The King of Diamonds

by Simon Tolkien

  At ten past six the outside light suddenly went on above the front door, and a moment later Claes and his sister appeared on the steps with Osman behind them, wearing a dinner jacket. Jacob watched them through his field glasses as they got into Osman’s Bentley. He knew where Jana Claes was going, dressed all in black with a lace mantilla on her head and the old worn prayer book in her hand. He’d followed her before on a Sunday evening to 6.30 Benediction at St Aloysius and sat two pews behind her in the big, echoing church while the tiny congregation abased themselves before the Blessed Sacrament and incense filled the air. Mass in the morning; Benediction in the evening – Claes had his work cut out on a Sunday, Jacob thought with bitter amusement, ferrying his sister back and forth to church so she could confess her family’s sins, seek forgiveness for the unforgivable. And then Claes had to drive Osman about as well. Tonight the master of the house looked like he was on the way to some gala dinner or other in the city, where he would no doubt be treated like visiting royalty. Jacob had done his research – he’d traced the way Osman had spent the last fifteen years building himself a position in local society with carefully targeted charitable gifts, trading his ill-gotten gains for his neighbours’ respect, until now no Oxford ball or banquet could be judged a real success if Titus Osman wasn’t present as the guest of honour.

  The headlights of the car raked the trees for a moment as Claes turned the wheel, and then they were gone, disappearing into the darkness up the drive. Jacob hesitated. He knew the house was almost certainly empty – there was no live-in staff at Blackwater Hall. It was the opportunity he had been waiting for, and yet still he hung back, unwilling to take the risk that Claes might come back unexpectedly and find him. Jacob hated Claes, but he feared him as well. He remembered the man’s wiry strength when they had wrestled together in Osman’s study the previous summer. He’d only just managed to get away.

  And yet Jacob knew he had to try his luck. The chance was too good to miss. He stepped out onto the lawn, feeling the crunch of the frosty grass beneath his shoes, and had just reached the side of the house when he came to an abrupt halt, flattening himself against the wall as a car drew up in the courtyard. Looking cautiously around the corner, Jacob saw two men going up the steps and then heard them knocking hard on the front door. It was what he’d feared: the moonlight was just sufficient to enable Jacob to recognize Trave and the other young detective – they’d escaped their captivity quicker even than he’d anticipated.

  Trave stopped his knocking for a moment and then started it up again, this time even louder than before. A minute later the younger policeman took over. Jacob thought they would never give up, but finally they turned around and went back to their car. The doors closed and Jacob waited expectantly for the sound of the engine gunning into life, but nothing happened. He cursed his luck: it was obvious what was happening – they were going to sit there and wait for Osman and Claes to come home so they could warn them about him. And there was nothing Jacob could do about it except stand shivering in the cold and watch.

  The minutes passed agonizingly slowly. It was too dark for Jacob to be able to see his watch, and he dared not risk his torch. An owl hooted several times somewhere high up in the trees, but there was otherwise no sound to break the silence until the bell in the tower of Blackwater Church on the other side of the hill began to toll out the hour of seven. It was like a signal: almost immediately a light went on in the car, and then, several minutes later, the younger policeman got out and went up the steps again. He didn’t knock on the door this time; he was doing something else, which Jacob couldn’t see in the darkness, and, once he’d finished, he went back to his car and drove away.

  Jacob held his breath. Benediction was a short service, and Claes and Jana could easily be back by now; they could still meet the policemen’s car further up the drive, and all would be lost. But Jacob heard nothing. Once again he was entirely alone. Stealthily, he crossed the courtyard and went up the steps. There was a folded piece of paper tucked into the letter box. Jacob let out a sigh of relief – the young detective had obviously thought his note was more likely to attract Osman’s attention hanging on the outside of the door rather than posted into the interior. Carefully lifting the brass flap, Jacob picked up the note, put it in his pocket, and went back to the trees, where he read it by the light of his pocket torch.

  It was addressed on the outside: ‘To Titus Osman/Franz Claes’ and marked ‘Urgent.’ Inside there were four sentences signed by ‘DC Adam Clayton’:

  I waited for you but you were out. I came to warn you that Ethan Mendel’s brother, Jacob, is the man who tried to break into your house last summer and he is likely to try again very soon. He is armed and dangerous. Please call the police station as soon as you get this letter.

  Jacob put the note in his pocket and smiled for the first time that day. If he’d been this lucky now, he’d be lucky tomorrow. He felt certain of it: he’d find what he was looking for because he was meant to find it. From down the drive came the sound of a car’s approach, and Jacob watched as Claes and his sister got out and went into the house. Then he turned away with a satisfied smile and headed back down the path toward Osman’s boathouse.

  Clayton would’ve preferred to wait longer. He didn’t share Trave’s confidence that there was nothing immediate to fear from Jacob, but he did agree that he needed to alert the station to what was happening – keeping the information about Jacob to themselves was clearly no longer an option, given that the man was armed, had broken into the Hall once already, and intended by his own admission to do so again.

  Clayton drove back into town via North Oxford, dropping Trave at his house on the way to the police station. Trave had been warned to attend court on the Monday afternoon to give evidence at the Swain trial, and they agreed to talk again the following evening.

  The station was almost deserted – hardly surprising on a Sunday evening. Clayton tried without success to get hold of Macrae and Creswell on the phone, and the operator reported that there was a fault on Osman’s line that couldn’t be investigated until morning. Clayton drank some black coffee and spent an hour typing up a statement of the day’s events, but halfway through, his fatigue finally caught up with him, and he fell asleep with his arms on his desk, only waking up in the small hours when two night-duty policemen brought in a pair of angry drunks who’d decided to finish off the weekend in style with a bare-knuckled fight on Broad Street. It was too late now to drive back out to Blackwater and wake up Osman, and Clayton assumed that the station would have heard something if there’d been any trouble. He told the night-duty sergeant to be sure to wake him if there were any developments and then drove slowly home, letting the cold air blow through the open car windows to keep himself awake. Once inside, he made a sandwich, set his alarm clock, and fell into bed, where he tossed and turned all night, at the mercy of a series of nightmares in which he was always a minute too late to prevent terrible things from happening to people he was responsible for but couldn’t help.

  Jacob woke with the first rays of the bright winter sun in his eyes as it shone across the still, blue-grey waters of Blackwater Lake and in through the curtainless windows of Titus Osman’s disused boathouse. His limbs ached from the hardwood floor and the cold, but he was oblivious to the pain. Adrenaline coursed through his veins at the thought of what lay ahead. Today was going to be the day – he was sure of it. And he was not mistaken. At just after seven o’clock Osman and Claes emerged from the house wearing overcoats and suits and got into Osman’s Bentley. There was no sign of Claes’s sister: she’d obviously not been warned to attend court that day, or perhaps the prosecution wasn’t calling her as a witness in any event. Jacob had no way of knowing, and it didn’t matter. Thinking about it, her presence in the house was actually an advantage. She wouldn’t be armed like her brother, and there would be no burglar alarm to fret about. Jacob had already cut the telephone wire, and so there was no risk of an alert being sent to the police station, but
he had been concerned about the possibility that he wouldn’t be able to stop the alarm bell ringing on the side of the house. Now he needn’t worry – all he had to do was wait for Osman and Claes to drive away and then walk up the steps, knock on the door, and wait to be let inside.

  Jana answered almost immediately. She was dressed as usual in a long black woollen dress with not a hair on her head out of place – she’d obviously been up for some time. ‘Remember me?’ asked Jacob brutally, as he pushed past her into the hall and then turned and shut the door with a hard shove of his hand.

  Jana didn’t respond. Terrified, she recoiled from Jacob into the corner, looking about wildly as if searching for some non-existent means of escape. Jacob laughed, enjoying her fear. He had no idea how much she was involved in all that had happened, but she was Claes’s sister, and that was crime enough.

  ‘Perhaps it’s the beard that’s throwing you off. Facial hair changes a man, doesn’t it?’ he said, fingering the thick black hair on his cheek and chin. ‘No? All right, well then let me remind you,’ Jacob continued, looking down at Jana’s shaking hands with unconcealed amusement. ‘I was here last summer in Titus’s study having a wrestling match with your Nazi brother – remember now?’

  ‘What do you want?’ asked Jana, stuttering over her words. She spoke hoarsely, as if fear had taken away her voice.

  ‘Want? I want everything,’ said Jacob with a humourless smile. ‘I want to know where you were when Katya died, whether you were involved in my brother’s death, what you did in the war – all your sins and secrets. But you aren’t going to tell me about them, are you? Not unless I make you, and luckily for you I haven’t got time for that. So let’s just settle for you telling me where Titus keeps his papers. Not his phone bills; his important papers. You know what I mean.’

  Jacob stared into Jana’s frightened eyes, demanding a response, but she said nothing, just slowly shook her head from side to side.

  ‘You won’t say? Well, you’ll show me then.’ Abruptly Jacob leaned forward and took hold of Jana’s wrist, squeezing it, pulling her towards the back of the hall. ‘Come on, let’s start with his study. I know where that is.’

  Inside the study he let go of her and went over to the desk. To his surprise, all the drawers except the one in the centre at the top were unlocked. He pulled them open one by one, rifling through their contents while Jana stood watching, looking appalled, like she was watching an act of desecration in a church. But there was nothing. Pens and stationery, headed letter-writing paper with an absurd golden crest at the top as if Osman was some kind of lord, a bundle of bank statements – everything that he wasn’t looking for.

  Only the top drawer remained. Jacob didn’t bother asking Jana for the key. Instead he took the revolver out of his pocket, stood back from the desk, and carefully fired a bullet into the keyhole, smashing the lock and the wood. Jana screamed in terror, but he ignored her. Instead he swept aside the dust and looked inside, but there were only cheque books and Osman’s passport – and of all things a photogaph of Katya in a silver frame. He didn’t touch it – the impact of the bullet had smashed the glass.

  ‘Where are they – the documents, the diamonds?’ asked Jacob angrily, fastening his eyes on Jana again. Her face was white now, and he noticed how she kept fingering a silver crucifix hanging from a chain around her neck. It was obviously an unconscious gesture – something she did in moments of stress – but the reminder of her hypocritical religion made Jacob hate her even more. He went over to her. She tried to turn away, but he took hold of her face in his hand, forcing her to look at him. It was as if he was trying to read her mind.

  ‘There’s a safe, isn’t there?’ he said softly after a moment, letting go of her chin. ‘That’s where he keeps his past. Where is it? Tell me where it is.’

  Jana turned away without answering, but not before Jacob had had time to see and understand her first reaction to his words. He knew what her rapid anxious glance up toward the ceiling had meant.

  ‘It’s not in here, is it?’ he said, speaking as if to himself. ‘It’s upstairs – upstairs where he sleeps. Show me where he sleeps.’

  Jana stood rooted to the spot, ignoring Jacob’s order. But whether it was resistance or fear that had immobilized her, Jacob neither knew nor cared. He put the revolver up to the side of her head, pressing its muzzle against her temple. ‘Move,’ he commanded, and this time Jana moved – up the stairs to the first floor and down the corridor to the left until they came to the door at the end. She hesitated outside, but Jacob reached in front of her, turned the handle, and pushed her inside.

  It was a grand room with an elaborately carved cornice surrounding its high ceiling. The furniture was ornate French Second Empire – an armchair and a four-poster bed that had not yet been made from the previous night and, on the nearest wall, two matching wardrobes decorated with pastoral scenes that stood on either side of a small oil painting of Blackwater Hall as it had appeared a hundred years earlier. However, the real glory of the room lay in the views from the tall rectangular sash windows hung with exquisite pale white silk curtains. At the front was the tree-lined drive leading up to the gates, and beyond that, across the invisible road, the green hill climbing up to Blackwater village. And through the window to the right there was the same view as from the drawing room below, except this time from higher up, so that on a clear day such as this the eye could take in the full expanse of Blackwater Lake and the pine woods beyond, disappearing down into the distant valley. This was what Osman woke to every morning, thought Jacob with disgust, while those he had wronged lay buried in the dirt, seeing nothing.

  ‘All right, where is it?’ he demanded, raising the gun threateningly toward Jana’s head. Petrified, she pointed over to the picture between the wardrobes with a trembling hand.

  Jacob’s eyes flicked over to the wall and back to Jana. He gestured with the gun, and, following its instruction, she backed away to the front window. Then, keeping the revolver trained on her with one hand, he lifted the picture from off its hook, revealing a steel wall safe surmounted by a small black-and-white number dial. His eyes lit up and he audibly exhaled, sensing how close he was now to the summit he had been struggling towards for so long.

  ‘I don’t know the code,’ said Jana in a whisper, pre-empting his question. He went up close to her again, but this time she held his gaze and he knew she was telling the truth. He returned to the safe and began twisting the dial this way and that, trying every combination of significant numbers he could think of – Osman’s birthday, the date the war ended and when it began, the registration number of Osman’s Bentley. Nothing worked. Finally, maddened with frustration, Jacob took aim and fired his revolver at the safe, but the bullet just ricocheted off the silvery surface and embedded itself in the opposite wall.

  He would have shot again, but from down below there was the sound of someone knocking on the front door. Jacob and Jana both froze. Jacob was the first to recover. ‘Get away from the window,’ he ordered, but she did the opposite, flattening herself back against the glass, refusing to obey. Jacob advanced on her, seizing her arm, trying to drag her away, but she took hold of the curtain and stood her ground. She was surprisingly strong, and Jacob pocketed his gun, realizing he would need two hands. Straight away, Jana took advantage of the momentary loosening of his grip to twist around and bang on the window with one of her hands, trying to attract the attention of the man in the courtyard down below.

  When he heard the noise Adam Clayton was just walking back to his police car. He’d requisitioned it from the station earlier that morning when he had gone in to try and track down Macrae, who was still nowhere to be found. Now, turning around, he looked up and saw Jacob Mendel locked in a struggle with Jana Claes. For a moment they were framed, silent and contorted in the first-floor window on the far left of the house. And then they disappeared, as if they had never been there at all.

  Clayton looked about wildly for something with which to break a
window, and then thought of the wheel jack in the back of the car. He’d got it out and was about to use it when Jana reappeared in the window above his head, pulling it up open wide. ‘He’s gone,’ she shouted, leaning out. And at that moment, to his left, out of sight and round the side of the house, Clayton heard the sound of another sash window opening; seconds later, he caught sight of a figure running fast across the wide lawn towards the trees. Clayton reacted instantly. He ran to his car, reversed it into a three-point turn with a screech of tyres, and set off up the drive, arriving at the fence where the path from the boathouse met the road long before Jacob could have got there on foot. Mindful of Jacob’s gun, Clayton moved his car further down the road out of sight and radioed in for reinforcements. Then he got out and stood behind a tree, watching. He knew his job wasn’t to arrest Jacob but to keep track of him until armed police arrived.

  A minute passed and then another, but nothing happened. Everything was still and silent. Clayton was sure he was in the right place – from where he was standing he could see the bushes where Jacob had hidden his scooter the previous day. Cautiously, he crossed the road and climbed over the fence. He searched all the nearby undergrowth carefully at first and then with a rising panic, but there was no sign of the scooter. He looked anxiously down the path leading to the boathouse. It was narrow and uneven, unsuitable for riding, but perhaps Jacob had wheeled his scooter down there this time. Nervously Clayton started walking, stopping at each corner to check the way ahead. But there was nothing, until he came in sight of the boathouse and looked out across the lake to where a rowing boat was fast approaching the weeping willow trees lining the bank on the other side. There was one solitary figure pulling on the oars, and Clayton didn’t need the man to turn his head to know who it was.