“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.”
“Didn’t you mind when she called you lower-class and told you that you didn’t belong in her house?”
“Yes, I was hurt, but then she came and apologized and I forgave her.”
“It was that easy, was it?”
“Yes, she was genuinely sorry. I admired her for coming to talk to me. It can’t have been easy for her to do that.”
“No. And it can’t surely have been as easy for you to forgive Lady Anne as you say. She told you that you were poisonous like a snake, didn’t she?”
“That’s right.”
“And it made you say, ‘You’ve fucking had it now, Mrs. Posh.’ Isn’t that right?”
“No, it’s not. That’s a fabrication.”
“Just like it’s a fabrication by Thomas that he overheard you referring to your employer’s wife as Mrs. Posh in the basement of the house in Chelsea?”
“Yes.”
“It seems to be something of a coincidence, wouldn’t you say, Lady Robinson?”
“Yes, I would, Mr. Sparling, and not an accidental coincidence I should say either.”
“Oh?”
“They’ve put their heads together and came up with this Mrs. Posh phrase. It’s not one I would ever use.”
“Even when Lady Anne was insulting you for being lower-class?”
“She apologized.”
“Yes, and you admired her for doing so. Isn’t that what you said?”
“Yes. She didn’t need to say sorry. It was her house.”
“You’d admired Lady Anne for a long time, hadn’t you? Even when you were a girl living in Manchester, you admired her.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Just like you admired all those fashionable aristocratic women whose pictures you cut out of those magazines and put in your scrapbooks. I think Sergeant Hearns told us they contained more than two thousand pictures.”
“I’ve always liked fashion. Is it so very wrong to have interests when you’re young?”
“No, not at all. But does an interest in fashion justify trying on someone else’s clothes without their permission?”
“No, it doesn’t. I shouldn’t have done that. I just couldn’t afford those kinds of clothes, and I wanted to see what they looked like on me.”
“There was only one way that you could afford them, wasn’t there? To become Lady Robinson yourself.”
“What are you suggesting, Mr. Sparling? That I murdered Lady Anne for money? There’s no evidence for that, you know. Nothing’s gone into my bank account. You’ve got the records. Whoever’s got those jewels has got nothing to do with me.”
“I wasn’t asking you about the jewels, Lady Robinson. I was suggesting that you wanted what Lady Anne had: her title, her husband, and her husband’s money.”
“But not her jewels.”
“Please don’t argue with counsel, Lady Robinson,” said the judge, intervening for the first time in the morning. “Just try to answer his questions.”
“I’m sorry, my Lord,” said Greta, bestowing one of her most winning smiles on the old judge.
“That’s all right. Please carry on, Mr. Sparling.”
The barrister turned a page of his notes and changed tack.
“What were you talking to your midnight visitor about in your basement apartment in April of last year?” he asked.
“Money. It was a man I owed money to. I was asking for more time to pay.”
“So it was in the nature of a business meeting. Why were you conducting business in the middle of the night, Lady Robinson?”
“I wasn’t. We went out earlier, and then he came back to my flat and stayed late. I thought that an evening’s entertainment might make him more…”
“More compliant?”
“Yes. More willing to give me more time.”
“Were you right? Was he more willing?”
“Yes. He agreed to wait.”
“How much money did you owe this man, Lady Robinson?”
“About ten thousand pounds.”
“And have you repaid it now?”
“Most of it.”
“How?”
“I saved money, and my husband has helped me a bit.”
“Even though you lied to him about meeting this man. You’ve already admitted that in your interview. You told your husband that you were with your mother in Manchester.”
“I lied because I was ashamed of owing the money.”
“You lied because you didn’t want anyone to know that you had been meeting the man who was going to kill Lady Anne. That’s the truth, isn’t it?” Sparling’s accusation came accompanied with a sudden aggression of voice and gesture, but neither seemed to have any effect on Greta. She smiled at Sparling before answering his question slowly and deliberately.
“No, it’s not the truth, Mr. Sparling. I lied because I was ashamed of being in debt. I did not want Sir Peter or Lady Anne to think badly of me.”
“Did you say to your visitor, ‘Can’t you see I haven’t got him yet’?”
“No, I would never have said that. I would’ve said: ‘Can’t you see I haven’t got it yet,’ about the money. If you recall, Mr. Sparling, Thomas couldn’t be sure if I said ‘him’ or ‘it.’ I’m sure it’ll be in your notes.”
“So you weren’t referring to not yet having secured Sir Peter. Is that right?”
“I was talking about the money.”
“Your visitor was the man who killed Lady Anne, I suggest. Thomas recognized him as such.”
“He saw a man from behind. And that man can’t have been the man in my flat anyway.”
“Why not?”
“Because the front door of the basement was locked when I went up to the main house via the internal staircase. I always kept it locked from the inside because of burglars.”
“Why couldn’t your visitor have unlocked it?”
“Because I had the key.”
“You never mentioned this in your interview, Lady Robinson. Why not?”
“Because I didn’t think of it.”
“And that’s not all you failed to mention, was it? Sergeant Hearns asked you again and again to give the name of your visitor. Again and again you refused to provide it. Why? What had you got to hide?”
“I had nothing to hide. The man’s name is Andrew Relton.”
Sparling stopped, momentarily taken aback. He hadn’t expected Greta’s reply, and he had never heard this name before. But it took no more than a second or two for him to regain his composure and return to the attack.