The King of Diamonds itadc-2

by Simon Tolkien

  ‘He will have to be ready,’ said Claes in his strangely formal English. ‘The Russians will attack — maybe this year, maybe next. Khrushchev, Stalin — they are all the same.’

  ‘What do you mean — the same?’ asked Vanessa, irritated by Claes’s doomsday certainty. ‘Khrushchev condemned Stalin and the purges. Didn’t you read about that?’

  ‘It does not matter,’ said Claes with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘They are Bolsheviks. They want to make everyone else Bolshevik. We had the chance to stop them in the war, and now maybe it is too late.’

  ‘What chance? What are you talking about? Without the Russians Hitler would have won. Is that what you wanted?’ asked Vanessa, outraged. She threw down her napkin and pushed her chair back from the table, but Osman reached out, covering her hand with his, preventing her from rising.

  ‘Please don’t be upset, my dear,’ he said in a soothing voice. ‘This is all a misunderstanding. Franz did not want Hitler to win. He fought in the Belgian army when the Germans invaded. It’s just that he does not like the Communists. None of us do, including your President Kennedy.’

  Vanessa sat stiffly in her chair, keeping her eyes fixed on Claes, refusing to be mollified. ‘What do you say?’ she asked.

  ‘About what?’ asked Claes. Vanessa sensed the contempt in his voice, in the way he looked at her. She felt that underneath his rigid exterior he was spoiling for a fight just as much as she was.

  ‘About Hitler? About fighting the wrong enemy in the war?’

  Claes smiled thinly at Vanessa, apparently about to respond, but then he glanced away, unable to ignore Osman’s intent stare. ‘I did not want Adolf Hitler to win the war,’ he said slowly, sounding for a moment like a recalcitrant schoolchild reciting a lesson that he’d been required to learn by heart. On the other side of the table, Claes’s sister exhaled deeply and put her hand up to the small silver crucifix that hung from a slender chain around her neck, in what was obviously a habitual nervous gesture in such moments of crisis.

  Titus, however, had behaved as if nothing had happened, taking Vanessa by the arm and leading her along the corridor to the drawing room, where they passed the rest of the afternoon side by side on the sofa in front of a roaring fire, talking about faraway places where Vanessa had never been and to which Titus was eager to take her.

  But now, sitting on the grey wooden bench by the riverbank in the darkening late January afternoon, Vanessa realized once and for all that there could be no future with Titus as long as she kept Katya’s words a secret. She could only give Titus what he wanted if she went against his wishes and told what she knew to the police. Not to her husband but to the policeman who’d taken over the case. He didn’t have an axe to grind with Titus; he’d be objective, unlike Bill; he’d tell her what to do.

  Vanessa thought of telling Titus first but then decided against the idea. He’d make her change her mind, and she couldn’t cope with the guilt of remaining silent any longer. She needed to do what was right. He’d just have to understand.

  Vanessa wasted no time once she’d made her decision. She phoned the police station as soon as she got home and made an appointment to see Inspector Macrae the following day.

  It felt strange going into the building where her husband had spent his working life. Vanessa had rarely been there while they were together. Police functions tended to be held at a hotel near the station, and Bill had always wanted to keep his professional and personal lives apart. Vanessa thought with sudden sadness how lost he must feel now that he’d been exiled from this place perhaps forever, but then she hardened her heart, remembering how he’d shut her out after Joe’s death, leaving her alone with her grief while he worked in his office through the long evenings, only coming home to go to bed.

  Macrae came out into the entrance hall, introduced himself, and led her back down a series of twisting corridors to his office. She appreciated his consideration but nevertheless felt put off by the man. Sitting across the desk from him, she couldn’t put her finger on the reason. Perhaps it was the way his eyes seemed so cold and watchful, detached from what he was saying; perhaps it was the way he stroked his long fingers together as he listened. But Vanessa was determined not to let an unfounded aversion obstruct the purpose of her visit, and so she pushed it to the back of her mind, refusing to acknowledge its existence.

  She began to describe her encounter with Katya in the drawing room at Blackwater Hall four months earlier. It felt like a relief at first to be breaking her long silence and telling this stranger what had happened, but then, faced with her own disclosure, she felt a new surge of guilt for not having spoken before and stumbled over her words, realizing to her shame that tears had started to spring from her eyes.

  ‘I didn’t want to get Titus into trouble,’ she said. ‘He’s a good man, and he was just trying to help Katya, but I knew that Bill, my husband…’

  ‘Would take it the wrong way,’ said Macrae, finishing Vanessa’s sentence. She nodded her head and bent down, taking a handkerchief from her bag to dry her eyes.

  ‘I can understand your concern, Mrs Trave,’ Macrae continued. ‘Your husband hates Mr Osman, and now, meeting you, I think that I can understand why.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that you are a beautiful woman. Your husband cannot bear the fact that you have left him for Titus Osman, and so he wants to paint Mr Osman as a murderer when he is nothing of the kind.’

  Vanessa flushed, not knowing what to say. She resented Macrae’s personal remarks, and yet she realized that he was only articulating what she had long thought herself.

  ‘It is a tragedy,’ Macrae went on. ‘Your husband was once a very good policeman but he has lost his way, and now I fear it may be too late.’

  Macrae sounded regretful, but the expression in his grey eyes didn’t seem to match his words. She sensed a cruel humour in them, as if Macrae was secretly enjoying himself, but then with an effort Vanessa dismissed the impression as an illusion. ‘I came here to talk about Katya, not about my husband,’ she said firmly.

  ‘But your husband is the reason you didn’t come forward with the information before. Isn’t that right, Mrs Trave?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Vanessa reluctantly. It was true — mistrust of her husband was the reason why she’d stayed quiet, but the spoken acknowledgement felt like a betrayal. She was saying that Bill was not to be trusted, that he had lost his objectivity, that he had become dishonest; and she was saying it here, in this place where he had worked so hard for so many years to do what was right. Vanessa looked up and felt for a moment as if Macrae had read her mind, as if he entirely understood the significance of her admission and was savouring it with relish.

  ‘But I am telling you now,’ she said, trying to regain control of the conversation. ‘And I need your advice about what to do…’

  ‘To do?’ repeated Macrae, appearing puzzled. ‘There’s nothing you need do, Mrs Trave. You see, this case is very simple. David Swain killed Katya Osman. There are no conspiracies, however much your husband would like to uncover them. By all accounts Katya was a very unhappy person. She took drugs and generally abused herself in places where no self-respecting girl should go, and her uncle, to his great credit, tried to help her by looking after her at home. It is not his fault that she had become too unbalanced to appreciate his efforts and made wild allegations to you one evening, and he does not deserve to have those allegations aired in public. No, Mrs Trave, there’s been too much muddying of the waters already in this case. We don’t need any more.’

  ‘So we do nothing?’ asked Vanessa, surprised. It was the outcome she’d hoped for, and yet it left her strangely dissatisfied, unable to reconcile all her soul-searching and guilt with this easy happy ending.

  ‘Just that — nothing at all,’ said Macrae with a smile. ‘Justice will take its course up in London, and you and Mr Osman will live happily ever after at Blackwater Hall. He’s a very lucky man.’

  ‘Nothing is deci
ded yet,’ said Vanessa defensively, getting up to go. There was nothing she could put her finger on, but once again she had the impression that Macrae was taunting her, enjoying her discomfort.

  ‘Of course not,’ he said evenly, holding out his hand. Reluctantly she took it, noticing again the policeman’s long, tapering fingers and his effeminately shaped nails. She made to let go immediately, but he held his grip, looking her in the eye. ‘A word of advice, Mrs Trave,’ he said softly. ‘You’ve done well to come to me, but now I would let the matter rest. Idle talk costs lives — remember what they told us in the war.’

  Macrae dropped Vanessa’s hand and walked over to the door, opening it to let her pass. A burly overweight man in police uniform was standing outside, apparently waiting to come in. He’d cut his chin shaving, and a big sticking plaster disfigured his already ugly face.

  ‘Ah, Jonah,’ said Macrae, addressing the big man with easy familiarity. ‘Please, could you show Mrs Trave out?’

  Wale glanced over at Vanessa with a leer when he heard the name and then turned without a word and began walking away down the corridor. Vanessa followed in his wake, thinking that there was something half-bestial about the man’s lumbering gait. And then out in the foyer he looked her up and down and smiled — a thin, cracked smirk of a smile that set her teeth on edge.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said more curtly than she intended. But he just grinned and turned away, disappearing back into the interior of the police station.

  Vanessa didn’t quite know what to feel in the days that followed her visit to Inspector Macrae. She’d at last done what her conscience demanded and the result had been better than she could have hoped. The policeman in charge of the case had expressly told her to let the matter rest. Now she could get on with her life, unencumbered by any self-reproach. She wouldn’t even need to tell Titus that she had gone to the police. And yet she remained troubled. It had all been too easy. She still felt that questions needed to be put to Claes and his sister, and she remembered with distaste the way Macrae had seemed to take such an unnatural pleasure in Bill’s downfall. Her silence had started to feel like a kind of complicity — a further betrayal of her husband with another of his enemies. But then the sense of accountability made her angry. Bill was the one to blame, she told herself — for the failure of their marriage, for the implosion of his career. He had always been stubborn and difficult to work with — it was why he’d never got promotion, dooming them to life on a financial shoestring. And now she couldn’t allow him to hold her back. Titus offered her a second chance at happiness, and she had to grasp it with both hands before it slipped away.

  Over the weekend the long-predicted snow finally began to fall, covering the world in a dazzling white brightness. It was beautiful, especially down by the frozen river in the University Parks, where groups of laughing students were out skating on the ice, their long, coloured scarves trailing behind their shoulders and their breath hanging in the still winter air like smoke. Vanessa watched them from the bench beside Rainbow Bridge, where she’d felt so despondent a few days earlier. Now she felt alive in every pore of her body, and, leaning down, she scooped up a ball of snow into her gloved hand and pressed it to her forehead, enjoying its sudden cold bite. And then she walked back through the avenues of black trees, delighting in the crunch of the thick-textured virgin snow beneath her feet, got into her tiny car that was parked outside the gates, and drove out to Blackwater Hall, following the golden-red glow of the sun as it sank down into the western sky.

  She was early, but Titus had already opened the front door and come down the steps by the time she’d turned off the engine. He’d obviously been watching out for her from the drawing room window, and it warmed Vanessa’s heart that he should look forward to her arrival with such anticipation.

  He was wearing no hat or coat, and she laughed when she got inside the house, seeing how the snowflakes had settled on his thick hair and beard, making him look like a fashionable Santa Claus dressed in an expensive suit and tie.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, taking her by the hand and leading her down the corridor to his study. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’

  ‘Something that can’t wait?’ she asked, laughing at his excited impatience.

  ‘Something that can’t wait,’ he agreed, opening the door.

  It was a colour photograph lying face-up on the desk. The surface was otherwise entirely empty except for a telephone and a green-shaded reading lamp near the corner. The silver-framed photograph of Katya that Vanessa had noticed on a previous visit had now disappeared.

  Looking down, Vanessa saw that it was a picture of an enormous square cushion-shaped diamond with innumerable facets, all glittering with different shades of white and dark light. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, staggered by the apparent size of the stone.

  ‘Yes, and extraordinary when you see it in person and know its story,’ said Titus quietly. ‘Because the great diamonds — and this is one of them — each have their own history. What they have in common is that they travel across the world, passing from one lustful hand to another, and that they tend to possess their owners rather than be possessed by them. That is their nature. Perhaps now people understand this and that is why so many of them are locked up in museums.’

  ‘Like this one?’

  ‘Yes. It’s in the Louvre. They have it sitting on an electrically controlled black velvet plinth in a case made of bulletproof glass. Below there is a specially made steel vault, and at a flick of a switch it rises into the light in the morning and descends back into the darkness when the museum closes at night. No one has even tried to steal it,’ said Titus with a smile.

  ‘Does it have a name?’ asked Vanessa.

  ‘Oh, yes. All the great diamonds have names. This one is the Regent. It was found by a slave worker who dug it out of the Partial mine on the Kistna River in India at the beginning of the eighteenth century,’ said Titus, taking obvious pleasure in the pronunciation of the foreign place-names. ‘The stone’s value was obvious — I mean it was the largest diamond ever found in the world up to then, and the slave was determined to try to keep it for himself, so he cut a gash in his leg and hid the jewel in the bandages he wrapped around the wound. And then, I don’t know how, he managed to escape from the mine and found his way to the coast, where he made a deal with an English sea captain to take him to Madras in return for half the value of the stone when sold. But the captain was greedy and arranged to have the slave thrown overboard, and so, as so often, the diamond’s history began with a murder…’

  Osman paused, looking out of the window toward the last golden glow of the sunset as it faded from the sky above the tall black pine trees on the other side of the snow-covered lawn.

  ‘Go on,’ said Vanessa impatiently. ‘What happened next?’

  ‘It was bought by Thomas Pitt, the British governor of Fort St George in Madras, and he sent it back to England and had it cut.’

  ‘Cut?’

  ‘Yes. Cutting is what changes a diamond, Vanessa: it releases the inner fire. Until there was cutting, the fire was invisible. In the Middle Ages no one understood what lay behind the dull, greasy outside of a rough diamond. The Indians valued the stone for its extraordinary hardness, not its beauty. And then someone somewhere began to use diamonds to cut diamonds, and the fire was released. First there was the rose cut — facets on a flat base like an opening rosebud, and then at the end of the seventeenth century a cutter in Venice invented the brilliant cut, and after that, nothing was the same. This stone, the Regent, was the first great diamond to receive the brilliant cut — fifty-eight facets, thirty-three above the girdle, twenty-five below

  …’

  ‘What’s the girdle?’ asked Vanessa, interrupting.

  ‘The middle of the stone. Above is the crown, below is the pavilion. And the facets bend the light as it enters and leaves the crystal, reflecting and refracting it so that the diamond dazzles and achieves its full glory. It took two years to cut the
Regent, and at the end it was almost flawless. It went from four hundred and ten carats to one hundred and forty and a half, and almost all the cleavage pieces were sold to Peter the Great, the emperor of Russia, but several small rose-cut diamonds remained, and this — this is one of them.’

  Pausing for effect, Titus took a small blue velvet box out of his pocket and placed it on the palm of Vanessa’s hand. With trembling fingers she opened it and looked down at the most beautiful bright white diamond ring she’d ever seen.

  ‘I love you, Vanessa,’ said Titus. ‘And I want you to be my wife. Say you will, please say you will.’

  The diamond was like a sparkling magnet drawing Vanessa’s eye down into its liquid depths. It made her giddy, made her want to throw all her anxiety and caution to the wind. It was the promise of a new world, a second chance at life: all she had to do was nod her head and say yes. And so she did.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I will.’

  And quickly, before she could change her mind, Titus took the ring from the case and slipped it on her finger. Then, taking Vanessa in his arms, he kissed her long and hard and then held her close to his body, feeling her heart beating against his chest. She leaned her head down against his shoulder, abandoning herself, and Titus stroked her long brown hair and looked over her head toward Cara, his cat, who had been lying curled up in an armchair in the corner of the room throughout the afternoon. The cat gazed up at her master for a moment and then began to purr, seeing the unmistakable expression of triumph dancing in Titus’s bright blue eyes…

  ‘Why is it called the Regent?’ asked Vanessa later in the evening when they were eating supper by candlelight, sitting side by side at the end of the long dining room table on the other side of the corridor from the study. There had been no sign of Claes or his sister all day.

  ‘Because in 1717 Thomas Pitt sold the diamond to the Duke of Orleans, the regent of France, and thereafter it became part of the French crown jewels. King Louis XV first wore it in public in March of 1721 to receive the Turkish ambassador, and it was said at the time that it surpassed in beauty and weight all the diamonds that had ever been seen in the West before that date. And afterwards the next king’s wife, Queen Marie Antoinette, had it set in a black velvet hat…’