Peter felt the pressure of Greta’s hand on his arm, but he steeled himself to continue.
“Listen, Greta. I’ve got to ask you about this. Try and help me.”
“How can I help you? He’s crazy. You saw him.”
“All right, help me with this. Thomas says he saw you in London, in the house on that first night he was up there with Anne. I was in my constituency, and you had to go up and stay with your mother. Is that true, Greta? Were you in Manchester or were you in London? I need to know.”
There was silence in the car. Peter sat very still waiting for Greta to answer. When eventually she spoke, her voice was soft and sad, regretful almost.
“Yes, Peter, I lied. I wanted to keep it a secret from you, but I shouldn’t have done. I see that now.”
“Keep what a secret?”
Peter turned to look at Greta, but she kept her eyes fixed on the darkness ahead.
“When I was at school in Manchester I met some bad people. I wasn’t like I am now. I’d lived with my parents all those years, and I wanted excitement. I wanted to test things, see how far they would go. I did something I shouldn’t have done, something I feel ashamed of.”
“What was it?”
“I don’t want to tell you, Peter. You wouldn’t respect me anymore if I did, and I couldn’t bear that.”
“That’s crazy, Greta. I wouldn’t turn my back on you because of something that happened in the past, before you knew me. What do you take me for?”
“A good man. You’re a good man, Peter. I’m not saying you’d turn your back on me; it’s just you wouldn’t like me anymore. You don’t know how important you are to me.”
Peter wanted to give in. He was tired and half drunk, and he longed for unconsciousness, some time when he wouldn’t have to feel this pain inside. It was under his ribs, trying to get out. But he couldn’t leave it: not after what Thomas had said. Not with his wife dead, lying in a hospital mortuary under a white sheet. Dried blood and the cold, fierce light of the postmortem; the gleam of the pathologist’s scalpel and the photographer waiting in the corner with the witnesses: all these images and more flashed across Peter’s brain and made him go on.
“You’ve got to tell me, Greta. My wife is dead and I have to know.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking.”
Peter could feel Greta’s tension. Her knuckles were white where her hands gripped the steering wheel.
“No, I don’t know, but you still have to tell me. Was it something criminal?”
“Yes.”
“Could it have something to do with what happened here tonight?”
“No!” Greta’s voice exploded in the car like a pistol shot. “What do you take me for?”
“I don’t mean you sent the man. Just that he might have found out about the house, about the jewelry, through you. That’s all.”
“How could you think that? I’ve never talked to anyone about the jewelry, and besides, I don’t know any man who would do a thing like this.”
“So who were you with in London? Thomas said he heard you talking with a man in your flat. Late at night.”
“He’s blackmailing me. I’ve been paying him for years. I saw him because he wanted more money. I shouldn’t have done it, I see that now.”
“Blackmailing you over what? You have to tell me, Greta.”
“Over what happened after I left school. He’s the only one who knows about it.”
“About what?”
“If I tell you, I’ll be in your power. Do you want that, Peter? Do you want that responsibility?”
Greta spoke as if she were playing her last card, making her last appeal, but Peter had gone too far down the road with her to stop now.
“I have to know. There’s no choice.”
“All right,” said Greta. Her voice was dull, and she had slumped back into her seat. It was as if all the fight had finally been knocked out of her.
“I’ll tell you but only if you promise to say nothing, to do nothing, to keep it to yourself.”
Peter was silent thinking of his wife lying on the sofa as she had been only eight hours earlier. She had had her slippers on, he remembered. Little gold slippers that looked like dancing shoes. He hadn’t kissed her properly when he left.
He felt Greta’s hand on his arm, her breath on his cheek requiring complicity.
“If it has nothing to do with Anne, I promise,” he said. “You’ll have to satisfy me of that.”
“All right, that’s fair,” she said, releasing him. “It’s simple, really. Most bad things are, I suppose. I took drugs. Everyone did then. I even got a conviction for it. I couldn’t afford to buy enough, and so I sold them too. Only a few times, but that was enough. I sold some pills to a girl and she died. I didn’t know they were bad. I swear I didn’t.”
There was bitterness in Greta’s voice, and she spoke quickly, allowing no time for Peter to respond.
“This man was with her. He felt he had a claim over me.”
“A claim?”
“He wanted me. Sexually.”
“What did you do?”
“I let him a few times. It was only sex, and I thought it didn’t matter, but then I realized it did.”
“Why?”
“Because the girl had died. Because I hadn’t. I stopped taking the drugs, and it cleared my head.”
“So what happened?”
“I refused to do it anymore. We fought, but he seemed to accept it in the end. He took money instead, and then I didn’t hear from him for a while. Not until recently. He’d seen my picture in the paper, coming out of a restaurant in London with you, and he wanted more money, a lot more. I had to give him some. I had no choice. He kept threatening to go to the police. He said he’d tell you too.”
“Bastard,” said Peter. “You should have told me, Greta.”
“No, I didn’t want to. I didn’t want you to know. I arranged for him to come to the flat when I was sure that you would be away. I didn’t know that Anne and Thomas were coming until it was too late, too late to put him off. I showed him what I earned — pay slips and everything. I told him I couldn’t pay him all he wanted, and then he wanted to touch me. I don’t know what got him going; maybe it was me being P.A. to a minister and being in your house, but it made him start all that up again.”
“Did he?” Peter could hardly get his question out. There were too many burning emotions inside of him fighting for release. The grief and the guilt and now anger against this unknown stranger demanding money, pawing at Greta in his house. Beneath the anger was another unacknowledged emotion: Peter was gripped by sexual jealousy. He felt it in his loins.
“Did he what?”
“Have sex with you?”
Peter blurted the words out. His heart was beating painfully inside his rib cage, and pictures flooded into his exhausted mind that he could not control. His wife dead, Greta naked with this man above her. He wanted to take hold of her, feel her full breasts encompassed in his wide hands. He thought of them like they were life when all around him was death and emptiness. In the early-morning darkness a cold breeze was blowing off the sea.
“No, I wouldn’t let him,” she said. “He’s frightened of me when I’m angry. It’s strange; it’s like he always wants to get me to that point, and then he backs away.”
Peter sighed. The constriction in his chest lifted, and Thomas’s accusations blew back into his consciousness.
“Greta, I understand about this man, and why you invited him. Thomas said that he heard you telling him to wait, and so that makes sense, given you were talking about the money. But that wasn’t all he told me. He said he recognized the man, that he was here tonight, that he killed Anne. Killed my wife, Greta.”
“It’s not the same man. I swear it isn’t. He knows nothing about this house, and even if he did, he wouldn’t do it. He’s a sneak, not a murderer.”
“Thomas says he saw him in the street outside the house when you came upstairs.”
“So he didn’t see him with me?”
“No.”
“Well, he could just have been a pedestrian then, couldn’t he?”
“Standing outside the house at midnight?”