Final Witness

by Simon Tolkien

  Peter parked beside the Harbour Inn and walked down the unmade road to the harbormaster’s hut in search of news.

  “They had them on the radio about half an hour ago,” he told the others when he returned to the car. “They’re expected back at the harbor mouth in the next ten minutes.”

  “But what about my Christopher?” asked Grace Marsh. “Did they say anything about him?”

  Peter sensed the rising hysteria in her quavering voice and tried to inject a note of reassurance into his answer.

  “Nothing one way or the other, Grace. But that’s good, I think. They’d have said something on the radio if anything was wrong.”

  Peter did not mention the atmosphere of gloom and foreboding that he’d found in the hut. More than a dozen men in there, and no one saying anything except in brief answer to his inquiry. The radio communication that he had told Grace about had been cut off halfway through.

  The minutes passed without any sign of the lifeboat, and the storm began to die away. On the opposite bank of the Flyte River the landscape took shape. Tethered boats rode high on the churning water, and beyond the harbor, fields of waving reeds and grasses rose toward Coyne Church. Several trees stood twisted at crazy angles.

  Like men broken on the rack, thought Greta, standing now beside Peter and Grace Marsh at the back of a small group at the water’s edge. Everyone had their eyes fastened on the mouth of the harbor where the Flyte River begins and the North Sea ends.

  It was just after the bells of the two churches, Flyte and Coyne, had finished tolling the hour of seven that a boat came into view, plowing its way slowly downstream.

  “Black flag!” shouted a man at the front, who had the advantage of a pair of field glasses. “There’s a black flag on the mast.” A shudder ran through the crowd, and Peter caught Grace Marsh as she stumbled forward in a half swoon.

  Soon everyone could see not only the black flag but also the bright yellow caps and raincoats of the crew moving about on deck. They tied up at the end of a long wooden jetty and came ashore almost immediately.

  It was easy to distinguish the shivering rescued strangers plucked from the murderous sea by their rescuers, men of Flyte whom Peter recognized from their other lives as bank tellers or fishmongers or churchwardens. Their faces, however, were haggard, drained by the struggle with a force so much more powerful than themselves.

  Peter kept an arm around Grace Marsh and watched the silent men coming up the jetty in the hope of seeing his neighbor. A minute passed and the last man reached the bank. There seemed to be no one left on either the boat or the jetty.

  “Where’s my husband?” cried Grace in the voice of the about-to-be-bereaved. “Where’s my Christopher?” As if in answer, Christopher Marsh and another yellow-coated man appeared out of the boat’s cabin carrying a third man in their arms. A drowned man. Peter could tell from the way that they carried him, as if it were a duty rather than an act of love. Their shoulders sagged with their load and their failure.

  “He was on the other side of the boat. Drowned before we could get to him, poor bastard,” said Abel Johnson, bank teller turned lifesaver.

  He finished his sentence with a mute cry of protest as Grace Marsh pushed him aside in her rush toward her husband.

  “Christy. I thought you were dead, Christy. Oh God, I don’t know what I would have done.”

  “It’s all right, Grace,” said her husband, who had had no option but to deposit his burden on the ground at the end of the jetty as his distraught wife threw her arms about him. “You mustn’t take on like this. How did you get here?”

  “Sir Peter brought me. In his car.”

  “Well, thank you, sir. It’s a kindness. Grace takes it hard when we go out at night.”

  “Perhaps you shouldn’t do it anymore, Christopher. Find someone to take your place.”

  “Well, I don’t know, sir. It’s like a duty. My father was on the lifeboat and his father before him.”

  As the two men talked, Greta stood looking down into the face of the drowned man. Blue jeans and a thick black sou’wester jersey. A black beard flecked with white, and thick black curly hair. A big, strong, seafaring man, and now just a corpse. A thing to be disposed of in an appropriate way. Morgue meat.

  The man’s blue eyes were like glass. There was nothing behind them, and the last of the rain pattered down on his upturned face, causing him no discomfort. His hands hung limp at his sides. Five hours ago they would have been wiping the water from his eyes. From his blue, far-seeing eyes.

  Life and death. Everything over in a moment as the drowning man’s lungs collapsed and he floated facedown in the sea. His whole huge life was gone, and now he lay discarded on the ground while people talked about the weather and a man embraced his wife.

  It was this that struck Greta most of all: the extraordinary insignificance of the fisherman’s death. A man from the lifeboat was cupping his hands in a practiced gesture to light a cigarette. The landlord of the Harbour Inn was sweeping the water from his doorstep with a broom, and the dead man lay untended on the muddy ground.

  Christopher Marsh gently disentangled himself from his wife’s embrace, and he and the other man from the lifeboat bent to pick up the corpse. Wearily they shuffled along the uneven road toward the harbormaster’s hut.

  Peter turned to Greta. There was a faraway look in her green eyes as she gazed out toward the sea. He thought that she looked quite extraordinarily beautiful at that moment but also inscrutable. He had no idea what she was thinking.

  It was the end of January 1999. It would be four months before another person died of unnatural causes in Flyte — and that would be murder. A cold-blooded murder that would be talked about in houses the length and breadth of England. A murder to put this sleepy fishing town forever on the map. Sir Peter’s own wife, the beautiful Lady Anne, gunned down in her own home by armed robbers while her son hid behind a bookcase less than ten feet away.

  Chapter 5

  The sound of the clicking cameras and the reporters’ unanswered questions ceased suddenly as the doors of the Old Bailey closed behind Sir Peter and Lady Greta. Security men watched impassively as they emptied their pockets and passed through a metal detector. Then up two wide flights of stairs and into a great open area, which made Greta think for a moment that she had arrived on the concourse of one of Mussolini’s North Italian railway stations.

  I am on a train journey though, she thought to herself wryly. I am but Peter isn’t, and I can’t get off the bloody train. It goes really slowly, stopping at all the stations along the way as the witnesses give their evidence, and all the time you don’t know where it’s going to end. Barristers and relatives and reporters get on and get off, but at the end they all go away. And then it’s just me. Just like it’s always been. Just me.

  “Are you all right, darling? You look pale. Is there something I can get you?”

  Peter stood looking concerned but impotent at the side of his wife, who had halted, swaying slightly in the middle of the great hall.

  “No, it’s nothing. I was just feeling a little faint, that’s all. Getting here is quite an ordeal, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it’s ghastly. Those reporters are just like bloody parasites. Sit down a moment and get your strength back. There’s plenty of time.”

  They sat on one of the tan leather benches that were positioned at regular intervals through the hall. There was no adornment on any of the walls apart from a clock that had stopped. The morning light penetrated weakly through dirty net curtains hung over the high windows.

  All around them barristers were moving to and fro. Their long black gowns billowed out behind them, and their patent leather shoes clicked on the marble floor. The eighteenth-century-style horsehair wigs that were part of the barristers’ required dress would have seemed absurd if their owners were not wearing them with such apparent confidence. Greta was suddenly filled with a sense of being out of her element. How could she control what happened here if she didn’
t know the rules? She got up from the bench hurriedly. Sitting still only made things worse.

  “Come on, let’s go and find court nine. That’s where we’re supposed to be meeting Miles.”

  Greta injected her voice with a sense of purpose that she was far from feeling.

  A small crowd was waiting outside the bank of elevators, and Greta glimpsed the squat figure of Sergeant Hearns, the officer in the case. He smiled lugubriously when he saw her, and Greta couldn’t decide whether it was a greeting or a spontaneous expression of pleasure at seeing the object of his investigation inside the courthouse at last. In any event, she didn’t respond, turning suddenly on her heel and calling to her husband.

  “Come on, Peter, it’s too crowded. Let’s take the stairs.”

  Peter turned obediently to follow his wife. He was determined to stand by her, but there were some places, of course, where he could not follow. She would be alone in the dock. Alone when she gave her evidence. Alone when the jury came back with their verdict.

  He worked his fingers into the wrinkled furrows on his forehead and hid his face momentarily behind his upturned hand.

  Four floors above them at that very moment Miles Lambert, counsel for the defense in the case of Regina v. Lady Greta Robinson, was buying two cups of coffee in the barristers’ cafeteria. One white with two sugars for himself and one black with none for his opponent, John Sparling, counsel for the prosecution.

  Miles Lambert was sixty-six and single. Forty years of drinking fine wines and eating rich food with other successful lawyers had earned him a florid complexion and a rotund figure that he kept encased within expensive, tailor-made suits, complete with waistcoat and gold watch and chain. Court etiquette required him to wear a wing collar and starched white neck bands, but outside court he was known for extravagant ties of wildly clashing colors that matched the handkerchiefs that poured from his breast pocket when he was not using them to dab his sweating brow. Although in recent years “Lurid Lambert” had given way to a new nickname of “Old Lurid,” opinion in legal circles was that Old Lurid might be sixty-six but as a defense lawyer he was at the height of his powers.

  Miles’s pale blue eyes looked out on the world from behind a pair of gold-framed half-moon spectacles, and those who knew him well said that the eyes were the key to understanding Miles’s character. They were small and shrewd, and if you studied them carefully, you would see that they seemed to become more quiet and watchful as Miles became more exuberant. It was as if they took no part in his loud laughter and extravagant gestures. They remained detached and attentive, watching for weaknesses, waiting for opportunities.

  John Sparling was as different from Miles Lambert as it was possible to be given that they were two successful lawyers of roughly the same age dressed in approximately the same way. He was tall while Miles was short, and thin while Miles was fat. He wore no glasses, and his large, gray eyes looked out coldly on the world from above a long, aquiline nose. His mouth was small, with thin, straight lips, and he spoke slowly, forming his questions with careful decision and always pausing after the witness had answered for the extra fraction of a second that was enough to tell the jury his opinion of what had just been said. He was fond of telling juries that they must put pity and sympathy aside in their search for the truth. Sparling’s enemies said that this was something that he had no need to do himself, as he had had all pity and sympathy excised from his character at an early age.

  John Sparling never defended, and Miles Lambert never prosecuted. They were polar opposites, and yet in a strange way they liked each other. You could almost say they were friends, although they never met outside the courthouse, where they spent their days in an unending struggle over the fate of their fellow human beings.

  If pressed, Sparling might have described himself as an instrument of justice. It was an article of faith for him that nobody should escape the consequences of his actions — least of all the wife of a cabinet minister. Sparling had been looking forward to this case for weeks, but then so too had his opponent. For Miles Lambert, criminal law was not so much about justice as about winning. It was something the two men had in common. They both hated to lose.

  “So, Miles, you’ve got Granger,” said Sparling. “Her Ladyship must be pleased.” His lower lip raised slightly, the nearest he ever got to a smile.

  “Haven’t talked to her about it yet,” replied Miles Lambert as he vigorously stirred the sugar into his coffee. “But yes, I’d prefer old Granger to one or two of the death’s head judges that sit on the first floor. Defense’ll get a fair crack of the whip at any rate.” He would have liked to have ladled four spoonfuls into the cup, but his doctor had set strict limits on coffee and sugar since Miles had suffered a minor heart attack two years before. The instruction to reduce stress by taking on fewer cases, however, had fallen on deaf ears.

  “He’ll like your client, I expect,” said Sparling. “Old Granger’s always been one for the ladies, hasn’t he?”

  His Honor Judge Granger was known as a fair judge with something of a defense bias. Miles was secretly very pleased to have gotten him, although it wouldn’t do to gloat.

  “It’s not the judge that matters,” he said diplomatically. “It’s the jury.”

  “Hoping for a few priapic jurors too, I expect.”

  Miles smiled broadly, but behind his cup of coffee he was registering a slight surprise. It was unlike John Sparling to be so cynical about the legal process. Something must be bothering him. Miles needed to find out what it was.

  “You’re exhibiting an unhealthy preoccupation with sex, if you don’t mind me saying so, John,” said Miles in a bantering tone. “Not what you need on a Thursday morning.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Miles. Have you got those further statements?”

  Miles’s smile gave way to a grin. It was the return of the killers to the murder scene the previous week that had gotten under his opponent’s skin. It was too much of a good thing.

  “Yes. I got them on Friday evening through the fax. The policeman at the scene, follow-up investigation by the omnipresent Sergeant Hearns. And the boy, of course. Your star witness.”

  “My star witness.”

  “Uncorroborated to the last.”

  “All right, Miles. We’ll let the jury form their own opinion about that.”

  “Oh, yes. The priapic jurors.”

  Sparling gave another of his smile imitations. He looked determinedly tolerant.

  “Yes, the priapic jurors,” he said. “But it wasn’t them I was asking you about.”

  “No,” Miles acknowledged. “You want to talk about the statements, don’t you, although I can’t imagine why. I’ve got them. You’ve got them. You’re calling these witnesses. What else is there to discuss?”

  “I want to call the boy last. Hearns says he needs time to get over what happened last Wednesday.”

  “If it happened.”

  “All right, Miles. I’ve read the police statements too, you know.”

  “No trace of any intruders whatsoever. No one saw the car come. No one saw the car go.”

  “It happened in the evening. The place was deserted.”

  Sparling sounded defiant, but this only encouraged Miles to goad his opponent more.

  “You’ve got no forensic evidence at all. Admit it, John.”

  “I do admit it. But the prosecution still says that Thomas Robinson is a witness of truth, and there’s no reason to change that.”

  “Maybe not. But I reckon you could have done without his latest contribution. Lonny and Rosie. I wonder where he dreamed them up from. He’s been watching too much television.”

  “Not when they drove up, he wasn’t.”

  “No. Very convenient.”

  Miles finished his coffee and put on his wig. He’d enjoyed his precourt skirmish with John Sparling even more than usual. The wily old prosecutor would never admit to being unhappy with his case, but Miles would have bet good money that the new statements had n
ot been welcome arrivals in Sparling’s chambers at the end of the previous week. The Crown’s case depended too much on the unsupported evidence of young Thomas already. This latest development made the case positively top-heavy, thought Miles, patting his own bulk contentedly.

  Certainly the defense had more to gain than to lose from the new statements. He’d seen Lady Greta in conference on Saturday morning and obtained her assurance that she knew nobody called either Lonny or Rosie and that she had not told anyone about that hiding place in the House of the Four Winds.

  “I’m going to find my client,” said Miles, getting up. “I’ll take her instructions, but I can’t see us objecting to you calling the boy last. Better make sure he turns up, though. Statements are one thing, evidence is another.”

  Miles was gone in a swirl of wig and gown before John Sparling could think of a suitable response.

  Peter and Greta were waiting outside court 9 with Peter’s lawyer, Patrick Sullivan, a handsome Irishman who bore more than a passing resemblance to Liam Neeson. Patrick and Peter had been at university together, and it had been a natural development for him to become Peter’s lawyer when Peter had started to need one. The work had taken up more and more of Patrick’s time since Peter had become a minister, and Greta’s trial had made it virtually a full-time occupation.

  Patrick was no criminal lawyer, but he had given Peter and Greta vital support in those nightmare days after Greta was first arrested. He had conveyed a sense that he was truly on their side, that he believed in them, and that was what Peter had craved more than anything else.

  Greta, unsurprisingly, had retreated into her shell as the police began investigating Thomas’s allegations against her, and Patrick seemed to restore some of her confidence. Later, after Greta was charged, Peter had asked Patrick to find a top criminal barrister to take on her case. He appeared to have succeeded admirably. Everyone that Peter spoke to agreed that Miles Lambert was one of the best in the business.