The King of Diamonds (20 page)

‘I needed someone to be a lookout; to hold on to the ropes . . .’

‘No, you didn’t. You’ve already told us all about your heroics, remember – the planning, the split-second timing. And you know what – Swain didn’t get a mention. He was the invisible man. Except he was the reason you got the outside help – the rope ladders and the car and the money. Where did you get all this money, Eddie?’ asked Trave, producing a large see-through plastic evidence bag stuffed full of banknotes. ‘There’s over a thousand pounds here.’

‘Gambling. You can ask that girl. That’s why she went home with me. Because she could see how much I’d won.’

‘Home. Yes, I wondered about that. What were you doing in someone’s house, I wonder? A friend of a friend, was it?’

‘It was a bedsit. They’re safer than a hotel. People don’t ask questions.’

‘I’m sure they don’t, but whose bedsit? That’s what I’m asking.’

‘And I’m not saying. I’m not ratting on my friends. I told you that already,’ said Eddie defiantly.

‘He doesn’t need to,’ said Clayton, speaking for the first time. ‘It’s in the report from the London police. The whole house is divided up into bedsits, and they talked to a couple of the tenants. Landlord’s a John Birch. Usually collects the rent in person on the first day of the month. Doesn’t have a forwarding address . . .’

‘Birch or Bircher?’ asked Trave, interrupting. Clayton picked up on the sudden expectancy in his boss’s voice – he’d seen how Trave had gripped the edge of the table with his hand when he heard the name.

‘I don’t know. It could be either. Here, you can look yourself,’ said Clayton, handing Trave the document that he’d been reading from. ‘The report’s obviously been written up in a hurry.’

Trave glanced down at the page and then fixed Eddie with a hard stare. Clayton noticed how the cigarette had started to shake again in Eddie’s hand and how the colour had gone out of his cheeks.

‘Who’s Bircher?’ asked Trave.

‘I don’t know. Never heard of him.’

‘How did you find that house?’

‘A friend told me about it.’

‘A friend. What friend?’

‘I’m not saying. Like I told you: I’m no rat.’

‘Tell that to the old ladies you’ve conned out of their life savings,’ said Trave angrily. ‘Tell that to the poor girl you hit with that bottle last night.’

‘She had it coming,’ said Eddie with a sneer.

‘What? Because she has to earn her living going home with people like you? You didn’t think she’d go to the police because of who she was. That was your big mistake, wasn’t it?’

‘I don’t have to listen to this,’ said Eddie. ‘I’ve changed my mind. I want a lawyer, and until I get one I’m saying nothing.’

‘Interview suspended at twelve thirty-one,’ said Trave smoothly, looking at his watch. ‘You can have your solicitor, Eddie, but we’re not finished. I can tell you that much.’

‘Come on,’ said Trave, looking back at Clayton over his shoulder as he picked up his coat and went out the door of their office. ‘We’ve got work to do.’

‘Where are we going?’ asked Clayton, half-running down the corridor to keep up with Trave.

‘Where do you think? Archives first – to get Bircher’s picture – and then down to see your friend at the prison. I hope he’s not gone off duty by the time we get there.’

They were in luck. Bircher was on parole and so his file was live. He’d been released on licence the previous year after doing three years of a five-year stretch for running the rent-boy ring that Claes had got caught up with. He’d kept girls in another house too apparently – quite an operation. He’d stayed out of trouble since getting out, which seemed to be something of an achievement, given that he had a string of previous convictions going back to when he was eighteen a quarter of a century earlier – most for pimping, a few for low-level fraud. He was living at an address in Oxford according to the parole record – there was no mention of the tenement house in London. And pinned to the front of the file were his arrest photographs – front on and in profile. Average height, average build, average-looking except for a thick black beard.

‘Gotcha,’ said Trave under his breath as he signed for the file.

It didn’t take long for the visits officer to identify Bircher as the man who’d visited Eddie Earle on four different occasions in the month before Earle escaped, but Trave wasn’t satisfied. He insisted on seeing the prison governor and wouldn’t take no for an answer, until, half an hour later, the two policemen found themselves seated on uncomfortable hard-backed chairs in the governor’s second-floor office. Opposite them the governor, an unfriendly, balding little man, sat bolt upright with his hands palm down and immobile on the desk in front of him, looking like he was about to have his photograph taken. Behind his head, a picture of the young Queen in a pearl-white dress adorned with a blue regal sash gazed down at them, while to her right a large laminated sign ordered inmates not to smoke and to stand in the presence of the governor. Above the door a wall clock ticked loudly, measuring out the time with thick black hands.

The one window in the office looked directly down onto the concrete exercise yard in the centre of the prison, bleak and deserted in the gathering gloom of the autumn afternoon, and beyond that, above a long brick building lined with tiny barred windows, Clayton glimpsed the top of the high perimeter wall. He wondered if that was the way Earle and Swain had gone when they escaped, and was struck with admiration for a moment at their audacity in finding a way out of this hellish place.

‘What is it you want to ask me about, Inspector?’ asked the governor, looking up at the clock behind his visitors’ heads. ‘I do my rounds at two o’clock and I’m a punctual man, so please be brief.’

There was a nasal, clipped quality to the governor’s voice that stopped just short of outright rudeness. Clayton put it down to the governor’s wanting to avoid having to answer any more questions about the escape – it wasn’t hard to imagine that he’d already taken a lot of flak over what had happened, and he didn’t look like someone who’d welcome being in the line of fire. But Trave wasn’t in the least deterred – Clayton couldn’t remember ever seeing his boss this fired up before.

‘I want to ask you about David Swain and Edward Earle, the two prisoners who escaped last weekend,’ said Trave. ‘I want to know who put them in a cell together. Whose decision was it?’

‘It was nobody’s decision,’ the governor shot back without hesitating. ‘It was standard administration. Swain’s cellmate was sent to the punishment block because he was caught fighting, and so Earle replaced him. It’s not our practice to keep cells in single occupation, Inspector. Space is at a premium here.’

‘But why Earle? Why put a known escaper in with a maximum-security prisoner?’

‘There are a lot of high-security prisoners here. Earle had to go somewhere.’

‘Why? Why couldn’t he stay where he was? Why not put a new arrival with Swain?’

‘Because we didn’t. That’s why. We move prisoners around. It’s our policy. I don’t know what you’re implying, Inspector, but . . .’

‘I’m not implying anything,’ said Trave interrupting. ‘Two men have escaped from your prison. One of them is a convicted murderer who’s still on the run, and I need to know how they came to be put together. That’s all.’

‘And I’ve told you how,’ said the governor, rising from his chair. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me . . .’

But Trave stayed anchored to his seat, ignoring the governor’s attempt to terminate the interview.

‘How many visits are convicted prisoners allowed each month?’ he asked.

‘Two,’ said the governor, reluctantly resuming his seat. ‘Two every four weeks.’

‘So why did Earle receive four last month?’

‘I don’t know,’ said the governor, sounding genuinely surprised. ‘It’s the first I’ve heard of it. If it’s true, there must have been some kind of mix-up.’ Clayton noticed how the governor’s cheeks had become suffused with a deep red flush and wondered whether this arose from embarrassment or anger or a combination of the two.

‘It is true,’ said Trave, pushing his advantage. ‘Your visits officer just confirmed it to us. He showed us the book.’

‘Well it won’t happen again. I can assure you of that.’

‘I’m sure it won’t, except that it sounds a bit like locking the stable door after the horse has bolted. Have you any idea what harm these mix-ups of yours have caused?’ asked Trave, leaning forward suddenly across the desk and giving his anger free rein. ‘If they are mix-ups . . . I haven’t even started looking into how Swain and Earle got out of your so-called maximum-security prison . . .’

‘What do you mean by that?’ asked the governor, whose plump hands had now curled into tight fists as he retreated back into his chair in the face of Trave’s attack.

‘What do you think I mean?’ Trave shot back, returning the governor’s hostile stare.

The governor opened his mouth to respond but then thought better of it, breathing deeply in an effort to regain his self-control.

‘I don’t know why you have chosen to be so offensive, Inspector,’ he said at last in a self-consciously dignified voice as he got up from his chair and went over to the door. ‘But it is not conduct that I will tolerate in my office. Please make an appointment if you have any further questions. Or even better, put them in writing.’ He now had the door open and stood waiting for them to leave.

Outside Trave wrinkled his nose in disgust. ‘Prig,’ he said, spitting out the word like it was a bad taste. ‘Another one who knows more than he’s saying.’

Clayton followed his boss to the car, wondering where they were going next. He soon found out: instead of returning to the police station, Trave drove out of town on the Cowley Road, pressing his foot down on the gas as they weaved in and out of the busy afternoon traffic.

‘Shouldn’t we have another go at Eddie first, now we’ve got the
ID
on Bircher?’ Clayton suggested, holding on to the dashboard to prevent himself flying forwards as Trave came to a sudden halt at a red light, narrowly missing a car coming from the right.

‘No, let him stew for a bit,’ said Trave in a tone that brooked no opposition. ‘Claes is the connection – it’s him we need to talk to now.’

‘Connection? So you really think Claes used Bircher to spring Swain out of gaol just so as to set him up for Katya’s murder?’ asked Clayton doubtfully.

‘Maybe,’ said Trave, sounding the opposite of doubtful. ‘And maybe Claes wasn’t acting on his own either.’

‘You mean Osman was in on it too?’

Trave nodded.

‘But why would they go to all this trouble to frame Swain?’ asked Clayton. ‘Katya was sick, mentally unbalanced. They could easily have faked a suicide.’

‘Sure, but that would’ve given me the opportunity to go straight for Osman’s jugular, wouldn’t it? He’s got too much to hide to risk that, whereas this way Swain’s the focus of the investigation. And if I start asking any awkward questions out at Blackwater, all Osman’s got to do is have a chat with the chief constable and I’m off the case.’

Trave glanced over at his companion, catching the look of disbelief on his face. ‘Osman did it to prove he could do it. That’s what I think,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s the same reason he does everything. To show he can.’

Clayton bit his lip and said nothing. He didn’t agree at all with his boss’s handle on the case, and he didn’t like the hard set of Trave’s jaw, the white-knuckled grip with which he held the steering wheel, the angry edge to his voice. As far as Clayton could see, there was precious little evidence against Claes and none whatsoever against Osman. Trave wanting him to be a murderer didn’t make him one. All the evidence pointed toward David Swain, and this surprise visit to Blackwater Hall felt like at best a wild-goose chase, at worst a serious mistake. But Trave was the man in charge – it was his call where they went next and when. Clayton had infuriated his boss once already by questioning his methods, and he wasn’t going to do it a second time unless he had to. Clayton was independent-minded, which was why Trave liked him as an assistant, but he was no mutineer.

And so he kept his peace and hoped for the best as Trave made a sharp left turn and headed up the road toward Blackwater Church, where it stood silver-stoned and serene at the top of the hill, looking down on the lush green landscape all around.

Franz Claes opened the front door before Vanessa had even got out of her car and came down to meet her on the steps. He took her coat in the hall and showed her into the drawing room, explaining that Titus was tied up with something in his study. He offered her a drink, which she refused, but then, just when she’d expected him to leave, he closed the door and came and sat down opposite her on the sofa. It made her feel nervous. Up until now he had always seemed keen to shun her company, treating her with an icy politeness that barely concealed an obvious antipathy, and she wondered what it was that had changed his attitude today.

‘Perhaps I’ll change my mind about that drink,’ she said. ‘A glass of wine would be nice.’

‘Certainly,’ said Franz, crossing to the sideboard and opening a bottle with quick, practised movements, and then, as he held the glass out towards her, he caught her eye and held it.

‘It’s obvious you’ve got something to say to me, Franz,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you tell me what it is and put me out of my suspense.’

He nodded, smiling thinly as he resumed his seat. ‘It’s about Titus,’ he said. ‘I am worried about him.’

‘Because of what’s happened?’

‘Yes. He is under very great strain, and the police inspector, your husband, he is making it worse.’

‘What? More since last Sunday?’ asked Vanessa, trying not to show how perturbed she felt. She’d only seen Titus once since the previous weekend for a hurried lunch in Oxford, and he hadn’t referred to her husband then or when they’d spoken each evening on the telephone. He’d obviously not wanted to worry her.

‘Yes, he comes here almost every day, insulting Titus, treating us like we are the criminals when he should be trying to catch the real murderer,’ said Franz, allowing his anger to show through. ‘Swain killed Katya just like he killed Ethan Mendel. I caught him doing it.’

‘I’m sure Bill’s doing his best to find him,’ said Vanessa, trying to inject her voice with a sense of conviction that she did not entirely feel. ‘The manhunt story’s on the radio every day.’

‘I am afraid that I do not share your confidence, Mrs Trave,’ said Claes coldly. ‘It has been a week and they have found nothing. And yet your husband won’t leave us alone . . .’

‘Well, what do you want me to do about it?’ Vanessa burst out, unable to contain her exasperation. ‘I’m sure it hasn’t escaped your notice that I’ve been separated from my husband for eighteen months. I can’t tell him what to do, and he wouldn’t listen to me even if I tried.’

‘I know. I understand this,’ said Claes, bowing his head. ‘Inspector Trave is a law to himself. It is not your fault that you are his wife.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ said Vanessa, bridling. It was one thing for her to leave her husband, quite another to stand by while Franz Claes insulted him. ‘He’s a good policeman. I know that much,’ she added angrily.

‘Maybe once upon a time he was good, but not now. He is treating us like this because of you and Titus, and that is not being a good policeman. I know this.’

‘All right,’ said Vanessa, controlling her temper. ‘If what you say is true then maybe Bill is in the wrong, but I still don’t see why you’re telling me about it. You just told me there was nothing I could do.’

‘Yes, but there is something you can
not
do,’ said Claes quietly.

‘What do you mean –
not
do?’

‘Titus told me about what Katya said to you in here. She lied of course, but it doesn’t matter – if your husband hears about it, he will never leave Titus alone. He will arrest him. It is just the excuse he is looking for. And Titus will be disgraced even though he is innocent. I ask you – is that justice?’ asked Franz, leaning forward and looking Vanessa in the eye. He hadn’t raised his voice, but she noticed how his bony hands were clenched together in his lap. She felt like he was looking inside her, and it made her heart beat fast. A cold sweat broke out on her forehead.

‘Titus has told me that he asked you to say nothing,’ Franz went on after a moment. ‘And he says that you are thinking about his request, but it is not enough to think, Mrs Trave. You must decide to do what is right; you must protect Titus from your husband.’

Vanessa drew a deep breath, trying to keep a lid on her inner turmoil. All week long she had been agonizing over what to do. She believed in Titus and wanted to help him, but then each time she resolved to do as he asked and stay silent, Katya’s desperate face appeared in her mind’s eye, and she remembered the terrible struggle that the girl had gone through to convey her message. ‘They’re trying to kill me’ – what if it was Claes and his invisible sister that Katya had been talking about? Was that why Claes was appealing to her now – not for Titus’s sake, but to protect himself?

‘Does Titus know about you talking to me about this?’ she asked.

Claes shook his head, and she was inclined to believe him. Titus was too considerate of her feelings to allow Claes to pester her – he knew how much she disliked his brother-in-law.

‘Well?’ Claes asked, looking at her expectantly. ‘Can we count on you?’

‘I’ll talk to Titus about it,’ she said. Claes flushed, but bit back the angry response he’d been about to make when the door opened and Titus came in.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, looking surprised. ‘I only just now saw your car outside, my dear. I had no idea you were already here. Has Franz been looking after you?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Vanessa holding up her glass. ‘He has been most attentive.’

After lunch, Titus lent Vanessa a pair of Wellington boots and they walked out across the lawn to where the path opened up in the pine trees leading down to the lake. Titus’s cat, Cara, followed them a little way but then turned aside, entering the woods at a different point, engaged on a hunting expedition in the undergrowth. Vanessa was not sorry to see the animal go. She found it unnerving the way the cat stared at her out of its unblinking green eyes whenever she visited the Hall. Once or twice she had tried to stroke the creature, but it had got up each time and stalked away, impervious to her well-intentioned advances.

It had been raining earlier and the ground was still wet underfoot. There were patches of thin mist floating in the damp air and the autumn cold tingled on Vanessa’s skin, making her feel irrationally nervous and uneasy. And yet Titus seemed in better spirits than she’d seen him since the murder. She’d been distressed by the change in him when she’d seen him the previous Sunday and then again in the middle of the week. Then there’d been thick dark circles under his eyes and he’d spoken in disjointed sentences as if his mind was constantly wandering away into desolate places where she could not follow. And afterwards, on her own, she’d thought of him as an old tree bent over to the ground in a winter storm. The image frightened her, making her worry whether he would recover from the blow of his niece’s violent death, as she selfishly realized how much she’d come to depend on her lover’s strength and self-assurance. But then today, as if in answer to her prayers, there was a spring in his step again and a glow in his eye. He seemed almost like his old self again.

‘Having you here makes such a difference,’ he told her, squeezing her hand as they passed under the trees and left the gardens behind.

‘I’m glad,’ she said. And she would have liked to have said more except that she felt self-conscious suddenly. It was as if another separate Vanessa was standing off to one side under the trees watching Titus and her pass by along the path. She hoped that he wouldn’t ask her about his marriage proposal or what she intended to do about what Katya had said. She felt upset by the pressure Claes had put on her back at the house – being in the drawing room had reminded her of Katya and how she’d suddenly appeared in the doorway ten days earlier swaying from side to side. It haunted Vanessa that Katya had known what was coming and yet nobody had been able to protect her from her fate.

‘I keep wishing I could have done something,’ said Osman, as if reading his companion’s mind. ‘I wish I’d known . . .’

‘About Swain? How could you have known he’d escape? Prisons are supposed to keep people in, not let them out,’ said Vanessa, quick with words of reassurance. ‘You can’t blame yourself.’

‘I know, but it’s hard sometimes,’ he said and then stopped, suddenly silent as the trees opened out in front of them and they found themselves standing on the edge of the lake. Here the mist was thicker, shrouding the far bank and absorbing a flock of geese into a grey-white invisibility almost as soon as the birds had passed overhead, leaving only their raucous calls borne back to Titus and Vanessa on the breeze. Vanessa shivered, and Titus put his arm around her.

‘Blackwater Lake can seem like an evil place on days like this,’ he said, ‘but then within an hour or two the wind will chase the clouds away, and it knocks me back with its beauty. Its changeability reminds me of home, I think. That’s why I like it so much.’

‘Home? Belgium, you mean?’

‘Yes. Antwerp and the River Scheldt and Flanders – where I came from, where I made my fortune.’

‘Selling diamonds?’ asked Vanessa, genuinely curious. Titus had never told her about how he had made his money before. The subject had not come up for some reason.

‘Yes, diamonds, always diamonds. I fell in love with them before I dealt in them and perhaps that was why they have been so good to me. They are in my blood, Vanessa. I can close my eyes here now and I’m back there, back in the attic workshops before the war with the rows of men on stools in their white shirts and black waistcoats cleaving the stones, sawing them, cutting them with a precision that you cannot imagine – each one of them an artist – or sitting among the dealers in the bourse or at the Diamond Club on the Pelikaanstraat, bent down over the jewels so all you could see were their wide-brimmed hats.’ Osman laughed, as if shaking off the intensity of his recollection.

‘Why don’t you go back there if you miss it so much?’

‘I don’t know. Because I have made a new life here; because I have enough money now to last me a lifetime; because there are too many bad memories over there, too many people that died when they shouldn’t have done. Except that now they are dying here too,’ added Titus with a bitter smile.

‘Come on, let’s go back,’ he went on after a moment. ‘You’re cold and this isn’t one of the lake’s better days.’

They walked slowly back through the woods without speaking, the sound of their footsteps muffled by the pine needles that carpeted the ground, each lost in their own thoughts, until, coming out on the other side, Titus shivered as he looked up toward his house and reached for Vanessa’s hand.

‘Thank God we’re together,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where I would be without you.’

Vanessa felt a sudden wave of protective love for Titus. She raised her head, waiting for his kiss, but the kiss never came. From across the lawn there was the sound of a car coming fast, much too fast, up the drive and then the screech of its brakes as it emerged into the front courtyard and screamed to a halt. Titus set off across the lawn at a run with Vanessa following in his wake, and she turned the corner of the house just in time to see her husband beginning a shouting match with Franz Claes at the foot of the front steps. Further back, a young man whom Vanessa recognized as her husband’s assistant, Adam Clayton, was standing beside the open door of Trave’s old Ford car, looking as if he knew that something bad was about to happen but was powerless to prevent it.

‘Where’s Bircher? Tell me where he is right now,’ shouted Trave. He was no more than a foot from Claes, who was standing ramrod straight, refusing to give ground.

‘I don’t know who you’re talking about,’ said Claes evenly. He seemed strangely calm, and there was even a faint smile playing around his thin lips: Vanessa sensed to her surprise that he was actually enjoying the situation.

‘You’re lying,’ yelled Trave. ‘Bircher was the one who set you up with those boys and he’s the one who you used to spring Swain out of gaol.’

‘Spring – what’s spring?’ asked Claes with a sneer. He spoke the word with derision. It was obvious that he was trying to provoke Trave, whose hands had bunched into fists, whereas Claes kept his hands firmly in the pockets of his trousers. Osman clearly sensed what was coming and chose this moment to intervene.

‘Inspector, please calm down. I’m sure we can sort this out,’ he said.

Trave wheeled round to his left, aware of Osman for the first time. He opened his mouth to speak and then closed it, seeing his wife behind Osman’s shoulder. It was one thing to imagine Titus Osman with his hands on Vanessa; it was quite another to see them together in the flesh. A current of rage surged through Trave, momentarily blacking out his reason, and, taking two steps forward, he punched out at Osman with all the force he could muster. But instead of connecting with cheek and eye and bone as he had hoped, Trave’s hand flailed through thin air. Osman had seen the blow coming and had had time to duck out of the way, and then, just as Trave was readying his arm for another punch, Clayton came from behind and pulled Trave backwards towards the car. Taken by surprise, Trave lost his balance and fell over onto the ground with a thud.

Sprawled on his back, Trave looked up into the grey indifferent sky and felt a terrible humiliation. He’d broken every rule in the book; he’d made a fool of himself in front of Vanessa; he’d played into the hands of his enemies. He sensed them all looking down at him and closed his eyes tight shut. He could imagine the different expressions on their faces: contempt and, even worse, pity, and triumph too. He knew he was finished unless he could prove a connection between Blackwater Hall and the prison escape, if there was one . . . But Trave refused to acknowledge the possibility that he might be mistaken. He felt sure that the vital piece of evidence was there, just out of reach. He’d come to the wrong place – that was all; he’d allowed his anger to swamp his reason. Clayton had been right – it was the police station that he should’ve gone to from the prison, not here. Eddie was the key. Trave saw that now as clear as day. He could offer Eddie a deal, lean on the cocky bastard until he coughed up the truth. Except that Trave would never get the chance once Creswell got to hear about what he’d done in the last two minutes. And that was only a matter of time. Osman would complain, and Clayton would have to make a report to Creswell once he got back to the station. He’d have no option. Trave would do the same if he was in Clayton’s shoes.