showed him what I earned — pay slips and everything. I told him I couldn’t pay him all he wanted, and then he wanted to touch me. I don’t know what got him going; maybe it was me being P.A. to a minister and being in your house, but it made him start all that up again.”
“Did he?” Peter could hardly get his question out. There were too many burning emotions inside of him fighting for release. The grief and the guilt and now anger against this unknown stranger demanding money, pawing at Greta in his house. Beneath the anger was another unacknowledged emotion: Peter was gripped by sexual jealousy. He felt it in his loins.
“Did he what?”
“Have sex with you?”
Peter blurted the words out. His heart was beating painfully inside his rib cage, and pictures flooded into his exhausted mind that he could not control. His wife dead, Greta naked with this man above her. He wanted to take hold of her, feel her full breasts encompassed in his wide hands. He thought of them like they were life when all around him was death and emptiness. In the early-morning darkness a cold breeze was blowing off the sea.
“No, I wouldn’t let him,” she said. “He’s frightened of me when I’m angry. It’s strange; it’s like he always wants to get me to that point, and then he backs away.”
Peter sighed. The constriction in his chest lifted, and Thomas’s accusations blew back into his consciousness.
“Greta, I understand about this man, and why you invited him. Thomas said that he heard you telling him to wait, and so that makes sense, given you were talking about the money. But that wasn’t all he told me. He said he recognized the man, that he was here tonight, that he killed Anne. Killed my wife, Greta.”
“It’s not the same man. I swear it isn’t. He knows nothing about this house, and even if he did, he wouldn’t do it. He’s a sneak, not a murderer.”
“Thomas says he saw him in the street outside the house when you came upstairs.”
“So he didn’t see him with me?”
“No.”
“Well, he could just have been a pedestrian then, couldn’t he?”
“Standing outside the house at midnight?”
“Why not? Was he looking in the house?”
“No, Thomas says he wasn’t. The man had his back to him.”
“How can he be sure it was the same man then?”
“I don’t know. He said he had a scar.”
There was doubt now in Peter’s voice, and Greta pressed home her advantage.
“That’s not enough. You know it’s not enough, Peter. Anyway, the man that was in my flat had no scar. Thomas has too much imagination; that’s the trouble. He’s heard me tell a lie and he’s seen a man in the street, the back of a man in the street, I should say. After dark. And now he’s crazy with shock and grief and he’s decided it’s the same man because he wants to blame me for what happened.”
“Why should he do that?”
“Because he knows Anne and I never got on. Because he feels guilty about liking me when his mother didn’t want him to. Because he has to make someone responsible other than himself.”
“What do you mean? How can Thomas be responsible?”
“He’s not. Of course he’s not. He just feels it like you do. He probably feels it because he was there and you feel it because you weren’t.”
It made sense. Peter wanted it to make sense, and so it did make sense. It was like when Greta tried on Anne’s clothes. He talked to her about it, and afterward he felt closer to her. It made him feel responsible for her, and he did not forget what she had said to him on the beach. There wasn’t anyone else in the world who loved him, who understood him like Greta did, now that Annie was dead.
Annie was dead. The words came unbidden into Peter’s mind. He had tried to keep them at bay, but now he was suddenly confronting the terrible reality of what had happened. She was no longer in the world. Her life had not been as happy as it should have been because he had let her down. Insisted on his career and his life in London. Not been the father to Thomas that she wanted him to be. Not been the husband that she deserved.
Peter did not know how he could cope with all this. He needed strength, he needed help, he needed Greta.
As if in answer to his unspoken thoughts, she leaned over and kissed him chastely on the cheek where the bristly early-morning hair was beginning to grow.
“Go and talk to Thomas,” she said. “He needs you. I’ll wait for you here.”
Chapter 16
They got to Rowston with the dawn. It was the hour when the tint of the sky changes subtly with every minute, and the birds had begun to chatter haltingly overhead. Peter felt feverish and wound down the window to let the cold morning air into the car. Greta drove without saying anything, staring into the new day, which was taking her away from Flyte forever.
In his head Peter could hear voices, a commotion of voices from yesterday and today all talking to him at once: Thomas yelling, “Get her out!” and Greta whispering secrets about a past that seemed to bear no relation to who she was. The grating, insistent voice of Sergeant Hearns: “Please let us know where you are both going to be,” with the emphasis on “both” containing just enough insinuation not to be offensive. Then Thomas’s voice again when he had gone back to the Marshes’ cottage. No words this time. Just screams, terrible screams, until the boy had finally fallen asleep and Jane Martin had arrived from Woodbridge to take care of him. Peter wished that the Marshes had called her earlier; the boy needed somebody he felt comfortable with, but he couldn’t criticize them. Christy and Grace had been good neighbors, the best.
There was one other soft voice asking to be heard that Peter still kept blocked out of his conscious mind. He would hear it soon enough. At the bottom of the road Rowston Hospital came into view: a silver-and-glass building glimmering in the first rays of the June sunshine like an alien arrival. Outside the entrance a police car was waiting. Arrangements had already been made for the first ceremony of the murdered dead: the identification of the body.
“Do you want me to come with you?” asked Greta.
“No,” he almost shouted. Anne and Greta had to be kept apart, he saw that clearly. He needed Greta more than ever, but outside this horror, somewhere distant where he could go when it was over. After the hospital she would go back to London on the train and wait for him there while he did what had to be done.
“I’m sorry, Greta,” he added after a moment, speaking softly now, tenderly even. “You’ve helped me more than I can say, but this is something I have to do alone.”
Inside the hospital he followed the policeman’s heavy-duty shoes as they beat a tattoo on the linoleum floors of the corridors. Turning right and left a dozen times, guided by black signs on white walls, they came eventually to a pair of doors that did not swing open like the others. Knocking was required here at these gates of the modern underworld.
While they waited, Peter noticed that the bottoms of the doors were scuffed, no doubt by hospital orderlies kicking them open so that they could bring in the dead. They could do with a lick of paint, Peter found himself thinking irrelevantly just before they opened.
At least they did it properly, Peter thought afterward. There was no drawer pulled out of a high steel filing cabinet and no row of silver metal tables to walk down while the doctor counted until he reached the right number. Instead he was taken to a room marked PRIVATE with a picture of a watery blue landscape on the wall and a vase of carnations on the windowsill. Peter wondered if they were real, but he didn’t touch them to find out.
“This won’t take a moment, sir,” said the policeman. “Just the identification and then you can have time alone with your wife.”
There was a kindness in the man’s voice that Peter was grateful for. He appreciated the description of the body under the white sheet as being his wife rather than the deceased or some other impersonal medical term, and when the mortuary attendant pulled back the sheet, he had no difficulty in recognizing her. The second bullet had
