The King of Diamonds (35 page)

But at the door, as he was leaving, he summoned his strength for one final effort. ‘It’s not for me that I’m asking you,’ he said. ‘It’s for the dead who can’t defend themselves: for Ethan and Katya – and yes, for the soon to be dead, for David Swain too. Think of them before you make up your mind.’

‘I have,’ she said. ‘And I’ve thought of the living too.’

There was nothing more to say, and so she closed the door, shutting her husband out as he stood looking back at her, committing the lines of her face to his memory one last time.

Vanessa was already upset after her ordeal in London, and Trave’s visit had made the strain almost intolerable. She’d had to appear convinced of Swain’s guilt in order to get her husband out of the flat, but beneath the surface she felt deeply confused, at sea amid a storm of conflicting emotions. She took a walk; she had a drink; she turned on the radio – but nothing helped. Try as she might, she couldn’t escape her recollection of that windowless Old Bailey courtroom with all those silent strangers hanging on her every word. Yes, it had only taken five minutes, but they had been five of the longest minutes of her life. She hadn’t been prepared for the sombre formality of the place – the wigs and the gowns and the antique language – and she hadn’t anticipated what it would be like to come face-to-face with David Swain for the first time. Until today he had been only a name. But now he was real – a living, breathing human being sitting only a few yards from where she stood giving evidence, a young man who probably only had a few weeks left to live, even though he was perfectly healthy. Sooner rather than later he was going to be turned off a gallows with a black hood over his head and his hands tied behind his back and left to swing until he was finally cut down. That was why the spectators’ gallery in the courtroom was filled to the rafters – it was the same reason why great crowds of people had always turned out to watch hangings when they were still carried out in public: a fascination with death that was as old as humanity itself.

Until today Vanessa hadn’t had to contemplate any of this, but now, by coming to court, she knew she’d become part of the process. She was involved, complicit, whether she liked it or not. And it was as if Swain instinctively knew this too. His eyes had never left her face all the time she was in the witness box, and she’d found she couldn’t resist his stare. She kept looking back at him as she answered the barristers’ questions; she could see the whiteness of his knuckles on the brass rail in front of the dock as he leaned over it toward her; and, as she walked past him down the aisle at the end of her evidence, she read his lips as he mouthed the word ‘thank you’ toward her, not once but twice.

Now she couldn’t get his face out of her mind, however hard she tried. He might well be guilty; in fact he probably was, but yet she couldn’t be sure. Bill had been right – she’d gone to London partly to assuage her conscience and partly, as he’d said, because she had doubts about Swain’s guilt, and denying her uncertainty to her husband had only served to make her doubts more insistent than before. They weren’t doubts about Titus – just like she’d told Trave, she was quite certain that he had had nothing to do with his niece’s murder, but what about Franz Claes? She remembered the cold, disgusted way she’d caught him looking at her sometimes in unguarded moments – in the rear-view mirror of the Bentley or when she entered a room. And she knew it wasn’t just her he hated; it was all women, except his sister perhaps, and she was as sexless as a woman could be. What must Claes have made of Titus’s passionate niece, Vanessa wondered, when Katya started asking awkward questions, poking her nose into Claes’s private affairs? Because Claes had secrets. That much was obvious. After quarrelling with Titus that evening at Blackwater, Vanessa had bought all the newspapers she could lay her hands on. She’d read every word about what had been put to Claes in cross-examination the day before; she’d looked at the blown-up photographs of his Nazi associates who’d ruled Belgium with an iron fist during the German occupation, pronouncing their harsh-sounding names to herself – Ehlers, Asche, Reeder. What had Claes been doing all those years, she asked herself – helping Jews or sending them to their deaths? And if the latter, what would Claes not do now to keep his secret?

Had Katya found out something about him? Vanessa wondered. Had he killed her because of that and set up Swain to take the blame? And had Katya known what he intended? Was that the meaning behind her desperate words – ‘They’re trying to kill me’?

Vanessa was quite sure that Claes, acting with or without his sister, was more than capable of murdering Katya, but was he actually guilty? Maybe Bill was right. Perhaps Katya’s diary would tell her the truth. Perhaps she should look for it – climb the stairs to the room that had once been Katya’s bedroom and look in her bookcase for a hollowed-out book. But for that she needed Titus to come back to her. Without him she could never return to Blackwater Hall, without him her future seemed suddenly black. Vanessa was filled with a sudden visceral longing for her lover. She wanted to feel his arms about her; she wanted to wear his ring again; and as if in answer to her prayer the telephone rang beside her hand and it was Titus asking to come over.

He came with flowers, a multitude of them that temporarily hid his face and body until she had taken them out of his hands and filled all the vases in the flat with purple and pink and yellow and blue – a riot of colour to match the pictures on the walls that her husband had complimented her on earlier in the day.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Osman, watching her arranging the stems from the doorway of the kitchen. ‘I was rude to you in my own house, when you were my guest. I am ashamed of myself. Can you forgive me, Vanessa?’

He stood up straight and spoke formally, as if he was making some kind of public confession. She could tell he was nervous about what she would say. It was endearing how much he cared.

‘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.

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 prosecutor 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 fate. 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.

And then the clerk’s voice came again, even and measured, reaching him as if from far, far away:

‘On the single count of murder, how do you find the defendant? Guilty or not guilty?’

‘Please, please, please,’ David screamed inside his head. But nobody heard him; all they heard was the foreman’s falsetto voice pronouncing that one word, ‘guilty’, that meant the end of David Swain.

It was what everyone in the court had been waiting for. They exhaled as one in a collective gasp, and then went quiet again as a skeletal man in a frock coat appeared behind the judge’s chair and silently placed a square of black silk on top of the old man’s wigged head.

And the judge began slowly speaking the words of the sentence, enunciating each syllable as if it was some ancient curse:

‘David John Swain, you are sentenced to be taken hence to the prison in which you were last confined and from there to a place of execution, where you will suffer death by hanging, and thereafter your body . . .’

But he got no further. The silence of the courtroom was shattered by a lone voice crying high up in the rafters of the public gallery, and, looking up, David saw his mother standing there, shaking her fist. She was dressed in that same charcoal-grey dress that she had worn for her visit to him in the prison.

‘No,’ she shouted. ‘No, you won’t. He’s mine, my flesh and blood. I won’t let you,’ and suddenly she reached down and took off one of her shiny black shoes and threw it through the air down at the judge. It didn’t hit him; instead it landed just short of his dais, bounced in the well of the court, and ending up under the feet of Inspector Macrae, who had up to that moment been sitting at the exhibits table with a look of smug satisfaction on his waxy face.

And immediately there was chaos: people getting up and knocking into one another and shouting as the judge and the ancient man in the frock coat disappeared through the door behind the dais, and David was bundled down the stairs from the dock, still uninformed about what would happen to his body after he had been hung by the neck until he was dead.

Back in his cell he knelt down on the hard cement floor and took hold of the toilet bowl in the corner with both his hands, gripping on to it like a drowning man. He felt nauseous, his stomach churned, and he could taste the vomit in his mouth as he retched, but nothing happened. He leant his head down against the cold porcelain and closed his eyes and contemplated his own extinction. He saw the rain again falling on his poor father’s coffin at the bottom of that pit in Wolvercote Cemetery, and he thought of being alive one moment, standing on the wooden trapdoor of the gallows, and then being dead and gone the next, blotted out forever. It was like turning off a light switch at the wall except that the light of his life could never be turned back on once they’d broken his neck. Life suddenly seemed so precious: air and sun and water, chestnuts in the pockets of his school uniform, his face in Katya’s long blonde hair one summer afternoon, his mother’s hand in his, crossing the road to the playground when he was a child. He’d never really understood that she loved him until now, when she’d thrown her shoe in front of all those strangers. He loved her for her defiance, but he knew it wouldn’t make any difference. The sand in the hourglass was fast running out.