The King of Diamonds

by Simon Tolkien

  ‘A what?’

  ‘I know. Not the word I’d have used either,’ said Macrae, raising his eyebrows in amusement. ‘But the point is you’ve got nothing to worry about. Swain’ll swing just like he deserves to, you’ll get the girl, and Trave’ll drink himself to death thinking about it.’

  ‘That’s the part that appeals to you, isn’t it?’ said Osman with a contemptuous look.

  ‘Yes, I’m not ashamed of it,’ said Macrae evenly. ‘We’re trying to see justice done. That’s the difference between us and Trave. He’s a self-righteous prig, and he deserves exactly what’s coming to him.’

  ‘Because he was in your way up the greasy ladder, I suppose?’

  ‘Not as much as he’s in yours,’ said Macrae with a dry smile. Turning to the hovering waiter, Macrae made his order, but Osman waved the man away. He didn’t know what it was about Macrae that irritated him so much or why he should feel so demeaned by their association. It was enough that he did, and he had no intention of prolonging their meeting any longer than he had to.

  ‘What about Jacob?’ he asked, pouring himself another drink from the bottle but purposefully leaving Macrae’s glass empty.

  ‘He’s gone to ground, but we’ll find him.’

  ‘You’d better. Before he finds me. He’s got a gun, remember.’

  ‘I remember,’ said Macrae, sounding unperturbed. ‘Do you think it was him or Trave who sent Swain’s lawyers the stuff about your brother-in-law?’

  ‘I don’t know. Both of them maybe. I’m not a clairvoyant,’ said Osman, making no effort to conceal his irritation as he got up from the table. ‘Just find Mendel, okay? Before he does any more damage.’

  Without waiting for an answer, Osman extracted an envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket, dropped it on the table, and then walked away without a word of farewell. Outside, he almost ran into the burly figure of Jonah Wale, who was standing on the pavement. Wale said hello, but Osman barely nodded in response as he got into his Bentley, letting out a sigh of relief as Franz Claes put the car in gear and drove away.

  Macrae watched Osman’s departure through the window and then picked up the envelope and glanced with satisfaction at its contents before turning his attention to the pâté de foie gras that he had ordered to precede the coq au vin. It gave him pleasure to know that Jonah was watching him through the window as he ate.

  Three and a half miles away ex-Inspector Trave was eating too – a cold dinner cobbled together from the remains of the two previous nights’ dinners, washed down with a glass of water from the tap. He ate mechanically, registering neither pleasure nor displeasure as he chewed and swallowed the food. His thoughts were elsewhere, focused obsessively on Katya’s missing diary. The last few days had been exhilarating: chasing down the elusive memory in his mind, finding the line about the diary in the transcript of the girl’s evidence, and getting the information about the hiding place from Swain of all people, right under Macrae’s nose. He’d acted on a hunch and been proved correct, but that didn’t mean the diary still existed. Trave knew from personal experience that happy endings were few and far between in real life. If the diary contained anything of note, Osman had almost certainly found it when he and his lackeys spring-cleaned Katya’s bedroom after her murder, or before when he caught his niece looking through his things. Because that’s what must have happened, Trave thought. She must have found something out, or Osman wouldn’t have needed to have her killed. It was an article of faith for Trave now that Osman was responsible for his niece’s death. He couldn’t conceive of any other explanation, and it mattered to him not one jot that the only person who shared his view was Jacob Mendel, who was now in hiding somewhere, a fugitive from justice.

  The diary had probably been destroyed. Going in search of it was probably a wild-goose chase. But a probability was not a certainty. There was a chance it was still there, sitting inside a hollowed-out book in Katya’s book-case, waiting to be discovered. There had been big books as well as small books on the shelves in Katya’s bedroom – hardbacks as well as paperbacks. Trave was sure he remembered them under the framed picture of her parents at the seaside that the doctor had asked him about. But was the right book there? Waiting?

  There was only one way to find out and that was to look, but Trave knew it was hopeless for him to even consider going out to the house himself. He had no power to search openly, and Osman and Claes would be doubly on the watch for burglars after Jacob’s antics three days earlier. No, the only person with a chance of getting in and out of Katya’s room undetected was Vanessa.

  Trave felt sick every time he thought of asking his wife to look for the diary, and yet he couldn’t leave the idea alone. He remembered the cold hatred he’d felt for Jacob when the young man admitted to persuading Katya to search for evidence, and now here he was contemplating asking his wife to do the same. Except that Vanessa didn’t need to be caught. A few minutes would be all it would take. Surely to God she could find an excuse to go upstairs for just a couple of minutes. The risk was minimal if she kept her wits about her.

  He had to know one way or the other, Trave realized. And so he had to ask her. It was that simple. He’d already made his decision. For better or worse.

  Vanessa didn’t answer her phone when he called her in the morning, and so he went over to her flat to find her. It was in a little street behind Keble College that he’d never been to before. She’d given him the address when she first moved there so that he could forward her mail, but this was the first time that he’d ever visited it. There was no one home, and so he wandered the streets aimlessly, wondering what he would find to do to fill his days now that he was officially an ex-policeman. He made a pint of beer and a cheese sandwich in the Gardeners’ Arms last half the afternoon and found Vanessa just returned from London when he knocked on her door again at half past three.

  ‘Hullo, it’s me again,’ he said, stating the obvious as he stood awkwardly on her doorstep, twisting his hat in his hands. He felt horribly nervous suddenly, with his heart beating hard and a hot red flush spreading across his face. It didn’t help that Vanessa didn’t seem pleased to see him. She seemed like someone he didn’t know any more, dressed in a black business suit and high heels, with her hair tied up above her head.

  ‘This isn’t a good time,’ she said. ‘I just got back from court, from giving evidence.’

  ‘How was it?’

  ‘Bad. I had to go. I know that. But I wish I hadn’t – had to, I mean.’ It was unlike Vanessa to muddle her words, and Trave saw how she looked upset, like she might be going to cry, and wished that he had chosen another time for his visit.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I phoned earlier but you weren’t home. I wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t urgent.’

  ‘All right, I suppose you’d better come in,’ she said reluctantly, standing aside to let him pass before following him down the narrow hall into a small living room at the end of the corridor. Vanessa’s pictures covered the walls – places he knew and didn’t know rendered in vivid lines and bright colours. The paintings shocked Trave. He thought of the dark, unremarkable interior of the house two miles away up the road that they had shared together for more than twenty years. It bore no relation to this place. He’d never guessed at the energy, the creativity locked inside his wife; he realized with a jolt that he’d never helped her try and release it.

  ‘They’re beautiful,’ he said, pointing at the walls. ‘You should never have given it up.’

  ‘Well, it’s not too late to start again,’ she said and then stopped, not intending her words to sound so harsh. She was overwrought. That was the problem. And her husband’s visit felt like an invasion. Her flat, her carefully created new surroundings, were an attempt to start again, but they were also a barrier against the past, against memories that she couldn’t cope with in the present. Just his presence posed a mortal threat to her peace of mind.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Like I said before, this isn�
�t a good day. What is it you want, Bill? Why are you here?’

  ‘I found out something – about Katya Osman. She kept a diary.’ Trave spoke hesitantly, sitting perched on the edge of a low armchair and looking up at Vanessa where she stood, taut and unforgiving, with her back to the window. It was partly her lack of warmth that made him nervous, but he also wondered once again whether he had any right to ask her to place herself in danger on what might well be a fool’s errand.

  ‘She mentioned it in her evidence at the first trial,’ he went on when Vanessa did not respond. ‘And it might still exist. In her bedroom out at Blackwater. It might show what really happened,’ he ended lamely, unable to bring himself to ask Vanessa outright to go out there and look for the diary.

  ‘What really happened!’ Vanessa repeated her husband’s words with an angry, exasperated edge to her voice. ‘What really happened is that David Swain went and put a bullet in his ex-girlfriend because she didn’t love him any more, and now he hasn’t got the guts to own up to it.’

  ‘I don’t believe that,’ said Trave quietly.

  ‘No, of course you don’t. You believe in some crazy conspiracy theory about Titus because you can’t stand the idea of me being happy. Don’t I deserve a life even if you’re determined not to have one? Don’t I?’ Vanessa shouted, stamping her foot.

  ‘Yes, of course you do,’ said Trave, taken aback by his wife’s sudden fury. ‘I told you I want you to be happy.’

  ‘You know I waited outside that courtroom for two hours today while Swain finished giving his evidence, and then I was in there for five minutes,’ she went on, refusing to be placated as she gave full vent to her frustration. ‘That’s all it took – five minutes to burn my boats and go right back to where I started. Titus’ll never marry me now,’ she burst out, unable to control her bitterness.

  ‘Well, if so, he’s a fool,’ said Trave. ‘If he loves you, he’ll understand you went to court because you had to. Because Swain’s jury needs to hear all the evidence. There can’t be any justice otherwise. It’s the same reason why I want them to see Katya’s diary. Except I can’t get it. Only you can do that.’

  ‘No, I can’t,’ Vanessa snapped back. ‘Can’t you get it through your head, Bill, that Titus and I have quarrelled? I’m not welcome at Blackwater Hall any more, and so I can’t go snooping round there even if I wanted to, which I don’t.’

  ‘He’ll make up with you. You know he will,’ said Trave stolidly. ‘And I’m not asking you to snoop around. I just want you to find an excuse to go up to Katya’s bedroom for a couple of minutes – it’s halfway down the corridor on the top floor, looking out to the front. All you’ve got to do is look in one bookcase and see if there are any large books with hollowed out insides. And if you don’t find anything I won’t ever bother you again. I promise.’

  ‘Why? Why should I?’

  ‘Because then you can be happy. Look, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Osman’s innocent; maybe Swain did kill Ethan and Katya; or maybe Claes did it and acted alone or with his sister. If you find the diary you’ll know what happened one way or the other. You wouldn’t have gone to London today if you didn’t have doubts.’

  Vanessa looked hard at her husband and then shook her head. ‘No, Bill,’ she said, getting up from her chair. ‘I’ve done enough. If Titus comes back I shall marry him, and you know why? Because I don’t need any diary to tell me who he is. He’s a good man, an innocent man, and if you’ve any decency, you’ll stop hounding him and leave him alone.’

  Trave felt sick. He wished he hadn’t come. He hadn’t been prepared for the reality of Vanessa’s new separate existence. There was something obscene about its negation of their shared past. He had no place here among these pictures, which screamed reproaches at him from every wall, and if he was to survive, he knew that he needed never to come here again.

  But at the door, as he was leaving, he summoned his strength for one final effort. ‘It’s not for me that I’m asking you,’ he said. ‘It’s for the dead who can’t defend themselves: for Ethan and Katya – and yes, for the soon to be dead, for David Swain too. Think of them before you make up your mind.’

  ‘I have,’ she said. ‘And I’ve thought of the living too.’

  There was nothing more to say, and so she closed the door, shutting her husband out as he stood looking back at her, committing the lines of her face to his memory one last time.

  Vanessa was already upset after her ordeal in London, and Trave’s visit had made the strain almost intolerable. She’d had to appear convinced of Swain’s guilt in order to get her husband out of the flat, but beneath the surface she felt deeply confused, at sea amid a storm of conflicting emotions. She took a walk; she had a drink; she turned on the radio – but nothing helped. Try as she might, she couldn’t escape her recollection of that windowless Old Bailey courtroom with all those silent strangers hanging on her every word. Yes, it had only taken five minutes, but they had been five of the longest minutes of her life. She hadn’t been prepared for the sombre formality of the place – the wigs and the gowns and the antique language – and she hadn’t anticipated what it would be like to come face-to-face with David Swain for the first time. Until today he had been only a name. But now he was real – a living, breathing human being sitting only a few yards from where she stood giving evidence, a young man who probably only had a few weeks left to live, even though he was perfectly healthy. Sooner rather than later he was going to be turned off a gallows with a black hood over his head and his hands tied behind his back and left to swing until he was finally cut down. That was why the spectators’ gallery in the courtroom was filled to the rafters – it was the same reason why great crowds of people had always turned out to watch hangings when they were still carried out in public: a fascination with death that was as old as humanity itself.

  Until today Vanessa hadn’t had to contemplate any of this, but now, by coming to court, she knew she’d become part of the process. She was involved, complicit, whether she liked it or not. And it was as if Swain instinctively knew this too. His eyes had never left her face all the time she was in the witness box, and she’d found she couldn’t resist his stare. She kept looking back at him as she answered the barristers’ questions; she could see the whiteness of his knuckles on the brass rail in front of the dock as he leaned over it toward her; and, as she walked past him down the aisle at the end of her evidence, she read his lips as he mouthed the word ‘thank you’ toward her, not once but twice.

  Now she couldn’t get his face out of her mind, however hard she tried. He might well be guilty; in fact he probably was, but yet she couldn’t be sure. Bill had been right – she’d gone to London partly to assuage her conscience and partly, as he’d said, because she had doubts about Swain’s guilt, and denying her uncertainty to her husband had only served to make her doubts more insistent than before. They weren’t doubts about Titus – just like she’d told Trave, she was quite certain that he had had nothing to do with his niece’s murder, but what about Franz Claes? She remembered the cold, disgusted way she’d caught him looking at her sometimes in unguarded moments – in the rear-view mirror of the Bentley or when she entered a room. And she knew it wasn’t just her he hated; it was all women, except his sister perhaps, and she was as sexless as a woman could be. What must Claes have made of Titus’s passionate niece, Vanessa wondered, when Katya started asking awkward questions, poking her nose into Claes’s private affairs? Because Claes had secrets. That much was obvious. After quarrelling with Titus that evening at Blackwater, Vanessa had bought all the newspapers she could lay her hands on. She’d read every word about what had been put to Claes in cross-examination the day before; she’d looked at the blown-up photographs of his Nazi associates who’d ruled Belgium with an iron fist during the German occupation, pronouncing their harsh-sounding names to herself – Ehlers, Asche, Reeder. What had Claes been doing all those years, she asked herself – helping Jews or sending them to their deaths? And if the latter, what
would Claes not do now to keep his secret?

  Had Katya found out something about him? Vanessa wondered. Had he killed her because of that and set up Swain to take the blame? And had Katya known what he intended? Was that the meaning behind her desperate words – ‘They’re trying to kill me’?

  Vanessa was quite sure that Claes, acting with or without his sister, was more than capable of murdering Katya, but was he actually guilty? Maybe Bill was right. Perhaps Katya’s diary would tell her the truth. Perhaps she should look for it – climb the stairs to the room that had once been Katya’s bedroom and look in her bookcase for a hollowed-out book. But for that she needed Titus to come back to her. Without him she could never return to Blackwater Hall, without him her future seemed suddenly black. Vanessa was filled with a sudden visceral longing for her lover. She wanted to feel his arms about her; she wanted to wear his ring again; and as if in answer to her prayer the telephone rang beside her hand and it was Titus asking to come over.

  He came with flowers, a multitude of them that temporarily hid his face and body until she had taken them out of his hands and filled all the vases in the flat with purple and pink and yellow and blue – a riot of colour to match the pictures on the walls that her husband had complimented her on earlier in the day.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Osman, watching her arranging the stems from the doorway of the kitchen. ‘I was rude to you in my own house, when you were my guest. I am ashamed of myself. Can you forgive me, Vanessa?’

  He stood up straight and spoke formally, as if he was making some kind of public confession. She could tell he was nervous about what she would say. It was endearing how much he cared.