Simon Tolkien - Final Witness

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 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.

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.”