Final Witness. Simon Tolkien

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      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.

      ‘Come on, let’s go and find Court 9. 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.

      At that very moment four floors above them Miles Lambert, Counsel for the Defence in the case of Regina v. Greta, Lady 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.

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