Final Witness

‘Thank you, Peter. I’m sorry I was so silly. You’re so—’

But Greta didn’t finish her sentence. Sir Peter pulled himself away quite violently and stood half swaying by the wall. Across the room a portrait of his wife’s father looked down at him with an expression of aristocratic contempt. It was a bad picture but a good likeness, painted in an era when family portraits were no longer in fashion. The artist had caught the aristocratic curl of his sitter’s lip and the distant look in the half-closed eyes. Sir Peter remembered the old man’s cool disapproval when he had come asking for his daughter’s hand in marriage.

‘Going places, Anne says. But which ones? That’s the question, isn’t it, young man? Which ones?’

‘All right, you old bastard,’ Sir Peter whispered to himself as he stared up at the portrait. ‘I’ve done nothing wrong.’

‘What did you say, Peter?’ asked Greta.

‘Nothing. Nothing except that you’re not the only one who’s felt out of place in this damned house. I’ve got to go now. See if Anne’s all right. You understand.’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Greta, wiping her eyes with her napkin.

CHAPTER 4

Peter took the stairs two at a time but at the top he found his bedroom door locked. There was no reply when he knocked and called out his wife’s name.

After a minute or two he walked despondently down the corridor to an infrequently used spare bedroom. The still heavy air of the evening persisted into the night, making it hard to sleep. Peter stripped himself naked, but still he felt his skin prickling and his heart beating too fast.

Getting up, he opened the old leaded windows as wide as they would go. Outside, the six thin yew trees at the front of the house stood completely still. Black clouds scurried across the sky, shutting out the pale crescent moon, and in the north over towards Carmouth jagged white lines of lightning rent the sky and were gone. There was a distant sound of thunder but no rain.

Peter remembered staying in this room when he and Anne had come to visit her father before their marriage. He’d lain on this bed listening to the sea, feeling the same anxiety mixed up with sexual frustration. Down the hall Sir Edward had lain snoring. Anne was in her room across the corridor, shut in with the stuffed bears and embroidery of her childhood.

‘Got everything you want, young man?’ had been his host’s last words before they went upstairs. Said in a tone that implied he wasn’t going to get anything more – like Sir Edward’s daughter, for instance. But he had. And now the old bastard was under the sod up in Flyte churchyard and Peter was the knight of the house.

He was a knight because of what he’d done in his life. Not like his father-in-law, who had inherited his title. Peter’s father had fought to defend his country and had instilled in his son a belief in duty and service. But all this counted for nothing with Sir Edward. The old man had lost no opportunity to make his feelings known. Peter wasn’t the right class. He was a self-made man, a nouveau riche. Not what Sir Edward had in mind for his aristocratic daughter.

But perhaps the old man had been right to oppose the marriage, thought Peter bitterly. He and Anne had less and less in common now. Before there had been her beauty and his determination to win her against the odds, to make her choose him over her father. Peter was always most fulfilled when he was overcoming obstacles.

He had thought that he would be delivering her from a tyrannical father and a boring rural life, but as it turned out, that was the life she really wanted. She had an inner contentment entirely foreign to her husband. She was happiest growing her roses and listening to her son’s stories. Far away from London and everything that mattered to Peter.

Thomas, of course, had driven his parents even further apart. He had made his father redundant, turned him into a visitor in the house, and, in the last year, Peter had come to rely more and more upon his personal assistant for companionship.

The sound of the thunder came closer, answered by the crash of the waves on the shore. Outside in the corridor Peter heard footsteps. He pulled on his shirt and opened the door just in time to see a figure standing outside the master bedroom at the end of the corridor. The next moment his wife stood framed in the suddenly illuminated doorway before she reached forward and pulled Thomas inside.

His son hated thunder and lightning, and Peter had been woken many times on stormy nights to find Thomas in the bed curled up on the far side of his wife.

‘He’s got to learn to cope with it on his own, Annie,’ Peter would say. ‘He’ll be frightened all his life if you carry on mollycoddling him like this.’ But his wife would not listen.

‘You don’t understand, Peter. You haven’t got an imagination like Thomas or I have. I remember how frightened I was by the Suffolk storms when I was young. They made me think that the world was going to end.’

The door of the master bedroom closed, and the corridor was plunged back into semi-darkness. Peter felt a sudden stab of jealousy. His son was now lying in the bed where he should be. They made him feel like an intruder in his own home. They didn’t want him and they didn’t understand him. Only Greta did.

Peter remembered their first meeting. It had been at the time of the Somali crisis in late 1996, when the prime minister had sent in the SAS to rescue the British diplomats held hostage there. The mission had been a disaster. Most of the hostages were killed, and so were several of their would-be rescuers. The newspapers called it a national humiliation, and everyone blamed the prime minister. People said that the hostages would still have been alive if he hadn’t been so impetuous. He should have tried harder to negotiate their release. But Peter didn’t agree. He’d been to Somalia. The revolutionary government there had no concept of negotiation or compromise. There had been no alternative but to act.

In the aftermath, however, Peter had felt unable to do anything himself. He was paralysed by the rumour and division swirling all around him. Every day the media talked openly about the prime minister as yesterday’s man and speculated about his successor. Senior ministers smelled blood and jockeyed for position. The government’s approval rating was the lowest in ten years.

Then one day everything had changed. Peter had agreed to be interviewed by a local newspaper about a hospital closure in his Midlands constituency, and a young reporter called Greta Grahame turned up to ask him questions. She was pretty and enthusiastic, and Peter took her out to lunch as a way of distracting himself from the political mess down in London. But the wine loosened his tongue, and he ended up telling her everything he thought and felt about the crisis. She listened while he drank the best part of two bottles of wine, and then she told him what to do. Her advice was so simple, but it hit him like a bombshell. ‘Speak out,’ she said. ‘Do what you think is right. Don’t worry about other people or the future. If the prime minister was right, then he deserves your support.’

Later in the afternoon, Greta interviewed Peter about the crisis, and by the end of the week the story had been taken up by all the networks. It was as if everyone had been waiting for someone to say what Peter had said. The political tide turned, and in the reshuffle that followed the prime minister’s election victory three months later, Peter was made minister of defence. The conduct of future military rescue missions would be his responsibility.

Peter did not forget the young reporter in his moment of triumph. He gave her a job as his personal assistant, and he had never for a moment regretted his decision. She was always there for him. Not like Anne, who found politics boring and got a migraine every time she left Suffolk. Greta stayed up with him into the small hours drafting and typing his speeches. She encouraged him through the bad times, and she shared in his successes. Greta. Where would he be without her?

Peter thought of his personal assistant sleeping now on the other side of the corridor. It was extraordinary how she’d carried on coming down here even after what had happened with the dresses, particularly as Anne hadn’t made it any easier for her. She came because he needed her. And Anne wouldn’t even come to London for the opening of Parliament. She was too busy with her garden. With all those bloody roses.

Peter turned out the light, leaving the windows open in the vain hope of a breath of wind to circulate the fetid air in the room. Outside the thunder persisted but there was still no rain. He twisted and turned, and the wet heat made the sheet cling to his body.

Around two o’clock he fell into an uneasy sleep. He dreamed that he was standing naked at the foot of his own bed here in the House of the Four Winds. The room was dark, but he could see by the light of the full moon, which hung outside the high open windows like a witness. In front of him a woman was lying face down on the soft white eiderdown. She was wearing a white silk skirt with the hemline ending just below the knee. It was the same skirt that his wife had worn at dinner that evening. Above the waist the woman was naked, and she lay with her invisible face and forearms supported on a mass of white pillows. He couldn’t tell if she was sleeping, and so he leaned forward and slowly traced two lines with the tips of his fingers down the back of the woman’s calves, feeling the strength of the tightening muscles underneath.

As he reached her ankles, she drew herself forward, away from him, and raised her body up into a kneeling position. The skirt gathered up on to her thighs, and Peter followed her, kneeling at the end of the bed. Reaching out with both hands, he took hold of the skirt and folded it up on to the woman’s waist, exposing her perfectly shaped buttocks.

And then it was as if time and movement were suspended. He knelt above the woman’s body with every fibre of his being willing himself forward to take hold of her. Yet nothing could happen unless she gave some indication of her consent.

It was a tiny wisp of wind that broke the moment. Some stealthy movement in the still air elicited a scarcely audible sigh from the naked figure beneath him. She pulled her knees forward and apart, raising herself up on her forearms so that Peter could see the swell of her breasts hanging down on to the white eiderdown. Everything was revealed to him, and with a cry of fulfilment he thrust himself forward and deep into the very centre of the woman beneath him.

As he pulled himself back from the brink of orgasm and prepared to enter her again, Peter called out the name of this woman that he loved so much.

‘Anne. Anne. I love you, Anne.’

But the woman, who half turned her head toward him out of a mass of white pillows, did not have his wife’s blue eyes. These eyes were green. Glittering green. How could he have mistaken that raven hair for the brown tresses of his wife? It was Greta beneath him on the bed. And someone was beating on the door trying to get in.

Peter woke with a start, sitting bolt upright in the strange bed with his body covered in sweat. It was not a knocking on the door that had woken him but the crash of the old leaded window against the casement. It had broken free of its catch and was swinging madly to and fro in the great storm that had burst over the house while he was asleep. A grey light showed that it was past dawn, although no sunlight penetrated the cloudy sky.

As Peter watched, the window crashed against the casement again and two of its leaded panes broke. The sill was awash with rain and shattered glass. Peter leapt from the bed and tugged at the window, forcing it back on to its latch but catching his elbow as he did so on a shard of broken glass. Blood dripped on his feet and on the apple-green carpet. Looking down, Peter saw that his penis was only now beginning to wilt. He stood still for a moment regarding himself with disgust tinged with a sense of ridicule before he crossed to the bed and wrapped the sweat-soaked pillowcase around his arm.

Outside, the previously statuesque yews were being blown in all directions by a screaming wind while the great rain beat against the House of the Four Winds with an unappeased fury. Beyond the yews the black gates stood open and Peter could see a small figure struggling up the drive toward the house.

Peter pulled on his clothes as fast as he could and ran down the wide curving staircase to the front door. Dropping the pillowcase tourniquet from his arm, he turned the key in the lock and opened the door. Mrs Marsh from the cottage across the road was dimly recognizable beneath her raincoat as she struggled to make her way up the steep steps to the yew tree terrace. Sir Peter hurried forward and pulled her into the house.

‘What is it, Grace? You look white as a sheet. Has something happened?’

‘No, it’s all right, Sir Peter. It’s just that my Christopher’s a volunteer on the lifeboat and they got called out just before midnight. He usually keeps in touch with the shore by radio when the boat’s out and so I can phone them to see that everything’s all right, but our telephone line’s gone down and so—’

‘You can’t. And so you need to use ours. Come into my study, and you can take your coat off.’

‘Thank you, Sir Peter. I’m sorry if I got you up.’

‘You didn’t. The storm woke me. Broke the window upstairs. It seems like quite a gale.’

‘It is. I haven’t felt the wind like this since the storm we had here ten years ago. I just hope that Christopher’s all right. I don’t know what I’d do—’

‘It’s all right, Grace, everything’s going to be fine,’ said Sir Peter with a conviction that he did not feel as he picked up the telephone on his desk. He had heard the underlying panic in her voice.

‘Damn. It’s dead too. Look, Grace, I’ll drive you down to the harbour. 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 towards 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 harbour in less than ten minutes.’

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

Going out to sea now would be like signing one’s own death warrant, thought Peter to himself as he glanced out at 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 harbour came into view through a sloping wall of rain.

‘I know. Thank you, Sir Peter. It’s just that 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 Flyte churchyard planted in honour 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 harbour master’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 harbour 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 enquiry. 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 harbour, 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, now standing 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 harbour 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, ploughing its way slowly downstream.

Soon everyone could see the bright yellow caps and raincoats of the crew moving about on the deck. They tied up at the end of a long wooden jetty and came ashore almost immediately.

It was easy to distinguish the rescued shivering 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 neighbour. 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 was 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 lifeboatman.

He finished his sentence with a mute cry of protest as Grace Marsh pushed him aside in her rush towards 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 any more, 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 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 face down in the sea. His whole huge life 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 practised 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 harbour master’s hut.

Peter turned to Greta. There was a faraway look in her green eyes as she gazed out to 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 Robinson, gunned down in her own home by armed robbers while her son hid behind a bookcase less than ten feet away.

CHAPTER 5

The sound of the clicking cameras and the reporters’ unanswered questions ceased suddenly as the doors of the Old Bailey closed behind Greta and Sir Peter. 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.