The King of Diamonds

by Simon Tolkien

  Titus had been patient with her for months, but she could sense that soon he would press her for an answer to his marriage proposal. Vanessa believed she loved him – certainly she thought of him constantly when he wasn’t there and looked forward with hungry anticipation to their evenings together. But was this a basis for married life? She’d loved her husband with all her heart once, years ago, and yet their union had failed. Vanessa was burdened with her past: however hard she tried, she was unable to free herself of her life experience. She feared commitment and yet could no longer enjoy the independence that she’d worked so hard to achieve in her little flat behind Keble College. She was always restless now, taking long, directionless walks after work, and at night she was oppressed by loneliness, turning on the radio beside her bed to fill the vacant space and then waking up in the small hours to the sound of alien, disembodied voices discussing the parlous state of the world.

  But she knew that it wasn’t just indecision over her future with Titus that had upset her peace of mind. It was guilt too – a gnawing guilt that was eating away at her inside. The months had passed since David Swain’s arrest, and now his trial was fast approaching, and yet she still maintained her silence about what Katya had said to her that September night in the drawing room at Blackwater Hall. Vanessa remembered the terrible effort the girl had made to reach her, to get her words out before she lost consciousness. ‘They’re trying to kill me,’ she’d said. And a few weeks later someone had killed her, and yet Vanessa had stayed quiet. Why? At first because Titus had asked her to, but that was all right because at that early stage she’d only agreed to think about what to do; she’d made no binding commitment. And then when Franz Claes had pressed her on the issue a week later, her immediate instinct had been to rebel against his pressure and tell Titus that she had decided to go to the police. She had always thought of her husband as essentially a fair man, and she’d been unable to credit the idea that Bill would twist Katya’s words to try to implicate Titus in the murder because he was conducting a jealous vendetta against his wife’s lover. But then within hours of her conversation with Claes she’d been forced to revise her opinion. Vanessa shuddered even now, months later, at the memory of her husband lying sprawled on his back in the courtyard of Blackwater Hall like some pathetic, angry schoolboy who’d just lost a playground fight. It was obvious he couldn’t be trusted, and so she’d reluctantly agreed to remain silent when Titus raised the matter with her again later that day. And she’d felt bound to stay quiet even when her husband was taken off the case.

  Then, as the weeks passed and Swain’s trial got closer, she tried to tell herself that her silence didn’t matter because the case against the defendant was so overwhelming, but her conscience kept getting the better of her. She couldn’t suppress the memory of Katya’s white, agonized face from her mind, and every day she felt more torn between her need to do what was right and her desire to protect Titus.

  What troubled Vanessa most was that she wasn’t just shielding Titus; she was shielding Claes too. Vanessa had no doubts that Titus was entirely innocent of all wrongdoing, but she was far less sure about Claes. She had always disliked Titus’s brother-in-law with an intensity that she didn’t understand, and at their most recent meeting the previous Sunday their unspoken mutual antipathy had almost erupted into open hostility.

  They’d been in the dining room at Blackwater – Osman at one end of the polished oak table and Claes at the other, with Vanessa and Claes’s silent, severe-looking sister sitting on either side between the two men. Outside, it had been raining all day and the atmosphere was heavy and oppressive. Vanessa had to force herself to eat the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding that Titus always liked to have served on Sundays in a strange culinary homage to his adopted country, and she was counting the minutes until Titus and she could be alone. With dessert they began a desultory conversation about politics and the state of the world. It was not a subject in which Vanessa had any great interest, but she had enjoyed watching the Kennedy inauguration on the television a few days earlier and had felt infected by the mood of excitement and hope inspired by the new young president.

  ‘He will have to be ready,’ said Claes in his strangely formal English. ‘The Russians will attack – maybe this year, maybe next. Khrushchev, Stalin – they are all the same.’

  ‘What do you mean – the same?’ asked Vanessa, irritated by Claes’s doomsday certainty. ‘Khrushchev condemned Stalin and the purges. Didn’t you read about that?’

  ‘It does not matter,’ said Claes with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘They are Bolsheviks. They want to make everyone else Bolshevik. We had the chance to stop them in the war, and now maybe it is too late.’

  ‘What chance? What are you talking about? Without the Russians Hitler would have won. Is that what you wanted?’ asked Vanessa, outraged. She threw down her napkin and pushed her chair back from the table, but Osman reached out, covering her hand with his, preventing her from rising.

  ‘Please don’t be upset, my dear,’ he said in a soothing voice. ‘This is all a misunderstanding. Franz did not want Hitler to win. He fought in the Belgian army when the Germans invaded. It’s just that he does not like the Communists. None of us do, including your President Kennedy.’

  Vanessa sat stiffly in her chair, keeping her eyes fixed on Claes, refusing to be mollified. ‘What do you say?’ she asked.

  ‘About what?’ asked Claes. Vanessa sensed the contempt in his voice, in the way he looked at her. She felt that underneath his rigid exterior he was spoiling for a fight just as much as she was.

  ‘About Hitler? About fighting the wrong enemy in the war?’

  Claes smiled thinly at Vanessa, apparently about to respond, but then he glanced away, unable to ignore Osman’s intent stare. ‘I did not want Adolf Hitler to win the war,’ he said slowly, sounding for a moment like a recalcitrant schoolchild reciting a lesson that he’d been required to learn by heart. On the other side of the table, Claes’s sister exhaled deeply and put her hand up to the small silver crucifix that hung from a slender chain around her neck, in what was obviously a habitual nervous gesture in such moments of crisis.

  Titus, however, had behaved as if nothing had happened, taking Vanessa by the arm and leading her along the corridor to the drawing room, where they passed the rest of the afternoon side by side on the sofa in front of a roaring fire, talking about faraway places where Vanessa had never been and to which Titus was eager to take her.

  But now, sitting on the grey wooden bench by the riverbank in the darkening late January afternoon, Vanessa realized once and for all that there could be no future with Titus as long as she kept Katya’s words a secret. She could only give Titus what he wanted if she went against his wishes and told what she knew to the police. Not to her husband but to the policeman who’d taken over the case. He didn’t have an axe to grind with Titus; he’d be objective, unlike Bill; he’d tell her what to do.

  Vanessa thought of telling Titus first but then decided against the idea. He’d make her change her mind, and she couldn’t cope with the guilt of remaining silent any longer. She needed to do what was right. He’d just have to understand.

  Vanessa wasted no time once she’d made her decision. She phoned the police station as soon as she got home and made an appointment to see Inspector Macrae the following day.

  It felt strange going into the building where her husband had spent his working life. Vanessa had rarely been there while they were together. Police functions tended to be held at a hotel near the station, and Bill had always wanted to keep his professional and personal lives apart. Vanessa thought with sudden sadness how lost he must feel now that he’d been exiled from this place perhaps forever, but then she hardened her heart, remembering how he’d shut her out after Joe’s death, leaving her alone with her grief while he worked in his office through the long evenings, only coming home to go to bed.

  Macrae came out into the entrance hall, introduced himself, and led her back down
a series of twisting corridors to his office. She appreciated his consideration but nevertheless felt put off by the man. Sitting across the desk from him, she couldn’t put her finger on the reason. Perhaps it was the way his eyes seemed so cold and watchful, detached from what he was saying; perhaps it was the way he stroked his long fingers together as he listened. But Vanessa was determined not to let an unfounded aversion obstruct the purpose of her visit, and so she pushed it to the back of her mind, refusing to acknowledge its existence.

  She began to describe her encounter with Katya in the drawing room at Blackwater Hall four months earlier. It felt like a relief at first to be breaking her long silence and telling this stranger what had happened, but then, faced with her own disclosure, she felt a new surge of guilt for not having spoken before and stumbled over her words, realizing to her shame that tears had started to spring from her eyes.

  ‘I didn’t want to get Titus into trouble,’ she said. ‘He’s a good man, and he was just trying to help Katya, but I knew that Bill, my husband . . .’

  ‘Would take it the wrong way,’ said Macrae, finishing Vanessa’s sentence. She nodded her head and bent down, taking a handkerchief from her bag to dry her eyes.

  ‘I can understand your concern, Mrs Trave,’ Macrae continued. ‘Your husband hates Mr Osman, and now, meeting you, I think that I can understand why.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that you are a beautiful woman. Your husband cannot bear the fact that you have left him for Titus Osman, and so he wants to paint Mr Osman as a murderer when he is nothing of the kind.’

  Vanessa flushed, not knowing what to say. She resented Macrae’s personal remarks, and yet she realized that he was only articulating what she had long thought herself.

  ‘It is a tragedy,’ Macrae went on. ‘Your husband was once a very good policeman but he has lost his way, and now I fear it may be too late.’

  Macrae sounded regretful, but the expression in his grey eyes didn’t seem to match his words. She sensed a cruel humour in them, as if Macrae was secretly enjoying himself, but then with an effort Vanessa dismissed the impression as an illusion. ‘I came here to talk about Katya, not about my husband,’ she said firmly.

  ‘But your husband is the reason you didn’t come forward with the information before. Isn’t that right, Mrs Trave?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Vanessa reluctantly. It was true – mistrust of her husband was the reason why she’d stayed quiet, but the spoken acknowledgement felt like a betrayal. She was saying that Bill was not to be trusted, that he had lost his objectivity, that he had become dishonest; and she was saying it here, in this place where he had worked so hard for so many years to do what was right. Vanessa looked up and felt for a moment as if Macrae had read her mind, as if he entirely understood the significance of her admission and was savouring it with relish.

  ‘But I am telling you now,’ she said, trying to regain control of the conversation. ‘And I need your advice about what to do . . .’

  ‘To do?’ repeated Macrae, appearing puzzled. ‘There’s nothing you need do, Mrs Trave. You see, this case is very simple. David Swain killed Katya Osman. There are no conspiracies, however much your husband would like to uncover them. By all accounts Katya was a very unhappy person. She took drugs and generally abused herself in places where no self-respecting girl should go, and her uncle, to his great credit, tried to help her by looking after her at home. It is not his fault that she had become too unbalanced to appreciate his efforts and made wild allegations to you one evening, and he does not deserve to have those allegations aired in public. No, Mrs Trave, there’s been too much muddying of the waters already in this case. We don’t need any more.’

  ‘So we do nothing?’ asked Vanessa, surprised. It was the outcome she’d hoped for, and yet it left her strangely dissatisfied, unable to reconcile all her soul-searching and guilt with this easy happy ending.

  ‘Just that – nothing at all,’ said Macrae with a smile. ‘Justice will take its course up in London, and you and Mr Osman will live happily ever after at Blackwater Hall. He’s a very lucky man.’

  ‘Nothing is decided yet,’ said Vanessa defensively, getting up to go. There was nothing she could put her finger on, but once again she had the impression that Macrae was taunting her, enjoying her discomfort.

  ‘Of course not,’ he said evenly, holding out his hand. Reluctantly she took it, noticing again the policeman’s long, tapering fingers and his effeminately shaped nails. She made to let go immediately, but he held his grip, looking her in the eye. ‘A word of advice, Mrs Trave,’ he said softly. ‘You’ve done well to come to me, but now I would let the matter rest. Idle talk costs lives – remember what they told us in the war.’

  Macrae dropped Vanessa’s hand and walked over to the door, opening it to let her pass. A burly overweight man in police uniform was standing outside, apparently waiting to come in. He’d cut his chin shaving, and a big sticking plaster disfigured his already ugly face.

  ‘Ah, Jonah,’ said Macrae, addressing the big man with easy familiarity. ‘Please, could you show Mrs Trave out?’

  Wale glanced over at Vanessa with a leer when he heard the name and then turned without a word and began walking away down the corridor. Vanessa followed in his wake, thinking that there was something half-bestial about the man’s lumbering gait. And then out in the foyer he looked her up and down and smiled – a thin, cracked smirk of a smile that set her teeth on edge.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said more curtly than she intended. But he just grinned and turned away, disappearing back into the interior of the police station.

  Vanessa didn’t quite know what to feel in the days that followed her visit to Inspector Macrae. She’d at last done what her conscience demanded and the result had been better than she could have hoped. The policeman in charge of the case had expressly told her to let the matter rest. Now she could get on with her life, unencumbered by any self-reproach. She wouldn’t even need to tell Titus that she had gone to the police. And yet she remained troubled. It had all been too easy. She still felt that questions needed to be put to Claes and his sister, and she remembered with distaste the way Macrae had seemed to take such an unnatural pleasure in Bill’s downfall. Her silence had started to feel like a kind of complicity – a further betrayal of her husband with another of his enemies. But then the sense of accountability made her angry. Bill was the one to blame, she told herself – for the failure of their marriage, for the implosion of his career. He had always been stubborn and difficult to work with – it was why he’d never got promotion, dooming them to life on a financial shoestring. And now she couldn’t allow him to hold her back. Titus offered her a second chance at happiness, and she had to grasp it with both hands before it slipped away.

  Over the weekend the long-predicted snow finally began to fall, covering the world in a dazzling white brightness. It was beautiful, especially down by the frozen river in the University Parks, where groups of laughing students were out skating on the ice, their long, coloured scarves trailing behind their shoulders and their breath hanging in the still winter air like smoke. Vanessa watched them from the bench beside Rainbow Bridge, where she’d felt so despondent a few days earlier. Now she felt alive in every pore of her body, and, leaning down, she scooped up a ball of snow into her gloved hand and pressed it to her forehead, enjoying its sudden cold bite. And then she walked back through the avenues of black trees, delighting in the crunch of the thick-textured virgin snow beneath her feet, got into her tiny car that was parked outside the gates, and drove out to Blackwater Hall, following the golden-red glow of the sun as it sank down into the western sky.

  She was early, but Titus had already opened the front door and come down the steps by the time she’d turned off the engine. He’d obviously been watching out for her from the drawing room window, and it warmed Vanessa’s heart that he should look forward to her arrival with such anticipation.

  He was wearing no hat or coat, and she laug
hed when she got inside the house, seeing how the snowflakes had settled on his thick hair and beard, making him look like a fashionable Santa Claus dressed in an expensive suit and tie.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, taking her by the hand and leading her down the corridor to his study. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’

  ‘Something that can’t wait?’ she asked, laughing at his excited impatience.

  ‘Something that can’t wait,’ he agreed, opening the door.

  It was a colour photograph lying face-up on the desk. The surface was otherwise entirely empty except for a telephone and a green-shaded reading lamp near the corner. The silver-framed photograph of Katya that Vanessa had noticed on a previous visit had now disappeared.

  Looking down, Vanessa saw that it was a picture of an enormous square cushion-shaped diamond with innumerable facets, all glittering with different shades of white and dark light. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, staggered by the apparent size of the stone.

  ‘Yes, and extraordinary when you see it in person and know its story,’ said Titus quietly. ‘Because the great diamonds – and this is one of them – each have their own history. What they have in common is that they travel across the world, passing from one lustful hand to another, and that they tend to possess their owners rather than be possessed by them. That is their nature. Perhaps now people understand this and that is why so many of them are locked up in museums.’

  ‘Like this one?’

  ‘Yes. It’s in the Louvre. They have it sitting on an electrically controlled black velvet plinth in a case made of bulletproof glass. Below there is a specially made steel vault, and at a flick of a switch it rises into the light in the morning and descends back into the darkness when the museum closes at night. No one has even tried to steal it,’ said Titus with a smile.