Final Witness

Chapter 2

In a tall nineteenth-century house on a fashionable street in Chelsea, Lady Greta Robinson was getting dressed. She kept very still with her head slightly to one side as she considered herself in a full-length Victorian mahogany mirror positioned in the middle of the master bedroom. She was wearing a sleeveless black Chanel dress cut just above her knee, a pearl necklace and a thin gold watch on her left wrist. She stood five feet seven inches high in her stockinged feet.

Greta’s short black hair matched her dress. It was swept back above her small ears and so exposed the full width of her cheekbones. There was something faintly Asiatic about her face, and her cool, green eyes accentuated an aura of detachment. However, this was contradicted by her full, red lips, untarnished by lipstick and always slightly parted as if she were about to tell you something that would change your life forever. Contradiction was the secret of her attraction. The boyishness of her face was in opposition to the fullness of her figure. With an easy motion she stepped out of the dress and looked at her nakedness for a moment with a half smile. Her full breasts needed no support, and there was no trace of fat around her hips or waist. There had been no child to change her contours.

Turning, she picked up a Christian Dior dress from where it lay draped across the back of a nearby Chippendale chair and put it on. It was black like the other, but it had sleeves, the hemline was longer and the neck was cut higher. Greta’s eyes hardly blinked as they concentrated on the reflected image of their owner. There was much for her to admire, but it was not narcissism that motivated her scrutiny today. Appearance was vital. Her barrister, that wily old fox Miles Lambert, had told her that. She was about to go onstage. The men and women who would be gazing at her from the jury box day after day as she sat in the dock or gave evidence must learn to love her. Her fate would be in their hands.

Their lives were not glamorous. They had no titles, no designer dresses, no fashionable home to go back to after the court day was over. Nobody noticed what happened to them. She must not repel them. She had been, after all, just like them once upon a time.

She took off the necklace and replaced the gold watch with a simple one on a black leather band that matched her dress. Narrowing her eyes, she bestowed a half smile of approval upon her reflection.

“Showtime,” she whispered to herself softly before she turned and padded over to the bed, where her husband lay sleeping. Looking at her at that moment, you’d have had to say that she was just like a cat. A sleek, well-cared-for white cat with a pair of glittering green eyes.

He looked good for his age, she thought. A full head of black hair with not too many silver flecks, a strong and wiry body; its outlines were clear and firm where he had wound himself up in his sheet during the long hot night. He had been sleeping badly for some time now, and she had often woken at three or four to see him standing by the open window gazing out into the night as if he could find some answer to his difficulties in the empty street below.

There had always been an inflexibility about the man, even before he was overtaken by disaster. He gave the impression of holding his features firm by an effort of will. It was apparent in the set of his jaw and the rigidity of his head upon his neck, but in the last year the lines on his forehead had become deeper and more pronounced. Recently he had formed a habit of passing his thumb and index finger along these furrows as if this was the only way of resting his piercing blue eyes, which never seemed to close. Except in his sleep, of course, like now, with little more than three hours to go before his second wife would go on trial for conspiring to murder his first.

Greta sat on the side of the bed and gently stroked her husband’s cheek with the tip of her finger, feeling the bristly facial hair that had grown there during the night above the hard jawbone. “You don’t know how to fight, do you, darling?” she whispered. “You’re pretty good at conquering but not so good at fighting. That’s the trouble. You can’t step back and defend yourself; you just keep on coming until you’ve got nothing left. Nothing left at all.”

“What’s left?” asked Sir Peter Robinson, looking up at his wife in the confusion of his first awakening. “What is it, Greta?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all, darling. Except that it’s nearly half past seven and it’s time to get up and face the jury.”

“Oh, Christ. Jesus Christ and all his saints. Christ.”

“I agree we could do with some help, but perhaps that’s asking too much. Come on, Peter. I need you today. You know that.”

Sir Peter unclenched his fists with a visible resolve and got out of bed. Greta stood and stepped back into the middle of the room. She put her hands on her hips.

“How do I look?”

“Ravishing. Like, like…”

“I’m waiting.”

“Like Audrey Hepburn in that movie. What was it called?”

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Well, let’s hope Judge Stranger likes old movies.”

“Granger, Greta. Granger.”

“Whatever.”

Two hours later John the chauffeur was driving Sir Peter and Lady Greta along the side of the River Thames in the black Daimler with the darkened windows that insulated the minister for defense so successfully from the population that had reelected his party into government three years before. Two short years ago Sir Peter had been riding high with a beautiful wife in the country and a personal assistant named Greta Grahame, whose bright efficiency had made him the envy of all his colleagues in the Palace of Westminster. But today the Daimler did not stop at the House of Commons or at Sir Peter’s offices in Whitehall but purred on toward an unfamiliar destination under the shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral: the Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court built on the foundations of Newgate Prison. Less than fifty years ago men and women had been sent by the Queen’s judges to death by hanging after being convicted of crimes just like that for which Lady Greta was about to be tried.

At the entrance to the courthouse the crews of photographers and journalists with their long, insidious lenses and soft woolly microphones were waiting for Sir Peter and his wife to arrive.

Against all the odds, the prime minister’s support had kept Peter in his position for far longer than any of his friends or enemies had ever expected. But Peter knew that he could not continue to defy political gravity if the trial didn’t go Greta’s way. Everything he had achieved was hanging in the balance, threatened with imminent destruction. And who did he have to thank for this state of affairs? His son, Thomas. His own flesh and blood.

Thomas, who had had everything he ever wanted and was now repaying him with this. Thomas the little bastard, who was so determined to bring everyone down because of what had happened to his mother. God knows, he wasn’t the only person who’d been hurt.

Sir Peter felt a surge of rage against his only child run through his body like electricity, and instinctively he gripped his wife’s arm.

“God, Greta, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s not your fault,” she replied, understanding that it was everything, the whole sorry mess that he was referring to and not the sudden grip, which had left a red mark on her slender wrist.

“Fucking little rat. That’s what he is. A rat.”

Greta did not respond. Instead she turned to look out the window. This was not a time to let their feelings show. The car had turned into the Old Bailey and was encircled by the swarm of reporters as it slowed to a crawl over the last 150 yards of its journey. She thought they looked just like people caught in a flash flood, holding their cameras high above their heads as if they were the only belongings they could hope to save from the rushing waters.

But that was wrong, of course. She was the one at risk of drowning. And as her husband had just said: all because of that boy. “The fucking little rat.” Her stepson, Thomas.