“Why not? Was he looking in the house?”
“No, Thomas says he wasn’t. The man had his back to him.”
“How can he be sure it was the same man then?”
“I don’t know. He said he had a scar.”
There was doubt now in Peter’s voice, and Greta pressed home her advantage.
“That’s not enough. You know it’s not enough, Peter. Anyway, the man that was in my flat had no scar. Thomas has too much imagination; that’s the trouble. He’s heard me tell a lie and he’s seen a man in the street, the back of a man in the street, I should say. After dark. And now he’s crazy with shock and grief and he’s decided it’s the same man because he wants to blame me for what happened.”
“Why should he do that?”
“Because he knows Anne and I never got on. Because he feels guilty about liking me when his mother didn’t want him to. Because he has to make someone responsible other than himself.”
“What do you mean? How can Thomas be responsible?”
“He’s not. Of course he’s not. He just feels it like you do. He probably feels it because he was there and you feel it because you weren’t.”
It made sense. Peter wanted it to make sense, and so it did make sense. It was like when Greta tried on Anne’s clothes. He talked to her about it, and afterward he felt closer to her. It made him feel responsible for her, and he did not forget what she had said to him on the beach. There wasn’t anyone else in the world who loved him, who understood him like Greta did, now that Annie was dead.
Annie was dead. The words came unbidden into Peter’s mind. He had tried to keep them at bay, but now he was suddenly confronting the terrible reality of what had happened. She was no longer in the world. Her life had not been as happy as it should have been because he had let her down. Insisted on his career and his life in London. Not been the father to Thomas that she wanted him to be. Not been the husband that she deserved.
Peter did not know how he could cope with all this. He needed strength, he needed help, he needed Greta.
As if in answer to his unspoken thoughts, she leaned over and kissed him chastely on the cheek where the bristly early-morning hair was beginning to grow.
“Go and talk to Thomas,” she said. “He needs you. I’ll wait for you here.”
Chapter 16
They got to Rowston with the dawn. It was the hour when the tint of the sky changes subtly with every minute, and the birds had begun to chatter haltingly overhead. Peter felt feverish and wound down the window to let the cold morning air into the car. Greta drove without saying anything, staring into the new day, which was taking her away from Flyte forever.
In his head Peter could hear voices, a commotion of voices from yesterday and today all talking to him at once: Thomas yelling, “Get her out!” and Greta whispering secrets about a past that seemed to bear no relation to who she was. The grating, insistent voice of Sergeant Hearns: “Please let us know where you are both going to be,” with the emphasis on “both” containing just enough insinuation not to be offensive. Then Thomas’s voice again when he had gone back to the Marshes’ cottage. No words this time. Just screams, terrible screams, until the boy had finally fallen asleep and Jane Martin had arrived from Woodbridge to take care of him. Peter wished that the Marshes had called her earlier; the boy needed somebody he felt comfortable with, but he couldn’t criticize them. Christy and Grace had been good neighbors, the best.
There was one other soft voice asking to be heard that Peter still kept blocked out of his conscious mind. He would hear it soon enough. At the bottom of the road Rowston Hospital came into view: a silver-and-glass building glimmering in the first rays of the June sunshine like an alien arrival. Outside the entrance a police car was waiting. Arrangements had already been made for the first ceremony of the murdered dead: the identification of the body.
“Do you want me to come with you?” asked Greta.
“No,” he almost shouted. Anne and Greta had to be kept apart, he saw that clearly. He needed Greta more than ever, but outside this horror, somewhere distant where he could go when it was over. After the hospital she would go back to London on the train and wait for him there while he did what had to be done.
“I’m sorry, Greta,” he added after a moment, speaking softly now, tenderly even. “You’ve helped me more than I can say, but this is something I have to do alone.”
Inside the hospital he followed the policeman’s heavy-duty shoes as they beat a tattoo on the linoleum floors of the corridors. Turning right and left a dozen times, guided by black signs on white walls, they came eventually to a pair of doors that did not swing open like the others. Knocking was required here at these gates of the modern underworld.
While they waited, Peter noticed that the bottoms of the doors were scuffed, no doubt by hospital orderlies kicking them open so that they could bring in the dead. They could do with a lick of paint, Peter found himself thinking irrelevantly just before they opened.
At least they did it properly, Peter thought afterward. There was no drawer pulled out of a high steel filing cabinet and no row of silver metal tables to walk down while the doctor counted until he reached the right number. Instead he was taken to a room marked PRIVATE with a picture of a watery blue landscape on the wall and a vase of carnations on the windowsill. Peter wondered if they were real, but he didn’t touch them to find out.
“This won’t take a moment, sir,” said the policeman. “Just the identification and then you can have time alone with your wife.”
There was a kindness in the man’s voice that Peter was grateful for. He appreciated the description of the body under the white sheet as being his wife rather than the deceased or some other impersonal medical term, and when the mortuary attendant pulled back the sheet, he had no difficulty in recognizing her. The second bullet had done its damage at the side of the head, not the front.
It was Anne, but he didn’t feel she was there at all. It was her absence that hurt. The dead body made him realize its permanence. He wanted to say he was sorry, to make amends, but Anne was not there to hear his confession, to forgive him his sins. She was gone somewhere he could not follow, and he was left with this empty face wearing an expression that he couldn’t read. There was fear there but also something else; it almost looked like joy.
Peter felt heartbroken. He thought of all the times that he had stayed in London, the gentle reproach with which she had spoken to him so often on the telephone and the way she’d looked up at him from the sofa in the drawing room when he had gotten up to leave the evening before: “Do you have to go so soon, Peter? It’s like you’ve barely arrived.”
That was what she’d said. He couldn’t remember if he’d replied, done more than kiss her lightly on the cheek on his way upstairs to pack.
It was just after he’d bent down to place the last ritual kiss on his wife’s cold brow, just after he’d turned away from her that the memory came floating unbidden into his numbed mind. He thought of it later as Anne’s last gift to him, and he tried to remember it whenever he thought of her afterward.
It was a summer’s morning just like this one that he remembered, but it was fifteen years ago and he was waking in their bed at home. Thomas was two or three months old, and Peter had been up with him in the night. The baby wouldn’t stop crying, and so he’d walked him up and down in the corridor at the top of the stairs singing some silly song that he remembered from his own childhood. Now he reached out toward Anne and found her gone, even though the bed was still warm where she had been sleeping with Thomas beside her in his cot.
Peter opened his eyes, blinking against the sunlight flooding into the room through the high open windows. To the east was the sea breaking blue and white on the sandy beach below the house, and to the south were Annie’s roses, multitudes of them staked out in the gardens and climbing on the old perimeter wall up toward the sun.