The King of Diamonds (11 page)

‘All right,’ Trave went on after a moment. ‘So where are they now?’

‘Earle, I don’t know. No one’s seen him as far as I know. And I’m pretty sure Swain’s not in the house. I’ve had the place searched from top to bottom. But he could be somewhere out in the grounds. I’ve got people looking, but it’s difficult in the dark. To be sure, I mean. And he may be wounded. We don’t know.’

‘Wounded?’

‘Yes. The owner’s brother-in-law, Franz Claes, says he fired two shots at him in the corridor out there. The first one hit the door and the second one hit the wall at the far end, just by the turning to the stairs, but it may have touched Swain on the way. It was too dark for Mr Claes to see, apparently. But the bullet holes match his story.’

‘We’ll need to get ballistics to compare the bullets with the one over there,’ said Trave, pointing at Katya. ‘Not that I’m holding my breath.’

‘Sir?’

‘Nothing. Don’t worry about it. How did Swain get in?’

‘He broke the window in the study downstairs, and I reckon that’s how he got out too. All the other doors and windows seem to have been locked when we got here. Oh, and he tore his clothes on the rosebushes outside. There’s a bit of shirt we’ve recovered. Blue-and-white stripe, like prison uniform. I’ll have it checked out.’

‘Anything missing?’

‘Can’t be sure yet, but the owner hasn’t noticed anything, except a silver candlestick that the intruder took upstairs from the dining room, to light his way. He left it outside the door before he came in here. I’ve got it being dusted for fingerprints. And the study too, sir. Photographs as well.’

‘Good. You’ve been very professional, Adam. Just what I would have hoped. Well, I suppose we’d better go and talk to our friends downstairs. See what their story is,’ said Trave, making for the door.

Clayton felt pleased. He didn’t often get praise from his boss, so when it came, it was worth savouring. But he also felt uneasy. There was something Trave wasn’t telling him, he thought, as they went downstairs. In normal circumstances he’d have expected the inspector to have a modicum of sympathy for the owner and his family after what they’d just been through, but instead, Trave’s attitude seemed to be bordering on hostile before he’d even clapped eyes on them.

‘Who do you want to see first?’ asked Clayton once they were back in the hall. ‘There are just three of them – the owner and his brother-in-law and sister-in-law. No servants – none of them live in apparently.’

‘Claes – the one with the gun,’ said Trave immediately. ‘Doesn’t he say he was the first one on the scene?’

Clayton nodded and was halfway to the drawing room door when Trave’s voice stopped him in his tracks.

‘Wait. We haven’t decided
where
to interview them yet. Where’s more important than the order they go in right now.’

‘You don’t want to interview them where they are?’ asked Clayton, looking puzzled.

‘Osman? No, anywhere but in there. That’s his lord-of-the-manor room.’

‘His what?’

‘The place where he struts about entertaining high society, feeling like a million dollars. No, we need to put him on edge, put him at a disadvantage when we talk to him.’

Trave stroked his chin musingly, and Clayton kept quiet. None of this made much sense as far as he was concerned. The training book said you should put witnesses at ease in order to get as much out of them as possible, not put them through the third degree. Unless they were suspects, of course, but Titus Osman wasn’t that. If anything, he was a victim. His niece had just been murdered, for God’s sake. However, Clayton knew better than to question his boss’s methods. Trave was the best detective on the Oxford force when it came to getting results.

‘What about Osman’s study?’ Trave asked, looking up. ‘Are forensics still working in there?’

‘Yes. I told them to start downstairs so you and the doctor could see the deceased first. I hope that was right?’

‘Yes, no problem,’ said Trave distractedly. ‘But tell them to finish in the study before they go anywhere else. We’ll interview Claes and his sister in the drawing room, and then see Osman in the study when forensics are done in there. We may have to wait a bit but that doesn’t matter.’

Franz Claes sat bolt upright on the edge of the sofa, facing Trave and Clayton, who sat side by side on the matching sofa opposite. The empty fireplace was between them. Claes was short, no higher than five foot two or three, and his forward position meant that he could at least keep his feet on the floor, although Clayton felt that Claes would have preferred a straight-backed wooden chair to the comfort of the sofa in any event. He was that type of man.

‘When did you get dressed, Mr Claes?’ asked Trave.

‘After calling the police and making sure Swain was no longer in the house.’

It was a strange first question to ask, thought Clayton, but Claes didn’t appear surprised by it. He seemed alert, ready for anything that might be thrown at him. And to be fair, Clayton had been surprised too when Claes had answered the door dressed semi-formally as he was now, in blazer, starched white shirt, and trousers, with not a hair out of place. He even looked as if he had shaved. His cheeks were entirely smooth and hairless even though it was the middle of the night.

‘And so you were the first to see Mr Swain?’ Trave continued.

‘Yes, I heard him as he went past my bedroom door. It was slightly open.’

‘It’s on the first floor as I recall,’ said Trave.

‘Yes, at the opposite end of the corridor to Mr Osman.’

‘Why do you call him Mr Osman? He’s your brother-in-law, isn’t he?’

‘Titus then,’ said Claes, nodding as if he had lost an insignificant point in a game that had barely begun. ‘As I say, I heard a noise. My light was off but I had not yet fallen asleep, and so I got up and went outside.’

‘Wearing?’

‘Pyjamas. I took my gun with me.’

‘And where was that? Do you sleep with it under your pillow, Mr Claes?’

‘It was in the top drawer of my desk,’ said Claes, apparently unruffled by the close questioning. His English was surprisingly good, thought Clayton. He spoke slowly and with an accent, but he was clearly fluent.

‘Is this the gun?’ asked Trave, holding up a Smith and Wesson revolver now neatly packaged in a see-through plastic bag.

‘Yes.’

‘And you’ve got a licence for it, have you?’

‘You know I have, Inspector. It’s the same gun I had two years ago. It’s not the first time we’ve discussed it, you know,’ said Claes with a half-smile. It was not an attractive smile, thought Clayton. It was partly the way in which the tightening of Claes’s facial muscles threw into sharper relief the ugly scar that ran down the left side of his face, but it was also because there was no warmth in the man. His eyes were cold too, grey and watchful and somehow disconnected.

Trave had been quiet for a moment, but now he pursed his lips as if coming to a decision.

‘All right, Mr Claes. You tell us what happened in your own words. I’ll try not to interrupt you.’

‘Thank you,’ said Claes with a nod. ‘Once outside my room I heard someone walking on the floor above, and so I climbed the stairs and looked around the corner. There was a candle burning on the floor outside Katya’s room. It’s about halfway down the corridor on the left-hand side. Her door was half-open and the light was on inside. It was then that I heard the shot. Almost immediately a man came out. I could see it was Swain. I recognized him from when I stopped him before down by the lake, and from his trial. He was standing still for a moment, and I shot at him, but he saw me and ducked back behind the door. And immediately he ran away down to the end of the corridor, toward the other set of stairs, and I fired again, but I don’t know whether I hit him or not. And then he disappeared.’

‘What was he wearing?’ asked Clayton, speaking for the first time.

‘A blue-and-white shirt, some jeans maybe. I’m not sure about the trousers.’

‘Were the clothes torn?’

‘I don’t know. There was no time to see things like that.’

Trave looked at Clayton impatiently, drumming his fingers on his knee as Clayton made a note in his report book.

‘So Mr Swain disappeared,’ Trave said, leaning forward. ‘Did you follow him?’

‘Yes, but not to catch him up. It would have been impossible: he was running and I have a problem with my leg’ – Claes tapped his left knee – ‘so I shouted down to Titus to warn him, and then I went downstairs myself. Titus was in the corridor outside his bedroom. We looked down here and it seemed like Swain was gone, so we went back up to Katya’s room.’

‘Together?’

‘No, Titus went first. I looked in all the rooms first because I wanted to make sure Swain wasn’t hiding somewhere.’

‘What would you have done if you’d found him?’

‘Whatever was necessary, of course,’ said Claes. There was a cold, clipped tone to his voice that Clayton found oddly disconcerting, chilling even.

‘And so when you didn’t find him, you went back upstairs and found Miss Osman shot in the head. How did that make you feel, Mr Claes?’ asked Trave.

Claes didn’t answer for a moment. It was as if he was nonplussed by the question, as if he’d prepared himself to say what had happened but not how he felt about it. Clayton didn’t think that Claes was the type of man who spent much of his life discussing his feelings.

‘I was sorry. Of course I was sorry,’ he said slowly. ‘But there was nothing I could do.’

‘No, there wasn’t, was there?’ said Trave, sounding unconvinced. ‘Miss Osman hasn’t exactly been a high priority in this house recently, has she?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘The doctor says she’s badly undernourished; she’s got puncture marks all the way up one arm; and there are steel bars on her windows. What have you got to say about that, Mr Claes?’

‘She had got herself into trouble in the town,’ said Claes, choosing his words carefully. ‘My brother-in-law was looking after her, but she was unwilling.’

‘Unwilling?’

‘Yes, often she would not eat. She was not grateful.’

‘Grateful! For being kept a prisoner in her own home?’

Claes shrugged his shoulders.

‘Why did you try to shoot Mr Swain?’ asked Trave, changing the subject.

‘Because I was frightened of what he was going to do next. Titus was downstairs and he had already shot Katya.’

‘You didn’t know that.’

‘He was coming out of her room. I’d heard the shot. Anyone would have assumed it.’

Clayton silently agreed, thinking that he’d have definitely taken a shot or two if some armed man was running around his house shooting people. But then again he didn’t keep a gun in his bedroom. Not like Franz Claes.

‘It’s not the first time you’ve tried to put a bullet in Mr Swain, is it?’ Trave observed.

But Claes was ready for this.

‘No, Inspector, it is the first time. After Mr Mendel was murdered, I fired my gun to stop Mr Swain running away, not to hit him. This time it was different.’

Trave didn’t argue. He was stroking his chin again, thinking, and Clayton was just wondering whether this might be the signal for him to take over, when Trave asked his next question. It was not one that Clayton had expected.

‘Where does your sister sleep, Mr Claes?’

‘On the top floor, further along the corridor from Katya’s room.’

‘I see. Further down the corridor. Well, then let me ask you this: Why did you fire twice down that corridor when you must have known that there was a serious risk that she would come outside and be hit?’

Claes didn’t answer. There was a flush in his cheeks: it was the first time during the interview that he’d looked really discomforted.

‘You could have killed her, couldn’t you?’ said Trave, pressing the point.

‘It was a moment of stress,’ said Claes, finally answering. ‘I didn’t have time to think,’ he finished lamely.

‘You didn’t think,’ repeated Trave with a withering smile. ‘Well, thank you, Mr Claes, for your assistance. That’ll be all for now. But please don’t leave the house without telling us. We may be needing you again.’

Claes stood, bringing his polished shoes together with an audible click; nodded his head once to the two policemen; and limped to the door. He went out without looking back.

‘Slippery bastard,’ said Trave. ‘He’s play-acting with that limp. He walked a lot quicker last time I saw him.’

‘Why do you dislike him so much, sir?’ Clayton felt compelled to ask the question. He hadn’t warmed to Franz Claes during the interview, but most of what the man said made sense, even though it was strange he hadn’t thought of his sister when he fired those shots. It was Trave’s hostility that was more puzzling.

‘It’s not that I like or dislike him; it’s that I don’t trust him. He’s got secrets – that much I can tell you.’

‘Secrets?’ repeated Clayton, surprised.

‘All right,
a
secret,’ said Trave. ‘He was picked up in a vice raid a few years back – before the Mendel murder. A man called Bircher was running a whole lot of underage boys out of an old tenement house in Cowley. The detective I talked to said they were going to charge Claes, but then orders came down to let him off with a talking to, because it was a first offence or something like that. I don’t know the ins and outs of it, but Osman obviously got involved – spun some sob story or other, made a donation to the police benevolent fund. I don’t know. It’s ancient history now. Let’s see what the sister’s got to say.’