Final Witness

Chapter 26

Afterward Thomasnever knew how they managed to get through the two hours that they had to wait in the cafeteria of the Family Records Office. It was torture watching the second hand of the big clock on the wall making its rounds while the evidence went on at the Old Bailey and Andrew dealt with the priority collections of those sensible enough to have made their applications earlier on the day before. He was visible through the window in the door of the cafe, and several times Matthew had to restrain Thomas from rushing out to physically attack the collections clerk.

It was in fact 12:17 when their number came up on the screen and 12:19 when Thomas snatched the certificates from Andrew’s hand. He and Matthew then left the building almost at a run so that there was no opportunity for Matthew to see if Andrew had finally had to resort to his buzzer.

Out on the sidewalk Thomas opened the envelope with trembling hands. The red birth certificate came out first, but he barely glanced at the document, handing it to Matthew while he unfolded the green marriage certificate and began to read.

“‘Certificate No. 38. Married on the twenty-sixth day of November 1989 at the Register Office in Liverpool. Jonathan Barry Rowes aged twenty-one years, Bachelor, to Greta Rose Grahame aged eighteen, both residents of Manchester.’ “

“Give me the birth certificate, Matt, quick,” said Thomas. His excitement made both his hand and his voice shake as he compared the two documents.

“Father’s name and surname: George Reynolds Grahame. Occupation: Factory worker. Name and surname of father: George Reynolds Grahame. Occupation: retired. They’re the same, Matt. We’ve got her now. We’ve got the murdering bitch.” Thomas’s voice was hysterical, filled with all the emotions that he had tried to keep suppressed for so long.

“All we need now is a taxi,” said Matthew. But a taxi was nowhere in sight. It took them ten minutes to find one, and it was past one o’clock when Thomas and Matthew arrived at the Old Bailey and went in search of Sergeant Hearns.

The court was locked and deserted by the time they got up to the third floor, so they went back down the stairs and peered around a pillar to look through the door of the restaurant. There was no sign of Hearns, but Greta was having lunch with Peter and Patrick Sullivan over at a table by the window. Their heads were close together, but then Greta leaned back in her chair and Thomas and Matthew could see that all three of them were laughing. A moment later Peter turned to his wife and kissed her on the cheek. Thomas saw the love in his father’s eyes, and he gripped the envelope with the certificates even more tightly as he turned away and went down the staircase.

“Look, there he is,” said Matthew, pointing excitedly to the other side of the great hall on the first floor. They were at the foot of the staircase and Hearns was fifty yards away talking to John Sparling.

“It’s perfect,” he said. “We’ll give the certificates to Sparling and he can show them to your father in the witness box. That’s the way to do it.”

Matthew pulled Thomas by the arm, but he stood rooted to the spot.

“No, Matthew, it’s not perfect,” he said. “It’ll get her convicted but it’ll make my father hate me even more. It’ll be something I’ve done to him.”

“Of course it will. And to be honest with you, I can’t imagine anyone who deserves a bad time more. He may be your father and a famous politician, but he’s also a major-league bastard in my book. He’s got it coming to him almost as much as she does.”

“Except that he hasn’t killed anyone, Matt. The point is that I’ve got to give him the chance to change his mind for himself. He’s got to have the opportunity to choose between me and her.”

“Well, I think you’re completely crazy,” said Matthew angrily. “He hasn’t trusted you. Not once. You told him over and over again who killed your mother, and all you got was a punch in the mouth. No, I’m sorry, two punches. He hit you down in Suffolk as well, didn’t he, Tom?”

“He slapped me.”

“All right, he slapped you. How considerate of him!”

“Shut up, Matthew. You’ve made your point.”

Thomas turned away and began to walk back up the stairs. Matthew felt as if he had been consigned to irrelevance, and it infuriated him even more.

“Don’t be a fool, Tom,” he shouted after his friend. “Your father’s obsessed with her. A couple of certificates aren’t going to change his mind.”

“Maybe not, but I’ve got to try. For my mother’s sake, I’ve got to try.”

“So what happens if you try and fail and the jury never gets to hear about Greta and Rosie being married? What happens if she gets acquitted, Thomas? Have you thought of that? How would your mother feel about that?”

Matthew’s questions pursued Thomas up the stairs. He didn’t have any answers and he didn’t give any. All he had was the sense of certainty that had come to him as he had looked at his lovestruck father through the window of the restaurant minutes before; the certainty that he had to give the man one more chance to choose.

Thomas watched his father and Greta through the window. Time ticked away. Patrick brought them cups of coffee. They drank them and then they drank more. There was nothing Thomas could do. He had to see his father alone, but even if he could win his father over, it would be useless if Greta had seen them together. She would tell old Lambert not to call Sir Peter. The barrister would close the defense case and then there could be no more evidence. Judging by Greta’s laughter and continued high spirits, there could only be one result if the jury didn’t see the certificates. Greta would be acquitted and could never be tried again.

Thomas wondered where Matthew had gone. Perhaps he was telling Hearns and Sparling about the Rowes marriage, although Thomas doubted it. Matthew didn’t have anything without the certificates, and besides, he wouldn’t go against Thomas. He was too good a friend for that. Thomas wished they hadn’t split up. Matthew might have helped him to create some sort of diversion. As things stood, he didn’t see any way of getting his father on his own.

At 1:55 the P.A. system crackled into action, summoning barristers and defendants back to their courtrooms. Thomas ducked behind a pillar as Peter came out of the restaurant sandwiched between his wife and Patrick Sullivan. Thomas caught the lawyer’s last words as the three of them walked over to the staircase leading up to the third floor.

“This shouldn’t take long, Peter. It’s the support for Greta’s character that’s most important. The Crown has got no answer for that.”

Thomas waited a minute and then followed them up the stairs. He realized now that his only chance was to ambush his father in the witness waiting room after the other two had gone into court. He knew the procedure from his own experience giving evidence two days earlier. Miss Hooks settled the witness in the little room next to the door of the court and then went and got the judge and the jury before bringing the witness in. He ought to have about three or four minutes maximum to change his father’s mind.

Everything went just as Thomas had predicted. Once his father was alone, he went straight into the waiting room to confront him. Thomas had had time to think out his strategy beforehand. He had to tell his father what he had discovered at the Records Office. Handing him the certificates would not be enough. His father might refuse to look at them. What Thomas had not reckoned on was the level of his father’s hostility. It stopped Thomas in his tracks almost as soon as he had gotten through the door.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Peter shouted, getting to his feet. “I thought I told you to stay away from me.”

It took every ounce of Thomas’s courage to shut the door of the little room behind him and stand his ground as his father advanced on him. Thomas knew that the shouting would be audible inside the court if the door remained open.

“Look, Dad, I know it’s a bad time but — ”

“Bad time!” interrupted his father furiously. “It’s not a bad time, Thomas. It’s no time. My wife’s in that court on trial for murder because of you. You’ve tried everything, haven’t you?”

“No, Dad — ”

“Everything! You’ve perjured yourself, you’ve gotten other people to perjure themselves and now you’re going to try and interfere with my evidence. Well, you won’t get away with it, Thomas. I promise you that.”

A frenzy seemed to take possession of Peter. He seized hold of his son’s shirt just as he’d done on the day of Lady Anne’s funeral a year before, and he shook Thomas as he spoke.

“Dad, you’ve got to listen to me. I’ve found out something — ”

“New lies, Thomas. I’ve had enough of your lies. Now get out of my way.”

Using all his strength, Peter thrust his son to one side and wrenched open the door of the waiting room. Then he strode out into the hall, leaving his son in a heap in the corner. The door of the courtroom remained closed, but Thomas knew that Miss Hooks would be opening it any minute to summon his father inside. Thomas’s legs felt weak underneath him, and he needed all his willpower to get to his feet and go outside.

Peter was standing by one of the high windows on the other side of the hall. Thomas took the envelope out of his pocket and removed the two certificates, keeping his eye on his father all the time.

“Damn you, boy,” hissed Peter as his son approached. “Get away from me.” The two of them looked, at that moment, like they were playing some strange but deadly game.

“She’s not your wife, Dad.”

“Shut up, Thomas. Do you hear me? Shut up. I won’t tell you again.”

“Sir Peter Robinson,” called the shrill voice of Miss Hooks behind Thomas. He did not look around but instead grabbed his father by the wrist. At the same time Thomas used his other hand to force the certificates into his father’s grasp, pushing Peter’s fingers down over the paper.

“Take these,” he said. “Read them before you say anything. For Mummy’s sake. Do it for Mummy’s sake, if not for mine.”

“Sir Peter Robinson,” called Miss Hooks even more shrilly than before, and Thomas felt his father move past him toward the door of the court. There was a pause. Then a few moments later it shut with a bang.

Thomas might never have known what happened in the court after his father had gone into the witness box if Matthew had not at that moment arrived at the top of the stairs. He found Thomas standing as if turned to stone, looking vacantly up through a high window toward a patch of blue sky. The aftershocks of his encounter with his father were sending shudders through Thomas’s thin frame, and Matthew could see the tears in his friend’s dark blue eyes.

“Where’s your father?” he asked. “Where are the certificates? Talk to me, Tom.”

“I gave them to him, but I don’t know if he’ll read them. He wouldn’t let me speak, Matt. I think I’ve screwed it up. I’m so sorry. I should have listened to you.”

“There’s no time for that now. Has your father gone inside?”

Thomas nodded miserably.

“Well, we’ve got nothing to lose then, have we? Let’s see what happens. We haven’t come this far to miss out on the last act.”

Matthew started to pull Thomas toward the door of the court.

“Sergeant Hearns told us not to go back in court after we’d finished giving evidence,” protested Thomas weakly, but Matthew took no notice. The fight had gone out of Thomas, and he put up no resistance as Matthew pushed open the door and pulled him down onto a seat at the back of the court.

A ripple of interest ran along the press benches as the reporters turned to look at the teenagers, but then they all settled back into their seats as Sir Peter Robinson took the oath. His voice sounded dead and his face was white, but Greta’s attention was concentrated on Thomas. It filled him with a raw pleasure to watch the anxiety growing in her green eyes until finally he could not resist the temptation to bait her any longer. He looked at his father and then he looked back at Greta and smiled meaningfully. The effect on Greta was instantaneous. She gripped the rail of the dock and the color drained from her face. Then she was suddenly writing something on a piece of paper and trying to get the attention of Patrick Sullivan sitting several yards away with his back to the dock. Thomas watched him turn around and get up to speak to Greta while with another part of his brain Thomas listened to the beginning of his father’s evidence.

“Tell us your name, please,” asked Miles Lambert.

“I am Sir Peter Robinson.”

“And your occupation?”

“I am the minister of defense.” Peter’s voice was entirely flat, without any intonation or emphasis.

Patrick Sullivan put a note in front of Miles Lambert, but the barrister did not look down to read it. There was no reason to. All he was doing was introducing his witness to the jury, getting them warmed up for the glowing character reference that Sir Peter was going to give his wife.

“How long have you known Lady Greta Robinson?” he asked.

“About three and a half years. She started working for me in 1997.”

“And it’s right to say that you were married last December.”

“Right and wrong.”

“Excuse me, Sir Peter. I don’t quite understand that answer.”

“Let me clarify it for you then,” said Peter evenly. “We certainly went through a ceremony of marriage at the Chelsea Registry Office on the twentieth of December last year, but it is now quite clear to me in the light of these documents that the ceremony was not valid.”

“Not valid?”

“Yes. Because the person I thought I was marrying was already married to someone else, and I have every reason to think that her husband was then, and in fact still is, very much alive.”

Miles’s mouth opened and closed and opened again, but for the first time in many years no words came out. He glanced down too late at the scrawled note that Patrick Sullivan had put on the table in front of him.

“Miles,” it said. “Don’t ask him any questions. He’ll destroy us if you do. Close the case now. Greta.”

She might have told me before, thought Miles bitterly. Before her bloody husband or whoever he is got up there and smashed up all my work.

The judge allowed the heavy silence to build in the courtroom for a few moments before he broke it himself.

“I see that you’ve got two documents there, Sir Peter,” he said in his usual courteous manner. “Perhaps you’d be good enough to tell us what they are.”

“This one’s Greta’s marriage certificate,” said Peter. “The certificate for her first marriage, I mean. It shows that she married Jonathan Barry Rowes on November twenty-sixth, 1989, in Liverpool — ”

“I’m sorry to interrupt you, Sir Peter, but did you just say ‘Rose’?” asked the judge. “As in the flower?”

“Yes, that’s right. It’s spelled R-O-W-E-S but it’s obviously pronounced like the flower.”

“Thank you. Please carry on.”

“This other one is Greta’s birth certificate,” said Peter, holding up the red-edged piece of paper. His voice was toneless and mechanical, completely at variance with the extraordinary things that he was saying. “The father’s name on it is the same as the father’s name on the marriage certificate. It proves it’s Greta who married Rowes, and I believe Rowes is the man who killed my wife and tried to kill my son two weeks ago.”

“Yes, thank you,” said the judge, raising his voice a little in order to quell a sudden outbreak of whispering in the court. “Well, the jury had better see these exhibits, don’t you think, Mr. Lambert? They really seem to be quite relevant, particularly given your client’s assertion yesterday that she doesn’t know anyone called Rosie or Rose.”

“My Lord, I request an adjournment,” said Miles, recovering his voice but not his composure.

“Why, Mr. Lambert? I can’t see the need. This is your witness, you know. You called him.”

“My Lord, if you won’t grant me an adjournment, will you at least let me address you in the absence of the jury?”

“Yes, Mr. Lambert, certainly you may, but first the jury must be allowed to finish examining the documents produced by your witness. Let’s make them exhibits twenty-one and twenty-two, Miss Hooks.”

The two certificates had just gotten as far as the Indian juror with the turban when Greta couldn’t contain herself any longer.

“Peter! Look at me, Peter!” she shouted to her husband across the courtroom. “It’s not what you think. It was just a stupid teenage thing. We got divorced years ago. I had nothing to do with this murder!”

Peter turned to look at his wife for the last time, and his composure cracked. He was suddenly like a drowning man, struggling in vain to swim up to the surface. He opened his mouth but no words came.

Perhaps Greta took his silence for encouragement, but she certainly lost no time in intensifying her appeal. “I made you what you are now, Peter,” she cried. “You know that. What did Anne ever do for you? All she cared about was Thomas and that house. I saved you from her. I set you free.”

“I’ll never be free again. You killed her, Greta. And then you made me part of what you’d done. You and your psychopath.”

The words were forced from Peter and came between great gulps. But they enraged Greta. It was as if she realized for the first time that she had lost him.

“You’re a fool, Peter. That’s what you are. You want it all for free, don’t you? The power and the glory and the beautiful girl. But there’s a price to pay. Just like there always is. You don’t get something for nothing, Peter. Not in the real world.”

Greta drew breath for more, and the reporters’ pencils raced across their notepads. But there was to be no more. The security guard whom Greta had pushed aside at the start of her outburst had now recovered. She tackled Greta to the floor and then manhandled her through the door at the back of the dock.

“Yes, take her down,” said Judge Granger in a commanding voice. “And Mr. Lambert, I’ll give you your adjournment, but your client will stay in custody until I say otherwise. Perhaps you better take some further instructions. Your client seems to have quite a lot to say.”

The courtroom emptied very quickly after the judge and jury had gone out. The reporters needed to phone the day’s sensation through to their editors. Soon Thomas and Matthew found themselves all alone except for Sir Peter, who continued to sit in the witness box gazing steadily into the middle distance. He looked as if something inside him had irrevocably broken, as if the motor that had driven him so hard for so many years had spluttered and died. Matthew saw Thomas staring at his father and quietly left the court.

Thomas wanted to go over to his father, but he hung back, rooted to his seat. He had the words for confronting his father but none for getting close to him. They had been strangers for too long. It was Peter who finally broke the silence, and his voice came as if from a great distance away.

“I’m sorry, Tom,” he said. “I’ve let you and Anne down all because of some stupid infatuation. I’ve betrayed you both and dressed it up as loyalty. I wanted to believe in Greta because I couldn’t bear the thought of life without her, and so I let all this happen. All this ruin, and now it’s too late.”

“What’s too late?”

“Everything. I don’t want to be anymore, Tom. That’s the trouble. I don’t want to be. If I hadn’t brought Greta Grahame into our world, your mother would still be alive. I can’t live with that, Tom. I just can’t live with that.”

“Perhaps you can’t at the moment, but it’ll be different later. You can’t give up, Dad.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re my father and you owe me,” said Thomas simply. It was the only reply he could think of.

“Perhaps I do,” said Peter, smiling sadly. “But you can’t get blood from a stone. I’m all out of love, Tom. I’m no good to you.”

“You’re all I’ve got,” said Thomas passionately. “Mummy loved you. That’s why she wore that locket. And she loved me too, which is why she saved me from Rowes. We both owe it to her to carry on, to help each other.”

Thomas leaned forward and kissed his father on the cheek, and a strange thing happened. He couldn’t remember ever seeing his father’s piercing blue eyes close before, but now they did.

The jury found Greta guilty by a majority of eleven to one at 4:05 on the following afternoon. The press tended to agree that it was the Italian man in the expensive designer suit who was the dissenting voice, although one or two of them thought that it might be the Indian man with the turban and the inscrutable expression who had held out against the rest. There was no doubting which way the forewoman of the jury had voted, however. She positively shouted the verdict across the courtroom, accompanying it with a mean glare at Miles Lambert, who had known what was coming and looked the other way. Afterward he congratulated John Sparling on his victory, and the prosecution barrister had the good grace to admit that he would certainly have lost the case if it had not been for the arrival of the two certificates at the last minute in the hand of Miles’s star witness.

At half past four Judge Granger sentenced Lady Greta Robinson to a term of life imprisonment. She showed no reaction to the sentence, but the reporters all agreed that she seemed to have lost none of her pride and dignity as she was led away. She was certainly a cut above the normal run of defendants.