“Was it Rosie who said: ‘Fuck, they’re all fucking closed’ about the windows on the night of your mother’s murder?”
“I don’t know. I’ve thought about that a lot, but I just don’t know.”
“Yet you say in your statement about Rosie’s return that you would recognize the voice of the man with the scar.”
“Yes. If I heard it again I would, but my mother got killed a year before they came back.”
“So you can’t say if the man with the scar said the words about the windows but you remember the words clearly?”
“That’s right.”
“I see. Well, let’s go on to the end of your story. You hear the siren. Rosie stops talking in midsentence, and he and Lonny run out the front door. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“You get out of the bench and answer the intercom.”
“I buzzed the police in through the front gate.”
“Having spoken to Officer Hughes through the intercom first. Isn’t that right, Thomas?”
“I don’t remember.”
“He told us what happened when he gave evidence yesterday. He said that you asked him who he was and he identified himself as a police officer. Then you opened the gates by remote control. Do you agree with his account, Thomas?”
“I suppose so. I was in a panic. I don’t remember everything that was said.”
“Well, I’ll take that as a yes. Now, you knew from Officer Hughes that the police were at the front gate. You knew that Rosie and Lonny had parked their car in the lane. You must have assumed that they were running back to their car. You knew all that, and so why didn’t you tell Officer Hughes through the intercom to drive down to the lane and cut them off instead of buzzing him in through the front gate?”
Miles had asked his final question with a fierce directness that sparked the jury into a concentrated focus on Thomas, who didn’t answer immediately. He looked like a chess player who has suddenly seen his king exposed to a massive unforeseen attack and now looks around desperately but in vain for a move that will stave off inevitable defeat.
“I don’t know,” Thomas said eventually. “I didn’t think. Those men would have killed me if they’d found me. I suppose I wanted to feel safe.”
“But you were safe. The men had left. This was your opportunity to catch your mother’s killers.”
“I didn’t think.”
“You didn’t think. It makes no sense, Thomas. It makes no sense because none of this really happened, did it?”
“Yes, it did. I swear it did.”
“Just like it makes no sense that the police found the north door locked.”
“They must have locked it when they left because they would have known how it would look.”
“Like they’d never been there?”
“Yes.”
“It looks like that because that’s the truth, isn’t it, Thomas? You’ve made all this up. You didn’t think the locket would be enough, and so you invented Rosie’s return and a casual reference to Greta and the bookcase just to be sure of getting your stepmother convicted. Isn’t that right, Thomas?”
“No! No!” The denial seemed to be wrenched from somewhere deep inside. Thomas’s face was contorted with pain, but this did nothing to deter Miles from driving home his point.
“You were the one who opened the front door before the police got close enough to see what you were doing.”
“No, they left it open.”
“Who?”
“Rosie and Lonny.”
“Rosie and Lonny! I don’t know where you got those names from, Thomas — unless it was some late-night TV movie — but the point is you made them up just like you made up this whole sorry story.”
“No, I didn’t. They came for me, I tell you. They’ll come again.”
“Will they, Thomas? Will they?” Miles Lambert wore an expression of sorrowful incredulity on his round face. He was not looking for an answer to his question, and he sat down before Thomas could give one.
Chapter 22
Peter sat in the back of his official car drumming on the leather top of the briefcase that he held across his knees. In front of him across Ludgate Circus the bright midafternoon sun lit up the magnificent dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, but the motionless traffic on Fleet Street barred his progress toward the Old Bailey and made him oblivious to the beauty of the view. He was already five minutes late for his meeting with Greta, and his frustration boiled uselessly inside him. The rat-a-tat-tat of his nails on the briefcase only echoed a more frenzied pounding in his head, which he held in place even more rigidly than usual so that the thick blue veins in his neck stood out above the tight collar of his shirt.
The week of the trial had not been good for Peter. He had hardly slept, and the strain of trying to do his job and worry about his wife at the same time was showing on his face. There were bags under his eyes, and he had developed a tiny tic on the side of his lip. His mind would begin wandering to the Bailey in the middle of complex negotiations with armament executives, and he sensed the growing doubt behind the friendly masks worn by his civil servants. He felt that it was only a matter of time before he made some appalling mistake that would bring his career tumbling down in ruins.
Peter realized now that he should have booked time off during the trial, but he had thought naively that his work would be a distraction; better the Ministry of Defense than sitting outside the courtroom wondering what was going on inside. He consoled himself with the thought that it would all soon be over and tried not to think of the possibility of conviction. Only in his dreams did Peter imagine Greta being sentenced and taken away, and then the horror would wake him up with his heart racing. He’d calm himself in the dark by reaching out to take hold of his wife’s sleeping body.
Peter had made his life-defining choice on that cold November day in Ipswich eight months before when that smug bastard Hearns finally got around to charging Greta with conspiracy to murder. That was the day that he had proposed marriage to her. It was his way of telling the world who he was and where he stood, and besides, he had grown to love Greta. He owed her so much, and there was not a day that passed that she did not fill him with a terrible aching desire. Marriage meant that she would never go away. Till death do us part.
Of course, the wedding announcement had caused a scandal, but Peter had been ready for that. He had done well in his job since becoming defense minister nearly three years before, and he had known that the prime minister would stand by him. In fact, Peter had almost welcomed the media circus that congregated on his doorstep at the time of the wedding. Answering the reporters’ questions had given him an opportunity to tell the whole world how he felt about Greta.
Then, two days later, a train had crashed in the north of England, killing thirty passengers, and the defense minister’s private life had become yesterday’s news. The media spotlight had only returned with the onset of the trial, and now it was not Peter but Greta who was suffering under its glare.
Once again Peter cursed the ridiculous legal rules that stopped him from being in court until after he’d given his evidence. Patrick Sullivan had been down at the Bailey with Greta for most of the trial, and this had helped a little because Patrick was Peter’s oldest friend as well as his lawyer. However it wasn’t the same as being in the courtroom himself sharing his wife’s ordeal. Miles Lambert had told him that he’d be giving his evidence on Wednesday or Thursday at the latest, and Peter looked forward to the prospect like a prisoner awaiting his release. He’d tell them what Greta was and wasn’t capable of and what kind of person she was. He’d tell them that Anne had worn that locket at dinner after the Chelsea Flower Show and that she and Greta had got on fine in London. He’d tell them that he hadn’t seen Anne wearing the locket on the day of her death, and he’d tell them that that sneak Matthew Barne had run away without answering when he’d asked him if Greta had said “It’s mine.” Peter had not seen Thomas since that October afternoon in Chelsea when he’d come home to find the two of them burgling his house, and he’d not missed him either. He didn’t intend to see his son again until the boy came to him on bended knees begging his forgiveness, and Greta’s too for that matter, and maybe even that wouldn’t be enough.