The King of Diamonds (13 page)

He lay back against the tree and closed his eyes. Unconsciously he ran his fingers over the smooth red-brown surface of one of the chestnuts that were lying strewn on the ground at his side. It felt reassuring somehow, perhaps because it reminded him of his childhood. At school he and his friends had threaded thin pieces of string through the soft centres of the conkers, as they called them, and then fought with them in the playground, taking it in turns to smite the other’s chestnut until one of them burst and the other survived to fight another day.
Conkers
. David remembered an especially hard nut that had once been his most treasured possession, the veteran of countless fights, a legend in its own time but now long forgotten – in a drawer somewhere perhaps, mouldering. In that house on the other side of Oxford, where his mother, old before her time, lived with Ben Bishop, who drove a bus and treated him like he didn’t exist. It wasn’t David’s home any more, hadn’t been for a long time, but for now he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. Ben worked on Sundays, and he needed someone to clean his wound, to let him rest for a few hours and get back his strength while he decided what to do, and surely to God his mother couldn’t deny him that. The police would come looking of course, but maybe not tonight, not while they were busy searching for him in the undergrowth. It was a bad plan. He knew that. But it was better than no plan at all.

Using the trunk of the chestnut tree for support, David hauled himself to his feet and took a last look at the road below and the lights from the house hidden in the trees: Osman’s house and inside it Katya, dead with a bullet in her head. Then, with a heavy sigh, David tucked the gun in the waistband of his jeans, pushed the wad of banknotes deep into his pocket, and set off down the other side of the hill towards Blackwater village.

It was difficult to see his way even in the moonlight, and once or twice he stumbled, almost losing his footing on the uneven ground. With each step he felt more light-headed, weaker at the knees, and, when he looked up, the stars seemed to be rushing through the sky as if he was looking at them through a black-and-white kaleidoscope. Reaching the empty road, he staggered a few hundred yards to a crossroads at the beginning of the village and then sank to the ground, exhausted, in the shadow of a garden hedge.

He was awoken in the first grey light of dawn by the noise of a lorry’s engine only a few feet away from where he was. The driver waited a moment or two, no doubt for the cross-traffic to pass, and then drove away into the night. Across the road in the light from a street-lamp David could see the Blackwater village store. There was food in the window – biscuits and loaves and even a birthday cake, and David suddenly felt ravenously hungry. He hadn’t eaten since six o’clock the night before, and not much then. Saturday-night dinner in Oxford Prison was always the worst of the week: the cooks went home for the weekend, and the cons got food reheated from the night before.

David remembered the shop now: he’d passed it on the bus ten times or more on his way to meet Katya at the boathouse in happier times. Katya and he had even been in there once, on a hot summer’s day more than three years ago now, standing in line behind a gaggle of children from the village as they queued to buy peppermints and ice creams from Mrs Parsler, who had to climb up on a tiny stepladder to reach down dusty jars of sweets from a shelf high above her head. Her husband’s name was on the sign above the door, and no doubt the two of them were now fast asleep behind the drawn curtains in their flat overhead. David was so hungry that he thought for a moment of smashing the shop window and taking the food from inside, but he resisted the temptation: if he was going to be caught, it wouldn’t be for something as stupid as that. Sleep had at least temporarily cleared his head, and he realized that he hadn’t any more time to waste. He needed help with his shoulder and he was too weak to go on much longer; certainly he was too weak to walk into Oxford. And there was no point trying to steal a car since he had no idea how to hot-wire the ignition. No, he’d have to get someone to drive him, and there was only one way of doing that.

He stood waiting in the shadows, holding the gun inside his pocket. Nothing moved. The village was entirely quiet, its inhabitants blissfully unaware that they would be on the front page of the national news by the end of the day. And then, just as the church bell had finished tolling the hour of five, David saw lights coming up the road toward him. It was now or never. As the car slowed to a stop at the junction, he walked out into the headlights and waved his uninjured arm above his head.

He was in luck. The driver wound down his window and leaned his head out.

‘What’s wrong, mate?’ The man sounded nervous, frightened even. David wasn’t surprised. He had to look like something out of a horror film, dressed in his blood-soaked, ripped-up prison clothes.

‘I’ve been in an accident,’ said David, improvising. ‘A car hit me when I was crossing the road. I need to get to a hospital. Can you take me?’

‘I don’t know about that. Why don’t you knock on one of these doors, ask someone to call you an ambulance? I’m sure they will.’

It was the answer David had anticipated. He hadn’t seriously expected that a passing motorist would give him a lift at five in the morning looking like he did, but the conversation had given him time to edge round toward the driver’s door of the car, and now he rushed forward and pulled it open, pointing the gun at the side of the man’s head.

‘Give me the keys,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘I’ll shoot you if you don’t.’

The man didn’t obey at first. He sat with his hands rigid on the steering wheel, obviously in shock, and it was only when David thrust the barrel of the gun against his right temple that he leant forward, turned off the engine, and handed David the keys with a shaking hand. On the man’s other side a young woman in a party dress sat frozen in fear, her eyes fixed on the gun.

With the keys in his pocket, David pulled the handle of the door to the back seat, but nothing happened. It was obviously locked.

‘Open it,’ he shouted. ‘Open the fucking door.’ But the man did nothing. Perhaps shock had immobilized him again, or maybe he couldn’t face the thought of having the gun pointing at the back of his head. David didn’t care. His frustration boiled over, and he wanted to hit the man, to pistol-whip him until he did what he was told. And maybe he would have done if the woman hadn’t intervened. Leaning across the back seat, she lifted the lock and David got in.

‘All right,’ he said, tossing the keys over the man’s shoulder into his lap. ‘Now drive. We’re going to Oxford.’

‘We! Why we? Why can’t you leave us here and take the car? Please, please do that.’ The man had got his voice back, but he was quite clearly terrified out of his wits. He stumbled over his words, and the woman didn’t look any better: David could see her hands shaking in her lap. But David felt no sympathy or guilt. Instead he felt a curious sense of disconnection from himself. The panic and desperation that he’d experienced earlier up on the hill had disappeared, and now it was as if he was watching himself, as if he wasn’t really here at all. And besides, there was no time to argue. That much was obvious. There would be more police cars coming this way soon, joining the manhunt down the road.

‘Do as I say,’ said David, louder this time. ‘Shut your fucking door and drive. I’ll use this thing if you don’t. I promise you I will.’

‘Do what he says, Barry. Please!’ The woman’s voice rose almost to a scream on the last word. David could clearly see that she was about to have hysterics. But the man made no move to start the car.

‘All right,’ said David, taking a deep breath and making a conscious effort to speak in a calm and measured voice. ‘I can’t take the car and leave you here because you’ll go straight into that shop over there, wake up Mr and Mrs Parsler if they’re not awake already with the noise we’re making, and get them to call the police. I need a head start, and that’s why I need you to drive. Okay? Twenty minutes: that’s all I need, and then you’ll never see me again. I promise.’

David didn’t know whether it was his words or the way he said them that had the desired effect, but the man seemed to relax. He sighed audibly and his shoulders slumped.

‘Put that thing down then,’ he said, turning his head to look at David over his shoulder. ‘I can’t drive with that pointing at me.’

Carefully, David put the gun down on the seat beside him and covered it with his hand. The man nodded, pulled his door shut, and put the keys in the ignition, and, as they pulled away, David saw that the lights had come on in several of the neighbouring houses, including above the window of the general store opposite, and inconsequentially he thought how the night’s events might at least be good for the Parslers’ business.

They drove in silence. The woman kept looking back at David and the gun on the seat beside him, but he didn’t pay her any attention. He was lost in thought, working out what to do, racing over the possibilities, calculating his chances, and all the time his shoulder hurt him more and more as he felt waves of hot and cold rush through his body. He wondered how much time he had left before he passed out.

Halfway down the Cowley Road, he told them where they were going. ‘The railway station,’ he said. ‘Take me to Oxford Station.’

It felt strange to be back in the station car park again, parked only a few yards away from where Eddie and he had arrived from the prison so elated five hours earlier. It seemed impossible that it was such a short time ago. Where was Eddie now? David wondered angrily, thinking of his cellmate driving away through the night to a new life in his red Triumph, but then he dismissed the thought from his mind. He had more important things to think about now, like laying a false trail. He needed to concentrate. Everything depended on him getting it right in the next few minutes.

‘Well, aren’t you going to go then?’ asked the man, looking back at David in the driving mirror. ‘Twenty minutes: that’s what you said. We’ve done what you asked.’

‘I need to know when the first train leaves for London. That’s when I’m going. Go and look on that board over there. It’ll say.’

‘I don’t need to look,’ said the man. ‘The first one on a Sunday’s at twenty to six.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’ve been on it before.’

‘Well, twenty to six it is then,’ said David, settling back in his seat. And they relapsed into silence. The man, Barry, sat rigid, staring straight ahead at the big Victorian clock over the station entrance, but his companion kept looking back at David. She seemed less frightened now, as if realizing that if he was going to do anything to them he’d have done it already. She was pretty in an odd sort of way, David realized. All dressed up in her party frock with a ribbon in her hair at the end of an evening that he’d turned into a nightmare.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

‘Lucille,’ she said. ‘What’s yours?’

‘David.’ He liked the way she said her name. Not Lucy – Lucille. A bit of class. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he added, making the words sound like a joke. And she smiled, as if appreciating his effort to lighten the tension. But Barry didn’t see it that way.

‘Shut up,’ he said, turning toward her. ‘Don’t talk to him, Luce, all right?’

But she was having none of it. ‘Shut up yourself,’ she said. ‘You don’t own me.’

David smiled. ‘So you’re not married?’ he asked.

‘No way,’ she said. David could sense Barry bristling with irritation in the seat in front, but she hadn’t finished. ‘What did you do?’ she asked. ‘We saw all those police cars back there before you . . .’ Her voice tailed off, but David had picked up on her greedy curiosity and felt suddenly disgusted.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter what I did.’

He looked up at the station clock. It was time.

‘Give me your jacket,’ he said, tapping Barry on the shoulder.

‘No.’ Barry sounded defiant, angry even.

‘Give me your fucking jacket,’ David shouted, losing his temper. And his anger had the desired effect. The man took off his jacket and passed it back to David, while the woman cowered in her seat, her fear returning as she saw the gun in his hand.

‘Right,’ said David. ‘I’m going. Don’t follow me and don’t call the police. Okay?’

He didn’t wait for an answer, just got out of the car and walked quickly into the station without a backward glance. He was sure they would call the police, but maybe not straight away. And probably not from the station either. He should have time.

He asked the clerk at the ticket office a whole lot of questions about train times, about the cost of first- and second-class tickets, and even about whether there was a dining car, hoping that the man would remember him when the police came asking questions later, and then, with a single ticket in his pocket, he crossed the bridge to the London platform. And when the train arrived several minutes later, blocking the view across the tracks from the ticket office and the car park, he slipped away unnoticed through a side exit, climbed over the barrier, and walked away towards the canal with the collar of Barry’s jacket pulled up around his ears.

Trave sat behind the big mahogany desk, across from its owner, Titus Osman, who was dressed in an expensive coal-black suit and tie. The desk’s surface was covered with a light film of white fingerprint powder but was otherwise bare except for a telephone, a green-shaded reading lamp, and a photograph of Katya in a silver frame. It had been taken several years previously, and she looked nothing like the emaciated waif she had since become. Clayton sat to one side of the desk with notebook and pen at the ready; opposite him, on the other side of the room, the glass from the shattered window pane lay in pieces on the pale blue Axminster carpet. Outside, Osman’s red and white roses were just beginning to be visible in the first grey light of dawn, and beyond the dew-covered lawn the sound of the police search teams shouting to each other in the woods was distantly audible.

‘I’m sorry for the wait, Mr Osman,’ said Trave. ‘This room is where the intruder broke into your house and probably got out too, and so I wanted to bring you in here so that you could see if anything is missing or has been moved about. And I’m afraid that meant waiting until forensics had finished.’

‘No problem, Inspector. It gave me time to get dressed and compose myself a little,’ said Osman evenly.

‘And yet you look surprised,’ said Trave, noticing Osman’s raised eyebrows and the quizzical look on his face. ‘May I ask why?’

‘I suppose I am unaccustomed to being interviewed on the wrong side of my own desk,’ said Osman with a thin smile. ‘But it doesn’t matter; it is Katya, my niece, who matters. It is horrible, quite horrible, what has happened. I cannot believe it, cannot credit it.’ Osman shuddered and put his hand up to his face, running his fingers across his eyes.

Trave couldn’t tell whether Osman had been crying. There was certainly redness around his pupils, but whether from tears or rubbing was anyone’s guess.

‘I’m sorry, Inspector,’ said Osman, taking a deep breath and shaking his head as if trying to pull himself together. He glanced around the room. ‘Nothing appears to have been taken as far as I am aware. I have not had time to check the drawers in my desk.’

‘Why do you keep the top one locked?’ asked Trave. He kept his eyes fixed on Osman as he asked the question.

‘Because its contents are private.’

‘Private to me?’

‘Yes, Inspector: private even to you. And frankly I can’t see their relevance to what has happened here tonight.’

Clayton, shifting in his seat, silently agreed.

‘Look, my brother-in-law has told me that he saw David Swain outside my niece’s room tonight – the same man who murdered my guest, Ethan Mendel, two years ago,’ Osman went on, leaning across the desk. ‘I thought that Mr Swain was safely locked away in prison, but perhaps he has escaped. Has he, Inspector?’

‘Yes, he’s escaped,’ said Trave in a flat, expressionless voice.

‘I see,’ said Osman, sounding unsurprised. ‘Well, then, perhaps it is Mr Swain that we should be talking about. Not my private correspondence.’

‘I’ll decide which questions to ask, if you don’t mind, Mr Osman,’ said Trave coolly. ‘Perhaps you wouldn’t mind explaining why you felt the need to keep your niece imprisoned in her room?’

‘The bars on her window were for her safety,’ said Osman patiently. ‘And her door wasn’t locked, Inspector. If it had been, Mr Swain wouldn’t have been able to get into her room tonight, would he?’

‘Perhaps not. But then can you explain why she seems to have been suffering from malnutrition and has needle marks all up one arm?’ Trave spoke harshly, not bothering to keep the anger out of his voice.

‘The marks are from the drugs she took when she was in Oxford before I got her back here last month, and she is thin because she refused to eat. It wasn’t for want of trying. It broke my heart to see her like that, but she was stubborn like her mother, my sister.’

‘So I assume you got professional help?’

‘Yes, of course. My doctor has been here regularly to see her.’

‘Is he a psychiatrist?’

‘He’s a doctor, a good doctor.’

There was an uneasy silence. Once again Clayton found himself puzzled by the way that Trave was pursuing the investigation. Certainly there were questions that needed to be asked about the deceased’s physical state, but there was no real evidence that she’d been imprisoned in her room, and there was nothing to justify Trave’s ill-concealed hostility to Osman and his family.

‘Can you tell us what you know about what happened here tonight?’ Clayton asked, speaking for the first time.

‘Certainly,’ said Osman, transferring his attention from Trave to the younger policeman with a smile. ‘I went to bed at about eleven. I heard gunshots . . .’

‘How many?’

‘Several. I can’t be sure. I was asleep. I got out of bed and opened the door of my bedroom. I heard Franz shouting my name, and then at the same time someone was rushing past me in the corridor. He was running very fast, and instinctively I backed away into my bedroom or he would have knocked me over.’

‘Did you see who it was?’

‘No, he was too quick.’

‘He?’

‘I had the impression it was a man. As I say, he was very quick.’

‘Were the lights on?’

‘Yes. It was dark outside when I opened the door, and so I turned on the light in the corridor. I wish I hadn’t now as it must have helped Swain find his way downstairs.’

‘And where is your bedroom, sir?’ asked Clayton.

‘Just above where we are now, off the first-floor corridor. It’s on the far left side of the house as you face it from the front.’

‘Thank you,’ said Clayton, making a note.

Osman looked benevolently at Trave’s assistant, and Trave looked even more irritated than before. ‘So what happened next?’ he asked, taking over the questioning.

‘There was quite a lot of noise coming from downstairs, but then it stopped; and, at about the same time, Franz came down the flight of stairs nearest my bedroom. As you probably know, there is a staircase at each end of the house leading from the first to the second floors, but only one central staircase coming up from the ground floor, and I’d heard the intruder running down that one,’ said Osman, glancing over at Clayton, who was busy writing in his book. ‘Franz had his gun with him, and so we came down here and found the window broken over there. It seemed like Swain had gone, and so I left Franz to look through the other rooms while I went back upstairs and found Katya. She was . . .’ Osman’s voice broke, and he covered his face with his hand for a moment, mastering his emotion.

‘How do you think Swain knew where he was going?’ asked Trave, once Osman had had a chance to compose himself. ‘Has he been here before tonight?’

‘Never with my permission. Once without, but that’s all as far as I know. Katya had him in the house when I was away on business, and she even took him in her bedroom. I was very angry when I found out about it afterwards.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it is my house. I make the rules,’ said Osman, as if he was stating the obvious.

‘But why wouldn’t you let him in the house in the first place?’ asked Trave. ‘What didn’t you like about Mr Swain?’

Osman paused, thinking about his answer before he gave it.

‘My niece has always had a tendency to mix with the wrong kind of people,’ he said slowly, choosing his words with care. ‘It became a great deal worse after Ethan’s death, when she got into quite a lot of trouble in Oxford, but the problem was there before. Ethan’s death hit me particularly hard because I had thought that Katya had at last found someone suitable.’

‘But in what way was Mr Swain unsuitable?’ asked Trave, persisting with his question.

‘He was without roots, without academic background; he was living hand-to-mouth.’

‘And Ethan?’

‘He had been to university in Antwerp and done well. He’d lost his parents, but I knew why, and his grandmother, who brought him up, is a solid, respectable person. Ethan had a future – a bright one, until Swain took it away from him. I was right about Swain, you see. He turned out to be worse, much worse, than I thought he was: nothing more or less than a cold-blooded murderer. But being right doesn’t help in the end. Katya is dead, and all I ever wanted to do was protect her. You see, she was my last blood relative. Everyone else died in the war. Franz was my wife’s brother, and so he and Jana are family too, but it is not the same.’

‘And yet you were able to save other people you knew from the Nazis, were you not, Mr Osman?’ asked Trave, leaning forward. ‘People like Ethan Mendel and his brother.’

‘Yes, I was lucky: I had the money and the contacts, and so when the deportations began in Belgium I was able to help some of my Jewish friends to escape.’

‘But you couldn’t save everyone; you had to choose, didn’t you? Who to help, who to leave behind,’ Trave went on insistently. ‘Like in that picture you’ve got up there over the mantelpiece. It’s from Exodus, isn’t it? The Angel of Death going through the streets, passing over the doors of those who were to be saved, exercising the power of life and death. Is that why you bought that picture, Mr Osman? So that it would make you think of having that power again?’

Osman looked furious for a moment, fighting to retain his self-possession. But then he smiled crookedly, as if he’d thought of the perfect riposte.

‘I have the picture in here because it reminds me every day of what happened in my country,’ he said slowly. ‘And because it is beautiful, a true work of art. I wouldn’t expect you to understand that, Inspector, but Vanessa certainly thinks it has quality. She was admiring it just the other day, and I have great faith in her judgement.’

Trave seemed to flinch as if he’d just been hit. His cheeks flushed, and Clayton saw how his boss’s fists clenched hard on the surface of the desk. He remembered the rumours, the station gossip from the year before about Trave’s wife walking out on him. Vanessa was her name. Clayton was sure of it. Was that the same Vanessa whom Osman was talking about now? It certainly seemed like it.

The door opened, but not to a human visitor. It was a cat, long and sleek and black with two distinctive white markings on either side of its green eyes. It was a most beautiful creature, thought Clayton, who had never been an animal lover. Coming to a halt beside Osman’s chair, the cat arched its back, as if delighting in its own suppleness, and then jumped into Osman’s lap with an easy, precise leap and sat facing Trave across the desk.

‘Hullo, Cara,’ said Osman, scratching the cat delicately behind its ears. ‘I was wondering where you’d got to.’ The cat purred, blinking its eyes at the two policemen, and Clayton had a sudden sense that Trave was now the one on the wrong side of the desk, that it was the inspector who was being interviewed, not the owner of the house.

‘Cara spends much of her time outside, hunting in the woods. And I like that, that she’s independent. But today it’s no fun for her out there with the grounds full of strangers,’ said Osman, looking out through the broken window toward the sunrise. ‘Better for her to stay inside, I think. Do you need me for anything else, Inspector? If not, I’ll go and give Cara her breakfast.’

Trave shook his head, and Osman got up to leave, but at the door Trave called him back.

‘There is just one last thing, Mr Osman. Do you have a burglar alarm?’

‘Yes, but I only use it when I’m away.’

‘And why is that? You have many valuable items in this house, don’t you?’

‘Yes. Perhaps I am too trusting. But – how is it you English say? – hindsight is a wonderful thing. I’m here if you need me, Inspector.’ Osman smiled and went through the door, preceded by his cat.

‘How bloody convenient,’ Trave burst out once the door was closed. ‘The bastard might just as well have left the window open.’

‘I don’t know about that. Aren’t you exaggerating a bit, sir? A lot of people don’t use their alarms when they’re at home, you know,’ said Clayton mildly.

Trave grunted, continuing to look thunderous, and once again Clayton felt disturbed by his boss’s obvious animosity toward the occupants of the house. Questions had to be asked, but the interviews with Titus Osman and his family had seemed at times more like interrogations. Just now, for instance, Trave’s questioning of Osman’s motives for helping Jews in the war seemed like a gratuitous personal attack for which Clayton could see no justification. Trave’s approach to the case made no sense, particularly when there was an obvious suspect with motive aplenty who was now on the run from the police. There had to be an explanation. Did it have something to do with Vanessa, Trave’s wife, who’d left him for another man? Clayton remembered how Trave had seemed to get so angry when Osman mentioned her name. What was Osman’s connection to Vanessa? Clayton wondered. He knew that sooner or later he was going to have to ask his boss what it was all about. He couldn’t do his job properly if he didn’t have the full picture. But at the same time Clayton shied away from the prospect. Trave was a private man, one of the most private men Clayton had ever met, and the thought of invading his boss’s privacy on a subject as sensitive as his failed marriage made Clayton feel distinctly uneasy. He’d have to find the right opportunity, but it certainly wasn’t now, not with Trave sitting behind Osman’s desk, looking like thunder.