“Yes,” replied Thomas. “He was angry.”
“Did you see the man say it?”
“No. I was sitting on my bed. They were below the window.”
“So you can’t say that the man was outside the study window when he swore. He could have been by the side door or the dining room windows just as easily.”
“I suppose so.”
“He could have been talking about all the windows on that side of the house in fact.”
“Not mine, because it was open.”
“On the lower level I mean.”
“Yes, he could have been.”
“Thank you. Now I’ve got nothing else to ask you about that night at this stage. I want to concentrate instead on this locket that you found in your father’s house last October.”
Miles Lambert picked up prosecution exhibit number thirteen and held it for a moment by its clasp so that the golden heart-shaped locket swung to and fro on its chain like a hypnotist’s pendulum.
“You have told us that your mother was very fond of this locket.”
“She was.”
“Did she wear it every day?”
“Not every day, no. She wore it a lot.”
“You made no mention of the locket to the police of course until after you found it.”
“I had no reason to.”
“No. I can see that that might make sense, but it doesn’t explain why you mentioned nothing in your first statement about Rosie bending down over your mother and then putting something gold in his pocket. That comes in your second statement, made after you found the locket.”
“I was upset when I made the first statement. My mother had just died.”
“Five days before. Your first statement is very detailed, Thomas. Sergeant Hearns and you took a lot of trouble over it. You’d think you wouldn’t leave out something as important as Rosie taking gold from your mother’s dead body.”
Thomas didn’t answer. Lambert’s brutal last words had felt like a punch in the face.
“You left the gold out of your first statement because it never happened. That’s the real explanation, isn’t it, Thomas?”
“No, it’s not. It did happen. He ripped it off her neck. That’s why they found a scratch there.”
“A small scratch. The locket wasn’t broken, though, when you found it in the desk, was it?”
“No. They could have repaired it.”
“There’s no sign of any repair on the clasp or the chain that I can see,” said Miles, making a show of carefully examining the locket as he held it up to his golden half-moon spectacles between two of his fat fingers.
“No doubt the jury will want to examine exhibit thirteen themselves when they are considering the evidence,” Miles added casually as he replaced the locket on the table in front of him.
“Now, there’s no dispute that you found the locket in the desk, Thomas. What I do have a problem with is what you say that my client said about it.”
“Which bit?”
“‘Give that to me. It’s mine.’ That bit.”
“She shouted it at me just as she tried to get hold of it — ”
“Yes, so you told us,” interrupted the barrister. “And then you pushed Greta over and you shouted at her: ‘No, it’s not. It’s my mother’s. That bastard took it from her and he gave it to you.’ That was what you told Mr. Sparling that you said when he asked you this morning. Do you agree?”
“Yes. Something like that.”
“No, not something like that. Word for word. I wrote it down when you said it this morning, and I wrote exactly the same thing down when your friend Matthew Barne told us what you said when he gave evidence yesterday. You’ve put your heads together about this, haven’t you, Thomas? You and Matthew?”
“Of course we’ve talked about it. We go to school together and he’s my best friend, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
“You both stole a paperweight at school from your headmaster, isn’t that right, Thomas?”
“It was a dare. We were going to put it back.”
“So, you found the locket and then you made your second statement to Detective Sergeant Hearns.”
“That’s right.”
“And you said in there that your mother was wearing the locket on the night of her death?”
“I saw it when I got her up. There was a V at the throat of her nightdress.”
“It seems a funny thing for you to notice at such a terrible moment. You could hear the men breaking in downstairs, isn’t that right?”
“Yes.”
“What happened is that you found that locket and then you set about concocting evidence to show that my client received it from your mother’s killer.”
“No.”
“You sat down with Matthew Barne to agree upon a false version of what was said in the drawing room before your father arrived.”
“It’s not a false version. It’s a true version.”
“You invented this story about your mother having the locket on under her nightdress and seeing the glint of gold when Rosie bent over her on the landing. Then as a final touch you got Jane Martin to say that Lady Anne was wearing the locket at lunch on the Monday.”
“I never saw it then.”
“Well, thank you for that, Thomas. You can see what I’m getting at. I suggest that you made all these things up because you’d already decided that Greta was guilty and so you had to make sure that she got charged.”
“I knew she was guilty, but that didn’t make me lie. It made me look for proof. That’s how I found the locket.”
“And yet your reasons for believing she was guilty didn’t amount to much, did they?”
“Mr. Lambert, we’ve already been over that,” said the judge irritably. “Try not to argue with the witness. Cross-examination is about asking questions.”
“Yes, my Lord,” said Miles. “Let’s move on, Thomas. Let’s talk about what happened on the fifth of July.”
Thomas shifted in his seat but otherwise did not respond. Miles did not carry on immediately but allowed a silence to build before he spoke again.
“Let’s make sure I’ve got the setting right first. Jane Martin left at six, having locked all the doors. You were in the dining room eating your dinner, with all the windows open.”
“Yes, it was a warm evening.”
“So it was. And you had your panic button next to your plate ready to call the emergency services if the need should arise?”
“No, it was in my pocket. Sergeant Hearns told me to keep it with me all the time. He’s the one who got it for me.”
“He told you there was a risk of the men coming back, the men who had killed your mother.”
“Not exactly.”
“Did he put that idea in your mind, Thomas?”
“No, he said it was better to be safe than sorry, that’s all.”
“I see. So the men came through the north door in the perimeter wall, crossed the lawn, and entered the house, and you stayed in this bench while they were looking for you?”
“Yes.”
“You can’t have been able to see very much from inside that.”
“I could see out through the holes in the eyes, like I said before.”
“Ah, yes. The holes in the eyes. They wouldn’t exactly have given you a grandstand view of what Lonny and Rosie were up to though, would they?”
“No. Not really.”
“And yet you say in your statement that ‘they looked around the rooms downstairs for a while but they didn’t touch anything.’ Were you able to watch them all the time then, see that they weren’t touching anything?”
“No. I meant that when I could see them, they weren’t touching anything. Rosie did later, though.”
“And Rosie just happened to mention my client by name.”
“That’s right. He said that she’d told him how the hiding-place mechanism works.”
“It’s very convenient, isn’t it, Thomas?”
“You don’t need to answer that, Thomas,” interrupted the judge. “Ask the witness questions; save your comments for the jury. I shouldn’t need to keep telling you that, Mr. Lambert.”
“No, my Lord.” Miles smiled affably up at the judge. Old Granger’s interruptions and instructions seemed to have no effect whatsoever on Lurid Lambert, who carried on relentlessly along his charted course, guiding the witness slowly but surely onto the rocks.