Kitabı oku: «Final Witness»

Simon Tolkien
Final Witness

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my wife, Tracy.

Without her it could not have been written.

Epigraph

Turning over and over in the sky, length after length of whiteness unwound over the earth and shrouded it. The blizzard was alone on earth and knew no rival.

When he climbed down from the window-sill Yura’s first impulse was to dress, run outside and start doing something. He was afraid that the cabbage patch would be buried so that no one could dig it up, and that his mother, buried in the open field, would helplessly sink deeper and deeper away from him in the ground.

From Doctor Zhivago,

Boris Pasternak

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

A Personal Note on the Writing of Final Witness

Chapter 1

My name is Thomas Robinson. I am sixteen years old.

Chapter 2

In a tall nineteenth-century house on a fashionable street in…

Chapter 3

It hadn’t always been like this between Greta and Thomas.

Chapter 4

Peter took the stairs two at a time but at…

Chapter 5

The sound of the clicking cameras and the reporters’ unanswered…

Chapter 6

The first thing that Greta was aware of on entering…

Chapter 7

Judge Granger allowed his eyes to travel down the two…

Chapter 8

One hundred and twenty miles to the east of the…

Chapter 9

It had been a long time since Thomas had stayed…

Chapter 10

Thomas woke at ten o’clock in a pool of sunshine…

Chapter 11

The next morning, Thomas waited at the top of the…

Chapter 12

‘And now, with your Lordship’s leave, I will call my…

Chapter 13

On Friday the court did not sit until half past…

Chapter 14

Greta left the courthouse by a side exit and walked…

Chapter 15

‘How was it, honey?’ asked Peter.

Chapter 16

They got to Rowston with the dawn. It was the…

Chapter 17

After the funeral, Peter stood beneath the portrait of his…

Chapter 18

‘The next witness, my Lord, is Matthew Barne.’

Chapter 19

Police Constable Hughes arrived in court in full uniform other…

Chapter 20

On that same Monday afternoon, the third day of the…

Chapter 21

‘Right, Mr Lambert, remember the age of the witness and…

Chapter 22

Peter sat in the back of his official car drumming…

Chapter 23

Peter paced the rooms after Greta had left, checking off…

Chapter 24

Thomas walked over the Albert Bridge and on into Battersea…

Chapter 25

The Family Records Office opened at ten o’clock on Thursday…

Chapter 26

Afterwards Thomas never knew how they managed to get through…

Chapter 27

The man was dressed in a white paper suit. The…

Chapter 28

On a bright spring day four years later Thomas drove…

Prologue

Also by Simon Tolkien: The King of Diamonds

Also by Simon Tolkien: The Inheritance

About the Author

Praise

Other Books by Simon Tolkien

Copyright

About the Publisher

A PERSONAL NOTE ON THE
WRITING OF FINAL WITNESS

I never thought I would be a writer. I think in retrospect that I always felt overshadowed by my famous grandfather, J.R.R. Tolkien, and believed that it would be presumptuous to even think of following in his footsteps. Instead I took the safe course after leaving university and went to law school in London in order to become a solicitor. I didn’t want to go – it felt at the time like I was voluntarily putting on a straitjacket, and for the next few years it really did feel like my horizons had narrowed as I learnt company and land law statutes by rote, and sat in an Islington law office under the senior partner’s watchful eye, conveying houses and flats from one North London owner to another. But then one day – several years after I qualified – I was told to go and represent a man accused of an assault at Highbury Corner Magistrates Court. I lost the case but a new and unexpected world opened in front of me. It was certainly scary – the magistrate was quite fierce and the prosecution lawyer didn’t give an inch, but the courtroom was exciting. The decisions that I made mattered and I had to think fast and on my feet.

Soon afterwards I changed firms and began to work full time in criminal law. Now I was spending a lot of my time in prisons like Brixton and Wandsworth preparing serious cases for trial, but there was something missing. I had to hand my work over to a barrister when the day of trial arrived and I realised with growing frustration that I wanted to present the cases in court myself. Perhaps arrogantly, I believed that I could do just as good a job of breaking down witnesses and convincing juries. I knew it was going to be difficult becoming a barrister – there were few job openings and the tall wrought-iron gates of the Inns of Court seemed an impenetrable barrier when I drove past them along the river. But I made endless applications and in the end I got lucky – I got taken on at 2 Paper Buildings in the Temple and finally realised my dream of representing defendants in the Crown Court.

As a barrister I tried to be ready for all eventualities but of course I never was. The court was a live theatre where the course of a trial could change in a moment – defendants who fervently insisted on their innocence could well be guilty and each side’s witnesses could be lying for any number of reasons. The jurors seemed to be watching your every move, and the judges were far fiercer than the magistrates I had encountered in the lower courts. I enjoyed arguing the law – sometimes the outcome of a trial could depend on the interpretation of a single word in an obscure statute, but most of all I loved the human drama of the courtroom. Masked behind the legal language and procedures lay raw human emotions and terrible events – gruesome crime scene photographs or a witness’s sudden collapse could tear away the veil of formality at a moment’s notice.

I loved my work as a barrister, but as the millennium approached and the Peter Jackson movies of The Lord of the Rings appeared on the horizon I began to feel restless again. Now everyone in the world seemed to be talking about my grandfather, and in sharing his distinctive surname I felt that I needed to forge an identity of my own and become a writer in my own right. I had grown in confidence as a barrister and I no longer felt so inhibited by my grandfather’s achievements. For the previous ten years I had kept a diary, even while remaining convinced that I couldn’t write, and through the thousands of daily entries I had slowly found a voice that I was comfortable with. I wrote my first book in nine months working at weekends and in the evenings after court, and dispatched it full of optimism to innumerable literary agents in the UK and US, only to find that each and every one of them turned it down with varying degrees of politeness. Slowly and reluctantly it began to dawn on me that this first novel wasn’t a masterpiece but rather a necessary learning experience, a way of teaching myself how to write fiction. I found it very hard to start over, but I steeled myself to do so, and one spring day I sat down in my back garden and began work on the novel, which became Final Witness, first published in the UK under the title The Stepmother.

I made an important decision with the book at the outset. I wanted above all to make my readers suspend their disbelief and so I set my book squarely in a world that I knew – the world of criminal law. I decided that I would tell the story of a family torn apart by jealousy, murder and accusation through the medium of a trial in the most extraordinary courthouse that I had ever worked in – London’s Old Bailey, where the judges wear black and the most notorious and important cases are tried.

Final Witness was a success – it was translated into eight languages and has changed my life. In the years that have followed I have given up the law, moved to California and become a full-time writer. Having had two more novels published in the States – The Inheritance, also a courtroom drama, in which a detective races against time to save an innocent man from death by hanging, and The King of Diamonds, in which the same detective faces personal ruin as he accuses his wife’s lover of a double murder – I am now hard at work on a new novel about a fictional assassination attempt against Winston Churchill, and I am delighted that HarperCollins is to publish all three of these books in the coming year. However, Final Witness still holds a special place in my heart. I wrote it with passion and determination and the day of its publication was the proudest moment of my life, reinforcing my belief that the most wonderful and unexpected things can happen to people if they stay the course and remain ready to seize new opportunities as they appear.

Simon Tolkien

Santa Barbara, California

June 2011

CHAPTER 1

My name is Thomas Robinson. I am sixteen years old. Today is Thursday, 6th July, and I am making this statement to Detective Sergeant Hearns of the Ipswich Police. I have made two statements already in these proceedings. Everything that I say is true to the best of my knowledge and belief, and I make this statement knowing that, if it is tendered in evidence, I shall be liable to prosecution if I have wilfully stated anything which I know to be false or do not believe to be true.

I live in the House of the Four Winds, which is on the outskirts of the town of Flyte on the coast of Suffolk. The only other person who lives here now is the housekeeper, Jane Martin, who looked after me when I was a boy. My father never comes to visit me any more.

My mother was killed in this house on the 31st May last year. I described everything that happened in my first two statements. Two men came and murdered her. One of them had a ponytail and a scar behind his jaw. I was here too but hidden in a secret place behind the great bookcase at the top of the stairs. It was made for Catholic priests to hide in when the Protestants were searching for them hundreds of years ago. I hid there but my mother didn’t. She couldn’t because there was not enough time. That’s why she died.

The men didn’t see me, but I saw the man with the scar through the little spyhole in the bookcase. He was bending down over my mother, and I saw him when he got to his feet with something gold in his hand.

I remember his face more clearly than any face I’ve ever seen, although I only saw him for a second or two. It’s like my memory took a photograph. Small, dark eyes, thin, bloodless lips and a thick scar that ran down from behind his jaw into his strong bull neck. You could see the scar because he had his black hair in a ponytail.

I’d seen the man before. He was with Greta in London. It was six weeks before he killed my mother. I only saw him from behind, but I know it was him. He had the same ponytail and the scar.

Yesterday evening at about seven o’clock I saw this man again. For a third time.

Jane Martin goes to the town hall in Flyte on Wednesday evenings for the Women’s Institute, and so I was alone in the dining-room eating my dinner. There are windows looking out to the front and towards the lane on the north side of the house. They were all open. I think I was listening to the sea and remembering things like I some times do.

I don’t suppose I would have heard them come if the television had been on, but I felt that something was wrong as soon as I heard the car pull up in the lane. We use the lane to go down to the beach, but nobody else does. It’s too far out of town and I wasn’t expecting any visitors.

They came through the door in the north wall just like they did on the night my mother died. They must have had a key. I saw them coming down the lawn to the front door. They were moving quickly, and there was no time for me to get upstairs to the hiding place behind the books where I’d hidden before. I ran instead to the old black bench, which is beside the door going from the dining room into the hall. It has a seat that opens up and I got in there. There are carvings of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John on the front, and you can see out through the holes in their eyes. When I was small, I used to climb in there when I played hide-and-seek with my mother and Aunt Jane, but now I didn’t fit very well and I was frightened, very frightened.

The police have installed a panic button in the house, and I pressed that before I got in the bench. It’s connected to Carmouth Police Station and makes them come if I need them.

I was in the bench when they came in through the front door. There were two of them and they used a key. I’m sure of that. The one with the scar was in charge, but he didn’t have his hair in a ponytail this time. He wore it long so I couldn’t see the scar. He called the other man Lonny. They wore leather jackets and jeans, and Lonny was wearing a baseball cap. He was overweight and looked like a boxer. I’d never seen Lonny before. I’d say they were both in their thirties, but they could have been older.

They looked around the rooms downstairs for a while, but they didn’t touch anything and they had gloves on.

Then the one with the scar said, ‘Lonny, watch the fucking road while I go upstairs. The kid’s behind that bookcase where he was before. Greta told me how it works.’

Lonny came and stood really close to where I was, but I couldn’t see him because he was to the side of me, and the man with the scar went upstairs. It was really hard not moving and I tried to hold my breath. That made it worse, and I thought Lonny would hear my heart beating. It sounded so loud to me.

About a minute later the man with the scar was back and I could hear anger in his voice, like he was getting ready to do something really bad. He wasn’t shouting though; it was almost as if he was talking through his teeth. And I can’t remember the exact words he used. All I can do is give the gist of them.

‘Fucking kid’s in here somewhere,’ he said. ‘Look, he was halfway through eating when we got here. He can’t have gone far.’

‘Want me to turn the gaff over, do you, Rosie? I’ll find him for you.’

I could hear the eagerness in Lonny’s voice, like he really wanted to break something.

‘No, I fucking don’t. I don’t want you to touch anything, you moron. Just keep a fucking watch and leave it to me. And don’t call me that again.’

The fat man went to stand by the front door. It was half open.

‘Lonny the loser,’ said the man with the scar. ‘He’s a fucking loser, isn’t he, Thomas?’

I couldn’t see him but he wasn’t far, and I almost answered because he said my name so suddenly and naturally, but I bit my tongue instead.

‘I’m sorry about your mother, Thomas. Really I am. And I promise you that you’ll be fine. Scout’s honour, Tom. Scout’s honour. All we want is to take you on a little holiday. That’s all. Until this trial is over and done with. Somewhere nice and sunny with plenty of foreign girls. Topless beaches. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Tom? So why don’t you be a good boy and come out and we can get to know each other.’

I could hear him moving about opening doors and cupboards all the time he was talking in this mock-friendly voice he’d put on, but now there was a pause. When he spoke again, the hard edge was back in his voice.

‘Too scared to come out, are you, boy? Too fucking scared. Want to play fucking games with me, do you, you little runt?’

He stopped suddenly, his voice cut off by the sound of the siren, and a second later they ran out of the front door. They must have waited in the lane until I buzzed the police in through the front gate and then driven away without anyone seeing them.

I would recognize both these men again, and I would also recognize the voice of the man with the scar. It was soft and he said the bad words slowly, like he enjoyed saying them over and over again. I think he would have killed me if he’d found me. I really think he would.

Like I said before, I have tried my best to give the gist of what the men said when they were in the house, but I can’t remember all their exact words. However, I am sure about the names they called each other and I know that the man with the scar said about the hiding place that ‘Greta told me how it works.’

When I went upstairs with the police officer afterwards, the door in the book case was standing half open.

I confirm that I am still willing to attend court and give evidence for the prosecution in the trial of my stepmother, Greta Robinson.

Signed: Thomas Robinson

Dated: 6th July, 2000.

CHAPTER 2

In a tall nineteenth-century house on a fashionable street in Chelsea, 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 was about to tell you something that would change your life for ever. 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 on stage. 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 day in court 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 his wife along the side of the River Thames in the black Daimler with the darkened windows, which insulated the minister of defence so successfully from the population that had re-elected 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 towards 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 their deaths after being convicted of crimes just like that for which 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 of 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 metres 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.

CHAPTER 3

It hadn’t always been like this between Greta and Thomas. Three years ago everything had been fine, or as near to fine as it could be between them. Thomas was just thirteen, and she’d just started working as Peter Robinson’s personal assistant.

He was as dreamy a boy as she’d ever met. He had fair hair the colour of summer straw, which he wore long so that it fell forward over his forehead. He had already developed a habit of brushing his hair away from his eyes with the back of his hand before he spoke, a habit that would stay with him all his life. It was part of a natural diffidence, which led him to speak in a tone of uncertainty even when he was sure of what he wanted to say. Yet underneath he had already developed the qualities of stubbornness and determination that were to become so evident after his mother’s death.

He had inherited his mother’s liquid blue eyes and delicate mouth, which endowed his face with an attractive half-feminine quality. He also had her fine hands and long, tapering fingers, suggesting a future as an artist or a musician. Not a future that his practical-minded father wanted for his only son.

Peter had had such grand hopes for Thomas when he was small. On the boy’s sixth birthday Peter got down the model aeroplanes that he and his father had made together when he was Thomas’s age. He arranged them lovingly in squadrons on the nursery floor and told his son their names. But Thomas only pretended to be interested. As soon as his father had left the room, he picked up the book of fairy stories that he had been reading and left the Hurricanes and Spitfires to gather dust.

Two weeks later the dog pursued a ball into the corner and broke the model of the bomber that his grandfather had flown in over Germany fifty years before. That evening Peter packed all the model aeroplanes away in a box and took them with him when he went back to London. Already his political career was keeping him away from home during the week, and Anne would not hear of selling the House of the Four Winds. Peter felt it was not him but the house that his wife really cared about. Her house and her son.

Peter could sense the expectation in his son when he was about to leave at the end of each weekend. He grew to hate the way the boy seemed to cower when he spoke to him. There was no reason for it. Peter had done nothing to deserve such treatment. He had struggled all his life to make his own father proud of him, and there was not a day that he did not thank providence for letting the old man live just long enough to know that his son had become the minister of defence. But Thomas didn’t care what his father thought. He had no pride in his father’s family, no interest in his father’s achievements. Thomas’s heart and mind belonged to his mother and to the house in which her family, the Sackvilles, had lived for generations.

As the years passed, father and son moved ever further apart. Thomas loved stories – he couldn’t get enough of them – but Peter never read fiction. It was almost a matter of principle. His mind was fixed on the here and now, and he felt nothing but irritation on rainy days when Thomas lay reading for hours at a time. The boy would stretch himself out on the window seat in the drawing room with cushions piled high under his head so that he could see over the dunes to the North Sea, where great waves crashed upon the shingle beach. He would imagine the postman’s knock on the back door as signalling the arrival of Long John Silver and his pirates come to claim their treasure from Billy Bones. Or when he was out walking the dog in the evening he would be looking for Heathcliff striding across the moors in search of a bloody revenge.

Thomas knew where all the wrecks were to be found off the coast. He had their locations marked with black crosses on a map on his bedroom wall, and he would swear on a stack of Bibles that he had heard the church bells of the lost city of Dunwich tolling bleakly in the small hours from their resting place beneath the waves. But such legends had no meaning for Thomas’s father, who saw their only value as keeping up the local tourist trade.

Within only a few months of being hired, Greta made herself indispensable to Sir Peter and began to accompany him on his weekend visits to his family at the House of the Four Winds. For at least half of the time they would be working in either Sir Peter’s study or the drawing room, with its french windows leading on to the garden where Anne spent so much of her time planting and pruning and tending the rose walks for which the House of the Four Winds had become so famous in recent years. And Thomas would be out there too, wheeling a barrow or unravelling a hose. Always helping his mother. The two were inseparable.

Greta made a great effort to get on with Thomas, and by and large she succeeded, for a time at least. She was a good listener when she wanted to be, and she read as much as she could about Suffolk and its history so that Thomas began to come to her when he needed information for the stories he was always writing and reading to his mother in the evenings. Anne raised her eyebrows and laughed in a disconcerting way when she heard of the assistance being given to her son by her husband’s PA, but otherwise she said nothing. Greta, however, felt an obscure disapproval emanating from Lady Robinson, a sense that the mistress of the house had found her out but chose to let events take their course without interference.

‘I know who you are and you’re not one of us,’ she seemed to be saying. ‘And you never will be one of us, however hard you try.’

And so Greta cultivated the boy but remained at a distance from the mother. Sometimes when Anne had one of her recurring migraines and lay upstairs silent with a white flannel over her head and her white bedroom curtains drawn against the sun, Thomas and Greta would walk on the beach and look for amber. Greta knew all about amber because she’d read a book about it.

Sometimes Peter and Anne would be invited out for lunch or dinner at the house of another well-connected family, and Greta, Thomas and Mrs Martin, the housekeeper, would remain behind. It was on one such Saturday that the first trouble happened. It was the birthday of Mrs Martin’s sister, and the housekeeper was taking Thomas with her to the party in Woodbridge. Thomas enjoyed these visits. Mrs Martin’s brother-in-law owned a seagoing boat, and Thomas had already extracted a promise that he would be taken out night fishing when he reached the golden age of fifteen, only five months away.

By midday Greta was alone in the House of the Four Winds. She finished typing out the corrections to a speech that Sir Peter was to give at the party conference the following week and then went out into the front hall. There was not a sound anywhere except the murmur of the sea as she climbed the stairs to Lady Robinson’s bedroom and closed the door softly behind her.

Greta stood in the centre of the room watching herself in the freestanding mirror as she slowly and deliberately undressed. It was the third time that she had done this, and each time it gave her greater pleasure. Now she carefully opened the top drawer of an antique chest and took out three or four pairs of Anne’s silk underwear, setting to one side a lavender sachet embroidered by the lady of the house. One by one she tried them on, pressing the white material against her body until at last she settled on the sheerest, thinnest pair of all and turned her attention to the closets containing Anne’s dresses.

Her green eyes sparkled as she passed the material between her fingers and raised it to her nose. As she breathed in deeply, it was almost as if she was holding Anne close to herself. Turning, she laid out five of the dresses across the wide bed and slowly tried each one on. Her erect nipples visible through the fabric of each dress and the faraway look in her half-closed eyes told their own story. She was too absorbed to notice the sound of the front door opening down below, and she didn’t hear the footsteps on the stairs as she pulled a lemon silk brocade dress over her head. She only knew that she was not alone when she looked in the mirror to admire herself and saw Thomas standing in the open doorway behind her.

One of Greta’s greatest qualities as a personal assistant was her calmness under pressure.

‘It’s almost unnatural,’ Sir Peter had told his wife only the previous weekend when they were lying in the bed across which Anne’s evening dresses were now draped. ‘It’s like there are all these boats being tossed about in some terrible tempest out there in the bay and she’s in her own boat in the centre and the storm’s having no effect on her at all. She’s one in a million, Annie. I bet that some of the other MPs would pay a king’s ransom to get hold of her, but then, she’s completely loyal. That’s another of her qualities.’

‘Yes, I see what you mean,’ Anne had replied. ‘It is unnatural. She must have worked very hard to become what she is.’

Now, at this moment of crisis, Greta remained just as calm as her employer would have expected. Only a slight shudder indicated her awareness of the boy’s presence. Thomas, however, stood rooted to the spot and his cheeks flushed crimson. His eyes were fixed on the reflection of Greta’s full breasts in the mirror, with the rose-red nipples clearly visible as the buttons on the front of the yellow dress remained undone right down to the waist.

Greta looked evenly at the boy’s reflection in the mirror but did nothing to hide herself.

‘You’re looking at my breasts, Thomas.’ There was a purring note in Greta’s voice that the boy had not heard before.

‘No, no. I’m not.’

‘All right. You’re not.’ Greta laughed, pulling the front of the dress together. ‘My mistake.’

‘You’re wearing my mother’s dress. The one she said was like spring daffodils. And you’re in her room. Why are you in her room?’

‘Well, Thomas. If you sit down a moment, I’ll try to explain it to you.’

Greta picked up two of the dresses from the bed and gestured for the boy to sit in the space that she had cleared, but he didn’t move from the doorway.

‘You shouldn’t be in here. You don’t belong in here.’

‘No, I don’t. You’re quite right. But Thomas, try to understand. I don’t have beautiful clothes like your mother does. I can’t afford them like she can. And I didn’t think it would do any harm if I tried them on just to see what I looked like. It doesn’t hurt anyone, does it?’

‘It’s not right. They belong to my mother.’

‘Yes, they do. But I wasn’t going to steal them. I wouldn’t be trying them on in here if I was going to do that, now would I?’

‘She wouldn’t want you to have them on. She wouldn’t want you in here. I know she wouldn’t.’

‘All right, perhaps she wouldn’t,’ said Greta, changing tack. ‘Perhaps she would be upset if she knew. And then she might get one of those horrible migraines. No one wants that, do they, Thomas?’

Thomas did not reply. His lower lip trembled and he looked like he was going to cry. Greta pressed home her advantage.

‘Wouldn’t it be better if we didn’t tell her? Then no one would get hurt. What do you say? It can be our secret. Just you and me.’

Greta put out her right hand towards the boy, thus allowing the yellow dress to fall open again, exposing her breasts.

Thomas took a step backwards, but Greta reached over and took his hand, pulling him toward her.

In the years that followed, Thomas always recalled this moment as one of the most significant of his childhood. It was a turning point of sorts. An end and a beginning. Certainly his memory chose to preserve the scene in extraordinary detail. Closing his eyes as an adult, he could recall his mother’s room with the sea breeze coming in through the half-drawn curtains; the sun shining on the rich mahogany chest with its top drawer open; the mass of clashing colours on the bed where Greta had laid out his mother’s clothes; the bright red sleeve of a gown that his mother had worn at Christmas cutting across the white of her pillow like a wound. And closer to him was his father’s personal assistant: raven hair and green cat’s eyes, yellow dress and full, exposed breasts with red nipples, which gave him a sense of urgency he’d never felt before. He was repelled and attracted all at the same time. And the mirror had been between them. They had seen each other in the mirror before she turned and began saying things. Things about his mother that he didn’t want to hear.

She took his hand, and he felt sure that she was going to place it on her breast. The breast that he could now see again so full and close. And he knew that that would make a secret between them that he could never break.

Thomas dragged his eyes away from Greta and focused on the first thing he saw. It was the white flannel on the edge of the sink in the corner of the room, the one his mother used to cover her eyes when she had her migraines.

Thomas wrenched his hand away from Greta, and the force of his action took him out into the hall.

‘No,’ he said, and all his being was concentrated in the one word.

Greta flinched, but whether from the hurt to her hand or the force of his response, Thomas didn’t know. The shudder was certainly gone from her face as soon as it had appeared, and she laughed softly.

‘I was only shaking your hand, Thomas. You certainly have got an active imagination. Your father’s right about that.’

There was no time for Thomas to reply. At the bottom of the stairs the front door was closing behind Mrs Martin.

‘What are you doing up there, Thomas? I told you the presents were in the kitchen. Come on or we’ll be late.’

Greta and the boy exchanged one final look, and then he turned and was gone.

If that bloody old housekeeper hadn’t forgotten her sister’s stupid presents and sent the boy back for them, I might not be here today, Greta thought to herself as she allowed her husband and the chauffeur to escort her to the courthouse door.

Thomas had waited until the weekend was over to tell his mother. And Greta never had to discuss the incident with Lady Robinson. It was Sir Peter who raised the subject with his personal assistant midway through the following week, and he did so in an uncomfortable, almost apologetic way that made her feel slightly sick. She, of course, had had time to prepare her response.

All morning her employer had been coming in and out of her room on one pretext or other. The ground floor of the London house had been converted into offices the year before, and Greta worked in the front room. A printer and fax machine stood on an elegant oak sideboard, while Greta sat at a circular walnut table in the centre of the room amid computer screens and telephone lines. Her employer circled the table nervously, clearing his throat.

‘What is it, Peter? Something’s bothering you.’

‘Yes, it is. It’s something I need to talk to you about, but it’s damned difficult to know how to go about it. It’s about Anne and that boy, Thomas. God, I wish I could understand him better.’

‘What about Thomas?’

‘Well, he’s told Anne something and she’s told me. And, well, it’s about you. She said I ought to talk to you about it.’

‘It’s about your wife’s dresses, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, that’s it. Thomas says you were trying them on. Last weekend when we were out. I told Anne that the boy’s made it up. Trying to cause trouble for everyone. He needs to be sent away to a good school. That’s what he needs. But Anne won’t have it.’

‘I did try them on. I shouldn’t have done but I did.’

‘You did?’

‘Yes. Because they’re beautiful and I wanted to see what I looked like in them. I haven’t ever had clothes like that, Peter. I’m not a rich girl, you know that.’

‘But couldn’t you have gone to a shop? A boutique or something?’

‘I suppose so. I do sometimes. It’s just they never leave you alone. It’s like they know who’s got the money and who hasn’t.’

Sir Peter was defenceless against this turning of the tables. His dependence on Greta had increased with each month that had passed since she first came to work for him, and it was in his nature to be impressed by straightforwardness of all kinds. Greta’s feminine attractions also had a more powerful effect upon him than he cared to admit.

‘Well, you shouldn’t have done it, but at least you’ve been honest enough to admit it, which is more than most people would have done. It’s my fault in a way. I probably don’t pay you enough.’

And so Greta succeeded in turning the disaster with the dresses to her own advantage. Sir Peter spent more time with her after the incident and began taking her out for working dinners when they were in London during the week. They would often be seen at The Ivy or Le Pont de la Tour with their heads close together in animated conversation. And not only that: Sir Peter raised her salary by fifty per cent, so that now she could afford designer dresses of her own to wear when she went out with her employer. As autumn faded into winter Sir Peter commented to himself that Greta looked prettier every day. And there was nothing wrong in having a pretty PA. He’d done nothing to be ashamed of.

Of course the society tittle-tattles and gossip writers didn’t see it that way, and stories began to appear in the tabloids and magazines, although they never made the headlines or even the front pages. The height of the publicity was a black-and-white photograph on page 21 of the Daily Mail of the two of them leaving a restaurant together under a caption that read ‘Minister Out on the Town’.

No word of all this reached the House of the Four Winds. Flyte might as well have been a thousand miles from London. Anne didn’t read tabloids or magazines, and none of her friends had the bad taste to raise the subject of Sir Peter’s personal assistant in her presence. She visited London less and less often, preferring to concentrate on her garden and her son.

For his part Sir Peter no longer visited the House of the Four Winds every weekend as he had done in the past. He went there once or twice a month while Parliament was in session, and Greta continued to accompany him on these periodic visits as his government duties made non-working weekends an impossibility.

The atmosphere in the house was strained, but Sir Peter refused to admit it. Anne was aloof, taking long walks with her son or shutting herself up in her room when Greta was there. The incident with the clothing lay between them unresolved. Anne was embarrassed, and Greta interpreted her silence as condemnation.

A conversation at the dinner table one evening the following January brought matters to a head. Greta sat equidistant between Sir Peter and his wife at the long dining-room table. The central heating had overcompensated for the inclement weather, and the room was hot and stuffy. The three diners were struggling to make their way through a dessert of cherry pie and custard.

Anne had been talking about a rich northern industrialist called Corbett who had bought himself a stretch of coastline on the other side of Flyte. He had made a fortune manufacturing paper clips and was now building himself a mansion overlooking the sea. More than one of the Robinsons’ neighbours had remarked in recent months on the similarity of this edifice to the House of the Four Winds, although it was clearly on a much larger scale.

‘I expect they’ll be sending their butler round to take photographs of the garden soon,’ said Anne. ‘Watch out for men in morning coats with stepladders and telephoto lenses,’ said Anne.

‘Oh, Anne, I’m sure it won’t come to that,’ said Sir Peter. ‘You shouldn’t be so sensitive.’ He had become increasingly impatient with his wife’s preoccupation with this subject during dinner.

‘I’m not being sensitive. It’s the principle of the thing that’s distasteful. People should be what they are. They shouldn’t try to wear other people’s things.’

‘Especially when they come from the north,’ said Greta, suddenly joining in the conversation.

‘No, wherever they come from.’ Anne stopped, realizing what she’d said. ‘Oh dear, I’m sorry. That wasn’t what I meant at all.’

‘It’s not your fault. You’re a lady and I’m not. People need to know their place. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?’

‘No. No, I’m not. I’m saying that people should be themselves and not try to be other people. That’s got nothing to do with knowing your place.’

‘Well, if I’d stayed being myself, I’d probably have ended up working in a paper-clip factory,’ said Greta in a rush.

‘My dear, I don’t know why you’re getting so agitated. I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking about this man, Corbett. You shouldn’t be so quick to take offence.’

Greta said nothing but put her napkin up over her face. A series of visible shudders passed through her upper body, bearing witness to her distress.

Part of Anne wanted to get up and put an arm around the girl. She was clearly upset, and it was rare for her to lose her self-control. But another, stronger part felt repelled. Greta seemed to cause nothing but trouble. It was Greta, after all, who had gone into her bedroom as a trespasser and put on her clothes like they were her own. It was Greta who had got Thomas so upset. Greta was the one who should be apologizing.

‘Look, who’s the injured party here?’ said Anne, unconsciously transferring her attention to her husband, who was moving about uncomfortably in his seat at the other end of the table. ‘I didn’t go and try on her clothes, did I?’

‘No, of course you didn’t. She’s got none for you to try on. That’s the whole bloody point, can’t you see that?’

‘Yes, I do see that,’ said Anne, getting up from the table. ‘I see it only too well. I’m going to bed. I think I’ve got a headache coming on. This home isn’t London, you know, Peter. I’m not here to have political debates with you. Greta may be, but I’m not.’

Anne closed the door before Sir Peter could reply. Greta’s face remained hidden by her napkin, but her shaking shoulders showed that she was in even greater distress than before. Sir Peter wound his own napkin into a ball and tried unsuccessfully to think of something to say to comfort her.

Eventually he got awkwardly to his feet and went over to stand behind Greta’s chair. He shifted his weight irresolutely from one foot to the other and then put out his hand tentatively so that it came to rest on her shoulder.

‘Please, Greta. Don’t cry. She didn’t mean it. She just got upset, that’s all.’

A few strands of black hair had fallen across Greta’s face as she bent over the table, and Sir Peter pulled them gently back over her ear, stroking the side of her head as he did so.

Greta looked up at him smiling through her tears, and he found himself staring down at the swell of her breasts beneath her simple white blouse. He felt a surge of sexual excitement.

‘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.