The King of Diamonds (17 page)

‘Give me the keys,’ he told his stepfather.

At first Ben didn’t understand, or perhaps he didn’t want to.

‘Give me the keys to your fucking car,’ David shouted, brandishing the gun. All his anger at this interloper, this man who’d taken over his home and treated him like dirt, came rushing to the surface. He felt like shooting Ben Bishop, putting an end to him once and for all.

Ben looked at the gun and saw the rage in David’s eyes. It hurt him harder than anything he’d ever had to do to hand over the keys to his most prized possession, but in the end his fear won out. He took the keys out of his pocket and tossed them at his stepson’s feet with a look of hatred in his eye.

David picked them up off the floor and then went over to the telephone on top of his mother’s bureau and yanked its cord out of the wall. He hadn’t got anything with which to cut the wire, and so he put the phone in the bag with the sandwiches that his mother had made for him.

‘Have you got an extension?’ he asked. His stepfather shook his head. Maybe he was telling the truth; maybe he wasn’t. David didn’t have the time to check. He needed to go. He looked over at his mother, took a step toward her, and then stopped, sensing her fury.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I didn’t do this thing. I promise you I didn’t. Katya was dead when I got there. I took the gun to protect myself. The man there shot at me last time, and I needed to defend myself. I needed . . .’

‘You’re lying,’ she said, interrupting him in a harsh, unforgiving voice. ‘Lying like you always do, but it won’t help you this time, David. This time you’ve gone too far, and you’ll have to pay the penalty. Now get out of my house and don’t come back. You’ve done enough to me and mine for one lifetime.’

There was nothing he could say. It was like his mother was a stranger suddenly, like she had no relation to him any more as she stood across from him in the kitchen doorway, protecting her son from the man with the gun, white-faced, willing him to be gone.

He looked around the room one last time, as if committing it to memory, and then turned on his heel and walked out, leaving the front door open behind him. He unlocked the car and got in, turned the key in the ignition, and waited a moment. It gave him a sudden savage pleasure to sit there in his stepfather’s seat feeling the engine purring underneath him. And then, just as he’d put the car in gear and was about to drive away, Max came running out of the front door with Robbie the Robot clutched in his hand.

David wound down the window.

‘I want you to have this,’ said Max. ‘Because . . .’

‘We’re brothers?’

Max nodded. David had never seen anyone looking so upset and so determined all at the same time.

‘Thank you, Max,’ he said, placing the robot carefully on the passenger seat beside the gun and the bag containing the sandwiches and the telephone. ‘I’ll take good care of him. And . . .’ He paused, searching for the right words, but they wouldn’t come. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Tell your mother I’m sorry. This isn’t how I wanted it to be.’

Turning away and looking over his shoulder, he reversed out of the drive, and then, pausing for a moment, he stared over at the door where his mother was standing with her arm around her younger son. And she remained there, tight-lipped, immobile, as he stepped on the gas and drove away.

Adam Clayton pulled down on the lever and watched the low-quality black coffee slowly filling the Styrofoam cup that he was holding under the nozzle of the hot-drinks machine. It was his third visit to the coffee machine that morning, and each cup had tasted worse than the one before, but he needed the caffeine to stay alert as he combed through the reports from the Katya Osman case that now covered every inch of his desk in the room he shared with Trave across the corridor. It was hard work, and he wasn’t sleeping well. Partly it was the pressure that always comes with a new inquiry, particularly one as high-profile as this; partly it was the continuing unease he’d felt with Trave ever since he’d voiced his anxieties in Osman’s boathouse two days earlier about Trave’s reaction to his wife’s ongoing relationship with the owner of Blackwater Hall. Clayton wished now that he’d kept quiet. Trave had not referred to the subject again, and so there was no opportunity to apologize or make amends, but he’d clearly not forgotten his junior’s implied doubts about his professionalism. Ever since their conversation, he’d treated Clayton with a new businesslike reserve, and the frostiness of the atmosphere had started to undermine the younger man’s confidence, making him realize how much he’d depended up to now on his boss’s goodwill and support.

And yet Clayton also felt a growing sense of injustice. He’d never have brought up the issue of a conflict of interest if Trave hadn’t treated everyone at Blackwater Hall like they were murder suspects, not witnesses. No wonder Claes and his sister had been less than forthcoming when Trave had started in on them straight away, giving them the third degree. And Osman had seemed genuinely distraught when they’d talked to him in his study across from the broken window through which this Swain character had come bursting in with his gun a few hours earlier. Swain was there in the house at the right time and with the right motive. Everything pointed to him, and yet Trave remained obviously dissatisfied, distrusting the accumulating evidence. Why? There was no reason for it. Unless . . .

‘You look like shit, lad. Something wrong with your love life?’

Clayton turned to his left and saw Inspector Macrae looking up at him from a chair in the corner. He’d obviously been too preoccupied with his troubles to notice that he wasn’t the only one in the break room when he’d come in earlier. But Macrae was like that – always there when you were least expecting it, popping up with some unnerving comment that you couldn’t think of an answer to. He was new at the station, transferred down from up north when old Inspector Finney retired. And Clayton and the other junior detectives were wary of him – he came with a reputation for getting results and not caring too much about how he got them. He seemed to have a way of always looking for the bad in people. It was more than cynicism, more like a perpetual sneer. It set Clayton on edge, and he tried to give Macrae as wide a berth as possible. Today he was the last person that Clayton wanted to talk to, but he could hardly turn his back on the man. Macrae was an inspector and Clayton was a junior detective, right down at the bottom of the station totem pole.

‘No, sir, I’m all right,’ Clayton said, forcing himself to sound friendly, like he was feeling on top of the world. ‘Just a lot of work suddenly. That’s all.’

‘Well, sit down and tell me about it, lad,’ said Macrae, patting the empty chair beside him. ‘Perhaps I can help.’

‘No, the work’s not a problem. It’s just I’ve got to give Inspector Trave a progress report when he comes in,’ said Clayton nervously. He stayed fixed to the spot by the coffee machine but looked longingly toward the door.

‘Ah yes. Bill Trave can be quite demanding when he wants to be. I’ve seen that for myself. Giving you a hard time of it, is he?’ asked Macrae with a smile, clearly enjoying Clayton’s discomfiture.

‘No, sir. Not at all.’

Macrae nodded knowingly as if he understood that Clayton wasn’t telling him the truth because he couldn’t, and then pointed again to the empty chair. Clayton sat down. He had no choice.

He’d never been so close to Macrae before, and Clayton felt an instinctive repulsion that he couldn’t quite explain to himself. It wasn’t that the man was ugly or smelt bad. Quite the opposite in fact: Inspector Macrae was a good-looking man in the prime of life, dressed in a far more expensive suit than Trave had ever worn. He wore his hair carefully combed back
en brosse
from his high, unwrinkled forehead and, to the extent that he smelt of anything, it was expensive Italian aftershave. But there was something weird about the way his waxy skin was pulled so tightly across the bones of his face like it was a mask with only his small, watchful grey eyes seeming to hint at the true personality underneath; and his hands were strange too – long, scrupulously clean nails on the end of tapering fingers and thumbs that Macrae kept perpetually in motion, moulding, stroking, kneading invisible shapes. An artist’s hands or a strangler’s, Clayton thought. Not a policeman’s.

‘An interesting case, this Blackwater murder, from what I’ve been hearing,’ said Macrae, looking not at Clayton but beyond him into the middle distance.

‘Yes,’ said Clayton non-commitally. He was not deceived by Macrae’s languid manner – the inspector clearly had an agenda of some kind.

‘Two press conferences already I see, so it’s quite high-profile.’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘Well, it’s got all the ingredients, hasn’t it? A beautiful girl gunned down in a country house owned by a rich foreigner, a dangerous armed suspect on the run who’s killed before and may well do so again. What more could you ask for? A bit more exciting than your average, run-of-the-mill hit-and-run, eh, Constable?’

Clayton nodded, waiting to see where Macrae was going.

‘And I suppose Trave’s the natural choice given that he was in charge last time there was trouble over there.’ Macrae paused and then went on musingly: ‘But there’s talk, you know, that he’s got something of a personal interest in the case – something about his wife and Mr Osman. Have you heard about any of this? Rumours, station gossip – I don’t pay much attention, of course, but I wonder if it’s something that might affect his approach.’

Clayton shook his head, keeping his eyes resolutely on the floor. He knew what Macrae was after now. A case like this with a lot of news interest followed by a quick, dramatic arrest could do wonders for an ambitious inspector’s career.

‘
Adversely
affect his approach,’ Macrae said softly, leaning closer and forcing Clayton to look him in the eye. ‘What do you think, Constable?’

‘I don’t know, sir. We’re doing the best we can,’ said Clayton stolidly. He might have some private concerns about his boss’s having a conflict of interest, but that sure as hell didn’t mean he was going to share his anxieties with a snake like Macrae.

‘We certainly are doing our best,’ said Trave brightly from the doorway, appearing as if from nowhere. ‘And while we really appreciate your interest, Hugh, we can’t stay to chat. We’ve got work to do, haven’t we, Adam? Come on.’

Clayton hadn’t obeyed an order with such alacrity in a long time. He practically ran out of the break room, leaving Macrae with an angry look on his face and a scarlet flush that was beginning to suffuse his pale cheeks. Clayton had no idea how much his boss had heard of what Macrae was saying, but Trave’s timing had been perfect, and he certainly seemed to be in a far better mood than he’d been since the case broke. The frostiness of the previous two days seemed to have been consigned to the past.

‘So what’s new?’ asked Trave once he’d hung up his jacket and sat down, adjusting himself to his favourite position, with his chair teetering on its back legs and his feet lightly resting on the edge of his desk. Clayton had never once seen him lose his balance.

‘Ballistics report is as you expected,’ said Clayton, picking up the top file from his desk. ‘The bullets in the door and the wall at the end of the corridor match Claes’s gun; the one that killed Miss Osman doesn’t. It’s a standard bullet apparently – could be fired from most types of handgun.’ Trave nodded, looking unsurprised. ‘And the rest of the fingerprint evidence has come back,’ Clayton went on. ‘There are matches to Swain’s prints on the desk in the study and on the reading lamp . . .’

‘What about on the photograph?’ asked Trave.

‘The one beside the reading lamp?’

‘Yes, the one of Katya.’

Clayton turned a page, running his finger down the list of items. ‘No, nothing. Just Osman’s prints – they took them for elimination.’

‘Interesting. Carry on.’

‘Well, upstairs you already know about. Swain’s prints are on the candlestick and the door of Katya’s room.’

‘On the handle?’

‘Yes. And the door itself.’

‘So he was there. Well, that’s not exactly a surprise, is it? We knew that already, but it’s curious he didn’t wear gloves, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Perhaps he couldn’t get hold of them in the prison.’

‘Maybe. But he got himself a gun, didn’t he? A little bit more difficult to lay your hands on inside than a pair of gloves I’d say.’

Clayton nodded, picking up another pile of reports. ‘Clothes,’ he said, looking at the top one. ‘They’ve matched the torn piece of clothing that we found in the rose bushes outside the study window to a standard-issue prison shirt.’

‘So what?’ said Trave dismissively. ‘It doesn’t add anything, does it? Like I said, we already know Swain was there. Have you seen the autopsy report?’

‘No.’

‘Not as bad as the autopsy itself,’ said Trave with a grimace. ‘I thought I’d spare you that.’

‘Thank you,’ said Clayton, and he meant it. He’d always had a queasy stomach, and he still hadn’t got used to attending post-mortems. He still remembered with shame the first one he’d been to with Trave when he’d had to run out of the room to stop himself being sick.

‘Anyway,’ said Trave. ‘It didn’t help us. She ate a small amount of supper – chicken and peas – about four hours before she died, and then got killed with a single shot to the head at about twelve thirty, give or take fifteen minutes either way. There’s no evidence she took drugs in the forty-eight hours before her death or that she was sedated.’

‘What about the needle marks on her arm?’ asked Clayton. ‘Did you find out anything about them?’

‘Yes, sources say she was a drug addict for most of last year and the first half of this, although I doubt she was injecting all that time. Anyway that means there’s no way of knowing whether Jana Claes is telling the truth about only sedating the girl on two occasions,’ said Trave, sounding disappointed.

‘But Osman was telling us the truth then, wasn’t he? About why he brought her home for her own good?’ asked Clayton. It hadn’t escaped his attention how Trave appeared to be downplaying Katya’s drug use as if it was an inconsequential detail rather than important corroboration of the history of events that Osman had given them when they’d questioned him after the murder.

‘Yes, I suppose he was,’ said Trave, looking irritated. It was clearly a reluctant concession.

‘The crime-scene guys found nothing of significance in Katya’s room,’ Clayton went on after a moment, glancing down at the last report he had in his hand.

‘Yes, someone had been doing some spring cleaning out of season in there, I’d say,’ said Trave with a hollow laugh. ‘Well, none of that seems to have taken us much further,’ he added with a sigh. ‘I better tell you what I’ve dug up. The woman at the telephone exchange says there were two calls to Blackwater Hall that evening, both from the same public call box in the centre of town. Came through at 12.20 and 12.21. Both times the phone rang six times; both times nobody answered. Interesting, eh? I went out to Blackwater and asked Osman about the calls, and he says he doesn’t know anything about them – says he must’ve been asleep, and there are no phone extensions upstairs. He’s right about that – I checked.’

‘What about Claes and his sister?’

‘Jana says she was asleep too, but Franz is a different story. You remember he said he was still awake when he first heard Swain in the corridor outside his room and that his door was slightly open, so he could hardly say he didn’t hear the phone. But he told me each time he went to go downstairs the phone stopped ringing and so he went back to bed. And then when I asked him why he hadn’t told us about the calls the bastard said it was because I didn’t ask him. Can you believe it? Anyway that’s not all. It turns out there’s been trouble out at the Hall already this summer – an attempted burglary back in July. Yes, exactly,’ said Trave, responding to Clayton’s look of surprise. ‘Another piece of information our friends out there decided to keep to themselves. Harrison, one of the uniforms, came and told me about it yesterday. There was an emergency call in the afternoon from a woman with a thick foreign accent – obviously Jana, so Harrison went out there and the burglar was gone. Claes said he’d caught him in Osman’s study and punched him a couple of times before the bloke hit him back and got away through the window. The burglar was wearing gloves, unlike our friend, Swain, and so it went down as an unsolved.’

‘Did he take anything?’

‘Osman says not.’

‘What’s the description?’

‘Well built, six foot, Caucasian male in his early twenties, clean-shaven with short dark hair, wearing jeans and a dark blue jersey – could be anyone, could be you apart from the clothing. Oh, and the glasses: he left them behind apparently. They fell off when Claes punched him. Harrison checked them out – they’re a German make, but the burglar didn’t say anything, so there’s no way of knowing where he’s from.’