Final Witness Read Free

rat.”
        Greta did not respond. Instead she turned to look out the window. This was not a time to let their feelings show. The car had turned into the Old Bailey and was encircled by the swarm of reporters as it slowed to a crawl over the last 150 yards of its journey. She thought they looked just like people caught in a flash flood, holding their cameras high above their heads as if they were the only belongings they could hope to save from the rushing waters.
        But that was wrong, of course. She was the one at risk of drowning. And as her husband had just said: all because of that boy. “The fucking little rat.” Her stepson, Thomas.
        

Chapter 3
        
        IT HADN’T ALWAYS been like this between Greta and Thomas. Three years ago everything had been fine, or as near to fine as it could be between them. Thomas was just thirteen, and she’d just started out working as Peter Robinson’s personal assistant.
        He was as dreamy a boy as she’d ever met. He had fair hair the color of summer straw, which he wore long so that it fell forward over his forehead. He had already developed a habit of brushing his hair away from his eyes with the back of his hand before he spoke, a habit that would stay with him all his life. It was part of a natural diffidence, which led him to speak in a tone of uncertainty even when he was sure of what he wanted to say. Yet underneath he had already developed the qualities of stubbornness and determination that were to become so evident after his mother’s death.
        He had inherited his mother’s liquid, blue eyes and delicate mouth, which endowed his face with an attractive half-feminine quality. He also had her fine hands and long, tapering fingers, suggesting a future as an artist or a musician. Not a future that his practical-minded father wanted for his only son.
        Peter had had such grand hopes for Thomas when he was small. On the boy’s sixth birthday Peter got down the model airplanes that he and his father had made together when he was Thomas’s age. He arranged them lovingly in squadrons on the nursery floor and told his son their names. But Thomas only pretended to be interested. As soon as his father had left the room, he picked up the book of fairy stories that he had been reading and left the Hurricanes and Spitfires to gather dust.
        Two weeks later the dog pursued a ball into the corner and broke the model of the bomber that his grandfather had flown in over Germany fifty years before. That evening Peter packed all the model airplanes away in a box and took them with him when he went back to London. Already his political career was keeping him away from home during the week, and Anne would not hear of selling the House of the Four Winds. Peter felt it was not him but the house that his wife really cared about. Her house and her son.
        Peter could sense the expectation in his son when he was about to leave at the end of each weekend. He grew to hate the way the boy seemed to cower when he spoke to him. There was no reason for it. Peter had done nothing to deserve such treatment. He had struggled all his life to make his own father proud of him, and there was not a day that he did not thank Providence for letting the old man live just long enough to know that his son had become the minister of defense. But Thomas didn’t care what his father thought. He had no pride in his father’s family, no interest in his father’s achievements. Thomas’s heart and mind belonged to his mother and to the house in which her family, the Sackvilles, had lived for generations.
        As the years passed, father and son moved ever further apart. Thomas loved stories – he couldn’t get enough of them – but Peter never read fiction. It was almost a matter of principle. His mind was fixed on the here and now, and he felt nothing but irritation on rainy days when Thomas lay reading for hours at a time. The boy would stretch