The King of Diamonds (42 page)

David swayed in the dock, unable to believe what he was hearing. It was a fantasy, a dream from which he would wake in a moment, a final trick of the cruel and malevolent fate that had pursued him for the last three years. The prosecutor’s words washed over him until finally a light dawned inside his head and he understood. It was over. He was free. The nightmare was at an end.

His mother was waiting for him outside the court. He didn’t recognize her at first because her face was lit up like he had never seen it before. It was as if all the years of worry and toil had been magically lifted from her in one transcendent, cleansing moment. And beside her, gazing up at his half-brother through those same extraordinarily thick glasses, was Max.

‘I’m very happy you’re free,’ said Max seriously. ‘Because I have a lot of things to show you at home. Not just robots; other things too. I’ve made some of them. You are coming home with us, aren’t you, David?’

‘Yes, Max,’ said David, taking a firm grip of his half-brother’s hand and smiling over Max’s head at their mother. ‘I’m coming home.’

Vanessa drove Trave to the ferry in her Citroen 2
CV
. 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:

Following conviction at his trial in Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann was hanged at a few minutes before midnight on May 31, 1962, at a prison in Ramla, Israel. His body was cremated and his ashes were scattered in the Mediterranean, outside the territorial waters of Israel so that he would have no memorial and no country would serve as his final resting place.

In Belgium the Eichmann trial briefly ignited interest in the fate of the Jews who had been imprisoned in the Dossin de St Georges Transit Camp in Mechelen and then transported across Europe to their deaths in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp in Poland. But the interest soon subsided, and the Dossin barracks fell into disuse after they were abandoned by the Belgian army in 1975. However, in recent years, a museum has been established in one wing of the barracks, and in 2007 a widely praised exhibition was mounted outside the walls showing the enlarged photographs of 1,200 of the 1,631 men, women, and children who left the transit camp for Auschwitz on 16 April, 1943, on Convoy 20. Among those who also made this terrible journey on twenty-five other trains between 4 August, 1942, and 31 July, 1944, were 23,285 other Jews and 351 Gypsies – and only 1,221 of those transported survived the war.

Fifteen miles from Mechelen the Jewish shtetl in Antwerp continues to thrive today, and Antwerp diamonds remain famous all over the world. It is one of the only such communities that now exists in Europe, and it serves as a reminder of what might have been if Eichmann and those who served him both in Germany and in the countries occupied by the Nazis had not been able to carry out their program of genocide.

Let us not forget.

COMING SOON,
THE INHERITANCE
BY
SIMON TOLKIEN

Detective Inspector William Trave of the Oxfordshire
CID
felt the pain as soon as he’d passed through the revolving entrance doors of the Old Bailey and had shaken the rain out from his coat onto the dirty wet floor of the courthouse. It hurt him in the same place as before – on the left side of his chest, just above his heart. But it was worse this time. It felt important. Like it might never go away.

There was a white plastic chair in the corner, placed there perhaps by some kind janitor to accommodate visitors made faint by their first experience of the Old Bailey. Now Trave fell into it, bending down over his knees to gather the pain into himself. He was fighting for breath while prickly sweat poured down in rivulets over his face, mixing with the raindrops. And all the time his brain raced from one thought to another, as if it wanted in the space of a minute or two to catch up on all the years he had wasted not talking to his wife, not coming to terms with his son’s death, not living. He thought of the lonely North Oxford house he had left behind at seven o’clock that morning, with the room at the back that he never went into, and he thought of his ex-wife, whom he had seen just the other day shopping in the Covered Market. He had run back into the High Street, frightened that his successor might come into view carrying a shared shopping bag, and had ducked into the Mitre in search of whisky.

Trave wanted whisky now, but the Old Bailey wasn’t the place to find it. For a moment he considered the possibility of the pub across the road. It was called the Witness Box, or some fatuous name like that, but it wouldn’t be open yet. Trave felt his breath beginning to come more easily. The pain was better, and he got out a crumpled handkerchief and wiped away some of the sweat and rain. It was funny that he’d felt for a moment that he was actually going to die, and yet no one seemed to have noticed. The security guards were still patting down the pockets of the public just like they had been doing all morning. One of them was even humming a discordant version of that American song, ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’ A rain-soaked middle-aged policeman sitting on a chair in the corner, gathering his breath for the day ahead, was hardly a cause for distraction.

A sudden weariness came over Trave. Once again he felt weighed down by the meaninglessness of the world around him. Trave always tried to keep his natural nihilism at bay as best he could. He did his job to the best of his ability, went to church on Sundays, and nurtured the plants that grew in the carefully arranged borders of his garden – and sometimes it all worked. Things seemed important precisely because they didn’t last. But underneath, the despair was always there, ready to spring out and take him unawares. Like that morning, halfway down his own street, when a young man in blue overalls working on a dismembered motorcycle had brought back the memory of Joe as if he had gone only yesterday. And fallen apples in the garden at the weekend had resurrected Vanessa stooping to gather them into a straw basket three autumns before. It was funny that he always remembered his wife with her back turned.

Trave gathered himself together and made for the stairs. When he got time, he’d go and see his doctor. Perhaps the
GP
could give him something. In the meantime he had to carry on. Today was important.
Regina v. Stephen Cade
, said the list on the wall outside the courthouse. Before His Honour Judge Murdoch at twelve o’clock. Charged with murder. Father murder – patricide, it was called. And the father was an important man – a colonel in the army during the war and a university professor in civilian life. If convicted, the boy would certainly hang. The powers that be would see to that. The boy. But Stephen wasn’t a boy. He was twenty-two. He just felt like a boy to Trave. The policeman fought to keep back the thought that Stephen was so much like Joe. It wasn’t just a physical resemblance. Joe had had the same passion, the same need to rebel that had driven him to ride his brand new 600cc silver motorcycle too fast after dark down a narrow road on the other side of Oxford. A wet January night more than two years ago. If he’d lived, Joe would be twenty-two. Just like Stephen. Trave shook his head. He didn’t need the police training manual to know that empathizing with the main suspect in a murder investigation was no way to do his job. Trave had trained himself to be fair and decent and unemotional. That way he brought order to a disordered world, and most of the time he believed there was some value in that. He would do his duty, give his evidence, and move on. The fate of Stephen Cade was not his responsibility.

Up in the police room, Trave poured himself a cup of black coffee, straightened his tie, and waited in a corner for the court usher to come and get him to give his evidence. He was the officer in the case, and, when the opening statements were over, he would be the first witness called by the prosecution.

The courtroom was one of the oldest in the Old Bailey. It was tall, lit by glass chandeliers that the maintenance staff needed long ladders to reach when the bulbs blew out. On the wood-panelled walls, pictures of long-gone nineteenth-century lawyers stared out on their twentieth-century successors. The judge sat robed in black in a leather-backed armchair placed on a high dais. Only the dock containing the defendant and two uniformed prison officers was at the same level. Between them, in the well of the court, were the lawyers’ tables; the witness box; and, to right and left, the benches for the press and the jury. The jurors were now in place, and Trave felt them slowly relaxing into their new surroundings. Their moment in the limelight, when they stumbled over their oath to render a true verdict in accordance with the evidence, had come and gone. Now they could sit in safe anonymity while the drama of the murder trial played out in front of them. Everyone – members of the press, the jurors, and the spectators packed together in the public gallery above the defendant’s head – was focused on the prosecutor, Gerald Thompson, as he gathered his long black gown around his shoulders and prepared to begin.

‘What time did you arrive at Moreton Manor, Inspector?’ he asked, ‘on the night of the murder?’

‘Eleven forty-five.’ Trave spoke loudly, forgetting for a moment the acoustic qualities of the Old Bailey.

‘Were you the first policeman on the scene?’

‘No. Officers Clayton and Watts were already there. They’d got everyone in the drawing room. It’s across from the front hall.’

‘And the victim, Professor Cade – he was in his study. On the ground floor of the east wing.’

‘Yes. That’s right,’ said Trave.

There was a measured coldness and determination in the way the prosecutor put his questions, which contrasted sharply with his remarkable lack of stature. Gerald Thompson couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. Now he took a deep breath and drew himself up to his full short height as if to underline to the jury the importance of his next question.

‘Now, tell us, Inspector. What did you find?’

‘In the study?’

‘Yes. In the study.’

Trave could hear the impatience in the prosecutor’s voice, but he still hesitated before beginning his reply. It was the question he’d asked himself a thousand times or more during the four months that had passed since he’d first seen the dead man, sitting bolt upright in his high-backed armchair, gazing out over a game of chess into nothing at all. Shot in the head. Detective Inspector Trave knew what he’d found, all right. He just didn’t know what it meant. Not in his bones, not where it mattered. Pieces of the jigsaw fitted too well, and others didn’t fit at all. Everything pointed to Stephen Cade as the murderer, but why had he called out for help after killing his father? Why had he waited to open the door to his accusers? Why had he not tried to escape? Trave remembered how Stephen had gripped the table at the end of their last interview in Oxford Police Station, shouting over and over again until he was hoarse: ‘I didn’t do it, I tell you. I didn’t kill him. I hated my father, but that doesn’t make me a murderer.’

Trave had got up and left the room, told the sergeant at the desk to charge the boy with murder, and walked out into the night. And he hadn’t slept properly ever since.

Thompson, of course, had no such doubts. Trave remembered the first thing the prosecution counsel had told him when the case was being prepared for trial: ‘There’s something you should know about me, Inspector,’ he’d said in that nasal bullying tone with which Trave had now become so familiar. ‘I don’t suffer fools gladly. I never have and I never will.’

And Trave was a fool. Thompson hadn’t taken long to form that opinion. The art of prosecution was about following the straight and narrow, keeping to the path through the woods until you got to the hanging tree on the other side. Defence lawyers spent their time trying to sidetrack witnesses and throw smoke in the jurors’ eyes to keep them from the truth. Trave was the officer in the case. It was his duty not to be sidetracked, to keep his language plain and simple, to help the jury do its job. And here he was: hesitant and uncertain before he’d even begun.

Thompson cleared his throat and glowered at his witness.

‘Tell us about the deceased, Inspector Trave,’ he demanded. ‘Tell us what you found.’

‘He’d been shot in the head.’

‘How many times?’

‘Once.’

‘Where in the head?’

‘In the forehead.’

‘Did you find the gun?’

‘Yes, it was on a side table, with a silencer attached. The defendant said he’d put it there after picking it up from the floor near the French windows, when he came back into the study from the courtyard.’

‘That was the story he told you?’

‘Yes, I interviewed him the next day at the police station.’

‘His fingerprints were on the gun. That’s right, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘And on the key that he admitted he turned in order to unlock the door into the corridor. The defendant told you that as well in his interview, didn’t he, Inspector?’

‘Yes. He said the door was locked and so he opened it to let Mr Ritter into the study.’

‘Tell us who Mr Ritter is.’

‘He was a friend of Professor Cade’s. They fought together in the war. He and his wife had been living at the manor house for about seven years, as I understand it. Mrs Ritter acted as the housekeeper. They had the bedroom above the professor’s study, overlooking the main courtyard.’

‘Thank you, Inspector. All the fingerprint evidence is agreed, my lord.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said the judge, in a tone that suggested he’d have had a great deal to say if it hadn’t been. His Honour Judge Murdoch looked furious already, Thompson noted with approval. Strands of grey hair stuck out at different angles from under his old horsehair wig, and his wrinkled cheeks shone even redder than usual. They were the legacy of a lifetime of excessive drinking, which had done nothing to improve the judge’s temper. Defendants, as he saw it, were guilty and needed to be punished. Especially this one. People like Stephen Cade’s father had fought in two world wars to defend their country. And for what? To see their sons rebel, take drugs, behave indecently in public places. Stephen Cade had made a mistake not cutting his hair for the trial. Judge Murdoch stared at him across the well of the court and decided that he’d never seen a criminal more deserving of the ultimate punishment. The little bastard had killed his father for money. There was no worse crime than that. He’d hang. But first he’d have his trial. A fair trial. Judge Murdoch would see to that.

‘Let’s stay with the interview for a little bit longer,’ said Gerald Thompson, taking up a file from the table in front of him. ‘You have it in front of you, if you need to refer to it, Inspector. It’s an agreed version. The defendant told you, did he not, that he’d been arguing with his father shortly before he found Professor Cade murdered?’

‘Yes. He said that he went to the study at ten o’clock and that he and his father played chess and argued.’

‘Argued about his father’s will? About his father’s intention to change that will and disinherit the defendant?’

‘Yes. The defendant told me they talked about the will but that their main argument was over the defendant’s need for money.’

‘Which his father was reluctant to give him.’

‘Yes . . .’

Trave seemed to want to answer more fully, but Thompson gave him no opportunity. ‘The defendant told you in interview that he became very angry with his father. Isn’t that right, Inspector?’ asked the prosecutor.

‘Yes.’

‘The defendant admitted to shouting at Professor Cade that he deserved to die.’ The pace of Thompson’s questioning continued to pick up speed.

‘Yes.’

‘And then he told you that he left the study and went for a walk. That’s what he said, wasn’t it, Inspector?’

Thompson asked the question in a rhetorical tone that made it quite clear what he, at least, though of Stephen Cade’s alibi.

‘He said he walked up to the main gate and came back to the study about five minutes later, when he found his father murdered.’

‘Yes. Now, Inspector, did you find any footprints to support Stephen Cade’s account?’

‘No. But I wouldn’t have expected to. The courtyard is stone and the drive is tarmac.’

‘All right. Let me ask you this, then. Did you find any witnesses to back up his story?’

‘No. No, I didn’t.’

‘Thank you. Now one last question,’ said Thompson, smiling as if he felt he’d saved his best for last. ‘Did you find any of the defendant’s belongings in the study?’