The King of Diamonds itadc-2

by Simon Tolkien

  ‘Fuck!’ Backing away from the window, Jacob vented his anger with a series of expletives, and then he noticed how Osman had risen up to his full height again, puffing out his chest like he had nothing left to fear, like he was back to being Titus Osman, the king of diamonds again. He laughed mirthlessly at Osman’s lack of understanding, realizing suddenly that the police were an opportunity for him, not Osman. They could be witnesses to Osman’s confession. Jacob was grateful for their arrival.

  ‘Get over by the window,’ he ordered, pressing the cold, hard muzzle of the gun against the back of Osman’s head to force him forward. Down below the two policemen were looking up at them through the mist.

  ‘Now tell them,’ ordered Jacob in a steely voice. ‘Tell them what you did. Tell them about my parents, about how you betrayed them to the Nazis, about how you sent them to Auschwitz on the cattle train. Tell them about my brother, about how you and Claes put a knife in his back. Tell them about Katya. Tell them, Titus. I’ll kill you if you don’t. I swear I will.’

  But Osman wasn’t listening. He thought of jumping, but it was too far and he was too frightened. ‘Help me,’ he shouted, not at Clayton but at the burly man standing behind him. ‘That’s what I pay you for.’

  Below, Wale backed away towards the police car without responding, leaving it to Clayton to do the talking. ‘Let him go,’ Clayton shouted up at Jacob. ‘Claes is dead. Isn’t that enough?’

  But Jacob wasn’t listening. All his attention was focused on the trembling man in front of him. ‘Confess,’ he demanded, thrusting the gun into the small of Osman’s back. ‘Confess and I’ll let you go.’

  ‘No,’ said Osman. ‘I’m an innocent man.’ He shouted out the words so that everyone could hear them: Jana and the servants on the other side of the courtyard; the policemen down below; and even Osman’s cat, who’d emerged from under the bed and now stood watching the man who was hurting her master over by the window, forcing him to cry out in pain. Suddenly Cara arched her back and launched herself through the air, hanging on to Jacob’s shoulder with her claws as she sank her teeth into his neck, and, shocked to the core by this utterly unexpected attack from behind, Jacob dropped the gun.

  Osman was onto the opportunity in an instant. Displaying an entirely unexpected athleticism for a man of his age, he dived to the ground, seized the gun in his hand, and rolled away towards the door.

  Jacob staggered back into the room, struggling to get a firm grip on the cat as she continued her assault, scratching at his face and neck. Finally he succeeded in getting both his hands around her squirming body and threw her against the far wall, from where she fell to the floor with a shriek and then disappeared back under her master’s bed.

  Jacob couldn’t see for a moment. Blood was spurting out from a line of cuts on his forehead, and he put up his hand to wipe it away. When he opened his eyes he found himself looking straight down the barrel of his own gun.

  ‘Don’t move. Don’t speak,’ said Osman. They were over by the bed, out of view of the people in the courtyard down below.

  ‘So you want to hear my confession, do you?’ he asked. His voice was a whisper. His head was inches from Jacob’s; it was almost as if he was kissing Jacob with his words, feeling for his fear with the gun. ‘You want to be my priest? You want to give me absolution for my sins?’

  Jacob looked at his adversary, saying nothing, waiting to hear the truth. Behind him the soft winter breeze blew into the white silk curtains through the remains of the broken window, and down below Adam Clayton took Franz Claes’s gun out of his pocket, looked at it a moment, steeling his courage to the sticking place, and then went up the steps and entered the house through the wide-open front door.

  ‘There’s a line I can hardly read here,’ said Trave. His forehead was furrowed with concentration as he held Katya’s little diary up to the light. ‘It’s smudged like she spilt something on the page, or maybe she was crying.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Vanessa, nearly beside herself with impatience. ‘Get on with it, Bill. Put me out of my misery, for Christ’s sake.’

  And Trave began to read again, slowly deciphering Katya’s scribbled words:

  My uncle was sitting at his desk with Ethan’s note in front of him. And he looked up at me and smiled and I knew the truth then once and for all. He didn’t need to admit it. I knew what he had done. To Ethan and to David and to Ethan’s parents and to all those Jews he didn’t save.

  ‘So you found something, little Katya,’ he said. He’d never called me that before. ‘A whisper from the past. But that’s all it is, you know. A whisper; a murmur on the breeze that nobody will ever hear.’ And he picked up the writing pad and threw it on the fire and I watched it burn. Burn my proof to ashes; my hope to dust.

  I looked at him and I spat in his face and he took out a silk handkerchief and wiped the spit away. He was still smiling, told me he was sorry it had come to this and even looked half-regretful when Franz took hold of me from behind and dragged me upstairs. I can still feel Franz’s cold hands on my body even now two hours later: killer’s hands they are, with no pity in them at all; no mercy. They’re going to kill me. I know they are. Just like they killed Ethan. So why don’t they get it over with? What are they waiting for?

  ‘They were waiting to get David Swain out of gaol; that’s what they were waiting for,’ said Trave, looking up. ‘So that they could set him up with the murder.’

  But Vanessa wasn’t listening. Her face had crumpled up, and her body shook with terrible sobs. Titus was a murderer and she was his accomplice. That was the truth. If she had gone to the police with what Katya had told her the girl would still be alive. She’d been Katya’s last chance, and yet she had done nothing, just left Katya to her fate.

  Titus had lied to her about everything — even perhaps about the existence of his dead wife and child, and she had believed him because she had wanted to; because she was flattered by his attention and wanted to be the new Mrs Osman, living the good life out at Blackwater Hall. Vanessa looked down at her hand and pulled Osman’s beautiful diamond ring from her finger and threw it away into a corner of the room. But it didn’t help; it didn’t change anything. The ring was still there, glittering by the skirting board, an indestructible symbol of her complicity, and she knew that she’d never stop feeling ashamed of herself until she was dead and buried and couldn’t feel anything any more.

  ‘You want to know why I betrayed your parents?’ asked Osman, staring into Jacob’s eyes.

  ‘Because they were Jews?’

  ‘No; they could have been Hindus for all I cared. Guess again.’

  ‘For their diamonds?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Osman. ‘You know the answer. Of course you do, but you don’t understand it. Look, look, where you threw them on the floor.’ Osman gestured with the gun down at the gemstones glittering like tiny stars all over the pale blue carpet at their feet.

  ‘They’re bits of rock. That’s all. They’re not alive,’ said Jacob. ‘Not like your victims were.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Osman. ‘You’re right. They’re not like flesh and blood; they don’t decay; they don’t rot. Diamonds are forever.’

  Osman smiled, and Jacob knew suddenly what was going to happen next. He thought of shouting but knew instinctively that he wouldn’t get the words out of his mouth before the bullet entered his head. Osman would be able to say it was in self-defence — everyone down below in the courtyard had already seen Jacob at the window threatening the owner of the house with a gun.

  ‘Do people mean nothing to you?’ Jacob asked, playing for time. ‘Katya was your flesh and blood. She was almost like your daughter

  …’

  ‘She was a fool. That’s what she was. Just like you. She couldn’t help herself: she had to peep through the keyhole; she had to go where she was forbidden — and for that there’s a price to pay; there’s always a price to pay. And you know what that price is, don’t you, Jacob?’ asked Osman. His voice wa
s gentle, almost sad, but the gun was steady in his hand.

  Jacob knew what was coming. He closed his eyes, shutting out Osman’s hateful face, waiting to hear the gun’s explosion in his ears — the last sound that he would ever hear, but instead he heard a familiar voice shouting ‘Stop’ somewhere to his left. He opened his eyes and saw Adam Clayton standing in the doorway, holding Claes’s gun shaking in his hands.

  And then everything happened in a whirl of motion that neither Clayton nor Jacob could really unravel afterward. Jacob threw his body against Osman as Osman turned and fired at Clayton, missing the policeman by a hair’s breadth. And in response, without thinking, Clayton squeezed the trigger of Claes’s gun and killed Titus Osman with a bullet that passed through his heart and flew out through the already-broken window of the bedroom, embedding itself in a high branch of one of the tall pine trees at the top of Osman’s drive. It was the first time that Clayton had ever fired a gun, and afterwards he hoped it would be the last.

  ‘Give me the diary, Bill,’ said Vanessa, holding out her hand. ‘I need to see what happened in the end.’

  At first Trave resisted. He was frightened for Vanessa, frightened of what the last entries in the dead girl’s diary might do to her peace of mind now that she knew who Osman really was and what he had done. In his moment of vindication Trave felt no sense of triumph at all. He just wished that none of it had ever happened, but, as he’d realized long ago, that was his lot in life. Like all murder detectives he always arrived too late.

  Reluctantly he handed the diary over. Vanessa had more right to it than he did after what she had gone through to get it. He sensed that she wanted to be alone, and so he went upstairs to phone Creswell. Osman and Claes and Claes’s sister needed to be arrested before anyone else got hurt.

  He put his hand on his wife’s shoulder briefly as he passed behind the sofa, feeling that he had never loved her as much as he did at that moment and yet had never been more powerless to make her happy.

  Once the door closed, Vanessa turned the pages quickly, looking for the entry for September 15th, the day of her encounter with Katya in the drawing room. She soon found it:

  September 15th:

  I cannot bear the pain any more. I feel like I’m going mad. I think it would be better to die than to carry on like this. But how? That’s the question. Perhaps I can steal the matches from Jana when she comes in to feed me and then we’ll die together, she and I. Burn until there’s nothing left. There would be justice in that. But I know that at the last moment I won’t be able to go through with it; I’ll draw back — I know I will. Why? Why, in God’s name, why? It’s not fear of death that stops me. I know that. It’s hope; hope for life. Hope is my curse. It always has been. I see that now. God, how much better I would be without it. How much…

  Vanessa realized that Katya must have written this entry earlier in the day, before she fought with Jana in her room and escaped downstairs, but none of those events was recorded in the diary. It was like that night had been a watershed. The entries on the pages that followed grew shorter, no longer a record of the days but rather sporadic thoughts and expressions of desperate emotion. Vanessa wondered whether Katya had worried about having the diary open too long at any one time, but it was more likely, she thought, that the girl had just run out of energy and perhaps at the end even hope. There was only one reference to Vanessa by name. It came two days later and consisted of only a few words, but they stabbed Vanessa to the heart with a pain that she felt would never go away:

  Will Vanessa help me? Did she listen to me? Or was all I did in vain?

  And the last entry in the book was undated — a one-line scrawl:

  What’s the bloody point?

  Vanessa closed the book and looked up at her husband standing wide-eyed in the doorway.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked, getting to her feet. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Claes is dead,’ he said. ‘He was hit by a lorry in Blackwater village. It must have been when he was chasing you. Died instantly apparently. Are you all right, Vanessa?’ he asked, noticing how his wife’s face had gone white with shock. She shuddered uncontrollably several times and then exhaled deeply.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, swallowing. ‘It’s a surprise. That’s all. He’d have killed me if he’d caught me. I know he would. And I never thought I’d hear myself say this about another human being, but I’m glad he’s dead. He was evil, Bill, wicked through and through. It wasn’t just Katya and Ethan whom he murdered, you know. There were many more in the war — Jews he helped send to the gas chambers without a second thought.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘He worked with Adolf Eichmann. I’m not sure in what way, but I know he did. Titus got angry with him at lunch today and said something about what the Israelis should do to Eichmann. It was deliberate, and Franz looked crazy suddenly, like he was going to kill Titus or something. I think that’s why they murdered Ethan, you know — because of what he found out in West Germany about Franz. That’s what Jacob told Katya and I think he was right.’

  Vanessa looked at her husband, noticing how he was shifting his weight from foot to foot, looking away from her to hide his discomfort.

  ‘There’s something else,’ she said. ‘Something you’re not telling me. It’s Titus, isn’t it?’ she asked, her voice rising hysterically as she instinctively guessed at the truth. ‘He’s dead too, isn’t he?’

  Trave nodded. And walked slowly over to his wife, putting his arms out to comfort her as she collapsed in tears on the sofa that they had bought together years before.

  ‘I’m sorry, Vanessa,’ he said. ‘You deserved so much better than this.’

  And he held her gently as her body was rocked with wild sobs and she gave way to a terrible grief.

  Cara waited under her master’s bed for several minutes after Clayton and Jacob had left the room. She sat wide-eyed in the darkness with her heart beating fast, waiting for the silence to return. And then, as the winter sun outside the window sank gently down toward the western horizon, she stepped out, picking her way carefully among the glittering diamonds scattered across the floor until she came to her master’s corpse. There she stopped, staring unblinking down into his dead eyes for a few moments before she laid herself slowly down, stretching her warm body over the blood-red stain that was still spreading out across the left side of his starched white shirt.

  CHAPTER 29

  Superintendent Creswell waited a moment to make sure he had his temper firmly under control and then turned round a large, green, leather-bound book and pushed it across his desk so that it was right in front of Inspector Macrae, who sat perched on the edge of his chair with a pained expression on his stretched, pale face.

  ‘This is Titus Osman’s accounts book for the last four years,’ said Creswell in a matter-of-fact tone of voice. ‘And here on the right is a page entirely devoted to you.’ Creswell tapped his forefinger where the name MACRAE was written in capital letters. ‘As you can see, there are three entries — fifteen hundred pounds on 4 October of last year, the day after Mr Swain was charged; five hundred pounds on 2 February, just after his trial began; and then another five hundred pounds just over a week ago. What was that last payment for, Inspector — seems a bit early for a third instalment?’ asked Creswell, looking up.

  ‘None of this has anything to do with me, and you know it doesn’t,’ said Macrae defiantly. ‘I’ve never taken any money off anyone.’

  ‘And nor has Constable Wale, I suppose. Adam Clayton tells me that Mr Osman shouted down at him — “Help me. That’s what I pay you for” — just before he died. Why would Mr Osman have said that, I wonder?’

  ‘How the hell should I know? I wasn’t there. Maybe he was talking about his taxes.’

  ‘Oh, please, Inspector. You can do better than that.’

  ‘No, I can’t,’ said Macrae angrily. ‘And I don’t have to. You’ve got nothing on me. Nothing!’

  ‘So you won’t mind us taking
a look in your bank account then? You’re quite sure we won’t find any large deposits round these dates?’ asked Creswell, pointing at the ledger.

  ‘You can do what you bloody well like,’ shouted Macrae, getting up, but Creswell sensed a burgeoning anxiety beneath his subordinate’s outward bravado.

  ‘All right, Inspector. We’ll do just that, and in the meantime you’re suspended on full pay. I suggest you enjoy the money while you can,’ said Creswell, nodding a curt dismissal.

  Macrae stood his ground for a moment, but in the end thought better of giving vent to his rage. He opened the door to leave, but then, just as he was about to go out, Creswell called him back.

  ‘I don’t know if you’ve heard about the new evidence that Bill Trave has dug up, but it appears that David Swain may well be an innocent man. And I warn you: if I find out that you or Wale laid a finger on that boy to extort his confession it won’t just be your job I’ll be after. You may have got away with using the thumbscrews in your last job, but you won’t get away with it down here. You understand that, don’t you, Mr Macrae?’ asked Creswell, emphasizing every word.

  Macrae shot a venomous look at the superintendent and then turned away, almost colliding with Clayton in the doorway. Macrae stared at his erstwhile junior with undisguised hatred for a moment and then suddenly put out his hand and shoved Clayton out of his way. And after that, without a backward look, he hurried away down the corridor and disappeared around the corner.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Creswell, coming out from behind his desk and helping Clayton to his feet.

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Clayton, brushing himself down. ‘I was just taken by surprise, sir. That’s all.’

  ‘Well, Macrae won’t be working here again if I’ve got anything to do with it,’ said Creswell angrily. ‘He can go and join Wale down at Land’s End Police Station if he ever gets his job back.’