The King of Diamonds

by Simon Tolkien

  ‘I wanted to see Titus,’ she said, stumbling over her words. ‘Something important has come up that I need to tell him about. Is he here?’ she finished lamely.

  Jana opened the door wide without saying anything and moved aside to let Vanessa pass. It was warm inside and Vanessa rubbed her hands together to restart her circulation, and then, looking up, she was surprised to see a uniformed policeman come through the doorway at the end of the hall and go up the stairs to the first floor. There were several voices talking somewhere out of sight, but Vanessa couldn’t tell if one of them was Titus’s.

  ‘Has something happened?’ she asked, turning to Jana. ‘Is Titus all right?’

  ‘A man broke in here yesterday, trying to take things. But the police came and he ran away,’ said Jana in her slow, heavily accented English.

  ‘Who was here?’ asked Vanessa, horrified.

  ‘I was. Please wait in here,’ said Jana, opening the door of the drawing room. ‘I will tell Titus you are come.’

  Vanessa had innumerable questions to ask, but something in Jana’s tone prohibited further conversation, and Vanessa did as she was told, taking a seat on the same sofa where Katya had lain unconscious five months before, having placed Vanessa under an obligation that, try as she might, she seemed unable to escape.

  The grey, overcast afternoon was now dissolving into an early evening gloom, and the drawing room felt cheerless and forlorn. There was no fire, and Vanessa did not turn on the lights. She felt like she was in some kind of medical waiting room and that there would be no good news when she finally got to see the doctor.

  She idly picked up the newspaper that was lying in front of her on the coffee table. It had obviously been read already since it was folded in on itself with an inside page now at the front, and the headline explained why it had attracted the previous reader’s attention: ‘Blackwater Murder – Witness’s Nazi Connections’. Osman came in when Vanessa was halfway through the article.

  ‘Is this true?’ she asked, leaning away as he bent down over the back of the sofa to kiss her.

  Osman glanced at the newspaper over her shoulder and sighed with obvious irritation. ‘That Franz was a Nazi?’ he asked, straightening up and heading over to the drinks tray in the corner.

  ‘Yes. Was he?’

  ‘I don’t know, to be honest with you. He certainly worked with them. He had no choice if he was going to keep his job in the interior ministry, but I’ve never asked him if he was actually required to join the party. I didn’t think it was any of my business.’

  ‘That he was, is, a Nazi,’ said Vanessa, looking appalled. ‘What could be more important?’

  ‘Nothing, if he really was one,’ said Osman evenly. ‘But the truth is he only worked with them so as to do good things. For Belgium and for Belgian Jews. Yes, that’s right, Vanessa,’ Osman went on, seeing the look of disbelief on his fiancée’s face. ‘Without Franz I would never have been able to help all those poor people to escape. I needed someone on the inside with power . . .’

  ‘A Nazi,’ said Vanessa interrupting. ‘You needed a Nazi.’

  Osman turned away without answering, concentrating on mixing himself a drink. Vanessa shook her head when he offered her one too. It was only quarter past five according to the clock on the mantelpiece.

  ‘I’m sorry, my dear,’ he said, coming over to sit beside her on the sofa. ‘I’m not at my best right now. This has not been an easy couple of days. Franz and I had to give evidence at the trial up in London, which was stressful, particularly for Franz’ – Osman gestured toward the newspaper – ‘and then when we came back we found the house had been broken into and Jana had been terrorized by a man with a gun. He fired a bullet into my desk and another one upstairs. Thank God the police came, or I don’t know what would have happened.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Ethan’s brother, Jacob Mendel. It’s not the first time he’s been here. He blames me for Ethan’s death. I don’t know why. The police need to catch him before he does something really stupid.’ Vanessa caught the note of anxiety in Titus’s voice. It was strange when he was usually so confident, so much the master of the situation.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t have come if I’d known it was a bad time. I wanted to talk to you because I saw Bill, like you asked me to. I had coffee with him in town yesterday morning and . . .’ Vanessa hesitated, searching for the right words.

  ‘Did he agree – to the divorce?’ Osman asked, suddenly eager.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I told you he would,’ said Osman, smacking the side of the sofa with his open hand. ‘He’s . . .’

  ‘A decent man,’ said Vanessa, remembering the word she’d used to describe her husband to Titus on the day that she’d agreed to marry him. Now she felt ashamed of its inadequacy, it felt obscurely like a betrayal. It was Titus’s triumphalism that was making her uneasy, she realized. It made her feel cheap, as if she was a prize won in a game of chance, as if Bill’s agreement to the divorce was Titus’s victory, not hers.

  ‘There’s something else,’ she said. ‘I agreed to give evidence myself.’

  ‘Give evidence. What evidence?’ asked Osman, not understanding her meaning.

  ‘About what Katya said. About people trying to kill her.’

  ‘You can’t,’ said Osman, horrified. ‘You can’t do that to me, Vanessa. You said you wouldn’t.’

  ‘I know I did, and I shouldn’t have done. I have to do this, Titus,’ she said sadly. ‘I can’t be with you otherwise.’

  Osman got up and walked away to the window. He stood with his back to her for a moment, looking out, and Vanessa could sense him battling to keep control of his emotions.

  ‘Your husband put you up to this, didn’t he?’ he said finally, turning round. There was a cold, hard edge to his voice that Vanessa had never heard before. It frightened her, but the fear only made her more determined to go through with her decision. She knew she would have no peace otherwise.

  ‘He made me see what I should have seen for myself. That’s all,’ she said.

  ‘Very clever,’ said Osman. Again Vanessa had that fleeting sense that Titus was playing a game, reacting to a surprise move of his opponent. ‘Wasn’t going to Macrae enough?’ he asked angrily.

  ‘Macrae! How do you know about Macrae?’ asked Vanessa. Now it was her turn to be astonished.

  ‘Because he told me. Macrae wants to do what’s right, unlike your husband, who’ll do anything to hurt me. Can’t you see that?’

  Vanessa shook her head and got up from the sofa, heading toward the door. She wanted the scene to be over. She wanted to be on her own. But Titus blocked her path, taking hold of her arm.

  ‘I love you,’ he said desperately. ‘Doesn’t that mean anything to you at all? Why do you have to ruin everything? Swain killed Katya. Everyone knows that.’

  Vanessa heard the appeal in her lover’s voice, and perhaps she would have answered it if at that moment the door hadn’t opened. It was Claes. No doubt he’d heard the raised voices coming from inside. Vanessa looked at him and remembered what she’d read in the newspaper minutes earlier, and she thought of what he had said about the war that day at lunch the previous month. He was a Nazi. She knew he was. It didn’t matter what Titus said. She wanted to be gone, far away from Claes and his limp and his scar and his thin-lipped, silent sister. Pulling away from Titus, she ran to the door and then out through the hall and down the steps to her car and drove away without a backward look.

  CHAPTER 23

  Trave drove up to the Old Bailey immediately after seeing Vanessa on the Monday morning and then spent the entire afternoon pacing the police room, waiting to give evidence, but the summons to attend court never came, and he had to wait until the next morning to take the stand.

  Almost all his testimony was going to be uncontroversial, but the jury still needed to hear about what he’d found at Blackwater Hall on the night of the murder and the various investigations that he�
��d carried out and ordered until Creswell took him off the case. The previous week he’d insisted on making a further statement about John Bircher’s connections with Claes and Eddie Earle, realizing that the defence would then be able to elicit this information from him in cross-examination, but he didn’t seriously anticipate that this would make any major difference to the outcome of the case, given the strength of the evidence against the defendant. The jury would dismiss Bircher’s involvement as a minor coincidence, just as the allegations of collaboration with the Nazis that the defence had thrown at Claes the day before – using the material sent by Jacob – would do no more than muddy the waters.

  Trave had heard from Clayton when he got back from court the day before about Jacob’s botched break-in at Blackwater Hall, but he thought it unlikely that the young man had found anything worthwhile in the house, given that Osman’s safe had apparently survived intact. It might conceivably make a difference to the outcome of the trial if Jacob came to court himself and told the jury that he’d sought out Katya a month before her death and asked her to search Osman’s house for incriminating evidence, but Trave wasn’t holding his breath about the likelihood of Jacob’s showing up. According to Clayton, Jacob had disappeared into thin air after the break-in, and there was no way of knowing where he was now holed up.

  Vanessa, on the other hand, would give evidence – Trave knew his wife well enough to be sure that her conscience would not allow her to do otherwise. But Trave doubted that her testimony would be enough to save Swain. The prosecution would recall Osman to explain away Katya’s words, and Vanessa’s continuing determination to marry Osman would provide him with a gold-plated character reference. And that would be that. One fine morning David Swain would have his neck broken for him in Pentonville Prison, and Trave’s wife would marry the man whom Trave believed should be hanging there instead. Trave felt the frustration pressing hard down onto his chest like a physical weight, but there was no relief to be had from the pain. And he knew he was running out of time.

  It was the same Old Bailey courtroom in which David Swain had been tried for the murder of Ethan Mendel two and a half years earlier, and Trave found the sense of déjà vu almost overpowering. There was a different judge and defence counsel this time around, but hawk-like Laurence Arne had again been instructed for the prosecution. Unwinding himself from behind the files of evidence that covered his table, he was just as imposing and dominant as before, and he seemed even more determined to secure a conviction now that the defendant faced the ultimate penalty for his crime. Hanging was the prescribed punishment for a murder by shooting, and Swain could expect no mercy given that this was the second time he’d killed with premeditation.

  Trave looked over at the defendant, sitting between two prison officers in the dock. It was the first time he’d seen Swain since their desperate meeting in the cricket pavilion the previous October. Surprisingly, Swain looked better than he had then, notwithstanding his terrible predicament. The wild, haggard look had disappeared from his face, replaced by an air of quiet resolution. Dressed in a sombre dark suit, he gazed at Trave intently, leaning forward on the railing of the dock as Trave answered the prosecutor’s questions. Trave found it hard to concentrate. He felt a terrible guilt about his inability to help an innocent man, about his unwitting role in Swain’s capture.

  During a pause in the questioning, he glanced over and caught the eye of Macrae, who was sitting at the same side table where Trave had sat when he had been the officer in the case at the first trial. The look of unconcealed triumphant glee on his successor’s face was intolerable. It made Trave want to be sick. He felt suddenly claustrophobic in the windowless courtroom, with its wood-panelled walls and bright white lights, and longed to be outside in the bracing winter air.

  And yet he lingered for some reason in the empty courtroom after his evidence was over and everyone had left for lunch. He sat in Macrae’s chair at the police table and stared over at the witness box, trying to reconstruct a memory of Katya that had been on the edge of his consciousness ever since his conversation with Vanessa the previous day. He remembered the girl lying on her narrow bed in that sparse, cleaned-up room at the top of Blackwater Hall – so thin she had been and fragile and gone forever. It was a vision that never left him, waiting always on the surface of his subconscious, ready to spring out at him like a permanent reproach. But this was another kind of memory – a detail, elusive and minute. He thought perhaps it was something Katya had said when she’d given evidence from this same witness box, staring over so angrily at her former boyfriend in the dock, convinced of his guilt. And yet he couldn’t be sure – maybe it was just his imagination, feeding on the intensity of his desire to find a key to unlock the case when perhaps there was no key to be found. The uncertainty made him nervous, and, picking up his hat, he headed for the door.

  Back at the house a letter was waiting for Trave on the doormat. The envelope was typed, official-looking, and he knew what it contained even before he’d ripped it open.

  Dear Mr Trave,

  The Chief Constable regrets to inform you that it has been decided to terminate your employment with the Oxfordshire Police forthwith in the light of a finding of gross dereliction of duty following the hearing last Saturday. You have fourteen days to appeal . . .

  Trave didn’t bother reading any further. He screwed up the letter and threw it across the room and then proceeded to get as drunk on neat whisky as he’d ever been before in his entire life.

  He woke up on the sofa the next day with the morning sun burning in his eyes. He had a blinding headache, and the telephone was ringing insistently in his ear, filling his head with yet more pain. It was Creswell.

  ‘Did you get the letter?’ asked the superintendent.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Trave, remembering with a feeling of renewed sickness the reason why he’d drunk himself into a stupor the night before.

  ‘I’m sorry, Bill,’ said Creswell, sounding genuinely upset. ‘I did my best, but they wouldn’t listen to me.’

  ‘I know. I didn’t think they would.’

  ‘Look, you have to appeal. I’ll try again. Dismissing you isn’t fair. It’s too harsh.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Trave. ‘I don’t think it’ll do any good. It’s cracking this case that would change things . . .’

  ‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Creswell, sounding angry now. ‘It’s your pig-headed obsession with Titus Osman that led to all this. If you’d been a bit more contrite . . .’

  ‘But I’ve never been much good at that, have I?’ said Trave. ‘Look, sir, I appreciate you calling, and I know you’re trying to help, but I’m not feeling at my best right now.’

  ‘Okay, I understand. But you’ll think about what I’ve said, won’t you? About not giving up?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Trave. ‘Of course I will.’

  But Trave stopped thinking about the appeal as soon as he’d got off the phone. He was touched by the superintendent’s concern, but now he had other things to worry about. Something had been on the edge of his mind when he woke up, and he needed to concentrate before it slipped away. He went upstairs and showered in ice-cold water until his head was clear of alcohol and self-pity, got dressed in a pair of old gardening trousers and a patched jersey, and made a pot of the strongest coffee he could tolerate. He drank down a cup, and then, with a second in his hand, he finally sat back down with the transcript of David Swain’s first trial across his knees. It was dog-eared now, the pages crumpled from overuse. Trave turned to Katya’s evidence and began to read:

  Evidence of Katya Osman

  Witness is sworn

  PROSECUTION COUNSEL, MR ARNE: Please tell the court who you are and where you live.

  WITNESS: I am Katya Osman and I live with my uncle at Blackwater Hall. It’s near Oxford.

  COUNSEL: Do you know the defendant sitting over there? (Counsel points toward the dock.)

  WITNESS: Yes, we used to be friends.

  COUNSEL: Friends?
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  WITNESS: He was my boyfriend for a year, but then I broke up with him after I met Ethan.

  COUNSEL: Ethan Mendel?

  WITNESS: Yes; he came to stay with my uncle last year. We fell in love. And David hated us for it. He sent me letters – horrible, threatening letters. I’ve got them here – six of them. I got the last one a few days before he killed Ethan. I brought them with me— (Witness produces bundle of handwritten letters.)

  COUNSEL: My lord, these will be exhibits 17 through 22. Copies have been made for the jury, and with your lordship’s leave the witness will now read them into the evidence.

  JUDGE: Very well, Mr Arne.

  Trave impatiently turned the pages of the transcript, looking for the resumption of Katya’s evidence. It was what Katya had to say that he was interested in, not David Swain’s childish, impassioned rants.

  COUNSEL: The defendant refers in his letters to meeting you at ‘the boathouse’. Please tell us where that is, Miss Osman.

  WITNESS: It’s by the lake. You get to it across the lawn and along a path through the woods. No one goes there.

  COUNSEL: But you did with Mr Swain. Why?

  WITNESS: Because no one goes there. My uncle didn’t approve of David, and so I couldn’t see him in the house.

  COUNSEL: Never?

  WITNESS: I took him there once when my uncle was away. Otherwise we met at the boathouse or in his room in Oxford.