The King of Diamonds itadc-2

by Simon Tolkien

  Guided by the moonlight, Trave picked a path past the wooden goalposts and nets that rose up like ghostly shapes in the semi-darkness, dividing one football pitch from the next. In the distance he could make out the weathercock on the top of the school cricket pavilion. Trave remembered the weathercock from his previous visit: it was a representation of Old Father Time, a miniature Grim Reaper complete with sickle. To Trave’s left a tall yew hedge divided the playing fields from a small side road, and he grimaced in momentary irritation when he noticed a gate halfway along, realizing that he could have saved himself a lot of trouble by parking his car on the other side and accessing the playing fields that way.

  A hundred yards further on Trave stopped in front of the pavilion. The cricket season was now over, but the scores of the last match of the summer were still displayed on the facade — Batsman 1, Batsman 2 — meaningless white numbers on a black background, which Trave could barely make out in the moonlight. Beyond, the grass sloped down gently to a row of poplar trees lining the riverbank.

  The door of the pavilion was open, but Trave didn’t go in. He’d been too revved up all day since Swain’s phone call to properly think through the implications of this clandestine meeting. He’d rushed headlong towards it, and now, standing on the brink, he suddenly hesitated, realizing the extent of the risk he was taking. Creswell wouldn’t be able to save him this time if it came out that he’d arranged a meeting with an escaped prisoner, the main suspect in a murder inquiry. And he wondered too what he stood to gain by taking the risk. What could Swain tell him that he didn’t already guess? But he’d never know if he didn’t ask. It was too late now to turn back, and, throwing caution to the winds, Trave walked up to the door and went inside.

  Immediately he found himself in almost pitch darkness, and instinctively he put out his hand, feeling for an invisible light switch.

  ‘Don’t,’ said a disembodied voice somewhere to Trave’s right. ‘Keep your hands by your side. I’ve got a gun, remember.’

  ‘What, are you going to shoot me?’ asked Trave, suddenly angry. ‘I’m the only friend you’ve got, you idiot.’

  ‘All right, all right, I’m sorry,’ said David. ‘I’m scared. That’s all.’ A match flared, illuminating the young man’s face for a moment as he lit a cigarette. He looked terrible — haggard, worn out, a shadow of the person that Trave had visited in Brixton Prison the previous year.

  He was sitting in the corner on a bench consisting of the top of a set of two-tiered footlockers that ran the length of the room. Trave felt his way along the wall and sat down beside him.

  ‘I used to go to school here, you know,’ said David, now invisible again apart from the red glow of his cigarette.

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ said Trave. St Luke’s wasn’t the kind of place that he would have pictured as Swain’s alma mater.

  ‘Too upmarket for a kid like me, eh?’ said David, catching the note of surprise in Trave’s response. ‘Well, you’re right. I never fitted in here. They could tell I wasn’t one of them from the day I arrived. I used to hide out in here when it got really bad, unless they were playing cricket, of course. Then there was nowhere to go. Cricket’s such a stupid game…’ David broke off, his bitterness filling the room.

  ‘David,’ said Trave, reaching out and touching the young man’s arm in an effort to connect. ‘You’ve got to tell me what happened. Like I told you, I can’t help you unless you tell me everything.’

  ‘If you can help me! I’m an innocent man — white as the bloody Christmas snow, and that hasn’t helped me any these last two years.’

  This was going to be more difficult than he’d thought, Trave realized. Swain was clearly at the end of his tether.

  ‘Here, have a drink of this,’ said Trave, taking a small hip flask out of his pocket and holding it out toward David. ‘It’s brandy. It’ll help.’

  Trave felt David’s trembling hand on his for a moment as the young man reached for the flask, and then he heard David cough violently as he swallowed the alcohol.

  ‘Thanks,’ said David, keeping hold of the flask.

  ‘No problem. Right, let’s start at the beginning — tell me what happened from when you and Earle got out of the prison. There was a man with a beard, right?’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Where did he take you?’

  But David didn’t get to say where Bircher had driven them. There was the sound of a car approaching at speed across the grass outside — it had to have come in through the gate in the hedge that Trave had noticed earlier. It screeched to a halt, and then suddenly the pavilion was full of white light from the car’s headlights, and David had dropped the hip flask and the cigarette and was reaching in his pocket for the gun. Trave saw the silver barrel at the last moment and lunged forward to grab hold of it, but David sensed him coming and got to his feet, pulling away. He took a step toward the door, raising the gun in readiness to shoot, and then fell suddenly forward, tripping on Trave’s hip flask where it lay on the floor. As if in slow motion, Trave watched the gun fly out of David’s hand and hit a footlocker on the right. He saw Swain recover his footing and bend down, reaching for the gun, and at that moment, knowing he had no time, Trave threw himself onto the ground like he was bellyflopping into water, covering the gun with his body. Surprised, David lost his balance and fell over Trave’s prone body, ending up sprawled out at right angles to Trave on the floor.

  Trave was the first to recover. Everything hurt, but at least he could move his limbs. He pulled the gun out from under his chest and got slowly to his feet.

  ‘We know you’re in there. Come out with your hands up. You too, Trave.’ It was Macrae outside, shouting at them through a megaphone. Trave could hear the conceited triumph in the Scotsman’s voice despite the amplified distortion of his mouthpiece. Trave felt like he was going to be sick.

  ‘Bastard,’ said David, looking up at Trave from the floor. ‘I should never have trusted you.’

  ‘And I should never have come,’ said Trave bitterly. ‘This was just as much a trap for me as for you. God, what a fool I’ve been.’

  ‘One minute,’ shouted Macrae. ‘And then we’re coming in.’

  ‘They’ll shoot us,’ said David. ‘Maybe it’s better that way.’

  ‘For you maybe,’ said Trave brutally. But Swain was right: Macrae might try to murder them if he could find an excuse. It was unlikely, but it was still possible.

  ‘Adam Clayton, are you there?’ shouted Trave, keeping out of sight behind the door. ‘Are you there, Adam?’

  There was silence and then the noise of people talking outside. Trave couldn’t make out the words. And then a nervous, familiar voice came over the megaphone: ‘This is Clayton. What do you want?’

  ‘I’ve got Swain’s gun,’ shouted Trave. ‘I’m going to throw it out. Once you’ve got it, we’re coming out too.’

  Trave lobbed the revolver underhand out into the light and waited until he heard the sound of someone picking it up. And then he went over to Swain and took him by the arm. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘It’s better this way.’

  Surprisingly Swain didn’t resist. ‘What does it matter? I’m dead meat anyway,’ he said, and Trave thought he’d never heard such resignation in a man’s voice.

  And then, blinking, they walked out into the light.

  PART TWO

  1961

  CHAPTER 15

  New Year’s Day dawned fresh and cold and was soon suffused in bright hard winter sunlight. A light coating of seasonal snow still covered the grass and flower beds in Trave’s garden, and two robins sitting on a black branch of the leafless apple tree over by the far wall made the view from Trave’s bedroom window look almost like a Christmas card. But Trave was unmoved. He felt neither festive nor ready for turning over new leaves or making New Year’s resolutions. There was no Christmas tree and there were no cards or decorations in the old North Oxford house that once used to be a family home.

&
nbsp; He hadn’t seen or heard from Vanessa since the day he’d disgraced himself out at Blackwater Hall three months earlier. What a fool he’d been! First with Osman and then with Macrae, who’d baited his hook with a few well-chosen words to the press and then reeled him and Swain in like a pair of floundering fish. And now Swain was awaiting trial in London — a trial he couldn’t win, and Trave was suspended on half pay, pending the outcome of a disciplinary hearing that he couldn’t win either, while Macrae swanned around Oxford Police Station like he owned the place and Osman ran his manicured hands over Vanessa’s body… Trave closed his eyes tight, using all his mental strength to shut out the obscene images that had once again floated unbidden into his mind. The telephone ringing in the front room was a welcome distraction.

  It was Clayton. ‘Bircher’s dead,’ he said, sounding excited. ‘Fell from the top of a multi-storey car park in the centre of town last night. Or was pushed…’

  ‘Welcome to 1961,’ said Trave.

  ‘Can I come over?’

  ‘For some free advice from an ex-copper with time on his hands? Why not?’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Trave got dressed and took a cup of coffee into the garden, where he felt the sharp winter air prickle against his unshaven cheeks. He looked back toward the house and felt reassured by the line of his footprints in the snow. They were a proof of his existence, like the bite of the cold snow on his hand as he moulded it into a ball and threw it at the shed in the corner. The snowball exploded into a mass of white flakes and a couple of birds flew, cawing wildly, up into the cloudless blue sky. And Trave felt suddenly ashamed — that Bircher’s death should make him suddenly feel alive or even perhaps that he should be alive at all when others lay dead and unavenged. He thought of Katya Osman lying stretched out on her bed with her eyes open, seeing nothing at all. He remembered the scene with a terrible, crystal clarity, and he shuddered at the recollection as he went back inside and closed the door.

  It wasn’t the first time that Clayton had seen his old boss since Trave’s suspension from duty on the morning following Swain’s arrest, and the events of that night had in fact played a big part in ending their brief estrangement. Three months later Clayton still remained disturbed by what had happened.

  Macrae had been ecstatic on the way back to the police station. ‘Two birds with one stone,’ he’d kept repeating in a sing-song voice as if Trave were a criminal too like Swain, instead of what he actually was: a good, honest policeman sent off the rails by an emotional strain that even the most balanced person would have found almost impossible to cope with. Clayton had felt desperately sorry for Trave as he’d come stumbling out of the cricket pavilion with Swain and stood there in the glare of the car headlights, shamed in front of the junior officers from the station that Macrae had brought along for support. Clayton remembered how they’d all turned away from Trave, shunning him like he’d got some infectious disease. All of them except Wale and Macrae, whom Clayton had heard afterward over by the cars hissing in Trave’s ear: ‘It’s over now, you moron. Over and out.’ But Trave hadn’t responded, just stood slumped over like a beaten man while Jonah Wale laughed out loud. It was the first time Clayton had ever heard the man’s laugh — an animal laugh, full of a vicious, unreasoning cruelty, devoid of all human compassion.

  Clayton had anticipated that they would interview Swain when they got back to the police station, but Macrae was having none of it. ‘Let’s not be hasty, Constable. He needs his dinner and his eight hours’ sleep first. Just like you. Go home and get some rest. We’ll talk to him in the morning.’ Clayton had hung around for a while, writing up his report, but Macrae and Wale had outwaited him and eventually Clayton had gone home.

  And the next day Swain admitted everything, or rather agreed with every suggestion that Macrae put to him in the interview room. He’d insisted on Eddie driving him out to Blackwater Hall; he’d taken the gun from the car and broken in through the study window, and then he’d gone upstairs and shot Katya in the head because she’d betrayed him with Ethan Mendel and it was her evidence that had put him away before. And then when he’d got out to the road, Eddie was gone, so he’d flagged down a car in Blackwater village and forced the driver to take him back to Oxford, where he’d holed up in a cheap hotel until he was caught.

  And that was that. As full and frank a confession as any investigating policeman could wish for. Except that Clayton was left obscurely dissatisfied. He felt that Swain had confessed too easily. He’d sung like a canary but without any variation in the notes. There’d been no intonation, no emotion in Swain’s voice when he answered Macrae’s questions except that his eyes seemed to keep flickering over to Wale, who sat motionless in the corner, saying nothing, looking off into space.

  Clayton had been sufficiently concerned to wait until Macrae had left the station for the day and had then gone to see Swain in his cell. But Swain had refused to talk to him, lying on his bunk in a foetal position with his face to the wall, shivering, even though the radiator was on and it wasn’t cold. And the sergeant who’d been on desk duty the night before just shook his head and suggested he take his questions to Inspector Macrae when Clayton asked him if he’d heard anything untoward.

  ‘There wasn’t a mark on him that I could see,’ Clayton told Trave a week later when his doubts and anxiety had driven him over to his ex-boss’s house for the first time since Swain’s arrest.

  ‘But you don’t need to leave a mark if you know what you’re doing,’ Trave said, laughing at Clayton’s naivete. ‘There’s other ways of breaking a man…’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Squeezing his genitals, half-drowning him in a bucket of water, threatening his family. It wouldn’t have taken much to break Swain. I saw him, remember, and he was already on his last legs in that cricket pavilion. And Macrae’s not averse to a bit of coercion where it suits his purpose.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because a few years back he put an innocent man in gaol for a murder he didn’t commit. The man did three years before the conviction was overturned and he got a Queen’s pardon.’

  ‘Did you have something to do with that?’ asked Clayton, remembering the oblique references that Trave and Macrae had both made earlier in the investigation to some kind of shared past.

  ‘Yes, by accident at first,’ said Trave. ‘I had a murder down here in which the killer left the same calling card as in Macrae’s case.’

  ‘What was it?’ asked Clayton, curious.

  ‘A shilling coin on the victim’s tongue. You know, like they used to do in Roman times to pay the ferryman to take the dead across the River Styx. Don’t you kids learn anything in school any more?’ asked Trave, shaking his head in response to Clayton’s look of bemusement. ‘Anyway, I remembered about the other murder up north, and I went and looked up the evidence. It was really weak apart from a confession extracted by guess who?’

  ‘Macrae?’

  ‘Exactly. And once I was able to tie my man to the first murder, then that was it for Macrae’s conviction.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘Macrae? Nothing as far as I know. The man who got the pardon said that Macrae had tortured him into confessing, but there was no physical evidence of that and the fact that his confession was false didn’t prove that Macrae had forced it out of him.’

  ‘It just made it very likely,’ said Clayton.

  ‘Yes. And that obviously didn’t help Macrae’s climb up the greasy ladder, for which he’s blamed me ever since. This Osman case was his chance for payback, and you can’t take it away from him — he grabbed the opportunity with both hands,’ said Trave with a rueful smile.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’ asked Clayton.

  ‘Because Creswell asked me not to, and I agreed with him. I didn’t want Macrac transferred down here, but once it happened I wasn’t going to make things worse by a lot of backstabbing. It had been a long time since I’d crossed swords with him and I did
n’t realize that he’s a Scotsman with a long memory.’

  The conversation with Trave increased Clayton’s sense of unease about the case, and his anxieties intensified soon after when the ballistics report came back from the lab with the news that Swain’s gun could have fired the bullet that killed Katya Osman but was now entirely loaded with blank ammunition. Clayton had expected Macrae to be concerned at this development, but he dismissed it with a shrug of his shoulders.

  ‘It’s an old trick, lad,’ he said. ‘Kill your man with a gun, load it with blanks like it never happened, and then play the innocent.’

  ‘But where would he get the blanks?’

  ‘Anywhere. It’s not difficult. The evidence is self-serving. It won’t make any difference.’

  And then, just as he was turning away, Macrae noticed the look of disappointment on Clayton’s face.

  ‘Don’t go lily-livered on me, Constable,’ he said with a sneer. ‘You don’t want to end up like old Trave, do you? Flushed down the toilet at fifty?’

  There seemed to be nothing Clayton could do to change the direction of events. Swain was charged with murder, and Eddie got an even better deal than Trave had dangled before him. The charges for the assault on the girl in London were dropped and leniency was promised for the escape, in return for Eddie’s testifying at trial about the threats he’d heard Swain make against Katya and about how he’d seen Swain enter the grounds of Blackwater Hall at around half past midnight on the morning of Sunday, 25 September, armed with a handgun.

  Swain had pleaded not guilty, but everyone at the station agreed that the trial would be a formality and that it was only a matter of time before Swain went to meet his maker.