twice loudly for want of anything else to say. He couldn’t understand a word of what the voice at the other end of the line was saying. Then suddenly the flurry of speech stopped and there was silence. Thomas wondered whether the phone had been hung up at the other end before a deep male voice identified itself as belonging to Pierre.
“Do you know Greta Grahame?” asked Thomas, wishing that he’d given himself a little time to work out what he was going to say.
“Who?”
“Greta Grahame. She says she knew you years ago in Manchester when you were both at school there.”
“Greta. Yes, I knew her. I more than knew her in fact. We went out together for a while. It was a long time ago.”
“I know it was, but I need to ask you about people she knew then.”
“Why don’t you ask her yourself?”
“Because she wouldn’t tell me,” said Thomas, desperately trying to think of a story that would persuade this stranger to give him the information he was looking for. “She wouldn’t want me to risk my safety.”
“I don’t get this,” said Pierre. “Who are you?”
“I’m a friend of Greta’s. A good friend. There’s this man who’s threatening her, and I need to find out who it is so that I can tell the police.”
“Why would I know anything about it? I haven’t seen Greta in more than ten years.”
Clearly Pierre didn’t know anything about the trial. That much at least was in Thomas’s favor.
“I’m calling you because you’re the only person who might know who this man is. He’s someone bad from her past, someone who’s got something on her.”
“I don’t know anyone like that. We were at school together in Manchester. I left before her and came south. I heard she went off the rails for a while, but then her father died and she got a place at Birmingham University. She wrote me from there a couple of times. She seemed to be doing okay. I don’t know what happened to her after that. Is she doing all right? Apart from this man who’s threatening her, I mean.”
“She’s doing great,” Thomas lied. “She’s married someone really rich.”
“Pretty girls have all the luck, don’t they?” said Pierre. “Anyway, I don’t know your name but I’m afraid I’m a working man. I’ll be late for my train if I don’t go now.”
“My name’s Thomas. I won’t keep you more than a minute longer, I promise. That time when she went off the rails, did you keep in touch with Greta at all then?”
“A bit. I went back to Manchester a few times. Not many because I didn’t like the place much. Too far north for me. And Greta had changed. She was a different person somehow.”
“Did you hear about Greta spending time with a man called Rosie when you went back?”
“Rosie. That’s a girl’s name.”
“Rose then. He’s got a thick scar running down under his right ear.”
“I heard about someone called Rose, but he didn’t have a scar. I met him once with Greta, and I’d have remembered the scar.”
“Was he the kind of person who would threaten people, hurt them?” asked Thomas, trying to keep the excitement out of his voice.
“He had a reputation as a hard man, someone to avoid. Greta was a fool if she got involved with him.”
“What was his name?”
“Rose. I told you that.”
“I know, but what was his Christian name?”
“John, Jonathan. Something like that. I’ve got to go now.”
Thomas slowly replaced the receiver and stood motionless and distracted in the hall trying to master his emotions. It was another connection between Greta and his mother’s killer, but it was useless unless it was turned into a proof, something that would convince his father and that jury down at the Old Bailey, something that Greta couldn’t explain away. And he had almost no time left, the evidence would all be complete sometime the next day. He had to get the proof to court before then, and he didn’t even know if it existed.
Matthew and Thomas got to the Family Records Office just before ten-thirty. Inside there was a big, light room with long rows of metal shelves divided by high, sloping desks where the searchers could read the heavy index books: black binders for deaths, green for marriages and red for births. There was a constant repetition of thuds as the books hit the desks or got replaced on the shelves. Everyone using the place seemed to Thomas to be both old and preoccupied, their fingers inky from copying out the entries in the index books onto the certificate application forms, which they then took up to a bored young woman sitting at a pine desk by the door.
It took Matthew no time at all to show Thomas how the system worked. There were seven or eight index books for each year, divided alphabetically. They started with the births and found the entry for Greta Rose Grahame after less than five minutes in the “G-H” book for 1971. Thomas wasn’t disappointed; he hadn’t really imagined that the certificate in Greta’s desk was a forgery. However, he felt his heart beating fast as they moved into the central aisles and began to search through the green marriage books. They started in 1987 and worked their way systematically forward through the years, searching under the name Rose. This was the only way of doing it, given that the index worked entirely by reference to the husband’s last name. There was in fact very little other information in the books. Just the last name followed by the husband’s first and middle initials, and beyond that the wife’s maiden name and the district in which the marriage had taken place. Finally there were the reference numbers that enabled the invisible workers on the upper floors of the building to enter the full details of each marriage on the certificates that had been applied for down below.
Matthew and Thomas searched through every Rose that had gotten married in Great Britain in every one of the previous fourteen years, but there was not one who had married a Grahame in Manchester or anywhere else. There were John Roses and Jonathan Roses, who had married a variety of names, but none bore any resemblance to Grahame.
They searched again and again without success until Thomas got careless and knocked one of the huge index books off a high desk onto the floor. It fell with a great crash, and suddenly there was silence in the records room. Everyone in their vicinity turned around to look at the culprits. They were all old and Thomas and Matthew were young. “Old people wouldn’t drop precious index books on the floor,” they seemed to be saying. “Old people would be more careful.”
“Come on,” said Matthew, beckoning Thomas to follow him into the black section. They took shelter in an obscure corner of the great room housing Deaths 1860–1868. Behind them the thud-silence-thud noise of the index books hitting shelves and tables began again.
“It’s no good, Matthew,” said Thomas in a depressed voice. “There’s no point in looking anymore. We’re not going to find anything. It was a long shot anyway. She could easily have been his Greta Rose without being married to him.”
“Welcome to Death Row,” said Matthew, relating their present surroundings to Thomas’s mood of resignation.
“What did you say?” asked Thomas, suddenly alert.
“Death Row — or Death Row H to be precise,” said Matthew, reading a notice on the wall.
“Leading to Death Row I. Put the two together and you’ve got Death Rows H and I.”
“What are you talking about, Thomas? It was a joke but it wasn’t that funny.”
“Rows. Don’t you get it, Matthew? There are other ways of spelling Rose. We need to check those out too.”
They went back to the front of the marriages section where they had been before, braving the disapproving glances that met them on their way, and started to search again. They found what they were looking for quite quickly. There were no Rows, but one or two bridegrooms did have the surname Rowes, and a Jonathan B. Rowes had married a Grahame in Liverpool in 1989.
“It’s them!” said Matthew excitedly. “It’s got to be. It’s just the right date. She’d have been eighteen. That’s when Pierre told you she went off the rails.”
“The date’s all right but the city’s not,” said Thomas. “Greta was in Manchester, remember. Not Liverpool.”
“They’re both towns in the north though, aren’t they? Not everyone gets married in their hometown. Maybe they didn’t want anyone to know about it.”
“Maybe. I’m not saying it’s not them. I’m just saying that there isn’t enough to know one way or another. We
