Simon Tolkien - Final Witness

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 something in the financial district. This something seemed to take up most of his time, but when he was home he shut himself up in a tiny room at the back of the house, which the family referred to for some reason as “the cubbyhole.” On Thomas’s previous visits he had only seen the door of this sanctum open on one occasion, when Mrs. Barne had come out carrying two empty bottles of Smirnoff vodka, from which Thomas had deduced that his best friend’s father was a not-so-secret alcoholic. There was nothing unfriendly about either of Matthew’s parents, however. Mrs. Barne had never criticized Thomas for involving Matthew in his troubles. She was kind to him in her way, but she shared with her husband an essential distractedness, so that Matthew and Thomas were left almost entirely to their own devices.

Matthew was the oldest of the six Barne children by two years, and this, combined with his status as the only boy in the family, had won him sole use of the attic bedroom at the top of the house. It was here that Thomas went with Greta’s address book.

Matthew hung a DO NOT DISTURB notice on the door that he had taken from a hotel in Brighton on the last day of the most recent Barne summer holiday, and the two teenagers sat down to talk about what to do next.

Thomas told Matthew about what had happened as quickly as he could. His mouth and cheekbone hurt him, and his lip had swollen where his father had hit him.

“Your father’s a total bastard,” said Matthew, not for the first time. “My one’s not great, but at least he doesn’t go round hitting me when he feels like it. You should go to the police.”

“I’ve already done that,” said Thomas, smiling ruefully. “He believes in her. That’s the problem. It doesn’t matter if she gets convicted. That wouldn’t change anything except that he’d hate me even more. She’d still win.”

“Is she likely to go down?”

“Go down?”

“That’s what they call it when someone gets found guilty. Do you think she will?”

“No. That fat barrister of hers did a real hatchet job on me, made everyone think that I’d made it all up.”

“I know. Me too.” Matthew felt slightly sick as he remembered his day in court.

“I keep on thinking that there must be something that would prove she’s guilty. Not just to the jury, but to my father too. Some document that would do it, something that she couldn’t explain away like she did with the locket. That’s why that birth certificate was so important. If only she hadn’t been called Greta Rose to start with — if she’d become it.”

“By marrying Rosie?”

“Yes. That’s what got my father so crazy. He was holding that birth certificate like it was one of the Crown Jewels.”

“Why does the birth certificate mean that she couldn’t have married him? Both things are possible, aren’t they?”

“What? Greta Rose marries a man called Rose?” Thomas looked more than skeptical.

“If that’s what Rosie’s last name is. I’m not saying she did marry him. All I’m saying is that it’s worth checking it out. There’s not much else for us to do. We’ve both had our day in court.”

“How do you check it out?”

“You go to the Family Records Office. It’s up in North London just behind Sadler’s Wells opera house. They’ve got big index books for all the marriages and births and deaths that there’ve been in England since the Battle of Waterloo.”

“Eighteen-fifteen?”

“Well, I don’t know what date precisely, but it doesn’t matter. The books go back at least a hundred years, and if Greta got married, it’s not going to be more than ten years ago, is it?”

“No, I suppose not. How do you know all this, Matthew?”

“We did a project on it at my last school. We spent a day there. Everyone had to find out as much as they could about their family history from the indexes. I got back to my grandfather’s birth certificate. It gave his father’s occupation as prison chaplain, so he probably got to pray with the criminals who were going to be executed the next day. It was quite exciting really.”

“So anybody can go in and look through these indexes?” asked Thomas.

“Yes, it doesn’t matter how old you are. They haven’t got all the information on the indexes though. Just enough for you to fill out the application for a certificate, and then you have to wait.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know. We had to wait a week for our certificates, but there’s probably a way of getting them quicker if you pay more.”

“I haven’t got a week. Once the evidence is over they won’t let any more in. That’s what Sergeant Hearns told me.”

“When’s the evidence going to be over?” asked Matthew.

“I don’t know. My father said he was going to be called sometime on Thursday, and he’s Greta’s only witness.”

“God, that’s no time. Why didn’t we think of this before?”

“Because it was only today that my father decided to tell me about Greta’s late-night telephone conversation,” said Thomas. He paused and then went on musingly, “He said Greta told the man ‘I’m not your Greta Rose.’ Not just ‘Greta Rose’ but ‘your Greta Rose.’ She and Rosie are linked up together, Matt. I don’t know if they were married or not, but someone’s going to have seen them together, known about them. I’m going to go through this address book and see if any of the names spring out at me, and then we’ll go to your family records place in the morning.”

Matthew was soon asleep, but Thomas stayed up into the small hours puzzling over the address-book entries, all made in Greta’s careful handwriting. Thomas wondered whether she would miss the book before the next morning. He doubted it somehow. She had enough things on her mind without looking up telephone numbers.

None of the entries seemed to offer much to Thomas. There was Greta’s mother in Manchester, but otherwise most of the names seemed to be for businesses of one kind or another. Dressmakers, dry cleaners, travel agents and a shop selling computer accessories. In between there were a few names with or without last names that Thomas copied out on a piece of paper to try the next morning. Anna, Martin, Giles, Peter, Pierre, Robert, Jane — but no Rosie or Rose. Nothing floral at all. The names swirled about in Thomas’s head after he turned out the bedside light and lay looking out the high window at the full moon hanging over the roofs of South London. It was a clear night and the moon seemed very close. He felt the great weight of it and thought of the arid desert that was its surface. He imagined the terrible silence and the darkness of its night and felt despair settling on his spirit like dust. The grand gesture of throwing the sultan’s sapphire into the North Sea now seemed an empty foolishness.