Final Witness

by Simon Tolkien

  Miles had loaded his gun, taken aim, and fired, but Sergeant Hearns dodged the bullet. The lugubrious smile remained in place as he turned to the judge.

  “Do I have to answer that, your Lordship? I don’t think it’s for me to give an opinion.”

  “No, you’re quite right; it’s not. Mr. Lambert, please don’t play games with the witness. Stick to the facts.”

  “Yes, my Lord. Now, Sergeant, we can take it that your efforts to find Rosie and Lonny have drawn a complete blank.”

  “There have been no arrests so far, sir. But it’s not been for want of investigating. The trouble is that the killers left so few clues. We’ve got the car and the footprints and the bullets but not much else, sir. There’s no match for the DNA from the blood sample on the database.”

  “What about the jewelry?”

  “Nothing there, sir. The jewels could have been reset, of course.”

  “Leaving aside the locket, you have found no jewelry of Lady Anne’s on either of the occasions you have searched my client’s apartment?”

  “No, sir.”

  Miles paused and cleared his throat loudly to ensure that the jury was paying attention to his next question. “My client, Lady Greta Robinson, is a lady of good character, is she not, Sergeant?”

  “That’s right, sir.”

  “Good. Now I want to ask you about your visit to the house of my client’s mother in Cale Street, Manchester. You’ve told Mr. Sparling that you found these pictures of Lady Anne in one of the bedrooms.”

  “Yes. They were in a scrapbook of press clippings dating from the late 1980s.”

  “There were in fact quite a number of these scrapbooks, were there not?”

  “Yes, sir. They were in the bedroom that Mrs. Grahame said her daughter had used before she left home.”

  “How many scrapbooks, Sergeant?”

  “Eight or nine. Perhaps more.”

  “And they contained over two thousand pictures, did they not? Lady Anne’s were just two among more than two thousand?”

  “Yes, sir. They were pictures of ladies of fashion.”

  “Taken from society magazines like the Tatler and Harpers amp; Queen.”

  “That’s right, sir.”

  What must they think of me? thought Greta, looking over at the impassive faces of the jurors. Their eyes traveled from lawyer to policeman and back again with metronomic regularity, like those of an audience at a tennis match.

  It had been years since she’d last looked at them, but she still vividly remembered those scrapbooks, which she’d lovingly assembled in those lost teenage years, crouching in front of the gas fire on winter evenings with scissors and paste while her mother watched the telly and a pot of tea got cold on the table. Her mother had stopped sewing by then, forced to give it up by early Parkinson’s, which had now — fifteen years later — reduced her to a shaking wreck.

  But perhaps it wasn’t Parkinson’s, reflected Greta. Perhaps it was just the fear of her husband, George, that made her mother’s hands tremble in her lap on those distant winter evenings.

  They’d have the news at six on. Her mother didn’t really watch it but instead just let it pass over her. Floods and famines, earthquakes and volcanoes, economic highs and lows soothed Greta’s mother. She liked that nice Mr. Baker who read the news, and when he’d finished she’d say in a comforted voice: “Terrible. It’s all just terrible. Those poor people. We should be grateful for what we’ve got, Greta.”

  But Greta wasn’t grateful. She pasted the pictures into the big black scrapbooks because they made her believe that there was a different world out there where women wore beautiful clothes and walked on thick carpets in perfect high-heeled shoes. Somewhere it didn’t smell of boiled cabbages and disinfectant.

  After the news came the program about local events — a Manchester school opened, a Manchester woman raped — and Greta’s mother wasn’t soothed anymore. George would be home at just after seven expecting his dinner on the table — unless he stopped at the pub of course, but that just made it worse.

  Sitting in the dock now, Greta tried to think of a time when her father hadn’t been the way he was, returning from the factory full of dust and rage. There must have been another time because otherwise he wouldn’t have affected her the way he did, filling the horizons of her imagination long after he was gone from this world. But she couldn’t remember, however hard she tried. It was too long ago.

  Her father was a man who had done so many bad things that there was no going back. He’d pressed down and down, harder and harder, smothering the light deep inside himself until all that was left was a greedy darkness. Darkness and the need for more darkness.

  There was no going back for Greta’s mother either. Perhaps it was her very lack of spirit, her cow’s eyes, that a younger George had found attractive back in the days of evening dances at the Manchester Empire, when his coal-black hair and sharp, chiseled features gave him the pick of the local girls. Greta would have bet good money that her mother never once thought of leaving her husband. It would have been like questioning the will of God.

  They’d gotten married in the rain; Greta remembered the picture in her mother’s old photograph album gathering dust on the bookcase in the front room at home. One of the guests was holding a sodden newspaper over her parents’ heads while they stood at the top of the church steps waiting to be recorded for posterity. Her mother smiling nervously for the camera and her father looking defiant.

  The dusty bookcase was all that posterity had to offer that wedding. Greta wondered if Hearns had had a look through the old album during his nasty, prying search for evidence. He probably had. God knows he was thorough enough. She imagined him leafing through the snapshots, turning the pages with his stubby fingers before he replaced the album between

  Casserole Cooking and an AA Road Atlas from 1966.

  It was upstairs that he’d found prosecution exhibits 18 and 19: the newspaper clippings of Lady Anne dressed in a shimmering Dior gown for some gala function with her young husband on her arm and a caption that said he was destined for high places. “Summer 1988,” she’d written on the front of the scrapbook. They were just a couple of photographs among two thousand. As exhibits they were ridiculous. Greta didn’t even need to listen to Miles making the obvious points at the expense of Detective Sergeant Bloodhound.

  The scrapbooks mattered, though. They had allowed her to dream, to believe in a world beyond the poor smoky Manchester suburb where she grew up, beyond the reach of her father’s calloused hands. He was always angry, burning with an eternal sense of injustice. No year went by without him being passed over for a better job because some snotnose twenty years his junior had a piece of paper in his pocket, some qualification or diploma that the company was too cheap to pay for him to get. Perhaps her father had a point. He’d been made ugly by his resentment and the ugly do not attract fair treatment, but at home Greta never thought about whether life was fair or just. She just tried to survive, pasting photographs of aristocrats into scrapbooks and whispering the names of fashion designers to herself like a religious mantra: Balenciaga, Christian Dior, Givenchy, Chanel. Greta wore her black hair like Coco Chanel and hung a picture of the queen of fashion beside her bed at just the right height to cover up a tear in the fading wallpaper.

  As she grew older, her father’s power over her diminished. He drank more, ranting down at the pub at the injustice of it all until the regulars turned their backs on him and the landlord told him he’d outstayed his welcome. He couldn’t afford pub prices anymore either. The company had laid him off, and he’d spent most of the severance pay the first year standing drinks to those who would listen.

  At home he sat in his battered armchair grinding out cigarettes in a black plastic ashtray and drinking cans of Special Brew. Greta’s mother still cooked the same stodgy meals, but he ate less and less, and after a while he stopped hitting her anymore. He was just too weak. He sat and watched the telly, using what energy he had to
hate the people who passed across the screen. There was always someone to hate — someone who was younger than him, richer than him, more successful. Like the boy next door. He moved in when George Grahame had been out of work a year and Greta had just turned seventeen. The boy’s mother was an invalid, and there was no sign of any father, which explained a lot, according to George. The boy wore tight black leather trousers and kept a thick wad of twenty-pound notes in the breast pocket of his shirt. More money than George used to earn in a month down at the factory. And yet the boy was only a couple of years older than Greta.

  George waited six weeks and then called in the police. He accused the boy of pushing drugs in the town center. How else could somebody that age have gotten all that money? But the police told George that he shouldn’t waste their time. If he did it again, he’d be committing an offense.

  From then on the boy began to goad Greta’s father, tuning his motorcycle up in the street outside every evening so that George couldn’t hear the television and the beer cans vibrated in his hand. George called the council, but they did nothing. It was just like the police, he said. The boy next door had bought them all off with a few bills pulled contemptuously from the wad in his shirt pocket. But George had paid his taxes all his life, and where had that gotten him?

  Greta thought about the boy next door just as much as her father, but the roar of the motorcycle in the dark didn’t make her angry. It sang to her of freedom and escape. She dreamed about the boy’s narrow hips and the tight muscles in his legs and arms. She longed to hold him hard against her as he drove them far away into a new world.

  And the boy watched her. She could sense him staring at her as she walked down the street in the morning on her way to school. It made her cheeks burn and her legs heavy. She felt hot and cold all at the same time.

  He took the longest time to ask her out, so that when he did, she accepted too quickly and felt stupid afterward. It was as if the boy always had an advantage over her. Everything he did was a challenge, and if she didn’t accept, she’d be right back where she started.

  She slept with him because she knew that he didn’t think she would. And the sex wasn’t lovemaking; it was more like fighting. She reveled in it. At night she slipped downstairs after her parents had gone to bed and let herself soundlessly out the front door. She stepped over the privet hedge that separated the two front gardens and waited for him to pull her into his house.

  He told Greta not to worry about his mother, and so she didn’t. His living room at midnight was an entire world lit by candles, and their entwined bodies cast fantastic shadows on the canary-yellow walls.

  And then for the first and last time in her life, Greta got pregnant. The baby had been growing inside her for two months by the time she went to the doctor. Back in the waiting room afterward she panicked. She couldn’t have the baby and she couldn’t kill it. She didn’t know what to do, and so she told her mother; and her mother told her father.

  With a sudden return of his old strength, George Grahame slapped his daughter across the face and called her a bloody whore. Greta wanted to hit him back, but instead she told him who the father was. George threw his black ashtray weakly in her direction and told her to get out.

  It was so easy to go. She tossed a few of her clothes in a suitcase and shut the front door behind her with a bang. She allowed herself one backward glance at her childhood home — just enough to catch a glimpse of her mother peeking out anxiously from behind the dirty net curtains hung across the window of the front room.

  Greta never had the baby. She miscarried in the sixth month and ended up in the Memorial Hospital with complications, and an Indian doctor telling her she was going to be all right if she didn’t take any more crazy drugs. He didn’t know where she’d been getting them from, but they’d almost killed her as well as the baby.

  “You’ll get used to not being able to have children,” he said. “It’s not the end of the world. You’ve got your whole life in front of you.”

  And really she hadn’t allowed herself to think about it until much later. There was no time. Three floors down and a wilderness of corridors away, her father was lying in one of the hospital’s terminal wards struggling to stay alive.

  It was as if he had always had cancer. It’s just it was mental before it became physical, and by the time it was diagnosed he was long past any hope of cure. Greta winced as she remembered the hospital ward with its rows of metal beds each tenanted by a dying man in concentration-camp pajamas. Flowers didn’t last long in the hot, humid air, and they kept the television on all day to drown out the sound of the coughing.

  She should have gone there to gloat over his death, but she didn’t. It made her desperate, it made her want to cry, but she couldn’t. He clung to her like he clung to life, and it was as if he’d forgotten all that he’d done to her. The anger and the envy were gone from his eyes, leaving only the fear that had been lurking there behind them all the time. An awful naked fear that made him fight death for weeks, long after the doctors had predicted that his bed would be free for the next terminal patient to take his place.

  Greta hated the fear. It seemed to be telling her that she would never get out, however hard she tried. She’d always be sucked back into the smoke and failure in which she’d grown up. She blamed her mother for it. In those long days in the hospital when her father hung on, refusing to die, Greta grew to hate her mother. She hated her trembling fingers and her pale blue deer-in-the-headlight eyes. She hated her lifeless hair and her shapeless figure, and above all she hated her mother’s acceptance of things. Her “its all for the best” view of the world.

  She understood why her father had always been so angry. He’d just not been clever enough to make something of his rage. Greta swore to herself softly that she would be different, and all the time he held her wrist and gazed up at her even when he could no longer speak.

  The other men in the ward who were not so far gone spoke to her, asking her to come over in shouted whispers as she went past their beds, but she ignored them. She wished that she could afford a private room so that she could watch her father die in peace.

  Peace for her, not peace for him of course. He would never feel peace. Not while he was still alive. Greta’s mother talked of getting a priest, even though neither she nor Greta’s father had been inside a church since their wedding day, but Greta wouldn’t hear of it. There was no forgiveness for her father’s sins; it disgusted Greta that her mother should even think of it. He wasn’t going to hell; he’d been in it all his life. George Grahame knew more about hell than anyone that Greta had ever met.

  That much is certain, she thought to herself as she looked out at the courtroom and thought how smug and self-satisfied all the people looked. Contented with their dingy lives and their second-rate marriages. Even the old judge in his wig and gown looked pathetic. He could sit up there grandly while everyone called him “my Lord” and bowed and scraped, but at the end of the day he probably had to go home to some nagging wife and badly cooked food.

  Greta closed her eyes. The droning voice of Sparling as he read out witness statements evaporated from her consciousness, and she was back in the hospital on the day her father died. Her memory had recorded it, taken a photograph, just like Thomas had done when his mother got killed. She felt it coming in the grip of her father’s hand on her wrist. Suddenly he was holding her tight, not just touching her, and his hand felt strong again like it had when she was a child. He opened his green eyes wide, and it was as if she could see Death reflected there, coming at him like a runaway train. Black and huge and total and gone in a second.

  Greta’s mother missed it, of course. She was downstairs in the cafeteria getting a cup of tea, and when she came back she had no difficulty bursting into tears, crying for the loss of a man who had beaten her and made her life a misery for twenty-eight years. She cried at the funeral too, and the rain and the tears made her inexpertly applied makeup run down her fat cheeks. She looked so awful that
the other mourners had visibly to overcome their aversion to approach her and offer their condolences, but Greta didn’t cry. Not then and not later.

  Her father’s death changed everything. Greta realized that now. It filled her with a determination to start over, to leave Manchester behind. She’d finished with boyfriends and relatives. She wanted a new life in a new town.

  She got a job as a reporter on a newspaper in Birmingham to pay her way through college and found she liked the work. She had the rare gift of making people believe in their own importance. Perhaps it was the concentration in her liquid green eyes or the half-suppressed enthusiasm in her low-pitched voice, but even the most taciturn of her interviewees ended up telling her all she wanted to know and more. Afterward they wondered about what they had or hadn’t said, but by then, of course, it was too late.

  And she wrote well too. Greta’s articles were punchy. They brought their subjects alive. As time passed, she was often promoted to the front page. The owners gave her more money and hoped that one of the big papers down south wouldn’t snap her up. But it didn’t happen. Because instead, one October day in 1996, the local member of Parliament walked into her life.

  Peter was at a crossroads, and she pointed him in the right direction. It was obvious that he should come out in support of the prime minister over the hostage crisis in Somalia and forget about what everyone else was saying. Peter was just too far inside the problem to see its solution. It was all so simple. Except that he was unlike anyone else she’d ever met. He had a driving ambition that wouldn’t give him any rest, and he allowed her to glimpse for the first time a new world of power politics. Afterward she couldn’t rest until she’d made that world her own. She could no longer bear her small-town existence, and when Peter’s call came after the election, she didn’t ask for time to think. She took the job as his personal assistant and everything that came with it. It was the easiest decision she’d ever made.