Final Witness

Yesterday evening at about seven o’clock I saw this man again. For a third time.

Jane Martin goes to the town hall in Flyte on Wednesday evenings for the Women’s Institute, and so I was alone in the dining-room eating my dinner. There are windows looking out to the front and towards the lane on the north side of the house. They were all open. I think I was listening to the sea and remembering things like I some times do.

I don’t suppose I would have heard them come if the television had been on, but I felt that something was wrong as soon as I heard the car pull up in the lane. We use the lane to go down to the beach, but nobody else does. It’s too far out of town and I wasn’t expecting any visitors.

They came through the door in the north wall just like they did on the night my mother died. They must have had a key. I saw them coming down the lawn to the front door. They were moving quickly, and there was no time for me to get upstairs to the hiding place behind the books where I’d hidden before. I ran instead to the old black bench, which is beside the door going from the dining room into the hall. It has a seat that opens up and I got in there. There are carvings of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John on the front, and you can see out through the holes in their eyes. When I was small, I used to climb in there when I played hide-and-seek with my mother and Aunt Jane, but now I didn’t fit very well and I was frightened, very frightened.

The police have installed a panic button in the house, and I pressed that before I got in the bench. It’s connected to Carmouth Police Station and makes them come if I need them.

I was in the bench when they came in through the front door. There were two of them and they used a key. I’m sure of that. The one with the scar was in charge, but he didn’t have his hair in a ponytail this time. He wore it long so I couldn’t see the scar. He called the other man Lonny. They wore leather jackets and jeans, and Lonny was wearing a baseball cap. He was overweight and looked like a boxer. I’d never seen Lonny before. I’d say they were both in their thirties, but they could have been older.

They looked around the rooms downstairs for a while, but they didn’t touch anything and they had gloves on.

Then the one with the scar said, ‘Lonny, watch the fucking road while I go upstairs. The kid’s behind that bookcase where he was before. Greta told me how it works.’

Lonny came and stood really close to where I was, but I couldn’t see him because he was to the side of me, and the man with the scar went upstairs. It was really hard not moving and I tried to hold my breath. That made it worse, and I thought Lonny would hear my heart beating. It sounded so loud to me.

About a minute later the man with the scar was back and I could hear anger in his voice, like he was getting ready to do something really bad. He wasn’t shouting though; it was almost as if he was talking through his teeth. And I can’t remember the exact words he used. All I can do is give the gist of them.

‘Fucking kid’s in here somewhere,’ he said. ‘Look, he was halfway through eating when we got here. He can’t have gone far.’

‘Want me to turn the gaff over, do you, Rosie? I’ll find him for you.’

I could hear the eagerness in Lonny’s voice, like he really wanted to break something.

‘No, I fucking don’t. I don’t want you to touch anything, you moron. Just keep a fucking watch and leave it to me. And don’t call me that again.’

The fat man went to stand by the front door. It was half open.

‘Lonny the loser,’ said the man with the scar. ‘He’s a fucking loser, isn’t he, Thomas?’

I couldn’t see him but he wasn’t far, and I almost answered because he said my name so suddenly and naturally, but I bit my tongue instead.

‘I’m sorry about your mother, Thomas. Really I am. And I promise you that you’ll be fine. Scout’s honour, Tom. Scout’s honour. All we want is to take you on a little holiday. That’s all. Until this trial is over and done with. Somewhere nice and sunny with plenty of foreign girls. Topless beaches. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Tom? So why don’t you be a good boy and come out and we can get to know each other.’

I could hear him moving about opening doors and cupboards all the time he was talking in this mock-friendly voice he’d put on, but now there was a pause. When he spoke again, the hard edge was back in his voice.

‘Too scared to come out, are you, boy? Too fucking scared. Want to play fucking games with me, do you, you little runt?’

He stopped suddenly, his voice cut off by the sound of the siren, and a second later they ran out of the front door. They must have waited in the lane until I buzzed the police in through the front gate and then driven away without anyone seeing them.

I would recognize both these men again, and I would also recognize the voice of the man with the scar. It was soft and he said the bad words slowly, like he enjoyed saying them over and over again. I think he would have killed me if he’d found me. I really think he would.

Like I said before, I have tried my best to give the gist of what the men said when they were in the house, but I can’t remember all their exact words. However, I am sure about the names they called each other and I know that the man with the scar said about the hiding place that ‘Greta told me how it works.’

When I went upstairs with the police officer afterwards, the door in the book case was standing half open.

I confirm that I am still willing to attend court and give evidence for the prosecution in the trial of my stepmother, Greta Robinson.

Signed: Thomas Robinson

Dated: 6th July, 2000.

CHAPTER 2

In a tall nineteenth-century house on a fashionable street in Chelsea, Greta Robinson was getting dressed. She kept very still, with her head slightly to one side as she considered herself in a full-length Victorian mahogany mirror positioned in the middle of the master bedroom. She was wearing a sleeveless black Chanel dress cut just above her knee, a pearl necklace and a thin gold watch on her left wrist. She stood five feet seven inches high in her stockinged feet.

Greta’s short black hair matched her dress. It was swept back above her small ears and so exposed the full width of her cheekbones. There was something faintly Asiatic about her face, and her cool, green eyes accentuated an aura of detachment. However, this was contradicted by her full, red lips, untarnished by lipstick and always slightly parted as if she was about to tell you something that would change your life for ever. Contradiction was the secret of her attraction. The boyishness of her face was in opposition to the fullness of her figure. With an easy motion she stepped out of the dress and looked at her nakedness for a moment with a half-smile. Her full breasts needed no support, and there was no trace of fat around her hips or waist. There had been no child to change her contours.

Turning, she picked up a Christian Dior dress from where it lay draped across the back of a nearby Chippendale chair and put it on. It was black like the other, but it had sleeves, the hemline was longer and the neck was cut higher. Greta’s eyes hardly blinked as they concentrated on the reflected image of their owner. There was much for her to admire, but it was not narcissism that motivated her scrutiny today. Appearance was vital. Her barrister, that wily old fox Miles Lambert, had told her that. She was about to go on stage. The men and women who would be gazing at her from the jury box day after day as she sat in the dock or gave evidence must learn to love her. Her fate would be in their hands.

Their lives were not glamorous. They had no titles, no designer dresses, no fashionable home to go back to after the day in court was over. Nobody noticed what happened to them. She must not repel them. She had been, after all, just like them once upon a time.

She took off the necklace and replaced the gold watch with a simple one on a black leather band that matched her dress. Narrowing her eyes, she bestowed a half-smile of approval upon her reflection.

‘Showtime,’ she whispered to herself softly before she turned and padded over to the bed, where her husband lay sleeping. Looking at her at that moment, you’d have had to say that she was just like a cat. A sleek, well-cared-for white cat with a pair of glittering green eyes.

He looked good for his age, she thought. A full head of black hair with not too many silver flecks, a strong and wiry body; its outlines were clear and firm where he had wound himself up in his sheet during the long hot night. He had been sleeping badly for some time now, and she had often woken at three or four to see him standing by the open window gazing out into the night as if he could find some answer to his difficulties in the empty street below.

There had always been an inflexibility about the man, even before he was overtaken by disaster. He gave the impression of holding his features firm by an effort of will. It was apparent in the set of his jaw and the rigidity of his head upon his neck, but in the last year the lines on his forehead had become deeper and more pronounced. Recently he had formed a habit of passing his thumb and index finger along these furrows as if this was the only way of resting his piercing blue eyes, which never seemed to close. Except in his sleep, of course, like now, with little more than three hours to go before his second wife would go on trial for conspiring to murder his first.

Greta sat on the side of the bed and gently stroked her husband’s cheek with the tip of her finger, feeling the bristly facial hair that had grown there during the night above the hard jawbone. ‘You don’t know how to fight, do you, darling?’ she whispered. ‘You’re pretty good at conquering but not so good at fighting. That’s the trouble. You can’t step back and defend yourself; you just keep on coming until you’ve got nothing left. Nothing left at all.’

‘What’s left?’ asked Sir Peter Robinson, looking up at his wife in the confusion of his first awakening. ‘What is it, Greta?’

‘Nothing. Nothing at all, darling. Except that it’s nearly half past seven and it’s time to get up and face the jury.’

‘Oh, Christ. Jesus Christ and all his saints. Christ.’

‘I agree we could do with some help, but perhaps that’s asking too much. Come on, Peter. I need you today. You know that.’

Sir Peter unclenched his fists with a visible resolve and got out of bed. Greta stood and stepped back into the middle of the room. She put her hands on her hips.

‘How do I look?’

‘Ravishing. Like, like …’

‘I’m waiting.’

‘Like Audrey Hepburn in that movie. What was it called?’

‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Well, let’s hope Judge Stranger likes old movies.’

‘Granger, Greta. Granger.’

‘Whatever.’

Two hours later, John the chauffeur was driving Sir Peter and his wife along the side of the River Thames in the black Daimler with the darkened windows, which insulated the minister of defence so successfully from the population that had re-elected his party into government three years before. Two short years ago, Sir Peter had been riding high with a beautiful wife in the country and a personal assistant named Greta Grahame, whose bright efficiency had made him the envy of all his colleagues in the Palace of Westminster. But today the Daimler did not stop at the House of Commons or at Sir Peter’s offices in Whitehall but purred on towards an unfamiliar destination under the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral: the Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court, built on the foundations of Newgate Prison. Less than fifty years ago, men and women had been sent by the Queen’s judges to their deaths after being convicted of crimes just like that for which Greta was about to be tried.