The King of Diamonds

CHAPTER 30

Vanessa drove Trave to the ferry in her Citroen 2CV. She had become very attached to the car since her escape from Claes in it a month earlier, and swore that she intended to keep it until it died a natural death.

‘And then I suppose you’ll bury it in the back garden?’ said Trave with a smile.

And Vanessa started to laugh too, but then stopped because there was no outside space at her flat, and he could only be referring to the garden of their old home in North Oxford.

But then the awkwardness passed as they came out onto a wide stretch of road with fields of wheat on either side waving in the breeze, and it was impossible not to feel happy about the coming of spring. There was a warmth between them now that sometimes reminded Trave of the days when they were young and had travelled through France and Italy in a car like this one, putting up at tiny auberges or even sometimes sleeping out in the open under the Mediterranean moonlight.

They were older now, scarred with their different experiences and kept awake at night by different kinds of guilt. But what they had both been through also made them more understanding of each other, and for the first time in their lives it seemed like they were really friends.

Trave worried about Vanessa. There was nothing he could do to change the fact that she had been seduced by Osman and had failed Katya in her hour of need, but he knew that he had failed Vanessa too. He had abandoned her when she needed him after their son died. And this time he was not going to make the same mistake. She needed comfort and support, but he also knew she needed space and time to think. She still stayed most nights in her flat, and he understood why that was important to her. Like her job, the flat was an achievement, an expression of her ability to be a person in her own right, outside her husband’s shadow. And in fact he enjoyed the evenings when he went to dinner there at her invitation, amazed by her newly developed culinary skills and the pictures on the walls that spoke of a talent and passion that he had hardly guessed at until now.

Trave encouraged his wife quietly and comforted her when she grieved, and he tried hard to live in the moment and hope for the best. Creswell had rushed through his reinstatement, which was accompanied by a fulsome letter of apology from the chief constable himself, and the return to work gave Trave’s life a renewed purpose. Sometimes he caught Clayton, newly promoted to the rank of detective sergeant, looking at him out of the corner of his eye, anxious that his boss was about to have another hunch, but so far there had been nothing to disturb their working harmony. Crime in Oxford this March was considerably down from the previous year.

Trave and Vanessa stopped for lunch on the way and got to Harwich with only minutes to spare, so that Trave was almost the last passenger to board the boat. He carried his small suitcase down the gangway and waved to his wife from the deck. ‘Next time you’ll come too,’ he shouted, but his voice was drowned out by the sound of a horn. And almost immediately the ship moved off, groaning as it left its moorings. Trave smelt the sea in his nostrils and was suddenly exhilarated. ‘I love you,’ he called to Vanessa’s receding figure, and this time he was sure she’d heard him. He saw her face light up with a smile as she put up her hand and waved back, and he thought that she had never looked as beautiful as at that moment, with her dark brown hair blown up around her face in the gathering wind.

He got to Antwerp in the early evening and went to bed early. He’d arranged with Aliza to pick her up in the hired car at nine o’clock the next morning, and he wanted to be rested for the day ahead.

Aliza was as he remembered her — old and frail and extraordinarily alive. As before she was dressed in black, but today she had a coloured prayer shawl over her shoulders. She looked straight ahead as he drove, as if preparing herself for what lay ahead.

‘It is hard to know I was so wrong about Titus. It hurts my faith in human nature,’ she said quietly, breaking the silence when they were halfway to Mechelen. Trave had phoned straight away to tell her about Osman’s death and Jacob’s arrest, and since then he had written her a long letter describing how the truth about Osman and Claes had emerged afterwards. And it was in response to that letter that she had invited him to Antwerp.

‘It’s your faith in human nature that has enabled you to survive,’ said Trave. ‘And I admire you for that.’

‘I survive because I survive,’ said Aliza sadly. ‘There is no secret to it. Some of us do and some of us don’t. But I thank God and your deputy, Mr Clayton, for sparing me my grandson. Do you know how much longer he must remain in prison, Inspector?’

‘Not too long, I hope. He will have to do some gaol time for the burglaries, but the court should give him credit for pleading guilty and will have to take account of his motivation for committing the crimes. It’ll be hard for the court to be too severe on him when he was simply trying to obtain a justice that the legal system played such a role in denying him.’

‘I hope you are right. He has written several times to say that he will return to me when he is released, and I am already weary with waiting,’ said Aliza with a smile that belied her words. Trave couldn’t imagine impatience getting the better of the old lady. He felt he had never in all his life met a person who radiated such inner calm.

‘Follow the road by the river,’ she directed when they arrived in the outskirts of Mechelen a few minutes later. ‘It’ll take you there.’ And she was right — Trave didn’t need any further directions.

He parked in a corner of the square and held Aliza’s arm as they crossed the road and stood across from the entrance to the barracks. He was surprised by the building — it was an eighteenth-century classical design, pleasing to the eye and very different to the soaring gabled Renaissance Gothic architecture that dominated the rest of the town. There were three storeys with rectangular windows at symmetrical intervals all around the four enclosing white-painted walls, and inside, through an arched entrance, Trave could see a quadrangle in which men in uniform were walking to and fro. He remembered what Jacob had told him — that the barracks were now used as a training centre for the Belgian army.

‘We come here in September,’ Aliza said softly. ‘And stand in a circle with candles and say the names of our dead. Because this is where the railhead was, where they put them on the trains. This is where they left Belgium never to return.’

‘Would you like to go inside?’ asked Trave. But Aliza shook her head. Instead she pulled her shawl over her head, slipped her arm out of Trave’s, and clasped her hands together in prayer. She bowed her head and then, looking over at the barracks, she began to sing, or rather to chant, in a language that Trave didn’t understand but knew must be Hebrew. The chant was beautiful, suffused with an infinite sadness that went straight to Trave’s heart.

‘What is it?’ asked Trave when she had finished. ‘It’s like you were grieving for the whole world.’

‘In a way I was,’ said Aliza, looking up. ‘It is from the Book of Lamentations. The prophet, Jeremiah, is weeping for the fate of Jerusalem after it was sacked by Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. He says: ‘Alas, she sits in solitude! The city that was great with people has become like a widow. She weeps bitterly in the night and her tear is on my cheek. Those who I cherished and brought up, my enemy has wiped out.’ It is the song we sing on Tisha B’av, our day of mourning, when we remember all that has happened to our people. But we are also commanded to hope and to believe, and so when those we love die we extol the name of God and we say that He is good. We say Kaddish for them, and we refuse to give in. Come, Inspector, say it with me. I will pray in English.’

Aliza held out her hand, and Trave took it and went to stand beside her, thinking for a moment how strange they must seem to anyone passing by — an old lady and a middle-aged man standing hand in hand praying outside an army barracks in the morning sunshine. He smiled at the thought and Aliza smiled back; and then, holding her hand in his, he repeated each line of the Kaddish after her, looking up at the plaque by the entrance arch, the best memorial Belgium could offer to the twenty-five thousand men, women, and children who had been sent away from this place to die:

MAY HIS GREAT NAME GROW EXALTED AND SANCTIFIED IN THE WORLD THAT HE CREATED AS HE WILLED. MAY HE GIVE REIGN TO HIS KINGSHIP IN YOUR LIFETIMES AND IN YOUR DAYS, AND IN THE LIFETIMES OF THE ENTIRE FAMILY OF ISRAEL SWIFTLY AND SOON. BLESSED, PRAISED, GLORIFIED, EXALTED, EXTOLLED, MIGHTY, UPRAISED, AND LAUDED BE THE NAME OF THE HOLY ONE BEYOND ANY BLESSING AND SONG, PRAISE AND CONSOLATION THAT ARE UTTERED IN THE WORLD. MAY THERE BE ABUNDANT PEACE FROM HEAVEN AND LIFE UPON US AND UPON ALL ISRAEL. HE WHO MAKES PEACE IN HIS HEIGHTS, MAY HE MAKE PEACE, UPON US AND UPON ALL ISRAEL.

AMEN