The King of Diamonds itadc-2

by Simon Tolkien

  ‘I was,’ said David apologetically. ‘But it’s all right now. I like your room, Max.’

  ‘Do you?’ The boy seemed immoderately pleased, as if nobody had noticed the place before.

  ‘Yes, I do. All your things — it’s quite an arrangement you’ve got going. Which is your favourite?’

  ‘Toy or animal?’ asked Max seriously. He’d come into the room now and was standing beside the bed.

  ‘Both.’

  ‘Well, that’s easy. I like Fluff the most of the animals,’ he said, picking up a worse-for-wear black-and-white teddy bear from the top of the bookcase. ‘I like to sleep with him, but Dad says I need to stop because I’m growing up. And my best toy…’ — Max looked around the room, carefully weighing his decision — ‘is… my robot,’ he finished with a flourish, holding up a silver flat-faced, cone-headed android with an elaborate control panel in what would otherwise have been its stomach. Robbie the Robot was engraved on the back over the compartment for the batteries.

  ‘Yes, good choice. I think that’s the best one too,’ said David admiringly. ‘Is Robbie your favourite character?’

  ‘Yes, one of them.’ Max seemed distracted, like he wanted to say something but couldn’t find the right words.

  ‘What is it?’ asked David.

  ‘This was your room too, wasn’t it, when you were a kid?’

  ‘Yes, it was once, a long time ago. But it’s yours now. And you’ve got it looking a lot better than I ever did.’

  ‘Have I? Thanks,’ said Max. Once again David had that same sense that the boy was filing away what he’d just heard for later inspection. It was a funny trait, but it appealed to David for some reason.

  ‘I’ve got to go to sleep now,’ he said. ‘But our talk’s made me feel better, so I promise you — no more nightmares.’

  Max nodded and left the room still carrying the robot and the teddy bear, and downstairs David could hear the muffled sound of the television being turned on — a new addition since he’d last been here. It was true — the conversation with his half-brother had helped — he felt calmer, easier in his mind, and, turning over, he fell into a deep dreamless sleep.

  He woke with a start. His mother was shaking him. ‘You’ve got to go. Ben’s back.’

  ‘But I thought you said one o’clock,’ he said, looking blearily at his watch. It was only five to twelve.

  ‘I know I did. He’s back early. That’s all. I’ve made you some sandwiches,’ she said, holding out a plastic bag. ‘You can go out of the back door. He won’t hear you if you’re quiet.’

  ‘What about my gun?’ he said, pulling on his clothes.

  ‘Leave it. I’ll get rid of it. And I’ll tell them you haven’t got one when they come. They won’t shoot you if you haven’t got a gun.’

  There was an urgent, pleading note in his mother’s voice, and it gave him some comfort in the days and weeks afterwards to know that she’d cared, but now it didn’t make any difference: he had to have the gun.

  Downstairs he heard his stepfather’s barking voice mixed up with the sound of the television.

  ‘I’ll keep him in the living room. You go through the kitchen and out the back. The door’s open,’ she said from the doorway.

  ‘I need the gun,’ he told her again, but she’d already left.

  Dressed in his prison jeans and shoes and his stepfather’s oversized shirt and cardigan, topped with the jacket he’d stolen the night before, David tiptoed down the stairs, holding the bag of sandwiches in his hand. Stopping halfway down, he listened to the voices in the living room across the hall and felt for a moment like he was a child again, eavesdropping on his parents in the half-light after he was supposed to have gone to bed, except that he was fifteen years older now and he needed the gun in his mother’s bureau. It was just behind the living room door.

  Ben had been holding forth about a road closure somewhere, something to do with a change in his bus route and coming home early, but now he wasn’t talking any more, and David could hear the news summary being read on the television — more about missile tests and the election coming up in the United States — Kennedy or Nixon; Nixon or Kennedy — who the hell cares? thought David. But maybe Ben did; maybe he was watching up at the other end of the room; maybe there’d be time to sneak in and take the gun out of the bureau without Ben’s seeing him at all.

  The door was already open, and Ben was watching the television, sitting in the big armchair, dressed in his bus driver’s uniform with his back to David and the window. Max was on the sofa looking at a book, and David’s mother was nowhere in sight. Slowly, stealthily, David opened the bureau drawer inch by inch, but it made no noise, and there was the gun inside, just where his mother had left it, lying on top of a bundle of old letters. It felt good to have it in his hand again; holding it made him feel empowered, safe. He straightened up, ready to go, and looked at his face staring back at him from the television.

  ‘… escaped from Oxford Prison late last night and is now wanted for a murder committed in an isolated country house outside the village of Blackwater shortly afterwards,’ intoned the impassive voice of the newsreader, talking over the blown-up photograph they’d taken of David at the police station after his arrest two years earlier.

  David gasped involuntarily, and Ben turned round, getting to his feet and letting out a bellow of rage as he caught sight of his stepson standing in the corner of the room behind him, but the gun in David’s hand, pointed at his midriff, brought him to an abrupt halt.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked through a deep exhalation of breath. He was obviously terrified.

  ‘Shut up and sit down,’ said David, ignoring the question. ‘I need to see this.’

  The picture on the television had changed. Now there was some kind of press conference going on with lights flashing and a whole bunch of microphones held up toward a thin, tired-looking man with a receding hairline. He was wearing a creased, crumpled-up suit, and his tie was on crooked. David remembered him: it was the policeman who’d been in charge of his case before, the one who’d come to talk to him in Brixton Prison last year before his transfer down here. He had an unusual name — Trave, Inspector Trave. That was it. David remembered the way the man’s eyes had been sad and focused all at the same time, like he was trying to see past David, through a glass darkly, and failing in the attempt.

  ‘He’s armed and dangerous,’ Trave was saying. ‘Members of the public should call the police immediately if they see him, and he should not be approached under any circumstances.’

  ‘Where is he? Any ideas?’ asked a reporter, pushing his microphone up toward the inspector.

  ‘He went to Oxford Railway Station this morning and bought a ticket to London. We don’t know for certain if he was on the train, but he may well have been.’

  ‘What about the murder?’ asked another invisible journalist. ‘Can you give us any more detail?’

  ‘She’s a young woman in her early twenties who’s been shot in the head. She was killed with a single bullet,’ said Trave. He seemed uncomfortable or impatient maybe, like he wished he was somewhere else.

  ‘Was the victim known to the suspect?’

  ‘Yes, known.’

  And the television cut away from the press conference to a photograph of Ethan Mendel, but now David couldn’t hear what the newsreader was saying. His mother was shouting, telling him to get out, telling Max to get behind her into the kitchen. But David stood his ground. He felt sorry, wished it hadn’t come to this with his pig of a stepfather involved, but he’d had no choice. She shouldn’t have taken away his gun.

  ‘Give me the keys,’ he told his stepfather.

  At first Ben didn’t understand, or perhaps he didn’t want to.

  ‘Give me the keys to your fucking car,’ David shouted, brandishing the gun. All his anger at this interloper, this man who’d taken over his home and treated him like dirt, came rushing to the surface. He felt like shooting Ben Bishop, putting an end t
o him once and for all.

  Ben looked at the gun and saw the rage in David’s eyes. It hurt him harder than anything he’d ever had to do to hand over the keys to his most prized possession, but in the end his fear won out. He took the keys out of his pocket and tossed them at his stepson’s feet with a look of hatred in his eye.

  David picked them up off the floor and then went over to the telephone on top of his mother’s bureau and yanked its cord out of the wall. He hadn’t got anything with which to cut the wire, and so he put the phone in the bag with the sandwiches that his mother had made for him.

  ‘Have you got an extension?’ he asked. His stepfather shook his head. Maybe he was telling the truth; maybe he wasn’t. David didn’t have the time to check. He needed to go. He looked over at his mother, took a step toward her, and then stopped, sensing her fury.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I didn’t do this thing. I promise you I didn’t. Katya was dead when I got there. I took the gun to protect myself. The man there shot at me last time, and I needed to defend myself. I needed…’

  ‘You’re lying,’ she said, interrupting him in a harsh, unforgiving voice. ‘Lying like you always do, but it won’t help you this time, David. This time you’ve gone too far, and you’ll have to pay the penalty. Now get out of my house and don’t come back. You’ve done enough to me and mine for one lifetime.’

  There was nothing he could say. It was like his mother was a stranger suddenly, like she had no relation to him any more as she stood across from him in the kitchen doorway, protecting her son from the man with the gun, white-faced, willing him to be gone.

  He looked around the room one last time, as if committing it to memory, and then turned on his heel and walked out, leaving the front door open behind him. He unlocked the car and got in, turned the key in the ignition, and waited a moment. It gave him a sudden savage pleasure to sit there in his stepfather’s seat feeling the engine purring underneath him. And then, just as he’d put the car in gear and was about to drive away, Max came running out of the front door with Robbie the Robot clutched in his hand.

  David wound down the window.

  ‘I want you to have this,’ said Max. ‘Because…’

  ‘We’re brothers?’

  Max nodded. David had never seen anyone looking so upset and so determined all at the same time.

  ‘Thank you, Max,’ he said, placing the robot carefully on the passenger seat beside the gun and the bag containing the sandwiches and the telephone. ‘I’ll take good care of him. And…’ He paused, searching for the right words, but they wouldn’t come. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Tell your mother I’m sorry. This isn’t how I wanted it to be.’

  Turning away and looking over his shoulder, he reversed out of the drive, and then, pausing for a moment, he stared over at the door where his mother was standing with her arm around her younger son. And she remained there, tight-lipped, immobile, as he stepped on the gas and drove away.

  CHAPTER 11

  Adam Clayton pulled down on the lever and watched the low-quality black coffee slowly filling the Styrofoam cup that he was holding under the nozzle of the hot-drinks machine. It was his third visit to the coffee machine that morning, and each cup had tasted worse than the one before, but he needed the caffeine to stay alert as he combed through the reports from the Katya Osman case that now covered every inch of his desk in the room he shared with Trave across the corridor. It was hard work, and he wasn’t sleeping well. Partly it was the pressure that always comes with a new inquiry, particularly one as high-profile as this; partly it was the continuing unease he’d felt with Trave ever since he’d voiced his anxieties in Osman’s boathouse two days earlier about Trave’s reaction to his wife’s ongoing relationship with the owner of Blackwater Hall. Clayton wished now that he’d kept quiet. Trave had not referred to the subject again, and so there was no opportunity to apologize or make amends, but he’d clearly not forgotten his junior’s implied doubts about his professionalism. Ever since their conversation, he’d treated Clayton with a new businesslike reserve, and the frostiness of the atmosphere had started to undermine the younger man’s confidence, making him realize how much he’d depended up to now on his boss’s goodwill and support.

  And yet Clayton also felt a growing sense of injustice. He’d never have brought up the issue of a conflict of interest if Trave hadn’t treated everyone at Blackwater Hall like they were murder suspects, not witnesses. No wonder Claes and his sister had been less than forthcoming when Trave had started in on them straight away, giving them the third degree. And Osman had seemed genuinely distraught when they’d talked to him in his study across from the broken window through which this Swain character had come bursting in with his gun a few hours earlier. Swain was there in the house at the right time and with the right motive. Everything pointed to him, and yet Trave remained obviously dissatisfied, distrusting the accumulating evidence. Why? There was no reason for it. Unless…

  ‘You look like shit, lad. Something wrong with your love life?’

  Clayton turned to his left and saw Inspector Macrae looking up at him from a chair in the corner. He’d obviously been too preoccupied with his troubles to notice that he wasn’t the only one in the break room when he’d come in earlier. But Macrae was like that — always there when you were least expecting it, popping up with some unnerving comment that you couldn’t think of an answer to. He was new at the station, transferred down from up north when old Inspector Finney retired. And Clayton and the other junior detectives were wary of him — he came with a reputation for getting results and not caring too much about how he got them. He seemed to have a way of always looking for the bad in people. It was more than cynicism, more like a perpetual sneer. It set Clayton on edge, and he tried to give Macrae as wide a berth as possible. Today he was the last person that Clayton wanted to talk to, but he could hardly turn his back on the man. Macrae was an inspector and Clayton was a junior detective, right down at the bottom of the station totem pole.

  ‘No, sir, I’m all right,’ Clayton said, forcing himself to sound friendly, like he was feeling on top of the world. ‘Just a lot of work suddenly. That’s all.’

  ‘Well, sit down and tell me about it, lad,’ said Macrae, patting the empty chair beside him. ‘Perhaps I can help.’

  ‘No, the work’s not a problem. It’s just I’ve got to give Inspector Trave a progress report when he comes in,’ said Clayton nervously. He stayed fixed to the spot by the coffee machine but looked longingly toward the door.

  ‘Ah yes. Bill Trave can be quite demanding when he wants to be. I’ve seen that for myself. Giving you a hard time of it, is he?’ asked Macrae with a smile, clearly enjoying Clayton’s discomfiture.

  ‘No, sir. Not at all.’

  Macrae nodded knowingly as if he understood that Clayton wasn’t telling him the truth because he couldn’t, and then pointed again to the empty chair. Clayton sat down. He had no choice.

  He’d never been so close to Macrae before, and Clayton felt an instinctive repulsion that he couldn’t quite explain to himself. It wasn’t that the man was ugly or smelt bad. Quite the opposite in fact: Inspector Macrae was a good-looking man in the prime of life, dressed in a far more expensive suit than Trave had ever worn. He wore his hair carefully combed back en brosse from his high, unwrinkled forehead and, to the extent that he smelt of anything, it was expensive Italian aftershave. But there was something weird about the way his waxy skin was pulled so tightly across the bones of his face like it was a mask with only his small, watchful grey eyes seeming to hint at the true personality underneath; and his hands were strange too — long, scrupulously clean nails on the end of tapering fingers and thumbs that Macrae kept perpetually in motion, moulding, stroking, kneading invisible shapes. An artist’s hands or a strangler’s, Clayton thought. Not a policeman’s.

  ‘An interesting case, this Blackwater murder, from what I’ve been hearing,’ said Macrae, looking not at Clayton but beyond him into the middle distanc
e.

  ‘Yes,’ said Clayton non-commitally. He was not deceived by Macrae’s languid manner — the inspector clearly had an agenda of some kind.

  ‘Two press conferences already I see, so it’s quite high-profile.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘Well, it’s got all the ingredients, hasn’t it? A beautiful girl gunned down in a country house owned by a rich foreigner, a dangerous armed suspect on the run who’s killed before and may well do so again. What more could you ask for? A bit more exciting than your average, run-of-the-mill hit-and-run, eh, Constable?’

  Clayton nodded, waiting to see where Macrae was going.

  ‘And I suppose Trave’s the natural choice given that he was in charge last time there was trouble over there.’ Macrae paused and then went on musingly: ‘But there’s talk, you know, that he’s got something of a personal interest in the case — something about his wife and Mr Osman. Have you heard about any of this? Rumours, station gossip — I don’t pay much attention, of course, but I wonder if it’s something that might affect his approach.’

  Clayton shook his head, keeping his eyes resolutely on the floor. He knew what Macrae was after now. A case like this with a lot of news interest followed by a quick, dramatic arrest could do wonders for an ambitious inspector’s career.

  ‘ Adversely affect his approach,’ Macrae said softly, leaning closer and forcing Clayton to look him in the eye. ‘What do you think, Constable?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. We’re doing the best we can,’ said Clayton stolidly. He might have some private concerns about his boss’s having a conflict of interest, but that sure as hell didn’t mean he was going to share his anxieties with a snake like Macrae.

  ‘We certainly are doing our best,’ said Trave brightly from the doorway, appearing as if from nowhere. ‘And while we really appreciate your interest, Hugh, we can’t stay to chat. We’ve got work to do, haven’t we, Adam? Come on.’

  Clayton hadn’t obeyed an order with such alacrity in a long time. He practically ran out of the break room, leaving Macrae with an angry look on his face and a scarlet flush that was beginning to suffuse his pale cheeks. Clayton had no idea how much his boss had heard of what Macrae was saying, but Trave’s timing had been perfect, and he certainly seemed to be in a far better mood than he’d been since the case broke. The frostiness of the previous two days seemed to have been consigned to the past.