Final Witness (32 page)

    “So you can’t say that the man was outside the study window when he swore. He could have been by the side door or the dining room windows just as easily.”

    “I suppose so.”

    “He could have been talking about all the windows on that side of the house in fact.”

    “Not mine, because it was open.”

    “On the lower level I mean.”

    “Yes, he could have been.”

    “Thank you. Now I’ve got nothing else to ask you about that night at this stage. I want to concentrate instead on this locket that you found in your father’s house last October.”

    Miles Lambert picked up prosecution exhibit number thirteen and held it for a moment by its clasp so that the golden heart-shaped locket swung to and fro on its chain like a hypnotist’s pendulum.

    “You have told us that your mother was very fond of this locket.”

    “She was.”

    “Did she wear it every day?”

    “Not every day, no. She wore it a lot.”

    “You made no mention of the locket to the police of course until after you found it.”

    “I had no reason to.”

    “No. I can see that that might make sense, but it doesn’t explain why you mentioned nothing in your first statement about Rosie bending down over your mother and then putting something gold in his pocket. That comes in your second statement, made after you found the locket.”

    “I was upset when I made the first statement. My mother had just died.”

    “Five days before. Your first statement is very detailed, Thomas. Sergeant Hearns and you took a lot of trouble over it. You’d think you wouldn’t leave out something as important as Rosie taking gold from your mother’s dead body.”

    Thomas didn’t answer. Lambert’s brutal last words had felt like a punch in the face.

    “You left the gold out of your first statement because it never happened. That’s the real explanation, isn’t it, Thomas?”

    “No, it’s not. It did happen. He ripped it off her neck. That’s why they found a scratch there.”

    “A small scratch. The locket wasn’t broken, though, when you found it in the desk, was it?”

    “No. They could have repaired it.”

    “There’s no sign of any repair on the clasp or the chain that I can see,” said Miles, making a show of carefully examining the locket as he held it up to his golden half-moon spectacles between two of his fat fingers.

    “No doubt the jury will want to examine exhibit thirteen themselves when they are considering the evidence,” Miles added casually as he replaced the locket on the table in front of him.

    “Now, there’s no dispute that you found the locket in the desk, Thomas. What I do have a problem with is what you say that my client said about it.”

    “Which bit?”

    “‘Give that to me. It’s mine.’ That bit.”

    “She shouted it at me just as she tried to get hold of it – ”

    “Yes, so you told us,” interrupted the barrister. “And then you pushed Greta over and you shouted at her: ‘No, it’s not. It’s my mother’s. That bastard took it from her and he gave it to you.’ That was what you told Mr. Sparling that you said when he asked you this morning. Do you agree?”

    “Yes. Something like that.”

    “No, not something like that. Word for word. I wrote it down when you said it this morning, and I wrote exactly the same thing down when your friend Matthew Barne told us what you said when he gave evidence yesterday. You’ve put your heads together about this, haven’t you, Thomas? You and Matthew?”

    “Of course we’ve talked about it. We go to school together and he’s my best friend, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

    “You both stole a paperweight at school from your headmaster, isn’t that right, Thomas?”

    “It was a dare. We were going to put it back.”

    “So, you found the locket and then you made your second statement to Detective Sergeant Hearns.”

    “That’s right.”

    “And you said in there that your mother was wearing the locket on the night of her death?”

    “I saw it when I got her up. There was a V at the throat of her nightdress.”

    “It seems a funny thing for you to notice at such a terrible moment. You could hear the men breaking in downstairs, isn’t that right?”

    “Yes.”

    “What happened is that you found that locket and then you set about concocting evidence to show that my client received it from your mother’s killer.”

    “No.”

    “You sat down with Matthew Barne to agree upon a false version of what was said in the drawing room before your father arrived.”

    “It’s not a false version. It’s a true version.”

    “You invented this story about your mother having the locket on under her nightdress and seeing the glint of gold when Rosie bent over her on the landing. Then as a final touch you got Jane Martin to say that Lady Anne was wearing the locket at lunch on the Monday.”

    “I never saw it then.”

    “Well, thank you for that, Thomas. You can see what I’m getting at. I suggest that you made all these things up because you’d already decided that Greta was guilty and so you had to make sure that she got charged.”

    “I knew she was guilty, but that didn’t make me lie. It made me look for proof. That’s how I found the locket.”

    “And yet your reasons for believing she was guilty didn’t amount to much, did they?”

    “Mr. Lambert, we’ve already been over that,” said the judge irritably. “Try not to argue with the witness. Cross-examination is about asking questions.”

    “Yes, my Lord,” said Miles. “Let’s move on, Thomas. Let’s talk about what happened on the fifth of July.”

    Thomas shifted in his seat but otherwise did not respond. Miles did not carry on immediately but allowed a silence to build before he spoke again.

    “Let’s make sure I’ve got the setting right first. Jane Martin left at six, having locked all the doors. You were in the dining room eating your dinner, with all the windows open.”

    “Yes, it was a warm evening.”

    “So it was. And you had your panic button next to your plate ready to call the emergency services if the need should arise?”

    “No, it was in my pocket. Sergeant Hearns told me to keep it with me all the time. He’s the one who got it for me.”

    “He told you there was a risk of the men coming back, the men who had killed your mother.”

    “Not exactly.”

    “Did he put that idea in your mind, Thomas?”

    “No, he said it was better to be safe than sorry, that’s all.”

    “I see. So the men came through the north door in the perimeter wall, crossed the lawn, and entered the house, and you stayed in this bench while they were looking for you?”

    “Yes.”

    “You can’t have been able to see very much from inside that.”

    “I could see out through the holes in the eyes, like I said before.”

    “Ah, yes. The holes in the eyes. They wouldn’t exactly have given you a grandstand view of what Lonny and Rosie were up to though, would they?”

    “No. Not really.”

    “And yet you say in your statement that ‘they looked around the rooms downstairs for a while but they didn’t touch anything.’ Were you able to watch them all the time then, see that they weren’t touching anything?”

    “No. I meant that when I could see them, they weren’t touching anything. Rosie did later, though.”

    “And Rosie just happened to mention my client by name.”

    “That’s right. He said that she’d told him how the hiding-place mechanism works.”

    “It’s very convenient, isn’t it, Thomas?”

    “You don’t need to answer that, Thomas,” interrupted the judge. “Ask the witness questions; save your comments for the jury. I shouldn’t need to keep telling you that, Mr. Lambert.”

    “No, my Lord.” Miles smiled affably up at the judge. Old Granger’s interruptions and instructions seemed to have no effect whatsoever on Lurid Lambert, who carried on relentlessly along his charted course, guiding the witness slowly but surely onto the rocks.

    “Was it Rosie who said: ‘Fuck, they’re all fucking closed’ about the windows on the night of your mother’s murder?”

    “I don’t know. I’ve thought about that a lot, but I just don’t know.”

    “Yet you say in your statement about Rosie’s return that you would recognize the voice of the man with the scar.”

    “Yes. If I heard it again I would, but my mother got killed a year before they came back.”

    “So you can’t say if the man with the scar said the words about the windows but you remember the words clearly?”

    “That’s right.”

    “I see. Well, let’s go on to the end of your story. You hear the siren. Rosie stops talking in midsentence, and he and Lonny run out the front door. Yes?”

    “Yes.”

    “You get out of the bench and answer the intercom.”

    “I buzzed the police in through the front gate.”

    “Having spoken to Officer Hughes through the intercom first. Isn’t that right, Thomas?”

    “I don’t remember.”

    “He told us what happened when he gave evidence yesterday. He said that you asked him who he was and he identified himself as a police officer. Then you opened the gates by remote control. Do you agree with his account, Thomas?”

    “I suppose so. I was in a panic. I don’t remember everything that was said.”

    “Well, I’ll take that as a yes. Now, you knew from Officer Hughes that the police were at the front gate. You knew that Rosie and Lonny had parked their car in the lane. You must have assumed that they were running back to their car. You knew all that, and so why didn’t you tell Officer Hughes through the intercom to drive down to the lane and cut them off instead of buzzing him in through the front gate?”

    Miles had asked his final question with a fierce directness that sparked the jury into a concentrated focus on Thomas, who didn’t answer immediately. He looked like a chess player who has suddenly seen his king exposed to a massive unforeseen attack and now looks around desperately but in vain for a move that will stave off inevitable defeat.

    “I don’t know,” Thomas said eventually. “I didn’t think. Those men would have killed me if they’d found me. I suppose I wanted to feel safe.”

    “But you were safe. The men had left. This was your opportunity to catch your mother’s killers.”

    “I didn’t think.”

    “You didn’t think. It makes no sense, Thomas. It makes no sense because none of this really happened, did it?”

    “Yes, it did. I swear it did.”

    “Just like it makes no sense that the police found the north door locked.”

    “They must have locked it when they left because they would have known how it would look.”

    “Like they’d never been there?”

    “Yes.”

    “It looks like that because that’s the truth, isn’t it, Thomas? You’ve made all this up. You didn’t think the locket would be enough, and so you invented Rosie’s return and a casual reference to Greta and the bookcase just to be sure of getting your stepmother convicted. Isn’t that right, Thomas?”

    “No! No!” The denial seemed to be wrenched from somewhere deep inside. Thomas’s face was contorted with pain, but this did nothing to deter Miles from driving home his point.

    “You were the one who opened the front door before the police got close enough to see what you were doing.”

    “No, they left it open.”

    “Who?”

    “Rosie and Lonny.”

    “Rosie and Lonny! I don’t know where you got those names from, Thomas – unless it was some late-night TV movie – but the point is you made them up just like you made up this whole sorry story.”

    “No, I didn’t. They came for me, I tell you. They’ll come again.”

    “Will they, Thomas? Will they?” Miles Lambert wore an expression of sorrowful incredulity on his round face. He was not looking for an answer to his question, and he sat down before Thomas could give one.

    

    

    PETER SAT IN the back of his official car drumming on the leather top of the briefcase that he held across his knees. In front of him across Ludgate Circus the bright midafternoon sun lit up the magnificent dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, but the motionless traffic on Fleet Street barred his progress toward the Old Bailey and made him oblivious to the beauty of the view. He was already five minutes late for his meeting with Greta, and his frustration boiled uselessly inside him. The rat-a-tat-tat of his nails on the briefcase only echoed a more frenzied pounding in his head, which he held in place even more rigidly than usual so that the thick blue veins in his neck stood out above the tight collar of his shirt.

    The week of the trial had not been good for Peter. He had hardly slept, and the strain of trying to do his job and worry about his wife at the same time was showing on his face. There were bags under his eyes, and he had developed a tiny tic on the side of his lip. His mind would begin wandering to the Bailey in the middle of complex negotiations with armament executives, and he sensed the growing doubt behind the friendly masks worn by his civil servants. He felt that it was only a matter of time before he made some appalling mistake that would bring his career tumbling down in ruins.

    Peter realized now that he should have booked time off during the trial, but he had thought naïvely that his work would be a distraction; better the Ministry of Defense than sitting outside the courtroom wondering what was going on inside. He consoled himself with the thought that it would all soon be over and tried not to think of the possibility of conviction. Only in his dreams did Peter imagine Greta being sentenced and taken away, and then the horror would wake him up with his heart racing. He’d calm himself in the dark by reaching out to take hold of his wife’s sleeping body.