The King of Diamonds (26 page)

‘Just that – nothing at all,’ said Macrae with a smile. ‘Justice will take its course up in London, and you and Mr Osman will live happily ever after at Blackwater Hall. He’s a very lucky man.’

‘Nothing is decided yet,’ said Vanessa defensively, getting up to go. There was nothing she could put her finger on, but once again she had the impression that Macrae was taunting her, enjoying her discomfort.

‘Of course not,’ he said evenly, holding out his hand. Reluctantly she took it, noticing again the policeman’s long, tapering fingers and his effeminately shaped nails. She made to let go immediately, but he held his grip, looking her in the eye. ‘A word of advice, Mrs Trave,’ he said softly. ‘You’ve done well to come to me, but now I would let the matter rest. Idle talk costs lives – remember what they told us in the war.’

Macrae dropped Vanessa’s hand and walked over to the door, opening it to let her pass. A burly overweight man in police uniform was standing outside, apparently waiting to come in. He’d cut his chin shaving, and a big sticking plaster disfigured his already ugly face.

‘Ah, Jonah,’ said Macrae, addressing the big man with easy familiarity. ‘Please, could you show Mrs Trave out?’

Wale glanced over at Vanessa with a leer when he heard the name and then turned without a word and began walking away down the corridor. Vanessa followed in his wake, thinking that there was something half-bestial about the man’s lumbering gait. And then out in the foyer he looked her up and down and smiled – a thin, cracked smirk of a smile that set her teeth on edge.

‘Thank you,’ she said more curtly than she intended. But he just grinned and turned away, disappearing back into the interior of the police station.

Vanessa didn’t quite know what to feel in the days that followed her visit to Inspector Macrae. She’d at last done what her conscience demanded and the result had been better than she could have hoped. The policeman in charge of the case had expressly told her to let the matter rest. Now she could get on with her life, unencumbered by any self-reproach. She wouldn’t even need to tell Titus that she had gone to the police. And yet she remained troubled. It had all been too easy. She still felt that questions needed to be put to Claes and his sister, and she remembered with distaste the way Macrae had seemed to take such an unnatural pleasure in Bill’s downfall. Her silence had started to feel like a kind of complicity – a further betrayal of her husband with another of his enemies. But then the sense of accountability made her angry. Bill was the one to blame, she told herself – for the failure of their marriage, for the implosion of his career. He had always been stubborn and difficult to work with – it was why he’d never got promotion, dooming them to life on a financial shoestring. And now she couldn’t allow him to hold her back. Titus offered her a second chance at happiness, and she had to grasp it with both hands before it slipped away.

Over the weekend the long-predicted snow finally began to fall, covering the world in a dazzling white brightness. It was beautiful, especially down by the frozen river in the University Parks, where groups of laughing students were out skating on the ice, their long, coloured scarves trailing behind their shoulders and their breath hanging in the still winter air like smoke. Vanessa watched them from the bench beside Rainbow Bridge, where she’d felt so despondent a few days earlier. Now she felt alive in every pore of her body, and, leaning down, she scooped up a ball of snow into her gloved hand and pressed it to her forehead, enjoying its sudden cold bite. And then she walked back through the avenues of black trees, delighting in the crunch of the thick-textured virgin snow beneath her feet, got into her tiny car that was parked outside the gates, and drove out to Blackwater Hall, following the golden-red glow of the sun as it sank down into the western sky.

She was early, but Titus had already opened the front door and come down the steps by the time she’d turned off the engine. He’d obviously been watching out for her from the drawing room window, and it warmed Vanessa’s heart that he should look forward to her arrival with such anticipation.

He was wearing no hat or coat, and she laughed when she got inside the house, seeing how the snowflakes had settled on his thick hair and beard, making him look like a fashionable Santa Claus dressed in an expensive suit and tie.

‘Come on,’ he said, taking her by the hand and leading her down the corridor to his study. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’

‘Something that can’t wait?’ she asked, laughing at his excited impatience.

‘Something that can’t wait,’ he agreed, opening the door.

It was a colour photograph lying face-up on the desk. The surface was otherwise entirely empty except for a telephone and a green-shaded reading lamp near the corner. The silver-framed photograph of Katya that Vanessa had noticed on a previous visit had now disappeared.

Looking down, Vanessa saw that it was a picture of an enormous square cushion-shaped diamond with innumerable facets, all glittering with different shades of white and dark light. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, staggered by the apparent size of the stone.

‘Yes, and extraordinary when you see it in person and know its story,’ said Titus quietly. ‘Because the great diamonds – and this is one of them – each have their own history. What they have in common is that they travel across the world, passing from one lustful hand to another, and that they tend to possess their owners rather than be possessed by them. That is their nature. Perhaps now people understand this and that is why so many of them are locked up in museums.’

‘Like this one?’

‘Yes. It’s in the Louvre. They have it sitting on an electrically controlled black velvet plinth in a case made of bulletproof glass. Below there is a specially made steel vault, and at a flick of a switch it rises into the light in the morning and descends back into the darkness when the museum closes at night. No one has even tried to steal it,’ said Titus with a smile.

‘Does it have a name?’ asked Vanessa.

‘Oh, yes. All the great diamonds have names. This one is the Regent. It was found by a slave worker who dug it out of the Partial mine on the Kistna River in India at the beginning of the eighteenth century,’ said Titus, taking obvious pleasure in the pronunciation of the foreign place-names. ‘The stone’s value was obvious – I mean it was the largest diamond ever found in the world up to then, and the slave was determined to try to keep it for himself, so he cut a gash in his leg and hid the jewel in the bandages he wrapped around the wound. And then, I don’t know how, he managed to escape from the mine and found his way to the coast, where he made a deal with an English sea captain to take him to Madras in return for half the value of the stone when sold. But the captain was greedy and arranged to have the slave thrown overboard, and so, as so often, the diamond’s history began with a murder . . .’

Osman paused, looking out of the window toward the last golden glow of the sunset as it faded from the sky above the tall black pine trees on the other side of the snow-covered lawn.

‘Go on,’ said Vanessa impatiently. ‘What happened next?’

‘It was bought by Thomas Pitt, the British governor of Fort St George in Madras, and he sent it back to England and had it cut.’

‘Cut?’

‘Yes. Cutting is what changes a diamond, Vanessa: it releases the inner fire. Until there was cutting, the fire was invisible. In the Middle Ages no one understood what lay behind the dull, greasy outside of a rough diamond. The Indians valued the stone for its extraordinary hardness, not its beauty. And then someone somewhere began to use diamonds to cut diamonds, and the fire was released. First there was the rose cut – facets on a flat base like an opening rosebud, and then at the end of the seventeenth century a cutter in Venice invented the brilliant cut, and after that, nothing was the same. This stone, the Regent, was the first great diamond to receive the brilliant cut – fifty-eight facets, thirty-three above the girdle, twenty-five below . . .’

‘What’s the girdle?’ asked Vanessa, interrupting.

‘The middle of the stone. Above is the crown, below is the pavilion. And the facets bend the light as it enters and leaves the crystal, reflecting and refracting it so that the diamond dazzles and achieves its full glory. It took two years to cut the Regent, and at the end it was almost flawless. It went from four hundred and ten carats to one hundred and forty and a half, and almost all the cleavage pieces were sold to Peter the Great, the emperor of Russia, but several small rose-cut diamonds remained, and this – this is one of them.’

Pausing for effect, Titus took a small blue velvet box out of his pocket and placed it on the palm of Vanessa’s hand. With trembling fingers she opened it and looked down at the most beautiful bright white diamond ring she’d ever seen.

‘I love you, Vanessa,’ said Titus. ‘And I want you to be my wife. Say you will, please say you will.’

The diamond was like a sparkling magnet drawing Vanessa’s eye down into its liquid depths. It made her giddy, made her want to throw all her anxiety and caution to the wind. It was the promise of a new world, a second chance at life: all she had to do was nod her head and say yes. And so she did.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I will.’

And quickly, before she could change her mind, Titus took the ring from the case and slipped it on her finger. Then, taking Vanessa in his arms, he kissed her long and hard and then held her close to his body, feeling her heart beating against his chest. She leaned her head down against his shoulder, abandoning herself, and Titus stroked her long brown hair and looked over her head toward Cara, his cat, who had been lying curled up in an armchair in the corner of the room throughout the afternoon. The cat gazed up at her master for a moment and then began to purr, seeing the unmistakable expression of triumph dancing in Titus’s bright blue eyes . . .

‘Why is it called the Regent?’ asked Vanessa later in the evening when they were eating supper by candlelight, sitting side by side at the end of the long dining room table on the other side of the corridor from the study. There had been no sign of Claes or his sister all day.

‘Because in 1717 Thomas Pitt sold the diamond to the Duke of Orléans, the regent of France, and thereafter it became part of the French crown jewels. King Louis XV first wore it in public in March of 1721 to receive the Turkish ambassador, and it was said at the time that it surpassed in beauty and weight all the diamonds that had ever been seen in the West before that date. And afterwards the next king’s wife, Queen Marie Antoinette, had it set in a black velvet hat . . .’

‘She was guillotined,’ interrupted Vanessa, frowning. ‘Is the diamond cursed? Tell me the truth, Titus. I’ve read about jewels like that.’

‘Well, I don’t think you need to worry, my dear,’ said Titus with a smile. ‘What you’re wearing on your finger is a tiny fragment of the Regent. And besides, I personally think it is a lucky diamond. A hundred years ago the Empress Eugenie wore it set in a diadem to the opera in Paris. On her way, a gang of revolutionaries threw three bombs at the carriage in which she was travelling, and yet she and her husband were unharmed – even though the coachmen and the horses all died.’

‘I like it when you tell me about the past,’ said Vanessa, looking at Titus with love and admiration in her eyes. ‘You make it come alive.’

‘The great diamonds are magical,’ said Titus. ‘All I do is tell their stories. But you need to see them to really understand. I will take you to Paris for our honeymoon, and you can look at the Regent in the Louvre, see it glittering in all its iridescent glory.’

‘No, not Paris,’ said Vanessa, looking suddenly troubled. Paris was where she and Bill had gone together so often when they were first married, spending long summer afternoons wandering in the Bois de Boulogne or the Jardins du Luxembourg, listening to jazz bands in the outdoor cafés. Paris was in the past, and she needed to keep it that way.

‘No?’ said Osman, darting Vanessa a quizzical look. ‘Well, we can go wherever you like: Istanbul, Baghdad, Tierra del Fuego – you choose, Vanessa. But I don’t want to wait any more – tell me when you will speak to your husband.’

‘Soon. I promise,’ said Vanessa, feeling suddenly under pressure.

‘Will he agree – to the divorce?’

‘Yes, I’m sure he will – he’s a decent man. But I must speak to him in person. He deserves that much.’

Titus nodded, looking pleased, but Vanessa turned away, hiding the look of anxiety that had creased her face. The prospect of seeing her husband again filled her with dismay. She felt for a moment like a swimmer who had dived into a beautiful river and found it far colder and quick-running than she had ever anticipated.

This was a new prison: Pentonville, in North London. But still there were the same high walls, the same barbed wire, the same iron bars as in all the other gaols that David had passed through in the two and a half years since he had first been incarcerated following Ethan Mendel’s murder. He had even been given the same prison number. And yet there was a change from before. He wasn’t just a number any more; he was also a name: he heard it being spoken in hushed voices as he passed by his fellow prisoners in the exercise yard or sat alone in the canteen eating his food, enduring their surreptitious glances. They were fascinated by him, and yet they avoided him like he had some kind of horrible infectious disease. And David knew why: he was charged with being a two-time murderer, and if the jury convicted him he’d swing. The Angel of Death was already hovering outside the door of his cell.

For the sake of administrative convenience, the prison authorities had assigned David as a cellmate the only other remand prisoner on a capital charge in their custody. Richard Toomes, he was called, and his trial had already begun. It seemed like a formality: one Sunday morning Toomes had gone over to the house where his wife of twenty years had moved in with her boyfriend and had dispatched the pair of them to kingdom come with two blasts from his shotgun. He’d then walked calmly round the corner to the local police station, deposited the gun on the desk, and made a full confession. Now he seemed resigned to his fate. When he came back from court in the evening, he read his library book on a stool in the corner, mouthing the words silently as he picked over them one by one, and then slept peacefully through the night, snoring quietly in the bunk above David’s head. Tombstone, as David had secretly nicknamed him, gave no trouble, and David envied him his peace of mind, because David did not sleep so easily. In fact, as his trial approached, he found he could hardly sleep at all. Instead he tossed and turned through the long prison nights, at the mercy of nightmares spun from his unconscious fears.

One repeated itself over and over again, coming back to attack him in the hour before dawn. He dreamt it was evening, after sunset, and he was alone in the twilight, walking along the narrow path through the woods that led from the road down to Blackwater Lake. The air was still and there was no sound, nothing except the noise of his footsteps on the ground. He could see the slender, silver-grey trunks of the pine trees arching up gracefully to make a canopy of branches overhead, but beyond them his eye couldn’t penetrate the shadows of the woods on either side.

Up ahead there was a light. It was where he was going, although he didn’t know why, and so he quickened his pace, frightened by the gathering silence. And now on his left he came to the lake, opening out black and wide and still under the darkening sky. He could hear the gentle lapping of the water against the stony bank, but he was looking the other way, over towards Osman’s boathouse standing on its wooden pilings, set back from the path, like a prehistoric creature marooned in the trees. That was where the light was coming from – bright and white through a shut uncurtained window at the side, and, standing still, he could hear sounds – a moaning or a wailing rising and falling and returning again clearer than before. He imagined it might be the sound of a night bird crying over the lake, but he knew he was deceiving himself: it was coming from inside the boathouse.

Now he wanted to run away back the way he’d come, but the dream wouldn’t permit him to turn around. Instead he was forced forward like a moth toward a flame, until, standing on his tiptoes, he looked down through the dusty window into the interior and saw what he’d seen before: Katya and Ethan naked, coupling like beasts on the floor under the unshaded electric light, turning and writhing and thrusting at each other, oblivious to the world around them. But this time it was different – they were changed somehow in a way that at first he didn’t understand: their faces and their bodies were pale white and their hair was lank and they moved like automatons, and there was blood, thick dried blood, on Katya’s forehead and all down Ethan’s lower back.

David cried out, but his cry did not wake him from his dream; rather it alerted the dead lovers inside the boathouse to his presence. He turned to run but tripped on the uneven ground just as he regained the path, and, picking himself up, he could hear the door of the boathouse opening behind him; he could hear them on the steps coming down. He tried to run, but his legs wouldn’t obey his command. He could feel them behind his shoulders now, holding him, forcing his neck down with their clammy hands. And as he fell into the cold black water of the lake, felt it close above his head, and started the struggle to breathe that he knew he couldn’t win, he sensed their voices inside his head, telling him he was going to die because they were dead and that there was no coming back, no coming back at all.

Each time the dream was worse. He’d wake panting and gasping in the half light, wildly warding away his unseen assailants until, after a few moments, he’d realize where he was, hearing the steady rise and fall of Toomes’s breathing above his head and the footsteps of a night guard walking on the metal landing outside their cell. And then, wiping the cold sweat from his brow, he understood why he dreamt like this about dying, why he woke before dawn with his hands encircling his neck. It was because soon now men he didn’t know would come for him at just this time; they would pin his arms behind his back, tie a noose around his neck, and kill him, put an end to David Swain once and for all. And however much he struggled, there would be nothing he could do about it – nothing at all.

The days passed and his fear grew, and on the day before the start of his trial David was called from his cell for a visit. He felt nervous as he crossed the exercise yard: apart from his lawyers, it was the first visit he’d received since the policeman, Trave, had come to see him in Brixton Prison more than a year earlier, and he could not imagine who his visitor might be. His face lit up when he saw that it was his mother.

He kissed her clumsily and sat down, taking in the novelty of her appearance. Instead of the pale blue housecoat she always wore at home, she had on a charcoal-grey dress with smart shiny black shoes. David had only seen the outfit once before – at his father’s funeral, when he had been too grieved to really take it in. It suited her, he thought, and he realized with a jolt that his mother had been pretty once and had a life of her own beyond caring for an unreliable husband and an unrewarding child.

He saw that she’d pinned a small brooch close to the lapel. It was nondescript – a small flower of some sort, but David found it oddly touching to think of his mother sitting in front of her dressing table at home and digging in a drawer to find this silly brooch so that she would look better for her reprobate son when she went to visit him in his London gaol.

She sat rigid and erect in her hard-backed chair but kept her eyes down, fastened on the empty square metal table between them. David noticed how she was holding on tight to the small black handbag in her lap, and he understood with a wrench how much it must have cost his mother to come to see him in this God-forsaken place when she had spent so much of her life struggling to stay respectable.

‘How was the journey?’ he asked, saying the first thing that came into his head in order to break the awkward silence that had begun to build up between them since he sat down.

‘It was all right,’ she said nervously, putting out the half-finished cigarette that she’d been smoking when he came in. ‘I haven’t been to London for a long time. It’s bigger than I remembered – more people.’

David saw how she darted quick looks at the other couples sitting at the adjacent tables – the men in their drab prison uniforms, the women decked out in their Sunday best. He wondered whether his mother had ever been inside a prison before – he doubted very much that she had.

‘Well, thank you for coming,’ he said. ‘I know it can’t have been easy.’

‘No, it wasn’t,’ she said, glancing up at him for a moment before she lowered her eyes again. ‘But it’s the right thing to do. I should have come before. I’m sorry.’

‘So you’re only here because it’s right, not because you wanted to come?’ asked David, suddenly irritated. He had his dignity too: he didn’t want to be an object of pity.

‘I’m here because I want to be here,’ she said quietly, holding his gaze this time. ‘I told you I’m sorry.’

‘All right, I’m sorry too,’ said David, mollified. ‘I’m glad you came. Did you tell Ben?’

‘Yes; I don’t tell lies. You should know that by now.’

David nodded. ‘So what did he say?’ he asked.

‘He was angry. Shouted and swore. But he calmed down when he saw that I’d made up my mind.’

‘He hates me. You know that?’

‘It doesn’t matter what he thinks.’

‘That’s not what you thought before though, was it?’ said David, unable to leave the past alone. ‘Why did you change your mind?’

‘Because I saw you, because you came home . . .’

‘And waved a gun at Ben, stole his car, terrorized Max . . .’

‘Max wanted me to come,’ she said. ‘He wants to know that you’re going to be all right, and I don’t know what to say.’

There were tears in David’s mother’s eyes, and they tore at David inside his chest. He held on to the table hard, resisting an impulsive longing to get up and run back to his cell and shut his mother and his family out of his mind forever, because he had no words of comfort to give them, and he didn’t want to think about the future or his lack of one.

‘Max is a good kid,’ he said, trying hard to keep his voice steady. ‘He’s a credit to you, Mother.’

‘And you’re not?’

‘You know I’m not,’ said David, bowing his head. ‘But for what it’s worth, I didn’t do what they say I did. Like I told you before, I only took that gun with me to protect myself. Fat lot of good it did me,’ he added bitterly.

‘That’s what the policeman said,’ she said, nodding. ‘He said you didn’t commit either of those murders.’

‘What policeman?’

‘Inspector Trave: the one who was in charge of your case and then got taken off it when he didn’t think you were guilty.’

‘The one who got me caught, you mean. If I hadn’t gone to meet him in that bloody cricket pavilion I wouldn’t be here,’ said David angrily.

‘They’d have found you in the end. You know they would. And it wasn’t that inspector’s fault. He didn’t know they were following him when he went to St Luke’s: he told me that. They’ve suspended him from duty for what he did. He’s probably going to lose his job.’

‘Well, at least he’s not going to lose his life,’ said David furiously, and then immediately regretted his words as he saw his mother blanch and grip on to the table for support.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, reaching out and touching her clenched hand for a moment. ‘It’s going to be all right. I’m innocent, remember,’ he added with a thin smile, trying to provide his mother with a reassurance that he didn’t believe in himself. She nodded wanly in response, struggling to regain her composure.

‘When did you talk to Trave?’ David asked, changing the subject.

‘A few days ago. He came to the house when Ben was out at work. He said he couldn’t come and visit you because prosecution witnesses can’t talk to a defendant but that he was going to do everything he could to help you. He wanted me to tell you that. He said he believed in you and told me that I should too.’

‘Oh, so that’s why you changed your mind,’ said David with a knowing smile.

‘No, it wasn’t just that. It was seeing you too. I already said I was sorry about not coming before.’

‘I know, I know,’ said David, holding up his hand. ‘I’m glad about Trave. Perhaps he’ll find something out.’

But David wasn’t holding his breath. Tomorrow his trial would begin. In two weeks or even less he would know his fate, and he couldn’t see any jury acquitting him on the evidence as it stood. In less than two months he could be dead.

‘I brought you clothes for your trial – a suit and two clean shirts,’ said David’s mother. ‘They said they’d give them to you in the morning.’

‘Thank you,’ said David, biting his lip. He remembered his mother ironing his school uniform before the start of term at St Luke’s, and now she was buying him clothes for his trial at the Old Bailey. It was too much, too painful. He was grateful to his mother for coming, but now he wanted her gone so he could escape back to the impersonal safety of his cell. He shuddered with relief when the horn sounded for the end of visits and hoped that his mother hadn’t read his mind.

‘Goodbye,’ he said, standing up. ‘Thank you for coming. Safe journey home.’

She looked at him hard as he spoke his inadequate words and then silently leant forward and took hold of both sides of his head with her hands and, reaching up, kissed him once on the centre of his forehead.

‘I made you,’ she said. ‘They’ve got no right to take you away.’

And then, without another word, she turned and walked away down the hall. He watched her until she disappeared from view, but she didn’t once look back.

Toomes was still at court when David got back to the cell. He lay down on his bunk and closed his eyes. His mother’s visit had unsettled him, and images from the past came floating unbidden into his mind. He tried to drive them out but one remained. It was a winter afternoon nine years earlier, and he was standing by his father’s open grave in a far corner of Wolvercote Cemetery. His mother was beside him wearing that same grey dress that she’d been wearing for her visit. It was cold, and a slow, heavy rain had begun to fall out of a grey, overcast sky. David was getting wet but he hardly noticed. Instead his eyes were fixed on the light brown coffin in the hole below his feet, on which the raindrops were falling one after the other – tap, tap, tapping out a steady staccato beat. Each one that fell exploded on impact, adding to the pool of water already spreading on the lid of the casket. David knew that his father was underneath that lid, dressed in a thin black suit, the same colour as David’s own, and he wondered if his father was getting wet too, if he was feeling the cold.