The King of Diamonds

CHAPTER 19

Trave sat bent over the kitchen table with his head in his hands and ignored the telephone, which was ringing again for the third time in ten minutes. He felt like throwing it at the wall — he needed some outlet for the anger and frustration that had been boiling up inside him ever since he’d left the disciplinary hearing the day before.

There had been three of them facing him across a long table in a room with a grandstand view of Christ Church Cathedral, of all places — the chief constable in full dress uniform flanked by Creswell on one side and a Home Office lawyer on the other — a little man with bushy eyebrows brought down from London for the day to take Trave apart. And he had done exactly that. Trave had simply not been prepared for the thrusting hostility of the questions, and his answers had sounded flat and unconvincing even to himself. He’d tried several times to explain his doubts about Swain’s guilt, but the lawyer had twisted his words around so that it looked like his concerns were just excuses that he’d dreamt up along the way to enable him to pursue his vendetta against Titus Osman.

The trouble was that the evidence all pointed one way. Trave couldn’t deny that there had been a conflict of interest, which he had wilfully ignored in his determination to stay on the case. And he could hardly claim that that conflict had not affected the conduct of his investigation when he had chosen to make an unprovoked assault on a vital prosecution witness outside the man’s house. And then, worst of all, he had disobeyed an order to stay off the case by setting up a secret meeting with the main suspect. Trave insisted that he had had no intention of assisting Swain’s flight from justice, but he could see disbelief etched all over the chief constable’s face. Disgust was there too, and on the chief constable’s left, Creswell looked like a man in pain. The superintendent stayed silent throughout the hearing and wouldn’t look Trave in the eye. It didn’t bode well for the final decision, which the chief constable had reserved giving for seven days at the end of the hearing.

Trave had no idea what he would do if he lost his job. The prospect was close now, but he still refused to think about it. His mind was fixated on the Osman case. David Swain’s trial had already opened up in London, and he had uncovered no new evidence on his trip to Antwerp. Jacob was nowhere to be found and probably knew nothing anyway, and Bircher, the only tenuous link between Blackwater Hall and the prison escape, was dead — written off as a jumping suicide. And yet Trave refused to give up: he read and reread the transcript of Swain’s first trial until the typed words swam in front of his eyes; and in recent days he had even taken to driving aimlessly around the centre of Oxford, searching the crowd in vain for a glimpse of Aliza Mendel’s grandson.

Trave went and sat down on the sofa in front of the television, making an unsuccessful attempt to distract himself from his troubles with the afternoon news. The television was a fairly new addition. Vanessa had bought it a few months after their son, Joe, died. It had helped to fill the silence, providing a buffer between their separate griefs, and Trave remembered how it had been on almost all the time in the weeks before Vanessa finally got up the courage to go. But then she didn’t take the television with her when she left: it was as if she didn’t need it any more now that she was making a new start. Trave wondered whether Vanessa had a television in her new home. It pained him that she had so entirely disappeared from his life that he couldn’t even picture her surroundings — except that soon he would be able to again if she divorced him and moved in with Titus Osman at Blackwater Hall. Trave pressed his hands up against the sides of his head, trying in vain to suppress the images that rushed unbidden into his mind. Each one was worse than the last: Vanessa gone, Vanessa at Blackwater Hall, Vanessa reaching out for Osman’s hand as she looked down at him, sprawled on the ground at Osman’s feet the last time they met.

He wanted to feel sorry for himself, but he knew that his pain was self-inflicted. He had lost his wife because he hadn’t been able to bring himself to comfort her in her hour of need. Instead he had spent every minute he could away from her, investigating other families’ deaths as if he could solve his own problems at second hand. He might as well have taken up with another woman: he’d abandoned his wife just as thoroughly by working day and night at his stupid job. It seemed poetic justice that he was now about to lose the job after all these years and would end up alone and unemployed in this big empty house that he’d tried so hard to get away from before.

The doorbell rang. It was an unusual sound, particularly on a Sunday, and it made Trave jump. Since Joe’s death and Vanessa’s departure, there were hardly any callers at 17 Hill Road apart from an occasional Jehovah’s Witness and the man who read the gas meter once a month, and he always came in the mornings. Trave thought of ignoring the bell in the same way as he had the telephone, but almost immediately it rang again, insistently this time. Whoever it was knew he was at home — the sound of the television must have betrayed his presence. Unwillingly, Trave got up and opened the door. Clayton was standing on the step, shivering even though he was wearing an overcoat.

‘What do you want?’ asked Trave. There was no hint of welcome in his voice: entertaining a visitor was the last thing he felt like at that moment.

‘To get out of this bloody cold,’ said Clayton, stamping his feet and rubbing his hands together to indicate his distress.

‘All right, you better come in,’ said Trave, reluctantly standing aside to let Clayton pass. ‘I warn you — I’m in no mood for company.’

‘I know that: I rang you three times and you didn’t pick up. Did the hearing go badly?’

‘Worse than badly,’ said Trave bitterly. ‘Bloody chief constable’s getting ready to give me the boot.’

‘I’m sorry about that,’ said Clayton, looking worried. ‘I wouldn’t have come over here if it wasn’t urgent.’

‘What’s urgent?’ asked Trave, starting for the first time to show some interest in the reason for Clayton’s visit.

‘I found Jacob. I know where he’s living.’ Clayton made his announcement like a conjuror producing a rabbit from a hat, and it had the desired effect. Trave was open-mouthed for a moment, unable to believe his ears. He’d given Clayton Aliza’s photograph of her grandson soon after his return from Antwerp. Jacob’s face was already imprinted on his memory, and Trave calculated that an active policeman would have a better chance of tracking Jacob down than one who was suspended from duty, but it was a long shot, and he hadn’t really expected anything to come of it. Trave knew that Clayton was answerable to Macrae, who had no interest in any further investigation of the Katya Osman case now that he had Swain’s trial under way, and Trave also had no evidence that Jacob was actually in Oxford: it was only a hunch based on Aliza’s account of her grandson’s fixation on Katya’s uncle.

‘How did you find him?’ asked Trave once he’d recovered his self-possession. ‘Where is he?’

‘He’s in a one-bed flat off the Iffley Road. He’s living there under the name Edward Newman, which is kind of an appropriate alias, given he’s got himself a completely new look since that photograph you gave me was taken. He’s grown a beard and wears jeans and a leather jacket these days. Oh, and he’s got glasses too now, like you said he might, but don’t worry — I’m sure it’s our man. I found him because of what you said about him being obsessed with Titus Osman. I thought: What do obsessed people do? Answer: They watch the people they’re obsessed with. So I went out to Blackwater a couple of times last week and walked along the path by the boathouse and drew a complete blank. And I was just about to give up on the idea when I got lucky: today was going to be my last visit in fact…’

‘Got lucky how?’ asked Trave, unable to contain his impatience.

‘There was a scooter hidden in the undergrowth on the other side of the fence from the road, and there he was at the end of the path that goes through the woods, just where it opens out onto the big lawn across from the side of Osman’s house. He was standing behind a tree, looking up at the house through a pair of binoculars.’

‘Did he see you?’

‘No. I’m good at moving quietly — I always won at hide-and-seek when I was a kid,’ said Clayton with a smile. ‘I just went back to my car, moved it away out of sight, and waited; and then, when he came back to the road, I followed him home, which was the difficult part, given he was on a Vespa and I was driving. They don’t teach that at training school.’

‘No, they don’t,’ agreed Trave. He looked his former assistant up and down and nodded once as if pleased with what he saw. ‘You’ve done damn well, Adam. I’m proud of you,’ he said, looking Clayton in the eye.

Clayton flushed with pleasure. It was the biggest compliment he’d ever received from Trave, and he filed it away carefully in his mind, intending to savour it when he was next alone. Recent events had done nothing to dent his admiration for his former boss, and sometimes he worried that his affection for Trave and his visceral dislike of Macrae were affecting his own judgement. The trouble was that Clayton couldn’t make up his mind about the case. He balanced the heavy weight of the evidence incriminating David Swain against his gnawing concerns about what had happened on the night after Swain’s arrest, remembering the passive, deflated way Swain had confessed to Katya’s murder, like he was some kind of automaton. And, try as he might, Clayton couldn’t form a mental picture of Swain going out into Oxford when he was on the run to buy blank ammunition for his gun, just so he’d look innocent when he was caught. Surely Swain would have been too desperate, too frightened to come up with such a plan, let alone carry it out. But that didn’t change the fact that Swain was the one with the motive and the opportunity to kill Katya. He’d been right there at the murder scene, just like he had been when Ethan was stabbed down by the lake. Every day, every night, Clayton went back and forth in his mind. The only thing he was sure of was that he wanted to know more. And maybe Jacob would be able to tell them something…

‘Have you told Macrae about this?’ asked Trave.

‘No, of course not,’ said Clayton, sounding surprised.

‘Are you going to?’

‘No, why would I do that?’

‘Because you’re working for him now, and so it’s your duty to tell him.’

‘Well, if I tell Macrae, he’ll find some excuse to get hold of Jacob and put him somewhere neither of us will ever find him, or at least not until Swain’s trial is over and it’s too late. The Blackwater case is Macrae’s pride and joy, you know. He guards it like it’s his private property. And he doesn’t trust me with it any more for some reason. My role’s limited to giving evidence next week. That’s why I’ve been able to go on all these joyrides out to Osman’s boathouse.’

‘I wonder what Jacob was doing out there,’ said Trave musingly.

‘I don’t know. Let’s go and ask him,’ said Clayton. ‘That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?’

Trave nodded, smiling for what seemed like the first time in weeks. ‘You’d better drive,’ he said. ‘You’re the one who knows where we’re going.’

They arrived outside 78 Divinity Road ten minutes later. Clayton was driving his own car since it was a Sunday, and they parked right across the street from Jacob’s house. It was a residential neighbourhood that had clearly seen better days. The tall, narrow nineteenth-century houses that had once been home to affluent families had been split up into small one-bedroom flats after the war, and 78 was in no better or worse condition than its neighbours. Some of the paint was peeling from the stucco, particularly around the portico under which Trave and Clayton were now standing, and above their heads several electric wires hung loose where there had once been an outside light. A few pieces of washing were hanging from a makeshift clothesline rigged up inside the wrought-iron balcony that ran the length of the first floor, and the white garments flapped to and fro occasionally in the intermittent wind like a row of disconsolate ghosts, but there was otherwise no sign that anyone was at home. The sun had set and the last of its light was beginning to fade from the sky, but there were no lights on in any of the windows.

To Trave’s right, there were five doorbells with a handwritten name beside each one, and Edward Newman proclaimed himself in neat capital letters as the occupant of Number 5.

‘How do you know he’s Newman?’ asked Trave.

‘Because 5’s obviously the top flat, and I saw him in the window at the top of the house a couple of minutes after he got back. And I don’t think he’s Fiona Jane Taylor, who lives in Number 4.’

Trave nodded. ‘All right, let’s go and talk to him,’ he said, and rang the bell. They waited for nearly a minute, but there was no response, and so Trave tried again, pushing the bell longer and harder this time. Still nothing happened. The building remained dead to the world, and behind them an empty brown paper bag blowing this way and that across the deserted street was the only sign of life.

‘Makes my road look like the West End of London,’ said Trave, blowing on his hands to keep them from going numb.

Clayton laughed. ‘I doubt he’s gone far,’ he said. ‘We can come back.’

‘You can,’ said Trave. ‘I’m going in.’

‘You’re what?’ said Clayton, unable to believe his ears. ‘You haven’t got a search warrant.’

‘And I’m not exactly likely to get one, am I? A suspended policeman about to get his marching orders — I carry about as much weight as a wet rag, and you can’t do anything official without Macrae’s say-so. No, I’m not really too worried about doing things by the book any more, Adam, to be honest with you. You’d better get used to it if you want to stick around me. People are dead and a boy’s likely to swing for something he never did; so I’m going to do whatever I have to do to get at the truth. And right now that means breaking into this flat. I’d like to see what Mr Newman-Mendel’s got up there before he comes back. Are you coming or not?’

Clayton knitted his brows, looking undecided, but then suddenly laughed out loud, infected by Trave’s mood of recklessness.

‘What the hell,’ he said. ‘I’m in.’

‘Good,’ said Trave. ‘Have you got something plastic or a piece of wire?’

Clayton had neither, but the penknife attached to his key chain proved sufficient to get them through both the front door and the door to flat Number 5, which they reached at the top of three steep flights of uncarpeted stairs. Jacob had obviously just pulled the latch shut when he left — the mortice lock further down the door had been left open. Now the two policemen stood in a narrow hallway running the length of the flat with two doors opening on either side. On the right there was a small kitchen with an old stove, a half-empty fridge, and a low shelf on which various packets with labels from a kosher grocery in the centre of town were displayed in a line. And beyond the kitchen on the same side a sparsely furnished bedroom contained only a narrow iron bed made up with sheet, blanket, and pillow tucked tight together with military precision; a small night table; and a heavy mahogany wardrobe in which Jacob’s clothes hung pressed and ready for use on a line of wire hangers. Everything was neat and orderly. It was like a monk’s cell, thought Trave: all that was missing was a cross over the bed, but that of course was hardly likely, given that the occupant was a Zionist Jew.

The windows on this side of the flat looked across to the back of a row of similar houses in the next street which were illuminated by a few lights here and there, and down below, in the gathering gloom, the policemen could make out the outlines of a few straggly bushes in the house’s disused garden surrounding the shape of what looked like an old Anderson air-raid shelter from World War II that stuck up out of the ground with a humped earthen back like some kind of stranded primeval creature. There was no one in sight and no sound from the floors below.

Leaving the bedroom, they crossed over to the other side of the corridor, to a tiny bathroom and toilet and, next to it, the living room, by far the largest room in the flat. It was twilight now and the soaring spires of the city churches were visible as silhouetted shadows on the skyline outside the window, but inside the room it was almost dark. Here they were at the front of the house, and they knew they could not risk turning on the light since it would have been visible to Jacob on his return if he chanced to look up from the road down below, but Trave had thought to bring a torch, and now he turned it on, circling the beam of light as they took in their surroundings. There was a rectangular pine table in the centre of the room covered with papers. A single chair was tucked into its side, and over by the window a button-back blue armchair faced a small television. The only other pieces of furniture were a large free-standing bookcase in the far corner stuffed to overflowing with books, files, and magazines and, beside it, a tall metal filing cabinet. But up above, all four walls were entirely covered with photographs, newspaper articles, maps, and diagrams so that the place felt like a miniature war room. It was a sinister place, Clayton thought — full and yet empty all at the same time. He had the sense that the man who lived in this room was driven, dedicated — someone who would stop at nothing to do what he had set out to do.

Now Trave focused his torch on the faces looking down at them from the photographs on the walls: David Swain peering out from one of the wanted posters that had gone up around the city after Katya’s murder; Eddie Earle in profile — a snapshot inset in an article describing the escape from Oxford Prison; Titus Osman, dressed in a dinner jacket speaking at a charity function the previous month; and, in the centre of the opposite wall, above two photographs of Blackwater Hall, a triptych of blown-up pictures of a man who was unmistakably a younger version of Franz Claes, albeit with no disfiguring scar below his left ear. In the first he was wearing a military uniform, standing on a raised platform in front of a microphone, addressing a crowd. There was a banner above his head emblazoned with big black gothic lettering. It looked like Dutch, and neither Trave nor Clayton could understand a word of it, but at the bottom of the picture ‘Flemish National Union 1938’ was written in neat letters. Trave wondered for a moment at Jacob’s use of English to annotate the picture, but then realized it made sense. Aliza had said that her grandson had inherited her facility with languages, and if Jacob Mendel was going to become Edward Newman, then he would need to immerse himself in his new identity even when he was alone.

In the next picture, the one in the centre, Claes was on the far left of a row of official-looking men in suits seated behind a long table facing two other men in skullcaps who were wearing the Star of David on their jackets. Again there was a handwritten inscription underneath — ‘Meeting of Security Police with AJB — Antwerp, July 1942.’ But it was the third picture that was the most striking. Here Claes stood between two other men outside some kind of government building. Claes was still in a suit, but his companions were in German uniform, and underneath Jacob had written in thick capital letters: ‘Asche, Claes, Ehlers — Sipo SD, Brussels — August 1943 — Last Picture?’

Trave caught Clayton’s eye and whistled softly under his breath, but he didn’t speak, remaining intent on his inspection of the room. Now his torch was shining on a large map of Europe with a series of coloured lines stretching out west and south from tiny Belgium like an octopus’s tentacles. They were obviously escape routes, thought Trave — ones along which people had got away and ones where they had been caught and sent to the transit camp at Mechelen, and then east. Like Jacob’s parents. There was a picture of them with their two sons on the mantelpiece above the gas fire — a framed studio portrait taken when Ethan and Jacob were children. The boys were wearing tweed suits with knee breeches and stood posed on either side of their mother, who was seated, wearing a long ankle-length black dress with her husband standing behind her with his hand on her shoulder. Their expressions were rigid, formal, but the parents’ touch was natural — enough for Trave to know that Avi Mendel and his wife had loved each other once years ago, before they were murdered. Trave closed his eyes thinking of the millions of other victims. It was incomprehensible. Photographs were the only way to begin to understand the horror, he thought, with sudden insight — to make some small sense of the meaningless numbers.

Clayton had been standing by the window, dividing his attention between following Trave’s torch beam as it travelled across the walls and keeping watch on the pavement down below, which was lit by a nearby street light; but now, as Trave remained immobile, lost in thought, Clayton became impatient and took the torch from Trave’s hand and began to look through the pile of papers on the table in the centre of the room. One by one he turned them over: correspondence; cut-out newspaper reports on Swain’s trial, including several describing its opening at the Old Bailey the previous Wednesday; a handwritten document listing possible prosecution witnesses marked with crossings out and question marks — Clayton noticed that his name and Trave’s had been left unamended; a letter from two months earlier confirming Edward Newman’s membership of a local rifle-shooting club; a tenancy agreement for the flat dating from the previous May, this time in the name of Jacob Mendel…

‘Something must have happened. Jacob changed his name after he got here,’ said Clayton, showing Trave the document.

‘Yes, can’t you guess?’ Trave paused, but Clayton shook his head. ‘He’s our burglar, Adam. The one who broke into Osman’s study last summer and had a boxing match with our Nazi friend over there,’ said Trave, pointing to the pictures of Claes on the opposite wall. ‘There’s a pair of glasses in the bedroom, and I’d bet my house they’ll turn out to be a match for the ones he left behind at Blackwater. I don’t suppose you’ll have much choice but to take him in now, Macrae or no Macrae.’

Clayton was about to respond, but the words died in his throat. There was the unmistakable sound of a key being fitted in the front door of the flat, and Clayton cursed himself for having abandoned his watch on the pavement down below. Instinctively the two policemen flattened themselves against the wall on either side of the open door to the living room and waited, holding their breath.