Final Witness Read online

  Thomas pulled the front door shut behind him and stood in the dark hallway trying to fight back the panic that was once again turning his legs to jelly. Afterward he realized that it was this moment of inactivity that had saved him from discovery. Turning on the light would have given him away, but as it was, Greta came through the door at the end of the hall to find everything in unsuspicious darkness, and Thomas had time, while she turned the key in the lock, to escape into the room she used as an office. He half closed the door behind him.

  There were tiny red lights twinkling on the computers and the other machines in the room, but they didn’t illuminate it sufficiently to enable Thomas to see any hiding place other than behind the thick curtains drawn across the tall windows. He moved slowly, taking care not to trip over any wires or bump into the circular table in the center of the room that he remembered from his afternoon tour of inspection. It seemed an eternity away now.

  Thomas realized as he stood by the curtains in the office that he was more frightened than he had ever been in his life. Clearly his experience with the youths in the street had shaken him, but it was Greta’s strange words, the invisible second person inside the basement flat, and the closeness of their presence that had unnerved him so badly.

  Outside in the hall Thomas heard footsteps, so he ducked behind the curtains and stood up against one of the front windows. On the other side of the room the owner of the footsteps — Greta it must be — turned on the light. She wasn’t moving, but Thomas could sense her standing in the doorway looking into the room. Involuntarily he turned his head away to look out into the street and in the same instant clapped a hand over his mouth to strangle a gasp that had risen in his throat. There was a man standing under the streetlight with his back to the house. Thomas did not know why he knew with such certainty that this was the person whom Greta had been entertaining in her flat two minutes before. He just knew.

  The man was wearing tight blue jeans and a white, collarless shirt. He had a belt too, thick and black, and Thomas had a sudden vision of the man taking it off his narrow hips and holding it above his head like a whip. There was something about his body, about his posture, that suggested violence. Thomas could sense the strength of the man’s muscles as he rocked back and forward on his heels like a boxer or a dancer even. He felt the man’s quickness. The stranger’s black hair was long, tied back in a ponytail. Without the ponytail Thomas wouldn’t have seen the scar that ran from behind the man’s right jawbone down into his strong bull neck.

  Thomas was terrified. He didn’t know how long he stood there with Greta behind him on the other side of the curtain and the man in front, who had only to turn his head for a moment to see Thomas in the window. In reality it was only a few seconds before Greta turned out the light and closed the door, but it seemed forever to Thomas as he fought to hold his breath and willed the man with the scar not to turn around. And he didn’t. He remained standing by the streetlight. Several times he looked to his right up toward the main road, but he never looked back at the house. Not while Thomas was standing at the window.

  When he heard the door to the basement close behind Greta, Thomas stepped back into the room and the thick curtain fell into place behind him, shutting out the streetlight and the man standing beneath it.

  He began slowly to grope his way across the dark room. He put his hands out in front of him to feel for obstacles and felt them trembling until they met the sideboard, which took him step by faltering step out into the hall.

  Thomas was only halfway up the stairs before his legs gave way under him outside the door of his mother’s room. He could hear her even breathing, but he did not go inside. Not too long ago he would have gotten into the bed beside her seeking comfort from the Suffolk storms, but now everything was changed. This was London and he was no longer a boy, whatever Greta Grahame might say to the contrary.

  Thomas brushed the tears from his eyes and took hold of the banister. At the top of the house he washed his face and then lay down on his bed. But sleep didn’t come until long after the bells of St. Luke’s Church had tolled three, and then it was troubled by dreams of faces at the window and hands behind the curtains.

  Chapter 10

  Thomas woke at ten o’clock in a pool of sunshine and for a moment did not know where he was. There were no trees like there were outside his bedroom window at home in Flyte. Here the view was of the roofs of the neighboring houses and in the distance towers and high spires. Through the open window he could hear the endless noise of the passing traffic. London had been awake for hours.

  After breakfast he went for a walk down to the river. The sidewalks were thronged with people, and he had to wait two or three minutes at the embankment before the traffic lights brought the stream of cars and trucks to a halt and he could cross over onto the Albert Bridge. It was just as pretty during the day, thought Thomas, even without the twinkling lights. There were golden portholes in its bright white sides and a canopy of curving metal girders overhead. Thomas stood in the center of the bridge, leaning over the parapet, and followed the line of golden sunlight glittering on the water that drew his eyes toward the east, toward Westminster and the Tower of London invisible beyond the next bend in the river. He felt suddenly excited by the great city stretching out all around him. The events of the night seemed as if they had taken place in another country. Children on bicycles were crossing the bridge on their way to Battersea Park, and it was hard to imagine being frightened in these sunlit crowded streets.

  Back at the house, Thomas leaned over the railings and looked down into the basement area. The curtains on the front window of Greta’s apartment were open, and there was no sign of life. After a minute or two he got up his courage to venture down the steps and peer in at the window. Everything was as it had been the previous afternoon. There were no glasses on the table, no papers left lying around, nothing to suggest that anyone had been home last night.

  Thomas’s mother was up when he returned, writing letters at an old oak bureau in a corner of the drawing room. She looked up when she saw her son and smiled.

  “Hullo, Tom. How did you sleep?”

  “All right, I suppose.”

  Thomas was surprised by his mother’s question, and he lied almost without thinking. He’d hated himself for telling his mother about Greta trying on her clothes last autumn. Nothing good had come of it, and he wasn’t about to confess to being an eavesdropper now.

  As for the trouble with the two youths, that had been his own fault and he wasn’t intending to wander the streets in the small hours again. There was no point in worrying his mother with what had happened now that it was over and done with.

  “I suppose?” Lady Anne turned her son’s answer back into a question.

  “Yes, I slept fine. Why? Didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I did, but I’ve got my sleeping tablets. I was only asking because you’ve got big black circles under your eyes.”

  Thomas glanced at himself in the mirror over the fireplace. His mother was right. He looked like death.

  “Bad dreams, I suppose,” he said with a half laugh.

  “Do you remember them?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  This time Thomas lied with conviction. He was not about to provide his mother with a blow-by-blow account of his wet dream even though he could remember much of it in Technicolor detail.

  “Stop interrogating me, Mum,” he added for good measure.

  “Sorry. It’s just you look so strange. Black circles under your eyes and now your cheeks have gone bright red. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Yes. Absolutely sure. If you won’t leave me alone, I’m going to go out again.”

  “No, don’t do that. I’ve got a table booked for lunch. I’ll go and get ready soon.”

  Thomas stood in the doorway with his hands thrust deep in his pockets. He looked irritable and morose.

  “Come here, Tom,” said Lady Anne apologetically. “I’m sorry if I’ve offended you. Look, t
here’s something I want to show you.”

  Thomas shuffled across the room and came to a halt on the other side of his mother’s desk. He hoped that she wasn’t just making an excuse for more cross-examination.

  “Don’t look like that. I won’t show you if you’re not interested. It’s a secret.”

  “A secret what?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  “Come on, Mum. Tell me. You’ve got to now.”

  “All right. But you’re not to tell anyone else. Your father might be upset if he knew that I told you.”

  “Told me what?”

  “About the drawer. Come round here and look. I’ll show you how it works.”

  Thomas leaned over his mother’s shoulder while she reached into the bureau. He saw that there were two sets of three tiny drawers on either side of a recess in the center, which appeared to extend to the back of the desk. As Thomas watched, Lady Anne gently pressed the two tiny brass knobs on the bottom drawers on either side of the recess, and suddenly the back of it opened, disclosing a small, hollow cupboard.

  “But there’s nothing inside,” said Thomas, sounding disappointed.

  “That’s not the point, silly. It’s the mechanism. Don’t you think it’s clever?”

  “Yes, but there should be something inside it. There’s no point in having a secret cupboard if you don’t keep something secret in it.”

  “Well, we haven’t got anything in the priest’s hole at home. Nothing secret anyway.”

  “That’s different. It’s bigger and everyone knows about it.”

  “Oh, well, I’m sorry to disappoint you. Personally I’m rather glad that your father isn’t hiding any guilty secrets. Not that I suppose he’d keep them here if he did have them. He never seems to use this bureau much.”

  “How long has he had it?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. He had it when we were first together. Inherited it from his mother, I think. He showed me the secret cupboard ages ago and made me promise not to tell. I don’t know why. Perhaps he just wanted to make a mystery out of it. Anyway, don’t tell him I told you.”

  “I won’t,” said Thomas, his mood brightening with the knowledge that his mother had shown him the secret even when his father had told her not to.

  “When are we going?”

  “Ten minutes. There’s a taxi coming. I’ll see you downstairs. I’m going to go and get ready.”

  They ate lunch in a restaurant in Covent Garden and then walked back to Westminster Pier and took an excursion boat down to the Tower of London.

  Thomas could hardly contain his impatience as the boat slowly chugged along the river. He had a book about the Tower in his bedroom back home in Flyte and thought it was the most wonderful building in the world. Once they had gone under London Bridge, the Tower’s high battlements came fully into view.

  “That’s where they put the heads of the executed prisoners,” said Thomas, pointing behind them. “On spikes on London Bridge. I read about it in my book.”

  “Were there pictures?” asked Lady Anne mischievously.

  “No, of course not. And it’s not the same bridge. They sold the old one to the Americans.”

  The boat’s pace got even more sluggish and there were signs of people getting ready to disembark, but Thomas kept his mother beside him looking out over the rail. He was waiting for the boat to pass its final landmark, the highlight of the journey.

  “There it is!” he cried suddenly, pointing toward the Tower. “Look, Mum. The Traitors’ Gate. That’s where they brought the prisoners. Through there on their way to die.”

  Lady Anne shivered in spite of herself. The gate’s name was chiseled into the stone above the portcullis, and the gray river water lapped against the black gates below. Sunlight did not penetrate this entrance to the Tower.

  “God, Thomas, you’re ghoulish,” she said with a note of real concern in her voice. Her son’s preoccupation with darkness and death troubled her. It was something she needed to talk to Peter about. Anne found herself wishing not for the first time that Thomas was not so imaginative. She felt that nothing good would come of it.

  Inside the Tower they did the full tour of dungeons and places of execution before waiting in line for over half an hour to see the Crown Jewels, but once inside Thomas was strangely disappointed. The huge jewels in their bulletproof cabinets held no meaning for him in contrast to the echoing stony interiors of the White Tower and the Bloody Tower, where Thomas could imagine the lives of the prisoners who had suffered there.

  His mother felt the same. About the jewels at any rate.

  “That’s why I wouldn’t let your father put our family jewelry in a bank vault,” she said. “Just like I was telling you yesterday in the car. If you take something out of its context, out of its history, then it stops having any meaning. For me at any rate.”

  They headed for the exit.

  In the evening they went to the Globe Theatre and saw Macbeth. Thomas was enthralled. He knew the story, but only now, under the open night sky, did the characters really come alive for him.

  At first Thomas remained aware of the other spectators and his mother, wrapped up in a shawl on the seat beside him, as Macbeth met the three witches who hailed him as the future king. But soon he lost all sense of his surroundings as Macbeth began to argue with his wife about whether to kill King Duncan while he slept in the guest bedroom of their castle.

  Thomas loved Macbeth, the brave chieftain who spoke so magically, and he willed him not to commit the crime even though he knew that Macbeth could not escape his fate.

  Then at last the stage became almost completely dark and a hush fell over the evening as Macbeth crept into the King’s room and stabbed him through the heart. Now Thomas hated Macbeth, and he hated him more as Macbeth went on to kill all those who stood in his way. Then at last King Duncan’s son, Malcolm, returned to Scotland with an army, and Thomas’s heart went out once more to the murderer, Macbeth, as he faced up to his own death with courage.

  As the play ended with a fanfare of trumpets and the characters turned back into actors bowing to the audience’s loud applause, Thomas felt almost drunk with the roller coaster of emotions that he had endured during the preceding two hours.

  “Oh, Mum, wasn’t it extraordinary?” he said suddenly in the taxi on the way home as his enthusiasm overflowed.

  “Yes, I suppose so,” replied Lady Anne coolly. Macbeth was not one of her favorite plays, and she’d had quite enough blood for one day.

  Back at the house they found Sir Peter and Greta sitting upstairs in the living room with files of papers on their laps and glasses of red wine in their hands. Work never seemed to stop for his father, thought Thomas, as he dutifully bent down and kissed him on his upturned cheek. These greetings always seemed to Thomas to have nothing to do with affection and everything to do with acknowledging his father’s superior status in the family. There was something quasi-military about them.

  “So, have you had a good evening?” asked Sir Peter.

  “Yes, we saw Macbeth at the Globe,” replied his wife. “I got a little cold toward the end, but Thomas enjoyed it. Didn’t you, darling?”

  Thomas nodded. Words couldn’t describe the wonder of his experience.

  “Oh, you’re so lucky,” said Greta, joining in the conversation with sudden passion. “It’s my favorite play. I love Macbeth. The character, I mean. Not just the play.”

  “Do you?” said Lady Anne frigidly. She already had her doubts about whether the Tower of London and Macbeth had been the best way to entertain Thomas when he was already so clearly in such an excited state. The last thing she wanted now was a ringing endorsement of Macbeth’s murderous qualities from her husband’s personal assistant.

  But Greta failed to be put off by Lady Anne’s forbidding tone.

  “I remember when I first saw the play. I was at university, and I’d never seen anything like it before. Macbeth has the most amazing lines. Do you remember when he sees t
he imaginary dagger in the air before he goes off to kill the King?”

  Greta held her hand up in front of her as if to take hold of a weapon and started to recite:

  “Is this a dagger which I see before me,

  The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.

  I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

  Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

  To feeling as to sight? or art thou but

  A dagger of the mind, a false creation,

  Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?”

  Greta spoke the words well, conveying Macbeth’s final uncertainty before he murders Duncan, and Thomas warmed to her. She seemed to him at that moment like a kindred spirit. He felt that he’d misjudged her in the past.

  However, her performance had the opposite effect on Lady Anne, who could not hide her irritation. Coming upon Peter and Greta sitting so intimately together in the living room had brought all her suppressed resentment to the surface, and now she wanted to lash out, put green-eyed Greta in her place.

  “Grand words,” she said in a tone that implied she thought the opposite. “They’re all very well, but you can’t hide behind them. Macbeth killed the King, who was a guest in his own house. Stabbed him in cold blood with a real dagger. Isn’t it hard to think of anything more mean and cowardly?”

  “His wife drove him to it,” said Greta. “His wife and the witches.”

  “You’re just looking for excuses. He was a bloodthirsty little man, who got exactly what he deserved.”

  “Maybe, but why then does the audience sympathize with him at the end and not with boring Malcolm?”

  Thomas longed to say how much he agreed with Greta, but he held his tongue. He instinctively realized that there was more at stake between his mother and Greta than two different interpretations of Shakespeare.

  It was Sir Peter who intervened in the argument. He seemed to have no idea of his wife’s underlying resentments.

  “You’re a revolutionary, Greta,” he said. “That’s what you are.” There was an unmistakable note of fondness in his voice, which irritated Lady Anne still further.