The King of Diamonds

CHAPTER 25

The trial was moving inexorably towards its end, towards the day when David Swain would finally know his fate. The evidence had all been heard, recorded word for word by the shorthand writer sitting crouched over at her table under the judge’s dais. All that remained now was for the judge to give his summing up and put the defendant in the charge of the jurors so that they could ‘render a true verdict according to the evidence’, and choose whether he would live or die.

The evidence included David’s testimony as well. He’d stood in the witness box for a day and a half at the end of the previous week, wearing the black suit and tie that his mother had brought him from Oxford, and told the silent jurors ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’. But his words had sounded flat and hollow and unconvincing even in his own ears, and he’d seen how they had kept their eyes averted as he spoke, looking everywhere except at him, refusing to connect, just like their predecessors had done when he was tried for Ethan’s murder in this same court two and a half years earlier. Just like before, the thin-faced prosecutor had been able to cleverly twist his words, and David realized now that the web that unseen hands had been spinning around him for so long was far too cunningly constructed for him to be able to escape its knots by mere assertions of his own innocence.

He knew instead that the only way out of the maze was to examine each link in the chain of events that had brought him to where he was now. There had to be a weakness somewhere — something he’d overlooked that would exonerate him and identify his tormentors. And so backwards in time he went, night after night, scouring his memory for clues, and each time he came face-to-face with the figure of one man — Franz Claes. At the critical moment, at the scene of each murder, Claes had been there waiting for him — limping round the corner of the boathouse, armed with his gun, just as David had taken hold of Ethan’s waterlogged body and felt the sticky blood seeping out onto his hands, or emerging from the shadows at the end of Blackwater Hall’s top-floor corridor, shooting at David’s back as David stumbled out of Katya’s bedroom, unable to comprehend the sight of her dead body. Claes; always Claes. And now it turned out that he was a Nazi, or as good as one: he’d spent the war working for the Belgian government, collaborating with Nazis, who were busy sending trainloads of Belgian Jews to the concentration camps. David felt sure that Claes was guilty of Ethan’s murder and Katya’s too. He just couldn’t prove it. That was the trouble.

And what about Titus Osman? Was he in league with Claes, or had Claes acted independently of his rich brother-in-law throughout? David didn’t know. At David’s first trial Osman testified that he’d seen Ethan for lunch before Ethan left for Oxford. Had Claes intercepted Ethan after he left the Hall or had Osman lied about Ethan’s departure? David remembered how Osman had banned him from Blackwater Hall because he wasn’t good enough for Katya, and he recalled the smooth, unemotional way Osman had given his evidence, but that didn’t amount to a case. Everything pointed to Claes as the man behind the curtain: his career in the Belgian government showed that he was clearly a resourceful man, more than capable of having orchestrated all the events that had brought David to his present sorry pass.

David understood now that all that had happened since Ethan’s death — the highs and the lows, the good luck and the bad — had been no more than his jerking about like a puppet on the end of a string, waiting until the hidden hand that controlled his fate returned to use him once again. That hand had been at work in Oxford Prison, tempting him toward escape: Eddie Earle had to have been involved in the conspiracy. He was connected back to Claes through this John Bircher character, who’d jumped off the top of a multi-storey car park — or been pushed…

David realized now how easy he had made it for Eddie. All that had been needed to fuel his anger to boiling point were the few inflammatory words and phrases that Eddie had dropped cleverly into their late-night conversations. Because anger had been the driving force of David’s life for as long as he could remember — he had been angry with his father for dying and his mother for remarrying, with Katya for rejecting him, and with Ethan for taking her away. Poor Ethan: David had stayed angry with his rival even after he was dead.

Anger had been David’s undoing. It gave him a motive, and it was the reason he’d been chosen to play the part of murderer not once but twice. He remembered every detail of the night of Katya’s murder like it was a film that he’d watched a thousand times and couldn’t get out of his head. He remembered the exhilaration of the prison escape — the terrible fear of being caught replaced by the explosion of ecstatic triumph as he reached the top of the perimeter wall and came down the other side, and then the unforgettable sensation of the cold night air beating against his face as Eddie drove them down the road to Blackwater, past the sleeping houses. He’d felt utterly alive at those moments because he was free, free when he had never expected to be free again.

What a fool he’d been! He’d taken such comfort in the gun he’d insisted on Eddie providing when he little knew that it was useless — loaded with blank ammunition. Claes had known he was coming. Bircher, the man with the beard, must have called Blackwater Hall straight after he’d left the railway station — those two unanswered calls to the Hall from a public phone box at 12.20 and a minute later had been a prearranged signal. David imagined Claes sitting on his bed in the darkness, nursing his gun in his hands, nodding with a knowing satisfaction as he caught the distant sound of the glass breaking in the study window down below and waited for David’s footsteps to pass by his door.

David was sure that Claes had meant to kill him: the bastard would have known that he would be immune from prosecution for shooting down an armed intruder who had just murdered the householder’s niece in her bed. But David thought that Claes must also have realized that missing the target wasn’t the end of the world either. Let the state do the work instead. David would be just as dead swinging from a gallows as with a bullet in the back of his head. And then it would all be over — wrapped up and disposed of once and for all: Ethan dead and Katya dead and David Swain too, who had killed them both for the sake of an insane jealousy.

David understood the plan. He knew he had been used, set up not once but twice. But he still had no idea why. Ethan and Katya had died for a reason. They had to have found out something — probably a secret or secrets about Claes and his Nazi past. The secret was the key to saving himself. David was sure of it. And yet what could he do to uncover it, locked up in the bowels of Pentonville Prison without a friend in the world?

People had tried to help him. He remembered how Inspector Trave had been so desperate to know about Katya’s diary when he came to see him in the cells beneath the court the previous week, but David had heard nothing since. Because what good could Trave do? He wasn’t even a policeman any more. And his wife had gone off with Osman. David was grateful to her. It must have cost her a lot to come to court and give evidence about what Katya had told her. ‘They’re trying to kill me’ — powerful words, but in the end they hadn’t made any difference. Osman had just gone back into the witness box afterwards and explained them away in a few short sentences, describing how Katya had gone so far off the rails after Ethan’s death that Osman ended up having to keep her at the Hall for her own safety, even though she hated him for it. And the jury had believed him. They’d had to — there was independent evidence to back him up.

David was as good as dead. He knew that. It amazed him that he could be so certain of conviction when he was so entirely innocent. But the prosecution had everything: presence, motive, weapon, even a confession. David did not regret admitting to Katya’s murder. He knew he had had no choice. Macrae and Wale had broken him after his arrest that night in the cell with the thick iron door at the back of Oxford police station, broken him entirely, and he knew that he would never be the same person again. He had been naked, and they had been clothed, and Wale had done things to him that he had never imagined one human being could do to another, turning the pain on and off like a faucet at Macrae’s direction, but never leaving a mark, until David had finally given up and confessed to everything just to have it over with.

In the witness box he’d told the jurors about the torture, but from the outset he’d sensed their disbelief. He hadn’t the power of description to make them understand what it had been like, standing there shivering under the white electric bulb, waiting for Wale to come at him again while Macrae sat on a chair in the corner, watching.

And the memory of Wale’s face and Macrae’s voice had stayed with him ever since, driving out his anger and emptying him inside as he lay awake at night in his cell, thinking back on all that had happened, trying in vain to find a way out of the web in which he was so tightly enmeshed.

Towards the end the trial became a blur, with the days dissolving into one another, divided only by bumpy rides in the prison van through dark London streets and awful, sleepless nights tossing and turning on his hard, narrow bed. He was alone now: Toomes had been convicted and sentenced to death and moved God knows where to await his fate. And now it was David’s turn. After hours spent like a caged animal, walking backwards and forwards across the nine square feet of his iron-barred cell in the basement of the Old Bailey, he was taken upstairs in the late afternoon to hear the jury’s verdict, handcuffed between two silent gaolers who had seen it all before. They passed down a neon-lit corridor beneath an arched, whitewashed roof, and David imagined for a moment that this is what his last walk would be like — stumbling along under bright white lights towards a half-open door at the end. But the door this time opened onto an old creaking elevator, not the wooden gallows and the knotted rope that haunted all his dreams.

From the lift, David climbed the short flight of steep stairs into the dock, and suddenly the packed courtroom rushed towards him from all sides as he emerged out into its midst. Everyone was already in their appointed places, and there was nowhere to hide from the stretched, hungry faces craning towards him to get a final look at the man who might be going to die. And above them all the black-robed judge sat quite still in his high-backed chair, brooding with hooded eyes like an old vulture.

The babbling murmur that had greeted David’s arrival in the courtroom subsided, and the judge’s clerk got slowly to his feet, cleared his throat, and asked the foreman of the jury the centuries-old question: ‘Have you reached a verdict on which you are all agreed?’

‘Yes, Your Honour,’ said the foreman immediately in a high, squeaky, nervous voice. He was a little man with red cheeks and a bald head, wearing a pair of horn-rimmed glasses that were too big for his cherubic round face. He looked like a middle-aged schoolboy, entirely out of place in the role he had been elected to perform.

A pause then — a second or two perhaps while the clerk gathered his robe about him — and David felt the pressure growing on his chest and inside his head like he was going to burst open or shatter into a thousand pieces. It was as if he was drowning, seeing and hearing everything around him through a wall of swirling blue water. He looked up at the picture of the lion and unicorn, the symbol of British justice, hanging on the wall above the judge’s head, and prayed for acquittal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He hadn’t made much of his life. He knew that. He wished he’d used his time better. But he was young. He could change, except that now he wouldn’t have that chance. He was going to die not because he had cancer or some incurable sickness but because others had decided that he must. It didn’t have to happen, but it would happen. That was what made it unbearable. He’d die and be put in a pit like his father, and the world would go on as before, except that he wouldn’t be a part of it any more. Soon he’d be old news, forgotten by everyone except his mother and Max, who’d met his brother one morning and now didn’t have one any more.

Tears ran down David’s face into the toilet bowl and his back shook and his stomach heaved, but the Old Bailey gaolers didn’t pay much attention. Prisoner R137861 was being sick in his cell, and there was nothing very remarkable about that. He’d just heard that he was going to swing, and that took some getting used to. They understood these things because, after all, they’d seen them all before.