‘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 h
adn’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.
‘I already forgave you. About five minutes after I drove away from your house,’ she said with a smile, reaching out to caress his cheek as she went past him through the door with a bunch of flowers in her hand.
‘I was taken by surprise,’ he said, following her into the living room. ‘That was the problem. When I thought about it, of course I understood that you had to do what you thought was right. But by then you were gone, and I felt nervous about coming after you.’
‘It was Franz,’ she said. ‘If he hadn’t come in I wouldn’t have left. I can’t stand him, Titus,’ she burst out, unable to control her feelings any longer. ‘I can’t stand the way he looks at me; I can’t stand who he was. You worked with him so you could help people escape. I understand why you did what you did. But I can’t make compromises like that. It’s not who I am.’
‘I know: it’s the same reason you gave evidence,’ said Osman gently, taking hold of her hands. ‘You are true to yourself through and through, you’re like a perfect diamond. It’s what I love about you; it’s why I want you to be my wife.’
‘And that’s what I want too,’ said Vanessa agitatedly. ‘But not with Franz there. He can’t live with us, Titus, when we’re together. I don’t want to see him, or his sister.’
‘You won’t have to. I promise,’ said Osman, placing his hand over his heart like he was taking an oath. ‘Now, do you feel better?’
‘Yes. Like a new woman,’ she said, laughing as she returned his kiss. And it was true. She felt wonderful suddenly, like everything was finally going to turn out all right. Titus had given her what she wanted without even hesitating. What greater proof could she have of how much he loved her?
But the feeling of euphoria didn’t last. Perhaps it was Titus’s nervousness at dinner that unsettled her. He insisted on sitting at the back of the restaurant that he had chosen in an out-of-the-way backstreet and kept glancing over towards the door whenever any new customers came in.
‘I’m sorry, my dear. It’s this man, Jacob Mendel, that I told you about, who’s got me on edge,’ he explained. ‘The police still haven’t found him. He’s gone into hiding, but that doesn’t mean he won’t try something again. Like I told you before, he’s got a gun and has no qualms about using it. God knows where he got it from. They’re not easy things to get hold of in this country. You need a licence.’ Osman’s anxiety was obvious, and it unnerved Vanessa. She wanted Titus to be a rock, strong and invincible like he was before, not the bundle of nerves that he had turned into tonight.
‘You said he blamed you for what happened to his brother. Why? Why would he do that?’ she asked, thinking how pleased her husband would be to know that someone else shared his obsessive suspicion of Titus.
‘I don’t know. It makes no sense,’ said Osman. ‘Maybe because Ethan was my guest and I didn’t protect him, but how could I? I had no idea that Swain was coming. Just like I didn’t know with Katya. God, if only I had,’ he said, pressing his hand over his eyes as if trying to shut out an unwanted memory.
‘It’s not your fault,’ said Vanessa, taking Titus’s hand across the table. ‘But what about Franz? Are you sure he didn’t know…’ She stopped in mid-sentence, but her meaning was obvious.
‘Yes, of course I’m sure,’ said Osman, recoiling. ‘I know you don’t like Franz, but he had nothing to do with what happened to Ethan or Katya. He couldn’t have done.’
‘But he didn’t like Ethan, did he?’ said Vanessa, persisting with her questions despite Osman’s discouragement. ‘Ethan was Jewish.’
‘That had nothing to do with it,’ said Osman quickly.
‘And what about Katya? What did he think of her?’ asked Vanessa.
‘They didn’t get on very well. But that doesn’t mean anything. He’s not good with women. I already told you that. Swain committed both those murders, Vanessa. You’ve got to understand that,’ said Osman in a voice that brooked no opposition. He was holding his wine glass so tight that Vanessa thought it would break.
She nodded in apparent acquiescence, dropping her eyes, keeping her doubts to herself. Secretly she hoped that Swain would be acquitted of Katya’s murder, but she wasn’t going to tell Titus that. He obv
iously had a complete blind spot where his brother-in-law was concerned, and she had no wish to risk another quarrel. And yet, try as she might, she couldn’t contain her sense of unease. Over coffee she returned to the subject of Titus’s niece. The girl had a hold over her mind, and Vanessa didn’t seem able to stop thinking about her.
‘What was Katya like?’ she asked. ‘You never talk about her.’
‘It’s painful,’ said Osman. ‘We didn’t get on a lot of the time, and now that she’s gone I wish I’d handled our relationship differently. But it’s too late, and so I try not to think about it, even though I know that’s wrong.’
‘It’s understandable,’ said Vanessa sympathetically. ‘Why didn’t you get on?’
‘Because it was my duty to step into her parents’ shoes after they died, and she wouldn’t go along with that. She got into trouble at school and with boys, and I tried to stop her; and then, each time I crossed her, she resented me more. It got much worse at the end after Ethan died, but I already told you that. “You’re not my father” was her favourite phrase,’ said Osman sadly. ‘And we often didn’t seem to be able to get much beyond our angry words. But what’s done is done. You can’t bring back the dead.’
‘Did she leave anything behind? Anything that you could remember her by?’ asked Vanessa.
‘No, hardly anything. But she was like that — quick and darting and slender, like some wild bird. I had her photograph on my desk, but then I put it away. It was too painful.’
‘Painful’: it was the second time that Osman had used the word in connection with Katya in less than a minute, and Vanessa felt oddly dissatisfied by the inadequacy of his description of his niece. Vanessa had only met Katya twice, the second time for only a few moments before the girl fainted away, and yet she had left an indelible impression on Vanessa’s mind, and Vanessa knew instinctively as she got up to go that she would never have any peace of mind until she knew for certain who it was that had murdered the poor girl in her bed the previous September.
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