Final Witness

by Simon Tolkien

  “All right, Dad, listen to what Aunt Jane has got to say,” said Thomas, controlling his impatience with visible difficulty.

  “She said bad things about my Lady, Sir Peter,” said the housekeeper.

  “When?”

  “The day the little dog died. After you left the house. She said she was going to make my Lady pay.”

  “A lot of people said bad things that day. The important point is that everyone said they were sorry afterward. Didn’t they, Thomas?”

  “She left the window open, and I heard one of the men saying that they were all closed,” said Thomas, ignoring his father’s question.

  “She left the window open by mistake. It’s easily done on a warm evening like yesterday was. Why would she have admitted leaving it open if she’d done so deliberately?”

  “Because she didn’t know I’d recognized him then.”

  “Someone you saw from behind in the street at midnight. She shouldn’t have lied, Thomas, but she had her reasons.”

  “Why did she arrange for me to go to Edward’s, then? What about that?”

  “I don’t know, Thomas. I haven’t got the answer to everything. I’m sure this is wrong though. I know Greta, and she’d never have had anything to do with something like this.”

  “Yes, she did. You know she did. You’re just protecting her because you’re screwing her.”

  Thomas pushed his chair away behind him and stood leaning over the table toward his father, resisting Jane Martin’s ineffectual efforts to pull him back.

  “You’re screwing her and my mother’s dead because of her. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!”

  Thomas’s voice rose to a hysterical scream, which was suddenly cut off when his father leaned across the table and smacked him hard on the cheek with the back of his hand.

  Peter stood up, facing his son. Thomas had a hand over his face, but his father could see the fury in his eyes. It was the sort of rage from which a lifetime of hatred is born.

  “I’m sorry, Thomas,” he said. “I wish I hadn’t done that, but you shouldn’t have said that to me. It’s your decision what you tell the police, but think before you speak. You might regret it otherwise.”

  Peter had retreated to the doorway and now stood there, hesitating for a moment. Neither his son nor Mrs. Martin said anything, and he felt as if he had no option but to go. To stay would only enrage the boy more, he told himself, so without another word he turned and let himself out the front door.

  Outside he sat in the Range Rover, gazing at the motionless net curtains hung across the front window of the little house. He longed to get out of the car and walk back up the path to the front door, but he didn’t do it. Instead, after a couple of minutes, he started up the engine and drove slowly away. There was no way back.

  Four days passed before the police said that the family could return to the House of the Four Winds. Sir Peter remained at the hotel in Flyte making arrangements for the funeral, and Aunt Jane thought that she and Thomas should stay on with her sister in Woodbridge, but he insisted on going home at the first opportunity. The House of the Four Winds had been his mother’s life, and walking in her garden made him feel that she still existed in the world.

  He sat on an old bench as the sun set and looked up at the window of his mother’s bedroom through a curtain of white roses imagining that she might appear there at any moment, calling him to come in. Trudging back to the house in the semidarkness brought a renewal of his pain, but these moments in the garden when his mother seemed so close were part of what kept him going. The rest was the thought of revenge: the need to make those responsible pay for what they had done. He knew what his mother had thought of Greta; Aunt Jane sat with him in the kitchen almost every night and told him all the things that his mother had said. Lady Anne had often used the old housekeeper as a shoulder to cry on, little realizing that all her words of frustration and resentment were being remembered so faithfully by the old friend she had known since her childhood.

  Thomas felt ashamed now, remembering his dreams about Greta. He bitterly regretted the declaration of love that he had made to her in the taxi, linking it in his mind with the sadness in his mother’s face as she looked down at him from the first-floor windows of his father’s house in London.

  Lying in his bed at night he thought of killing Greta, of plunging a knife into her chest, but then he remembered his mother lying at the top of the staircase with the pool of red sticky blood behind her head and her eyes full of nothing at all. There was another way of making Greta pay — a cleaner way, the way his mother would want. He knew what his father had said about talking to the police, but his father was with Greta just like he always had been. Thomas remembered the sting of his father’s hand on his face and made his decision.

  Early the next morning he telephoned the police and made an appointment for Sergeant Hearns to come and take his statement in the afternoon. He needed to have it over and done with before his mother’s funeral the next day.

  It rained on the morning of the funeral. A slow Suffolk rain that fell heavily on the heads of the congregation as they stood around the newly dug grave in the corner of the Flyte churchyard.

  Thomas had sat between his father and Aunt Jane in the church. He had no more wish than Sir Peter to advertise the divisions in the family, but by the graveside he shrank away from his father’s protective arm and gripped hold of Aunt Jane’s hand instead.

  The wet dirt clung to Thomas’s black, polished shoes and the rain plastered his long, fair hair to his head. He wiped it from his eyes and wondered why he wasn’t crying. Aunt Jane wasn’t either. The old lady bit her lip and stared angrily up at the overcast sky, looking like a veteran about to go into battle. Thomas loved the old housekeeper; now that his mother was gone, she was the only person he really trusted in the whole wide world.

  Thomas kept his face turned away from his father and tried not to look down into the obscene hole in the ground into which the undertaker’s men had lowered his mother’s body. He could hear the rain pattering on the wooden coffin lid and the vicar’s voice louder than it had been before, straining to be heard above the rumblings of thunder in the sky.

  “Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down like a flower…”

  Yes, thought Thomas. The words were right. His mother had never been happy. How could she be when his father had deserted her? And she had not lived long enough. She had been cut down like one of her roses when she was the most beautiful, the most vital, the best of women in the world.

  Thomas suddenly began to weep not just for himself but for his mother too. For what had been taken away from her. She would never see another summer; she would never know what he might become.

  “O holy and most merciful Savior, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death,” asked the vicar, but the grand words felt hollow to Thomas. His mother’s death was eternal. That was what this funeral meant. She would never be again. He would never again see the smile that lit up her face when he came into the room; never feel her hand as it brushed his long hair back away from his forehead in a gesture of affection that had lived on past his childhood. Thomas did not know why he was still in the world when she was not. How could he live when she didn’t?

  “O holy and merciful Savior, thou most worthy judge eternal, suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.”

  Thomas thought of his mother’s last hour, and the memory came to him as it had so often in recent days of their last moment together at the top of the stairs. He’d pushed the books and the hiding place had opened. He’d heard the voices at the bottom of the stairs and sensed the light of the flashlights. He’d stepped forward, stumbling into the darkness of the priest hole, and lost hold of the side of his mother’s white nightgown. He’d replayed it in his mind so many times, but still he couldn’t say whether he had let go or his mother had pulled away. All he knew was that as he
turned back to her in the darkness, he felt the bookcase close behind him. She must have stood with her back to the books pushing the shelves back into place until the first shot took her and she fell to the ground. But by then she had succeeded in her purpose. She died knowing that he was hidden.

  Her last act was to preserve his life, and suddenly Thomas realized what this meant. He had to continue living because she had saved him. He was not cut off from her because he knew precisely what she wanted. She was not shut up in that dark brown box in the ground on which his father was at that moment throwing his farewell flowers. She lived on in him. It was not “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” He would see that it was not.

  Thomas looked around him. The graves of generations of Sackvilles and their retainers stretched back toward the old gray stone church, past the trunk of the great chestnut tree that had blown down in the storm of 1989. Some of the moss-covered graves had sunk into the ground so far that it was not now possible to read the name of the Sackville whose bones lay under the turf.

  The church and the graveyard had not changed in 350 years. Buried here were the same men and women who had screamed lustily in the font at their baptism and glowed with the promise of life as they signed their names in the leather-bound Register of Marriages that was now gathering dust in the church vestry. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century vicars had walked down this same gravel path between the graves and read the same words from the Book of Common Prayer.

  Thomas suddenly had a profound sense of the significance of the dead who lay all around him. People who had walked the old narrow streets of Flyte and fought against the same cruel sea. Sackvilles who had inherited the House of the Four Winds and passed it on intact to the next generation. Thomas’s father was alien to all of this, but he, Thomas, was inseparable from what had gone before and what was still to come. He looked up at the friendly, sympathetic faces of his neighbors; men and women whom he had known all his life, and he smiled at them through his tears. He was not alone, and as if in answer to his thought, the rain slowed and then stopped and the sun came out weakly overhead.

  Chapter 17

  After the funeral, Peter stood beneath the portrait of his father-in-law in the dining room of the House of the Four Winds, talking in turn to each of the friends, neighbors, and distant relatives who had come to pay their respects.

  His training in politics had made him skillful at this type of event. He remembered almost everybody’s name and spoke to each of them for just the right amount of time, accepting their sympathy with just the right amount of gratitude.

  All the time that he was talking, however, he was also looking for his son. Thomas had disappeared after the funeral, and no one, not even Jane Martin, seemed to know where he had gone. Peter had been very conscious of how the boy had shrunk from his side in the graveyard, and he wanted to try to bridge the gap between them before he had to go back to London.

  Not a day passed that Peter did not regret hitting his son, although he knew himself well enough to realize that it was not something that he could have chosen not to do. Thomas had provoked him too far when he said those terrible things.

  Most of the guests had gone when Jane Martin told Peter that Greta wanted him on the phone. He extricated himself politely from a conversation with the Flyte harbormaster and took his glass of red wine into the study where he stood looking out through the newly repaired window as he picked up the phone.

  “Hullo, Greta,” he said, but there was no response. Just a hubbub of voices above which he could hear a drunken man shouting that he wanted to go home.

  “Greta!” he shouted into the phone. He could feel something was wrong, although he didn’t know what it was.

  He heard her voice just before he was about to hang up and try to call back.

  “Peter, thank God you’re there. They’ve arrested me.”

  Peter dropped his glass of wine on the floor. It did not smash, but the red wine spread out over the pale carpet and Peter turned away. It looked too much like blood.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “I’m in Ipswich with this Hearns man. They brought me here from London.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I don’t know. There’s a lawyer here. He says that Thomas has made a statement saying it was me that sent those men to kill Anne. I don’t understand how he could say that to them, Peter. Not after all the time that we’ve spent together.”

  “Greta, I’m coming. I’ll get you out. I promise.”

  “Make it quick, Peter. Please.”

  As he put down the phone, Peter saw his son come through the north gate and walk toward the house across the lawn. Peter ran outside to intercept him. They met under an old elm tree, and Peter pulled his son behind it so that they wouldn’t be visible from the dining room window.

  “What is it, Dad?” Thomas was alarmed. His father was breathless and had still not let go of the lapel of his suit jacket.

  “Where’ve you been?” It was not the question Peter wanted to ask but he needed time to find the right words.

  “I went down to the beach. I was trying to make some sense of it all. You can help me, Dad.”

  “Help you?” Peter laughed harshly. He could hear the wine in his voice. He’d drunk too much at the wake or whatever the dismal gathering inside was called. It wasn’t just today, of course. He was drinking too much every day and every night trying to cope while his son went off to that pushy policeman and stuck a knife in his back.

  “Help you after what you’ve done to me!”

  “What, Dad?”

  Thomas sounded frightened now. His father had hold of both his lapels and was shaking him as he spoke.

  Abruptly Peter let go. It was as if an electrical current inside him had suddenly been switched off.

  “They’ve arrested Greta. Just like you wanted them to. You’ve got what you wanted now, Thomas.”

  “It’s not what I want, Dad. It’s what’s right. That man was with her in London. I know he was.”

  “There’s no point arguing with you, Thomas. You’ve gone down your own road now, and I can’t follow. I just think I deserved better from you. That’s all.”

  “Oh, Dad.” Thomas began to cry. All the sense that he had started to make of things at the graveside and down on the beach began to crumble inside him.

  “I’m sorry, Thomas. Perhaps you should have waited to make your revelations until after your mother’s funeral.”

  Peter knew he was being cruel. Somewhere inside he even dimly realized that he was quite wrong to speak to his fifteen-year-old son like this on the day of his mother’s funeral, but uppermost in his mind was the thought of Greta in the police station among all the drunks and lechers. Stuck in the back of the police car coming down from London, with Hearns beside her sweating onto the stained upholstery, and now sitting in a cell feeling sick and scared.

  “It’s true, Dad. Why can’t you believe me?” Thomas begged his father through his tears.

  “Because it’s not true. It’s delusion. You’re sick with delusion, and you’re making innocent people pay for it.” The urgency was back in Peter’s voice. “I’ve got to go now, Thomas.”

  “Where?”

  “Where do you think? To Ipswich Police Station to get Greta out, and then I’m taking her back to London.”

  “When will I see you again, Dad?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve got to go back to work. Jane’ll be here to look after you, and then we’ll see. You need to go to a good school and learn something. That’s my opinion.”

  Thomas turned away. There was no point in talking to this man who understood him so little. Just like his father hadn’t understood his mother.

  Thomas started to walk slowly toward the house. His shoulders sagged and his back bent like he was carrying a burden way beyond his years.

  “Pull yourself together, Thomas,” his father called after him. “There are still people in the house.”

  Peter drove
fast, checking in his rearview mirror to see that none of the reporters at the gate had followed him. The road was empty, and beyond Carmouth he wound down the windows and tried to make some sense of what was happening.

  Above all he felt guilty about having left Greta alone in London. She had offered to come to the funeral, but he had told her to stay away. He hadn’t wanted any more conflict with Thomas after what had happened in Woodbridge, but he should have seen this coming. There was a craziness about his son that afternoon that should have given him fair warning, although there was obviously nothing he could have done once Thomas had decided to point the finger at Greta. Injustice must take its course, like justice. Except that he might have been there with her when they came for her; he might have been able to get to the police station sooner, get her a good lawyer. She needed someone strong to protect her from Hearns with his probing questions and dirty insinuations.

  Greta was still being interviewed when he got to the station. He paced up and down in the front office, watched indifferently by a uniformed constable behind the desk.

  “How long will it be before I can see Sergeant Hearns?” he’d asked over and over again, only to get the same reply each time.

  “He knows you’re here, sir. He knows you’re here.”

  It was past six o’clock, and Peter was debating whether or not to go to the nearest pub and drink some whisky when Hearns came out.

  “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, Sir Peter.”

  “No you’re not,” Peter countered rudely. “Couldn’t you have waited until after the funeral?”

  “I’m afraid not. We have to move quickly, otherwise evidence might be destroyed.”

  “Who by?”

  Sergeant Hearns did not reply, other than to raise his shaggy gray eyebrows. He looked as if he was wearing the same suit and tie that he’d worn on the night of the murder.

  “Can I ask you a question, Sir Peter?” he said after a moment. “Why are you so angry about us pursuing this investigation? It is your wife that has been killed. I would have thought you would want us to find the culprit.”