Final Witness (9 page)

    She should have taken his advice.

    “The prosecution has the first word, my dear, but we have the last. Remember that. We have the last.”

    Greta smiled. She had a lot of faith in Miles.

    

    

    ONE HUNDRED and twenty miles to the east of the Old Bailey the boy who was figuring so prominently in John Sparling’s opening address was standing at his bedroom window in the House of the Four Winds looking out over the broad expanse of the north lawn. It was a bright summer’s day, and the sun shone down through the branches of the elm trees, creating a fantastic play of shadows on the newly mowed grass.

    One hundred yards from where Thomas was standing, the north gate of the property stood closed and locked. Thomas shivered as he looked at it even though his room was warm, even hot. As had happened so often in the last few months, Thomas could not stop his mind from going back to the previous summer, to the night of his mother’s murder.

    In his imagination, Thomas saw the man with the scar and his sidekick pulling up in the lane in the dark. The sidekick would have been driving, Thomas thought, with the other giving directions in his soft, cruel voice. Pushing through the unlocked door in the wall, Thomas imagined that they must have hesitated for a moment while the man fingered the scar running down behind his jaw and let his eyes run over the house, visible in the pale moonlight. Thomas thought of him in that moment as if he were a cat enjoying the defenselessness of what he was about to destroy before he set off across the lawn with the gun hard and metallic in his pocket. He knew where he was going, and nothing would deflect him from his purpose.

    Just as it had done a thousand times before, Thomas’s mind flew to his mother, sleeping so peacefully in her bed with the moonlight shining down through the half-drawn curtains. Sleeping in the same room where her parents had slept. Where her father had died looking up at the portrait of his wife on the wall. Where Thomas had often slept himself, driven by the Suffolk storms to find comfort beside his mother in the small hours. Life and love and death going on through the generations of the Sackvilles, until Greta came.

    Hardly anyone had been in the room since Lady Anne’s death. Sir Peter never came, and it was only Jane Martin who went in there once a week to dust, and she didn’t stay long. She had not yet been able to face the task of disposing of Lady Anne’s clothes. The dresses still hung in the closets just as they had before their owner’s death, as if nothing had happened.

    Thomas kept his distance. He had been determined from the outset to remain in the House of the Four Winds. He was his mother’s heir. To leave would have meant defeat, and he honored her by remaining, but at a cost. Everywhere he went reminded him of her. He tried to help himself by avoiding the front stairs and his mother’s bedroom, but he often found himself standing outside his own bedroom as he was now, gazing down the corridor to the closed door at the end, remembering his failure.

    Over and over again he’d replayed it in his mind. He’d had to shake her so hard to get her to wake up, and there’d been no time. He could hear the men downstairs. Perhaps if he’d been quicker or made her go in front, then she’d have gotten inside the hiding place and the man with the scar would never have seen her, never have shot her, never have taken her away. Put her in a black, wet hole in the Flyte churchyard.

    Suddenly Thomas felt violently sick. His legs went weak and he was barely able to make it into the bathroom before he threw up, kneeling on the tiles with his arms hugging the cold porcelain of the toilet bowl. He retched again and again until he had nothing left.

    Back in his bedroom Thomas tried to think of something good. The trouble was that the past was his mother and her death had destroyed it all. Made it unbearable. He looked out the window again and tried to reclaim the north lawn for his own. It was across the lawn to the north gate that he would go with Barton at his side almost every morning of the holidays for as long as he could remember. Walking barefoot with the Labrador padding after him, making a path through the glistening dew on their way to the beach. There Thomas would break off a piece of driftwood and throw it high and far and the dog would rush headlong across the sand and into the sea, grasping it miraculously from the clutch of the waves before bringing back the prize to his master.

    At night there was a ritual. The word
bedtime,
said by Lady Anne even in the softest voice, would transform Barton into a wolf. He would growl menacingly and push Thomas up the back stairs toward his room. Protests were useless. The growls would redouble in volume and even turn into snarls until Thomas reached his door, whereupon the dog would spring onto the bed and curl up in contentment.

    Thomas loved the Labrador passionately, and Barton loved him. The two were almost inseparable. When Thomas wrote stories about being marooned on a desert island, he never imagined himself alone. Barton was there to keep him company, protecting him from the wild animals that tried to attack their camp after the sun went down. If Thomas was a knight of the Round Table dressed in the helmet and breastplate that Jane Martin had given him for his tenth birthday, then Barton would be his black charger dressed up for the tournament in one of Lady Anne’s most beautiful silk handkerchiefs.

    Time passed and Barton grew older. He could no longer always catch the sticks that Thomas threw out into the waves. The dog would stand at the water’s edge looking puzzled as the tide took his prize away, and the sleek black tail that had always crashed from side to side with the joy of being alive now hung still. Thomas put his arm around Barton’s warm neck and went to tell his mother.

    The vet in Flyte listened to Barton’s heart and shook his head a fraction.

    “There’s a murmur. Give him these tablets and don’t let him strain himself. He’s an old boy now, Thomas. Nearly ninety in our years.”

    Nearly ninety? Barton wasn’t ninety. He was three years younger than Thomas. “But dogs don’t live that long, darling,” said Lady Anne in the car on the way home. “We must enjoy them while we can.”

    Two months later Barton could not get up the stairs. Thomas picked up the old dog and carried him up to his room. He slept on the bed all night, but toward dawn he began to whimper and Thomas fetched his mother.

    In the morning Barton was no better, and they called the vet.

    “It’s not fair to Barton to make him carry on,” said Lady Anne to her son. “He’s hurting inside, Tom. You can see that.”

    “But I don’t want him to die,” cried Thomas with his pajama-clad arm wrapped around the old dog’s neck.

    Barton looked up at his master and tried to get to his feet, but the effort was too much and he laid his head down on the floor again.

    “He’s trusting us. Trusting us to help him. You have to understand that, Tom.” And Thomas did. Love worked both ways.

    He kissed the dog and held his paw while the vet prepared the injection. And then it was all over in an instant. It was something that Thomas never forgot: the thinness of the line between life and death.

    He and his mother buried Barton in the garden under the old elm tree that stood by the north gate so that Thomas could see the grave from his bedroom window. They held hands and said a prayer thanking God for Barton’s life, and the next day Thomas made a wooden cross with Barton’s name and dates and dug it deep into the soil.

    

    Lady Anne had thought of buying a puppy before Barton died so that Thomas would have another dog already there when Barton was gone. However, she ended up not doing so. It wouldn’t have been fair to the old dog to see a puppy rushing about as he lost his strength and couldn’t compete for Thomas’s attention.

    Lady Anne took care also to allow her son enough time to properly mourn his friend. Thomas and she would pick the wildflowers that grew on the edges of the marsh and bring them back to lay on Barton’s grave, but Lady Anne soon came to realize that these walks were only making things worse. Thomas would forget what had happened and look up expecting to see Barton bounding toward him across the dunes, only to realize that the Labrador was gone for good and nothing would bring him back.

    After two weeks Lady Anne decided that it was time to act. Breakfast was over, and Thomas was sitting on the front step watching the early sun make patterns on the hall carpet as it shone down through the yew trees. A paperback copy of
Robinson Crusoe
lay face up beside him, but in truth he hadn’t read anything since Barton’s death. The sea was quiet, and as Thomas looked down over the lawn to the front gate and the houses beyond the road, he felt an enormous desolation settling over the world. There seemed to be nowhere to go and nothing to do.

    The voice of his mother calling to him from the top of the stairs startled him out of his lethargy.

    “Come on, Tom, we need to get packed.”

    “Packed. Why?”

    “Because we’re going to London. This afternoon. Everything’s arranged.”

    “London. Why are we going to London?”

    “For a holiday, Tom. For a change of scenery. To put some color in your cheeks so you stop walking around looking like the Carmouth Ghost.”

    “I don’t look like the Carmouth Ghost. She was a woman who killed her husband with a steak knife, and I’m a – ”

    “You’re a fourteen-year-old who’s been having a terrible time and doesn’t know what to do with himself.”

    “But Mum, you hate London. You know you do. That’s what you always say to Dad when he wants you to go up there for one of his political things.”

    “I’m not going up there for them. I’m going to London to spend time with you.”

    “And Dad?”

    “Yes, of course. He’s promised to take time out to be with us. He knows you’re having a bad time at the moment. That’s why he wrote you that letter.”

    “Not exactly a letter. Five lines. ‘I was sorry to hear about Barton. Here’s ten pounds. Buy yourself something at the shop.’”

    “He’s very busy, darling. He meant well.”

    “No, he didn’t. If he cared, he’d have come down here last weekend.”

    “He couldn’t. There was a conference he had to go to. You know that.”

    “I know that he doesn’t care about me. Or you. That’s what I know.”

    “That’s not true, Thomas.”

    “It is true. Spending all his time with Greta. Green-eyed Greta.”

    “She’s his personal assistant, Tom. And the fact that she’s got green eyes has got nothing to do with it. She’s very good at her job, and we must try to like her for your father’s sake.”

    “Everything is for his sake. Nothing is for ours,” said Thomas, becoming visibly angry. He kicked his book to one side and went and stood at the top of the steps leading down to the drive.

    Behind him he felt his mother approaching, but he did not turn his head even when she came to stand beside him. He fought to hold back the tears that were starting in his eyes and bunched his hands into hard fists.

    Lady Anne worried for her son as she stood beside him between the yews. He was so rigid and unbending as he fought to control emotions of anger and grief that threatened to overwhelm him. She thought of the old beech tree by the south gate, broken by the great storm in January when the fisherman had drowned in the bay. It had been too rigid, unlike the yews that swayed in the wind.

    Peter had been here that night. With Greta. Driving Gracie Marsh down to the harbor. Lady Anne didn’t like Greta. She had formed that opinion long before her son had found the woman trying on her clothes. She had seen Greta watching everyone, insinuating herself into their lives, but Anne had held her peace because Greta had done nothing wrong and it was clear that Peter needed her so much for his work.

    Anne could tell that Greta had changed her accent, and she felt that the girl was watching her in order to imitate her. It sometimes almost seemed as if Greta was trying to become her.

    “She’s not one of us,” she had once caught herself saying to her husband in an unguarded moment, but she had accepted his retaliatory accusation of snobbery as just. Forgiveness was part of the code of manners by which Lady Anne lived her life, and she had forced herself to accept Peter’s explanation for why Greta had tried on the dresses. She had money and Greta didn’t, and if she’d been nicer to her, then perhaps Greta would have felt able to ask to borrow a dress or two.

    Thomas, of course, didn’t see it that way. It was ironic, given all the efforts that Greta had made to get on with him. All those books she’d read about Suffolk. Lady Anne didn’t know how she’d found time. It was as if something more had happened in her bedroom when Thomas found Greta trying on her clothes, but there was no point in asking her son. He’d found it difficult enough to tell her about the dresses.

    “Let’s not talk about Greta or your father, Tom. I know things aren’t easy at the moment with what’s happened with Barton, but you shouldn’t try to make them worse. You’re not the only one who misses Barton. Jane loved him and so did I. What we both need is a change of scenery. London’ll be good for us.”

    There was a note of appeal in his mother’s voice that Thomas could not resist. He loved his mother and could not bear to make her anxious or distressed. That would lead to one of the terrible migraines that hurt her so badly. The long afternoons when his mother lay on her bed with her face covered by a flannel sighing with the pain were the worst days of his childhood. Afterward she would be weak for days, sitting in the rocking chair by the kitchen door in her dressing gown, drinking the cups of peppermint tea that Aunt Jane made for her in a special teapot.

    “Yes, Mum. I’m being silly. I’d love to go with you. I’ll go and get packed.”