Final Witness (40 page)

    “Excuse me, Sir Peter. I don’t quite understand that answer.”

    “Let me clarify it for you then,” said Peter evenly. “We certainly went through a ceremony of marriage at the Chelsea Registry Office on the twentieth of December last year, but it is now quite clear to me in the light of these documents that the ceremony was not valid.”

    “Not valid?”

    “Yes. Because the person I thought I was marrying was already married to someone else, and I have every reason to think that her husband was then, and in fact still is, very much alive.”

    Miles’s mouth opened and closed and opened again, but for the first time in many years no words came out. He glanced down too late at the scrawled note that Patrick Sullivan had put on the table in front of him.

    “Miles,” it said. “Don’t ask him any questions. He’ll destroy us if you do. Close the case now. Greta.”

    She might have told me before, thought Miles bitterly. Before her bloody husband or whoever he is got up there and smashed up all my work.

    The judge allowed the heavy silence to build in the courtroom for a few moments before he broke it himself.

    “I see that you’ve got two documents there, Sir Peter,” he said in his usual courteous manner. “Perhaps you’d be good enough to tell us what they are.”

    “This one’s Greta’s marriage certificate,” said Peter. “The certificate for her first marriage, I mean. It shows that she married Jonathan Barry Rowes on November twenty-sixth, 1989, in Liverpool – ”

    “I’m sorry to interrupt you, Sir Peter, but did you just say ‘Rose’?” asked the judge. “As in the flower?”

    “Yes, that’s right. It’s spelled R-O-W-E-S but it’s obviously pronounced like the flower.”

    “Thank you. Please carry on.”

    “This other one is Greta’s birth certificate,” said Peter, holding up the red-edged piece of paper. His voice was toneless and mechanical, completely at variance with the extraordinary things that he was saying. “The father’s name on it is the same as the father’s name on the marriage certificate. It proves it’s Greta who married Rowes, and I believe Rowes is the man who killed my wife and tried to kill my son two weeks ago.”

    “Yes, thank you,” said the judge, raising his voice a little in order to quell a sudden outbreak of whispering in the court. “Well, the jury had better see these exhibits, don’t you think, Mr. Lambert? They really seem to be quite relevant, particularly given your client’s assertion yesterday that she doesn’t know anyone called Rosie or Rose.”

    “My Lord, I request an adjournment,” said Miles, recovering his voice but not his composure.

    “Why, Mr. Lambert? I can’t see the need. This is your witness, you know. You called him.”

    “My Lord, if you won’t grant me an adjournment, will you at least let me address you in the absence of the jury?”

    “Yes, Mr. Lambert, certainly you may, but first the jury must be allowed to finish examining the documents produced by your witness. Let’s make them exhibits twenty-one and twenty-two, Miss Hooks.”

    The two certificates had just gotten as far as the Indian juror with the turban when Greta couldn’t contain herself any longer.

    “Peter! Look at me, Peter!” she shouted to her husband across the courtroom. “It’s not what you think. It was just a stupid teenage thing. We got divorced years ago. I had nothing to do with this murder!”

    Peter turned to look at his wife for the last time, and his composure cracked. He was suddenly like a drowning man, struggling in vain to swim up to the surface. He opened his mouth but no words came.

    Perhaps Greta took his silence for encouragement, but she certainly lost no time in intensifying her appeal. “I made you what you are now, Peter,” she cried. “You know that. What did Anne ever do for you? All she cared about was Thomas and that house. I saved you from her. I set you free.”

    “I’ll never be free again. You killed her, Greta. And then you made me part of what you’d done. You and your psychopath.”

    The words were forced from Peter and came between great gulps. But they enraged Greta. It was as if she realized for the first time that she had lost him.

    “You’re a fool, Peter. That’s what you are. You want it all for free, don’t you? The power and the glory
and
the beautiful girl. But there’s a price to pay. Just like there always is. You don’t get something for nothing, Peter. Not in the real world.”

    Greta drew breath for more, and the reporters’ pencils raced across their notepads. But there was to be no more. The security guard whom Greta had pushed aside at the start of her outburst had now recovered. She tackled Greta to the floor and then manhandled her through the door at the back of the dock.

    “Yes, take her down,” said Judge Granger in a commanding voice. “And Mr. Lambert, I’ll give you your adjournment, but your client will stay in custody until I say otherwise. Perhaps you better take some further instructions. Your client seems to have quite a lot to say.”

    

    The courtroom emptied very quickly after the judge and jury had gone out. The reporters needed to phone the day’s sensation through to their editors. Soon Thomas and Matthew found themselves all alone except for Sir Peter, who continued to sit in the witness box gazing steadily into the middle distance. He looked as if something inside him had irrevocably broken, as if the motor that had driven him so hard for so many years had spluttered and died. Matthew saw Thomas staring at his father and quietly left the court.

    Thomas wanted to go over to his father, but he hung back, rooted to his seat. He had the words for confronting his father but none for getting close to him. They had been strangers for too long. It was Peter who finally broke the silence, and his voice came as if from a great distance away.

    “I’m sorry, Tom,” he said. “I’ve let you and Anne down all because of some stupid infatuation. I’ve betrayed you both and dressed it up as loyalty. I wanted to believe in Greta because I couldn’t bear the thought of life without her, and so I let all this happen. All this ruin, and now it’s too late.”

    “What’s too late?”

    “Everything. I don’t want to be anymore, Tom. That’s the trouble. I don’t want to be. If I hadn’t brought Greta Grahame into our world, your mother would still be alive. I can’t live with that, Tom. I just can’t live with that.”

    “Perhaps you can’t at the moment, but it’ll be different later. You can’t give up, Dad.”

    “Why not?”

    “Because you’re my father and you owe me,” said Thomas simply. It was the only reply he could think of.

    “Perhaps I do,” said Peter, smiling sadly. “But you can’t get blood from a stone. I’m all out of love, Tom. I’m no good to you.”

    “You’re all I’ve got,” said Thomas passionately. “Mummy loved you. That’s why she wore that locket. And she loved me too, which is why she saved me from Rowes. We both owe it to her to carry on, to help each other.”

    Thomas leaned forward and kissed his father on the cheek, and a strange thing happened. He couldn’t remember ever seeing his father’s piercing blue eyes close before, but now they did.

    

    The jury found Greta guilty by a majority of eleven to one at 4:05 on the following afternoon. The press tended to agree that it was the Italian man in the expensive designer suit who was the dissenting voice, although one or two of them thought that it might be the Indian man with the turban and the inscrutable expression who had held out against the rest. There was no doubting which way the forewoman of the jury had voted, however. She positively shouted the verdict across the courtroom, accompanying it with a mean glare at Miles Lambert, who had known what was coming and looked the other way. Afterward he congratulated John Sparling on his victory, and the prosecution barrister had the good grace to admit that he would certainly have lost the case if it had not been for the arrival of the two certificates at the last minute in the hand of Miles’s star witness.

    At half past four Judge Granger sentenced Lady Greta Robinson to a term of life imprisonment. She showed no reaction to the sentence, but the reporters all agreed that she seemed to have lost none of her pride and dignity as she was led away. She was certainly a cut above the normal run of defendants.

    

    

    THE MAN WAS dressed in a white paper suit. The police had given it to him that morning to replace his clothing, which had been removed for forensic examination. And it wasn’t just his clothing that the police had taken. They’d also gotten his passport, travel documents, and a neck brace that he had been wearing at the time of his arrest. When on, it had concealed a thick scar that ran down behind his right jawbone into his strong bull neck.

    Every police officer worth his salt knew that the paper suit was a sure way of stripping the suspect of his defenses, making him more likely to crack under questioning. But it wasn’t working its magic with this man. He wore the suit as if it were tailor-made, shaking out his thick black hair over its collar. He had his long, muscular legs stretched out in front of him as if he didn’t have a care in the world. And he said nothing. Just stared at Detective Sergeant Hearns with a half smile playing across his bloodless lips, while the big policeman asked question after question and got no reply. Jonathan Barry Rowes was exercising his right to silence.

    Hearns knew he was having no effect. It was bloody-mindedness that kept him going, and afterward he had no idea why Rowes started to talk. Perhaps he just got bored. Clearly any advice given by the shifty-looking lawyer sitting beside Rowes in the interview room was entirely irrelevant. He was the type of man who made his own decisions.

    “What’s your name?” he asked suddenly, interrupting Hearns in the middle of a question about Rowes’s Mercedes C-class car.

    “Detective Sergeant Hearns of the Ipswich Police. I introduced myself at the start of the interview, Mr. Rowes.”

    “Sure you did. But it’s not your fucking surname I’m after, Sergeant. What’s the name your parents gave you? Or didn’t you have any fucking parents?”

    Rowes’s voice remained soft and slow. There was no increase in volume or emphasis to accompany the abuse and foul language. He kept his small, dark eyes fixed on the policeman across the table.

    Hearns looked away for a moment, twisting his stubby-fingered hands together. He was remembering like a mantra the section in the training manual headed “Never lose your temper when interviewing a suspect.” He needed to humor Rowes if he was going to get any answers to his questions.

    “Martin,” he said after a pause. “My parents called me Martin.”

    “Marty. Funny name for a copper. Well, Marty, you’re trying to tell me something, aren’t you? Isn’t that the truth?”

    “No. All I’ve been doing is asking you questions, which you’ve been declining to answer. That’s your right.”

    “Oh, come off it, Marty. You’re telling me I’m dead in the water. My DNA matches the blood on the windowsill, and there’s fuck-all I can do about it. I’ve got that moron, Lonny, to thank for that. The idiot pushed me when I was trying to pick the glass out. He’s always been in too much of a hurry. It’ll get him in trouble one of these days.” Rowes laughed harshly.

    “Lonny who?” asked Hearns.

    “Lonny nothing. Don’t ask stupid questions, Marty. It doesn’t suit you. Now, what was I saying? Yeah, DNA. The scientists have got the better of us. Not just me. You too, Marty. No need for any of your old-fashioned police work anymore, is there? Just grab a blood sample, send it off to the lab, and hey presto, Johnny Burglar gets ten years. You’ll be out of a job soon, Marty.”

    “I agree that it’s certainly changed things. Except that in your case we didn’t have your DNA to make the comparison. Not until we found you, that is.”

    “Until I dropped into your lap, you mean. You didn’t find me, Marty. The kid did. Get your facts right. You screwed up the investigation. That was your contribution.”

    “You’re entitled to your opinion, Mr. Rowes. But the point is you’ve been arrested and this is your opportunity to give your side of the story.”

    “Uncle Marty. Always looking after my interests. No, you just want answers for your stupid questions. And you know, thinking about it, there’s really no reason not to talk, is there? I’m going down anyway, thanks to this DNA garbage. So ask away, Marty. Let me satisfy your copper’s curiosity.”

    “The murder. Whose idea was it? Yours or Greta’s?”

    “Mine. I suggested it because I needed her. And she had to have an incentive for getting involved. She wanted to be Mrs. Big Time, and His Lordship was never going to divorce the lady of the house.”

    “So it was your idea. Good. How long before the murder did you and Greta first start talking about it?”

    “Conspiring, you mean. Not long. I saw her picture in the paper leaving some fancy restaurant with that creep, Peter Robinson. I did some research, and then I went and talked to her. I hadn’t seen her in over a year.”

    “What did she say?”

    “She didn’t like the idea at first. Didn’t want to get her hands dirty. But she soon changed her mind when I threatened to tell lover boy about her and me. I’ve always been one of her best-kept secrets, you know. She wouldn’t tell her parents when we got married. We had to sneak off to Liverpool when no one was looking. So anyway, she signed up to getting rid of Her Ladyship, but then she kept on getting me to wait because she wasn’t sure she’d got His Lordship hooked. I got bored in the end.”

    “And whose idea was it to go back to the house before the trial? Yours or Greta’s?”

    “Mine. She got mad about it afterward. She loves the little runt, or used to anyway.”

    “So what were you going to do with Thomas when you found him?”