The King of Diamonds itadc-2

by Simon Tolkien

  ‘Drink,’ he said. ‘You need it. We both do.’

  Vanessa did as he asked. The alcohol did make her feel better, but she continued to look up at Titus expectantly.

  ‘Two questions, Vanessa, which both need answers,’ said Titus. He spoke slowly, choosing his words with care. ‘As to the first one, no, no one in this house is trying to kill my niece, least of all Franz. And yet it doesn’t surprise me to hear that this is what she believes. She is being kept in this house against her will, and without the drugs that she craves, she has to use her mind and think, which is terrible for her.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because she is what you English call highly strung and her thoughts are full of pain — the death of her parents in the war, the loss of her home, the murder of Ethan, her guilt over his death.’

  ‘Why should she feel guilty? It wasn’t her fault that that man Swain went crazy.’

  ‘No, but she thinks it is. And I can understand why she feels responsible. If she’d not started a relationship with Ethan, then Ethan would still be alive today.’

  ‘But that makes no sense. We’re not Hindus. People have to be allowed to decide who they want to be with.’

  ‘Like you and me,’ said Titus with a half smile. ‘I wonder what your husband would have to say about that.’

  ‘He doesn’t like it — of course he doesn’t — but that doesn’t mean he thinks people shouldn’t be free to choose.’

  ‘Even when they’re married?’

  ‘Yes, even when they’re married. And your niece wasn’t,’ Vanessa added pointedly.

  ‘Yes, you’re right,’ said Titus with a sigh. ‘Katya shouldn’t feel guilty, but that doesn’t change the fact that she does. I just wish I could get her to see things differently. As I said, she’s her own worst enemy.’

  ‘Well, what about getting someone else to talk to her? Maybe a psychiatrist could help?’

  ‘Don’t you think I’ve tried?’ said Titus bitterly. ‘She won’t speak to anyone.’

  ‘There must be something you can do.’

  ‘Only what we are doing. Giving her our love and keeping her out of harm’s way. And hoping that time will heal her wounds, of course. I’m a great believer in that.’

  Titus was silent, lost in his troubles, but Vanessa stayed quiet, certain that he had more to say. It was unusual for him to talk about himself and she didn’t want to interrupt his train of thought. And yet when he spoke again it was to change the subject.

  ‘You asked me about Franz,’ he said. ‘I am sorry you don’t like him. He’s not an easy person, I know. And he’s not at his best with women. But it’s not because he doesn’t like them or doesn’t like you. I assure you of that. It’s rather that he feels uncomfortable because he doesn’t know what to say. You see, his mother died when he was very young and his father was away, and it was really left to his older sister, Jana, to bring him up. She did her best, but she couldn’t be his mother — if nothing else she was too young. And then afterward he was in the army…’

  ‘The Belgian army?’

  ‘Yes. For ten years before the war. He did well, but it left its mark. I suppose you could say he has all the virtues and the vices of the well-trained military man. He can be awkward in company, especially with the opposite sex, and he tends to see everything in — how do you say? — in black and white. But he is loyal and true; a man of honour. And there is nothing he would not do for me, Vanessa.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because years ago I was able to help him when he needed help, because once upon a time I was married to his sister, because…’

  Titus broke off in midsentence as if turning away from an unwanted memory. Vanessa couldn’t remember how she had first heard that Titus was a widower, but she’d known it for as long as she’d known him. And yet his dead wife had always been an invisible presence. There were no family photographs in the house that she’d ever seen and he’d never mentioned her until now.

  ‘What was her name?’ Vanessa asked. Her voice was quiet, almost a whisper, and she felt for a moment like a child pushing open a forbidden door.

  ‘Amelie.’

  ‘Was she beautiful?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you miss her?’

  ‘Sometimes. My child too. But it is painful and so I try not to think about them.’

  ‘Your child! I never knew you had a child.’ Vanessa was rigid with astonishment.

  ‘Yes, a son like you, but younger. It is part of what draws me to you, I think, Vanessa. That we have both suffered, both lost what was dear to us. Life is never the same after that.’

  ‘But why didn’t you tell me before? When I told you about Joe?’

  ‘Because that conversation was about you, not me. I wanted to know how you felt, not to tell you about me.’

  Vanessa sat back in the sofa, trying to cope with the confusion of her emotions. It made no sense that Titus should not have told her about his loss when she told him about hers, and yet it also made perfect sense because of the person he was. She vividly remembered the evening sitting up late in front of the fire in her flat when she’d described the terrible night of the motorcycle accident to Titus and told him in broken words about the shroud of meaninglessness that had hung over her ever since. She remembered the way he’d listened to her so quietly, so intently, so that she felt able to talk about what had happened, about what it meant, for really the first time since the accident. And she realized now that she couldn’t have talked like that, couldn’t have unburdened her soul, if the conversation had been about him as well as her. She felt a sudden wave of emotion, of gratitude toward this man about whom she still knew so little.

  ‘What happened to them? Your wife and child?’ she asked, leaning toward Titus with sympathy and concern written all over her face.

  ‘They died in the war. Back at the beginning when the Germans came in. Nothing special about it. There was a lot of bombing and many people lost their families back then. You go out, you go to work, you come back, and what do you find? Rubble. Yes, you English have the right word for it. Le mot juste. In the morning a house, a home; in the evening rubble.’

  Titus had closed his fist while he was speaking, and now he suddenly opened it empty, like a circus conjuror. And with a bitter, twisted smile he got up and went over and stood by the window, looking out. It was almost dusk and hard to see past the lawn and the rose beds to the lake and the line of trees beyond.

  ‘ Tramonte the Italians call it,’ he said musingly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The twilight, the in-between time. It means “across the mountains” in English. And I suppose you could say that that’s where I’ve come from, Vanessa. Across the mountains. Bringing what I could out of the flames. Katya, my niece, more damaged than I am, whom I must try to protect however much she hates me for it, and Franz and Jana. Yes, Franz, Vanessa,’ said Titus, looking at her apologetically. ‘He is my family too, and I cannot turn my back on him even if I wanted to.’

  ‘But I wasn’t asking you to do anything like that,’ said Vanessa, raising her hands in protest. ‘Your life is your own; it’s not for me to interfere.’

  ‘But that’s where you’re wrong, my dear,’ said Titus, coming back over to the sofa and raising her right hand to his lips. ‘I want you to interfere; I want you to be a part of my life. Not just now but for always.’

  Vanessa looked into Titus’s bright blue eyes and knew exactly what he was saying. She felt like a swimmer being borne out to sea on a riptide. She was falling in love with a man whom she hardly knew. Whom she hardly knew — an inner voice repeated the words inside her head, holding her back almost against her will.

  ‘I’m married, Titus,’ she said in a soft voice.

  ‘Yes, and your husband hates me,’ said Titus with a sigh.

  ‘No, he doesn’t. He just hates what you represent. Bill’s always been a fair man. It’s one of the things he prides himself on.’

  ‘Well, then maybe he
’ll be fair to us and give you a divorce. Won’t you ask him, Vanessa?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Vanessa, sounding upset. It distressed her to hear Titus talking about Bill. Because she’d spoken no less than the truth. She did believe her husband was a fair man. He might be unable to express his emotions or to cope with his son’s death; he was certainly unbearable to live with; and yet he was fundamentally decent — good even. It wasn’t that she wanted to go back to him. She was sure of that, but she and Bill had been through a lot together; they’d been happy once, and something inside Vanessa rebelled at the thought of the divorce court, of a legal end to everything that had gone before.

  And yet here was Titus offering her a new life, entirely unlike the one she’d left behind. He would take care of her; love her; encourage her to express herself in a way in which her husband had never been able to do. He was wealthy, influential, a man of the world. There would be no more scrimping and saving at the supermarket, no more worrying about the next bank statement. Surely her marriage was over? It was eighteen months since she’d left her husband. Did her independence, her tiny little flat, mean so much to her that she’d turn down the chance of becoming Mrs Osman? Or was it simply that she no longer believed in happiness, didn’t want to put the possibility of it to the test?

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said softly. ‘I don’t know, Titus. You must give me more time.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘All the time that you need, dearest Vanessa. It’s enough for me that you will think about it. Love will take care of the rest.’

  Titus got to his feet with a smile. He was not discouraged. He’d watched the storm of conflicting emotions pass across Vanessa’s face, and he sensed how close he was to obtaining his heart’s desire.

  CHAPTER 5

  ‘Why do you want a gun?’ asked Eddie as they completed another circuit of the exercise yard. Several hours had gone by since they had reached their agreement to escape, but they were both still in a state of unnatural excitement.

  ‘Because that bastard Claes had one,’ said David. ‘On the night I didn’t kill Ethan Mendel. You remember.’

  ‘So you’re going back there?’

  ‘Yeah, but not for long. You don’t have to take me if you don’t want to.’

  ‘No, I’ll take you. It’s on the way out of Oxford. But what you do in there’s your business.’

  ‘Fine.’

  Here, in the exercise yard, they were in the very centre of the prison and the high walls of the wing buildings surrounding them formed a barrier against the wind that was blowing hard across the city outside, but they still wore the collars of their jackets turned up high against the unseasonable cold, leaning their heads close together when they spoke to hear what the other was saying. Halfway round each circuit, David glanced up at the top of the rec room block on the other side of the yard. It seemed impossibly high to come down from, but at least the roof was reasonably flat so there was less risk of slipping down the tiles on the other side and breaking one’s neck on the ground below.

  And Eddie had been right about the scaffolding. A gang of workmen had just been finishing carrying the poles in through the door to the gymnasium on the ground floor when they’d come out for afternoon exercise, and now David could see their heads moving across the barred rec room windows up at the top of the building as they assembled the scaffold.

  ‘How are we going to get in there? The rec room’s going to be out of bounds while they’re painting it,’ he asked, leaning toward Eddie again and pointing across the yard.

  ‘Yeah, but not the gym,’ said Eddie. ‘They’re painting the rec room first and then the gym. That’s what I heard and it makes sense if you think about it. One’s on top of the other, and they don’t want both out of use at the same time; otherwise, what are they going to do with us? So all we’ve got to do is slip up the stairs from the gym during evening association and then wait until everyone’s back in their cells.’

  ‘Except us! How the hell are we going to get past the head count?’ asked David, suddenly raising his voice so that several prisoners nearby turned and looked over at them with curiosity. He couldn’t believe that he hadn’t thought of this before. The screws went round the cells, landing by landing, every evening before lights-out counting the prisoners, making sure they were all there. Except that he and Eddie wouldn’t be; they’d be hiding under a dust sheet over in the rec room, waiting to be caught. Like sitting ducks.

  ‘Keep your fucking voice down, can’t you?’ said Eddie angrily, pulling David over toward a set of steps leading up to B Wing, where they sat down. ‘People have ears, you know. Of course I’ve thought about the count. Do you think I’m an idiot? We’ll make dummies and put them in our beds, and then we’ll go at the weekend when they’re understaffed. Association’s later on Fridays and Saturdays and they do a lot less checking.’

  ‘Yeah, but what happens if they talk to us, ask us something?’ asked David, refusing to be reassured.

  ‘Well, we’ll be asleep with the lights out and we’ll just have to hope they don’t. Like I told you before, you need some luck to succeed with something like this.’

  David sighed, thinking about the succession of events that had brought him to where he was now. If there was one thing he wasn’t, it was lucky.

  Uncharacteristically, Eddie went to sleep early that night, but David tossed and turned in his bunk, thinking of Katya. Now that he had allowed himself to start thinking of escaping his prison walls, David’s obsession with the girl who had betrayed him had returned in full force. Once again the vision of her locked in naked embrace with that Belgian bastard returned to haunt him. The thin, hawkeyed prosecutor at his trial hadn’t known that he’d looked in at them through the grimy boathouse window; he’d only guessed. But it had been a bull’s-eye guess. David had lied at his trial — said he’d never seen them together. How could he have done otherwise? But he couldn’t hide behind the lie now. The memory of that spring afternoon returned in Technicolor to haunt him, and he saw them again, coupling like a pair of beasts on the ground. Two or three seconds he’d looked. No more than that, but it was enough for the memory to last a lifetime.

  David remembered how he’d fallen back from the windowsill and run blindly down to the lakeside, fallen on his knees, and vomited his lunch down into the grey water. There they were behind him in the boathouse intertwined, interlocked. In the same place where Katya had met with him the year before. But they hadn’t writhed on the floor like animals. Kissing, holding hands, but nothing like that. It wasn’t an act of love; it was an act of hate. That’s what it was. A way of saying he didn’t exist. And it was the same hate she’d shown him in the courtroom when she’d read out his letters with such contempt, when she smiled at him after he got his sentence and was led off to the cells like a dog. He hated her himself now; with every fibre of his being he hated her, just as much as he’d loved her before. She’d trampled on him, robbed him of everything he had, and now she was going to have to look him in the face and tell him why. Suddenly still, David closed his eyes tight shut, clenching his body in anticipation of that moment.

  Two nights later, working by torchlight in the darkness, they started work on the dummy heads. Eddie had been busy in the interim purloining what he needed, and, not for the first time, David was impressed by his cellmate’s resourcefulness. He had got carrots and flour from the kitchens and a spare prison-issue blue-and-white shirt from the laundry, which he had torn into small pieces.

  ‘That’s for the inside of the heads when I’ve got the outsides ready,’ said Eddie, who was standing over the sink in the corner mixing his ingredients. Page by page, he was tearing up O’Brien’s Jesus for Prisoners and adding it with practised hands to the flour and water mush to make papier-mache.

  ‘What are the carrots for then?’ asked David curiously.

  ‘To give the heads some flesh colour.’

  ‘What about hair?’

  ‘Paintbrushes! I got two out of the rec
room last night. The workmen leave them behind when they go home,’ said Eddie, looking even more pleased with himself than usual as he pulled back his mattress to reveal his ill-gotten gains. ‘You can start pulling the bristles out while I’m doing this.’

  ‘How was it over there?’ David asked. They’d been working steadily for a little while and David had now finished with the first paintbrush and started work on the second.

  ‘Great,’ said Eddie, breaking off from humming a discordant version of Elvis Presley’s ‘Love Me Tender’ as he looked up from the sink. ‘They’ve got all the dust sheets we need in there, which helps because we can’t use the sheets in here — we’ll need them for covering the dummies. The scaffolding’s up near the ceiling, just where we want it, and there’s an old half-broken tubular chair in a corner that’ll work perfectly for a grapple. You know, to get over that first wall. It’s looking good, Davy, really good.’

  An hour later Eddie was ready with the first head. He’d sculpted out a crude nose and ears and now he used a tube of glue that he’d stolen from God knows where to add bristles from David’s pile to make hair and eyebrows.

  ‘It’ll do,’ he said, turning the head from side to side. ‘We can use a pen to touch them up at the end after they’ve dried.’

  ‘How long’ll that take?’

  ‘Twenty-four, thirty-six hours maybe. Don’t worry. We’ve got time. It’s the screws finding them that bothers me. We’ll have to keep them under the bunks and hope there isn’t a cell search. That’s all.’

  ‘Hope we’re lucky, you mean?’

  ‘Yeah, and stop sounding like a doubting Thomas all the time, okay? It’s getting on my nerves.’

  It was unlike Eddie to sound so irritated for no reason. The tension must be getting to him too, David realized.

  They went as planned on the Saturday night. When the cell doors were opened for evening association, Eddie had the dummies ready in the bunks. They’d broken up their two wooden chairs and covered them with their jackets and bunched up bedclothes to simulate their bodies, and then they’d laid the papier-mache heads in profile on the pillows. The effect was better than David had anticipated, but Eddie, eyeing his handiwork with a professional detachment, was less confident.