The King of Diamonds

CHAPTER 26

All through the weekend Vanessa grew more agitated. She tried everything to calm herself down, but nothing worked: she took up her paints and then threw them away in disgust; she spent half an hour reading her book and then realized that she hadn’t taken in a single word; and eventually, in despair, she put on her overcoat in defiance of the wintry weather, intending to take a brisk walk down by the river, but ended up envying the regal calm of a pair of swans watching her disinterestedly from the other bank. The only respite from her anxiety came when she went out to the newsagent on Sunday morning and bought editions of all the newspapers, stumbling home with a pyramid of newsprint balanced precariously in her hands, and then drank three cups of coffee one after the other while she sat at the kitchen table reading with avid concentration all the accounts of everything that had happened at the Swain trial the previous week, grimacing with worry when each article ended up referring to the strength of the case against the accused.

Vanessa continued to go back and forth in her mind, gnawing at the evidence in a state of ever-growing anxiety. As Bill had said, only Katya’s diary could tell her the truth — if it existed, of course, which was a big if. She wished she could read it without having to look for it. Because looking might mean tangling with Claes, and Vanessa was not ashamed to admit that that prospect unnerved her. She knew how much Claes disliked her already, and she was sure that his dislike would soon build into hatred when he found out that Titus was prepared to sacrifice him on the altar of his love for Vanessa Trave. And if Claes was guilty of these murders and found her digging for evidence against him, he wouldn’t hesitate about killing her. She knew how cold-blooded he was. He’d wait to get her alone on some deserted street corner or down by the river, and then he’d take her from behind with a hand over her mouth to stifle her screams and twist a sharpened knife in her gut, just like he must have done with Ethan. If he killed Ethan…

Vanessa couldn’t make up her mind about who was responsible. She remained steadfastly unsure of the truth, plagued by doubt and uncertainty, hoping for David Swain to be acquitted so that she could carry on as before and do nothing, even though deep down she knew that Katya’s ghost would not permit her to remain inert forever. Sooner or later she’d have to go and look for the diary, but in the meantime she ignored the summons of the telephone that kept ringing in the living room. She knew it was either her husband or Titus. Both of them wanted her to go out to Blackwater Hall, albeit for different reasons, and that was the one place she didn’t want to go near, at least until the trial was over.

The weekend finally came to an end, and work on Monday morning did help provide some temporary distraction from her inner turmoil. For the next two days she stayed long hours in the office, filing and refiling her employer’s correspondence, answering letters that didn’t need answering, but under her professional exterior she was finding the uncertainty of the trial’s outcome harder and harder to cope with. And on Wednesday, after reading two newspaper summaries of the judge’s summing up of the mountain of evidence against the defendant, she decided she couldn’t stand it any more and stayed home from work. All day she paced the rooms of her flat like they were a prison cell, listening to the hourly news broadcasts on the radio, until the verdict was finally announced at five o’clock, complete with a description of the pandemonium that had broken out in the courtroom when a member of the public had thrown her shoe at the judge, just when he was halfway through pronouncing the defendant’s death sentence.

Now Vanessa didn’t hesitate. She knew what she had to do. She turned off the radio and rang up Titus. He sounded ecstatic to hear from her.

‘I’ve been worrying about you,’ he said. ‘You didn’t answer my calls. Have you been all right?’

‘I had some kind of virus,’ she lied, ‘so I went to bed and took lots of medicines and unplugged the telephone, but I’m better now. Can I see you?’

‘Of course you can. When?’

‘Tomorrow for lunch? I can get the day off.’

‘Wonderful,’ he said. She’d never heard him sounding so happy.

‘Good, I’ll see you then.’

She rang off, realizing that she’d said nothing about the verdict, and that she hadn’t even asked about the man with the gun whom Titus was so worried about. Still, she knew there’d be plenty of time to discuss these topics and others at lunch the next day — before she found an excuse to slip away and look for Katya’s diary at the top of the house.

She awoke the next morning to a dense white fog that had enveloped the city in a damp, sightless embrace. The red brick neo-Gothic towers of Keble College that usually dominated the view from her living room window were now no more than vague shapes in the mist. All morning she hoped that the fog would clear, but if anything it was thicker than before when she finally screwed up her courage and got in her car to go to Blackwater.

The journey took much longer than usual since she had to drive very slowly, feeling her way tentatively along the roads, and Osman was waiting anxiously for her when she finally pulled up in the courtyard and turned off her headlights. He came hurrying down the steps, opened her door, and, taking her arm, steered her through the haze into the warmth of the hall. She felt a surge of relief as she took off her coat and preceded her lover through the door of the drawing room, but then stopped dead in her tracks as she caught sight of Claes standing in front of the fire. She was rooted to the spot, unable to go forward to take Claes’s outstretched hand, but Claes didn’t seem in the least put out by her rudeness. Instead he smiled broadly, and the tightening of his facial muscles stretched the white scar running down beside his left ear and the mutilated red skin below his jaw, giving him an almost obscene appearance that Vanessa felt sure was a calculated effect, since there was no warmth in his grey eyes to back up the smile on his lips. She felt as if some invisible portion of the fog had followed her inside, wrapping its tendrils around her body.

Osman didn’t seem pleased with Claes’s presence either, but Claes remained apparently impervious to his companions’ obvious wish to be alone. Lunch in the dining room was a miserable affair. Vanessa kept looking towards the door, getting ready to excuse herself so she could go upstairs and search for the diary, but then each time she was about to open her mouth, she caught Claes looking at her out of the corner of his eye. She felt irrationally certain that he could read her mind. And so she dropped her eyes to the table and watched his bony hands holding his knife and fork as he methodically cut up the meat on his plate, and imagined him cutting into her flesh too, sawing her, watching her bleed.

She couldn’t eat. She felt weak, helpless in the face of her fear of Claes. What if there was no diary? she asked herself. What if Swain was guilty — just like the jury had said? But then she remembered the way Swain had mouthed ‘thank you’ at her as she left the court, and she thought of how young he was — not much older than her own son who had died. She imagined him on the gallows, waiting for the trap to give way beneath his feet, and she went back to toying with her food.

‘Have you heard about the verdict, Mrs Trave?’ Claes asked, breaking the silence.

‘Yes,’ she said, refusing to meet his eye.

‘And what do you make of it?’ he asked. ‘You must be disappointed in the outcome after your efforts for Mr Swain’s defence.’

‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s for the jury to decide, not me.’

‘Quite right, my dear,’ said Osman, coming to her rescue. ‘These trials are very unpleasant. We have to do our duty and give evidence, whether it’s for the prosecution or the defence, but that doesn’t mean we enjoy the experience or what comes after. Personally I do not like the death penalty, but I understand why some people think it’s necessary.’

Claes snorted, as if unable to believe his ears. ‘What are you talking about?’ he asked. ‘You can’t have law and order without it. They should use it more, not less. And for scum like Swain the rope’s too quick, if you ask me. They should throttle him to death for what he did.’

Vanessa looked up, appalled by Claes’s sadism, and was in time to see a look of fury on Titus’s face before it vanished, replaced by a thin smile.

‘Well, I suppose there are exceptions,’ he said in a measured voice, keeping his eyes on Claes. ‘Colonel Eichmann for instance. Have you been following that story, Vanessa?’

‘Yes, a little.’ Vanessa wasn’t going to admit it, but she’d read a great deal about Adolf Eichmann since his capture by the Israeli secret service in Buenos Aires the previous May. There had been an international outcry about the kidnap, but Vanessa had been overjoyed. Now his trial was fast approaching in Jerusalem and there’d be a chance for some tiny measure of justice for the millions of men, women, and children that the monster had had transported across Europe to their deaths in the Nazi concentration camps.

‘Perhaps there are some criminals whose crimes are so, how do you say, heinous — yes, that’s the word — that they should suffer the ultimate punishment,’ Osman went on, speaking in the same precise way, as if he was taking part in an organized debate. ‘What do you think, Franz?’

Vanessa glanced over at Claes and saw that livid red spots had appeared in the centre of each of his pale cheeks and that his hands were clenched into tight fists. He looked Osman in the eye, but he didn’t reply.

‘Well, perhaps we should change the subject and discuss something more pleasant,’ said Osman, shrugging his shoulders. ‘Have you been doing any painting, Vanessa?’

But Vanessa had no chance to respond. The doorbell rang, and a minute later Detective Clayton and Constable Wale were shown into the dining room by a housemaid.

‘I’m sorry to bother you, sir,’ said Clayton awkwardly, ‘but we wanted you to know we were here, taking a look around.’ He spoke to Osman but glanced over at Vanessa, as if surprised by her presence.

‘Thank you. I appreciate your consideration, Detective,’ said Osman. ‘Have you any particular reason for thinking Mr Mendel’s going to be showing up here today?’ he asked in an apparently casual tone, although Vanessa could tell that he was more interested than he was letting on.

‘Just that when I talked to him before in his flat he seemed to attach a great deal of significance to the outcome of the trial up in London,’ said Clayton, picking his words carefully.

‘Significance — what significance?’ demanded Claes.

‘Well, he said that if Mr Swain was convicted, then “they’ll have won; they’ll have got away with everything”. Those were his words,’ said Clayton reluctantly. ‘He implied that he would have nothing left to lose.’

‘And we are they, of course,’ said Osman with a faint smile. ‘Well, that certainly sounds rather ominous, Detective. I hope that you and Constable Wale manage to find Mr Mendel before he does anything else stupid.’

Vanessa looked past Clayton to where Wale was standing in the doorway. She remembered him now from when she’d gone to visit Inspector Macrae at the police station and he’d shown her out. He’d had that same ugly, smirking smile on his face then as he had now. It felt like he was mentally undressing her, and she turned away with a shudder.

‘Are you all right, Mrs Trave?’ asked Clayton, noticing Vanessa’s grimace without understanding its cause. He’d seen how nervous she looked when he first came in.

‘I’m fine,’ she said, refusing to meet his eye. She was all too aware of Claes staring at her across the table.

‘Bloody foreigners! They get all the luck,’ said Wale with a harsh laugh once they were back outside. ‘I bet Trave finds it difficult getting much shut-eye at night thinking about his missis tucked up with old Casanova in there. She’s quite a looker for her age, I’ll give you that.’

‘Shut up, Jonah. And keep your foul thoughts to yourself,’ said Clayton angrily.

‘All right, keep your hair on,’ said Wale, getting into the police car beside Clayton. ‘You’re a grumpy sod, aren’t you?’

Clayton stayed quiet, sensing the car’s suspension settling down under Wale’s weight. He knew better than to allow himself to be needled, knowing that he’d only be providing Wale with free entertainment, but even after a week in Wale’s company he still found it hard to get used to the mean, crude way in which the man’s mind worked.

Their complete lack of success in tracking down Jacob Mendel hadn’t helped Clayton’s mood either. But he had an instinctive feeling that today would be the day that Jacob would show himself if he was ever going to, and he was determined to make as thorough a search of the grounds as the fog would allow. Ignoring Wale’s complaints therefore that it was ‘a bloody waste of time’, Clayton drove down to the road and parked under the trees by the path that led up to the boathouse. And then, leaving Wale in the car, he climbed the fence and set off into the mist.

Back in the dining room of Blackwater Hall, Vanessa had had enough. The policemen’s visit had unnerved Osman, and now he and Claes were talking anxiously about Jacob’s possible whereabouts. Vanessa knew it was now or never. Maybe there was no diary, but soon she would run out of courage and would never know one way or the other.

She got up from the table, announcing casually that she was going to the bathroom. Osman raised his hand in brief acknowledgement, and Claes went on talking, apparently unaware of her departure. Outside, she turned quickly down the corridor leading to the hall, and then ran up the staircase to the first floor. At the top of the stairs a corridor opened out in both directions. She knew she wasn’t yet on the top floor, but she couldn’t see the way up. Blindly she ran to her right, and at the end, round the corner, she found what she was looking for — another flight of stairs going up. She took them two at a time and started down another corridor, narrower than the one down below. Now she went slower, counting the doors on her left until she was halfway along. Tentatively, she pushed open the half-closed door and saw a bed but no bookcase. Perhaps this had been Katya’s room; perhaps the bookcase had been moved; perhaps the girl’s books had been sold or thrown out now that their owner had no further use for them. With an effort Vanessa pushed her doubts to the back of her mind — she’d come too far to stop now. The next door down could still count as halfway. This one was shut. Slowly she turned the handle, and there it was, right in front of her — an old brown bookcase filled to overflowing with books of different sizes, and on the top a silver-framed photograph of a middle-aged couple standing by the sea.

Vanessa closed the door and began to search. Bill had said the book was big, and so there was no point looking in the top two shelves, which were lower in height and mostly filled with dog-eared paperbacks. It had to be in one of the bottom two shelves if it was anywhere. One by one Vanessa took the larger books out and rifled their pages, looking for a hollowed-out interior. Soon she had a pile of them beside her on the ruby-red carpet, and she was running out of time. Claes would come up the stairs and find her, and she’d have no explanation for what she was doing. Her hands shook as she began work on the bottom shelf. Still nothing: Tolstoy’s War and Peace; volume 4 of a children’s encyclopedia; a thick atlas of the world that had her briefly excited since it seemed just the right size to conceal a diary; a book of Van Gogh’s paintings; and then, just as she’d given up hope, she saw at the back of the shelf, standing on its side, a big hardback copy of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. She recognized the book — she’d had the same illustrated edition herself since she was a child, and instinctively she knew it had to be the one. It had been deliberately hidden behind the other books — she’d only found it after taking out all the books in front of it, practically emptying the bottom shelf onto the carpet.

She sat back on her haunches and turned the first few pages, past a picture of Alice falling down the well, and came to the cut in the paper. And there it was — a small square red book no bigger than the size of her hand, sitting neatly inside the mutilated Alice in Wonderland. With the edge of her fingernail Vanessa lifted the front cover and read the handwritten inscription with a beating heart:

Katya Osman

My Diary

Keep Out

The diary was real. Bill had been right. Now all she had to do was get it out of the house, except that that wasn’t going to be so easy. She knew she was running out of time, and so she quickly shoved the books back into the shelves, calculating that no one would notice they had been moved as long as they were in the bookcase. And then, getting to her feet, she opened the door and came face-to-face with Jana Claes.

All the time she’d been in the house Vanessa hadn’t once thought of Claes’s silent sister. She’d seen her so rarely on her visits to Blackwater Hall, and today her thoughts had all been concentrated on Claes himself. Vanessa cursed her stupidity. She should never have made so much noise going through the books: that’s what must have attracted the woman’s attention. And now it was too late: Jana was blocking her only route of escape.

‘What are you doing?’ Jana asked. She spoke with a thick foreign accent, but her hostility was obvious.

‘I was looking. That’s all. Just looking,’ said Vanessa weakly, unable to think of an excuse.

‘Looking for what?’

Vanessa didn’t answer, and the older woman’s glance fell to the big book that Vanessa was clutching to her chest.

‘What is that? Where did it come from?’ asked Jana. ‘You took it,’ she said, answering her own question a moment later. ‘Give it to me.’

Without warning Jana took hold of the book, wresting it away from Vanessa, who was taken by surprise, unprepared for the suddenness of the assault and Jana’s wiry strength. Perhaps Jana hadn’t expected to get hold of the book so easily either — she took several steps back, trying to regain her balance. And in that moment Vanessa lost her temper. She hadn’t come this far and risked everything just to be thwarted at the last by this dried-up woman who was probably just as guilty as her brother. Reaching out with both her hands she took hold of Jana by the shoulders and shoved her as hard as she could back against the wall behind her. Jana hit it with a thud and fell to the ground. She looked like she’d lost consciousness, but Vanessa didn’t care. Her mind was focused on one thing and one thing only — to escape the house with the diary. Stooping, she picked up Alice in Wonderland from where it had fallen on the ground and ran back down the corridor to the stairs. At the bottom she paused for breath. Still there was no sound from up above. Treading softly now, she made her way back to the top of the grand staircase leading down to the hall. She looked down, and there was nobody in sight except Osman’s black cat, sitting contentedly on the fifth stair up, licking her paws. Vanessa had seen the cat there before and knew why Cara liked the position: it had the widest viewpoint of anywhere in the house.

Vanessa’s legs were weak and her hands were shaking, so she held on to the curving mahogany banister for support as she went down, clutching the book in her other hand. She paused just above the cat and raised her forefinger to her lips in a mute appeal for silence, and Cara remained obediently still, her unblinking, luminous green eyes watching Vanessa intently as she went slowly past. Now Vanessa could hear raised voices to her right — it sounded like Claes and Osman were arguing in the dining room. She started across the hall to the front door, and suddenly there was the noise of shouting coming from up above.

For a moment the adrenaline coursing through her body rooted Vanessa to the spot, but then it released her and she was at the door, wrenching it open. The fog rushed up to meet her, and she almost fell on the steps, but somehow she made it to the bottom and into her car. She could hear running feet behind her as she pulled the door shut and gunned the engine, setting off down the drive with a screech of tyres.

Claes watched her go. He hesitated a moment in the courtyard, looking back through the mist at his sister and Osman, who were standing in the doorway.

‘She’s got something. From Katya’s room. A book,’ said Jana, speaking in Dutch. Her voice was breathless, and she was holding on to her side like she was in pain.

Claes nodded, making up his mind. He ran past them into the house to get his keys. In his room he unlocked the top drawer of his desk and took out his revolver. He spun the magazine to check the bullets, put the gun in his pocket with a grunt of satisfaction, and then ran back down the stairs.

‘Franz, listen to me. Don’t…’ Osman began, but Claes ignored him.

‘I won’t be long,’ he shouted as he got into the Bentley and set off down the drive in pursuit of Vanessa.

Osman swayed on the step, looking shell-shocked. He leaned against the jamb for a moment before Jana took hold of his arm and led him back into the house. The door closed behind them, and out in the fog-shrouded courtyard the eerie mid-afternoon silence returned until, a few minutes later, a tall figure emerged from the trees at the top of the drive. He hesitated a moment and then went up the front steps and rang the bell.

The fog had been less dense down by the road, but it grew thick again as Clayton pressed forward down the path leading toward the boathouse. Soon he could only see a few yards in any direction. To his left he could hear the water lapping against the shore of the lake, while up ahead the boathouse loomed up out of the mist, silhouetted by the surrounding trees. He didn’t know why, but the place drew him like a magnet. Perhaps it was because of all that had happened there — love and death, and now this pressing silence, interrupted only by the mournful cries of a gull hovering above the invisible lake. Clayton went up the wooden steps and glanced inside, but instinctively he already knew that the place would be deserted. There was something else that was calling his attention, but he didn’t realize what it was until he’d got back outside. Then he noticed it — the rowing boat was back, pushed in underneath the floor of the boathouse. Clayton got down on his hands and knees to pull it out and a moment later looked down at a brand-new bicycle lying on its side in the bottom of the boat.

Keeping away from the trees on either side, Clayton walked as quickly as the fog would let him down the centre of the path, returning the way he’d come. It was easier going towards the end as the fog thinned out nearer to the road. Wale hadn’t moved from the car while Clayton had been away, and Clayton got in beside him and turned on the engine, intending to go straight back to the Hall. He felt sure that Jacob wasn’t far away. But then, just as he was about to turn out into the road, he had to slam on his brakes as a small blue car rushed past them at high speed. Clayton recognized Vanessa in the driving seat — she looked crazy, like someone or something had sent her clean out of her mind. And then, less than a minute later, another car came hurtling by. It was Claes, driving Osman’s Bentley. Clayton knew Vanessa couldn’t match the speed of the Bentley, however hard she pushed her little car. Claes would’ve easily caught up with her by the time she got to Blackwater village. Clayton hesitated a moment and then reluctantly turned the steering wheel of the police car back in the opposite direction and set off in pursuit.