The King of Diamonds

CHAPTER 9

Trave sat behind the big mahogany desk, across from its owner, Titus Osman, who was dressed in an expensive coal-black suit and tie. The desk’s surface was covered with a light film of white fingerprint powder but was otherwise bare except for a telephone, a green-shaded reading lamp, and a photograph of Katya in a silver frame. It had been taken several years previously, and she looked nothing like the emaciated waif she had since become. Clayton sat to one side of the desk with notebook and pen at the ready; opposite him, on the other side of the room, the glass from the shattered window pane lay in pieces on the pale blue Axminster carpet. Outside, Osman’s red and white roses were just beginning to be visible in the first grey light of dawn, and beyond the dew-covered lawn the sound of the police search teams shouting to each other in the woods was distantly audible.

‘I’m sorry for the wait, Mr Osman,’ said Trave. ‘This room is where the intruder broke into your house and probably got out too, and so I wanted to bring you in here so that you could see if anything is missing or has been moved about. And I’m afraid that meant waiting until forensics had finished.’

‘No problem, Inspector. It gave me time to get dressed and compose myself a little,’ said Osman evenly.

‘And yet you look surprised,’ said Trave, noticing Osman’s raised eyebrows and the quizzical look on his face. ‘May I ask why?’

‘I suppose I am unaccustomed to being interviewed on the wrong side of my own desk,’ said Osman with a thin smile. ‘But it doesn’t matter; it is Katya, my niece, who matters. It is horrible, quite horrible, what has happened. I cannot believe it, cannot credit it.’ Osman shuddered and put his hand up to his face, running his fingers across his eyes.

Trave couldn’t tell whether Osman had been crying. There was certainly redness around his pupils, but whether from tears or rubbing was anyone’s guess.

‘I’m sorry, Inspector,’ said Osman, taking a deep breath and shaking his head as if trying to pull himself together. He glanced around the room. ‘Nothing appears to have been taken as far as I am aware. I have not had time to check the drawers in my desk.’

‘Why do you keep the top one locked?’ asked Trave. He kept his eyes fixed on Osman as he asked the question.

‘Because its contents are private.’

‘Private to me?’

‘Yes, Inspector: private even to you. And frankly I can’t see their relevance to what has happened here tonight.’

Clayton, shifting in his seat, silently agreed.

‘Look, my brother-in-law has told me that he saw David Swain outside my niece’s room tonight — the same man who murdered my guest, Ethan Mendel, two years ago,’ Osman went on, leaning across the desk. ‘I thought that Mr Swain was safely locked away in prison, but perhaps he has escaped. Has he, Inspector?’

‘Yes, he’s escaped,’ said Trave in a flat, expressionless voice.

‘I see,’ said Osman, sounding unsurprised. ‘Well, then, perhaps it is Mr Swain that we should be talking about. Not my private correspondence.’

‘I’ll decide which questions to ask, if you don’t mind, Mr Osman,’ said Trave coolly. ‘Perhaps you wouldn’t mind explaining why you felt the need to keep your niece imprisoned in her room?’

‘The bars on her window were for her safety,’ said Osman patiently. ‘And her door wasn’t locked, Inspector. If it had been, Mr Swain wouldn’t have been able to get into her room tonight, would he?’

‘Perhaps not. But then can you explain why she seems to have been suffering from malnutrition and has needle marks all up one arm?’ Trave spoke harshly, not bothering to keep the anger out of his voice.

‘The marks are from the drugs she took when she was in Oxford before I got her back here last month, and she is thin because she refused to eat. It wasn’t for want of trying. It broke my heart to see her like that, but she was stubborn like her mother, my sister.’

‘So I assume you got professional help?’

‘Yes, of course. My doctor has been here regularly to see her.’

‘Is he a psychiatrist?’

‘He’s a doctor, a good doctor.’

There was an uneasy silence. Once again Clayton found himself puzzled by the way that Trave was pursuing the investigation. Certainly there were questions that needed to be asked about the deceased’s physical state, but there was no real evidence that she’d been imprisoned in her room, and there was nothing to justify Trave’s ill-concealed hostility to Osman and his family.

‘Can you tell us what you know about what happened here tonight?’ Clayton asked, speaking for the first time.

‘Certainly,’ said Osman, transferring his attention from Trave to the younger policeman with a smile. ‘I went to bed at about eleven. I heard gunshots…’

‘How many?’

‘Several. I can’t be sure. I was asleep. I got out of bed and opened the door of my bedroom. I heard Franz shouting my name, and then at the same time someone was rushing past me in the corridor. He was running very fast, and instinctively I backed away into my bedroom or he would have knocked me over.’

‘Did you see who it was?’

‘No, he was too quick.’

‘He?’

‘I had the impression it was a man. As I say, he was very quick.’

‘Were the lights on?’

‘Yes. It was dark outside when I opened the door, and so I turned on the light in the corridor. I wish I hadn’t now as it must have helped Swain find his way downstairs.’

‘And where is your bedroom, sir?’ asked Clayton.

‘Just above where we are now, off the first-floor corridor. It’s on the far left side of the house as you face it from the front.’

‘Thank you,’ said Clayton, making a note.

Osman looked benevolently at Trave’s assistant, and Trave looked even more irritated than before. ‘So what happened next?’ he asked, taking over the questioning.

‘There was quite a lot of noise coming from downstairs, but then it stopped; and, at about the same time, Franz came down the flight of stairs nearest my bedroom. As you probably know, there is a staircase at each end of the house leading from the first to the second floors, but only one central staircase coming up from the ground floor, and I’d heard the intruder running down that one,’ said Osman, glancing over at Clayton, who was busy writing in his book. ‘Franz had his gun with him, and so we came down here and found the window broken over there. It seemed like Swain had gone, and so I left Franz to look through the other rooms while I went back upstairs and found Katya. She was…’ Osman’s voice broke, and he covered his face with his hand for a moment, mastering his emotion.

‘How do you think Swain knew where he was going?’ asked Trave, once Osman had had a chance to compose himself. ‘Has he been here before tonight?’

‘Never with my permission. Once without, but that’s all as far as I know. Katya had him in the house when I was away on business, and she even took him in her bedroom. I was very angry when I found out about it afterwards.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it is my house. I make the rules,’ said Osman, as if he was stating the obvious.

‘But why wouldn’t you let him in the house in the first place?’ asked Trave. ‘What didn’t you like about Mr Swain?’

Osman paused, thinking about his answer before he gave it.

‘My niece has always had a tendency to mix with the wrong kind of people,’ he said slowly, choosing his words with care. ‘It became a great deal worse after Ethan’s death, when she got into quite a lot of trouble in Oxford, but the problem was there before. Ethan’s death hit me particularly hard because I had thought that Katya had at last found someone suitable.’

‘But in what way was Mr Swain unsuitable?’ asked Trave, persisting with his question.

‘He was without roots, without academic background; he was living hand-to-mouth.’

‘And Ethan?’

‘He had been to university in Antwerp and done well. He’d lost his parents, but I knew why, and his grandmother, who brought him up, is a solid, respectable person. Ethan had a future — a bright one, until Swain took it away from him. I was right about Swain, you see. He turned out to be worse, much worse, than I thought he was: nothing more or less than a cold-blooded murderer. But being right doesn’t help in the end. Katya is dead, and all I ever wanted to do was protect her. You see, she was my last blood relative. Everyone else died in the war. Franz was my wife’s brother, and so he and Jana are family too, but it is not the same.’

‘And yet you were able to save other people you knew from the Nazis, were you not, Mr Osman?’ asked Trave, leaning forward. ‘People like Ethan Mendel and his brother.’

‘Yes, I was lucky: I had the money and the contacts, and so when the deportations began in Belgium I was able to help some of my Jewish friends to escape.’

‘But you couldn’t save everyone; you had to choose, didn’t you? Who to help, who to leave behind,’ Trave went on insistently. ‘Like in that picture you’ve got up there over the mantelpiece. It’s from Exodus, isn’t it? The Angel of Death going through the streets, passing over the doors of those who were to be saved, exercising the power of life and death. Is that why you bought that picture, Mr Osman? So that it would make you think of having that power again?’

Osman looked furious for a moment, fighting to retain his self-possession. But then he smiled crookedly, as if he’d thought of the perfect riposte.

‘I have the picture in here because it reminds me every day of what happened in my country,’ he said slowly. ‘And because it is beautiful, a true work of art. I wouldn’t expect you to understand that, Inspector, but Vanessa certainly thinks it has quality. She was admiring it just the other day, and I have great faith in her judgement.’

Trave seemed to flinch as if he’d just been hit. His cheeks flushed, and Clayton saw how his boss’s fists clenched hard on the surface of the desk. He remembered the rumours, the station gossip from the year before about Trave’s wife walking out on him. Vanessa was her name. Clayton was sure of it. Was that the same Vanessa whom Osman was talking about now? It certainly seemed like it.

The door opened, but not to a human visitor. It was a cat, long and sleek and black with two distinctive white markings on either side of its green eyes. It was a most beautiful creature, thought Clayton, who had never been an animal lover. Coming to a halt beside Osman’s chair, the cat arched its back, as if delighting in its own suppleness, and then jumped into Osman’s lap with an easy, precise leap and sat facing Trave across the desk.

‘Hullo, Cara,’ said Osman, scratching the cat delicately behind its ears. ‘I was wondering where you’d got to.’ The cat purred, blinking its eyes at the two policemen, and Clayton had a sudden sense that Trave was now the one on the wrong side of the desk, that it was the inspector who was being interviewed, not the owner of the house.

‘Cara spends much of her time outside, hunting in the woods. And I like that, that she’s independent. But today it’s no fun for her out there with the grounds full of strangers,’ said Osman, looking out through the broken window toward the sunrise. ‘Better for her to stay inside, I think. Do you need me for anything else, Inspector? If not, I’ll go and give Cara her breakfast.’

Trave shook his head, and Osman got up to leave, but at the door Trave called him back.

‘There is just one last thing, Mr Osman. Do you have a burglar alarm?’

‘Yes, but I only use it when I’m away.’

‘And why is that? You have many valuable items in this house, don’t you?’

‘Yes. Perhaps I am too trusting. But — how is it you English say? — hindsight is a wonderful thing. I’m here if you need me, Inspector.’ Osman smiled and went through the door, preceded by his cat.

‘How bloody convenient,’ Trave burst out once the door was closed. ‘The bastard might just as well have left the window open.’

‘I don’t know about that. Aren’t you exaggerating a bit, sir? A lot of people don’t use their alarms when they’re at home, you know,’ said Clayton mildly.

Trave grunted, continuing to look thunderous, and once again Clayton felt disturbed by his boss’s obvious animosity toward the occupants of the house. Questions had to be asked, but the interviews with Titus Osman and his family had seemed at times more like interrogations. Just now, for instance, Trave’s questioning of Osman’s motives for helping Jews in the war seemed like a gratuitous personal attack for which Clayton could see no justification. Trave’s approach to the case made no sense, particularly when there was an obvious suspect with motive aplenty who was now on the run from the police. There had to be an explanation. Did it have something to do with Vanessa, Trave’s wife, who’d left him for another man? Clayton remembered how Trave had seemed to get so angry when Osman mentioned her name. What was Osman’s connection to Vanessa? Clayton wondered. He knew that sooner or later he was going to have to ask his boss what it was all about. He couldn’t do his job properly if he didn’t have the full picture. But at the same time Clayton shied away from the prospect. Trave was a private man, one of the most private men Clayton had ever met, and the thought of invading his boss’s privacy on a subject as sensitive as his failed marriage made Clayton feel distinctly uneasy. He’d have to find the right opportunity, but it certainly wasn’t now, not with Trave sitting behind Osman’s desk, looking like thunder.

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.

Trave could be a hard taskmaster, and the last thing that Clayton wanted was to get on the wrong side of his boss, but he felt he had no choice in the matter. He had to ask Trave about his wife’s connection to Osman if only to get some reassurance before they went any further with the investigation.

‘Mr Osman mentioned something earlier that I wanted to ask you about,’ Clayton began nervously.

‘Yes, what?’ asked Trave, sounding distracted. He was obviously still thinking about Ethan’s murder.

‘Well, he said something about someone called Vanessa, and I wondered…’

Clayton broke off, alarmed by the change in his boss’s demeanour: the name had registered on Trave’s face like an electric shock.

‘You wondered what?’ asked Trave, staring angrily at his subordinate.

‘I wondered if… well, if it was Mrs Trave he was talking about,’ Clayton finished lamely.

Trave was silent for a moment, breathing heavily, and then, when he spoke again, his voice was hard and cold.

‘Yes, Constable, Titus Osman was referring to my wife, the same lady who has left me and taken up with him, as you must know full well given that you choose to spend your time listening to station gossip instead of doing your job.’

‘I’m sorry, sir. I asked you because I didn’t know — about her and Osman, I mean. I knew she’d left, that she was no longer with you, but I didn’t know the other. I promise you, I didn’t,’ said Clayton, stumbling over his words.

‘Well, now you do. What of it?’ asked Trave brutally.

‘Well, it’s just, it worried me, sir, that it might affect things, the inquiry…’

‘Cloud my judgement, you mean?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Well, it won’t. Are you satisfied now?’

Clayton nodded, and he would have said more, but for the fact that they were at that moment interrupted by someone tapping on the half-open door. It was Watts, one of the detectives who’d been helping organize the search.

‘What do you want?’ asked Trave furiously, rounding on the newcomer in the doorway.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Watts nervously. ‘It’s just I thought you ought to know. The switchboard called. A man that matches Mr Swain’s description hijacked a car in Blackwater village a few hours ago and made the people in it take him to the railway station.’

‘The station — which station?’ asked Trave.

‘Oxford. They think he took the first train to London apparently. Oh, and he’s got a gun. He threatened them with it.’

‘A gun. Anything else?’

‘Yes, they say he was wounded — there was blood around his left shoulder and he was holding his arm like it was hurting him, apparently.’

Behind Trave, Clayton got to his feet. It was the news they’d been waiting for — independent evidence that Swain had been here during the night — and armed too. Now surely there could be no doubt about the identity of their main suspect.

‘Put out an alert,’ said Trave. ‘Nationwide. You know the drill. And Adam, you come with me,’ he said, turning to Clayton. ‘We’ve got work to do.’

Titus waited until the police had cleared out of his study before he telephoned Vanessa and told her what had happened.

Vanessa was aghast, remembering Katya’s desperate face in the drawing room ten days before, the way she’d struggled so hard to convey her message. ‘They’re trying to kill me,’ the girl had said. And now she was dead, murdered in her bed.

‘I need to see you,’ said Titus urgently. ‘Can I come over?’

Twenty-five minutes later he was sitting beside her on the sofa in her living room. The weather had turned cold, and she’d lit a fire before Titus called so the room was warm. But he still shivered, as if the shock of what had happened was only now beginning to penetrate his skin. He was different to how she’d ever seen him before — like something inside him had broken, and his voice had a faraway feel, even though he was sitting beside her.

‘It’s such a waste,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Such a terrible waste. She’d have got better if she’d just had a little bit more time. I know she would. She had so much to live for, and now it’s as if she never was. You should have seen her, Vanessa. Like a rag doll in her bed, with all the life blown out of her by that swine. And her beautiful face such a mess too, such a damned, God-awful mess.’

Titus shuddered, and Vanessa reached over and took his shaking hand, wishing she could find some way to comfort her lover, but she could think of nothing to say to mitigate his pain. Death of the young was unbearable. Because it was avoidable, because of what might have been and now would never be. She knew these things from bitter personal experience.

‘It’s how we parted that I cannot bear,’ said Titus. It was obviously hard for him to speak, and the words caught in his throat. ‘If she’d had a bit more time to recover, then we could have been friends again like we were when Ethan was alive. She’d have got her hope back. But instead she saw me as her enemy; she wouldn’t understand why I was keeping her at home. And your husband doesn’t understand either, or rather he doesn’t want to understand.’

‘My husband. What’s my husband got to do with it?’ asked Vanessa, not understanding the connection for a moment.

‘He’s the man in charge, what you English call the officer in the case,’ said Titus bitterly. ‘I know — it’s crazy,’ he added, seeing the look of surprise on Vanessa’s face. ‘Anyone else would have handed the investigation over to another detective given his personal interest. But oh no, Bill Trave knows best.’

‘What’s he done?’ asked Vanessa, feeling alarmed.

‘Interrogated me and my family like we were the criminals. That’s what. He accused us of deliberately starving Katya, of hurting her. And he even asked Jana, my sister-in-law, why she didn’t take communion or go to confession when she went to church. Can you imagine? The other policeman stopped him, or I don’t know what else he’d have said.’

‘That’s not like Bill,’ said Vanessa, shaking her head. ‘He always took pride in his work. That’s the one thing that kept him going, I think.’

‘Well, maybe his jealousy of us has changed all that. I am sorry for what has happened to him. Truly I am. I bear him no ill will, but I need him to be a policeman now, to catch this maniac who has done this terrible thing, not use my niece’s death as an opportunity to

…’

‘Settle the score,’ Vanessa said, finishing Osman’s sentence for him when he couldn’t seem to find the right word. ‘I have to say I find all this hard to believe, Titus. That Bill should be so unfair. He was on the radio while I was waiting for you to come over, appealing for help finding Swain. It’s a pity you didn’t hear him. It might have made you feel better.’

‘It does make me feel better,’ said Titus, sounding just as upset as before. ‘Once Swain is under lock and key then maybe everything will settle down. But, in the meantime, Vanessa, I need to ask you something. A favour. You have to help me.’

‘Help you how?’ asked Vanessa, looking puzzled.

‘Help me by not telling your husband about what Katya said to you. She was out of her mind with misdirected anger and grief that night like I told you before, and she didn’t know what she was saying. The evidence against Swain is overwhelming. He was in Katya’s room with a gun — Franz and Jana heard him fire it. But your husband refuses to see it that way. I know it’s wrong, but I didn’t feel able to tell him that I was keeping Katya at home against her will. It was for her own good, but I know he’d just have used it against me. I know what he’s trying to do — he’s looking for any excuse to build a case against me because he hates me, Vanessa. You know he does.’

Titus looked hard at Vanessa, willing her to look him in the eye and give him what he asked, but she looked away into the fire, knitting her brow. She didn’t like it. She’d been brought up to tell the truth and this felt all wrong. But then again Titus wasn’t asking her to tell a lie, only to keep information to herself, and maybe the thought of it made her feel bad just because anything less than one hundred per cent truthfulness always made her uncomfortable. And Titus was right — the case against this Swain man did seem overwhelming. Why did she need to make Titus’s life hell for no reason just when he needed time and space to recover from the terrible wound that Swain had inflicted upon him? What would it do to their relationship if she got Titus into trouble just when he needed her the most, if she denied him the first major sacrifice he’d ever asked of her? Vanessa still hadn’t made up her mind whether she wanted to marry Titus, but she had no doubt in her mind that she didn’t want to lose him.

And yet it was unlike Bill to be unprofessional. And it certainly was a strange coincidence that Katya should have been so convinced that nameless people were trying to kill her less than two weeks before she met a violent death. Vanessa thought of Franz Claes’s cold smile and shivered, wondering not for the first time if Titus knew his brother-in-law as well as he claimed.

‘Let me think about it,’ she said, looking up. ‘I know this has been a terrible shock for you, Titus. But it’s a shock for me too.’

‘I understand,’ said Titus, drawing a deep breath as he tried to hide his disappointment. ‘Will you talk to me before you do anything, though, Vanessa? Can I ask you that much?’

‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘If you only knew how much I want to help you, Titus, if you only knew…’

She stopped, struggling with her emotions.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘You don’t need to tell me. I already know.’

And as they sat hand in hand on the sofa watching the fire burn down to glowing broken embers, Vanessa felt she’d never loved anyone as much as she loved Titus Osman at that moment.