And then the clerk’s voice came again, even and measured, reaching him as if from far, far away:
‘On the single count of murder, how do you find the defendant? Guilty or not guilty?’
‘Please, please, please,’ David screamed inside his head. But nobody heard him; all they heard was the foreman’s falsetto voice pronouncing that one word, ‘guilty’, that meant the end of David Swain.
It was what everyone in the court had been waiting for. They exhaled as one in a collective gasp, and then went quiet again as a skeletal man in a frock coat appeared behind the judge’s chair and silently placed a square of black silk on top of the old man’s wigged head.
And the judge began slowly speaking the words of the sentence, enunciating each syllable as if it was some ancient curse:
‘David John Swain, you are sentenced to be taken hence to the prison in which you were last confined and from there to a place of execution, where you will suffer death by hanging, and thereafter your body . . .’
But he got no further. The silence of the courtroom was shattered by a lone voice crying high up in the rafters of the public gallery, and, looking up, David saw his mother standing there, shaking her fist. She was dressed in that same charcoal-grey dress that she had worn for her visit to him in the prison.
‘No,’ she shouted. ‘No, you won’t. He’s mine, my flesh and blood. I won’t let you,’ and suddenly she reached down and took off one of her shiny black shoes and threw it through the air down at the judge. It didn’t hit him; instead it landed just short of his dais, bounced in the well of the court, and ending up under the feet of Inspector Macrae, who had up to that moment been sitting at the exhibits table with a look of smug satisfaction on his waxy face.
And immediately there was chaos: people getting up and knocking into one another and shouting as the judge and the ancient man in the frock coat disappeared through the door behind the dais, and David was bundled down the stairs from the dock, still uninformed about what would happen to his body after he had been hung by the neck until he was dead.
Back in his cell he knelt down on the hard cement floor and took hold of the toilet bowl in the corner with both his hands, gripping on to it like a drowning man. He felt nauseous, his stomach churned, and he could taste the vomit in his mouth as he retched, but nothing happened. He leant his head down against the cold porcelain and closed his eyes and contemplated his own extinction. He saw the rain again falling on his poor father’s coffin at the bottom of that pit in Wolvercote Cemetery, and he thought of being alive one moment, standing on the wooden trapdoor of the gallows, and then being dead and gone the next, blotted out forever. It was like turning off a light switch at the wall except that the light of his life could never be turned back on once they’d broken his neck. Life suddenly seemed so precious: air and sun and water, chestnuts in the pockets of his school uniform, his face in Katya’s long blonde hair one summer afternoon, his mother’s hand in his, crossing the road to the playground when he was a child. He’d never really understood that she loved him until now, when she’d thrown her shoe in front of all those strangers. He loved her for her defiance, but he knew it wouldn’t make any difference. The sand in the hourglass was fast running out.
He hadn’t made much of his life. He knew that. He wished he’d used his time better. But he was young. He could change, except that now he wouldn’t have that chance. He was going to die not because he had cancer or some incurable sickness but because others had decided that he must. It didn’t have to happen, but it would happen. That was what made it unbearable. He’d die and be put in a pit like his father, and the world would go on as before, except that he wouldn’t be a part of it any more. Soon he’d be old news, forgotten by everyone except his mother and Max, who’d met his brother one morning and now didn’t have one any more.
Tears ran down David’s face into the toilet bowl and his back shook and his stomach heaved, but the Old Bailey gaolers didn’t pay much attention. Prisoner R137861 was being sick in his cell, and there was nothing very remarkable about that. He’d just heard that he was going to swing, and that took some getting used to. They understood these things because, after all, they’d seen them all before.
CHAPTER 26
All through the weekend Vanessa grew more agitated. She tried everything to calm herself down, but nothing worked: she took up her paints and then threw them away in disgust; she spent half an hour reading her book and then realized that she hadn’t taken in a single word; and eventually, in despair, she put on her overcoat in defiance of the wintry weather, intending to take a brisk walk down by the river, but ended up envying the regal calm of a pair of swans watching her disinterestedly from the other bank. The only respite from her anxiety came when she went out to the newsagent on Sunday morning and bought editions of all the newspapers, stumbling home with a pyramid of newsprint balanced precariously in her hands, and then drank three cups of coffee one after the other while she sat at the kitchen table reading with avid concentration all the accounts of everything that had happened at the Swain trial the previous week, grimacing with worry when each article ended up referring to the strength of the case against the accused.
Vanessa continued to go back and forth in her mind, gnawing at the evidence in a state of ever-growing anxiety. As Bill had said, only Katya’s diary could tell her the truth – if it existed, of course, which was a big if. She wished she could read it without having to look for it. Because looking might mean tangling with Claes, and Vanessa was not ashamed to admit that that prospect unnerved her. She knew how much Claes disliked her already, and she was sure that his dislike would soon build into hatred when he found out that Titus was prepared to sacrifice him on the altar of his love for Vanessa Trave. And if Claes was guilty of these murders and found her digging for evidence against him, he wouldn’t hesitate about killing her. She knew how cold-blooded he was. He’d wait to get her alone on some deserted street corner or down by the river, and then he’d take her from behind with a hand over her mouth to stifle her screams and twist a sharpened knife in her gut, just like he must have done with Ethan. If he killed Ethan . . .
Vanessa couldn’t make up her mind about who was responsible. She remained steadfastly unsure of the truth, plagued by doubt and uncertainty, hoping for David Swain to be acquitted so that she could carry on as before and do nothing, even though deep down she knew that Katya’s ghost would not permit her to remain inert forever. Sooner or later she’d have to go and look for the diary, but in the meantime she ignored the summons of the telephone that kept ringing in the living room. She knew it was either her husband or Titus. Both of them wanted her to go out to Blackwater Hall, albeit for different reasons, and that was the one place she didn’t want to go near, at least until the trial was over.
The weekend finally came to an end, and work on Monday morning did help provide some temporary distraction from her inner turmoil. For the next two days she stayed long hours in the office, filing and refiling her employer’s correspondence, answering letters that didn’t need answering, but under her professional exterior she was finding the uncertainty of the trial’s outcome harder and harder to cope with. And on Wednesday, after reading two newspaper summaries of the judge’s summing up of the mountain of evidence against the defendant, she decided she couldn’t stand it any more and stayed home from work. All day she paced the rooms of her flat like they were a prison cell, listening to the hourly news broadcasts on the radio, until the verdict was finally announced at five o’clock, complete with a description of the pandemonium that had broken out in the courtroom when a member of the public had thrown her shoe at the judge, just when he was halfway through pronouncing the defendant’s death sentence.
Now Vanessa didn’t hesitate. She knew what she had to do. She turned off the radio and rang up Titus. He sounded ecstatic to hear from her.
‘I’ve been worrying about you,’ he said. ‘You didn’t answer my calls. Have you been all right?’
‘I
had some kind of virus,’ she lied, ‘so I went to bed and took lots of medicines and unplugged the telephone, but I’m better now. Can I see you?’
‘Of course you can. When?’
‘Tomorrow for lunch? I can get the day off.’
‘Wonderful,’ he said. She’d never heard him sounding so happy.
‘Good, I’ll see you then.’
She rang off, realizing that she’d said nothing about the verdict, and that she hadn’t even asked about the man with the gun whom Titus was so worried about. Still, she knew there’d be plenty of time to discuss these topics and others at lunch the next day – before she found an excuse to slip away and look for Katya’s diary at the top of the house.
She awoke the next morning to a dense white fog that had enveloped the city in a damp, sightless embrace. The red brick neo-Gothic towers of Keble College that usually dominated the view from her living room window were now no more than vague shapes in the mist. All morning she hoped that the fog would clear, but if anything it was thicker than before when she finally screwed up her courage and got in her car to go to Blackwater.
The journey took much longer than usual since she had to drive very slowly, feeling her way tentatively along the roads, and Osman was waiting anxiously for her when she finally pulled up in the courtyard and turned off her headlights. He came hurrying down the steps, opened her door, and, taking her arm, steered her through the haze into the warmth of the hall. She felt a surge of relief as she took off her coat and preceded her lover through the door of the drawing room, but then stopped dead in her tracks as she caught sight of Claes standing in front of the fire. She was rooted to the spot, unable to go forward to take Claes’s outstretched hand, but Claes didn’t seem in the least put out by her rudeness. Instead he smiled broadly, and the tightening of his facial muscles stretched the white scar running down beside his left ear and the mutilated red skin below his jaw, giving him an almost obscene appearance that Vanessa felt sure was a calculated effect, since there was no warmth in his grey eyes to back up the smile on his lips. She felt as if some invisible portion of the fog had followed her inside, wrapping its tendrils around her body.
Osman didn’t seem pleased with Claes’s presence either, but Claes remained apparently impervious to his companions’ obvious wish to be alone. Lunch in the dining room was a miserable affair. Vanessa kept looking towards the door, getting ready to excuse herself so she could go upstairs and search for the diary, but then each time she was about to open her mouth, she caught Claes looking at her out of the corner of his eye. She felt irrationally certain that he could read her mind. And so she dropped her eyes to the table and watched his bony hands holding his knife and fork as he methodically cut up the meat on his plate, and imagined him cutting into her flesh too, sawing her, watching her bleed.
She couldn’t eat. She felt weak, helpless in the face of her fear of Claes. What if there was no diary? she asked herself. What if Swain was guilty – just like the jury had said? But then she remembered the way Swain had mouthed ‘thank you’ at her as she left the court, and she thought of how young he was – not much older than her own son who had died. She imagined him on the gallows, waiting for the trap to give way beneath his feet, and she went back to toying with her food.
‘Have you heard about the verdict, Mrs Trave?’ Claes asked, breaking the silence.
‘Yes,’ she said, refusing to meet his eye.
‘And what do you make of it?’ he asked. ‘You must be disappointed in the outcome after your efforts for Mr Swain’s defence.’
‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s for the jury to decide, not me.’
‘Quite right, my dear,’ said Osman, coming to her rescue. ‘These trials are very unpleasant. We have to do our duty and give evidence, whether it’s for the prosecution or the defence, but that doesn’t mean we enjoy the experience or what comes after. Personally I do not like the death penalty, but I understand why some people think it’s necessary.’
Claes snorted, as if unable to believe his ears. ‘What are you talking about?’ he asked. ‘You can’t have law and order without it. They should use it more, not less. And for scum like Swain the rope’s too quick, if you ask me. They should throttle him to death for what he did.’
Vanessa looked up, appalled by Claes’s sadism, and was in time to see a look of fury on Titus’s face before it vanished, replaced by a thin smile.
‘Well, I suppose there are exceptions,’ he said in a measured voice, keeping his eyes on Claes. ‘Colonel Eichmann for instance. Have you been following that story, Vanessa?’
‘Yes, a little.’ Vanessa wasn’t going to admit it, but she’d read a great deal about Adolf Eichmann since his capture by the Israeli secret service in Buenos Aires the previous May. There had been an international outcry about the kidnap, but Vanessa had been overjoyed. Now his trial was fast approaching in Jerusalem and there’d be a chance for some tiny measure of justice for the millions of men, women, and children that the monster had had transported across Europe to their deaths in the Nazi concentration camps.
‘Perhaps there are some criminals whose crimes are so, how do you say, heinous – yes, that’s the word – that they should suffer the ultimate punishment,’ Osman went on, speaking in the same precise way, as if he was taking part in an organized debate. ‘What do you think, Franz?’
Vanessa glanced over at Claes and saw that livid red spots had appeared in the centre of each of his pale cheeks and that his hands were clenched into tight fists. He looked Osman in the eye, but he didn’t reply.
‘Well, perhaps we should change the subject and discuss something more pleasant,’ said Osman, shrugging his shoulders. ‘Have you been doing any painting, Vanessa?’
But Vanessa had no chance to respond. The doorbell rang, and a minute later Detective Clayton and Constable Wale were shown into the dining room by a housemaid.
‘I’m sorry to bother you, sir,’ said Clayton awkwardly, ‘but we wanted you to know we were here, taking a look around.’ He spoke to Osman but glanced over at Vanessa, as if surprised by her presence.
‘Thank you. I appreciate your consideration, Detective,’ said Osman. ‘Have you any particular reason for thinking Mr Mendel’s going to be showing up here today?’ he asked in an apparently casual tone, although Vanessa could tell that he was more interested than he was letting on.
‘Just that when I talked to him before in his flat he seemed to attach a great deal of significance to the outcome of the trial up in London,’ said Clayton, picking his words carefully.
‘Significance – what significance?’ demanded Claes.
‘Well, he said that if Mr Swain was convicted, then “they’ll have won; they’ll have got away with everything”. Those were his words,’ said Clayton reluctantly. ‘He implied that he would have nothing left to lose.’
‘And we are they, of course,’ said Osman with a faint smile. ‘Well, that certainly sounds rather ominous, Detective. I hope that you and Constable Wale manage to find Mr Mendel before he does anything else stupid.’
Vanessa looked past Clayton to where Wale was standing in the doorway. She remembered him now from when she’d gone to visit Inspector Macrae at the police station and he’d shown her out. He’d had that same ugly, smirking smile on his face then as he had now. It felt like he was mentally undressing her, and she turned away with a shudder.
‘Are you all right, Mrs Trave?’ asked Clayton, noticing Vanessa’s grimace without understanding its cause. He’d seen how nervous she looked when he first came in.
‘I’m fine,’ she said, refusing to meet his eye. She was all too aware of Claes staring at her across the table.
‘Bloody foreigners! They get all the luck,’ said Wale with a harsh laugh once they were back outside. ‘I bet Trave finds it difficult getting much shut-eye at night thinking about his missis tucked up with old Casanova in there. She’s quite a looker for her age, I’ll give you that.’
‘Shut up, Jonah. And keep your f
oul thoughts to yourself,’ said Clayton angrily.
‘All right, keep your hair on,’ said Wale, getting into the police car beside Clayton. ‘You’re a grumpy sod, aren’t you?’
Clayton stayed quiet, sensing the car’s suspension settling down under Wale’s weight. He knew better than to allow himself to be needled, knowing that he’d only be providing Wale with free entertainment, but even after a week in Wale’s company he still found it hard to get used to the mean, crude way in which the man’s mind worked.
Their complete lack of success in tracking down Jacob Mendel hadn’t helped Clayton’s mood either. But he had an instinctive feeling that today would be the day that Jacob would show himself if he was ever going to, and he was determined to make as thorough a search of the grounds as the fog would allow. Ignoring Wale’s complaints therefore that it was ‘a bloody waste of time’, Clayton drove down to the road and parked under the trees by the path that led up to the boathouse. And then, leaving Wale in the car, he climbed the fence and set off into the mist.
Back in the dining room of Blackwater Hall, Vanessa had had enough. The policemen’s visit had unnerved Osman, and now he and Claes were talking anxiously about Jacob’s possible whereabouts. Vanessa knew it was now or never. Maybe there was no diary, but soon she would run out of courage and would never know one way or the other.
She got up from the table, announcing casually that she was going to the bathroom. Osman raised his hand in brief acknowledgement, and Claes went on talking, apparently unaware of her departure. Outside, she turned quickly down the corridor leading to the hall, and then ran up the staircase to the first floor. At the top of the stairs a corridor opened out in both directions. She knew she wasn’t yet on the top floor, but she couldn’t see the way up. Blindly she ran to her right, and at the end, round the corner, she found what she was looking for – another flight of stairs going up. She took them two at a time and started down another corridor, narrower than the one down below. Now she went slower, counting the doors on her left until she was halfway along. Tentatively, she pushed open the half-closed door and saw a bed but no bookcase. Perhaps this had been Katya’s room; perhaps the bookcase had been moved; perhaps the girl’s books had been sold or thrown out now that their owner had no further use for them. With an effort Vanessa pushed her doubts to the back of her mind – she’d come too far to stop now. The next door down could still count as halfway. This one was shut. Slowly she turned the handle, and there it was, right in front of her – an old brown bookcase filled to overflowing with books of different sizes, and on the top a silver-framed photograph of a middle-aged couple standing by the sea.
The King of Diamonds Page 35
