Chapter 17
After the funeral, Peter stood beneath the portrait of his…
Chapter 18
‘The next witness, my Lord, is Matthew Barne.’
Chapter 19
Police Constable Hughes arrived in court in full uniform other…
Chapter 20
On that same Monday afternoon, the third day of the…
Chapter 21
‘Right, Mr Lambert, remember the age of the witness and…
Chapter 22
Peter sat in the back of his official car drumming…
Chapter 23
Peter paced the rooms after Greta had left, checking off…
Chapter 24
Thomas walked over the Albert Bridge and on into Battersea…
Chapter 25
The Family Records Office opened at ten o’clock on Thursday…
Chapter 26
Afterwards Thomas never knew how they managed to get through…
Chapter 27
The man was dressed in a white paper suit. The…
Chapter 28
On a bright spring day four years later Thomas drove…
Prologue
Also by Simon Tolkien: The King of Diamonds
Also by Simon Tolkien: The Inheritance
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Simon Tolkien
Copyright
About the Publisher
A PERSONAL NOTE ON THE
WRITING OF FINAL WITNESS
I never thought I would be a writer. I think in retrospect that I always felt overshadowed by my famous grandfather, J.R.R. Tolkien, and believed that it would be presumptuous to even think of following in his footsteps. Instead I took the safe course after leaving university and went to law school in London in order to become a solicitor. I didn’t want to go – it felt at the time like I was voluntarily putting on a straitjacket, and for the next few years it really did feel like my horizons had narrowed as I learnt company and land law statutes by rote, and sat in an Islington law office under the senior partner’s watchful eye, conveying houses and flats from one North London owner to another. But then one day – several years after I qualified – I was told to go and represent a man accused of an assault at Highbury Corner Magistrates Court. I lost the case but a new and unexpected world opened in front of me. It was certainly scary – the magistrate was quite fierce and the prosecution lawyer didn’t give an inch, but the courtroom was exciting. The decisions that I made mattered and I had to think fast and on my feet.
Soon afterwards I changed firms and began to work full time in criminal law. Now I was spending a lot of my time in prisons like Brixton and Wandsworth preparing serious cases for trial, but there was something missing. I had to hand my work over to a barrister when the day of trial arrived and I realised with growing frustration that I wanted to present the cases in court myself. Perhaps arrogantly, I believed that I could do just as good a job of breaking down witnesses and convincing juries. I knew it was going to be difficult becoming a barrister – there were few job openings and the tall wrought-iron gates of the Inns of Court seemed an impenetrable barrier when I drove past them along the river. But I made endless applications and in the end I got lucky – I got taken on at 2 Paper Buildings in the Temple and finally realised my dream of representing defendants in the Crown Court.
As a barrister I tried to be ready for all eventualities but of course I never was. The court was a live theatre where the course of a trial could change in a moment – defendants who fervently insisted on their innocence could well be guilty and each side’s witnesses could be lying for any number of reasons. The jurors seemed to be watching your every move, and the judges were far fiercer than the magistrates I had encountered in the lower courts. I enjoyed arguing the law – sometimes the outcome of a trial could depend on the interpretation of a single word in an obscure statute, but most of all I loved the human drama of the courtroom. Masked behind the legal language and procedures lay raw human emotions and terrible events – gruesome crime scene photographs or a witness’s sudden collapse could tear away the veil of formality at a moment’s notice.
I loved my work as a barrister, but as the millennium approached and the Peter Jackson movies of The Lord of the Rings appeared on the horizon I began to feel restless again. Now everyone in the world seemed to be talking about my grandfather, and in sharing his distinctive surname I felt that I needed to forge an identity of my own and become a writer in my own right. I had grown in confidence as a barrister and I no longer felt so inhibited by my grandfather’s achievements. For the previous ten years I had kept a diary, even while remaining convinced that I couldn’t write, and through the thousands of daily entries I had slowly found a voice that I was comfortable with. I wrote my first book in nine months working at weekends and in the evenings after court, and dispatched it full of optimism to innumerable literary agents in the UK and US, only to find that each and every one of them turned it down with varying degrees of politeness. Slowly and reluctantly it began to dawn on me that this first novel wasn’t a masterpiece but rather a necessary learning experience, a way of teaching myself how to write fiction. I found it very hard to start over, but I steeled myself to do so, and one spring day I sat down in my back garden and began work on the novel, which became Final Witness, first published in the UK under the title The Stepmother.
I made an important decision with the book at the outset. I wanted above all to make my readers suspend their disbelief and so I set my book squarely in a world that I knew – the world of criminal law. I decided that I would tell the story of a family torn apart by jealousy, murder and accusation through the medium of a trial in the most extraordinary courthouse that I had ever worked in – London’s Old Bailey, where the judges wear black and the most notorious and important cases are tried.
Final Witness was a success – it was translated into eight languages and has changed my life. In the years that have followed I have given up the law, moved to California and become a full-time writer. Having had two more novels published in the States – The Inheritance, also a courtroom drama, in which a detective races against time to save an innocent man from death by hanging, and The King of Diamonds, in which the same detective faces personal ruin as he accuses his wife’s lover of a double murder – I am now hard at work on a new novel about a fictional assassination attempt against Winston Churchill, and I am delighted that HarperCollins is to publish all three of these books in the coming year. However, Final Witness still holds a special place in my heart. I wrote it with passion and determination and the day of its publication was the proudest moment of my life, reinforcing my belief that the most wonderful and unexpected things can happen to people if they stay the course and remain ready to seize new opportunities as they appear.
Simon Tolkien
Santa Barbara, California
June 2011
CHAPTER 1
My name is Thomas Robinson. I am sixteen years old. Today is Thursday, 6th July, and I am making this statement to Detective Sergeant Hearns of the Ipswich Police. I have made two statements already in these proceedings. Everything that I say is true to the best of my knowledge and belief, and I make this statement knowing that, if it is tendered in evidence, I shall be liable to prosecution if I have wilfully stated anything which I know to be false or do not believe to be true.
I live in the House of the Four Winds, which is on the outskirts of the town of Flyte on the coast of Suffolk. The only other person who lives here now is the housekeeper, Jane Martin, who looked after me when I was a boy. My father never comes to visit me any more.
My mother was killed in this house on the 31st May last year. I described everything that happened in my first two statements. Two men came and murdered her. One of them had a ponytail and a scar behind his jaw. I was here too but hidden in a secret place behind the great bookcase at the top of the stairs. It was made for Catholic priests to hide in when the Protestants were searching for them hundreds of years ago. I hid there but my mother didn’t. She couldn’t because there was not enough time. That’s why she died.
The men didn’t see me, but I saw the man with the scar through the little spyhole in the bookcase. He was bending down over my mother, and I saw him when he got to his feet with something gold in his hand.
I remember his face more clearly than any face I’ve ever seen, although I only saw him for a second or two. It’s like my memory took a photograph. Small, dark eyes, thin, bloodless lips and a thick scar that ran down from behind his jaw into his strong bull neck. You could see the scar because he had his black hair in a ponytail.
I’d seen the man before. He was with Greta in London. It was six weeks before he killed my mother. I only saw him from behind, but I know it was him. He had the same ponytail and the scar.