“I just wish I could be there with you. Perhaps I should talk to Miles.”
“No,” said Greta, and her voice was suddenly firm. “I don’t want you to hear those things they’re saying, and we must do what Miles says. He’s good, you know. He made Aunt Jane look just like the nasty bit of work she is.”
“Well, that’s something,” said Peter. He took her delicate hand in his and gently stroked the back of it with the tips of his fingers, mapping all the tiny bones that radiated out from her thin wrist. It was something that he’d often done with Anne in the early years, before they grew apart.
“What about the other witnesses? How did Miles deal with them?”
“All right. He’s made it so it’s perfectly possible that Anne took a walk down to the beach after we’d gone and then left the door unlocked when she came back.”
“Which door?”
“The one in the north wall. There would’ve been time for her to do that and go to bed before Thomas came back. She’d have been out when he telephoned.”
“Well, that’s good,” he said, trying to sound a note of encouragement when it was the opposite of what he really felt.
Not for the first time Peter was aware of a tiny pinprick of doubt on the outer edge of his consciousness. He remembered Anne lying on the sofa in the drawing room with her face knotted in pain. She didn’t look like she was about to go for a walk, but perhaps she felt the air would clear her head. Peter fought down his momentary feeling of unease almost without thinking.
“I won’t need you again today, John,” he said to the chauffeur as he helped his wife out of the car. “Lady Greta and I will be staying in tonight.”
“Very good, sir,” said the chauffeur, touching his peaked cap. Peter could not read his expressionless features. Perhaps he was looking for another job. Scandal does not sit well with men in high places.
Later, lying in bed, Peter could not sleep. Greta was turned away from him with her knees brought up almost to her stomach. She had slept in this fetal position for weeks now, and he could feel the tension in her back even without touching her. Sometimes she cried out strange words and names that made no sense, and he would be struck with how little he really knew his wife. She seemed to have no real friends or relatives; just the half-disabled mother in Manchester that she traveled up to visit every few weeks. Greta’s solitude in the world made Peter even more painfully protective toward her than he might otherwise have been. The trial made him feel that he was letting her down even though he knew that there was nothing he could have done to prevent it. He contrasted the way in which Greta had helped him over the years with his inability to help her now.
He closed his eyes and remembered how she had been there for him when Anne died. It had been just about this time — eleven at night — when the telephone had rung beside the bed and he had answered it, waking blearily from sleep to hear the news that shattered his life. The same telephone was there now less than a yard from his outstretched hand sitting pale and silent in the half darkness.
It was Hearns who made the call. He must have been standing in the drawing room where Peter had been sitting with his wife only four hours before.
“You don’t know me, sir. I’m Detective Sergeant Hearns of the Ipswich Police. I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news. It’s your wife…”
Peter could still remember the exact words Hearns had used. It was like a tape recorder had been turned on in Peter’s brain when he answered the telephone. He could remember Hearns’s tone too. The intrusive, pressing quality of it that he later got to know so well as the policeman pulled his net around Greta, although he couldn’t have closed it without Thomas. Nothing would have happened without Thomas, thought his father bitterly.
Disbelief was the first thing he’d felt after talking to Hearns. Peter remembered how the news seemed to bear no relation to reality. There was no violence in the ordered bedroom where he was standing in a pair of clean pajamas. There were no shouts or screams coming from the quiet street below. Everything was normal, and yet 130 miles away this event had happened. There would have been no call if it hadn’t. He dialed the House of the Four Winds and a policeman answered. Another policeman. Peter put the phone down and felt the panic beginning in his chest, spreading down into his legs as the news seeped through into his brain, overwhelming the pathetic defenses that it had tried to throw up against the horror.
Peter sat down on the end of the bed. He did not cry, but his upper body shuddered convulsively. As he steeled himself against these tremors, a thought came into his mind. It was the thought of Greta. He needed help, he needed not to be alone. He picked up the telephone again and dialed her number.
“Please hold. The person you are calling knows you are waiting,” said the operator’s mechanical voice, once, twice, three times. He put the phone down and the shudders began again. Two minutes later she called him back.
After that it was a blur. He didn’t remember getting dressed or much of how he told Greta or of her reaction. He remembered that her phone had been engaged, though, and he wondered not for the first time who she’d been talking to so late at night.
She’d brought the Range Rover round to the front of the house and insisted on driving. It didn’t seem as if they’d even discussed whether or not she should go; he had just assumed it.
At the last moment he got out of the car and went back into the house, returning a minute later with a half- drunk bottle of whisky. It was almost empty by the time they passed through Carmouth at quarter to two. The little seaside town was deserted, but the lights were on in the police station.
A uniformed policeman with a flashlight stood outside the front gate of the House of the Four Winds. Not that he needed the flashlight. The house was ablaze with lights and Peter could also see spotlights set up away to his left by the north gate and over on the north lawn. There were men in white overalls moving back and forth.
All this, however, was at a distance, seen through the bars of the gate where Greta and he were told to wait. They sat saying nothing, gazing up at the house and the six old yew trees standing in front of it like sentinels. Ineffectual sentinels they had proved to be, Peter thought bitterly.
Two minutes passed and he got out to remonstrate with the policeman.
“I’m sorry, sir. I’ve got orders not to let anyone in. I’ve told Detective Sergeant Hearns you’re here. He won’t be long.”
Peter was too exhausted to be angry. He was just a young man doing his job.
“Where’s my wife? Can you tell me that?” he asked, trying to summon up the voice that he used at work, the voice of a man used to getting his way.
“We’ve moved her, sir. She’s gone to Rowston. You can see her tonight if you want to. I can phone ahead.”
Sergeant Hearns’s voice came out of the darkness beyond the gate, followed immediately by the man himself. He was dressed in a cheap suit that was too small for him. Peter was aware of the stomach pressing against the belt and the sweat from the constricted underarms trickling down the inside of the polyester shirt into the detective’s clammy palms. Peter felt it transmitted onto his skin as he shook Hearns’s hand, and he resisted a sudden urge to wipe his palm on the side of his trousers.
“I’m sorry to meet you under such distressing circumstances,” continued Hearns in the same soft but insistent voice that was already grating on Peter’s overstretched nerves. He had questions himself — he was overflowing with them — but the detective seemed to give him no chance to speak.
They walked back to the open passenger door of the Range Rover and Peter sensed Hearns registering the smell of alcohol on his breath and connecting it with the empty whisky bottle on the floor. Connecting, noting, filing observations, impressions, conversations away in some dirty corner of his mind for later consideration back at the station or in whatever neat little house on the outskirts of Ipswich Hearns called home.
“Hullo, I’m Detective Sergeant Hearns, Ipswich Police,” he said, pushing his clammy hand across the vacant passenger seat in the general direction of Greta’s left breast.
She took his hand, she had no option, and he held it until she’d given him her name and explained her relationship to Peter. He looked at her quizzically for a moment, half raising his thick eyebrows as if wondering to himself why a minister of defense should want to bring his attractive personal assistant to the scene of his wife’s murder. Then he gave her a lugubrious smile that exposed two long yellow teeth in the middle of his mouth and turned back to Sir Peter.
“I’m sure that you’ll want to see your son. He’s with Mr. and Mrs. Marsh across the road. They have been very kind. He went there to raise the alarm after the…” Hearns hesitated, searching for the best word. “The men
