Greta. That’s what Mum used to call her. You and her in this house. You and her and your brilliant career.”
“I never slept with her before…”
Peter stopped in midsentence and Thomas finished it for him.
“Before Mum died, but you did on the night of her funeral, didn’t you? That’s how you heard that conversation that rattled you so badly, wasn’t it?”
Thomas’s words were pouring out in a flood now. There was no chance for Peter to reply to his questions even if he had wanted to.
“Your first wife spending her first night in the ground and you fucking your secretary up in London. What a picture.”
“Shut up, Thomas,” said Peter. There was a warning note in his voice that Thomas ignored.
“And somewhere deep down you must know that she sent those men to kill Mummy, but it wasn’t enough to sleep with your wife’s murderer — you needed to marry her as well. You’re a pig, Dad, and this place, it’s your fucking sty.”
Thomas was shouting now and he had brought his face close to his father’s, so he had no chance of defending himself when Peter lashed out. His fist was clenched this time, and he hit Thomas on the side of his mouth with a swinging punch that sent his son crashing against the bureau and from there to the floor.
Peter put a hand out toward his son and then immediately pulled it back. He felt disgusted with himself for what he’d done but at this moment of crisis he wasn’t man enough to face his guilt. Instead he swamped it beneath a torrent of self-justification. It was Thomas who had brought all this about with his crazy witch hunt against his stepmother.
“You shouldn’t have talked to me like that,” said Peter, as Thomas slowly got to his feet clutching the side of his face.
“Fuck you, Dad.” The anger had gone out of Thomas’s voice, and he spoke the words softly like a curse.
“Here, take my handkerchief,” said Peter, but Thomas backed away. The blood had seeped through his fingers and dripped down onto his shirt.
“You don’t want my blood on the carpet, do you? You don’t want your bitch wife to know I’ve been here.”
“Shut up, Thomas.”
“Shut up or you’ll hit me again. Is that it?”
“No, it’s not. I’m sorry I hit you, but I’m not going to let you say those things about Greta.”
“So it’s perfectly all right for her to have killed my mother?”
“She didn’t kill your mother. I don’t want to talk to you about it anymore, Thomas.”
“But you did half an hour ago. You thought it was a possibility then, didn’t you? It’s wonderful what a birth certificate can do.”
“I was stupid. I feel ashamed of myself, but that’s between me and my own conscience.”
“If you’ve got one.”
“This is pointless,” said Peter wearily. “We’ve got nothing to say to each other.”
Thomas turned away. He didn’t disagree with what his father had said. His objection was that his father had no right not to love him, but there was no point in telling him that. He couldn’t make his father feel things if he didn’t. At the door, Thomas turned back. The situation called for a parting shot, but Thomas could think of nothing suitable to say. He felt suddenly exhausted. A sense of utter desolation overwhelmed him, and his father’s words came to him as if over a great distance.
“You can stay in the house for as long as you like. Jane too. It’s just I can’t see you. Not after all that’s happened.”
Down below, the front door opened. Greta had come home early.
Looking back on the moment later in the evening, Thomas wondered why he hadn’t walked down the stairs to meet his stepmother. He could have told her that he was there at his father’s invitation to search through her personal papers. How could their marriage have survived the revelation of his father’s doubt? The only explanation that occurred to Thomas for his decision to hide was that a victory based on doubts that his father no longer felt would be no victory at all. He could only properly avenge his mother by showing up Greta for what she really was. He needed proof. The birth certificate was not that proof. He could not use it against Greta now.
Peter had been talking when the door opened. He had his eyes on his son, and Thomas saw the fear in them as Greta began to climb the stairs.
He stepped back into the drawing room, putting the open door between himself and the landing, and at the same time he motioned with head and hand to his father to go past him.
“Are you here, Peter?” Greta called from the stairs.
Peter went out onto the landing.
“You’re home early,” he said.
“I didn’t stay long. I was worried about you. You looked so awful earlier. Are you any better?”
“Yes, much better.”
Peter’s voice sounded fraught with anxiety to Thomas standing on the other side of the door, but Greta seemed to accept her husband’s assurance.
“Come up and talk to me while I get changed,” she said. “But don’t talk about the trial. Anything but the trial. I’ve had enough of it for one day.”
Thomas listened to the sound of his father following his stepmother up the stairs to the second story and turned back into the room. So much had happened here. He remembered his mother showing him the secret recess in the bureau on that first morning in London and the day he opened it six months later and found her golden locket inside. There must be something else that would connect Greta with his mother’s killers. Something that couldn’t be explained away, something that wasn’t just his own assertion. The birth certificate was not the end of the line. For his father, perhaps, but not for him. There had to be something or someone in Greta’s past that would connect her.
Thomas’s eyes fastened on the old bandaged address book sitting on the writing surface of the bureau under the documents that his father had spilled out of the brown envelope. There was no time to lose. He could hear footsteps moving about on the floor above his head. It must be Greta changing out of whatever dress she had worn to charm her fat slippery barrister. She’d be down in a minute ready for his father to mix her a Bloody Mary.
Thomas moved across the room on tiptoes. He carefully put back all the documents, including the birth certificate, in the envelope and replaced them in the drawer. Then he picked up the address book and shut the bureau.
At the door he took a last look around the room as if committing it to memory and then went quietly down the stairs. He let himself soundlessly out of the house and stood on the top of the steps for a moment before he walked rapidly away without looking back. He held Greta’s address book concealed under his jacket.
Chapter 24
Thomas walked over the Albert Bridge and on into Battersea heading for Matthew Barne’s house, where he was due to spend the night.
Thomas and Matthew had been drawn together from the start of their time at Carstow School. It was partly, as Matthew had told Miles Lambert, that they had been the only two newcomers in a class where all the other students had already been at the school two years. But their friendship was also founded on shared interests and passions. They both loved romance and adventure. They had read the same books by the Bronte sisters and Robert Louis Stevenson. They believed in chivalry and heroism, and Matthew had from the outset adopted his friend’s crusade for justice against Greta as his own. Thomas, for his part, was intensely grateful to Matthew for his support. After his own experience with Miles Lambert, he knew that it couldn’t have been easy for Matthew to give evidence, but he had agreed to do so without complaint. The two put an intense value on their friendship and were inseparable at school.
The Barne family lived in a rambling Victorian house full of children and toys and pets. Matthew’s mother was always cooking, trying to keep pace with the insatiable appetites of her red-haired progeny, while Mr. Barne did
