The King of Diamonds (24 page)

COUNSEL
: Why?

WITNESS
: Osman knew my father before the war. They both dealt in diamonds. My family – we are Jews, and after the German invasion it became unsafe. More and more unsafe. Osman – he was called Usman then – helped my brother and me escape with our grandmother to Switzerland in 1942, but my parents waited. I don’t really know why. And then the next year, when Osman tried to help them, they were caught crossing the border into France and the Germans sent them to the deportation camp at Malines. And from there they went on a train to Auschwitz. And they died. Ethan wanted to know more about what happened to them and so he went to see Osman in England.

COUNSEL
: Did you hear from Ethan after he left?

WITNESS
: Yes, he telephoned my grandmother and me at Christmas, and he wrote us postcards. He said that he was staying longer than he’d expected and that he had met a girl, Katya, who was Osman’s niece. He said he was happy. And then at the start of May I got a letter from Ethan which was different. He said that he had found out something important, too important to tell me about except face-to-face. He said that I should come to England and talk to him. But I did not go to England because Katya telephoned to say that Ethan was dead – murdered. His body came back to us on an aeroplane.

COUNSEL
: Did Ethan say anything else in his letter about what he had found out?

WITNESS
: He said it was dangerous. That’s all.

COUNSEL
: You have the letter with you, Mr Mendel?

WITNESS
: Yes.

Witness produces handwritten letter in postmarked envelope.

COUNSEL
: This will be exhibit 33, my lord. It’s dated May 4 of this year and postmarked Munich, West Germany – the day before Ethan Mendel’s death.

JUDGE
: Yes, very well – exhibit 33. Is that all, Mr Relton?

COUNSEL
: Yes, my lord.

JUDGE
: Very well. Do you wish to cross-examine the witness, Mr Arne?

PROSECUTION COUNSEL
,
MR ARNE
: Yes, my lord, just a few questions. You have no idea what it is that your brother wished to talk to you about, do you?

WITNESS
: No, but I’m pretty sure it was . . .

COUNSEL
: Please don’t speculate, Mr Mendel. We are solely concerned with facts here, not guesses. Do you know David Swain?

WITNESS
: No.

COUNSEL
: Do you know anything about letters written by Mr Swain to Katya Osman?

WITNESS
: No.

COUNSEL
: Do you know anything about David Swain’s movements on the day of your brother’s murder?

WITNESS
: No.

COUNSEL
: Do you know anything about your brother’s movements that day?

WITNESS
: No, of course I don’t. I was in Belgium when my brother was murdered. I already said that.

COUNSEL
: Yes, you did. And the point I’m making to you now is that you don’t know anything about what happened to your brother because he never told you anything, and you weren’t even in this country when he was killed . . .

WITNESS
: I know he’d found out something . . .

COUNSEL
: But you don’t know what it was. Your letter leads us precisely nowhere. It’s not evidence.

WITNESS
: But . . .

COUNSEL
: Thank you, Mr Mendel, I’ve no more questions. I’m sorry that you’ve had such a wasted journey.

WITNESS
: I don’t care what’s evidence or not evidence; I care about who killed my brother. Ethan died because he’d found out something, and I’m going to find out what it was.

JUDGE
: Please just answer the questions, Mr Mendel. Do you have any re-examination, Mr Relton?

DEFENCE COUNSEL
,
MR RELTON
: No, my lord.

JUDGE
: Thank you, Mr Mendel. You may step down.

‘Pretty effective piece of cross-examination I’d say,’ said Trave, catching Clayton’s eye as he looked up at the end of the page. ‘Jacob Mendel had no real probative evidence to give, and the defence looked stupid for calling him. That’s what I thought at the time anyway, but since then Jacob and his mysterious letter have gnawed at the back of my mind. It’s like Ethan’s note – an itch that won’t go away.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the letter and the note don’t make any sense. Think about it: Ethan goes to West Germany and finds out something dangerous and important – so important that he can’t put it in a letter but instead asks his brother to cross the Channel so that they can discuss it face-to-face. Then he rushes back to England and immediately goes off to Oxford to see a man he’s never met. And when he doesn’t find Swain at home, he doesn’t wait; instead he leaves an urgent note setting up a meeting at Osman’s boathouse for five o’clock the same day.’

‘You mean – how would Ethan have known Swain would get the message?’ said Clayton thoughtfully.

‘Yes. Unless whoever left the note knew Swain was at home and that’s why he left it – because he didn’t want to be seen.’

‘Because whoever it was wasn’t Ethan at all, but someone pretending to be him.’

‘Someone setting a trap,’ said Trave, nodding.

‘Why didn’t you tell me about the brother before?’ asked Clayton.

‘Because, like the prosecutor said, Jacob’s evidence didn’t go anywhere, and then you made it pretty obvious that you thought I was chasing my tail when I told you my concerns about Ethan’s murder after Katya was killed,’ said Trave with a dry smile. ‘I’m telling you now because it seems like you’ve got more of an open mind, and also – well, also because I’ve decided to do something about Jacob.’

‘Do something?’ repeated Clayton, sitting up, suddenly alert.

‘Yes, I’m going to go to Antwerp and try and find him.’

‘Why, if he doesn’t know anything?’ asked Clayton, surprised.

‘Because he might know something now. Look what he said at the end of his evidence,’ said Trave, tapping the page with his finger. ‘“Ethan died because he’d found out something, and I’m going to find out what it was.” Perhaps he’s done just that. I remember him at the trial. He was angry and upset, but determined too. He didn’t need to come all the way to London to give evidence, but he did. I don’t think he’s someone who’d give up easily once he’d set his mind to something.’

‘Like you,’ said Clayton wryly, raising his eyebrows.

‘Like me,’ agreed Trave. ‘The point is, Adam, I know in my bones that Swain’s not guilty. He’s a hot-headed fool, but he’s no murderer, and I’m not going to rest until I’ve proved it.’

‘And I suppose that’s also your only way to get your job back,’ said Clayton, looking quizzically at his ex-boss.

‘Yes, there’s that too,’ said Trave, agreeing with a wry smile of his own. ‘Creswell’s agreed to postpone my disciplinary hearing for a month, but I can’t see the Chief Constable showing me much mercy once he’s finally got me in his sights.’

On the other side of town, Macrae was working late in his office, reading through the documents in the John Bircher file. After a few minutes he gathered together the incident reports, the attending doctor’s statement, and the three hideous photographs of Bircher’s smashed-up body lying on the concrete outside the entrance to the car park, fastened them together with a paper clip, and replaced them in the cardboard file. Then, picking up a red pen, he wrote
SUICIDE
in thick capital letters across the front, added his initials, and pushed the file to the other side of his desk.

The door opened and Detective Constable Wale came in.

‘Well?’ asked Macrae, looking up.

‘Clayton’s been to Trave’s house again. I followed him there this evening. He stayed inside more than an hour. You want me to talk to him?’

Macrae looked across the desk at his assistant and ran his eyes over Wale’s thick arms and heavy, oversized hands. The sight of them always gave him pleasure, and he hesitated for a moment, stroking his chin. He liked the thought of Jonah trying out a few of his techniques on that self-righteous little sneak, Clayton, but he knew that it wasn’t worth the risk of the runt going squealing to Creswell.

‘No, Jonah. It’s a tempting suggestion, I must admit, but I think we’d better leave Constable Clayton alone for now. Keep watching him though. He’ll hang himself if we give him enough rope – save us the trouble.’

Macrae knew that it wouldn’t be long now before Creswell retired, and who better to take over as superintendent than the up-and-coming Inspector Macrae? And then, once he had the power, he wouldn’t waste any time: he’d shake up this sleepy police station and teach Clayton and his like a lesson that they’d never forget.

Trave crossed the Channel on the early morning ferry to Calais and then took the train to Antwerp. He had never been to the city before and was unprepared for the baroque grandeur of the central railway station, with its gilt and marble interior and huge metal and glass dome. It was like a cathedral – there was even a rose window above the entrance, surmounted, however, not by Christ in glory but by a golden clock. In Antwerp the trains ran on time.

Trave had obtained an address but no telephone number for Jacob Mendel from the lawyers who had acted for David Swain at his first trial two years earlier. The house was in the Jewish Quarter, which ran in a tangle of crooked streets south from the station. It didn’t seem too far on the street map that Trave had brought with him from England, and so he decided to walk. Almost immediately he found himself in a strange, utterly foreign world. It was the lunch hour, and crowds of Hasidic Jews thronged the pavements in their dark suits and white shirts, with curled sidelocks emerging from under their black felt hats. Everywhere was a hubbub of activity: cafés and synagogues and kosher delicatessens, and on Pelikaanstraat Trave passed by endless diamond shops with narrow storefronts and glittering wares watched over by morose merchants sitting perched on stools behind thick reinforced-glass windows.

Trave soon felt hopelessly lost amid a sea of trams and bicycles. The roads with their long Flemish names all seemed to twist and turn into one another, and he had just made up his mind to stop and ask directions when he looked up and saw that he was standing opposite the side street that he was looking for. Jacob’s house was halfway down – a nineteenth-century apartment building constructed around a small cobbled courtyard. There were names on the letter-boxes, but Mendel was not one of them, and Trave was about to start knocking on the apartment doors when a voice called to him from behind in a language he didn’t understand.

He turned around and found himself looking down at a small elderly woman with a bent back and a black scarf covering her hair. She was standing a few feet away in a low doorway under the entrance arch that Trave hadn’t noticed when he came in. She had a walking stick in her hand.

‘I’m English,’ he said hopefully. ‘I am looking for Jacob Mendel.’

Surprisingly the old woman seemed to understand.

‘No Mendel here. Why you want him?’ she asked suspiciously.

‘To talk to him about his brother. I’m a friend.’

‘Friend! Everyone says that,’ she said with a sneer.

‘Well, I am one,’ said Trave. ‘Jacob wants to find out who killed his brother, and I want to find out too. I want to help him.’

The old woman looked at him blankly and Trave realized with a sinking heart that she hadn’t understood a word he’d said. Her English was obviously very limited, and Trave didn’t know a word of Dutch.

‘Parlez-vous français?’ he asked, switching to French, but the old woman ignored him. Instead she looked him up and down, staring intently, and then waved her walking stick toward his feet. For a moment he thought she was going to attack him with it, but then realized that she was giving him an instruction: ‘You wait,’ she said, and then turned around and went back through the doorway behind her.

She emerged again a minute later, holding out a big book, a piece of paper, and a pencil. Trave opened the book and found that it was written in incomprehensible lettering, which he assumed to be Hebrew.

‘I can’t read this,’ he said, pointing to the text and tapping the side of his head to try to make her understand his ignorance.

Impatiently she pulled the book back, closed it, and pushed the blank piece of paper down on top of the cover and made as if to write.

‘You write,’ she said. ‘Then you come back.’

‘When?’

‘Four,’ she said, holding up four fingers. ‘Maybe.’

Trave nodded and began to write:

When he was finished, Trave caught the old woman’s eye as he handed the note back to her.

‘Please,’ he said, pointing to his chest. ‘I mean good.’

‘Yes, yes. Friend,’ she said, and Trave took comfort from the fact that at least she didn’t pronounce the word with the same derision with which she’d spoken it earlier. ‘Now you go,’ she ordered. And Trave went.

With more than two hours to kill, he wandered the streets in a state of distraction. Would Jacob come? Would he know anything? Trave had no answers to his questions. He began to feel hemmed in by the rows of tall medieval guild houses in the old town with their myriad of leaded windows, and so he headed west toward the river. Leaning on the parapet, Trave gazed out over the wide expanse of the Scheldt and watched as the afternoon turned from blue to grey in a moment as a bank of low clouds came funnelling up the river from the North Sea. He shivered suddenly, feeling the January cold in his bones, and turned to go back.

The old concierge was waiting for him under the entrance arch. ‘Badge,’ she said. ‘Show me badge.’

Trave complied, and she examined his credentials for a moment before beckoning him inside her doorway. Trave took off his hat and followed her into a surprisingly spacious room with two windows overlooking the main street through which the last of the winter sunshine was picking a golden, glowing path across the spotless wooden floor. There was no sign of Jacob Mendel, but on the other side of the room an old lady with bright blue eyes was sitting in a rocking chair beside a brightly burning fire. Trave could see that she must once have been very beautiful, but now her skin was wrinkled and pulled tight over the bones of her face so that it seemed as if she was made of antique porcelain, like the teacup she was holding in her hand. She was dressed entirely in black with her silver-grey hair tied up into a bun at the nape of her neck, and an enormous white cat lay stretched across her lap, apparently fast asleep.

‘Excuse me for not getting up, Mr Trave,’ she said in accented but otherwise perfect English, gesturing to an armchair facing her on the other side of the fire. ‘Mrs Morgenstein’s cat does not like to be disturbed. Would you like tea?’

Trave shook his head as he sat down, but the concierge handed him a cup regardless, before vanishing behind a curtain into the interior of the apartment.

‘It seems I have no choice in the matter,’ he said wryly. ‘Mrs Morgenstein was a lot more formidable earlier.’

‘Yes, she can be quite frightening when she chooses,’ said the old lady, smiling. ‘But it’s because she’s protective – she’s the kindest person when you get to know her. I miss her since we moved. And her cat.’

‘We?’ repeated Trave, looking perplexed.

‘I’m sorry, Inspector. I don’t mean to talk in riddles. I’m Aliza Mendel, Jacob’s grandmother. I expect you’re wondering where Jacob is?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s gone, I’m afraid. Where I don’t know. It’s nine months now since he left, and he is my last living relative, so you can understand why I am worried.’ Aliza screwed up her eyes, resisting a spasm of pain that momentarily contorted her features. ‘It is why I am here, Inspector: to ask you if you find Jacob to give him a message from me.’

‘What message?’ asked Trave. He wanted to help the old lady if he could. He remembered what had happened to Jacob’s parents, her son and daughter-in-law, in the war.

‘Tell him to come back to Antwerp and stop digging into the past. No good will come of it. I know that.’

‘I’ll give him the message if I find him, but I doubt he’ll listen to me. He’s a determined young man. I remember that from watching him at the trial when he gave his evidence.’

‘Yes – determined, headstrong, foolhardy. And obsessed too – obsessed with the letter Ethan wrote to him before he died. Jacob can’t stand it. That’s the problem. He can’t bear it that his brother wanted to tell him something but died before he had the chance. I suppose he thinks he could have saved Ethan’s life if Ethan had confided in him. There’s no basis for him thinking that, but he still feels it, and like you, he’s convinced that this man, Swain, had nothing to do with Ethan’s death. He says it was a set-up, a conspiracy. And I’m sure he thinks the same about poor Katya’s death as well, which I read about in the newspaper, although I haven’t seen him since that happened.’

‘Why? Why does he say it was a conspiracy?’ asked Trave, trying to keep the excitement out of his voice.

‘Because Ethan wrote the letter from West Germany and not from England, and so Jacob says that Ethan must have discovered something there that led to his death. Jacob may well be right. After the trial in London a stranger came here to this building and told me to warn Jacob to stay away from the past. Jacob wasn’t here, fortunately, or there might have been violence, and after the man’s visit we moved.’

‘What did the man look like?’

‘Not tall; thin; small, cold, watchful eyes. He kept on his hat and had the collar of his raincoat turned up around his ears so I couldn’t see much of his face. He came in the evening, and it was getting dark outside my apartment, so I doubt I’d recognize him again. But I know what kind of person he was. I’ve seen men like him before when the Germans were here, people who worked for the security police. He spoke in Dutch, almost like a native. But not quite,’ she added thoughtfully. ‘Languages are my speciality – they’re how I made my living once upon a time, and they’re also the one thing Jacob seems to have inherited from me. I don’t think the man who came here was Belgian by birth – German maybe.’

‘Did he give a name?’

‘No, of course not. People like that don’t have names,’ said the old lady, giving a hollow laugh. ‘He didn’t stay long – just long enough to make his meaning clear. And I was frightened – I don’t mind admitting that, and so I told Jacob. I wish I hadn’t now. The man’s visit just made him more determined to find out who killed Ethan. And by then he’d become convinced that Titus Osman was behind it all, which made
me
angry . . .’

‘Why? Why Osman?’ interrupted Trave, leaning forward in his chair.

‘I don’t know. It’s difficult to understand when someone’s so wrong-headed. I suppose it’s because Ethan went to stay with Titus to find out more about his parents and ended up dying in Titus’s house, and because he went straight back there after posting the letter to Jacob, but I think most of all it’s because Titus arranged for Jacob’s parents to escape from Belgium and they ended up getting caught. That’s the root of the trouble, you see – Jacob blames Titus for his parents’ deaths, and so he blames him for everything else as well. It was awful at Ethan’s funeral. Titus came to pay his respects, as was right and proper, and Jacob practically accused him of being a murderer in front of all the guests. Titus was very good about it, very kind and understanding, but it didn’t change what Jacob had done. He had shamed me, shamed our family, and after that it was never the same between us. But now, now I wish he would just come back.’

The old lady’s voice caught, and she took a small white handkerchief from the sleeve of her black cardigan and dabbed her eyes.

‘Why are you so sure Jacob is wrong about Titus?’ asked Trave. He felt a little ashamed of persisting with his questions when the old lady was so visibly distressed, but he couldn’t bring himself to stop their conversation just when it had become so interesting to him.

‘Because I wouldn’t be here speaking to you if it wasn’t for Titus,’ Aliza said quietly, recovering her composure. ‘He saved my life and the lives of my grandchildren, and for that he deserves our gratitude, not slander. He arranged everything: the false papers to get us into France and the guides who cut the wire and took us through the woods into Switzerland in the early morning with diamonds hidden in the heels of our shoes. Without the diamonds the Swiss would never have let us stay. At the border you had no chance – they handed you over to the Germans without a second’s thought, but in Zurich it was different. We paid money, and they put us in a labour camp. It was hard, but at least we were safe, and my son and his wife could have been there with us if Avi hadn’t been so stubborn, so pig-headed about staying in Belgium. It was Avi’s fault what happened, not Titus’s. He waited nearly a year, until the winter of 1943, and by then it was much harder to get out. Switzerland had become impossible, and so Titus tried to send them through Vichy and across the Pyrenees to Spain, but the borders were tighter and they were stopped, sent back . . .’

‘Why did your son wait?’ asked Trave. ‘He must have known how dangerous it was here.’

‘He thought he would be safe because he and Golda were Belgian citizens, and for the first year after the deportations began in 1942 the Germans had a strict policy of only taking foreign Jews. It was easier for them that way. Almost all the Jews in this country were refugees, and exempting Belgian citizens kept the local population guilt-free. And the Germans were clever that way. They did everything gradually so as not to make us panic. They came in in May 1940, but it was two years before they made us wear the yellow stars. Registration was the key. Once we’d registered they knew where to find us when they were ready. They made a camp at Mechelen. Do you know where I mean?’