The King of Diamonds

CHAPTER 23

Trave drove up to the Old Bailey immediately after seeing Vanessa on the Monday morning and then spent the entire afternoon pacing the police room, waiting to give evidence, but the summons to attend court never came, and he had to wait until the next morning to take the stand.

Almost all his testimony was going to be uncontroversial, but the jury still needed to hear about what he’d found at Blackwater Hall on the night of the murder and the various investigations that he’d carried out and ordered until Creswell took him off the case. The previous week he’d insisted on making a further statement about John Bircher’s connections with Claes and Eddie Earle, realizing that the defence would then be able to elicit this information from him in cross-examination, but he didn’t seriously anticipate that this would make any major difference to the outcome of the case, given the strength of the evidence against the defendant. The jury would dismiss Bircher’s involvement as a minor coincidence, just as the allegations of collaboration with the Nazis that the defence had thrown at Claes the day before — using the material sent by Jacob — would do no more than muddy the waters.

Trave had heard from Clayton when he got back from court the day before about Jacob’s botched break-in at Blackwater Hall, but he thought it unlikely that the young man had found anything worthwhile in the house, given that Osman’s safe had apparently survived intact. It might conceivably make a difference to the outcome of the trial if Jacob came to court himself and told the jury that he’d sought out Katya a month before her death and asked her to search Osman’s house for incriminating evidence, but Trave wasn’t holding his breath about the likelihood of Jacob’s showing up. According to Clayton, Jacob had disappeared into thin air after the break-in, and there was no way of knowing where he was now holed up.

Vanessa, on the other hand, would give evidence — Trave knew his wife well enough to be sure that her conscience would not allow her to do otherwise. But Trave doubted that her testimony would be enough to save Swain. The prosecution would recall Osman to explain away Katya’s words, and Vanessa’s continuing determination to marry Osman would provide him with a gold-plated character reference. And that would be that. One fine morning David Swain would have his neck broken for him in Pentonville Prison, and Trave’s wife would marry the man whom Trave believed should be hanging there instead. Trave felt the frustration pressing hard down onto his chest like a physical weight, but there was no relief to be had from the pain. And he knew he was running out of time.

It was the same Old Bailey courtroom in which David Swain had been tried for the murder of Ethan Mendel two and a half years earlier, and Trave found the sense of deja vu almost overpowering. There was a different judge and defence counsel this time around, but hawk-like Laurence Arne had again been instructed for the prosecution. Unwinding himself from behind the files of evidence that covered his table, he was just as imposing and dominant as before, and he seemed even more determined to secure a conviction now that the defendant faced the ultimate penalty for his crime. Hanging was the prescribed punishment for a murder by shooting, and Swain could expect no mercy given that this was the second time he’d killed with premeditation.

Trave looked over at the defendant, sitting between two prison officers in the dock. It was the first time he’d seen Swain since their desperate meeting in the cricket pavilion the previous October. Surprisingly, Swain looked better than he had then, notwithstanding his terrible predicament. The wild, haggard look had disappeared from his face, replaced by an air of quiet resolution. Dressed in a sombre dark suit, he gazed at Trave intently, leaning forward on the railing of the dock as Trave answered the prosecutor’s questions. Trave found it hard to concentrate. He felt a terrible guilt about his inability to help an innocent man, about his unwitting role in Swain’s capture.

During a pause in the questioning, he glanced over and caught the eye of Macrae, who was sitting at the same side table where Trave had sat when he had been the officer in the case at the first trial. The look of unconcealed triumphant glee on his successor’s face was intolerable. It made Trave want to be sick. He felt suddenly claustrophobic in the windowless courtroom, with its wood-panelled walls and bright white lights, and longed to be outside in the bracing winter air.

And yet he lingered for some reason in the empty courtroom after his evidence was over and everyone had left for lunch. He sat in Macrae’s chair at the police table and stared over at the witness box, trying to reconstruct a memory of Katya that had been on the edge of his consciousness ever since his conversation with Vanessa the previous day. He remembered the girl lying on her narrow bed in that sparse, cleaned-up room at the top of Blackwater Hall — so thin she had been and fragile and gone forever. It was a vision that never left him, waiting always on the surface of his subconscious, ready to spring out at him like a permanent reproach. But this was another kind of memory — a detail, elusive and minute. He thought perhaps it was something Katya had said when she’d given evidence from this same witness box, staring over so angrily at her former boyfriend in the dock, convinced of his guilt. And yet he couldn’t be sure — maybe it was just his imagination, feeding on the intensity of his desire to find a key to unlock the case when perhaps there was no key to be found. The uncertainty made him nervous, and, picking up his hat, he headed for the door.

Back at the house a letter was waiting for Trave on the doormat. The envelope was typed, official-looking, and he knew what it contained even before he’d ripped it open.

Dear Mr Trave,

The Chief Constable regrets to inform you that it has been decided to terminate your employment with the Oxfordshire Police forthwith in the light of a finding of gross dereliction of duty following the hearing last Saturday. You have fourteen days to appeal…

Trave didn’t bother reading any further. He screwed up the letter and threw it across the room and then proceeded to get as drunk on neat whisky as he’d ever been before in his entire life.

He woke up on the sofa the next day with the morning sun burning in his eyes. He had a blinding headache, and the telephone was ringing insistently in his ear, filling his head with yet more pain. It was Creswell.

‘Did you get the letter?’ asked the superintendent.

‘Yeah,’ said Trave, remembering with a feeling of renewed sickness the reason why he’d drunk himself into a stupor the night before.

‘I’m sorry, Bill,’ said Creswell, sounding genuinely upset. ‘I did my best, but they wouldn’t listen to me.’

‘I know. I didn’t think they would.’

‘Look, you have to appeal. I’ll try again. Dismissing you isn’t fair. It’s too harsh.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Trave. ‘I don’t think it’ll do any good. It’s cracking this case that would change things…’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Creswell, sounding angry now. ‘It’s your pig-headed obsession with Titus Osman that led to all this. If you’d been a bit more contrite…’

‘But I’ve never been much good at that, have I?’ said Trave. ‘Look, sir, I appreciate you calling, and I know you’re trying to help, but I’m not feeling at my best right now.’

‘Okay, I understand. But you’ll think about what I’ve said, won’t you? About not giving up?’

‘Yes,’ said Trave. ‘Of course I will.’

But Trave stopped thinking about the appeal as soon as he’d got off the phone. He was touched by the superintendent’s concern, but now he had other things to worry about. Something had been on the edge of his mind when he woke up, and he needed to concentrate before it slipped away. He went upstairs and showered in ice-cold water until his head was clear of alcohol and self-pity, got dressed in a pair of old gardening trousers and a patched jersey, and made a pot of the strongest coffee he could tolerate. He drank down a cup, and then, with a second in his hand, he finally sat back down with the transcript of David Swain’s first trial across his knees. It was dog-eared now, the pages crumpled from overuse. Trave turned to Katya’s evidence and began to read:

Evidence of Katya Osman

Witness is sworn

PROSECUTION COUNSEL, MR ARNE: Please tell the court who you are and where you live.

WITNESS: I am Katya Osman and I live with my uncle at Blackwater Hall. It’s near Oxford.

COUNSEL: Do you know the defendant sitting over there? (Counsel points toward the dock.)

WITNESS: Yes, we used to be friends.

COUNSEL: Friends?

WITNESS: He was my boyfriend for a year, but then I broke up with him after I met Ethan.

COUNSEL: Ethan Mendel?

WITNESS: Yes; he came to stay with my uncle last year. We fell in love. And David hated us for it. He sent me letters — horrible, threatening letters. I’ve got them here — six of them. I got the last one a few days before he killed Ethan. I brought them with me(Witness produces bundle of handwritten letters.)

COUNSEL: My lord, these will be exhibits 17 through 22. Copies have been made for the jury, and with your lordship’s leave the witness will now read them into the evidence.

JUDGE: Very well, Mr Arne.

Trave impatiently turned the pages of the transcript, looking for the resumption of Katya’s evidence. It was what Katya had to say that he was interested in, not David Swain’s childish, impassioned rants.

COUNSEL: The defendant refers in his letters to meeting you at ‘the boathouse’. Please tell us where that is, Miss Osman.

WITNESS: It’s by the lake. You get to it across the lawn and along a path through the woods. No one goes there.

COUNSEL: But you did with Mr Swain. Why?

WITNESS: Because no one goes there. My uncle didn’t approve of David, and so I couldn’t see him in the house.

COUNSEL: Never?

WITNESS: I took him there once when my uncle was away. Otherwise we met at the boathouse or in his room in Oxford.

COUNSEL: How often did you meet Mr Swain at the boathouse?

WITNESS: Lots of times.

COUNSEL: And how did Mr Swain get there if he wanted to avoid your uncle seeing him?

WITNESS: There’s a place on the road before you get to the main gate. You can get over the fence and walk down the path to the lake. That’s how.

COUNSEL: Did you use the boathouse after you ended your relationship with Mr Swain?

WITNESS: With Ethan you mean?

COUNSEL: Yes.

WITNESS: Yes, we did. I liked that it was our place, our secret. It was romantic with the lake and everything.

COUNSEL: I understand. Did you ever see the defendant at or near the boathouse after you ended your relationship with him?

WITNESS: Yes, once. It was in the evening. Ethan was writing something, and I went outside to look at the sunset. David was in the trees further up the path, watching. It was horrible, creepy. I never saw him again after that — until now.

COUNSEL: When was this?

WITNESS: The third of April — three days before Easter.

COUNSEL: How can you be so sure?

WITNESS: It upset me, and so I wrote about it in my diary. It helps to get things out of my system.

COUNSEL: What did the defendant do when you saw him?

WITNESS: He ran away back towards the road. I could hear him in the undergrowth.

COUNSEL: Did you tell Mr Mendel?

WITNESS: Yes. He was angry at first, worried. He wanted to go and see David about it, but I didn’t want him to. I thought it would make things worse. And so he didn’t. We stayed away from the boathouse for a while after that, but then we went back because it was beautiful and it was our place and David had no right to try and take it away from us. (Witness breaks down, distressed.)

COUNSEL: I’d like to move forward now to the period immediately leading up to Mr Mendel’s murder. What was the state of your relationship with Mr Mendel at that time?

WITNESS: We were in love; we were happy, although Ethan was preoccupied with something. He wouldn’t tell me what it was. He went away to Europe for a week. He didn’t tell me where he was going, but I assumed he was going to see his family in Antwerp. And then on the day he came back, I was out shopping in Oxford with Jana and so I never saw him. (Witness breaks down again, distressed.) I don’t know why he sent that note to David. Perhaps it was because of David’s letters. Ethan knew they upset me; he knew I was scared. I wanted them to stop.

COUNSEL: I want to show you the knife, the murder weapon — it’s exhibit three, my lord. Have you seen it before, Miss Osman?

WITNESS: I may have done. David had several knives similar to this in his room in Oxford. I can’t say if it’s the same one.

COUNSEL: Thank you, Miss Osman. If you wait there, my learned friend will have some questions.

Trave got up from the table and made himself some more coffee. He glanced around the room, grimacing at the dust and disorder: unwashed dishes stacked up by the sink, piles of unanswered correspondence balanced precariously on his desk in the corner. He didn’t need to be told that the mess was a symptom of the way his life was spinning out of control, as recorded in jottings on the Oxfordshire Police Force calendar hanging on the opposite wall — disciplinary hearing; Vanessa; give evidence — he might as well add lost job under today’s date.

Calendars, records — Katya had kept a record, a diary — it was how she’d been able to remember the date when David Swain had come stalking her and Ethan at the boathouse. And it wasn’t just an engagement diary; it was a fully fledged journal that she used ‘to get things out of my system’. That was what she’d said. The reference to the diary was what Trave had been trying to remember in the courtroom the day before — he was certain of it. But where was the diary now? Trave wondered. Had Osman found it? Probably — Trave remembered the cleaned-up feel of Katya’s room on the night of her murder. But then again, not necessarily — perhaps Osman didn’t know about the diary. He’d hardly have looked for it if he didn’t know it existed, and Katya was a girl who loved secrets — her meetings with David Swain behind her uncle’s back and her attachment to the boathouse itself were part of the same pattern. ‘I liked that it was our place, our secret.’ That was what she’d said.

And yet she’d also been prepared to tell the world about the diary when she gave evidence, unless of course she’d answered Arne’s question about the date without thinking, regretting the immediacy of her response later as she rode home in the back of her uncle’s car, hoping no one had noticed what she’d accidentally revealed. Trave paced backwards and forwards across his living room as his mind turned the scraps of evidence this way and that. He knew perfectly well that it was all speculation and that he was clutching at straws, just like he’d accused Jacob of doing two days earlier. But if straws were all he had, then he also knew he had no choice but to clutch at them, however pointless the exercise. Doing nothing was the alternative, and that was intolerable.

But if Katya had kept a secret diary that survived her death, then who was to say where it was now? Trave knew he couldn’t follow in Jacob’s footsteps and break into Blackwater Hall in the hope of finding something. Apart from the fact that Claes and Osman were now on high alert for intruders, he wouldn’t have the first idea of where to look. Katya’s bedroom had been cleaned up before her death, and the forensics team had gone through it with a fine-tooth comb on his orders afterwards and found nothing. If the diary was in there, it was concealed in some ingenious fashion that had eluded both her uncle and the police. To find it Trave needed to talk to someone who knew about the hiding place, someone in whom Katya had confided. Because Trave knew from his years of criminal investigation that that was the way of secrets: they existed to be revealed, to be disclosed in hushed whispers to those we love or think we love. And who had Katya loved? Ethan — but he was dead — and before Ethan, David. Trave remembered the transcript:

‘My uncle didn’t approve of David, and so I couldn’t see him in the house.’

‘Never?’

‘I took him there once when my uncle was away.’

What had happened when Katya had taken her first lover up to the house that one time? Trave wondered. It was an act of defiance on Katya’s part, a way of telling David that she valued their relationship more than her uncle’s wishes. And once inside, once they were upstairs in her bedroom, would she have wanted to do more — to show David things, to share her secrets with him so that he would know she cared? Perhaps. It was a long shot, but worth asking David about, if he could just find a way to talk to him. Except that that wasn’t going to be easy. Prosecution witnesses were not supposed to talk to the defendant during the trial, and even if he could find a way past the court gaolers, David might not be prepared to see him. They hadn’t parted on good terms in the cricket pavilion the previous October, and Trave didn’t know whether David still blamed him for his arrest. He remembered how David had stared at him so intently while he was giving his evidence the day before — now he couldn’t make up his mind whether the stare was benevolent or hostile. But whichever it was, Trave knew he had to try.

He looked at his watch. It was already twelve o’clock, but he didn’t trust himself to drive after all the alcohol he’d drunk the night before. He rang up the police station, hoping to find Clayton, but was told that Clayton was out with PC Wale. And so without further delay Trave called a taxi to take him to the railway station. If Clayton couldn’t drive him to London, he’d have to take the train.

It was mid-afternoon when he got to the Old Bailey, and some of the spectators had already gone home, making it possible for Trave to find a seat at the back of the public gallery above Court Number 1. Down below, Eddie Earle was in the witness box. The prosecution’s star witness was still a serving prisoner, but someone, Macrae perhaps, had equipped him with a suit and tie, making him look almost respectable.

To Trave’s surprise, Eddie seemed to enjoy giving evidence — he clearly had no shame about selling his old cellmate down the river. He was Easy Eddie again, wallowing in the attention of the courtroom, reliving the glory of his escape from Oxford Prison, and the prosecutor had to cut him off several times — or he would have been on the stand for the rest of the week describing his exploits.

Trave watched as David’s barrister did everything he could to shake Eddie’s credibility when his turn came to cross-examine: he made the obvious point that Eddie was lying to obtain leniency for his escape offence; he read Eddie’s long list of previous convictions to the jury; and he questioned Eddie about his connection to Claes’s friend, John Bircher. But Eddie was somehow able to deflect the attacks with ease. And looking down, Trave could see that what really held the jury’s interest was Eddie’s tale of his late-night conversations with David in their prison cell. Try as he might, David’s barrister couldn’t change the ring of truth with which Eddie described David’s gathering rage against Katya, whom he blamed for all his misfortunes. There was no denying it: Eddie’s evidence showed beyond doubt that the defendant was highly motivated to commit the crime with which he was charged.

Trave gazed down at Eddie and wished he could turn back the clock to the interview room in Oxford Police Station, to that moment when he’d been so convinced that Eddie had been on the verge of telling him the truth. About Bircher and Claes; about driving David out to Blackwater Hall and giving him the gun loaded with blanks. Before Creswell came in and took him off the case. Trave remembered Macrae smiling at him from behind Creswell’s shoulder in the corridor, just like he was smiling now, watching the noose tightening around David Swain’s neck. Trave knew what was happening in the trial — the evidence that mattered was all one way. It was like the defendant was falling down a deep stone well and the points that his barrister made were no more than the scratches of his flailing hands on the walls as he fell.

At half past four Eddie finished his evidence and the judge adjourned the case for the day. Trave knew that it was now or never. He watched as the gaolers led David Swain down the stairs from the dock, and then he slipped out the back of the public gallery, ran down five flights of stairs until he got to the basement of the courthouse, and rang the bell beside the big iron door marked Cells. It was a busy time of day with the prisoners being got ready for the vans that would return them to their different prisons for the night, and Trave had to wait nearly five minutes for the door to open, but he knew better than to keep ringing to be let in. He needed the gaolers to be accommodating if he was to have any chance of an interview before David was taken back to Pentonville.

He was lucky. The young gaoler who answered the door seemed entirely satisfied when Trave waved his warrant card and said that he was a police officer come to see Swain — the prisoner on trial in Court Number 1. Trave signed his name in the book and took a seat in a small glass-fronted interview room. Opposite, across the corridor, a man with a scar across his face was gesticulating wildly at a barrister still dressed in his horsehair wig and gown, and through the open door Trave could hear a cacophony of shouts and footsteps and jangling keys. Finally, just as he had been about to give up, David Swain appeared in the doorway.

‘You again,’ he said, sitting down heavily in the chair across the table from Trave without shaking his hand. ‘I thought you weren’t allowed to see me, you being a prosecution witness and all. That’s what my mother told me.’

‘She’s right. I lied to get in here.’

‘What did you say?’

‘That I was a police officer.’

‘Well, you are that.’

‘Not any more. I got fired this morning.’

‘I’m sorry. Katya hasn’t done either of us much good, has she?’ said David, looking Trave in the eye for the first time. Trave was relieved to see that there wasn’t hostility in the young man’s expression, just a fathomless suffering in his eyes that had aged him by years in the months since they had last met. ‘God, I’ve had enough of this. Every day it just seems to get worse,’ David went on in a weary voice without waiting for an answer to his question. ‘Eddie’s a professional liar, and yet the jurors were hanging on every word he said. I could see it in their eyes. The trial’s a charade. That’s what it is. Claes and Macrae have got it sewn up between them.’

‘What about Osman?’ asked Trave.

‘What about him? I don’t know if he’s involved or not. Claes has probably got him duped as well. I wouldn’t put it past him. Claes is the one behind it all, you know. It was him who was there waiting for me each time, not Osman. At the boathouse when Ethan died, outside Katya’s room when I came out. He’s a clever bastard — I’ll say that for him. Too clever for the likes of us, I’m afraid. You should face it, Inspector — we’re all played out. They should have done with the fancy wordplay and hang me tomorrow.’

‘No,’ said Trave fiercely. ‘I won’t let them.’

David looked at Trave for a moment as if he was some kind of lunatic, but then his expression softened. ‘You mean well,’ he said. ‘And you want to help me. I know that. But the trouble is you can’t. You’re out of your league this time, Inspector. Accept it.’

‘No, I tell you,’ said Trave, shouting now as he seized hold of David’s hands across the table. ‘There is something — a chance.’

‘What chance?’ asked David, pulling his hands away, taken aback by Trave’s sudden outburst, his unnatural excitement.

‘Katya wrote a diary. Maybe it still exists; maybe Osman never found it. Did she tell you about it? Did she?’ asked Trave insistently, but David looked blank.

‘What about the afternoon she took you up to the house, up to her room — when Osman was away? Did she show you something then?’ demanded Trave, refusing to give up. His eyes bored into David’s, searching for a response, and slowly, as if in answer to a prayer, a light of understanding began to dawn in David’s face.

‘Yes, she kissed me,’ he said, speaking rapidly as if in the grip of a memory that he’d entirely forgotten up until that moment, ‘and she took out a big book from the shelf and opened it — and it was hollow. And there was another book inside with lots of tiny writing, her writing, and she went to a page in the middle and showed me a picture she’d drawn. It was a picture of us, and it was like we were in our own house and we didn’t need to hide all the time, like we had a future…’ David broke off in mid-sentence, putting his head in his hands to hide his pain, and behind his back the door of the interview room opened. It was another gaoler — an older, more senior one this time. ‘Time’s up,’ he said in a voice that brooked no argument. ‘The prison van’s here.’

‘What book was it?’ asked Trave as David got up to go. ‘What big book?’

‘I don’t remember. It was a long time ago. Like it was in another lifetime, like it happened to someone else,’ said David sadly as he held out his wrists for the gaoler to put on the handcuffs.

Trave sensed the return of David’s despair and wanted desperately to say something encouraging, but the words died in his mouth. It was just so damned hard to maintain hope when the cards were all stacked the other way, and he felt his heart sink as he watched David shuffle away down the corridor like a beaten man.

Just as he reached the top of the stairs leading up from the cells, Trave came face-to-face with Macrae.

‘What were you doing down there? Have you been up to something you shouldn’t?’ asked Macrae with a smirk on his face.

Trave thought of punching his enemy but knew that he’d be playing into Macrae’s hands if he did, and so contented himself with simply barging Macrae out of the way with his shoulder as he headed across the foyer toward the exit.

‘Sorry to hear about your job,’ Macrae shouted after Trave as soon as he’d recovered his balance, but Trave showed no sign he’d heard the taunt as he headed out the door into the cold darkness of the late afternoon.