Final Witness Read Free Page A

himself out on the window seat in the drawing room with cushions piled high under his head so that he could see over the dunes to the North Sea, where great waves crashed upon the shingle beach. He would imagine the postman’s knock on the back door as signaling the arrival of Long John Silver and his pirates come to claim their treasure from Billy Bones. Or when he was out walking the dog in the evening he would be looking for Heathcliff striding across the moors in search of a bloody revenge.
        Thomas knew where all the wrecks were to be found off the coast. He had their locations marked with black crosses on a map on his bedroom wall, and he would swear on a stack of Bibles that he had heard the church bells of the lost city of Dunwich tolling bleakly in the small hours from their resting place beneath the waves. But such legends had no meaning for Thomas’s father, who saw their only value as keeping up the local tourist trade.
        
        Within only a few months of being hired Greta made herself indispensable to Sir Peter and so began to accompany him on his weekend visits to his family at the House of the Four Winds. For at least half of the time they would be working in either Sir Peter’s study or the drawing room, with its French windows leading onto the garden where Lady Anne spent so much of her time planting and pruning and tending the rose walks for which the House of the Four Winds had become so famous in recent years. And Thomas would be out there too, wheeling a barrow or unraveling a hose. Always helping his mother. The two were inseparable.
        Greta made a great effort to get on with Thomas, and by and large she succeeded, for a time at least. She was a good listener when she wanted to be, and she read as much as she could about Suffolk and its history so that Thomas began to come to her when he needed information for the stories he was always writing and reading to his mother in the evenings. Lady Anne raised her eyebrows and laughed in a disconcerting way when she heard of the assistance being given her son by her husband’s P.A., but otherwise she said nothing. Greta, however, felt an obscure disapproval emanating from Lady Anne, a sense that the mistress of the house had found her out but chose to let events take their course without interference.
        “I know who you are and you’re not one of us,” she seemed to be saying. “And you never will be one of us, however hard you try.”
        And so Greta cultivated the boy but remained at a distance from the mother. Sometimes when Lady Anne had one of her recurring migraines and lay upstairs silent with a white flannel over her head and her white bedroom curtains drawn against the sun, Thomas and Greta would walk on the beach and look for amber. Greta knew all about amber because she’d read a book about it.
        Sometimes Sir Peter and Lady Anne would be invited out for lunch or dinner at the house of another well-connected family, and Greta, Thomas, and Mrs. Martin, the housekeeper, would remain behind. It was on one such Saturday that the first trouble happened. It was the birthday of Mrs. Martin’s sister, and the housekeeper was taking Thomas with her to the party in Woodbridge. Thomas enjoyed these visits. Mrs. Martin’s brother-in-law owned a seagoing boat, and Thomas had already extracted a promise that he would be taken out night fishing when he’d reached the golden age of fifteen, only five months away.
        By midday Greta was alone in the House of the Four Winds. She finished typing out the corrections to a speech that Sir Peter was to give at the party conference the following week and then went out into the front hall. There was not a sound anywhere except the murmur of the sea as she climbed the stairs to Lady Anne’s bedroom and closed the door softly behind her.
        Greta stood in the center of the room watching herself in the freestanding mirror as she slowly and deliberately