couldn’t take this to anyone; we’d need the proper certificate. That gives dates of birth and stuff like that, doesn’t it?”
“No. Just the ages on marriage certificates,” said Matthew. “I remember that. They have the fathers’ names though, and their occupations. Greta can’t pretend it’s not her if the father’s name on the marriage certificate is the same as that on her birth certificate. We’ll have her then.”
“If it’s her and if we get the certificate in time and if we get them to the right people before the evidence is over. We’ve got nothing at the minute,” said Thomas. Underneath his cautious exterior he was as excited as Matthew. It was just that he was determined to keep control of himself. He didn’t want to repeat his experience of the day before with the birth certificate.
Matthew refused to share his friend’s somber mood.
“But we’ve got hope, which is more than we had twenty minutes ago,” he said. “We ought to get on and order the certificates now. They take twenty-four hours if you make a priority application. That’s what it says on that notice over there.”
Thomas filled out the application forms and handed them in. The bored young woman at the desk by the door had been replaced by a bored young man, who glanced at his watch before writing the collection time on Thomas’s receipt — 12:21 on Thursday. Thomas wondered, as he went down the steps of the records building, whether he might find himself tomorrow with the crucial evidence in his hand at last, when it was already too late to use it.
Chapter 25
The Family Records Office opened at ten o’clock on Thursday morning, and by five past ten Thomas was already well embarked on an argument with a cadaverous young man wearing a plastic badge on his lapel identifying him as Andrew, Applications Clerk. Thomas seemed completely unaware of Matthew’s efforts to calm him down and of the disapproving impatience of the people queuing for priority collections behind him.
“I know it’s ten-oh-five and the receipt says twelve twenty-one,” said Thomas, allowing his exasperation to increase the volume of his voice still further. “I know that. I’m just asking you as a special favor to see if my certificates are ready. Maybe they are, maybe they’re not, but it won’t hurt you to try, will it, Andy?”
“I’m not Andy, I’m Andrew,” said the clerk.
“I’m sorry,” said Thomas. “Really I am. I didn’t mean to offend you, Andrew. Won’t you just do me this favor?”
“I can’t help you, sir,” said Andrew for the third time. “You’ll simply have to wait like everyone else.”
“Can’t or won’t?” shouted Thomas, losing his temper. “You government employees are all the same. Everything’s got to be by the bloody rule book, and meanwhile justice goes down the drain.”
“All right, Thomas, calm down,” said Matthew, pulling his friend away from the counter. He’d noticed Andrew’s hand straying toward a buzzer on the side of his desk and feared ejection would follow any minute at the hands of the two burly security guards whom they had passed at the front of the building.
“I’m sorry about all this,” Matthew said to Andrew. “He’s got big problems with his family. We’ll come back later.”
“Twelve twenty-one,” said Andrew mechanically, ignoring the explanation.
“Twelve twenty-one,” agreed Matthew as he shepherded Thomas toward the door to the cafeteria.
The court sat late on Thursday morning. It was eleven o’clock when Greta resumed her place in the witness box and Sparling started his cross-examination. The reporters had divided eleven to three in favor of Greta at the end of the prosecution case. Even the three still holding out for a conviction had agreed that Miles Lambert had gotten the better of Thomas. They all thought that the victim’s son had made up at least some of his evidence in order to strengthen the case against his stepmother.
The jurors were hard to read. The Italian man in the designer suit had seemed to be a sure vote for Greta from the start, and the reporters had noticed that at least three of the other male jurors appeared to have been won over to the defendant’s charms in the last couple of days. The Mrs. Thatcher look-alike sitting in the foreperson’s position looked more furious with each passing day, and the general view among the press was that this was due to the growing number of her colleagues deserting the prosecution’s side as the case unfolded. A single vote for a guilty verdict wouldn’t be enough to stop Greta from being acquitted after the judge had given a majority direction. It wouldn’t matter in those circumstances if the single voter was forewoman of the jury or not.
Miles Lambert had taken Greta gently through her evidence on the previous afternoon, and now she stood with a soft smile on her pretty face, waiting for Sparling to do his worst. Her air of confidence irritated the old barrister, making him launch into his cross-examination with more aggression than he might otherwise have chosen to use.
“You told this jury yesterday that you got on reasonably well with Lady Anne,” he said. “Did you really mean that?”
“We had a few arguments, but I’d say that was inevitable when I was in her house so often over a period of years. By and large, we got on quite well.”
“Didn’t you mind when she called you lower-class and told you that you didn’t belong in her house?”
“Yes, I was hurt, but then she came and apologized and I forgave her.”
“It was that easy, was it?”
“Yes, she was genuinely sorry. I admired her for coming to talk to me. It can’t have been easy for her to do that.”
“No. And it can’t surely have been as easy for you to forgive Lady Anne as you say. She told you that you were poisonous like a snake, didn’t she?”
“That’s right.”
“And it made you say, ‘You’ve fucking had it now, Mrs. Posh.’ Isn’t that right?”
“No, it’s not. That’s a fabrication.”
“Just like it’s a fabrication by Thomas that he overheard you referring to your employer’s wife as Mrs. Posh in the basement of the house in Chelsea?”
“Yes.”
“It seems to be something of a coincidence, wouldn’t you say, Lady Robinson?”
“Yes, I would, Mr. Sparling, and not an accidental coincidence I should say either.”
“Oh?”
“They’ve put their heads together and came up with this Mrs. Posh phrase. It’s not one I would ever use.”
“Even when Lady Anne was insulting you for being lower-class?”
“She apologized.”
“Yes, and you admired her for doing so. Isn’t that what you said?”
“Yes. She didn’t need to say sorry. It was her house.”
“You’d admired Lady Anne for a long time, hadn’t you? Even when you were a girl living in Manchester, you admired her.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Just like you admired all those fashionable aristocratic women whose pictures you cut out of those magazines and put in your scrapbooks. I think Sergeant Hearns told us they contained more than two thousand pictures.”
“I’ve always liked fashion. Is it so very wrong to have interests when you’re young?”
“No, not at all. But does an interest in fashion justify trying on someone else’s clothes without their permission?”
“No, it doesn’t. I shouldn’t have done that. I just couldn’t afford those kinds of clothes, and I wanted to see what they looked like on me.”
“There was only one way that you could afford them, wasn’t there? To become Lady Robinson yourself.”
“What are you suggesting, Mr. Sparling? That I murdered Lady Anne for money? There’s no evidence for that,
