” he said. “Just one more. Was Rosie his first name or his last?”

    “How should I know? The other man just called him that. What is it about his name that’s so important?”

    The angry tone of his son’s voice incensed Peter. Part of him wanted to push Thomas away or even strike him again, like he had in Woodbridge, but the need for an answer stayed his hand. There was nobody except Thomas whom he could talk to about the conversation he’d overheard. He had to know if there was a connection.

    “On the night after your mother’s funeral, I heard Greta talking to someone on the phone,” said Peter slowly. “I just heard the end of the conversation; that’s all. She said to whoever it was: ‘Don’t call me that. I’m not your Greta Rose. Not anymore.’ Then afterward I asked her what that meant and she said it was her name, that Rose was her middle name.”

    “And then today you heard about Rosie for the first time and you wondered – ”

    “I don’t know what I wondered.”

    “You wondered about Rosie and Greta. You wondered…” Thomas stopped in midsentence. He didn’t need to spell it out for his father. If he could prove a connection, then he could still win.

    “Have you looked through her things?” Thomas asked.

    “For what?”

    “To see if she’s really called Greta Rose. She must have a passport or a birth certificate or something like that.”

    “I suppose I could,” said Peter doubtfully. Talking to Thomas behind Greta’s back was a betrayal, but going through her papers would be worse, far worse.

    “Where is she now?” asked Thomas.

    “She’s talking to her barrister.”

    “Cooking up more lies.”

    “No, going through her evidence,” said Peter angrily. He swung like a pendulum between his loyalty to Greta, which made him feel almost violent toward his son, and the doubts about her innocence that he couldn’t get out of his head.

    “When’s she coming back?” asked Thomas.

    “I don’t know. Not before eight.”

    “There’s time then. Let’s go and look.”

    They began walking toward the house. Peter’s agitation became more evident with every step they took.

    “I can’t give evidence like this,” he said as they turned the corner. “I need to know first.”

    “When are you giving evidence?”

    “I don’t know. Sometime on Thursday probably. The prosecution have still got some statements to read, and then there’s Greta. I don’t know how long she’ll take.”

    Peter was talking in order not to think about the significance of what he was doing as he beckoned to Thomas to follow him into the house.

    Thomas expected his father to turn into the room on the right, but instead he carried on up the stairs to the first floor and went over to the very same oak bureau in the corner of the drawing room where Thomas had found the locket the previous October.

    “Greta keeps most of her papers in here now,” said Peter, opening the bureau.

    “Not much point in looking in the secret place, I wouldn’t think,” said Thomas from behind his father’s shoulder. He was right. The recess was empty, but in the drawer below Peter found his wife’s passport. It had been issued the previous year, three months before Greta’s marriage. There was an unflattering photograph taken just after Greta had had an unusually severe haircut, and next to it the details of the holder. Last name, Grahame. Given names, Greta. Nothing else. Just Greta.

    Thomas leaned across his father and jabbed his finger against the name so hard that the passport almost fell out of Peter’s trembling hand.

    “Look, Dad. No Rose. No nothing. She lied to you about it being her middle name. That’s not why she used to be called Greta Rose.”

    “It’s not enough,” said Peter stubbornly. “It doesn’t mean anything. Greta told me herself that she stopped calling herself Greta Rose after she left Manchester, and so it makes sense that she’d leave it off her renewal application. It’s the birth certificate that’s important. It’ll be here somewhere.”

    “Let me look,” said Thomas impatiently. “You’re taking forever.”

    “No, I don’t want you touching anything,” said Peter angrily.

    “Look in the drawer where the passport was, then,” said Thomas. “She’s going to keep all those kind of documents together.”

    Thomas was right. There was an old black address book held together by a liberal application of masking tape and underneath it a thick brown envelope with the word
certificates
written on it in Greta’s neat handwriting.

    Peter emptied the contents of the envelope out onto the writing surface of the bureau. At the top was a much newer piece of paper than the others, which turned out to be the certificate of Greta’s marriage to Peter. Underneath it was a document headed University of Birmingham, and then a copy of a death certificate for a George Grahame, and at the bottom the certified copy of an entry of birth for Greta Rose Grahame, a girl born on November 17, 1971, at 20 Cale Street in Manchester. Greta Rose had had a home birth.