else she’d ever met. He had a driving ambition that wouldn’t give him any rest, and he allowed her to glimpse for the first time a new world of power politics. Afterward she couldn’t rest until she’d made that world her own. She could no longer bear her small-town existence, and when Peter’s call came after the election, she didn’t ask for time to think. She took the job as his personal assistant and everything that came with it. It was the easiest decision she’d ever made.
And what did come with the job? Long hours and a sense of being close to the beating heart of government. The happiness of knowing that Peter depended on her, and the pleasure that came from the time she spent with his son. It was the only aspect of her employer’s character that Greta couldn’t relate to. He neglected the boy, and Greta couldn’t understand it. At first she tried to get Peter to change, but the subject of Thomas always made him irrationally angry. He seemed to blame his son for not loving him, when he had given the boy no chance to do so. Greta soon came to realize that there was nothing she could do except give Thomas her own affection. And he warmed to her in response. They spent hours walking together on the beach at Flyte exchanging stories, while they held themselves steady against the rush of the wind off the sea. Thomas appealed to Greta’s imaginative, dreaming side — the side that Peter could never know.
In the early days, long before the murder, Greta had often wondered at her growing attachment to Thomas. Eventually she had come to the conclusion that it must be, in part at least, a long-delayed reaction to her own infertility. Certainly there was a sense in which she thought of Thomas as the child she would never have. She cared for him without showing it too much, because she knew what the boy’s mother thought of her. Lady Anne resented anyone becoming close to her son, especially a factory worker’s daughter from an industrial town up north.
Then suddenly Anne was murdered and everything changed. Greta could never forget Thomas’s searing hatred when she had rushed to comfort him in Christy Marsh’s cottage. She had somehow gotten through that terrible drive up from London with Peter getting drunk on whisky in the passenger seat, but then Thomas had thrown his mug at her and screamed for her to get out. He’d been like someone possessed.
She had gotten out. Left on the train and stayed away just like they’d all told her to. She’d been questioned and searched and questioned again by that pig Hearns until she couldn’t bear it anymore, until finally she’d had enough. On the first weekend in October she drove down to Carstow School to see Thomas.
Perhaps it would have been better if Greta had planned out what she was going to say. But the only way she could get to Carstow was on a wave of emotion, so she drove fast down the motorway and opened the windows all the way. The big wind blew away all her mixed-up thoughts like cobwebs.
She’d dressed carefully. After much debate, she’d finally selected the dark gray business suit that she’d worn on that magical spring day in London when they’d had the picnic together in the park. She wanted to remind Thomas that there was another time before his mother’s murder, when she’d meant something very different to him.
Greta didn’t tell the woman in the school office her name, because she thought that Thomas wouldn’t come if she did. She just said that she was a friend of the family, and then sat down on a hard-backed chair to wait.
She felt hot in the suit and wished that she’d worn something more comfortable. Beads of sweat trickled down her arms, but she kept her jacket on and drummed her fingers on a school prospectus. The minutes ticked by, and Greta felt stifled by the waiting room. She allowed her head to drop and lost all sense of time and place. She looked up bemused when someone said her name. Thomas stood facing her in the doorway.
For a moment she didn’t recognize him. He was thinner than when she had last seen him, and the school had given him a military haircut. It allowed Greta to see for the first time that Thomas had inherited the set of his father’s head. She recognized Peter’s rigid determination in his son’s forehead, and for a moment she quailed.
At least Thomas didn’t turn and leave. He didn’t go forward or back. Greta couldn’t read his expression. He seemed resolute and vulnerable all at the same time, and she was stirred by a great longing for the past. She stood up, putting her arms out toward him, and there were tears in her eyes.
The effect on Thomas was instantaneous. “Get away from me!” he screamed, putting his hands up in front of him to make a barrier.
“Thomas, don’t get upset. I only want to explain. You’ve got it all wrong. You know you have. What happened to your mother had nothing to do with me.”
Greta spoke in a rush as if she knew that he would only give her a little time.
“You liar!” he shouted. “You sent them. I know you did.”
“No, I didn’t. I swear I didn’t. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you, Tom. I care about you, can’t you see that?”
Greta waited a moment for an answer, but there was none. Thomas remained hidden behind his hands.
“You need me,” she said. “You know you do.”
“I need my mother.” The words escaped from Thomas with a cry, as if they had been pulled out of him by brute force.
“Of course you do. But she’s not here anymore, Tom. I am. I’m here for you.”
Greta moved toward Thomas again and took hold of his hands, pulling him close just like she had done on that afternoon in his mother’s bedroom a year before. And perhaps he would have given in if they hadn’t been interrupted. But their raised voices had brought the school secretary to the door asking if everything was all right, and her question broke the connection between them forever.
“Get away from me!” Thomas shouted. “I’m in hell because of you. I hate you.”
The venom in his voice forced Greta back. The color drained from her cheeks, and the words dried up in her throat. When Thomas spoke again, his voice was cold and quiet. Not like she’d ever heard it before.
“I’m going to make you pay, Greta,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do about it. Nothing at all.”
Thomas turned on his heel, leaving Greta behind. She did not try to follow.
Two weeks later he went to London with his friend Matthew Barne and found the locket in the secret drawer of his father’s desk.
Chapter 20
On that same Monday afternoon, the third day of the trial, Thomas roamed restlessly from room to room in the House of the Four Winds, unable to settle down to any occupation. He could hear the murmuring voices of Aunt Jane and the detective from Carmouth coming from behind the half-closed door of the kitchen, but he did not try to make out what they were saying. He knew that Aunt Jane would be talking about the trial down in London; she’d talked about nothing else since she’d gotten back to Flyte the previous evening until Tom didn’t want to hear any more about Greta’s fat barrister and his tricks and the jury that watched everything and said nothing. Thomas knew that he would have his turn the next day. For now he didn’t want to think about it.
He stopped his pacing and stood in the center of the wide hallway midway between the open front door and the staircase behind him. He looked out beyond the yew trees into the hot summer’s day, and suddenly it was as if there were voices all around him, snatches of conversation drifting in and out of earshot like specks of dust on the air.
Thomas recognized some of the voices or thought he did, but they were gone before he could be sure. He thought he heard his mother saying something about a dress, but it was his mother younger than he had ever known her, with an eager voice that had no awareness of responsibilities. Then there was a voice behind him that was like his mother’s but richer, talking about a horse. Thomas turned but there was nothing, only the sound of a man crying and the name Sarah wrenched from somewhere deep down inside.
The voices were above Thomas now: a man talking in clipped tones about India and another voice, an older woman’s cursing. Her words came from very far away, and Thomas could barely make them out.
He stood rooted to the spot, unable to tell if the voices were real. They had been calling him to climb the stairs, which he had avoided for so many months. At the top he could see the bookcase where he had hidden, but he couldn’t get to it without crossing the place where his mother had died. They had taken up the carpet and laid a new one since, but he knew where the bloodstains had been. He’d had to step over her when he ran to Christy Marsh’s cottage.
Thomas closed his eyes and realized his mistake. The voices hadn’t been calling to him from the hiding place at all. They were coming from somewhere else. Slowly he began to climb the stairs and the voices came down to
