The King of Diamonds

by Simon Tolkien

  ‘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 gather, 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.’

  ‘Who had been seeing David Swain . . .’

  ‘Exactly: meeting Swain here in this pretty little boathouse for romantic trysts whenever her uncle was looking the other way,’ said Trave musingly, looking around the spartan room. ‘Anyway, to cut a long story short, Swain got crazy about being thrown over and wrote Katya a lot of very unpleasant letters, which she later produced at his trial.’

  ‘Were they threatening?’ asked Clayton.

  ‘Oh yes, very. Bursting with motive, if that’s what you mean,’ said Trave with a smile. ‘David Swain was the living definition of an angry young man.’

  ‘So what happened next?’

  ‘Ethan left. I don’t know why, and I don’t know where he went exactly, although the stamps in his passport show that he spent three days in France and then just over a week in West Germany before he came back on an early morning flight from Munich to London. He arrived here at Blackwater at about twelve o’clock according to Osman. And five hours later he was dead.’

  ‘Did Osman know he was coming?’

  ‘Yes, apparently Ethan called ahead from Heathrow – the telephone records confirmed that afterward. Katya wasn’t home when he got here – she was out all day shopping with Jana, but Osman told me when I took his statement that Ethan seemed happy and excited to be back. They ate lunch together, and then Ethan drove into Oxford in the afternoon – and that was the last Osman saw of him. He didn’t see Ethan come back – he said that that must have been because he was working in his study at the back of the house – and he could shed no light whatsoever on the note that Swain received later that afternoon.’

  ‘The note? What note?’ asked Clayton, not following.

  ‘The note Ethan supposedly left stuck in the doorbell outside Swain’s lodgings in Oxford asking Swain to meet him at the boathouse at five o’clock. It was found on Swain after his arrest, and he gave it as his reason for being where he was.’

  ‘Standing over the body,’ said Clayton.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And then running away until Claes fired his gun in the air to stop him,’ added Clayton, remembering what Claes had told them up at the house.

  ‘Yes. And Swain didn’t argue with that at his trial – he said he panicked. I know it looks bad,’ said Trave reluctantly. ‘Everything pointed to David Swain as the murderer – motive, presence, even the knife we got out of the water was similar to other kitchen knives in his flat. It was one of the easiest cases I’ve ever had to put together, and maybe it was that that bothered me. It was as if everything fitted together too well. The people here, Claes and Osman, had an answer for everything just like they do now, and I couldn’t shake them on the facts, however hard I tried. And then Swain didn’t help himself of course. He sacked his barrister a month before the trial, which didn’t give the new one much time to get up to scratch, but not even the best counsel could have done much with a case like that. The jurors came back unanimous after less than two hours. Not a reasonable doubt among them. The verdict didn’t surprise me; it just left me feeling uneasy – like an itch that wouldn’t go away. Afterwards I tried to put the case behind me. You have to do that in this job or you lose focus and nothing gets done. But I couldn’t for some reason . . .’

  ‘Why?’ asked Clayton.

  ‘A few things: the way Claes just happened to come round the corner of this boathouse with a gun in his pocket at exactly the time specified in the note; the fact that Katya was sent out shopping for the day; but most of all, I think, it was the note itself that worried me,’ said Trave reflectively. ‘Whichever way I looked at it, it made no sense that the first thing Ethan did after he got back from his European trip was to go and see a person who hated him, a person whom he didn’t even know, and that then, instead of suggesting a meeting in Oxford where he already was, he left a note asking Swain to come out here at five o’clock the same day.’

  ‘Maybe he was going to propose to Katya and wanted to straighten things out with Swain before he did,’ suggested Clayton.

  ‘But he didn’t need to,’ said Trave, warming to his theme. ‘Ethan had no responsibility to Swain. Katya had finished with Swain long before. The note nagged at me. I couldn’t make any sense of it, and Swain couldn’t shed any light on the bloody thing either when I went to see him . . .’

  ‘You went to see him!’ repeated Clayton, sounding surprised. ‘When?’

  ‘A couple of times last year. He was still up in London then, in Brixton Prison pending transfer. But he wasn’t any help – just went endlessly on about the injustice of it all and how much he hated Katya Osman. And so I came back out here a couple of times, even though I knew I was wasting my time – I got nowhere with Osman and Claes, and there was no evidence to justify a search warrant, although I doubt I’d have found anything worthwhile even if I’d got one. The diamond business is a secret world at the best of times, and Osman’s got a castle
wall built around his share in it. I thought I was on to something at one point when I found a neighbour of Swain’s who said she’d seen a man with a beard hanging around near Swain’s flat on the day of the murder, but then she didn’t recognize Osman when I showed her his photograph, and so that was that.’

  ‘Where did you get the picture?’ asked Clayton.

  ‘Out of a magazine. Our friend up at the house is quite a celebrity in these parts, you know – always willing to reach into his pocket for a good cause, always available to cut a ribbon, say a few words. You know what I mean,’ said Trave with a twisted smile.

  There it was again – the unexplained animosity toward the owner of Blackwater Hall. It alarmed Clayton more each time he saw it. What Trave had told him about the case was interesting, and there was certainly something strange about the note the dead man had left for Swain, but Clayton had seen enough police work to know there were always a few loose threads left hanging at the end of every investigation. The note didn’t make Swain’s conviction unsafe. In fact, the more Clayton heard about it, the more the Mendel murder sounded like an open-and-shut case. And yet Trave hadn’t been prepared to let it drop. Why? Had the answer got something to do with Trave’s wife and this man, Osman? Once again Clayton remembered how Trave had looked in the study when Osman had said the name Vanessa. Clayton vividly recalled the way his boss’s fists had involuntarily clenched on the desk, the scarlet flush that had spread across his face, and Osman’s look of smug self-satisfaction as if he’d just downed an opponent with a knockout blow. Clayton didn’t much like the man either, but that wasn’t the point. This was a murder inquiry he and Trave were conducting, and personal feelings couldn’t come into it. It had to be without prejudice.

  Trave could be a hard taskmaster, and the last thing that Clayton wanted was to get on the wrong side of his boss, but he felt he had no choice in the matter. He had to ask Trave about his wife’s connection to Osman if only to get some reassurance before they went any further with the investigation.

  ‘Mr Osman mentioned something earlier that I wanted to ask you about,’ Clayton began nervously.

  ‘Yes, what?’ asked Trave, sounding distracted. He was obviously still thinking about Ethan’s murder.

  ‘Well, he said something about someone called Vanessa, and I wondered . . .’

  Clayton broke off, alarmed by the change in his boss’s demeanour: the name had registered on Trave’s face like an electric shock.

  ‘You wondered what?’ asked Trave, staring angrily at his subordinate.

  ‘I wondered if . . . well, if it was Mrs Trave he was talking about,’ Clayton finished lamely.

  Trave was silent for a moment, breathing heavily, and then, when he spoke again, his voice was hard and cold.

  ‘Yes, Constable, Titus Osman was referring to my wife, the same lady who has left me and taken up with him, as you must know full well given that you choose to spend your time listening to station gossip instead of doing your job.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. I asked you because I didn’t know – about her and Osman, I mean. I knew she’d left, that she was no longer with you, but I didn’t know the other. I promise you, I didn’t,’ said Clayton, stumbling over his words.

  ‘Well, now you do. What of it?’ asked Trave brutally.

  ‘Well, it’s just, it worried me, sir, that it might affect things, the inquiry . . .’

  ‘Cloud my judgement, you mean?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Well, it won’t. Are you satisfied now?’

  Clayton nodded, and he would have said more, but for the fact that they were at that moment interrupted by someone tapping on the half-open door. It was Watts, one of the detectives who’d been helping organize the search.

  ‘What do you want?’ asked Trave furiously, rounding on the newcomer in the doorway.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Watts nervously. ‘It’s just I thought you ought to know. The switchboard called. A man that matches Mr Swain’s description hijacked a car in Blackwater village a few hours ago and made the people in it take him to the railway station.’

  ‘The station – which station?’ asked Trave.

  ‘Oxford. They think he took the first train to London apparently. Oh, and he’s got a gun. He threatened them with it.’

  ‘A gun. Anything else?’

  ‘Yes, they say he was wounded – there was blood around his left shoulder and he was holding his arm like it was hurting him, apparently.’

  Behind Trave, Clayton got to his feet. It was the news they’d been waiting for – independent evidence that Swain had been here during the night – and armed too. Now surely there could be no doubt about the identity of their main suspect.

  ‘Put out an alert,’ said Trave. ‘Nationwide. You know the drill. And Adam, you come with me,’ he said, turning to Clayton. ‘We’ve got work to do.’

  * * *

  Titus waited until the police had cleared out of his study before he telephoned Vanessa and told her what had happened.

  Vanessa was aghast, remembering Katya’s desperate face in the drawing room ten days before, the way she’d struggled so hard to convey her message. ‘They’re trying to kill me,’ the girl had said. And now she was dead, murdered in her bed.

  ‘I need to see you,’ said Titus urgently. ‘Can I come over?’

  Twenty-five minutes later he was sitting beside her on the sofa in her living room. The weather had turned cold, and she’d lit a fire before Titus called so the room was warm. But he still shivered, as if the shock of what had happened was only now beginning to penetrate his skin. He was different to how she’d ever seen him before – like something inside him had broken, and his voice had a faraway feel, even though he was sitting beside her.

  ‘It’s such a waste,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Such a terrible waste. She’d have got better if she’d just had a little bit more time. I know she would. She had so much to live for, and now it’s as if she never was. You should have seen her, Vanessa. Like a rag doll in her bed, with all the life blown out of her by that swine. And her beautiful face such a mess too, such a damned, God-awful mess.’

  Titus shuddered, and Vanessa reached over and took his shaking hand, wishing she could find some way to comfort her lover, but she could think of nothing to say to mitigate his pain. Death of the young was unbearable. Because it was avoidable, because of what might have been and now would never be. She knew these things from bitter personal experience.

  ‘It’s how we parted that I cannot bear,’ said Titus. It was obviously hard for him to speak, and the words caught in his throat. ‘If she’d had a bit more time to recover, then we could have been friends again like we were when Ethan was alive. She’d have got her hope back. But instead she saw me as her enemy; she wouldn’t understand why I was keeping her at home. And your husband doesn’t understand either, or rather he doesn’t want to understand.’

  ‘My husband. What’s my husband got to do with it?’ asked Vanessa, not understanding the connection for a moment.

  ‘He’s the man in charge, what you English call the officer in the case,’ said Titus bitterly. ‘I know – it’s crazy,’ he added, seeing the look of surprise on Vanessa’s face. ‘Anyone else would have handed the investigation over to another detective given his personal interest. But oh no, Bill Trave knows best.’

  ‘What’s he done?’ asked Vanessa, feeling alarmed.

  ‘Interrogated me and my family like we were the criminals. That’s what. He accused us of deliberately starving Katya, of hurting her. And he even asked Jana, my sister-in-law, why she didn’t take communion or go to confession when she went to church. Can you imagine? The other policeman stopped him, or I don’t know what else he’d have said.’

  ‘That’s not like Bill,’ said Vanessa, shaking her head. ‘He always took pride in his work. That’s the one thing that kept him going, I think.’

  ‘Well, maybe his jealousy of us has changed all that. I am sorry for what has happened to him. Tr
uly I am. I bear him no ill will, but I need him to be a policeman now, to catch this maniac who has done this terrible thing, not use my niece’s death as an opportunity to . . .’

  ‘Settle the score,’ Vanessa said, finishing Osman’s sentence for him when he couldn’t seem to find the right word. ‘I have to say I find all this hard to believe, Titus. That Bill should be so unfair. He was on the radio while I was waiting for you to come over, appealing for help finding Swain. It’s a pity you didn’t hear him. It might have made you feel better.’

  ‘It does make me feel better,’ said Titus, sounding just as upset as before. ‘Once Swain is under lock and key then maybe everything will settle down. But, in the meantime, Vanessa, I need to ask you something. A favour. You have to help me.’

  ‘Help you how?’ asked Vanessa, looking puzzled.

  ‘Help me by not telling your husband about what Katya said to you. She was out of her mind with misdirected anger and grief that night like I told you before, and she didn’t know what she was saying. The evidence against Swain is overwhelming. He was in Katya’s room with a gun – Franz and Jana heard him fire it. But your husband refuses to see it that way. I know it’s wrong, but I didn’t feel able to tell him that I was keeping Katya at home against her will. It was for her own good, but I know he’d just have used it against me. I know what he’s trying to do – he’s looking for any excuse to build a case against me because he hates me, Vanessa. You know he does.’

  Titus looked hard at Vanessa, willing her to look him in the eye and give him what he asked, but she looked away into the fire, knitting her brow. She didn’t like it. She’d been brought up to tell the truth and this felt all wrong. But then again Titus wasn’t asking her to tell a lie, only to keep information to herself, and maybe the thought of it made her feel bad just because anything less than one hundred per cent truthfulness always made her uncomfortable. And Titus was right – the case against this Swain man did seem overwhelming. Why did she need to make Titus’s life hell for no reason just when he needed time and space to recover from the terrible wound that Swain had inflicted upon him? What would it do to their relationship if she got Titus into trouble just when he needed her the most, if she denied him the first major sacrifice he’d ever asked of her? Vanessa still hadn’t made up her mind whether she wanted to marry Titus, but she had no doubt in her mind that she didn’t want to lose him.