Simon Tolkien - Final Witness

Thomas thought of his father’s last words: “I can’t see you. Not after all that’s happened,” and he thought of his beautiful mother lying unavenged in the Flyte churchyard. There was no time left and no one to turn to. He looked away from the moon and drifted into a troubled sleep.

He woke again later and felt as if no time had passed, but the luminous clock on Matthew’s mantelpiece showed it was nearly 7 A.M. and Thomas could hear the Barne children beginning to move about on the floors below. He felt as if he had just dreamed something vitally important, but he couldn’t remember what it was. The frustration was almost too much to bear. There was a word or a name on the edge of his consciousness that Thomas just could not reach, and he would probably never have done so had his eye not fallen on the list of names and numbers that he had transcribed from Greta’s address book before he’d gone to sleep.

Pierre. That was the name. It took Thomas back to a golden afternoon by the River Thames when he hadn’t known who Greta was or what she was plotting. He remembered white wine in a plastic cup, the blanket spread out on the grass while Big Ben chimed the hours, and Greta’s head resting on his legs. She’d talked about a boy she knew in school years before. A boy who Thomas reminded her of. A boy called Pierre.

Thomas jumped out of bed and ran down five flights of stairs, narrowly avoiding a collision at the bottom with Matthew’s father, who was headed for his cubbyhole. Thomas waited for the door to close behind Mr. Barne and then dialed Pierre’s number on the hall telephone.

It was a foreign country code, and the female voice that answered spoke in French. Thomas said “Pierre” 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.