The King of Diamonds (25 page)

Trave shook his head.

‘It’s a pretty town – twenty kilometres from here on the road to Brussels. There are good rail connections into Germany and from Germany to Poland. And Mechelen’s where they told the Jews to report for deportation to labour camps in the east, except it wasn’t a labour camp they went to. You know where they went, don’t you, Inspector?’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Trave, bowing his head, experiencing that same sense of empty despair that he always felt when he thought of the Holocaust.

‘Many Jews suspected too, I think,’ said Aliza. ‘They went into hiding, and when only a few thousand answered the work orders, the Germans began the round-ups, the razzias – beating down people’s doors, dragging them from their beds in the middle of the night.’

‘And yet your son stayed?’

‘Yes, for more than a year. Like a fool he believed he was safe even while the Shoah was occurring all around him. And he didn’t want to leave his home, his business – everything that he’d worked so hard to achieve.’

‘But surely he wasn’t able to carry on his business?’

‘He used gentiles to run it as a front. And that worked for a while. Until the Germans changed their minds and went after the Belgian Jews too. And then Avi and Golda went into hiding, sewed diamonds into their clothes, and got caught at the border. They were on one of the last convoys that went from Mechelen to Auschwitz, and they didn’t come back. Almost no one came back.’

Auschwitz
: the dread name that Aliza had hitherto avoided using fell like a stone into their conversation, reducing them both to silence. Outside the sun had set, and the fire’s blaze had died down so that Trave could hardly make out the expression on the face of the old lady. She seemed far away, lost in places where he could not follow.

‘How do you bear it?’ he asked her. ‘This terrible suffering – how do you go on?’

‘Because I must,’ she said simply. ‘It is my fate, the fate of my people. I have a choice – to live or to die. I cannot choose to live
and
die.’

Trave shook his head, thinking of his own life – the death of his son, the loss of his wife, all the murdered men and women whose deaths he’d been called on to investigate, but it was all as nothing compared with what had happened in the war. Auschwitz was beyond measure – it stripped the world of meaning.

‘It’s not easy,’ said Aliza, looking at Trave as if she understood what he was thinking. ‘My life has been hard, but there’s been good as well as bad amid all the wandering. My name, Aliza, means “merry and joyful” in Hebrew. I think my parents called me that because they were so pleased to have me. My mother had had difficulties before – several miscarriages. Many times during my life I have thought of changing my name, but I never have because it is who I am, who my poor parents intended me to be, who I must try to be despite all the suffering.’

‘You said you wandered,’ said Trave. ‘So you are not from here?’

‘Antwerp? No. I came here from Poland after the first war, fleeing from pogroms, dreaming of America, but I ended up staying like so many others. I got work at the bourse, the diamond exchange, as an interpreter. I met my late husband there and we had Avi. And Antwerp became my home. I could have gone to Israel after the war, but I had to come back. They say that Antwerp is now the last shtetl in Europe . . .’

‘Shtetl?’ repeated Trave, not understanding.

‘It means “little town” in Yiddish. Like one of your villages in England where everyone knows each other and everything is familiar and yet life is always fresh and new and colourful.’

Trave nodded, remembering the vivid bustle of the Jewish Quarter earlier in the afternoon.

‘But perhaps I was wrong,’ said Aliza meditatively. ‘Perhaps I was selfish. Maybe in Israel the boys would have looked forward rather than back. Every day in Switzerland they waited for their parents to come, and then in Antwerp they thought constantly of what might have been.’

‘Were they close, Ethan and Jacob?’

‘Yes, they were inseparable, even though they were so different. Ethan was two years older, and he was more like me I suppose – steady, patient, persevering – whereas Jacob is headstrong, ruled by his emotions, in love with extreme positions. After Ethan’s death he left our synagogue and became a Hasid, and then two months later he gave that up and said he was a Zionist. I don’t know what he is now. Or where he is . . .’

‘Has he written to you, telephoned you, made any kind of contact since he left?’ asked Trave.

‘No, nothing. As I said, our relationship deteriorated after Ethan’s funeral.’

‘Do you have a photograph of him? I saw Jacob once when he gave evidence in London, but a picture would help with finding him.’

‘Yes, I thought of that,’ said Aliza. She leaned forward to pick up an old weather-beaten black bag that was lying on the ground by her feet, and the white cat on her lap stretched and jumped softly down, looked quizzically at Trave for a moment, and then stalked away out of sight.

Aliza took a small framed picture out of the bag and handed it to Trave, who got up from his chair to take it from her.

‘It was taken two years ago,’ said the old lady. ‘And Jacob wears glasses now. He was always short-sighted like his father, but it got a lot worse at the beginning of last year. I’ve written my address and phone number on the back.’

A young, good-looking man with thin cheeks and wide eyes stared back at Trave out of the photograph. He was neither smiling nor scowling, but the line of his mouth was resolute and his chin was firm and set. He looked like a man on a mission, Trave thought – a soldier about to go to war.

‘I will look for him,’ said Trave slowly, feeling like he was taking a vow. ‘I can’t promise anything, but I will try, and if I succeed, I’ll tell him your message.’

‘Thank you. That’s all I ask,’ said the old lady, holding out her hand in farewell. ‘I feel you are a good man, William Trave. I think you have suffered too like me and so you understand what I have told you. May God go with you and be your guide.’

Vanessa shivered, pushing her hands deep into the pockets of her overcoat. She’d wrapped up warm to come out, but it still wasn’t enough to keep out the stabbing cold. There’d been a forecast for snow in the morning paper, but for now there was only the cold and the clinging mist that hung over the river beside which Vanessa was sitting, rendering the line of black, leafless trees on the far bank into tall, ominous shadows that filled her with unease.

Vanessa hated January – the month when winter seemed like it would never end and it was dark by half past four in the afternoon. It was like an annual endurance test – bedraggled Christmas trees awaiting collection at the end of the road, the ground hard and barren, nothing to look forward to but more of the same. It made Vanessa think, as she often did, that she’d been born in the wrong country, that she was a southerner at heart, forever longing in vain for the warm sun of the Mediterranean or the hot countries beyond.

She knew, of course, that she could go there now on a cheap ticket, lie on a beach for a week, burn the cold from her bones. She had some money saved up, and she was sure Titus would go with her if she asked him. He’d jump at the idea. But something held her back. It felt too much like an escape, an abdication of responsibility. Because it wasn’t just the winter that was making her feel anxious and hemmed in. Her unease had deeper roots. She felt she was at a crossroads in her life and would soon have to choose a road to go down for better or worse. And yet she distrusted the signposts, feeling unready to make a decision.

Titus had been patient with her for months, but she could sense that soon he would press her for an answer to his marriage proposal. Vanessa believed she loved him – certainly she thought of him constantly when he wasn’t there and looked forward with hungry anticipation to their evenings together. But was this a basis for married life? She’d loved her husband with all her heart once, years ago, and yet their union had failed. Vanessa was burdened with her past: however hard she tried, she was unable to free herself of her life experience. She feared commitment and yet could no longer enjoy the independence that she’d worked so hard to achieve in her little flat behind Keble College. She was always restless now, taking long, directionless walks after work, and at night she was oppressed by loneliness, turning on the radio beside her bed to fill the vacant space and then waking up in the small hours to the sound of alien, disembodied voices discussing the parlous state of the world.

But she knew that it wasn’t just indecision over her future with Titus that had upset her peace of mind. It was guilt too – a gnawing guilt that was eating away at her inside. The months had passed since David Swain’s arrest, and now his trial was fast approaching, and yet she still maintained her silence about what Katya had said to her that September night in the drawing room at Blackwater Hall. Vanessa remembered the terrible effort the girl had made to reach her, to get her words out before she lost consciousness. ‘They’re trying to kill me,’ she’d said. And a few weeks later someone had killed her, and yet Vanessa had stayed quiet. Why? At first because Titus had asked her to, but that was all right because at that early stage she’d only agreed to think about what to do; she’d made no binding commitment. And then when Franz Claes had pressed her on the issue a week later, her immediate instinct had been to rebel against his pressure and tell Titus that she had decided to go to the police. She had always thought of her husband as essentially a fair man, and she’d been unable to credit the idea that Bill would twist Katya’s words to try to implicate Titus in the murder because he was conducting a jealous vendetta against his wife’s lover. But then within hours of her conversation with Claes she’d been forced to revise her opinion. Vanessa shuddered even now, months later, at the memory of her husband lying sprawled on his back in the courtyard of Blackwater Hall like some pathetic, angry schoolboy who’d just lost a playground fight. It was obvious he couldn’t be trusted, and so she’d reluctantly agreed to remain silent when Titus raised the matter with her again later that day. And she’d felt bound to stay quiet even when her husband was taken off the case.

Then, as the weeks passed and Swain’s trial got closer, she tried to tell herself that her silence didn’t matter because the case against the defendant was so overwhelming, but her conscience kept getting the better of her. She couldn’t suppress the memory of Katya’s white, agonized face from her mind, and every day she felt more torn between her need to do what was right and her desire to protect Titus.

What troubled Vanessa most was that she wasn’t just shielding Titus; she was shielding Claes too. Vanessa had no doubts that Titus was entirely innocent of all wrongdoing, but she was far less sure about Claes. She had always disliked Titus’s brother-in-law with an intensity that she didn’t understand, and at their most recent meeting the previous Sunday their unspoken mutual antipathy had almost erupted into open hostility.

They’d been in the dining room at Blackwater – Osman at one end of the polished oak table and Claes at the other, with Vanessa and Claes’s silent, severe-looking sister sitting on either side between the two men. Outside, it had been raining all day and the atmosphere was heavy and oppressive. Vanessa had to force herself to eat the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding that Titus always liked to have served on Sundays in a strange culinary homage to his adopted country, and she was counting the minutes until Titus and she could be alone. With dessert they began a desultory conversation about politics and the state of the world. It was not a subject in which Vanessa had any great interest, but she had enjoyed watching the Kennedy inauguration on the television a few days earlier and had felt infected by the mood of excitement and hope inspired by the new young president.

‘He will have to be ready,’ said Claes in his strangely formal English. ‘The Russians will attack – maybe this year, maybe next. Khrushchev, Stalin – they are all the same.’

‘What do you mean – the same?’ asked Vanessa, irritated by Claes’s doomsday certainty. ‘Khrushchev condemned Stalin and the purges. Didn’t you read about that?’

‘It does not matter,’ said Claes with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘They are Bolsheviks. They want to make everyone else Bolshevik. We had the chance to stop them in the war, and now maybe it is too late.’

‘What chance? What are you talking about? Without the Russians Hitler would have won. Is that what you wanted?’ asked Vanessa, outraged. She threw down her napkin and pushed her chair back from the table, but Osman reached out, covering her hand with his, preventing her from rising.

‘Please don’t be upset, my dear,’ he said in a soothing voice. ‘This is all a misunderstanding. Franz did not want Hitler to win. He fought in the Belgian army when the Germans invaded. It’s just that he does not like the Communists. None of us do, including your President Kennedy.’

Vanessa sat stiffly in her chair, keeping her eyes fixed on Claes, refusing to be mollified. ‘What do you say?’ she asked.

‘About what?’ asked Claes. Vanessa sensed the contempt in his voice, in the way he looked at her. She felt that underneath his rigid exterior he was spoiling for a fight just as much as she was.

‘About Hitler? About fighting the wrong enemy in the war?’

Claes smiled thinly at Vanessa, apparently about to respond, but then he glanced away, unable to ignore Osman’s intent stare. ‘I did not want Adolf Hitler to win the war,’ he said slowly, sounding for a moment like a recalcitrant schoolchild reciting a lesson that he’d been required to learn by heart. On the other side of the table, Claes’s sister exhaled deeply and put her hand up to the small silver crucifix that hung from a slender chain around her neck, in what was obviously a habitual nervous gesture in such moments of crisis.

Titus, however, had behaved as if nothing had happened, taking Vanessa by the arm and leading her along the corridor to the drawing room, where they passed the rest of the afternoon side by side on the sofa in front of a roaring fire, talking about faraway places where Vanessa had never been and to which Titus was eager to take her.

But now, sitting on the grey wooden bench by the riverbank in the darkening late January afternoon, Vanessa realized once and for all that there could be no future with Titus as long as she kept Katya’s words a secret. She could only give Titus what he wanted if she went against his wishes and told what she knew to the police. Not to her husband but to the policeman who’d taken over the case. He didn’t have an axe to grind with Titus; he’d be objective, unlike Bill; he’d tell her what to do.

Vanessa thought of telling Titus first but then decided against the idea. He’d make her change her mind, and she couldn’t cope with the guilt of remaining silent any longer. She needed to do what was right. He’d just have to understand.

Vanessa wasted no time once she’d made her decision. She phoned the police station as soon as she got home and made an appointment to see Inspector Macrae the following day.

It felt strange going into the building where her husband had spent his working life. Vanessa had rarely been there while they were together. Police functions tended to be held at a hotel near the station, and Bill had always wanted to keep his professional and personal lives apart. Vanessa thought with sudden sadness how lost he must feel now that he’d been exiled from this place perhaps forever, but then she hardened her heart, remembering how he’d shut her out after Joe’s death, leaving her alone with her grief while he worked in his office through the long evenings, only coming home to go to bed.

Macrae came out into the entrance hall, introduced himself, and led her back down a series of twisting corridors to his office. She appreciated his consideration but nevertheless felt put off by the man. Sitting across the desk from him, she couldn’t put her finger on the reason. Perhaps it was the way his eyes seemed so cold and watchful, detached from what he was saying; perhaps it was the way he stroked his long fingers together as he listened. But Vanessa was determined not to let an unfounded aversion obstruct the purpose of her visit, and so she pushed it to the back of her mind, refusing to acknowledge its existence.

She began to describe her encounter with Katya in the drawing room at Blackwater Hall four months earlier. It felt like a relief at first to be breaking her long silence and telling this stranger what had happened, but then, faced with her own disclosure, she felt a new surge of guilt for not having spoken before and stumbled over her words, realizing to her shame that tears had started to spring from her eyes.

‘I didn’t want to get Titus into trouble,’ she said. ‘He’s a good man, and he was just trying to help Katya, but I knew that Bill, my husband . . .’

‘Would take it the wrong way,’ said Macrae, finishing Vanessa’s sentence. She nodded her head and bent down, taking a handkerchief from her bag to dry her eyes.

‘I can understand your concern, Mrs Trave,’ Macrae continued. ‘Your husband hates Mr Osman, and now, meeting you, I think that I can understand why.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that you are a beautiful woman. Your husband cannot bear the fact that you have left him for Titus Osman, and so he wants to paint Mr Osman as a murderer when he is nothing of the kind.’

Vanessa flushed, not knowing what to say. She resented Macrae’s personal remarks, and yet she realized that he was only articulating what she had long thought herself.

‘It is a tragedy,’ Macrae went on. ‘Your husband was once a very good policeman but he has lost his way, and now I fear it may be too late.’

Macrae sounded regretful, but the expression in his grey eyes didn’t seem to match his words. She sensed a cruel humour in them, as if Macrae was secretly enjoying himself, but then with an effort Vanessa dismissed the impression as an illusion. ‘I came here to talk about Katya, not about my husband,’ she said firmly.

‘But your husband is the reason you didn’t come forward with the information before. Isn’t that right, Mrs Trave?’

‘Yes,’ said Vanessa reluctantly. It was true – mistrust of her husband was the reason why she’d stayed quiet, but the spoken acknowledgement felt like a betrayal. She was saying that Bill was not to be trusted, that he had lost his objectivity, that he had become dishonest; and she was saying it here, in this place where he had worked so hard for so many years to do what was right. Vanessa looked up and felt for a moment as if Macrae had read her mind, as if he entirely understood the significance of her admission and was savouring it with relish.

‘But I am telling you now,’ she said, trying to regain control of the conversation. ‘And I need your advice about what to do . . .’

‘To do?’ repeated Macrae, appearing puzzled. ‘There’s nothing you need do, Mrs Trave. You see, this case is very simple. David Swain killed Katya Osman. There are no conspiracies, however much your husband would like to uncover them. By all accounts Katya was a very unhappy person. She took drugs and generally abused herself in places where no self-respecting girl should go, and her uncle, to his great credit, tried to help her by looking after her at home. It is not his fault that she had become too unbalanced to appreciate his efforts and made wild allegations to you one evening, and he does not deserve to have those allegations aired in public. No, Mrs Trave, there’s been too much muddying of the waters already in this case. We don’t need any more.’

‘So we do nothing?’ asked Vanessa, surprised. It was the outcome she’d hoped for, and yet it left her strangely dissatisfied, unable to reconcile all her soul-searching and guilt with this easy happy ending.