The King of Diamonds

CHAPTER 15

New Year’s Day dawned fresh and cold and was soon suffused in bright hard winter sunlight. A light coating of seasonal snow still covered the grass and flower beds in Trave’s garden, and two robins sitting on a black branch of the leafless apple tree over by the far wall made the view from Trave’s bedroom window look almost like a Christmas card. But Trave was unmoved. He felt neither festive nor ready for turning over new leaves or making New Year’s resolutions. There was no Christmas tree and there were no cards or decorations in the old North Oxford house that once used to be a family home.

He hadn’t seen or heard from Vanessa since the day he’d disgraced himself out at Blackwater Hall three months earlier. What a fool he’d been! First with Osman and then with Macrae, who’d baited his hook with a few well-chosen words to the press and then reeled him and Swain in like a pair of floundering fish. And now Swain was awaiting trial in London — a trial he couldn’t win, and Trave was suspended on half pay, pending the outcome of a disciplinary hearing that he couldn’t win either, while Macrae swanned around Oxford Police Station like he owned the place and Osman ran his manicured hands over Vanessa’s body… Trave closed his eyes tight, using all his mental strength to shut out the obscene images that had once again floated unbidden into his mind. The telephone ringing in the front room was a welcome distraction.

It was Clayton. ‘Bircher’s dead,’ he said, sounding excited. ‘Fell from the top of a multi-storey car park in the centre of town last night. Or was pushed…’

‘Welcome to 1961,’ said Trave.

‘Can I come over?’

‘For some free advice from an ex-copper with time on his hands? Why not?’

‘Thanks.’

Trave got dressed and took a cup of coffee into the garden, where he felt the sharp winter air prickle against his unshaven cheeks. He looked back toward the house and felt reassured by the line of his footprints in the snow. They were a proof of his existence, like the bite of the cold snow on his hand as he moulded it into a ball and threw it at the shed in the corner. The snowball exploded into a mass of white flakes and a couple of birds flew, cawing wildly, up into the cloudless blue sky. And Trave felt suddenly ashamed — that Bircher’s death should make him suddenly feel alive or even perhaps that he should be alive at all when others lay dead and unavenged. He thought of Katya Osman lying stretched out on her bed with her eyes open, seeing nothing at all. He remembered the scene with a terrible, crystal clarity, and he shuddered at the recollection as he went back inside and closed the door.

It wasn’t the first time that Clayton had seen his old boss since Trave’s suspension from duty on the morning following Swain’s arrest, and the events of that night had in fact played a big part in ending their brief estrangement. Three months later Clayton still remained disturbed by what had happened.

Macrae had been ecstatic on the way back to the police station. ‘Two birds with one stone,’ he’d kept repeating in a sing-song voice as if Trave were a criminal too like Swain, instead of what he actually was: a good, honest policeman sent off the rails by an emotional strain that even the most balanced person would have found almost impossible to cope with. Clayton had felt desperately sorry for Trave as he’d come stumbling out of the cricket pavilion with Swain and stood there in the glare of the car headlights, shamed in front of the junior officers from the station that Macrae had brought along for support. Clayton remembered how they’d all turned away from Trave, shunning him like he’d got some infectious disease. All of them except Wale and Macrae, whom Clayton had heard afterward over by the cars hissing in Trave’s ear: ‘It’s over now, you moron. Over and out.’ But Trave hadn’t responded, just stood slumped over like a beaten man while Jonah Wale laughed out loud. It was the first time Clayton had ever heard the man’s laugh — an animal laugh, full of a vicious, unreasoning cruelty, devoid of all human compassion.

Clayton had anticipated that they would interview Swain when they got back to the police station, but Macrae was having none of it. ‘Let’s not be hasty, Constable. He needs his dinner and his eight hours’ sleep first. Just like you. Go home and get some rest. We’ll talk to him in the morning.’ Clayton had hung around for a while, writing up his report, but Macrae and Wale had outwaited him and eventually Clayton had gone home.

And the next day Swain admitted everything, or rather agreed with every suggestion that Macrae put to him in the interview room. He’d insisted on Eddie driving him out to Blackwater Hall; he’d taken the gun from the car and broken in through the study window, and then he’d gone upstairs and shot Katya in the head because she’d betrayed him with Ethan Mendel and it was her evidence that had put him away before. And then when he’d got out to the road, Eddie was gone, so he’d flagged down a car in Blackwater village and forced the driver to take him back to Oxford, where he’d holed up in a cheap hotel until he was caught.

And that was that. As full and frank a confession as any investigating policeman could wish for. Except that Clayton was left obscurely dissatisfied. He felt that Swain had confessed too easily. He’d sung like a canary but without any variation in the notes. There’d been no intonation, no emotion in Swain’s voice when he answered Macrae’s questions except that his eyes seemed to keep flickering over to Wale, who sat motionless in the corner, saying nothing, looking off into space.

Clayton had been sufficiently concerned to wait until Macrae had left the station for the day and had then gone to see Swain in his cell. But Swain had refused to talk to him, lying on his bunk in a foetal position with his face to the wall, shivering, even though the radiator was on and it wasn’t cold. And the sergeant who’d been on desk duty the night before just shook his head and suggested he take his questions to Inspector Macrae when Clayton asked him if he’d heard anything untoward.

‘There wasn’t a mark on him that I could see,’ Clayton told Trave a week later when his doubts and anxiety had driven him over to his ex-boss’s house for the first time since Swain’s arrest.

‘But you don’t need to leave a mark if you know what you’re doing,’ Trave said, laughing at Clayton’s naivete. ‘There’s other ways of breaking a man…’

‘Like what?’

‘Squeezing his genitals, half-drowning him in a bucket of water, threatening his family. It wouldn’t have taken much to break Swain. I saw him, remember, and he was already on his last legs in that cricket pavilion. And Macrae’s not averse to a bit of coercion where it suits his purpose.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because a few years back he put an innocent man in gaol for a murder he didn’t commit. The man did three years before the conviction was overturned and he got a Queen’s pardon.’

‘Did you have something to do with that?’ asked Clayton, remembering the oblique references that Trave and Macrae had both made earlier in the investigation to some kind of shared past.

‘Yes, by accident at first,’ said Trave. ‘I had a murder down here in which the killer left the same calling card as in Macrae’s case.’

‘What was it?’ asked Clayton, curious.

‘A shilling coin on the victim’s tongue. You know, like they used to do in Roman times to pay the ferryman to take the dead across the River Styx. Don’t you kids learn anything in school any more?’ asked Trave, shaking his head in response to Clayton’s look of bemusement. ‘Anyway, I remembered about the other murder up north, and I went and looked up the evidence. It was really weak apart from a confession extracted by guess who?’

‘Macrae?’

‘Exactly. And once I was able to tie my man to the first murder, then that was it for Macrae’s conviction.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘Macrae? Nothing as far as I know. The man who got the pardon said that Macrae had tortured him into confessing, but there was no physical evidence of that and the fact that his confession was false didn’t prove that Macrae had forced it out of him.’

‘It just made it very likely,’ said Clayton.

‘Yes. And that obviously didn’t help Macrae’s climb up the greasy ladder, for which he’s blamed me ever since. This Osman case was his chance for payback, and you can’t take it away from him — he grabbed the opportunity with both hands,’ said Trave with a rueful smile.

‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’ asked Clayton.

‘Because Creswell asked me not to, and I agreed with him. I didn’t want Macrac transferred down here, but once it happened I wasn’t going to make things worse by a lot of backstabbing. It had been a long time since I’d crossed swords with him and I didn’t realize that he’s a Scotsman with a long memory.’

The conversation with Trave increased Clayton’s sense of unease about the case, and his anxieties intensified soon after when the ballistics report came back from the lab with the news that Swain’s gun could have fired the bullet that killed Katya Osman but was now entirely loaded with blank ammunition. Clayton had expected Macrae to be concerned at this development, but he dismissed it with a shrug of his shoulders.

‘It’s an old trick, lad,’ he said. ‘Kill your man with a gun, load it with blanks like it never happened, and then play the innocent.’

‘But where would he get the blanks?’

‘Anywhere. It’s not difficult. The evidence is self-serving. It won’t make any difference.’

And then, just as he was turning away, Macrae noticed the look of disappointment on Clayton’s face.

‘Don’t go lily-livered on me, Constable,’ he said with a sneer. ‘You don’t want to end up like old Trave, do you? Flushed down the toilet at fifty?’

There seemed to be nothing Clayton could do to change the direction of events. Swain was charged with murder, and Eddie got an even better deal than Trave had dangled before him. The charges for the assault on the girl in London were dropped and leniency was promised for the escape, in return for Eddie’s testifying at trial about the threats he’d heard Swain make against Katya and about how he’d seen Swain enter the grounds of Blackwater Hall at around half past midnight on the morning of Sunday, 25 September, armed with a handgun.

Swain had pleaded not guilty, but everyone at the station agreed that the trial would be a formality and that it was only a matter of time before Swain went to meet his maker.

‘It’s not like the old days with all that dangling and strangling,’ said Macrae, sounding disappointed. ‘They’ve got it scientific now so it snaps their necks in a second.’

They were in Macrae’s office on the morning after the arraignment. Suddenly Clayton jumped, hearing a loud snap. And then he looked back over his shoulder to where Jonah was sitting in the corner. Wale met Clayton’s stare and then leaned forward and snapped his fingers again hard. And Macrae laughed like it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen.

After this episode Clayton started going over to Trave’s house a lot more in the evenings after work. But it didn’t help. Trave was depressed and felt as impotent as Clayton. And then Christmas came and the new year, and John Bircher fell off the top of a multi-storey car park and broke his head into three different pieces on the concrete down below.

‘Perhaps he jumped,’ said Clayton without conviction. ‘That’s what Macrae says.’

‘What? Felt sorry for his sins, couldn’t stand to live with himself any more?’ asked Trave with a hollow laugh. ‘I don’t think so. Bircher was as black-hearted as they come: look at his rap sheet. No, someone got worried because he knew too much — arranged to meet him and then gave him the heave-ho.’

‘It wouldn’t be that easy. Bircher was a big man, you know.’

‘Maybe whoever did it had a gun.’

‘Like Claes, you mean?’

‘Maybe. But you’ll never prove it.’

They were sitting on either side of the old dining table in Trave’s living room, each nursing a glass of neat whisky. Trave sighed and relapsed back into his own thoughts; and then, as if coming to a decision, he got up and went over to an open-top bureau in the corner of the room and brought back a thick file crammed with well-thumbed, typed papers. There was a label on the front: regina versus david john swain, central criminal court, 1958.

Trave dropped the file on the table in front of Clayton and leant down over him, rapidly turning the pages until he got to one towards the end headed evidence of jacob mendel.

‘Here, read this,’ said Trave. ‘And then we’ll talk.’ And Clayton began to read:

DEFENCE COUNSEL, MR RELTON: You are the younger brother of the victim in this case, Ethan Mendel?

WITNESS: Yes.

COUNSEL: When did you last see your brother?

WITNESS: November last year. He left our home in Antwerp to go to England.

COUNSEL: Why?

WITNESS: He was going to see Titus Osman.

COUNSEL: Why?

WITNESS: Osman knew my father before the war. They both dealt in diamonds. My family — we are Jews, and after the German invasion it became unsafe. More and more unsafe. Osman — he was called Usman then — helped my brother and me escape with our grandmother to Switzerland in 1942, but my parents waited. I don’t really know why. And then the next year, when Osman tried to help them, they were caught crossing the border into France and the Germans sent them to the deportation camp at Malines. And from there they went on a train to Auschwitz. And they died. Ethan wanted to know more about what happened to them and so he went to see Osman in England.

COUNSEL: Did you hear from Ethan after he left?

WITNESS: Yes, he telephoned my grandmother and me at Christmas, and he wrote us postcards. He said that he was staying longer than he’d expected and that he had met a girl, Katya, who was Osman’s niece. He said he was happy. And then at the start of May I got a letter from Ethan which was different. He said that he had found out something important, too important to tell me about except face-to-face. He said that I should come to England and talk to him. But I did not go to England because Katya telephoned to say that Ethan was dead — murdered. His body came back to us on an aeroplane.

COUNSEL: Did Ethan say anything else in his letter about what he had found out?

WITNESS: He said it was dangerous. That’s all.

COUNSEL: You have the letter with you, Mr Mendel?

WITNESS: Yes.

Witness produces handwritten letter in postmarked envelope.

COUNSEL: This will be exhibit 33, my lord. It’s dated May 4 of this year and postmarked Munich, West Germany — the day before Ethan Mendel’s death.

JUDGE: Yes, very well — exhibit 33. Is that all, Mr Relton?

COUNSEL: Yes, my lord.

JUDGE: Very well. Do you wish to cross-examine the witness, Mr Arne?

PROSECUTION COUNSEL, MR ARNE: Yes, my lord, just a few questions. You have no idea what it is that your brother wished to talk to you about, do you?

WITNESS: No, but I’m pretty sure it was…

COUNSEL: Please don’t speculate, Mr Mendel. We are solely concerned with facts here, not guesses. Do you know David Swain?

WITNESS: No.

COUNSEL: Do you know anything about letters written by Mr Swain to Katya Osman?

WITNESS: No.

COUNSEL: Do you know anything about David Swain’s movements on the day of your brother’s murder?

WITNESS: No.

COUNSEL: Do you know anything about your brother’s movements that day?

WITNESS: No, of course I don’t. I was in Belgium when my brother was murdered. I already said that.

COUNSEL: Yes, you did. And the point I’m making to you now is that you don’t know anything about what happened to your brother because he never told you anything, and you weren’t even in this country when he was killed…

WITNESS: I know he’d found out something…

COUNSEL: But you don’t know what it was. Your letter leads us precisely nowhere. It’s not evidence.

WITNESS: But…

COUNSEL: Thank you, Mr Mendel, I’ve no more questions. I’m sorry that you’ve had such a wasted journey.

WITNESS: I don’t care what’s evidence or not evidence; I care about who killed my brother. Ethan died because he’d found out something, and I’m going to find out what it was.

JUDGE: Please just answer the questions, Mr Mendel. Do you have any re-examination, Mr Relton?

DEFENCE COUNSEL, MR RELTON: No, my lord.

JUDGE: Thank you, Mr Mendel. You may step down.

‘Pretty effective piece of cross-examination I’d say,’ said Trave, catching Clayton’s eye as he looked up at the end of the page. ‘Jacob Mendel had no real probative evidence to give, and the defence looked stupid for calling him. That’s what I thought at the time anyway, but since then Jacob and his mysterious letter have gnawed at the back of my mind. It’s like Ethan’s note — an itch that won’t go away.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the letter and the note don’t make any sense. Think about it: Ethan goes to West Germany and finds out something dangerous and important — so important that he can’t put it in a letter but instead asks his brother to cross the Channel so that they can discuss it face-to-face. Then he rushes back to England and immediately goes off to Oxford to see a man he’s never met. And when he doesn’t find Swain at home, he doesn’t wait; instead he leaves an urgent note setting up a meeting at Osman’s boathouse for five o’clock the same day.’

‘You mean — how would Ethan have known Swain would get the message?’ said Clayton thoughtfully.

‘Yes. Unless whoever left the note knew Swain was at home and that’s why he left it — because he didn’t want to be seen.’

‘Because whoever it was wasn’t Ethan at all, but someone pretending to be him.’

‘Someone setting a trap,’ said Trave, nodding.

‘Why didn’t you tell me about the brother before?’ asked Clayton.

‘Because, like the prosecutor said, Jacob’s evidence didn’t go anywhere, and then you made it pretty obvious that you thought I was chasing my tail when I told you my concerns about Ethan’s murder after Katya was killed,’ said Trave with a dry smile. ‘I’m telling you now because it seems like you’ve got more of an open mind, and also — well, also because I’ve decided to do something about Jacob.’

‘Do something?’ repeated Clayton, sitting up, suddenly alert.

‘Yes, I’m going to go to Antwerp and try and find him.’

‘Why, if he doesn’t know anything?’ asked Clayton, surprised.

‘Because he might know something now. Look what he said at the end of his evidence,’ said Trave, tapping the page with his finger. ‘“Ethan died because he’d found out something, and I’m going to find out what it was.” Perhaps he’s done just that. I remember him at the trial. He was angry and upset, but determined too. He didn’t need to come all the way to London to give evidence, but he did. I don’t think he’s someone who’d give up easily once he’d set his mind to something.’

‘Like you,’ said Clayton wryly, raising his eyebrows.

‘Like me,’ agreed Trave. ‘The point is, Adam, I know in my bones that Swain’s not guilty. He’s a hot-headed fool, but he’s no murderer, and I’m not going to rest until I’ve proved it.’

‘And I suppose that’s also your only way to get your job back,’ said Clayton, looking quizzically at his ex-boss.

‘Yes, there’s that too,’ said Trave, agreeing with a wry smile of his own. ‘Creswell’s agreed to postpone my disciplinary hearing for a month, but I can’t see the Chief Constable showing me much mercy once he’s finally got me in his sights.’

On the other side of town, Macrae was working late in his office, reading through the documents in the John Bircher file. After a few minutes he gathered together the incident reports, the attending doctor’s statement, and the three hideous photographs of Bircher’s smashed-up body lying on the concrete outside the entrance to the car park, fastened them together with a paper clip, and replaced them in the cardboard file. Then, picking up a red pen, he wrote SUICIDE in thick capital letters across the front, added his initials, and pushed the file to the other side of his desk.

The door opened and Detective Constable Wale came in.

‘Well?’ asked Macrae, looking up.

‘Clayton’s been to Trave’s house again. I followed him there this evening. He stayed inside more than an hour. You want me to talk to him?’

Macrae looked across the desk at his assistant and ran his eyes over Wale’s thick arms and heavy, oversized hands. The sight of them always gave him pleasure, and he hesitated for a moment, stroking his chin. He liked the thought of Jonah trying out a few of his techniques on that self-righteous little sneak, Clayton, but he knew that it wasn’t worth the risk of the runt going squealing to Creswell.

‘No, Jonah. It’s a tempting suggestion, I must admit, but I think we’d better leave Constable Clayton alone for now. Keep watching him though. He’ll hang himself if we give him enough rope — save us the trouble.’

Macrae knew that it wouldn’t be long now before Creswell retired, and who better to take over as superintendent than the up-and-coming Inspector Macrae? And then, once he had the power, he wouldn’t waste any time: he’d shake up this sleepy police station and teach Clayton and his like a lesson that they’d never forget.