The King of Diamonds (14 page)

Later that morning Trave and Clayton went for a walk down to Osman’s boathouse, where Ethan Mendel had met his end two years before. Trave’s mood seemed to improve as soon as he was outside the front door of the house. He rubbed his hands together, took a deep draught of the fresh morning air into his lungs, and set off across the lawn at a cracking pace, with Clayton following in his wake.

Soon they entered the woods. Above their heads squirrels were running in the tall trees through which the sun shone down, dappling the ground below with a play of shadows and light. Trave and Clayton were walking on a thick carpet of pine needles that deadened their footsteps, and their voices seemed unnaturally loud in the surrounding silence. The search team had obviously moved on to the other side of the road.

Trave seemed to know where he was going. At a fork in the path he took a left turn without hesitation and then stopped dead in his tracks so that Clayton had to suddenly brace himself to avoid falling over his superior officer. Osman’s cat was sitting on a low, leafless branch of a pine tree that jutted out from its fellows, half-blocking their way. Clayton laughed uneasily. It was a ridiculous idea, but the creature really seemed like it was guarding the path. It sat entirely motionless, staring at them out of its unblinking eyes until Trave picked up a handful of pine needles and threw them at the cat’s head. With an enraged squawk, Cara leapt from her perch and disappeared into the trees.

‘Gone to report me to her boss I expect,’ said Trave morosely as they carried on down toward the lake.

‘Why do you dislike him so much?’ asked Clayton, remembering how he’d asked exactly the same question at the end of their interview with Claes earlier that morning.

‘Because he’s so smooth and insincere, because he’s a snob, because he’s so bloody pleased with himself, because he’s got that iceman, Claes, in tow. What do you want me to say?’ asked Trave angrily. His irritation seemed to have returned in spades following their encounter with the cat.

‘I don’t think he was insincere,’ said Clayton, taken aback by his boss’s venom. ‘He seemed genuinely upset about his niece. That’s what I thought anyway.’

‘He’s a better actor than the other two. That’s all,’ said Trave shortly. ‘Didn’t you notice how Claes and his sister seemed so unsurprised at the way I went after them? It was almost as if they expected it. And what about all their monosyllabic answers when you’d expect them to want to help? Jana’s more worried about the bloody ornaments than a girl with a bullet in her head at the top of the house.’

‘She’s shocked.’

‘Maybe. But I’d say they all sounded rehearsed, like they were reading from a script. And don’t tell me they’re foreign, that English isn’t their first language, because I know that.’

‘Well, it isn’t,’ said Clayton stubbornly. ‘And if it’s all so rehearsed, then why didn’t Osman say he saw Swain in the corridor? Isn’t that what you’d have expected?’

‘Because that would be over-egging the pudding, wouldn’t it?’ said Trave impatiently.

They took a turn in the path and came out beside the lake, leaving the woods behind. At once Clayton was struck by the utter stillness of the dark blue water. Its glassy surface stretched perhaps half a mile across to a line of weeping willow trees on the far shore, and beyond that a meadow, where a herd of black-and-white cows stood in a group, dully eating the grass in the shadow of a grove of conifers growing further up the bank.

‘Does all that belong to Osman too?’ asked Clayton, pointing at the lake.

‘No. The boundary of his property is this path as it runs along the side of the lake and then through the trees over there to a fence by the road. But the boathouse is his, even though he never seems to use it,’ said Trave, pointing to a single-storey black wooden building with a tarred convex roof that they were now approaching. Clayton had not noticed it at first since it was set well back from the water and was thus heavily camouflaged by the surrounding trees.

The boathouse was set on wooden struts, and an old rowing boat, pushed into the crawl space underneath, was partially visible. Above, the door was unlocked, and they went inside. There was a deal table and two chairs in the centre of the room but no other furniture apart from a bookshelf in the corner, its shelves empty except for a few well-worn Agatha Christie paperbacks. The air smelt musty as if from long disuse, but the electric lightbulb overhead worked and there was a sink and a small refrigerator behind a partition at the back.

‘It’s even got a phone line,’ said Trave, picking up the receiver mounted on the wall by the door. ‘Line’s dead now,’ he added. ‘But it wasn’t when Ethan died. Claes called the police and the house from here while he was holding Swain at gunpoint – very convenient.’

‘Where was the body?’ asked Clayton.

‘Out there,’ said Trave, pointing through the open door toward the lake. ‘Face down, half in the water, half out. He’d been stabbed in the back, but the killer took the knife out and threw it in the lake, so there were no prints.’

‘Tell me about him, about Ethan,’ said Clayton, sitting down on one of the chairs at the table and looking up at Trave expectantly. It had to be why his boss had brought him here, after all – to tell him about what had happened here before, to fill him in on the background. He couldn’t say he wasn’t interested.

‘He was twenty-four years old when he died,’ said Trave. He remained standing by the door, looking out at the morning sunlight glittering on the surface of the lake, and he spoke in a slow, flat voice, as if he was describing distant events. ‘He was a Jewish boy from Antwerp, which is, as you probably know, the world centre for diamonds – for cutting them, polishing them, selling them, you name it. And before the war it was the town’s heyday. Everyone wanted Antwerp diamonds. Osman made his fortune trading in them, and from what I can gather, Ethan’s father did well too. The two of them were friends. But then the Nazis came, looking for Jews, and Osman started helping them escape. Across the border into Switzerland; and then, when that became too difficult, down through Vichy France and into Spain; and, from there, by boat to Cuba, places like that. I’ve no doubt he was well rewarded for his pains.’

‘How do you know that?’ asked Clayton suspiciously.

‘I don’t. It’s an assumption. Call it my natural cynicism if you like. Anyway, sometime in 1942 Ethan and his younger brother, Jacob, and their grandmother got away, but the parents waited. I don’t know why. And when they went the next year they got caught crossing the border with false papers and were sent to Auschwitz. By the end of the war they were dead. I don’t know the circumstances, but one can assume the worst.’

Trave paused, noticing how Clayton had turned away, biting his lip. Trave wondered whether Clayton had seen any of those films that they’d all watched at the end of the war, films about Auschwitz and Treblinka, Majdanek and Sobibor, those terrible places in the east where the world had changed forever. Clayton was young – he couldn’t be more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight, Trave thought, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t seen the pictures. It was only a few months ago that the Israelis had captured that bastard, Eichmann, living it up in Argentina.

‘And so the war ended and the two brothers came back to Antwerp with their grandmother,’ Trave went on in the same flat monotone. ‘Ethan went to university and got a very respectable degree, just like Osman told us this morning, and then sometime towards the end of 1957 he took his savings out of the bank, crossed the Channel, and came to stay here with his family’s benefactor, Titus Osman. His fairy godfather,’ Trave added with a dry laugh.

‘Why?’

‘Good question. According to Osman, Ethan was here because he wanted to thank Osman personally for saving his life, but that wouldn’t have required more than a short visit. He stayed on because almost immediately after his arrival he began a passionate relationship with Osman’s niece.’

‘Who had been seeing David Swain . . .’

‘Exactly: meeting Swain here in this pretty little boathouse for romantic trysts whenever her uncle was looking the other way,’ said Trave musingly, looking around the spartan room. ‘Anyway, to cut a long story short, Swain got crazy about being thrown over and wrote Katya a lot of very unpleasant letters, which she later produced at his trial.’

‘Were they threatening?’ asked Clayton.

‘Oh yes, very. Bursting with motive, if that’s what you mean,’ said Trave with a smile. ‘David Swain was the living definition of an angry young man.’

‘So what happened next?’

‘Ethan left. I don’t know why, and I don’t know where he went exactly, although the stamps in his passport show that he spent three days in France and then just over a week in West Germany before he came back on an early morning flight from Munich to London. He arrived here at Blackwater at about twelve o’clock according to Osman. And five hours later he was dead.’

‘Did Osman know he was coming?’

‘Yes, apparently Ethan called ahead from Heathrow – the telephone records confirmed that afterward. Katya wasn’t home when he got here – she was out all day shopping with Jana, but Osman told me when I took his statement that Ethan seemed happy and excited to be back. They ate lunch together, and then Ethan drove into Oxford in the afternoon – and that was the last Osman saw of him. He didn’t see Ethan come back – he said that that must have been because he was working in his study at the back of the house – and he could shed no light whatsoever on the note that Swain received later that afternoon.’

‘The note? What note?’ asked Clayton, not following.

‘The note Ethan supposedly left stuck in the doorbell outside Swain’s lodgings in Oxford asking Swain to meet him at the boathouse at five o’clock. It was found on Swain after his arrest, and he gave it as his reason for being where he was.’

‘Standing over the body,’ said Clayton.

‘Yes.’

‘And then running away until Claes fired his gun in the air to stop him,’ added Clayton, remembering what Claes had told them up at the house.

‘Yes. And Swain didn’t argue with that at his trial – he said he panicked. I know it looks bad,’ said Trave reluctantly. ‘Everything pointed to David Swain as the murderer – motive, presence, even the knife we got out of the water was similar to other kitchen knives in his flat. It was one of the easiest cases I’ve ever had to put together, and maybe it was that that bothered me. It was as if everything fitted together too well. The people here, Claes and Osman, had an answer for everything just like they do now, and I couldn’t shake them on the facts, however hard I tried. And then Swain didn’t help himself of course. He sacked his barrister a month before the trial, which didn’t give the new one much time to get up to scratch, but not even the best counsel could have done much with a case like that. The jurors came back unanimous after less than two hours. Not a reasonable doubt among them. The verdict didn’t surprise me; it just left me feeling uneasy – like an itch that wouldn’t go away. Afterwards I tried to put the case behind me. You have to do that in this job or you lose focus and nothing gets done. But I couldn’t for some reason . . .’

‘Why?’ asked Clayton.

‘A few things: the way Claes just happened to come round the corner of this boathouse with a gun in his pocket at exactly the time specified in the note; the fact that Katya was sent out shopping for the day; but most of all, I think, it was the note itself that worried me,’ said Trave reflectively. ‘Whichever way I looked at it, it made no sense that the first thing Ethan did after he got back from his European trip was to go and see a person who hated him, a person whom he didn’t even know, and that then, instead of suggesting a meeting in Oxford where he already was, he left a note asking Swain to come out here at five o’clock the same day.’

‘Maybe he was going to propose to Katya and wanted to straighten things out with Swain before he did,’ suggested Clayton.

‘But he didn’t need to,’ said Trave, warming to his theme. ‘Ethan had no responsibility to Swain. Katya had finished with Swain long before. The note nagged at me. I couldn’t make any sense of it, and Swain couldn’t shed any light on the bloody thing either when I went to see him . . .’

‘You went to see him!’ repeated Clayton, sounding surprised. ‘When?’

‘A couple of times last year. He was still up in London then, in Brixton Prison pending transfer. But he wasn’t any help – just went endlessly on about the injustice of it all and how much he hated Katya Osman. And so I came back out here a couple of times, even though I knew I was wasting my time – I got nowhere with Osman and Claes, and there was no evidence to justify a search warrant, although I doubt I’d have found anything worthwhile even if I’d got one. The diamond business is a secret world at the best of times, and Osman’s got a castle wall built around his share in it. I thought I was on to something at one point when I found a neighbour of Swain’s who said she’d seen a man with a beard hanging around near Swain’s flat on the day of the murder, but then she didn’t recognize Osman when I showed her his photograph, and so that was that.’

‘Where did you get the picture?’ asked Clayton.

‘Out of a magazine. Our friend up at the house is quite a celebrity in these parts, you know – always willing to reach into his pocket for a good cause, always available to cut a ribbon, say a few words. You know what I mean,’ said Trave with a twisted smile.

There it was again – the unexplained animosity toward the owner of Blackwater Hall. It alarmed Clayton more each time he saw it. What Trave had told him about the case was interesting, and there was certainly something strange about the note the dead man had left for Swain, but Clayton had seen enough police work to know there were always a few loose threads left hanging at the end of every investigation. The note didn’t make Swain’s conviction unsafe. In fact, the more Clayton heard about it, the more the Mendel murder sounded like an open-and-shut case. And yet Trave hadn’t been prepared to let it drop. Why? Had the answer got something to do with Trave’s wife and this man, Osman? Once again Clayton remembered how Trave had looked in the study when Osman had said the name Vanessa. Clayton vividly recalled the way his boss’s fists had involuntarily clenched on the desk, the scarlet flush that had spread across his face, and Osman’s look of smug self-satisfaction as if he’d just downed an opponent with a knockout blow. Clayton didn’t much like the man either, but that wasn’t the point. This was a murder inquiry he and Trave were conducting, and personal feelings couldn’t come into it. It had to be without prejudice.