“Greta. She hated my mother. No, that’s not it. She wanted to become her. That’s why she sent me to Edward’s. Because she wanted to save me. I was part of what she was going to get.”
“Well, thank you for giving us the benefit of your theory, Thomas, but that’s all it is, isn’t it? You haven’t got one shred of evidence to support what you’ve just said, have you?”
“I saw the way she looked at my mother. She tried on her clothes.”
“Yes, she did, but that’s not quite the same as arranging to have your mother killed, now, is it?”
“I know what she did.”
“So you say. Now, you’ve told us that you decided to come home from the Balls after you couldn’t reach your mother on the telephone. Mrs. Ball drove you home and dropped you off at the front gate. How did you get in?”
“I had keys. To the front door too.”
“About what time was this?”
“I don’t know. Sometime around half past eight.”
“How long after you made the phone call to your mother did you get home?”
“I don’t know. Twenty minutes, half an hour. I wasn’t wearing a watch.”
“Did you leave immediately after you phoned up and got no reply?”
“No, we talked about it a bit and Mrs. Ball’s husband called about something.”
“So you got home, and you’ve already told us that you closed the window that you found open in the study. Then you went upstairs and opened the window in your bedroom.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Because it was a warm evening?”
“That’s right.”
“Did you keep it open when it started raining?”
“Yes, it wasn’t a storm.”
“You were lying on your bed and your mother was asleep in her room.”
“Yes. I’d just turned my light off when I heard the car drive up. Then I saw them coming across the lawn toward the study window, and one of them was really upset that the windows were all closed.”
“‘Fuck. They’re all fucking closed.’ That’s what you told us earlier that the man said.” Miles seemed to enunciate the swear words with particular relish.
“Yes,” replied Thomas. “He was angry.”
“Did you see the man say it?”
“No. I was sitting on my bed. They were below the window.”
“So you can’t say that the man was outside the study window when he swore. He could have been by the side door or the dining room windows just as easily.”
“I suppose so.”
“He could have been talking about all the windows on that side of the house in fact.”
“Not mine, because it was open.”
“On the lower level I mean.”
“Yes, he could have been.”
“Thank you. Now I’ve got nothing else to ask you about that night at this stage. I want to concentrate instead on this locket that you found in your father’s house last October.”
Miles Lambert picked up prosecution exhibit number thirteen and held it for a moment by its clasp so that the golden heart-shaped locket swung to and fro on its chain like a hypnotist’s pendulum.
“You have told us that your mother was very fond of this locket.”
“She was.”
“Did she wear it every day?”
“Not every day, no. She wore it a lot.”
“You made no mention of the locket to the police of course until after you found it.”
“I had no reason to.”
“No. I can see that that might make sense, but it doesn’t explain why you mentioned nothing in your first statement about Rosie bending down over your mother and then putting something gold in his pocket. That comes in your second statement, made after you found the locket.”
“I was upset when I made the first statement. My mother had just died.”
“Five days before. Your first statement is very detailed, Thomas. Sergeant Hearns and you took a lot of trouble over it. You’d think you wouldn’t leave out something as important as Rosie taking gold from your mother’s dead body.”
Thomas didn’t answer. Lambert’s brutal last words had felt like a punch in the face.
“You left the gold out of your first statement because it never happened. That’s the real explanation, isn’t it, Thomas?”
“No, it’s not. It did happen. He ripped it off her neck. That’s why they found a scratch there.”
“A small scratch. The locket wasn’t broken, though, when you found it in the desk, was it?”
“No. They could have repaired it.”
“There’s no sign of any repair on the clasp or the chain that I can see,” said Miles, making a show of carefully examining the locket as he held it up to his golden half-moon spectacles between two of his fat fingers.
“No doubt the jury will want to examine exhibit thirteen themselves when they are considering the evidence,” Miles added casually as he replaced the locket on the table in front of him.
“Now, there’s no dispute that you found the locket in the desk, Thomas. What I do have a problem with is what you say that my client said about it.”
“Which bit?”
“‘Give that to me. It’s mine.’ That bit.”
“She shouted it at me just as she tried to get hold of it — ”
“Yes, so you told us,” interrupted the barrister. “And then you pushed Greta over and you shouted at her: ‘No, it’s not. It’s my mother’s. That bastard took it from her and he gave it to you.’ That was what you told Mr. Sparling that you said when he asked you this morning. Do you agree?”
“Yes. Something like that.”
“No, not something like that. Word for word. I wrote it down when you said it this morning, and I wrote exactly the same thing down when your friend Matthew Barne told us what you said when he gave evidence yesterday. You’ve put your heads together about this, haven’t you, Thomas? You and Matthew?”
“Of course we’ve talked about it. We go to school together and he’s my best friend, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
“You both stole a paperweight at school from your headmaster, isn’t that right, Thomas?”
“It was a dare. We were going to put it back.”
“So, you found the locket and then you made your second statement to Detective Sergeant Hearns.”
“That’s right.”
“And you said in there that your mother was wearing the locket on the night of her death?”
“I saw it when I got her up. There was a V at the throat of her nightdress.”
“It seems a funny thing for you to notice at such a terrible moment. You could hear the men breaking in downstairs, isn’t that right?”
“Yes.”
“What happened is that you found that locket and then you set about concocting evidence to show that my client received it from your mother’s killer.”
“No.”
“You sat down with Matthew Barne to agree upon a false version of what was said in the drawing room before your father arrived.”
“It’s not a false version. It’s a true version.”
“You invented this story about your mother having the locket on under her nightdress and seeing the glint of gold when Rosie bent over her on the landing. Then as a final touch you got Jane Martin to say that Lady Anne was wearing the locket at lunch on the Monday.”
“I never saw it then.”
“Well, thank you for that, Thomas. You can see what I’m getting at. I suggest that you made all these things
