Final Witness (27 page)

    “Just one question, my Lord. Officer, you’ve said that you parked outside the front gate. Could you see the exit from the lane from where you were?”

    “No, sir. The gate is set back from the road a little way, and there’s a row of trees between the wall and the curb. We wouldn’t have had a view from where we were parked, sir.”

    “Thank you, Officer. That’s all.”

    Police Constable Hughes put on his cap and headed for the door on his way back to Carmouth and obscurity.

    

    The day wore on. At one o’clock everyone broke for lunch. John Sparling wasn’t hungry but made a concession to the time of day by picking at a green salad, which he washed down with a glass of mineral water in the barristers’ canteen upstairs.

    Miles Lambert, however, took his bulk round the corner to a little Italian restaurant where Dino kept him a table in the corner. A glass of thick red wine and a plate of Dino’s mother’s special lasagna fortified him for the afternoon. Afterward he ordered himself a cup of sweet Turkish coffee and sat back in his chair wearing an expression of heavy contentment.

    Miles felt well pleased with how the trial had gone so far. The prosecution’s case was not standing up to cross-examination, and he could hardly wait to get at their main witness. It was obvious that Thomas had gotten the old housekeeper and his schoolfriend to back up his story. And he’d also made up the Lonny and Rosie characters, for whom there was not a shred of evidence outside of his statement.

    Miles knew that he could rely on his client to put on an Oscar-winning performance in the witness box when her turn came. Every day he grew more confident of an acquittal, and he felt sure that that would be the right verdict in this case. Miles had decided long before the trial began that Lady Greta was the most beautiful client he had ever had. Now, having seen Sparling’s witnesses, he had no doubt of her innocence.

    Detective Sergeant Hearns had, of course, precisely the opposite view of the defendant, and he ruminated on her guilt in the police room as he chewed the big cheese-and-pickle sandwiches that he had brought down with him from Ipswich.

    At two o’clock he fastened his double-breasted jacket over a pickle stain in the center of his polyester shirt and went down to court to begin giving his evidence. It was a hot day and the jurors were sleepy. Sparling asked questions to which they felt they already knew the answers. It was only when Miles Lambert got to his feet and asked for them to be sent out of court that they really started paying attention.

    “Will this take long, Mr. Lambert?” asked the judge.

    “No, my Lord. Not long.”

    The jury filed out looking perplexed, and Miles waited to speak until the door had finally closed behind them.

    “It’s about my client’s character, my Lord,” said Miles. “You will see that she has one minor indiscretion recorded against her from nearly eleven years ago but nothing since.”

    “A conviction, Mr. Lambert. Not an indiscretion.”

    “Yes, my Lord, but it is only for possession of a very small amount of drugs.”

    “Cocaine, Mr. Lambert. A class-A drug.”

    “Yes, my Lord, but she was a juvenile at the time.”

    “What’s your application?”

    “For my client to be treated as a lady of good character. The conviction is old and not serious in nature.”

    “What do you say, Mr. Sparling?”

    “I’d say that possession of cocaine is not minor, my Lord. Mr. Lambert does not need to raise the issue of his client’s character, but if he does so, the jury should know all about her. Of course your Lordship has discretion.”

    “Yes, I do, and I shall exercise it in favor of the defendant on this occasion. The conviction is indeed old and it is not for violence or dishonesty. Lady Greta may be presented as a lady of good character, Mr. Lambert.”

    “Thank you, my Lord.”

    

    “Sergeant Hearns, I want to ask you about a conversation you had with my client outside the House of the Four Winds,” said Miles once the jury was back in place.

    “I’ve only ever had one conversation with her there, sir, and that was when Sir Peter drove down with her after I told him about the murder.”

    “That’s the one. Now you’d already spoken to Thomas Robinson.”

    “No, sir, I hadn’t. He was too upset. I spoke to Christopher Marsh, who spoke to Thomas. I did that because I needed to know where the perpetrators had gone in the house. And the grounds, sir,” the policeman added as if it were an afterthought.

    Sergeant Hearns’s lugubrious smile was set in place above the big tie and the bulging stomach. He was clearly determined not to let the lawyer set the pace of their exchanges.

    “All right, you’d spoken to Christopher Marsh and you had discovered that Thomas had found the study window open on his return to the House of the Four Winds.”

    “At about half past eight. Yes, sir.”

    “Now, you asked my client about whether she was responsible for leaving the window open, did you not, Sergeant?”

    “No, sir.”

    “No?”

    “No, I asked Sir Peter. He said that he had not been in the study, and then Sir Peter asked your client and she said that she
may
have left the window open.”

    “She didn’t refuse to answer, did she, Sergeant Hearns? She didn’t say Thomas was lying. She freely admitted leaving the window open.”

    “She said she didn’t know but she may have done. She looked anxious at the time, sir. Very anxious.”

    “Like Sir Peter?”

    “No, he looked more determined than anxious. Your client had gone on ahead of us, sir.”

    “Perhaps she was anxious to see Thomas?”

    “Perhaps, sir.”

    “Did she not also say that she’d left the window open because it was a warm evening?”

    “Yes, she did say that, sir.”

    “Now, you didn’t arrest her that night, did you, Sergeant, even though you knew she’d left the window open?”

    “No, I did not, sir. I arrested your client after I had taken statements from Thomas Robinson and Jane Martin. It was only then that she became a suspect.”

    “You took the statements on Saturday, the fifth of June. Five days after the murder. Is that right?”

    “Yes, sir. That was the first occasion that Thomas felt able to talk to me about what had happened.”

    “And you arrested Greta Grahame, as she then was, the next day. The Sunday. The day of the funeral?”

    “Yes, sir. In the morning. We went to her apartment in Chelsea at seven twenty-five A.M.”

    “And you searched the premises.”

    “Yes, we had a warrant.”

    “I don’t doubt it. Did you find anything?”

    “Nothing relevant to the allegation. No, sir.”

    “Then you took Miss Grahame to Ipswich and interviewed her.”

    “Yes. She denied the allegation.”

    “And then you released her without charge, didn’t you?”

    “She was bailed to return. Pending advice from the Crown Prosecution Service.”

    “And they advised that she should not be charged because there was no realistic prospect of conviction. Isn’t that right, Sergeant Hearns?”

    “They advised that she should not be charged, sir.”

    “Yes. No charge even though you had the window that she’d admitted leaving open and the unlocked north gate. You had the arrangement for Thomas to go to the Balls and his identification of the man outside my client’s apartment with the killer. You had all that and the statement of Jane Martin, but you still didn’t have enough to charge. Because it didn’t amount to anything very much. Isn’t that right, Sergeant?”

    Miles had loaded his gun, taken aim, and fired, but Sergeant Hearns dodged the bullet. The lugubrious smile remained in place as he turned to the judge.

    “Do I have to answer that, your Lordship? I don’t think it’s for me to give an opinion.”

    “No, you’re quite right; it’s not. Mr. Lambert, please don’t play games with the witness. Stick to the facts.”

    “Yes, my Lord. Now, Sergeant, we can take it that your efforts to find Rosie and Lonny have drawn a complete blank.”

    “There have been no arrests so far, sir. But it’s not been for want of investigating. The trouble is that the killers left so few clues. We’ve got the car and the footprints and the bullets but not much else, sir. There’s no match for the DNA from the blood sample on the database.”

    “What about the jewelry?”

    “Nothing there, sir. The jewels could have been reset, of course.”

    “Leaving aside the locket, you have found no jewelry of Lady Anne’s on either of the occasions you have searched my client’s apartment?”

    “No, sir.”

    Miles paused and cleared his throat loudly to ensure that the jury was paying attention to his next question. “My client, Lady Greta Robinson, is a lady of good character, is she not, Sergeant?”

    “That’s right, sir.”

    “Good. Now I want to ask you about your visit to the house of my client’s mother in Cale Street, Manchester. You’ve told Mr. Sparling that you found these pictures of Lady Anne in one of the bedrooms.”

    “Yes. They were in a scrapbook of press clippings dating from the late 1980s.”

    “There were in fact quite a number of these scrapbooks, were there not?”

    “Yes, sir. They were in the bedroom that Mrs. Grahame said her daughter had used before she left home.”

    “How many scrapbooks, Sergeant?”

    “Eight or nine. Perhaps more.”

    “And they contained over two thousand pictures, did they not? Lady Anne’s were just two among more than two thousand?”

    “Yes, sir. They were pictures of ladies of fashion.”

    “Taken from society magazines like the
Tatler
and
Harpers & Queen
.”

    “That’s right, sir.”

    

    What must they think of me? thought Greta, looking over at the impassive faces of the jurors. Their eyes traveled from lawyer to policeman and back again with metronomic regularity, like those of an audience at a tennis match.

    It had been years since she’d last looked at them, but she still vividly remembered those scrapbooks, which she’d lovingly assembled in those lost teenage years, crouching in front of the gas fire on winter evenings with scissors and paste while her mother watched the telly and a pot of tea got cold on the table. Her mother had stopped sewing by then, forced to give it up by early Parkinson’s, which had now – fifteen years later – reduced her to a shaking wreck.

    But perhaps it wasn’t Parkinson’s, reflected Greta. Perhaps it was just the fear of her husband, George, that made her mother’s hands tremble in her lap on those distant winter evenings.

    They’d have the news at six on. Her mother didn’t really watch it but instead just let it pass over her. Floods and famines, earthquakes and volcanoes, economic highs and lows soothed Greta’s mother. She liked that nice Mr. Baker who read the news, and when he’d finished she’d say in a comforted voice: “Terrible. It’s all just terrible. Those poor people. We should be grateful for what we’ve got, Greta.”

    But Greta wasn’t grateful. She pasted the pictures into the big black scrapbooks because they made her believe that there was a different world out there where women wore beautiful clothes and walked on thick carpets in perfect high-heeled shoes. Somewhere it didn’t smell of boiled cabbages and disinfectant.

    After the news came the program about local events – a Manchester school opened, a Manchester woman raped – and Greta’s mother wasn’t soothed anymore. George would be home at just after seven expecting his dinner on the table – unless he stopped at the pub of course, but that just made it worse.

    Sitting in the dock now, Greta tried to think of a time when her father hadn’t been the way he was, returning from the factory full of dust and rage. There must have been another time because otherwise he wouldn’t have affected her the way he did, filling the horizons of her imagination long after he was gone from this world. But she couldn’t remember, however hard she tried. It was too long ago.

    Her father was a man who had done so many bad things that there was no going back. He’d pressed down and down, harder and harder, smothering the light deep inside himself until all that was left was a greedy darkness. Darkness and the need for more darkness.

    There was no going back for Greta’s mother either. Perhaps it was her very lack of spirit, her cow’s eyes, that a younger George had found attractive back in the days of evening dances at the Manchester Empire, when his coal-black hair and sharp, chiseled features gave him the pick of the local girls. Greta would have bet good money that her mother never once thought of leaving her husband. It would have been like questioning the will of God.

    They’d gotten married in the rain; Greta remembered the picture in her mother’s old photograph album gathering dust on the bookcase in the front room at home. One of the guests was holding a sodden newspaper over her parents’ heads while they stood at the top of the church steps waiting to be recorded for posterity. Her mother smiling nervously for the camera and her father looking defiant.

    The dusty bookcase was all that posterity had to offer that wedding. Greta wondered if Hearns had had a look through the old album during his nasty, prying search for evidence. He probably had. God knows he was thorough enough. She imagined him leafing through the snapshots, turning the pages with his stubby fingers before he replaced the album between
Casserole Cooking
and an AA Road Atlas from 1966.

    It was upstairs that he’d found prosecution exhibits 18 and 19: the newspaper clippings of Lady Anne dressed in a shimmering Dior gown for some gala function with her young husband on her arm and a caption that said he was destined for high places. “Summer 1988,” she’d written on the front of the scrapbook. They were just a couple of photographs among two thousand. As exhibits they were ridiculous. Greta didn’t even need to listen to Miles making the obvious points at the expense of Detective Sergeant Bloodhound.