he had formed a habit of passing his thumb and index finger along these furrows as if this was the only way of resting his piercing blue eyes, which never seemed to close. Except in his sleep, of course, like now, with little more than three hours to go before his second wife would go on trial for conspiring to murder his first.
Greta sat on the side of the bed and gently stroked her husband’s cheek with the tip of her finger, feeling the bristly facial hair that had grown there during the night above the hard jawbone. ‘You don’t know how to fight, do you, darling?’ she whispered. ‘You’re pretty good at conquering but not so good at fighting. That’s the trouble. You can’t step back and defend yourself; you just keep on coming until you’ve got nothing left. Nothing left at all.’
‘What’s left?’ asked Sir Peter Robinson, looking up at his wife in the confusion of his first awakening. ‘What is it, Greta?’
‘Nothing. Nothing at all, darling. Except that it’s nearly half past seven and it’s time to get up and face the jury.’
‘Oh, Christ. Jesus Christ and all his saints. Christ.’
‘I agree we could do with some help, but perhaps that’s asking too much. Come on, Peter. I need you today. You know that.’
Sir Peter unclenched his fists with a visible resolve and got out of bed. Greta stood and stepped back into the middle of the room. She put her hands on her hips.
‘How do I look?’
‘Ravishing. Like, like …’
‘I’m waiting.’
‘Like Audrey Hepburn in that movie. What was it called?’
‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Well, let’s hope Judge Stranger likes old movies.’
‘Granger, Greta. Granger.’
‘Whatever.’
Two hours later, John the chauffeur was driving Sir Peter and his wife along the side of the River Thames in the black Daimler with the darkened windows, which insulated the minister of defence so successfully from the population that had re-elected his party into government three years before. Two short years ago, Sir Peter had been riding high with a beautiful wife in the country and a personal assistant named Greta Grahame, whose bright efficiency had made him the envy of all his colleagues in the Palace of Westminster. But today the Daimler did not stop at the House of Commons or at Sir Peter’s offices in Whitehall but purred on towards an unfamiliar destination under the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral: the Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court, built on the foundations of Newgate Prison. Less than fifty years ago, men and women had been sent by the Queen’s judges to their deaths after being convicted of crimes just like that for which Greta was about to be tried.
At the entrance to the courthouse the crews of photographers and journalists, with their long insidious lenses and soft woolly microphones, were waiting for Sir Peter and his wife to arrive.
Against all the odds, the prime minister’s support had kept Peter in his position for far longer than any of his friends or enemies had ever expected. But Peter knew that he could not continue to defy political gravity if the trial didn’t go Greta’s way. Everything he had achieved was hanging in the balance, threatened with imminent destruction. And who did he have to thank for this state of affairs? His son, Thomas. His own flesh and blood.
Thomas, who had had everything he ever wanted and was now repaying him with this. Thomas, the little bastard, who was so determined to bring everyone down because of what had happened to his mother. God knows, he wasn’t the only person who’d been hurt.
Sir Peter felt a surge of rage against his only child run through his body like electricity, and instinctively he gripped his wife’s arm.
‘God, Greta, I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. It’s not your fault,’ she replied, understanding that it was everything, the whole sorry mess that he was referring to and not the sudden grip, which had left a red mark on her slender wrist.
‘Fucking little rat. That’s what he is. A rat.’
Greta did not respond. Instead she turned to look out of 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 metres 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 working as Peter Robinson’s personal assistant.
He was as dreamy a boy as she’d ever met. He had fair hair the colour 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 aeroplanes 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 aeroplanes 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 defence. 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
