Vanessa closed the door and began to search. Bill had said the book was big, and so there was no point looking in the top two shelves, which were lower in height and mostly filled with dog-eared paperbacks. It had to be in one of the bottom two shelves if it was anywhere. One by one Vanessa took the larger books out and rifled their pages, looking for a hollowed-out interior. Soon she had a pile of them beside her on the ruby-red carpet, and she was running out of time. Claes would come up the stairs and find her, and she’d have no explanation for what she was doing. Her hands shook as she began work on the bottom shelf. Still nothing: Tolstoy’s War and Peace; volume 4 of a children’s encyclopedia; a thick atlas of the world that had her briefly excited since it seemed just the right size to conceal a diary; a book of Van Gogh’s paintings; and then, just as she’d given up hope, she saw at the back of the shelf, standing on its side, a big hardback copy of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. She recognized the book – she’d had the same illustrated edition herself since she was a child, and instinctively she knew it had to be the one. It had been deliberately hidden behind the other books – she’d only found it after taking out all the books in front of it, practically emptying the bottom shelf onto the carpet.
She sat back on her haunches and turned the first few pages, past a picture of Alice falling down the well, and came to the cut in the paper. And there it was – a small square red book no bigger than the size of her hand, sitting neatly inside the mutilated Alice in Wonderland. With the edge of her fingernail Vanessa lifted the front cover and read the handwritten inscription with a beating heart:
Katya Osman
My Diary
Keep Out
The diary was real. Bill had been right. Now all she had to do was get it out of the house, except that that wasn’t going to be so easy. She knew she was running out of time, and so she quickly shoved the books back into the shelves, calculating that no one would notice they had been moved as long as they were in the bookcase. And then, getting to her feet, she opened the door and came face-to-face with Jana Claes.
All the time she’d been in the house Vanessa hadn’t once thought of Claes’s silent sister. She’d seen her so rarely on her visits to Blackwater Hall, and today her thoughts had all been concentrated on Claes himself. Vanessa cursed her stupidity. She should never have made so much noise going through the books: that’s what must have attracted the woman’s attention. And now it was too late: Jana was blocking her only route of escape.
‘What are you doing?’ Jana asked. She spoke with a thick foreign accent, but her hostility was obvious.
‘I was looking. That’s all. Just looking,’ said Vanessa weakly, unable to think of an excuse.
‘Looking for what?’
Vanessa didn’t answer, and the older woman’s glance fell to the big book that Vanessa was clutching to her chest.
‘What is that? Where did it come from?’ asked Jana. ‘You took it,’ she said, answering her own question a moment later. ‘Give it to me.’
Without warning Jana took hold of the book, wresting it away from Vanessa, who was taken by surprise, unprepared for the suddenness of the assault and Jana’s wiry strength. Perhaps Jana hadn’t expected to get hold of the book so easily either – she took several steps back, trying to regain her balance. And in that moment Vanessa lost her temper. She hadn’t come this far and risked everything just to be thwarted at the last by this dried-up woman who was probably just as guilty as her brother. Reaching out with both her hands she took hold of Jana by the shoulders and shoved her as hard as she could back against the wall behind her. Jana hit it with a thud and fell to the ground. She looked like she’d lost consciousness, but Vanessa didn’t care. Her mind was focused on one thing and one thing only – to escape the house with the diary. Stooping, she picked up Alice in Wonderland from where it had fallen on the ground and ran back down the corridor to the stairs. At the bottom she paused for breath. Still there was no sound from up above. Treading softly now, she made her way back to the top of the grand staircase leading down to the hall. She looked down, and there was nobody in sight except Osman’s black cat, sitting contentedly on the fifth stair up, licking her paws. Vanessa had seen the cat there before and knew why Cara liked the position: it had the widest viewpoint of anywhere in the house.
Vanessa’s legs were weak and her hands were shaking, so she held on to the curving mahogany banister for support as she went down, clutching the book in her other hand. She paused just above the cat and raised her forefinger to her lips in a mute appeal for silence, and Cara remained obediently still, her unblinking, luminous green eyes watching Vanessa intently as she went slowly past. Now Vanessa could hear raised voices to her right – it sounded like Claes and Osman were arguing in the dining room. She started across the hall to the front door, and suddenly there was the noise of shouting coming from up above.
For a moment the adrenaline coursing through her body rooted Vanessa to the spot, but then it released her and she was at the door, wrenching it open. The fog rushed up to meet her, and she almost fell on the steps, but somehow she made it to the bottom and into her car. She could hear running feet behind her as she pulled the door shut and gunned the engine, setting off down the drive with a screech of tyres.
Claes watched her go. He hesitated a moment in the courtyard, looking back through the mist at his sister and Osman, who were standing in the doorway.
‘She’s got something. From Katya’s room. A book,’ said Jana, speaking in Dutch. Her voice was breathless, and she was holding on to her side like she was in pain.
Claes nodded, making up his mind. He ran past them into the house to get his keys. In his room he unlocked the top drawer of his desk and took out his revolver. He spun the magazine to check the bullets, put the gun in his pocket with a grunt of satisfaction, and then ran back down the stairs.
‘Franz, listen to me. Don’t . . .’ Osman began, but Claes ignored him.
‘I won’t be long,’ he shouted as he got into the Bentley and set off down the drive in pursuit of Vanessa.
Osman swayed on the step, looking shell-shocked. He leaned against the jamb for a moment before Jana took hold of his arm and led him back into the house. The door closed behind them, and out in the fog-shrouded courtyard the eerie mid-afternoon silence returned until, a few minutes later, a tall figure emerged from the trees at the top of the drive. He hesitated a moment and then went up the front steps and rang the bell.
The fog had been less dense down by the road, but it grew thick again as Clayton pressed forward down the path leading toward the boathouse. Soon he could only see a few yards in any direction. To his left he could hear the water lapping against the shore of the lake, while up ahead the boathouse loomed up out of the mist, silhouetted by the surrounding trees. He didn’t know why, but the place drew him like a magnet. Perhaps it was because of all that had happened there – love and death, and now this pressing silence, interrupted only by the mournful cries of a gull hovering above the invisible lake. Clayton went up the wooden steps and glanced inside, but instinctively he already knew that the place would be deserted. There was something else that was calling his attention, but he didn’t realize what it was until he’d got back outside. Then he noticed it – the rowing boat was back, pushed in underneath the floor of the boathouse. Clayton got down on his hands and knees to pull it out and a moment later looked down at a brand-new bicycle lying on its side in the bottom of the boat.
Keeping away from the trees on either side, Clayton walked as quickly as the fog would let him down the centre of the path, returning the way he’d come. It was easier going towards the end as the fog thinned out nearer to the road. Wale hadn’t moved from the car while Clayton had been away, and Clayton got in beside him and turned on the engine, intending to go straight back to the Hall. He felt sure that Jacob wasn’t far away. But then, just as he was about to turn out into the road, he had to slam on his brakes as a small blue car rushed past them at high speed. Clayton recogni
zed Vanessa in the driving seat – she looked crazy, like someone or something had sent her clean out of her mind. And then, less than a minute later, another car came hurtling by. It was Claes, driving Osman’s Bentley. Clayton knew Vanessa couldn’t match the speed of the Bentley, however hard she pushed her little car. Claes would’ve easily caught up with her by the time she got to Blackwater village. Clayton hesitated a moment and then reluctantly turned the steering wheel of the police car back in the opposite direction and set off in pursuit.
CHAPTER 27
Claes rounded the corner and eased the Bentley back into fourth gear, increasing his speed as the road bent back around the hill toward Blackwater village. The trees that loomed like black ghostly shadows out of the fog now gave way to open fields covered in low-hanging mist, and Claes knew that Vanessa couldn’t be too far ahead.
His anger beat with a quickening pulse inside his brain as he peered forward, searching for the tail lights of her car in the haze. He gripped the steering wheel tight with both hands and imagined gripping her neck the same way, feeling for her windpipe with his thumbs so that he could slowly choke the life out of her as he watched the terror emptying from her eyes. That was the least she deserved for seducing Titus, stealing him away with her woman’s tricks – low-cut dresses and flickering eyelids. Titus deserved to suffer too. Claes wasn’t a fool: he’d already guessed that Titus intended to throw him over once he’d got the Trave woman ensconced as his wife at Blackwater Hall. But Titus could wait. First Claes was going to deal with the woman. He knew that he should have gone after her before now, once he’d realized that she had got Titus bewitched. But instead he’d sat on his hands like a fool and done nothing while she went off to court and told the world about what that bitch, Katya, had said. And now she had something from Katya’s room. What it was he didn’t know, but he’d have to make sure he got it back before the police arrived.
Perhaps he’d make her talk, tease her with the gun and let her babble a bit with stupid pleas for mercy before he killed her. A faraway look came into Claes’s eyes for a moment as he remembered old times in other countries where he’d had the law on his side. But here it was different, he remembered with a jolt. He couldn’t torture her or strangle her or bludgeon her to death. He couldn’t even shoot her. Not with no one to pin the murder on. He’d have to content himself with running her off the road, making it look like she’d got in an accident in the fog. The weather was on his side at least. It’d be easy once he’d caught up with her – child’s play.
Now he was rushing through Blackwater village and could see tail lights up ahead. It had to be her – he could make out the domed roof of her Citroen 2CV, and he sensed she was going as fast as her little car would go. But not fast enough: the Bentley had twice as much horsepower. He only had to apply the slightest pressure to the accelerator and he was practically on her bumper. He imagined her terror as she kept glancing in her rear-view mirror, hoping it wasn’t him, knowing it was. They were approaching the crossroads at the end of the village – the same place where David Swain had hijacked a car five months earlier. Beyond, the road turned sharply westward and the woods began again – just the place to stage a fatal accident far from watching eyes.
Claes had expected Vanessa to slow down at the junction, but he had done the job of terrifying her too well. She shot across the crossroads, and automatically he followed. Too late he realized his mistake. A heavily laden lorry coming up out of the fog from the right just missed Vanessa’s car, but Claes wasn’t so lucky. The collision was immediate and overwhelming as the lorry drove through and over the Bentley. Even if he had been wearing a seat belt, Claes would have stood almost no chance. Without one he died instantly with his last, highly uncharacteristic sensation of astonishment etched across what was left of his pale, twisted face.
* * *
Clayton got to the crash site moments later, but he didn’t stay long with the wreckage. Leaving Wale to radio in a report to the police station, he delivered the shocked, white-faced lorry driver into the care of the old married couple who ran the grocery store at the crossroads and then squatted down beside Claes’s corpse, staring for a moment into the dead man’s wide-open eyes. And then, almost as an afterthought, he leant down and felt inside Claes’s pockets. There was nothing on the right side, but in the left jacket pocket he found a snub-nosed, silver-plated revolver. It was a Colt Detective Special – a different gun to the one Claes had had before. Clayton didn’t need to check to know it was loaded.
‘What do you want with that?’ asked Wale, looking down at the gun over Clayton’s shoulder. ‘It’s evidence.’
‘None of your business,’ said Clayton, straightening up and returning to their car. ‘Did you get through to the station?’
‘Yeah,’ said Wale. ‘But don’t think I won’t tell Macrae about that gun,’ he added. ‘Because I will.’
‘Good,’ said Clayton viciously, swinging the car into a violent three-point turn before heading back toward the Hall at breakneck speed.
Up ahead, around the turn in the road, Vanessa was entirely unaware of what had happened back at the crossroads. All she knew was that there had been lights blazing into her car from behind and then from the right, and suddenly they were all gone. Now she was alone in the mist, careering along a deserted road with the car’s accelerator pedal pinned to the floor beneath her foot. If it had been Claes behind her, she didn’t know what had happened to him, but she wasn’t going to go back and find out. Instead she leant forward in her seat, yearning for her first glimpse of the spires of Oxford.
She was sure she didn’t want to go back to her flat. That was where Claes would come looking for her. Instead she realized that her unconscious mind had already made a decision about her destination: she was heading back to her old home in North Oxford, the one she’d left behind for a new life two years earlier. It was Bill who had sent her into the jaws of death to look for this diary, so let him be the first one to see whether the risk had been worth taking.
She parked the car with a screech of the brakes and then, clutching the diary in one hand, she rang the doorbell over and over again until her husband answered. And, once inside the house, she fell rather than sat on the old sofa in the living room. She was shaking uncontrollably, and she spoke in a rush with her words tumbling over one another as she told her husband all that had happened.
Trave felt dreadful, sick with remorse. He wrapped a blanket around Vanessa and poured her a glass of brandy and wondered how on earth he could have put the person he loved most in all the world into such terrible danger. It was worse than what Jacob had done to Katya – much worse because Trave had the benefit of hindsight. He tried to apologize, but Vanessa waved his inadequate words away. She felt at sea in a storm of emotions – remembered fear; something that bore a strange resemblance to happiness about being back in her old home, or perhaps it was just relief; and above all, a consuming curiosity about what was contained in the little red book that she had taken such a terrible risk to obtain.
With a trembling hand she extracted Katya’s diary from inside Alice in Wonderland and handed it to her husband. ‘You read it,’ she told him. ‘Start at the beginning and tell me what she wrote.’ And she laid her head back against the sofa cushions and closed her eyes, preparing to listen.
Trave soon found that the first half of the diary had been written years before. Alongside the entries there were pencil sketches of the boathouse and the Hall and of David and later Ethan, and a particularly good one of Osman sitting at his desk with a benevolent smile on his face and a half-smoked cigar burning between his fingers. Then, after Ethan’s death, there were several pages of rapid writing in which Katya had recorded her intense distress, and after that the diary was silent for more than two years until it began again the previous August.
Trave found it hard at first to decipher Katya’s tiny, spidery writing, but gradually he got used to it, and his voice quickened as he read:
August 17th, 1960
:
I think it’s time to start writing in this diary again; time to start keeping a record. I’ve neglected it far too long, just like I’ve neglected myself. It’s time for turning a new leaf, beginning a new page . . .
I saw Ethan’s brother, Jacob, yesterday. We sat in a café in St Clement’s and he told me things about Franz that made me want to be sick. He showed me pictures of Franz with those Nazi pigs and it was like I was in two places at once – in Belgium with those poor people being rounded up and sent off in cattle trucks and here in Oxford drinking sweet coffee in the sunshine. And I thought of how I lived with Franz all those years when I was a girl and I felt unclean, like I could never wash the shame of it away. Not ever.
And suddenly I knew it wasn’t David who had killed Ethan; it was Franz. I don’t know why I knew. I just did. It was like I was Saint Paul on the road to Damascus. The scales were lifted from my eyes and I could see. I was in the same place, the same café, and the earth was going round the sun, but the earth was different and the sun was too. Everything was changed.
The King of Diamonds Page 36
