The King of Diamonds

CHAPTER 28

For ten days Jacob had holed up in the cheap hotel behind Paddington Station where he’d stayed once before, back in the days when he was travelling round the records offices of Europe digging into Claes’s murky past. They took cash in advance at reception and asked no questions, so he didn’t need to tell them any lies. Every day he read the newspaper reports on the Swain trial and listened to the radio and took long walks through the London parks, enjoying the biting cold air that kept him alert as he waited for the jury to reach their verdict on David Swain. And when it came, announced as the first item on the six o’clock news on Wednesday evening, he wasn’t surprised. Instead he was ready. He got up the next morning, hoisted his pack onto his back after breakfast, and took the train to Banbury. He didn’t think the police would be watching the station in Oxford, but there was no need to take the risk. And from Banbury he rode the bicycle that he’d bought in London slowly through the gathering fog, taking the back roads until he came to the far side of Blackwater Lake and found the rowing boat exactly where he’d left it, hidden in a grove of evergreen trees growing a little way back from the bank. His plan had been to avoid the village and the road that passed by the boathouse and the Hall, but the thick fog meant that he did not need to worry about observation. Instead he found it a hard task to navigate his way across the lake and ended up reaching the other side a hundred yards up from his target. Still, eventually he had the boat and the bicycle stowed away under the boathouse and set off through the woods with his torch.

An hour later, standing hidden in the trees at the top of the drive, listening to the Bentley disappearing into the distance, Jacob allowed himself a small smile of satisfaction. Claes’s departure was a piece of luck that he hadn’t been anticipating. Now Osman would be on his own, apart from the servants and Claes’s sister, and he had nothing to fear from them. He waited a few minutes and then, with his hand cradled round the butt of the gun in his pocket, stepped out into the fog.

This time it wasn’t Jana but a maid in uniform who answered the door and asked him his business. Immediately Jacob forced his way past her, demanding to see the master of the house. The noise brought Osman into the hall. He quickly retreated back towards his study as soon as he recognized his visitor, but Jacob ran after him down the corridor and was through the door before Osman had the chance to lock himself in.

With nowhere left to go, Osman sat down behind his desk, as if hoping that a little display of dignity might bring Jacob to this senses, although it didn’t help that the top drawer was missing, gone to the furniture maker for repair after Jacob had blasted a hole through it on his last visit.

‘How dare you come in here like this?’ Osman demanded, trying and failing to give the impression that he was in control of the situation.

Jacob didn’t respond, just looked down with contempt at Osman like he was some kind of loathsome insect that he hadn’t yet decided how best to dispose of.

‘What do you want?’ asked Osman. He was unmistakably nervous now — beads of sweat had begun to form in his hairline, and a twitch at the corner of his bottom lip indicated his growing anxiety.

‘I want justice — the kind they’re not handing out up in London,’ said Jacob, pointing to the headline of the Daily Telegraph, which was lying folded on the desk between them: ‘David Swain to hang for Blackwater murder.’

‘I want justice for my father and mother and for my brother and Katya and for all the other men, women, and children that you and Claes have murdered in the last twenty years. That’s what I want,’ Jacob went on, banging his fist down on the desk to emphasize the name of each of the dead victims.

‘I’ve done nothing wrong,’ said Osman in a shaky voice, shrinking into the back of his chair in the face of this verbal onslaught. ‘I swear it. David Swain killed your brother and Katya, and I tried to save your parents but I couldn’t. I saved you. Don’t you understand that? You wouldn’t be here now if it wasn’t for me.’

‘Yes, you’re right. But why? Why did you save me, Titus?’ asked Jacob, leaning forward so that his face was only a few inches from Osman’s. ‘Come on, tell me. Spit it out: you know the answer. So that my parents would trust you when their turn came to try and escape across the border. That’s why. So they’d bring you all their precious diamonds and make you the diamond king. That’s all they were to you: the chance for more loot.’

Jacob could no longer contain his anger. He lunged at Osman, taking hold of his enemy by the lapels of his Savile Row suit, and the fine cloth tore in Jacob’s hands as he dragged Osman out from behind the desk and over towards the door. Osman was too shocked at first to struggle; and then, when he began to resist, Jacob threw him down on the carpet, took the gun out of his pocket, and pointed it at Osman’s head.

‘Get up,’ he ordered, speaking through gritted teeth. ‘I’ll kill you. I swear I will, if you don’t give me what I want.’

‘What do you want?’ asked Osman. It was the second time he’d asked Jacob the question, but now there was desperation in his voice: he’d lost control of his breathing and was panting as he spoke. And he seemed to have hurt himself as he fell: he held both his hands behind his back at the base of his spine as he got to his feet and stood swaying backwards and forwards in the doorway.

‘Proof,’ said Jacob. ‘That’s what I want. Proof of what you’ve done, so all the world can see you for what you are: a thief and a cold-blooded killer, not some big-hearted philanthropist.’

‘But there is no proof,’ said Osman, reaching out to touch Jacob’s arm in a gesture of supplication. ‘You’ve got to believe me: I’m an innocent man.’

‘Stop lying. I can’t stand to hear it,’ shouted Jacob, brandishing his gun. With his free hand he pushed Osman away, back through the half-open door, and then immediately came up behind him in the corridor outside, forcing the gun into the small of Osman’s back. It was the place where Osman had hurt himself when he fell, and he cried out in sudden pain.

‘You’re the least innocent man in the whole wide world,’ said Jacob, hissing the information into Osman’s ear. ‘Now get upstairs. Or I’ll do that again; only it’ll be worse this time.’

Osman was shaking from head to toe, but he obeyed the order, shuffling forward into the hall and up the stairs. At the top, Jacob directed him to the left, and they carried on their strange procession down the corridor to Osman’s bedroom. There was no sign of either Jana or the parlour maid or any of the other servants, and Osman wondered whether they had all fled the house, leaving him to deal with Jacob on his own. He’d been listening hard for the sound of the returning Bentley outside, but he’d heard nothing. ‘I won’t be long,’ Franz had said. So where was he now? And where were the police when he needed them?

Concentrating his mind, Trave resumed his reading of Katya’s diary:

Franz looked me in the eye and straight away I knew he knew. It was my fault. I realized what I’d done: like a fool I’d left the writing pad open on my desk when I ran out of the house, and he must have been watching me; he or his foul sister. She was there too, standing behind him on the steps with a smirk on her ugly white face like she was enjoying what was happening, like she wanted to see me suffer. I didn’t struggle. What was the point? I know Franz; I know what he’d like to do to me with his hands if he got the chance. I know what he did to Ethan with that knife. I wasn’t going to give him an excuse.

I told him that I wanted to see my uncle; that I wanted to tell Titus what I’d found. I was playing my last card but it was like Franz knew what I’d been going to say. He said: ‘Certainly.’ Just that, and gave a little bow of his head and a wave of his hand like he was being polite, treating me like I was some kind of lady who needed to go first out the door. I wanted to run but I could hardly walk, and Jana was in front of me anyway so there was no way I could have escaped. Franz was behind my back. He wasn’t touching me, but I could feel his cold breath on the back of my neck while we walked through the woods and across the lawn back to the house. Back to my uncle waiting in his study.

At the end of the corridor Jacob reached round Osman and pushed open the half-closed door with his free hand, and then shoved Osman forwards into the bedroom. But Osman was ready and didn’t fall this time; instead he caught hold of one of the carved mahogany posts of his four-poster bed and then turned to face his adversary, who was standing in the doorway, holding the gun trained on his forehead. Behind Osman, his cat, Cara, who had been sleeping on the bed, opened her green eyes wide in surprise. She’d never seen her master pushed across a room before.

‘Open it,’ commanded Jacob, pointing with a quick sideways motion of the gun towards the oil painting hanging on the wall between the two matching wardrobes.

‘Open what?’ asked Osman, playing for time even though he knew perfectly well what Jacob was telling him to do. Jana had given him a detailed description of her gunpoint encounter with Jacob and his inability to get in the safe ten days earlier. God, what an idiot he’d been, Osman thought, cursing himself for his stupidity. He should have known Jacob would come back, just as he should have known neither Franz nor Macrae could be relied on for protection — instead of finding Jacob they had left him here defenceless to face this maniac on his own. Too late, Osman realized he should have hired guards or left Blackwater altogether until Jacob was caught. Now he was caught himself with no means of escape.

‘Open the fucking safe!’ Jacob repeated his demand with a snarl in his voice; and then, when Osman did not immediately comply, he turned the gun a fraction of an inch and fired through the window overlooking the courtyard, shattering the glass with the bullet. A wave of cold air blew into the room, and Osman’s legs gave way beneath him as, unseen, the cat disappeared under the bed.

Slowly, Osman got back to his feet and took the picture down off the wall with shaking hands. He glanced across at Jacob and then twisted the knob, entering the coded numbers one by one until the steel door clicked and he pulled it open. Behind Osman, Jacob leaned forwards, looking in at the lines of small blue silk bags, each with a different tiny white number embroidered on its side, and, behind them on a shelf, taking up most of the space at the back of the safe, three thick, dark green, leather-bound books.

‘Get those out,’ ordered Jacob, pointing at the books. ‘Show them to me.’

‘They’re my accounts. That’s all — who I’ve sold to, who I’ve bought from, my expenses — nothing else,’ said Osman as he took out the ledgers. He put the first two down on the ground and then held out the third one, turning the pages for Jacob’s inspection, as if he really thought they might convince Jacob that he was indeed an innocent man.

‘How far do they go back?’ asked Jacob, looking up from the names and dates and the columns of figures recorded in red and black ink.

‘This one four years,’ said Osman. ‘But it’s not finished. The other two are five each.’

‘Fourteen years. And before that?’

‘I don’t have records before I came to England. It was the war, you know,’ said Osman. He made it sound like the war explained everything.

‘No, I don’t know. You’re lying,’ said Jacob, losing his temper as his frustration boiled over. He’d pinned all his hopes on the stupid safe, and it had yielded him nothing. Trave had been right about Blackwater Hall. There was nothing here — no evidence, no proof, nothing. Or at least nothing that he was going to find without Osman’s help. And that help would only be forthcoming if Osman really believed that Jacob would kill him if he didn’t talk. The bastard didn’t believe that at present — that much was obvious. Jacob had to convince him. That’s what he needed to do.

‘Get down on your knees,’ he ordered, stepping back and retraining the gun on Osman’s head.

Osman saw the homicidal look in Jacob’s eyes and was filled with a mortal terror that he’d never felt before. He couldn’t be going to die. Not now when he’d finally got everything he’d ever wanted. He grabbed a handful of the silk bags from inside the safe and pulled open their drawstrings, spilling radiant diamonds of all sizes and colours and cuts into his hand, holding them out to Jacob.

‘Here, take them,’ he said. ‘There are more, lots more. I can sell them for you if you want. They’re worth millions, more than you can imagine.’

Jacob looked down at the array of jewels glittering in Osman’s outstretched hand and felt like he was going to be sick. He thought of his family members, dying terrible deaths in unspeakable places just so Osman could get hold of these meaningless baubles of crystal carbon and call them his own. They enraged him, and he leant forward with his free hand and dashed the diamonds out of Osman’s hand onto the floor. They fell, scattering in all directions across the pale blue Axminster carpet, and such was Osman’s obsession with the jewels that he looked down at them for a moment in disbelief, unable to believe that a person could treat such beauty with such contempt. But then he looked back up into Jacob’s cold, angry eyes and remembered his situation.

‘Get down on your knees,’ Jacob commanded again.

But Osman stood his ground: he knew what would happen when he knelt, and he wasn’t going to assist in his own death. He closed his eyes and prayed to a God he didn’t believe in for rescue, and, as if in direct response, the roar of a police siren rent the silence, followed by the sound of a car coming fast up the drive. And suddenly the fog outside was lit up by flashing blue lights. Doors were opening — car doors and the front door of the house, and several moments later a familiar voice shouted up at them from down below: ‘Come out, Jacob Mendel. We know you’re in there. Come out now.’

Keeping his gun trained on Osman, Jacob crossed the room and looked quickly down into the courtyard through the shattered window. The fog had cleared a little, and in the lights he could just about make out the faces of the figures down below: the young detective who’d held him in his flat with Trave was the one who had shouted, and a few yards away on the other side of the fountain was a big burly man in police uniform whom Jacob didn’t recognize. Beyond them, two figures, who could only be Jana Claes and the maid who’d answered the door, were running away up the drive.

‘Fuck!’ Backing away from the window, Jacob vented his anger with a series of expletives, and then he noticed how Osman had risen up to his full height again, puffing out his chest like he had nothing left to fear, like he was back to being Titus Osman, the king of diamonds again. He laughed mirthlessly at Osman’s lack of understanding, realizing suddenly that the police were an opportunity for him, not Osman. They could be witnesses to Osman’s confession. Jacob was grateful for their arrival.

‘Get over by the window,’ he ordered, pressing the cold, hard muzzle of the gun against the back of Osman’s head to force him forward. Down below the two policemen were looking up at them through the mist.

‘Now tell them,’ ordered Jacob in a steely voice. ‘Tell them what you did. Tell them about my parents, about how you betrayed them to the Nazis, about how you sent them to Auschwitz on the cattle train. Tell them about my brother, about how you and Claes put a knife in his back. Tell them about Katya. Tell them, Titus. I’ll kill you if you don’t. I swear I will.’

But Osman wasn’t listening. He thought of jumping, but it was too far and he was too frightened. ‘Help me,’ he shouted, not at Clayton but at the burly man standing behind him. ‘That’s what I pay you for.’

Below, Wale backed away towards the police car without responding, leaving it to Clayton to do the talking. ‘Let him go,’ Clayton shouted up at Jacob. ‘Claes is dead. Isn’t that enough?’

But Jacob wasn’t listening. All his attention was focused on the trembling man in front of him. ‘Confess,’ he demanded, thrusting the gun into the small of Osman’s back. ‘Confess and I’ll let you go.’

‘No,’ said Osman. ‘I’m an innocent man.’ He shouted out the words so that everyone could hear them: Jana and the servants on the other side of the courtyard; the policemen down below; and even Osman’s cat, who’d emerged from under the bed and now stood watching the man who was hurting her master over by the window, forcing him to cry out in pain. Suddenly Cara arched her back and launched herself through the air, hanging on to Jacob’s shoulder with her claws as she sank her teeth into his neck, and, shocked to the core by this utterly unexpected attack from behind, Jacob dropped the gun.

Osman was onto the opportunity in an instant. Displaying an entirely unexpected athleticism for a man of his age, he dived to the ground, seized the gun in his hand, and rolled away towards the door.

Jacob staggered back into the room, struggling to get a firm grip on the cat as she continued her assault, scratching at his face and neck. Finally he succeeded in getting both his hands around her squirming body and threw her against the far wall, from where she fell to the floor with a shriek and then disappeared back under her master’s bed.

Jacob couldn’t see for a moment. Blood was spurting out from a line of cuts on his forehead, and he put up his hand to wipe it away. When he opened his eyes he found himself looking straight down the barrel of his own gun.

‘Don’t move. Don’t speak,’ said Osman. They were over by the bed, out of view of the people in the courtyard down below.

‘So you want to hear my confession, do you?’ he asked. His voice was a whisper. His head was inches from Jacob’s; it was almost as if he was kissing Jacob with his words, feeling for his fear with the gun. ‘You want to be my priest? You want to give me absolution for my sins?’

Jacob looked at his adversary, saying nothing, waiting to hear the truth. Behind him the soft winter breeze blew into the white silk curtains through the remains of the broken window, and down below Adam Clayton took Franz Claes’s gun out of his pocket, looked at it a moment, steeling his courage to the sticking place, and then went up the steps and entered the house through the wide-open front door.

‘There’s a line I can hardly read here,’ said Trave. His forehead was furrowed with concentration as he held Katya’s little diary up to the light. ‘It’s smudged like she spilt something on the page, or maybe she was crying.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Vanessa, nearly beside herself with impatience. ‘Get on with it, Bill. Put me out of my misery, for Christ’s sake.’

And Trave began to read again, slowly deciphering Katya’s scribbled words:

My uncle was sitting at his desk with Ethan’s note in front of him. And he looked up at me and smiled and I knew the truth then once and for all. He didn’t need to admit it. I knew what he had done. To Ethan and to David and to Ethan’s parents and to all those Jews he didn’t save.

‘So you found something, little Katya,’ he said. He’d never called me that before. ‘A whisper from the past. But that’s all it is, you know. A whisper; a murmur on the breeze that nobody will ever hear.’ And he picked up the writing pad and threw it on the fire and I watched it burn. Burn my proof to ashes; my hope to dust.

I looked at him and I spat in his face and he took out a silk handkerchief and wiped the spit away. He was still smiling, told me he was sorry it had come to this and even looked half-regretful when Franz took hold of me from behind and dragged me upstairs. I can still feel Franz’s cold hands on my body even now two hours later: killer’s hands they are, with no pity in them at all; no mercy. They’re going to kill me. I know they are. Just like they killed Ethan. So why don’t they get it over with? What are they waiting for?

‘They were waiting to get David Swain out of gaol; that’s what they were waiting for,’ said Trave, looking up. ‘So that they could set him up with the murder.’

But Vanessa wasn’t listening. Her face had crumpled up, and her body shook with terrible sobs. Titus was a murderer and she was his accomplice. That was the truth. If she had gone to the police with what Katya had told her the girl would still be alive. She’d been Katya’s last chance, and yet she had done nothing, just left Katya to her fate.

Titus had lied to her about everything — even perhaps about the existence of his dead wife and child, and she had believed him because she had wanted to; because she was flattered by his attention and wanted to be the new Mrs Osman, living the good life out at Blackwater Hall. Vanessa looked down at her hand and pulled Osman’s beautiful diamond ring from her finger and threw it away into a corner of the room. But it didn’t help; it didn’t change anything. The ring was still there, glittering by the skirting board, an indestructible symbol of her complicity, and she knew that she’d never stop feeling ashamed of herself until she was dead and buried and couldn’t feel anything any more.

‘You want to know why I betrayed your parents?’ asked Osman, staring into Jacob’s eyes.

‘Because they were Jews?’

‘No; they could have been Hindus for all I cared. Guess again.’

‘For their diamonds?’

‘Yes,’ said Osman. ‘You know the answer. Of course you do, but you don’t understand it. Look, look, where you threw them on the floor.’ Osman gestured with the gun down at the gemstones glittering like tiny stars all over the pale blue carpet at their feet.

‘They’re bits of rock. That’s all. They’re not alive,’ said Jacob. ‘Not like your victims were.’

‘Yes,’ said Osman. ‘You’re right. They’re not like flesh and blood; they don’t decay; they don’t rot. Diamonds are forever.’

Osman smiled, and Jacob knew suddenly what was going to happen next. He thought of shouting but knew instinctively that he wouldn’t get the words out of his mouth before the bullet entered his head. Osman would be able to say it was in self-defence — everyone down below in the courtyard had already seen Jacob at the window threatening the owner of the house with a gun.

‘Do people mean nothing to you?’ Jacob asked, playing for time. ‘Katya was your flesh and blood. She was almost like your daughter

…’

‘She was a fool. That’s what she was. Just like you. She couldn’t help herself: she had to peep through the keyhole; she had to go where she was forbidden — and for that there’s a price to pay; there’s always a price to pay. And you know what that price is, don’t you, Jacob?’ asked Osman. His voice was gentle, almost sad, but the gun was steady in his hand.

Jacob knew what was coming. He closed his eyes, shutting out Osman’s hateful face, waiting to hear the gun’s explosion in his ears — the last sound that he would ever hear, but instead he heard a familiar voice shouting ‘Stop’ somewhere to his left. He opened his eyes and saw Adam Clayton standing in the doorway, holding Claes’s gun shaking in his hands.

And then everything happened in a whirl of motion that neither Clayton nor Jacob could really unravel afterward. Jacob threw his body against Osman as Osman turned and fired at Clayton, missing the policeman by a hair’s breadth. And in response, without thinking, Clayton squeezed the trigger of Claes’s gun and killed Titus Osman with a bullet that passed through his heart and flew out through the already-broken window of the bedroom, embedding itself in a high branch of one of the tall pine trees at the top of Osman’s drive. It was the first time that Clayton had ever fired a gun, and afterwards he hoped it would be the last.

‘Give me the diary, Bill,’ said Vanessa, holding out her hand. ‘I need to see what happened in the end.’

At first Trave resisted. He was frightened for Vanessa, frightened of what the last entries in the dead girl’s diary might do to her peace of mind now that she knew who Osman really was and what he had done. In his moment of vindication Trave felt no sense of triumph at all. He just wished that none of it had ever happened, but, as he’d realized long ago, that was his lot in life. Like all murder detectives he always arrived too late.

Reluctantly he handed the diary over. Vanessa had more right to it than he did after what she had gone through to get it. He sensed that she wanted to be alone, and so he went upstairs to phone Creswell. Osman and Claes and Claes’s sister needed to be arrested before anyone else got hurt.

He put his hand on his wife’s shoulder briefly as he passed behind the sofa, feeling that he had never loved her as much as he did at that moment and yet had never been more powerless to make her happy.

Once the door closed, Vanessa turned the pages quickly, looking for the entry for September 15th, the day of her encounter with Katya in the drawing room. She soon found it:

September 15th:

I cannot bear the pain any more. I feel like I’m going mad. I think it would be better to die than to carry on like this. But how? That’s the question. Perhaps I can steal the matches from Jana when she comes in to feed me and then we’ll die together, she and I. Burn until there’s nothing left. There would be justice in that. But I know that at the last moment I won’t be able to go through with it; I’ll draw back — I know I will. Why? Why, in God’s name, why? It’s not fear of death that stops me. I know that. It’s hope; hope for life. Hope is my curse. It always has been. I see that now. God, how much better I would be without it. How much…

Vanessa realized that Katya must have written this entry earlier in the day, before she fought with Jana in her room and escaped downstairs, but none of those events was recorded in the diary. It was like that night had been a watershed. The entries on the pages that followed grew shorter, no longer a record of the days but rather sporadic thoughts and expressions of desperate emotion. Vanessa wondered whether Katya had worried about having the diary open too long at any one time, but it was more likely, she thought, that the girl had just run out of energy and perhaps at the end even hope. There was only one reference to Vanessa by name. It came two days later and consisted of only a few words, but they stabbed Vanessa to the heart with a pain that she felt would never go away:

Will Vanessa help me? Did she listen to me? Or was all I did in vain?

And the last entry in the book was undated — a one-line scrawl:

What’s the bloody point?

Vanessa closed the book and looked up at her husband standing wide-eyed in the doorway.

‘What is it?’ she asked, getting to her feet. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Claes is dead,’ he said. ‘He was hit by a lorry in Blackwater village. It must have been when he was chasing you. Died instantly apparently. Are you all right, Vanessa?’ he asked, noticing how his wife’s face had gone white with shock. She shuddered uncontrollably several times and then exhaled deeply.

‘Yes,’ she said, swallowing. ‘It’s a surprise. That’s all. He’d have killed me if he’d caught me. I know he would. And I never thought I’d hear myself say this about another human being, but I’m glad he’s dead. He was evil, Bill, wicked through and through. It wasn’t just Katya and Ethan whom he murdered, you know. There were many more in the war — Jews he helped send to the gas chambers without a second thought.’

‘How do you know?’

‘He worked with Adolf Eichmann. I’m not sure in what way, but I know he did. Titus got angry with him at lunch today and said something about what the Israelis should do to Eichmann. It was deliberate, and Franz looked crazy suddenly, like he was going to kill Titus or something. I think that’s why they murdered Ethan, you know — because of what he found out in West Germany about Franz. That’s what Jacob told Katya and I think he was right.’

Vanessa looked at her husband, noticing how he was shifting his weight from foot to foot, looking away from her to hide his discomfort.

‘There’s something else,’ she said. ‘Something you’re not telling me. It’s Titus, isn’t it?’ she asked, her voice rising hysterically as she instinctively guessed at the truth. ‘He’s dead too, isn’t he?’

Trave nodded. And walked slowly over to his wife, putting his arms out to comfort her as she collapsed in tears on the sofa that they had bought together years before.

‘I’m sorry, Vanessa,’ he said. ‘You deserved so much better than this.’

And he held her gently as her body was rocked with wild sobs and she gave way to a terrible grief.

Cara waited under her master’s bed for several minutes after Clayton and Jacob had left the room. She sat wide-eyed in the darkness with her heart beating fast, waiting for the silence to return. And then, as the winter sun outside the window sank gently down toward the western horizon, she stepped out, picking her way carefully among the glittering diamonds scattered across the floor until she came to her master’s corpse. There she stopped, staring unblinking down into his dead eyes for a few moments before she laid herself slowly down, stretching her warm body over the blood-red stain that was still spreading out across the left side of his starched white shirt.