Final Witness

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.”

“So anybody can go in and look through these indexes?” asked Thomas.

“Yes, it doesn’t matter how old you are. They haven’t got all the information on the indexes though. Just enough for you to fill out the application for a certificate, and then you have to wait.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know. We had to wait a week for our certificates, but there’s probably a way of getting them quicker if you pay more.”

“I haven’t got a week. Once the evidence is over they won’t let any more in. That’s what Sergeant Hearns told me.”

“When’s the evidence going to be over?” asked Matthew.

“I don’t know. My father said he was going to be called sometime on Thursday, and he’s Greta’s only witness.”

“God, that’s no time. Why didn’t we think of this before?”

“Because it was only today that my father decided to tell me about Greta’s late-night telephone conversation,” said Thomas. He paused and then went on musingly, “He said Greta told the man ‘I’m not your Greta Rose.’ Not just ‘Greta Rose’ but ‘your Greta Rose.’ She and Rosie are linked up together, Matt. I don’t know if they were married or not, but someone’s going to have seen them together, known about them. I’m going to go through this address book and see if any of the names spring out at me, and then we’ll go to your family records place in the morning.”

Matthew was soon asleep, but Thomas stayed up into the small hours puzzling over the address-book entries, all made in Greta’s careful handwriting. Thomas wondered whether she would miss the book before the next morning. He doubted it somehow. She had enough things on her mind without looking up telephone numbers.

None of the entries seemed to offer much to Thomas. There was Greta’s mother in Manchester, but otherwise most of the names seemed to be for businesses of one kind or another. Dressmakers, dry cleaners, travel agents and a shop selling computer accessories. In between there were a few names with or without last names that Thomas copied out on a piece of paper to try the next morning. Anna, Martin, Giles, Peter, Pierre, Robert, Jane — but no Rosie or Rose. Nothing floral at all. The names swirled about in Thomas’s head after he turned out the bedside light and lay looking out the high window at the full moon hanging over the roofs of South London. It was a clear night and the moon seemed very close. He felt the great weight of it and thought of the arid desert that was its surface. He imagined the terrible silence and the darkness of its night and felt despair settling on his spirit like dust. The grand gesture of throwing the sultan’s sapphire into the North Sea now seemed an empty foolishness.

Thomas thought of his father’s last words: “I can’t see you. Not after all that’s happened,” and he thought of his beautiful mother lying unavenged in the Flyte churchyard. There was no time left and no one to turn to. He looked away from the moon and drifted into a troubled sleep.

He woke again later and felt as if no time had passed, but the luminous clock on Matthew’s mantelpiece showed it was nearly 7 A.M. and Thomas could hear the Barne children beginning to move about on the floors below. He felt as if he had just dreamed something vitally important, but he couldn’t remember what it was. The frustration was almost too much to bear. There was a word or a name on the edge of his consciousness that Thomas just could not reach, and he would probably never have done so had his eye not fallen on the list of names and numbers that he had transcribed from Greta’s address book before he’d gone to sleep.

Pierre. That was the name. It took Thomas back to a golden afternoon by the River Thames when he hadn’t known who Greta was or what she was plotting. He remembered white wine in a plastic cup, the blanket spread out on the grass while Big Ben chimed the hours, and Greta’s head resting on his legs. She’d talked about a boy she knew in school years before. A boy who Thomas reminded her of. A boy called Pierre.

Thomas jumped out of bed and ran down five flights of stairs, narrowly avoiding a collision at the bottom with Matthew’s father, who was headed for his cubbyhole. Thomas waited for the door to close behind Mr. Barne and then dialed Pierre’s number on the hall telephone.

It was a foreign country code, and the female voice that answered spoke in French. Thomas said “Pierre” twice loudly for want of anything else to say. He couldn’t understand a word of what the voice at the other end of the line was saying. Then suddenly the flurry of speech stopped and there was silence. Thomas wondered whether the phone had been hung up at the other end before a deep male voice identified itself as belonging to Pierre.

“Do you know Greta Grahame?” asked Thomas, wishing that he’d given himself a little time to work out what he was going to say.

“Who?”

“Greta Grahame. She says she knew you years ago in Manchester when you were both at school there.”

“Greta. Yes, I knew her. I more than knew her in fact. We went out together for a while. It was a long time ago.”

“I know it was, but I need to ask you about people she knew then.”

“Why don’t you ask her yourself?”

“Because she wouldn’t tell me,” said Thomas, desperately trying to think of a story that would persuade this stranger to give him the information he was looking for. “She wouldn’t want me to risk my safety.”

“I don’t get this,” said Pierre. “Who are you?”

“I’m a friend of Greta’s. A good friend. There’s this man who’s threatening her, and I need to find out who it is so that I can tell the police.”

“Why would I know anything about it? I haven’t seen Greta in more than ten years.”

Clearly Pierre didn’t know anything about the trial. That much at least was in Thomas’s favor.

“I’m calling you because you’re the only person who might know who this man is. He’s someone bad from her past, someone who’s got something on her.”

“I don’t know anyone like that. We were at school together in Manchester. I left before her and came south. I heard she went off the rails for a while, but then her father died and she got a place at Birmingham University. She wrote me from there a couple of times. She seemed to be doing okay. I don’t know what happened to her after that. Is she doing all right? Apart from this man who’s threatening her, I mean.”

“She’s doing great,” Thomas lied. “She’s married someone really rich.”

“Pretty girls have all the luck, don’t they?” said Pierre. “Anyway, I don’t know your name but I’m afraid I’m a working man. I’ll be late for my train if I don’t go now.”

“My name’s Thomas. I won’t keep you more than a minute longer, I promise. That time when she went off the rails, did you keep in touch with Greta at all then?”

“A bit. I went back to Manchester a few times. Not many because I didn’t like the place much. Too far north for me. And Greta had changed. She was a different person somehow.”

“Did you hear about Greta spending time with a man called Rosie when you went back?”

“Rosie. That’s a girl’s name.”

“Rose then. He’s got a thick scar running down under his right ear.”

“I heard about someone called Rose, but he didn’t have a scar. I met him once with Greta, and I’d have remembered the scar.”

“Was he the kind of person who would threaten people, hurt them?” asked Thomas, trying to keep the excitement out of his voice.

“He had a reputation as a hard man, someone to avoid. Greta was a fool if she got involved with him.”

“What was his name?”

“Rose. I told you that.”

“I know, but what was his Christian name?”

“John, Jonathan. Something like that. I’ve got to go now.”

Thomas slowly replaced the receiver and stood motionless and distracted in the hall trying to master his emotions. It was another connection between Greta and his mother’s killer, but it was useless unless it was turned into a proof, something that would convince his father and that jury down at the Old Bailey, something that Greta couldn’t explain away. And he had almost no time left, the evidence would all be complete sometime the next day. He had to get the proof to court before then, and he didn’t even know if it existed.

Matthew and Thomas got to the Family Records Office just before ten-thirty. Inside there was a big, light room with long rows of metal shelves divided by high, sloping desks where the searchers could read the heavy index books: black binders for deaths, green for marriages and red for births. There was a constant repetition of thuds as the books hit the desks or got replaced on the shelves. Everyone using the place seemed to Thomas to be both old and preoccupied, their fingers inky from copying out the entries in the index books onto the certificate application forms, which they then took up to a bored young woman sitting at a pine desk by the door.

It took Matthew no time at all to show Thomas how the system worked. There were seven or eight index books for each year, divided alphabetically. They started with the births and found the entry for Greta Rose Grahame after less than five minutes in the “G-H” book for 1971. Thomas wasn’t disappointed; he hadn’t really imagined that the certificate in Greta’s desk was a forgery. However, he felt his heart beating fast as they moved into the central aisles and began to search through the green marriage books. They started in 1987 and worked their way systematically forward through the years, searching under the name Rose. This was the only way of doing it, given that the index worked entirely by reference to the husband’s last name. There was in fact very little other information in the books. Just the last name followed by the husband’s first and middle initials, and beyond that the wife’s maiden name and the district in which the marriage had taken place. Finally there were the reference numbers that enabled the invisible workers on the upper floors of the building to enter the full details of each marriage on the certificates that had been applied for down below.

Matthew and Thomas searched through every Rose that had gotten married in Great Britain in every one of the previous fourteen years, but there was not one who had married a Grahame in Manchester or anywhere else. There were John Roses and Jonathan Roses, who had married a variety of names, but none bore any resemblance to Grahame.

They searched again and again without success until Thomas got careless and knocked one of the huge index books off a high desk onto the floor. It fell with a great crash, and suddenly there was silence in the records room. Everyone in their vicinity turned around to look at the culprits. They were all old and Thomas and Matthew were young. “Old people wouldn’t drop precious index books on the floor,” they seemed to be saying. “Old people would be more careful.”

“Come on,” said Matthew, beckoning Thomas to follow him into the black section. They took shelter in an obscure corner of the great room housing Deaths 1860–1868. Behind them the thud-silence-thud noise of the index books hitting shelves and tables began again.

“It’s no good, Matthew,” said Thomas in a depressed voice. “There’s no point in looking anymore. We’re not going to find anything. It was a long shot anyway. She could easily have been his Greta Rose without being married to him.”

“Welcome to Death Row,” said Matthew, relating their present surroundings to Thomas’s mood of resignation.

“What did you say?” asked Thomas, suddenly alert.

“Death Row — or Death Row H to be precise,” said Matthew, reading a notice on the wall.

“Leading to Death Row I. Put the two together and you’ve got Death Rows H and I.”

“What are you talking about, Thomas? It was a joke but it wasn’t that funny.”

“Rows. Don’t you get it, Matthew? There are other ways of spelling Rose. We need to check those out too.”

They went back to the front of the marriages section where they had been before, braving the disapproving glances that met them on their way, and started to search again. They found what they were looking for quite quickly. There were no Rows, but one or two bridegrooms did have the surname Rowes, and a Jonathan B. Rowes had married a Grahame in Liverpool in 1989.

“It’s them!” said Matthew excitedly. “It’s got to be. It’s just the right date. She’d have been eighteen. That’s when Pierre told you she went off the rails.”

“The date’s all right but the city’s not,” said Thomas. “Greta was in Manchester, remember. Not Liverpool.”

“They’re both towns in the north though, aren’t they? Not everyone gets married in their hometown. Maybe they didn’t want anyone to know about it.”

“Maybe. I’m not saying it’s not them. I’m just saying that there isn’t enough to know one way or another. We couldn’t take this to anyone; we’d need the proper certificate. That gives dates of birth and stuff like that, doesn’t it?”

“No. Just the ages on marriage certificates,” said Matthew. “I remember that. They have the fathers’ names though, and their occupations. Greta can’t pretend it’s not her if the father’s name on the marriage certificate is the same as that on her birth certificate. We’ll have her then.”

“If it’s her and if we get the certificate in time and if we get them to the right people before the evidence is over. We’ve got nothing at the minute,” said Thomas. Underneath his cautious exterior he was as excited as Matthew. It was just that he was determined to keep control of himself. He didn’t want to repeat his experience of the day before with the birth certificate.

Matthew refused to share his friend’s somber mood.

“But we’ve got hope, which is more than we had twenty minutes ago,” he said. “We ought to get on and order the certificates now. They take twenty-four hours if you make a priority application. That’s what it says on that notice over there.”

Thomas filled out the application forms and handed them in. The bored young woman at the desk by the door had been replaced by a bored young man, who glanced at his watch before writing the collection time on Thomas’s receipt — 12:21 on Thursday. Thomas wondered, as he went down the steps of the records building, whether he might find himself tomorrow with the crucial evidence in his hand at last, when it was already too late to use it.