The King of Diamonds itadc-2

by Simon Tolkien

  ‘The bars on her window were for her safety,’ said Osman patiently. ‘And her door wasn’t locked, Inspector. If it had been, Mr Swain wouldn’t have been able to get into her room tonight, would he?’

  ‘Perhaps not. But then can you explain why she seems to have been suffering from malnutrition and has needle marks all up one arm?’ Trave spoke harshly, not bothering to keep the anger out of his voice.

  ‘The marks are from the drugs she took when she was in Oxford before I got her back here last month, and she is thin because she refused to eat. It wasn’t for want of trying. It broke my heart to see her like that, but she was stubborn like her mother, my sister.’

  ‘So I assume you got professional help?’

  ‘Yes, of course. My doctor has been here regularly to see her.’

  ‘Is he a psychiatrist?’

  ‘He’s a doctor, a good doctor.’

  There was an uneasy silence. Once again Clayton found himself puzzled by the way that Trave was pursuing the investigation. Certainly there were questions that needed to be asked about the deceased’s physical state, but there was no real evidence that she’d been imprisoned in her room, and there was nothing to justify Trave’s ill-concealed hostility to Osman and his family.

  ‘Can you tell us what you know about what happened here tonight?’ Clayton asked, speaking for the first time.

  ‘Certainly,’ said Osman, transferring his attention from Trave to the younger policeman with a smile. ‘I went to bed at about eleven. I heard gunshots…’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Several. I can’t be sure. I was asleep. I got out of bed and opened the door of my bedroom. I heard Franz shouting my name, and then at the same time someone was rushing past me in the corridor. He was running very fast, and instinctively I backed away into my bedroom or he would have knocked me over.’

  ‘Did you see who it was?’

  ‘No, he was too quick.’

  ‘He?’

  ‘I had the impression it was a man. As I say, he was very quick.’

  ‘Were the lights on?’

  ‘Yes. It was dark outside when I opened the door, and so I turned on the light in the corridor. I wish I hadn’t now as it must have helped Swain find his way downstairs.’

  ‘And where is your bedroom, sir?’ asked Clayton.

  ‘Just above where we are now, off the first-floor corridor. It’s on the far left side of the house as you face it from the front.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Clayton, making a note.

  Osman looked benevolently at Trave’s assistant, and Trave looked even more irritated than before. ‘So what happened next?’ he asked, taking over the questioning.

  ‘There was quite a lot of noise coming from downstairs, but then it stopped; and, at about the same time, Franz came down the flight of stairs nearest my bedroom. As you probably know, there is a staircase at each end of the house leading from the first to the second floors, but only one central staircase coming up from the ground floor, and I’d heard the intruder running down that one,’ said Osman, glancing over at Clayton, who was busy writing in his book. ‘Franz had his gun with him, and so we came down here and found the window broken over there. It seemed like Swain had gone, and so I left Franz to look through the other rooms while I went back upstairs and found Katya. She was…’ Osman’s voice broke, and he covered his face with his hand for a moment, mastering his emotion.

  ‘How do you think Swain knew where he was going?’ asked Trave, once Osman had had a chance to compose himself. ‘Has he been here before tonight?’

  ‘Never with my permission. Once without, but that’s all as far as I know. Katya had him in the house when I was away on business, and she even took him in her bedroom. I was very angry when I found out about it afterwards.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it is my house. I make the rules,’ said Osman, as if he was stating the obvious.

  ‘But why wouldn’t you let him in the house in the first place?’ asked Trave. ‘What didn’t you like about Mr Swain?’

  Osman paused, thinking about his answer before he gave it.

  ‘My niece has always had a tendency to mix with the wrong kind of people,’ he said slowly, choosing his words with care. ‘It became a great deal worse after Ethan’s death, when she got into quite a lot of trouble in Oxford, but the problem was there before. Ethan’s death hit me particularly hard because I had thought that Katya had at last found someone suitable.’

  ‘But in what way was Mr Swain unsuitable?’ asked Trave, persisting with his question.

  ‘He was without roots, without academic background; he was living hand-to-mouth.’

  ‘And Ethan?’

  ‘He had been to university in Antwerp and done well. He’d lost his parents, but I knew why, and his grandmother, who brought him up, is a solid, respectable person. Ethan had a future — a bright one, until Swain took it away from him. I was right about Swain, you see. He turned out to be worse, much worse, than I thought he was: nothing more or less than a cold-blooded murderer. But being right doesn’t help in the end. Katya is dead, and all I ever wanted to do was protect her. You see, she was my last blood relative. Everyone else died in the war. Franz was my wife’s brother, and so he and Jana are family too, but it is not the same.’

  ‘And yet you were able to save other people you knew from the Nazis, were you not, Mr Osman?’ asked Trave, leaning forward. ‘People like Ethan Mendel and his brother.’

  ‘Yes, I was lucky: I had the money and the contacts, and so when the deportations began in Belgium I was able to help some of my Jewish friends to escape.’

  ‘But you couldn’t save everyone; you had to choose, didn’t you? Who to help, who to leave behind,’ Trave went on insistently. ‘Like in that picture you’ve got up there over the mantelpiece. It’s from Exodus, isn’t it? The Angel of Death going through the streets, passing over the doors of those who were to be saved, exercising the power of life and death. Is that why you bought that picture, Mr Osman? So that it would make you think of having that power again?’

  Osman looked furious for a moment, fighting to retain his self-possession. But then he smiled crookedly, as if he’d thought of the perfect riposte.

  ‘I have the picture in here because it reminds me every day of what happened in my country,’ he said slowly. ‘And because it is beautiful, a true work of art. I wouldn’t expect you to understand that, Inspector, but Vanessa certainly thinks it has quality. She was admiring it just the other day, and I have great faith in her judgement.’

  Trave seemed to flinch as if he’d just been hit. His cheeks flushed, and Clayton saw how his boss’s fists clenched hard on the surface of the desk. He remembered the rumours, the station gossip from the year before about Trave’s wife walking out on him. Vanessa was her name. Clayton was sure of it. Was that the same Vanessa whom Osman was talking about now? It certainly seemed like it.

  The door opened, but not to a human visitor. It was a cat, long and sleek and black with two distinctive white markings on either side of its green eyes. It was a most beautiful creature, thought Clayton, who had never been an animal lover. Coming to a halt beside Osman’s chair, the cat arched its back, as if delighting in its own suppleness, and then jumped into Osman’s lap with an easy, precise leap and sat facing Trave across the desk.

  ‘Hullo, Cara,’ said Osman, scratching the cat delicately behind its ears. ‘I was wondering where you’d got to.’ The cat purred, blinking its eyes at the two policemen, and Clayton had a sudden sense that Trave was now the one on the wrong side of the desk, that it was the inspector who was being interviewed, not the owner of the house.

  ‘Cara spends much of her time outside, hunting in the woods. And I like that, that she’s independent. But today it’s no fun for her out there with the grounds full of strangers,’ said Osman, looking out through the broken window toward the sunrise. ‘Better for her to stay inside, I think. Do you need me for anything else, Inspector? If not, I’ll go and
give Cara her breakfast.’

  Trave shook his head, and Osman got up to leave, but at the door Trave called him back.

  ‘There is just one last thing, Mr Osman. Do you have a burglar alarm?’

  ‘Yes, but I only use it when I’m away.’

  ‘And why is that? You have many valuable items in this house, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes. Perhaps I am too trusting. But — how is it you English say? — hindsight is a wonderful thing. I’m here if you need me, Inspector.’ Osman smiled and went through the door, preceded by his cat.

  ‘How bloody convenient,’ Trave burst out once the door was closed. ‘The bastard might just as well have left the window open.’

  ‘I don’t know about that. Aren’t you exaggerating a bit, sir? A lot of people don’t use their alarms when they’re at home, you know,’ said Clayton mildly.

  Trave grunted, continuing to look thunderous, and once again Clayton felt disturbed by his boss’s obvious animosity toward the occupants of the house. Questions had to be asked, but the interviews with Titus Osman and his family had seemed at times more like interrogations. Just now, for instance, Trave’s questioning of Osman’s motives for helping Jews in the war seemed like a gratuitous personal attack for which Clayton could see no justification. Trave’s approach to the case made no sense, particularly when there was an obvious suspect with motive aplenty who was now on the run from the police. There had to be an explanation. Did it have something to do with Vanessa, Trave’s wife, who’d left him for another man? Clayton remembered how Trave had seemed to get so angry when Osman mentioned her name. What was Osman’s connection to Vanessa? Clayton wondered. He knew that sooner or later he was going to have to ask his boss what it was all about. He couldn’t do his job properly if he didn’t have the full picture. But at the same time Clayton shied away from the prospect. Trave was a private man, one of the most private men Clayton had ever met, and the thought of invading his boss’s privacy on a subject as sensitive as his failed marriage made Clayton feel distinctly uneasy. He’d have to find the right opportunity, but it certainly wasn’t now, not with Trave sitting behind Osman’s desk, looking like thunder.

  Later that morning Trave and Clayton went for a walk down to Osman’s boathouse, where Ethan Mendel had met his end two years before. Trave’s mood seemed to improve as soon as he was outside the front door of the house. He rubbed his hands together, took a deep draught of the fresh morning air into his lungs, and set off across the lawn at a cracking pace, with Clayton following in his wake.

  Soon they entered the woods. Above their heads squirrels were running in the tall trees through which the sun shone down, dappling the ground below with a play of shadows and light. Trave and Clayton were walking on a thick carpet of pine needles that deadened their footsteps, and their voices seemed unnaturally loud in the surrounding silence. The search team had obviously moved on to the other side of the road.

  Trave seemed to know where he was going. At a fork in the path he took a left turn without hesitation and then stopped dead in his tracks so that Clayton had to suddenly brace himself to avoid falling over his superior officer. Osman’s cat was sitting on a low, leafless branch of a pine tree that jutted out from its fellows, half-blocking their way. Clayton laughed uneasily. It was a ridiculous idea, but the creature really seemed like it was guarding the path. It sat entirely motionless, staring at them out of its unblinking eyes until Trave picked up a handful of pine needles and threw them at the cat’s head. With an enraged squawk, Cara leapt from her perch and disappeared into the trees.

  ‘Gone to report me to her boss I expect,’ said Trave morosely as they carried on down toward the lake.

  ‘Why do you dislike him so much?’ asked Clayton, remembering how he’d asked exactly the same question at the end of their interview with Claes earlier that morning.

  ‘Because he’s so smooth and insincere, because he’s a snob, because he’s so bloody pleased with himself, because he’s got that iceman, Claes, in tow. What do you want me to say?’ asked Trave angrily. His irritation seemed to have returned in spades following their encounter with the cat.

  ‘I don’t think he was insincere,’ said Clayton, taken aback by his boss’s venom. ‘He seemed genuinely upset about his niece. That’s what I thought anyway.’

  ‘He’s a better actor than the other two. That’s all,’ said Trave shortly. ‘Didn’t you notice how Claes and his sister seemed so unsurprised at the way I went after them? It was almost as if they expected it. And what about all their monosyllabic answers when you’d expect them to want to help? Jana’s more worried about the bloody ornaments than a girl with a bullet in her head at the top of the house.’

  ‘She’s shocked.’

  ‘Maybe. But I’d say they all sounded rehearsed, like they were reading from a script. And don’t tell me they’re foreign, that English isn’t their first language, because I know that.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t,’ said Clayton stubbornly. ‘And if it’s all so rehearsed, then why didn’t Osman say he saw Swain in the corridor? Isn’t that what you’d have expected?’

  ‘Because that would be over-egging the pudding, wouldn’t it?’ said Trave impatiently.

  They took a turn in the path and came out beside the lake, leaving the woods behind. At once Clayton was struck by the utter stillness of the dark blue water. Its glassy surface stretched perhaps half a mile across to a line of weeping willow trees on the far shore, and beyond that a meadow, where a herd of black-and-white cows stood in a group, dully eating the grass in the shadow of a grove of conifers growing further up the bank.

  ‘Does all that belong to Osman too?’ asked Clayton, pointing at the lake.

  ‘No. The boundary of his property is this path as it runs along the side of the lake and then through the trees over there to a fence by the road. But the boathouse is his, even though he never seems to use it,’ said Trave, pointing to a single-storey black wooden building with a tarred convex roof that they were now approaching. Clayton had not noticed it at first since it was set well back from the water and was thus heavily camouflaged by the surrounding trees.

  The boathouse was set on wooden struts, and an old rowing boat, pushed into the crawl space underneath, was partially visible. Above, the door was unlocked, and they went inside. There was a deal table and two chairs in the centre of the room but no other furniture apart from a bookshelf in the corner, its shelves empty except for a few well-worn Agatha Christie paperbacks. The air smelt musty as if from long disuse, but the electric lightbulb overhead worked and there was a sink and a small refrigerator behind a partition at the back.

  ‘It’s even got a phone line,’ said Trave, picking up the receiver mounted on the wall by the door. ‘Line’s dead now,’ he added. ‘But it wasn’t when Ethan died. Claes called the police and the house from here while he was holding Swain at gunpoint — very convenient.’

  ‘Where was the body?’ asked Clayton.

  ‘Out there,’ said Trave, pointing through the open door toward the lake. ‘Face down, half in the water, half out. He’d been stabbed in the back, but the killer took the knife out and threw it in the lake, so there were no prints.’

  ‘Tell me about him, about Ethan,’ said Clayton, sitting down on one of the chairs at the table and looking up at Trave expectantly. It had to be why his boss had brought him here, after all — to tell him about what had happened here before, to fill him in on the background. He couldn’t say he wasn’t interested.

  ‘He was twenty-four years old when he died,’ said Trave. He remained standing by the door, looking out at the morning sunlight glittering on the surface of the lake, and he spoke in a slow, flat voice, as if he was describing distant events. ‘He was a Jewish boy from Antwerp, which is, as you probably know, the world centre for diamonds — for cutting them, polishing them, selling them, you name it. And before the war it was the town’s heyday. Everyone wanted Antwerp diamonds. Osman made his fortune trading in them, and from what I can gath
er, Ethan’s father did well too. The two of them were friends. But then the Nazis came, looking for Jews, and Osman started helping them escape. Across the border into Switzerland; and then, when that became too difficult, down through Vichy France and into Spain; and, from there, by boat to Cuba, places like that. I’ve no doubt he was well rewarded for his pains.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ asked Clayton suspiciously.

  ‘I don’t. It’s an assumption. Call it my natural cynicism if you like. Anyway, sometime in 1942 Ethan and his younger brother, Jacob, and their grandmother got away, but the parents waited. I don’t know why. And when they went the next year they got caught crossing the border with false papers and were sent to Auschwitz. By the end of the war they were dead. I don’t know the circumstances, but one can assume the worst.’

  Trave paused, noticing how Clayton had turned away, biting his lip. Trave wondered whether Clayton had seen any of those films that they’d all watched at the end of the war, films about Auschwitz and Treblinka, Majdanek and Sobibor, those terrible places in the east where the world had changed forever. Clayton was young — he couldn’t be more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight, Trave thought, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t seen the pictures. It was only a few months ago that the Israelis had captured that bastard, Eichmann, living it up in Argentina.

  ‘And so the war ended and the two brothers came back to Antwerp with their grandmother,’ Trave went on in the same flat monotone. ‘Ethan went to university and got a very respectable degree, just like Osman told us this morning, and then sometime towards the end of 1957 he took his savings out of the bank, crossed the Channel, and came to stay here with his family’s benefactor, Titus Osman. His fairy godfather,’ Trave added with a dry laugh.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Good question. According to Osman, Ethan was here because he wanted to thank Osman personally for saving his life, but that wouldn’t have required more than a short visit. He stayed on because almost immediately after his arrival he began a passionate relationship with Osman’s niece.’