Final Witness (5 page)

    “Damn. It’s dead too. Look, Grace, I’ll drive you down to the harbor. It won’t take a moment.”

    Mrs. Marsh weakly protested, but Peter remained firm. There was nothing in fact that he wanted more at that moment than to get out of the house and put a space between himself and the events of the night. The trouble with Anne, the debauchery of his dream, the blood on the floor.

    

    “There, I’ve written a note telling Anne where we’ve gone. I’ll just get my coat, Grace. I won’t be a minute.”

    When Peter came back, he found that Grace Marsh was no longer alone. Greta had put a coat over her nightdress and was sitting beside Grace on the old black bench in the hall, the one with the four evangelists on the front. As she turned toward him with a look of concern, Peter felt himself plunged back into his dream and it was only with a supreme effort of will that he fought down a sudden, almost overwhelming urge to take her in his arms.

    “What? You’re up as well.” Peter blurted out the first words that came into his head.

    “Yes, I want to come too. Please let me.” Greta’s green eyes glittered.

    “All right. But mind yourself on the steps. That wind’ll blow you into the road if you let it. Grace, you hold on to me. I’ll have you down at the harbor in less than ten minutes.”

    

    Peter held the steering wheel of the Range Rover almost in his lap as he craned forward onto the dashboard in order to pick out the turns in the narrow road that wound down to the harbor alongside the seawall. He was conscious of Grace Marsh straining forward just like him, as if willing herself closer to the harbor and news of her husband.

    Going out on the sea now would be like signing one’s own death warrant, thought Peter to himself as he glanced out to the foaming mass of furious high waves beating against the shore.

    “I’m sure everything’s going to be all right,” he said, summoning as much conviction into his voice as he could. “Everyone on the lifeboat is very experienced.” The harbor came into view through a sloping wall of rain.

    “I know. Thank you, Sir Peter. It’s just there’s not been a storm like this one since 1989. And that was when…”

    Grace’s voice trailed away. Peter knew why. The storm of ’89 had not only uprooted the great chestnut tree in the Flyte churchyard planted in honor of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. It had also ended the lives of two Flyte fathers swept from the deck of the lifeboat as it went to rescue a sinking fishing boat out in the bay.

    In the back of the Range Rover Greta gazed out at the sea. She felt electrified by the storm. Never had she seen such violence. She heard nothing of the anxious conversation being carried on in the front.

    Peter parked beside the Harbour Inn and walked down the unmade road to the harbormaster’s hut in search of news.

    “They had them on the radio about half an hour ago,” he told the others when he returned to the car. “They’re expected back at the harbor mouth in the next ten minutes.”

    “But what about my Christopher?” asked Grace Marsh. “Did they say anything about him?”

    Peter sensed the rising hysteria in her quavering voice and tried to inject a note of reassurance into his answer.

    “Nothing one way or the other, Grace. But that’s good, I think. They’d have said something on the radio if anything was wrong.”

    Peter did not mention the atmosphere of gloom and foreboding that he’d found in the hut. More than a dozen men in there, and no one saying anything except in brief answer to his inquiry. The radio communication that he had told Grace about had been cut off halfway through.

    The minutes passed without any sign of the lifeboat, and the storm began to die away. On the opposite bank of the Flyte River the landscape took shape. Tethered boats rode high on the churning water, and beyond the harbor, fields of waving reeds and grasses rose toward Coyne Church. Several trees stood twisted at crazy angles.

    Like men broken on the rack, thought Greta, standing now beside Peter and Grace Marsh at the back of a small group at the water’s edge. Everyone had their eyes fastened on the mouth of the harbor where the Flyte River begins and the North Sea ends.

    It was just after the bells of the two churches, Flyte and Coyne, had finished tolling the hour of seven that a boat came into view, plowing its way slowly downstream.

    “Black flag!” shouted a man at the front, who had the advantage of a pair of field glasses. “There’s a black flag on the mast.” A shudder ran through the crowd, and Peter caught Grace Marsh as she stumbled forward in a half swoon.

    Soon everyone could see not only the black flag but also the bright yellow caps and raincoats of the crew moving about on deck. They tied up at the end of a long wooden jetty and came ashore almost immediately.

    It was easy to distinguish the shivering rescued strangers plucked from the murderous sea by their rescuers, men of Flyte whom Peter recognized from their other lives as bank tellers or fishmongers or churchwardens. Their faces, however, were haggard, drained by the struggle with a force so much more powerful than themselves.

    Peter kept an arm around Grace Marsh and watched the silent men coming up the jetty in the hope of seeing his neighbor. A minute passed and the last man reached the bank. There seemed to be no one left on either the boat or the jetty.

    “Where’s my husband?” cried Grace in the voice of the about-to-be-bereaved. “Where’s my Christopher?” As if in answer, Christopher Marsh and another yellow-coated man appeared out of the boat’s cabin carrying a third man in their arms. A drowned man. Peter could tell from the way that they carried him, as if it were a duty rather than an act of love. Their shoulders sagged with their load and their failure.

    “He was on the other side of the boat. Drowned before we could get to him, poor bastard,” said Abel Johnson, bank teller turned lifesaver.

    He finished his sentence with a mute cry of protest as Grace Marsh pushed him aside in her rush toward her husband.

    “Christy. I thought you were dead, Christy. Oh God, I don’t know what I would have done.”

    “It’s all right, Grace,” said her husband, who had had no option but to deposit his burden on the ground at the end of the jetty as his distraught wife threw her arms about him. “You mustn’t take on like this. How did you get here?”

    “Sir Peter brought me. In his car.”

    “Well, thank you, sir. It’s a kindness. Grace takes it hard when we go out at night.”

    “Perhaps you shouldn’t do it anymore, Christopher. Find someone to take your place.”

    “Well, I don’t know, sir. It’s like a duty. My father was on the lifeboat and his father before him.”

    As the two men talked, Greta stood looking down into the face of the drowned man. Blue jeans and a thick black sou’wester jersey. A black beard flecked with white, and thick black curly hair. A big, strong, seafaring man, and now just a corpse. A thing to be disposed of in an appropriate way. Morgue meat.

    The man’s blue eyes were like glass. There was nothing behind them, and the last of the rain pattered down on his upturned face, causing him no discomfort. His hands hung limp at his sides. Five hours ago they would have been wiping the water from his eyes. From his blue, far-seeing eyes.

    Life and death. Everything over in a moment as the drowning man’s lungs collapsed and he floated facedown in the sea. His whole huge life was gone, and now he lay discarded on the ground while people talked about the weather and a man embraced his wife.

    It was this that struck Greta most of all: the extraordinary insignificance of the fisherman’s death. A man from the lifeboat was cupping his hands in a practiced gesture to light a cigarette. The landlord of the Harbour Inn was sweeping the water from his doorstep with a broom, and the dead man lay untended on the muddy ground.

    Christopher Marsh gently disentangled himself from his wife’s embrace, and he and the other man from the lifeboat bent to pick up the corpse. Wearily they shuffled along the uneven road toward the harbormaster’s hut.

    Peter turned to Greta. There was a faraway look in her green eyes as she gazed out toward the sea. He thought that she looked quite extraordinarily beautiful at that moment but also inscrutable. He had no idea what she was thinking.

    

    It was the end of January 1999. It would be four months before another person died of unnatural causes in Flyte – and that would be murder. A cold-blooded murder that would be talked about in houses the length and breadth of England. A murder to put this sleepy fishing town forever on the map. Sir Peter’s own wife, the beautiful Lady Anne, gunned down in her own home by armed robbers while her son hid behind a bookcase less than ten feet away.

    

    

    THE SOUND of the clicking cameras and the reporters’ unanswered questions ceased suddenly as the doors of the Old Bailey closed behind Sir Peter and Lady Greta. Security men watched impassively as they emptied their pockets and passed through a metal detector. Then up two wide flights of stairs and into a great open area, which made Greta think for a moment that she had arrived on the concourse of one of Mussolini’s North Italian railway stations.

    I am on a train journey though, she thought to herself wryly. I am but Peter isn’t, and I can’t get off the bloody train. It goes really slowly, stopping at all the stations along the way as the witnesses give their evidence, and all the time you don’t know where it’s going to end. Barristers and relatives and reporters get on and get off, but at the end they all go away. And then it’s just me. Just like it’s always been. Just me.

    “Are you all right, darling? You look pale. Is there something I can get you?”

    Peter stood looking concerned but impotent at the side of his wife, who had halted, swaying slightly in the middle of the great hall.

    “No, it’s nothing. I was just feeling a little faint, that’s all. Getting here is quite an ordeal, isn’t it?”

    “Yes, it’s ghastly. Those reporters are just like bloody parasites. Sit down a moment and get your strength back. There’s plenty of time.”

    They sat on one of the tan leather benches that were positioned at regular intervals through the hall. There was no adornment on any of the walls apart from a clock that had stopped. The morning light penetrated weakly through dirty net curtains hung over the high windows.

    All around them barristers were moving to and fro. Their long black gowns billowed out behind them, and their patent leather shoes clicked on the marble floor. The eighteenth-century-style horsehair wigs that were part of the barristers’ required dress would have seemed absurd if their owners were not wearing them with such apparent confidence. Greta was suddenly filled with a sense of being out of her element. How could she control what happened here if she didn’t know the rules? She got up from the bench hurriedly. Sitting still only made things worse.

    “Come on, let’s go and find court nine. That’s where we’re supposed to be meeting Miles.”

    Greta injected her voice with a sense of purpose that she was far from feeling.

    A small crowd was waiting outside the bank of elevators, and Greta glimpsed the squat figure of Sergeant Hearns, the officer in the case. He smiled lugubriously when he saw her, and Greta couldn’t decide whether it was a greeting or a spontaneous expression of pleasure at seeing the object of his investigation inside the courthouse at last. In any event, she didn’t respond, turning suddenly on her heel and calling to her husband.

    “Come on, Peter, it’s too crowded. Let’s take the stairs.”

    Peter turned obediently to follow his wife. He was determined to stand by her, but there were some places, of course, where he could not follow. She would be alone in the dock. Alone when she gave her evidence. Alone when the jury came back with their verdict.

    He worked his fingers into the wrinkled furrows on his forehead and hid his face momentarily behind his upturned hand.

    

    Four floors above them at that very moment Miles Lambert, counsel for the defense in the case of
Regina
v.
Lady Greta Robinson,
was buying two cups of coffee in the barristers’ cafeteria. One white with two sugars for himself and one black with none for his opponent, John Sparling, counsel for the prosecution.

    Miles Lambert was sixty-six and single. Forty years of drinking fine wines and eating rich food with other successful lawyers had earned him a florid complexion and a rotund figure that he kept encased within expensive, tailor-made suits, complete with waistcoat and gold watch and chain. Court etiquette required him to wear a wing collar and starched white neck bands, but outside court he was known for extravagant ties of wildly clashing colors that matched the handkerchiefs that poured from his breast pocket when he was not using them to dab his sweating brow. Although in recent years “Lurid Lambert” had given way to a new nickname of “Old Lurid,” opinion in legal circles was that Old Lurid might be sixty-six but as a defense lawyer he was at the height of his powers.

    Miles’s pale blue eyes looked out on the world from behind a pair of gold-framed half-moon spectacles, and those who knew him well said that the eyes were the key to understanding Miles’s character. They were small and shrewd, and if you studied them carefully, you would see that they seemed to become more quiet and watchful as Miles became more exuberant. It was as if they took no part in his loud laughter and extravagant gestures. They remained detached and attentive, watching for weaknesses, waiting for opportunities.

    John Sparling was as different from Miles Lambert as it was possible to be given that they were two successful lawyers of roughly the same age dressed in approximately the same way. He was tall while Miles was short, and thin while Miles was fat. He wore no glasses, and his large, gray eyes looked out coldly on the world from above a long, aquiline nose. His mouth was small, with thin, straight lips, and he spoke slowly, forming his questions with careful decision and always pausing after the witness had answered for the extra fraction of a second that was enough to tell the jury his opinion of what had just been said. He was fond of telling juries that they must put pity and sympathy aside in their search for the truth. Sparling’s enemies said that this was something that he had no need to do himself, as he had had all pity and sympathy excised from his character at an early age.