The King of Diamonds

by Simon Tolkien

  ‘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 obviously 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.

  ‘Why did Inspector Macrae tell you I went to see him?’ Vanessa asked as Osman went to kiss her goodbye at the end of the evening. ‘I thought it was confidential.’

  ‘I suppose he wanted to help me,’ said Osman slowly, thrown momentarily off-balance by the suddenness of the question. ‘He wanted me to know that he was doing all he could to make poor Katya’s murderer pay for what he’d done.’

  ‘By concealing evidence?’

  ‘Yes; he was wrong. And so was I,’ said Osman. ‘And you forgave me for that, remember?’

  ‘Yes, I remember,’ said Vanessa, and, putting both her arms around Titus’s neck, she kissed him long and hard. It felt that good to have him back.

  CHAPTER 25

  The trial was moving inexorably towards its end, towards the day when David Swain would finally know his fate. The evidence had all been heard, recorded word for word by the shorthand writer sitting crouched over at her table under the judge’s dais. All that remained now was for the judge to give his summing up and put the defendant in the charge of the jurors so that they could ‘render a true verdict according to the evidence’, and choose whether he would live or die.

  The evidence included David’s testimony as well. He’d stood in the witness box for a day and a half at the end of the previous week, wearing the black suit and tie that his mother had brought him from Oxford, and told the silent jurors ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’. But his words had sounded flat and hollow and unconvincing even in his own ears, and he’d seen how they had kept their eyes averted as he spoke, looking everywhere except at him, refusing to connect, just like their predecessors had done when he was tried for Ethan’s murder in this same court two and a half years earlier. Just like before, the thin-faced prosecut
or had been able to cleverly twist his words, and David realized now that the web that unseen hands had been spinning around him for so long was far too cunningly constructed for him to be able to escape its knots by mere assertions of his own innocence.

  He knew instead that the only way out of the maze was to examine each link in the chain of events that had brought him to where he was now. There had to be a weakness somewhere – something he’d overlooked that would exonerate him and identify his tormentors. And so backwards in time he went, night after night, scouring his memory for clues, and each time he came face-to-face with the figure of one man – Franz Claes. At the critical moment, at the scene of each murder, Claes had been there waiting for him – limping round the corner of the boathouse, armed with his gun, just as David had taken hold of Ethan’s waterlogged body and felt the sticky blood seeping out onto his hands, or emerging from the shadows at the end of Blackwater Hall’s top-floor corridor, shooting at David’s back as David stumbled out of Katya’s bedroom, unable to comprehend the sight of her dead body. Claes; always Claes. And now it turned out that he was a Nazi, or as good as one: he’d spent the war working for the Belgian government, collaborating with Nazis, who were busy sending trainloads of Belgian Jews to the concentration camps. David felt sure that Claes was guilty of Ethan’s murder and Katya’s too. He just couldn’t prove it. That was the trouble.

  And what about Titus Osman? Was he in league with Claes, or had Claes acted independently of his rich brother-in-law throughout? David didn’t know. At David’s first trial Osman testified that he’d seen Ethan for lunch before Ethan left for Oxford. Had Claes intercepted Ethan after he left the Hall or had Osman lied about Ethan’s departure? David remembered how Osman had banned him from Blackwater Hall because he wasn’t good enough for Katya, and he recalled the smooth, unemotional way Osman had given his evidence, but that didn’t amount to a case. Everything pointed to Claes as the man behind the curtain: his career in the Belgian government showed that he was clearly a resourceful man, more than capable of having orchestrated all the events that had brought David to his present sorry pass.

  David understood now that all that had happened since Ethan’s death – the highs and the lows, the good luck and the bad – had been no more than his jerking about like a puppet on the end of a string, waiting until the hidden hand that controlled his fate returned to use him once again. That hand had been at work in Oxford Prison, tempting him toward escape: Eddie Earle had to have been involved in the conspiracy. He was connected back to Claes through this John Bircher character, who’d jumped off the top of a multi-storey car park – or been pushed . . .

  David realized now how easy he had made it for Eddie. All that had been needed to fuel his anger to boiling point were the few inflammatory words and phrases that Eddie had dropped cleverly into their late-night conversations. Because anger had been the driving force of David’s life for as long as he could remember – he had been angry with his father for dying and his mother for remarrying, with Katya for rejecting him, and with Ethan for taking her away. Poor Ethan: David had stayed angry with his rival even after he was dead.

  Anger had been David’s undoing. It gave him a motive, and it was the reason he’d been chosen to play the part of murderer not once but twice. He remembered every detail of the night of Katya’s murder like it was a film that he’d watched a thousand times and couldn’t get out of his head. He remembered the exhilaration of the prison escape – the terrible fear of being caught replaced by the explosion of ecstatic triumph as he reached the top of the perimeter wall and came down the other side, and then the unforgettable sensation of the cold night air beating against his face as Eddie drove them down the road to Blackwater, past the sleeping houses. He’d felt utterly alive at those moments because he was free, free when he had never expected to be free again.

  What a fool he’d been! He’d taken such comfort in the gun he’d insisted on Eddie providing when he little knew that it was useless – loaded with blank ammunition. Claes had known he was coming. Bircher, the man with the beard, must have called Blackwater Hall straight after he’d left the railway station – those two unanswered calls to the Hall from a public phone box at 12.20 and a minute later had been a prearranged signal. David imagined Claes sitting on his bed in the darkness, nursing his gun in his hands, nodding with a knowing satisfaction as he caught the distant sound of the glass breaking in the study window down below and waited for David’s footsteps to pass by his door.

  David was sure that Claes had meant to kill him: the bastard would have known that he would be immune from prosecution for shooting down an armed intruder who had just murdered the householder’s niece in her bed. But David thought that Claes must also have realized that missing the target wasn’t the end of the world either. Let the state do the work instead. David would be just as dead swinging from a gallows as with a bullet in the back of his head. And then it would all be over – wrapped up and disposed of once and for all: Ethan dead and Katya dead and David Swain too, who had killed them both for the sake of an insane jealousy.

  David understood the plan. He knew he had been used, set up not once but twice. But he still had no idea why. Ethan and Katya had died for a reason. They had to have found out something – probably a secret or secrets about Claes and his Nazi past. The secret was the key to saving himself. David was sure of it. And yet what could he do to uncover it, locked up in the bowels of Pentonville Prison without a friend in the world?

  People had tried to help him. He remembered how Inspector Trave had been so desperate to know about Katya’s diary when he came to see him in the cells beneath the court the previous week, but David had heard nothing since. Because what good could Trave do? He wasn’t even a policeman any more. And his wife had gone off with Osman. David was grateful to her. It must have cost her a lot to come to court and give evidence about what Katya had told her. ‘They’re trying to kill me’ – powerful words, but in the end they hadn’t made any difference. Osman had just gone back into the witness box afterwards and explained them away in a few short sentences, describing how Katya had gone so far off the rails after Ethan’s death that Osman ended up having to keep her at the Hall for her own safety, even though she hated him for it. And the jury had believed him. They’d had to – there was independent evidence to back him up.

  David was as good as dead. He knew that. It amazed him that he could be so certain of conviction when he was so entirely innocent. But the prosecution had everything: presence, motive, weapon, even a confession. David did not regret admitting to Katya’s murder. He knew he had had no choice. Macrae and Wale had broken him after his arrest that night in the cell with the thick iron door at the back of Oxford police station, broken him entirely, and he knew that he would never be the same person again. He had been naked, and they had been clothed, and Wale had done things to him that he had never imagined one human being could do to another, turning the pain on and off like a faucet at Macrae’s direction, but never leaving a mark, until David had finally given up and confessed to everything just to have it over with.

  In the witness box he’d told the jurors about the torture, but from the outset he’d sensed their disbelief. He hadn’t the power of description to make them understand what it had been like, standing there shivering under the white electric bulb, waiting for Wale to come at him again while Macrae sat on a chair in the corner, watching.

  And the memory of Wale’s face and Macrae’s voice had stayed with him ever since, driving out his anger and emptying him inside as he lay awake at night in his cell, thinking back on all that had happened, trying in vain to find a way out of the web in which he was so tightly enmeshed.

  Towards the end the trial became a blur, with the days dissolving into one another, divided only by bumpy rides in the prison van through dark London streets and awful, sleepless nights tossing and turning on his hard, narrow bed. He was alone now: Toomes had been convicted and sentenced to death and moved God knows where to await his f
ate. And now it was David’s turn. After hours spent like a caged animal, walking backwards and forwards across the nine square feet of his iron-barred cell in the basement of the Old Bailey, he was taken upstairs in the late afternoon to hear the jury’s verdict, handcuffed between two silent gaolers who had seen it all before. They passed down a neon-lit corridor beneath an arched, whitewashed roof, and David imagined for a moment that this is what his last walk would be like – stumbling along under bright white lights towards a half-open door at the end. But the door this time opened onto an old creaking elevator, not the wooden gallows and the knotted rope that haunted all his dreams.

  From the lift, David climbed the short flight of steep stairs into the dock, and suddenly the packed courtroom rushed towards him from all sides as he emerged out into its midst. Everyone was already in their appointed places, and there was nowhere to hide from the stretched, hungry faces craning towards him to get a final look at the man who might be going to die. And above them all the black-robed judge sat quite still in his high-backed chair, brooding with hooded eyes like an old vulture.

  The babbling murmur that had greeted David’s arrival in the courtroom subsided, and the judge’s clerk got slowly to his feet, cleared his throat, and asked the foreman of the jury the centuries-old question: ‘Have you reached a verdict on which you are all agreed?’

  ‘Yes, Your Honour,’ said the foreman immediately in a high, squeaky, nervous voice. He was a little man with red cheeks and a bald head, wearing a pair of horn-rimmed glasses that were too big for his cherubic round face. He looked like a middle-aged schoolboy, entirely out of place in the role he had been elected to perform.

  A pause then – a second or two perhaps while the clerk gathered his robe about him – and David felt the pressure growing on his chest and inside his head like he was going to burst open or shatter into a thousand pieces. It was as if he was drowning, seeing and hearing everything around him through a wall of swirling blue water. He looked up at the picture of the lion and unicorn, the symbol of British justice, hanging on the wall above the judge’s head, and prayed for acquittal.