from the lifeboat was cupping his hands in a practiced gesture to light a cigarette. The landlord of the Harbour Inn was sweeping the water from his doorstep with a broom, and the dead man lay untended on the muddy ground.
Christopher Marsh gently disentangled himself from his wife’s embrace, and he and the other man from the lifeboat bent to pick up the corpse. Wearily they shuffled along the uneven road toward the harbormaster’s hut.
Peter turned to Greta. There was a faraway look in her green eyes as she gazed out toward the sea. He thought that she looked quite extraordinarily beautiful at that moment but also inscrutable. He had no idea what she was thinking.
It was the end of January 1999. It would be four months before another person died of unnatural causes in Flyte — and that would be murder. A cold-blooded murder that would be talked about in houses the length and breadth of England. A murder to put this sleepy fishing town forever on the map. Sir Peter’s own wife, the beautiful Lady Anne, gunned down in her own home by armed robbers while her son hid behind a bookcase less than ten feet away.
Chapter 5
The sound of the clicking cameras and the reporters’ unanswered questions ceased suddenly as the doors of the Old Bailey closed behind Sir Peter and Lady Greta. Security men watched impassively as they emptied their pockets and passed through a metal detector. Then up two wide flights of stairs and into a great open area, which made Greta think for a moment that she had arrived on the concourse of one of Mussolini’s North Italian railway stations.
I am on a train journey though, she thought to herself wryly. I am but Peter isn’t, and I can’t get off the bloody train. It goes really slowly, stopping at all the stations along the way as the witnesses give their evidence, and all the time you don’t know where it’s going to end. Barristers and relatives and reporters get on and get off, but at the end they all go away. And then it’s just me. Just like it’s always been. Just me.
“Are you all right, darling? You look pale. Is there something I can get you?”
Peter stood looking concerned but impotent at the side of his wife, who had halted, swaying slightly in the middle of the great hall.
“No, it’s nothing. I was just feeling a little faint, that’s all. Getting here is quite an ordeal, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it’s ghastly. Those reporters are just like bloody parasites. Sit down a moment and get your strength back. There’s plenty of time.”
They sat on one of the tan leather benches that were positioned at regular intervals through the hall. There was no adornment on any of the walls apart from a clock that had stopped. The morning light penetrated weakly through dirty net curtains hung over the high windows.
All around them barristers were moving to and fro. Their long black gowns billowed out behind them, and their patent leather shoes clicked on the marble floor. The eighteenth-century-style horsehair wigs that were part of the barristers’ required dress would have seemed absurd if their owners were not wearing them with such apparent confidence. Greta was suddenly filled with a sense of being out of her element. How could she control what happened here if she didn’t know the rules? She got up from the bench hurriedly. Sitting still only made things worse.
“Come on, let’s go and find court nine. That’s where we’re supposed to be meeting Miles.”
Greta injected her voice with a sense of purpose that she was far from feeling.
A small crowd was waiting outside the bank of elevators, and Greta glimpsed the squat figure of Sergeant Hearns, the officer in the case. He smiled lugubriously when he saw her, and Greta couldn’t decide whether it was a greeting or a spontaneous expression of pleasure at seeing the object of his investigation inside the courthouse at last. In any event, she didn’t respond, turning suddenly on her heel and calling to her husband.
“Come on, Peter, it’s too crowded. Let’s take the stairs.”
Peter turned obediently to follow his wife. He was determined to stand by her, but there were some places, of course, where he could not follow. She would be alone in the dock. Alone when she gave her evidence. Alone when the jury came back with their verdict.
He worked his fingers into the wrinkled furrows on his forehead and hid his face momentarily behind his upturned hand.
Four floors above them at that very moment Miles Lambert, counsel for the defense in the case of Regina v. Lady Greta Robinson, was buying two cups of coffee in the barristers’ cafeteria. One white with two sugars for himself and one black with none for his opponent, John Sparling, counsel for the prosecution.
Miles Lambert was sixty-six and single. Forty years of drinking fine wines and eating rich food with other successful lawyers had earned him a florid complexion and a rotund figure that he kept encased within expensive, tailor-made suits, complete with waistcoat and gold watch and chain. Court etiquette required him to wear a wing collar and starched white neck bands, but outside court he was known for extravagant ties of wildly clashing colors that matched the handkerchiefs that poured from his breast pocket when he was not using them to dab his sweating brow. Although in recent years “Lurid Lambert” had given way to a new nickname of “Old Lurid,” opinion in legal circles was that Old Lurid might be sixty-six but as a defense lawyer he was at the height of his powers.
Miles’s pale blue eyes looked out on the world from behind a pair of gold-framed half-moon spectacles, and those who knew him well said that the eyes were the key to understanding Miles’s character. They were small and shrewd, and if you studied them carefully, you would see that they seemed to become more quiet and watchful as Miles became more exuberant. It was as if they took no part in his loud laughter and extravagant gestures. They remained detached and attentive, watching for weaknesses, waiting for opportunities.
John Sparling was as different from Miles Lambert as it was possible to be given that they were two successful lawyers of roughly the same age dressed in approximately the same way. He was tall while Miles was short, and thin while Miles was fat. He wore no glasses, and his large, gray eyes looked out coldly on the world from above a long, aquiline nose. His mouth was small, with thin, straight lips, and he spoke slowly, forming his questions with careful decision and always pausing after the witness had answered for the extra fraction of a second that was enough to tell the jury his opinion of what had just been said. He was fond of telling juries that they must put pity and sympathy aside in their search for the truth. Sparling’s enemies said that this was something that he had no need to do himself, as he had had all pity and sympathy excised from his character at an early age.
John Sparling never defended, and Miles Lambert never prosecuted. They were polar opposites, and yet in a strange way they liked each other. You could almost say they were friends, although they never met outside the courthouse, where they spent their days in an unending struggle over the fate of their fellow human beings.
If pressed, Sparling might have described himself as an instrument of justice. It was an article of faith for him that nobody should escape the consequences of his actions — least of all the wife of a cabinet minister. Sparling had been looking forward to this case for weeks, but then so too had his opponent. For Miles Lambert, criminal law was not so much about justice as about winning. It was something the two men had in common. They both hated to lose.
“So, Miles, you’ve got Granger,” said Sparling. “Her Ladyship must be pleased.” His lower lip raised slightly, the nearest he ever got to a smile.
“Haven’t talked to her about it yet,” replied Miles Lambert as he vigorously stirred the sugar into his coffee. “But yes, I’d prefer old Granger to one or two of the death’s head judges that sit on the first floor. Defense’ll get a fair crack of the whip at any rate.” He would have liked to have ladled four spoonfuls into the cup, but his doctor had set strict limits on coffee and sugar since Miles had suffered a minor heart attack two years before. The instruction to reduce stress by taking on fewer cases, however, had fallen on deaf ears.
“He’ll like your client, I expect,” said Sparling. “Old Granger’s always been one for the ladies, hasn’t he?”
His Honor Judge Granger was known as a fair judge with something of a defense bias. Miles was secretly very pleased to have gotten him, although it wouldn’t do to gloat.
“It’s not the judge that matters,” he said diplomatically. “It’s the jury.”
“Hoping for a few priapic jurors too, I expect.”
