Final Witness

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.

Standing in the south window looking out were Peter’s wife and son. Thomas’s hair was curly and golden, and his cheeks were fat and red and round above a little dimpled chin. His unbelievably tiny fingers were twined in his mother’s long, brown hair, and he seemed to gurgle with delight as she held him up to the light. Peter smiled at his son, and just at that moment Anne turned to him with eyes that were liquid blue and sparkling.

“Oh, Peter,” she said. “I am so happy. I can’t tell you how happy I am.”

Peter dropped Greta at the railway station and watched the first train of the morning take her off into the distance. Then he drove the Range Rover slowly back to Flyte and took a room at the Anchor Inn. He was more exhausted than he had ever been in his life, and he fell on the bed without bothering to undress and slept until the afternoon.

He woke because the phone was ringing. It stopped and then began again, on and on until he finally answered. It was Thomas, but his voice sounded different. There was a desperate determination in it that Peter had never heard before.

“I need to speak to you, Dad. Aunt Jane does too.”

“Where are you? Are you all right?”

“We’re in Woodbridge. At Mary’s house.”

“Whose?”

“Aunt Jane’s sister. It’s twenty-eight Harbour Street. Will you come?”

“Yes, of course I will. I’m glad Jane’s taken you there. I should have thought of it myself.” Then, just as Peter was about to replace the receiver, Thomas’s voice came again.

“Has she gone, Dad? You have to be alone. I can’t see you otherwise.”

“Don’t worry, I’m alone,” said Peter, and hung up. He’d said no more than the truth; he’d never felt more alone than he did now.

“What are you going to do, Dad?”

“About what?”

“About Greta. She killed my mother.”

“No, she didn’t. She had nothing to do with it, Thomas. You’ve got this fixation in your mind, and it’s doing neither of us any good.”

They were sitting in the front room of the little house in Harbour Street surrounded by a lifetime’s collection of bric-a-brac. Coronation mugs and ships in bottles jostled for space with china cats and dogs. Their owner, Jane’s sister Mary, had made them cups of milky tea and then left them sitting around a heavy 1930s oak dining table — Jane and Thomas on one side and Peter on the other.

Part of Peter realized that all this was wrong. He should be the one with his arm around his son, not the old housekeeper, but Thomas’s obsession with Greta divided them and Peter felt powerless to do anything about it.

“All right, Dad, listen to what Aunt Jane has got to say,” said Thomas, controlling his impatience with visible difficulty.

“She said bad things about my Lady, Sir Peter,” said the housekeeper.

“When?”

“The day the little dog died. After you left the house. She said she was going to make my Lady pay.”

“A lot of people said bad things that day. The important point is that everyone said they were sorry afterward. Didn’t they, Thomas?”

“She left the window open, and I heard one of the men saying that they were all closed,” said Thomas, ignoring his father’s question.

“She left the window open by mistake. It’s easily done on a warm evening like yesterday was. Why would she have admitted leaving it open if she’d done so deliberately?”

“Because she didn’t know I’d recognized him then.”

“Someone you saw from behind in the street at midnight. She shouldn’t have lied, Thomas, but she had her reasons.”

“Why did she arrange for me to go to Edward’s, then? What about that?”

“I don’t know, Thomas. I haven’t got the answer to everything. I’m sure this is wrong though. I know Greta, and she’d never have had anything to do with something like this.”

“Yes, she did. You know she did. You’re just protecting her because you’re screwing her.”

Thomas pushed his chair away behind him and stood leaning over the table toward his father, resisting Jane Martin’s ineffectual efforts to pull him back.

“You’re screwing her and my mother’s dead because of her. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!”

Thomas’s voice rose to a hysterical scream, which was suddenly cut off when his father leaned across the table and smacked him hard on the cheek with the back of his hand.

Peter stood up, facing his son. Thomas had a hand over his face, but his father could see the fury in his eyes. It was the sort of rage from which a lifetime of hatred is born.

“I’m sorry, Thomas,” he said. “I wish I hadn’t done that, but you shouldn’t have said that to me. It’s your decision what you tell the police, but think before you speak. You might regret it otherwise.”

Peter had retreated to the doorway and now stood there, hesitating for a moment. Neither his son nor Mrs. Martin said anything, and he felt as if he had no option but to go. To stay would only enrage the boy more, he told himself, so without another word he turned and let himself out the front door.

Outside he sat in the Range Rover, gazing at the motionless net curtains hung across the front window of the little house. He longed to get out of the car and walk back up the path to the front door, but he didn’t do it. Instead, after a couple of minutes, he started up the engine and drove slowly away. There was no way back.

Four days passed before the police said that the family could return to the House of the Four Winds. Sir Peter remained at the hotel in Flyte making arrangements for the funeral, and Aunt Jane thought that she and Thomas should stay on with her sister in Woodbridge, but he insisted on going home at the first opportunity. The House of the Four Winds had been his mother’s life, and walking in her garden made him feel that she still existed in the world.

He sat on an old bench as the sun set and looked up at the window of his mother’s bedroom through a curtain of white roses imagining that she might appear there at any moment, calling him to come in. Trudging back to the house in the semidarkness brought a renewal of his pain, but these moments in the garden when his mother seemed so close were part of what kept him going. The rest was the thought of revenge: the need to make those responsible pay for what they had done. He knew what his mother had thought of Greta; Aunt Jane sat with him in the kitchen almost every night and told him all the things that his mother had said. Lady Anne had often used the old housekeeper as a shoulder to cry on, little realizing that all her words of frustration and resentment were being remembered so faithfully by the old friend she had known since her childhood.

Thomas felt ashamed now, remembering his dreams about Greta. He bitterly regretted the declaration of love that he had made to her in the taxi, linking it in his mind with the sadness in his mother’s face as she looked down at him from the first-floor windows of his father’s house in London.

Lying in his bed at night he thought of killing Greta, of plunging a knife into her chest, but then he remembered his mother lying at the top of the staircase with the pool of red sticky blood behind her head and her eyes full of nothing at all. There was another way of making Greta pay — a cleaner way, the way his mother would want. He knew what his father had said about talking to the police, but his father was with Greta just like he always had been. Thomas remembered the sting of his father’s hand on his face and made his decision.

Early the next morning he telephoned the police and made an appointment for Sergeant Hearns to come and take his statement in the afternoon. He needed to have it over and done with before his mother’s funeral the next day.

It rained on the morning of the funeral. A slow Suffolk rain that fell heavily on the heads of the congregation as they stood around the newly dug grave in the corner of the Flyte churchyard.

Thomas had sat between his father and Aunt Jane in the church. He had no more wish than Sir Peter to advertise the divisions in the family, but by the graveside he shrank away from his father’s protective arm and gripped hold of Aunt Jane’s hand instead.

The wet dirt clung to Thomas’s black, polished shoes and the rain plastered his long, fair hair to his head. He wiped it from his eyes and wondered why he wasn’t crying. Aunt Jane wasn’t either. The old lady bit her lip and stared angrily up at the overcast sky, looking like a veteran about to go into battle. Thomas loved the old housekeeper; now that his mother was gone, she was the only person he really trusted in the whole wide world.

Thomas kept his face turned away from his father and tried not to look down into the obscene hole in the ground into which the undertaker’s men had lowered his mother’s body. He could hear the rain pattering on the wooden coffin lid and the vicar’s voice louder than it had been before, straining to be heard above the rumblings of thunder in the sky.

“Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down like a flower…”

Yes, thought Thomas. The words were right. His mother had never been happy. How could she be when his father had deserted her? And she had not lived long enough. She had been cut down like one of her roses when she was the most beautiful, the most vital, the best of women in the world.

Thomas suddenly began to weep not just for himself but for his mother too. For what had been taken away from her. She would never see another summer; she would never know what he might become.

“O holy and most merciful Savior, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death,” asked the vicar, but the grand words felt hollow to Thomas. His mother’s death was eternal. That was what this funeral meant. She would never be again. He would never again see the smile that lit up her face when he came into the room; never feel her hand as it brushed his long hair back away from his forehead in a gesture of affection that had lived on past his childhood. Thomas did not know why he was still in the world when she was not. How could he live when she didn’t?

“O holy and merciful Savior, thou most worthy judge eternal, suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.”

Thomas thought of his mother’s last hour, and the memory came to him as it had so often in recent days of their last moment together at the top of the stairs. He’d pushed the books and the hiding place had opened. He’d heard the voices at the bottom of the stairs and sensed the light of the flashlights. He’d stepped forward, stumbling into the darkness of the priest hole, and lost hold of the side of his mother’s white nightgown. He’d replayed it in his mind so many times, but still he couldn’t say whether he had let go or his mother had pulled away. All he knew was that as he turned back to her in the darkness, he felt the bookcase close behind him. She must have stood with her back to the books pushing the shelves back into place until the first shot took her and she fell to the ground. But by then she had succeeded in her purpose. She died knowing that he was hidden.

Her last act was to preserve his life, and suddenly Thomas realized what this meant. He had to continue living because she had saved him. He was not cut off from her because he knew precisely what she wanted. She was not shut up in that dark brown box in the ground on which his father was at that moment throwing his farewell flowers. She lived on in him. It was not “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” He would see that it was not.

Thomas looked around him. The graves of generations of Sackvilles and their retainers stretched back toward the old gray stone church, past the trunk of the great chestnut tree that had blown down in the storm of 1989. Some of the moss-covered graves had sunk into the ground so far that it was not now possible to read the name of the Sackville whose bones lay under the turf.

The church and the graveyard had not changed in 350 years. Buried here were the same men and women who had screamed lustily in the font at their baptism and glowed with the promise of life as they signed their names in the leather-bound Register of Marriages that was now gathering dust in the church vestry. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century vicars had walked down this same gravel path between the graves and read the same words from the Book of Common Prayer.

Thomas suddenly had a profound sense of the significance of the dead who lay all around him. People who had walked the old narrow streets of Flyte and fought against the same cruel sea. Sackvilles who had inherited the House of the Four Winds and passed it on intact to the next generation. Thomas’s father was alien to all of this, but he, Thomas, was inseparable from what had gone before and what was still to come. He looked up at the friendly, sympathetic faces of his neighbors; men and women whom he had known all his life, and he smiled at them through his tears. He was not alone, and as if in answer to his thought, the rain slowed and then stopped and the sun came out weakly overhead.