charge. Because it didn’t amount to anything very much. Isn’t that right, Sergeant?”
Miles had loaded his gun, taken aim, and fired, but Sergeant Hearns dodged the bullet. The lugubrious smile remained in place as he turned to the judge.
“Do I have to answer that, your Lordship? I don’t think it’s for me to give an opinion.”
“No, you’re quite right; it’s not. Mr. Lambert, please don’t play games with the witness. Stick to the facts.”
“Yes, my Lord. Now, Sergeant, we can take it that your efforts to find Rosie and Lonny have drawn a complete blank.”
“There have been no arrests so far, sir. But it’s not been for want of investigating. The trouble is that the killers left so few clues. We’ve got the car and the footprints and the bullets but not much else, sir. There’s no match for the DNA from the blood sample on the database.”
“What about the jewelry?”
“Nothing there, sir. The jewels could have been reset, of course.”
“Leaving aside the locket, you have found no jewelry of Lady Anne’s on either of the occasions you have searched my client’s apartment?”
“No, sir.”
Miles paused and cleared his throat loudly to ensure that the jury was paying attention to his next question. “My client, Lady Greta Robinson, is a lady of good character, is she not, Sergeant?”
“That’s right, sir.”
“Good. Now I want to ask you about your visit to the house of my client’s mother in Cale Street, Manchester. You’ve told Mr. Sparling that you found these pictures of Lady Anne in one of the bedrooms.”
“Yes. They were in a scrapbook of press clippings dating from the late 1980s.”
“There were in fact quite a number of these scrapbooks, were there not?”
“Yes, sir. They were in the bedroom that Mrs. Grahame said her daughter had used before she left home.”
“How many scrapbooks, Sergeant?”
“Eight or nine. Perhaps more.”
“And they contained over two thousand pictures, did they not? Lady Anne’s were just two among more than two thousand?”
“Yes, sir. They were pictures of ladies of fashion.”
“Taken from society magazines like the Tatler and Harpers amp; Queen.”
“That’s right, sir.”
What must they think of me? thought Greta, looking over at the impassive faces of the jurors. Their eyes traveled from lawyer to policeman and back again with metronomic regularity, like those of an audience at a tennis match.
It had been years since she’d last looked at them, but she still vividly remembered those scrapbooks, which she’d lovingly assembled in those lost teenage years, crouching in front of the gas fire on winter evenings with scissors and paste while her mother watched the telly and a pot of tea got cold on the table. Her mother had stopped sewing by then, forced to give it up by early Parkinson’s, which had now — fifteen years later — reduced her to a shaking wreck.
But perhaps it wasn’t Parkinson’s, reflected Greta. Perhaps it was just the fear of her husband, George, that made her mother’s hands tremble in her lap on those distant winter evenings.
They’d have the news at six on. Her mother didn’t really watch it but instead just let it pass over her. Floods and famines, earthquakes and volcanoes, economic highs and lows soothed Greta’s mother. She liked that nice Mr. Baker who read the news, and when he’d finished she’d say in a comforted voice: “Terrible. It’s all just terrible. Those poor people. We should be grateful for what we’ve got, Greta.”
But Greta wasn’t grateful. She pasted the pictures into the big black scrapbooks because they made her believe that there was a different world out there where women wore beautiful clothes and walked on thick carpets in perfect high-heeled shoes. Somewhere it didn’t smell of boiled cabbages and disinfectant.
After the news came the program about local events — a Manchester school opened, a Manchester woman raped — and Greta’s mother wasn’t soothed anymore. George would be home at just after seven expecting his dinner on the table — unless he stopped at the pub of course, but that just made it worse.
Sitting in the dock now, Greta tried to think of a time when her father hadn’t been the way he was, returning from the factory full of dust and rage. There must have been another time because otherwise he wouldn’t have affected her the way he did, filling the horizons of her imagination long after he was gone from this world. But she couldn’t remember, however hard she tried. It was too long ago.
Her father was a man who had done so many bad things that there was no going back. He’d pressed down and down, harder and harder, smothering the light deep inside himself until all that was left was a greedy darkness. Darkness and the need for more darkness.
There was no going back for Greta’s mother either. Perhaps it was her very lack of spirit, her cow’s eyes, that a younger George had found attractive back in the days of evening dances at the Manchester Empire, when his coal-black hair and sharp, chiseled features gave him the pick of the local girls. Greta would have bet good money that her mother never once thought of leaving her husband. It would have been like questioning the will of God.
They’d gotten married in the rain; Greta remembered the picture in her mother’s old photograph album gathering dust on the bookcase in the front room at home. One of the guests was holding a sodden newspaper over her parents’ heads while they stood at the top of the church steps waiting to be recorded for posterity. Her mother smiling nervously for the camera and her father looking defiant.
The dusty bookcase was all that posterity had to offer that wedding. Greta wondered if Hearns had had a look through the old album during his nasty, prying search for evidence. He probably had. God knows he was thorough enough. She imagined him leafing through the snapshots, turning the pages with his stubby fingers before he replaced the album between
Casserole Cooking and an AA Road Atlas from 1966.
It was upstairs that he’d found prosecution exhibits 18 and 19: the newspaper clippings of Lady Anne dressed in a shimmering Dior gown for some gala function with her young husband on her arm and a caption that said he was destined for high places. “Summer 1988,” she’d written on the front of the scrapbook. They were just a couple of photographs among two thousand. As exhibits they were ridiculous. Greta didn’t even need to listen to Miles making the obvious points at the expense of Detective Sergeant Bloodhound.
The scrapbooks mattered, though. They had allowed her to dream, to believe in a world beyond the poor smoky Manchester suburb where she grew up, beyond the reach of her father’s calloused hands. He was always angry, burning with an eternal sense of injustice. No year went by without him being passed over for a better job because some snotnose twenty years his junior had a piece of paper in his pocket, some qualification or diploma that the company was too cheap to pay for him to get. Perhaps her father had a point. He’d been made ugly by his resentment and the ugly do not attract fair treatment, but at home Greta never thought about whether life was fair or just. She just tried to survive, pasting photographs of aristocrats into scrapbooks and whispering the names of fashion designers to herself like a religious mantra: Balenciaga, Christian Dior, Givenchy, Chanel. Greta wore her black hair like Coco Chanel and hung a picture of the queen of fashion beside her bed at just the right height to cover up a tear in the fading wallpaper.
As she grew older, her father’s power over her diminished. He drank more, ranting down at the pub at the injustice of it all until the regulars turned their backs on him and the landlord told him he’d outstayed his welcome. He couldn’t afford pub prices anymore either. The company had laid him off, and he’d spent most of the severance pay the first year standing drinks to those who would listen.
At home he sat in his battered armchair grinding out cigarettes in a black plastic ashtray and drinking cans of Special Brew. Greta’s mother still cooked the same stodgy meals, but he ate less and less, and after a while he stopped hitting her anymore. He was just too weak. He sat and watched the telly, using what energy he had to hate the people who passed across the screen. There was always someone to hate — someone who was younger than him, richer than him, more successful. Like the boy next door. He moved in when George Grahame had been out of work a year and Greta had just turned seventeen. The boy’s mother was an invalid, and there was no sign of any father, which explained a lot, according to George. The boy wore tight black leather trousers and kept a thick wad
