Peter had been talking when the door opened. He had his eyes on his son, and Thomas saw the fear in them as Greta began to climb the stairs.
He stepped back into the drawing room, putting the open door between himself and the landing, and at the same time he motioned with head and hand to his father to go past him.
“Are you here, Peter?” Greta called from the stairs.
Peter went out onto the landing.
“You’re home early,” he said.
“I didn’t stay long. I was worried about you. You looked so awful earlier. Are you any better?”
“Yes, much better.”
Peter’s voice sounded fraught with anxiety to Thomas standing on the other side of the door, but Greta seemed to accept her husband’s assurance.
“Come up and talk to me while I get changed,” she said. “But don’t talk about the trial. Anything but the trial. I’ve had enough of it for one day.”
Thomas listened to the sound of his father following his stepmother up the stairs to the second story and turned back into the room. So much had happened here. He remembered his mother showing him the secret recess in the bureau on that first morning in London and the day he opened it six months later and found her golden locket inside. There must be something else that would connect Greta with his mother’s killers. Something that couldn’t be explained away, something that wasn’t just his own assertion. The birth certificate was not the end of the line. For his father, perhaps, but not for him. There had to be something or someone in Greta’s past that would connect her.
Thomas’s eyes fastened on the old bandaged address book sitting on the writing surface of the bureau under the documents that his father had spilled out of the brown envelope. There was no time to lose. He could hear footsteps moving about on the floor above his head. It must be Greta changing out of whatever dress she had worn to charm her fat slippery barrister. She’d be down in a minute ready for his father to mix her a Bloody Mary.
Thomas moved across the room on tiptoes. He carefully put back all the documents, including the birth certificate, in the envelope and replaced them in the drawer. Then he picked up the address book and shut the bureau.
At the door he took a last look around the room as if committing it to memory and then went quietly down the stairs. He let himself soundlessly out of the house and stood on the top of the steps for a moment before he walked rapidly away without looking back. He held Greta’s address book concealed under his jacket.
Chapter 24
Thomas walked over the Albert Bridge and on into Battersea heading for Matthew Barne’s house, where he was due to spend the night.
Thomas and Matthew had been drawn together from the start of their time at Carstow School. It was partly, as Matthew had told Miles Lambert, that they had been the only two newcomers in a class where all the other students had already been at the school two years. But their friendship was also founded on shared interests and passions. They both loved romance and adventure. They had read the same books by the Bronte sisters and Robert Louis Stevenson. They believed in chivalry and heroism, and Matthew had from the outset adopted his friend’s crusade for justice against Greta as his own. Thomas, for his part, was intensely grateful to Matthew for his support. After his own experience with Miles Lambert, he knew that it couldn’t have been easy for Matthew to give evidence, but he had agreed to do so without complaint. The two put an intense value on their friendship and were inseparable at school.
The Barne family lived in a rambling Victorian house full of children and toys and pets. Matthew’s mother was always cooking, trying to keep pace with the insatiable appetites of her red-haired progeny, while Mr. Barne did something in the financial district. This something seemed to take up most of his time, but when he was home he shut himself up in a tiny room at the back of the house, which the family referred to for some reason as “the cubbyhole.” On Thomas’s previous visits he had only seen the door of this sanctum open on one occasion, when Mrs. Barne had come out carrying two empty bottles of Smirnoff vodka, from which Thomas had deduced that his best friend’s father was a not-so-secret alcoholic. There was nothing unfriendly about either of Matthew’s parents, however. Mrs. Barne had never criticized Thomas for involving Matthew in his troubles. She was kind to him in her way, but she shared with her husband an essential distractedness, so that Matthew and Thomas were left almost entirely to their own devices.
Matthew was the oldest of the six Barne children by two years, and this, combined with his status as the only boy in the family, had won him sole use of the attic bedroom at the top of the house. It was here that Thomas went with Greta’s address book.
Matthew hung a DO NOT DISTURB notice on the door that he had taken from a hotel in Brighton on the last day of the most recent Barne summer holiday, and the two teenagers sat down to talk about what to do next.
Thomas told Matthew about what had happened as quickly as he could. His mouth and cheekbone hurt him, and his lip had swollen where his father had hit him.
“Your father’s a total bastard,” said Matthew, not for the first time. “My one’s not great, but at least he doesn’t go round hitting me when he feels like it. You should go to the police.”
“I’ve already done that,” said Thomas, smiling ruefully. “He believes in her. That’s the problem. It doesn’t matter if she gets convicted. That wouldn’t change anything except that he’d hate me even more. She’d still win.”
“Is she likely to go down?”
“Go down?”
“That’s what they call it when someone gets found guilty. Do you think she will?”
“No. That fat barrister of hers did a real hatchet job on me, made everyone think that I’d made it all up.”
“I know. Me too.” Matthew felt slightly sick as he remembered his day in court.
“I keep on thinking that there must be something that would prove she’s guilty. Not just to the jury, but to my father too. Some document that would do it, something that she couldn’t explain away like she did with the locket. That’s why that birth certificate was so important. If only she hadn’t been called Greta Rose to start with — if she’d become it.”
“By marrying Rosie?”
“Yes. That’s what got my father so crazy. He was holding that birth certificate like it was one of the Crown Jewels.”
“Why does the birth certificate mean that she couldn’t have married him? Both things are possible, aren’t they?”
“What? Greta Rose marries a man called Rose?” Thomas looked more than skeptical.
“If that’s what Rosie’s last name is. I’m not saying she did marry him. All I’m saying is that it’s worth checking it out. There’s not much else for us to do. We’ve both had our day in court.”
“How do you check it out?”
“You go to the Family Records Office. It’s up in North London just behind Sadler’s Wells opera house. They’ve got big index books for all the marriages and births and deaths that there’ve been in England since the Battle of Waterloo.”
“Eighteen-fifteen?”
“Well, I don’t know what date precisely, but it doesn’t matter. The books go back at least a hundred years, and if Greta got married, it’s not going to be more than ten years ago, is it?”
“No, I suppose not. How do you know all this, Matthew?”
“We did a project on it at my last school. We spent a day there. Everyone had to find out as much as they could about their family history from the indexes. I got back to my grandfather’s birth certificate. It gave his father’s occupation as prison chaplain, so he probably got to pray with the criminals who were going to be executed the next day. It was quite exciting really.”