Final Witness by Simon Tolkien

Author:Simon Tolkien
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Political, Legal, Fiction, Psychological, Suspense, Thrillers
ISBN: 9780345468246
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2003-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

THEY GOT TO Rowston with the dawn. It was the hour when the tint of the sky changes subtly with every minute, and the birds had begun to chatter haltingly overhead. Peter felt feverish and wound down the window to let the cold morning air into the car. Greta drove without saying anything, staring into the new day, which was taking her away from Flyte forever.

In his head Peter could hear voices, a commotion of voices from yesterday and today all talking to him at once: Thomas yelling, “Get her out!” and Greta whispering secrets about a past that seemed to bear no relation to who she was. The grating, insistent voice of Sergeant Hearns: “Please let us know where you are both going to be,” with the emphasis on “both” containing just enough insinuation not to be offensive. Then Thomas’s voice again when he had gone back to the Marshes’ cottage. No words this time. Just screams, terrible screams, until the boy had finally fallen asleep and Jane Martin had arrived from Woodbridge to take care of him. Peter wished that the Marshes had called her earlier; the boy needed somebody he felt comfortable with, but he couldn’t criticize them. Christy and Grace had been good neighbors, the best.

There was one other soft voice asking to be heard that Peter still kept blocked out of his conscious mind. He would hear it soon enough. At the bottom of the road Rowston Hospital came into view: a silver-and-glass building glimmering in the first rays of the June sunshine like an alien arrival. Outside the entrance a police car was waiting. Arrangements had already been made for the first ceremony of the murdered dead: the identification of the body.

“Do you want me to come with you?” asked Greta.

“No,” he almost shouted. Anne and Greta had to be kept apart, he saw that clearly. He needed Greta more than ever, but outside this horror, somewhere distant where he could go when it was over. After the hospital she would go back to London on the train and wait for him there while he did what had to be done.

“I’m sorry, Greta,” he added after a moment, speaking softly now, tenderly even. “You’ve helped me more than I can say, but this is something I have to do alone.”

Inside the hospital he followed the policeman’s heavy-duty shoes as they beat a tattoo on the linoleum floors of the corridors. Turning right and left a dozen times, guided by black signs on white walls, they came eventually to a pair of doors that did not swing open like the others. Knocking was required here at these gates of the modern underworld.

While they waited, Peter noticed that the bottoms of the doors were scuffed, no doubt by hospital orderlies kicking them open so that they could bring in the dead. They could do with a lick of paint, Peter found himself thinking irrelevantly just before they opened.

At least they did it properly, Peter thought afterward.

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