The King of Diamonds (27 page)

There was a small brass plaque screwed into the centre of the coffin bearing the legend
john david swain 1900–1952
. John David Swain, father of David Swain, lying in a box in a hole in the ground with the rain coming down, while his relatives looked down on him from above.
This is it
, David had thought at that moment. This was the truth – not shops and cinemas and cafés, not fleeting sensations of love or happiness, but this – rain falling on a box. Everything else was nothing more than a pretence, worse than a lie.

He’d stood there beside the grave after the funeral was over and the mourners had drifted away, until in the end there had just been him and his mother standing there side by side in the rain. Finally she’d taken his hand and tried to pull him away, but he’d silently resisted, staying where he was, until eventually she’d given up and walked round the mound of earth at the bottom of the grave and away down the path toward the car. And he’d stayed there alone with his dead father in the gathering gloom until he could hardly see the coffin any more and one of the sallow-faced undertakers had had to lead him away.

Trave sat bent over the kitchen table with his head in his hands and ignored the telephone, which was ringing again for the third time in ten minutes. He felt like throwing it at the wall – he needed some outlet for the anger and frustration that had been boiling up inside him ever since he’d left the disciplinary hearing the day before.

There had been three of them facing him across a long table in a room with a grandstand view of Christ Church Cathedral, of all places – the chief constable in full dress uniform flanked by Creswell on one side and a Home Office lawyer on the other – a little man with bushy eyebrows brought down from London for the day to take Trave apart. And he had done exactly that. Trave had simply not been prepared for the thrusting hostility of the questions, and his answers had sounded flat and unconvincing even to himself. He’d tried several times to explain his doubts about Swain’s guilt, but the lawyer had twisted his words around so that it looked like his concerns were just excuses that he’d dreamt up along the way to enable him to pursue his vendetta against Titus Osman.

The trouble was that the evidence all pointed one way. Trave couldn’t deny that there had been a conflict of interest, which he had wilfully ignored in his determination to stay on the case. And he could hardly claim that that conflict had not affected the conduct of his investigation when he had chosen to make an unprovoked assault on a vital prosecution witness outside the man’s house. And then, worst of all, he had disobeyed an order to stay off the case by setting up a secret meeting with the main suspect. Trave insisted that he had had no intention of assisting Swain’s flight from justice, but he could see disbelief etched all over the chief constable’s face. Disgust was there too, and on the chief constable’s left, Creswell looked like a man in pain. The superintendent stayed silent throughout the hearing and wouldn’t look Trave in the eye. It didn’t bode well for the final decision, which the chief constable had reserved giving for seven days at the end of the hearing.

Trave had no idea what he would do if he lost his job. The prospect was close now, but he still refused to think about it. His mind was fixated on the Osman case. David Swain’s trial had already opened up in London, and he had uncovered no new evidence on his trip to Antwerp. Jacob was nowhere to be found and probably knew nothing anyway, and Bircher, the only tenuous link between Blackwater Hall and the prison escape, was dead – written off as a jumping suicide. And yet Trave refused to give up: he read and reread the transcript of Swain’s first trial until the typed words swam in front of his eyes; and in recent days he had even taken to driving aimlessly around the centre of Oxford, searching the crowd in vain for a glimpse of Aliza Mendel’s grandson.

Trave went and sat down on the sofa in front of the television, making an unsuccessful attempt to distract himself from his troubles with the afternoon news. The television was a fairly new addition. Vanessa had bought it a few months after their son, Joe, died. It had helped to fill the silence, providing a buffer between their separate griefs, and Trave remembered how it had been on almost all the time in the weeks before Vanessa finally got up the courage to go. But then she didn’t take the television with her when she left: it was as if she didn’t need it any more now that she was making a new start. Trave wondered whether Vanessa had a television in her new home. It pained him that she had so entirely disappeared from his life that he couldn’t even picture her surroundings – except that soon he would be able to again if she divorced him and moved in with Titus Osman at Blackwater Hall. Trave pressed his hands up against the sides of his head, trying in vain to suppress the images that rushed unbidden into his mind. Each one was worse than the last: Vanessa gone, Vanessa at Blackwater Hall, Vanessa reaching out for Osman’s hand as she looked down at him, sprawled on the ground at Osman’s feet the last time they met.

He wanted to feel sorry for himself, but he knew that his pain was self-inflicted. He had lost his wife because he hadn’t been able to bring himself to comfort her in her hour of need. Instead he had spent every minute he could away from her, investigating other families’ deaths as if he could solve his own problems at second hand. He might as well have taken up with another woman: he’d abandoned his wife just as thoroughly by working day and night at his stupid job. It seemed poetic justice that he was now about to lose the job after all these years and would end up alone and unemployed in this big empty house that he’d tried so hard to get away from before.

The doorbell rang. It was an unusual sound, particularly on a Sunday, and it made Trave jump. Since Joe’s death and Vanessa’s departure, there were hardly any callers at 17 Hill Road apart from an occasional Jehovah’s Witness and the man who read the gas meter once a month, and he always came in the mornings. Trave thought of ignoring the bell in the same way as he had the telephone, but almost immediately it rang again, insistently this time. Whoever it was knew he was at home – the sound of the television must have betrayed his presence. Unwillingly, Trave got up and opened the door. Clayton was standing on the step, shivering even though he was wearing an overcoat.

‘What do you want?’ asked Trave. There was no hint of welcome in his voice: entertaining a visitor was the last thing he felt like at that moment.

‘To get out of this bloody cold,’ said Clayton, stamping his feet and rubbing his hands together to indicate his distress.

‘All right, you better come in,’ said Trave, reluctantly standing aside to let Clayton pass. ‘I warn you – I’m in no mood for company.’

‘I know that: I rang you three times and you didn’t pick up. Did the hearing go badly?’

‘Worse than badly,’ said Trave bitterly. ‘Bloody chief constable’s getting ready to give me the boot.’

‘I’m sorry about that,’ said Clayton, looking worried. ‘I wouldn’t have come over here if it wasn’t urgent.’

‘What’s urgent?’ asked Trave, starting for the first time to show some interest in the reason for Clayton’s visit.

‘I found Jacob. I know where he’s living.’ Clayton made his announcement like a conjuror producing a rabbit from a hat, and it had the desired effect. Trave was open-mouthed for a moment, unable to believe his ears. He’d given Clayton Aliza’s photograph of her grandson soon after his return from Antwerp. Jacob’s face was already imprinted on his memory, and Trave calculated that an active policeman would have a better chance of tracking Jacob down than one who was suspended from duty, but it was a long shot, and he hadn’t really expected anything to come of it. Trave knew that Clayton was answerable to Macrae, who had no interest in any further investigation of the Katya Osman case now that he had Swain’s trial under way, and Trave also had no evidence that Jacob was actually in Oxford: it was only a hunch based on Aliza’s account of her grandson’s fixation on Katya’s uncle.

‘How did you find him?’ asked Trave once he’d recovered his self-possession. ‘Where is he?’

‘He’s in a one-bed flat off the Iffley Road. He’s living there under the name Edward Newman, which is kind of an appropriate alias, given he’s got himself a completely new look since that photograph you gave me was taken. He’s grown a beard and wears jeans and a leather jacket these days. Oh, and he’s got glasses too now, like you said he might, but don’t worry – I’m sure it’s our man. I found him because of what you said about him being obsessed with Titus Osman. I thought: What do obsessed people do? Answer: They watch the people they’re obsessed with. So I went out to Blackwater a couple of times last week and walked along the path by the boathouse and drew a complete blank. And I was just about to give up on the idea when I got lucky: today was going to be my last visit in fact . . .’

‘Got lucky how?’ asked Trave, unable to contain his impatience.

‘There was a scooter hidden in the undergrowth on the other side of the fence from the road, and there he was at the end of the path that goes through the woods, just where it opens out onto the big lawn across from the side of Osman’s house. He was standing behind a tree, looking up at the house through a pair of binoculars.’

‘Did he see you?’

‘No. I’m good at moving quietly – I always won at hide-and-seek when I was a kid,’ said Clayton with a smile. ‘I just went back to my car, moved it away out of sight, and waited; and then, when he came back to the road, I followed him home, which was the difficult part, given he was on a Vespa and I was driving. They don’t teach that at training school.’

‘No, they don’t,’ agreed Trave. He looked his former assistant up and down and nodded once as if pleased with what he saw. ‘You’ve done damn well, Adam. I’m proud of you,’ he said, looking Clayton in the eye.

Clayton flushed with pleasure. It was the biggest compliment he’d ever received from Trave, and he filed it away carefully in his mind, intending to savour it when he was next alone. Recent events had done nothing to dent his admiration for his former boss, and sometimes he worried that his affection for Trave and his visceral dislike of Macrae were affecting his own judgement. The trouble was that Clayton couldn’t make up his mind about the case. He balanced the heavy weight of the evidence incriminating David Swain against his gnawing concerns about what had happened on the night after Swain’s arrest, remembering the passive, deflated way Swain had confessed to Katya’s murder, like he was some kind of automaton. And, try as he might, Clayton couldn’t form a mental picture of Swain going out into Oxford when he was on the run to buy blank ammunition for his gun, just so he’d look innocent when he was caught. Surely Swain would have been too desperate, too frightened to come up with such a plan, let alone carry it out. But that didn’t change the fact that Swain was the one with the motive and the opportunity to kill Katya. He’d been right there at the murder scene, just like he had been when Ethan was stabbed down by the lake. Every day, every night, Clayton went back and forth in his mind. The only thing he was sure of was that he wanted to know more. And maybe Jacob would be able to tell them something . . .

‘Have you told Macrae about this?’ asked Trave.

‘No, of course not,’ said Clayton, sounding surprised.

‘Are you going to?’

‘No, why would I do that?’

‘Because you’re working for him now, and so it’s your duty to tell him.’

‘Well, if I tell Macrae, he’ll find some excuse to get hold of Jacob and put him somewhere neither of us will ever find him, or at least not until Swain’s trial is over and it’s too late. The Blackwater case is Macrae’s pride and joy, you know. He guards it like it’s his private property. And he doesn’t trust me with it any more for some reason. My role’s limited to giving evidence next week. That’s why I’ve been able to go on all these joyrides out to Osman’s boathouse.’

‘I wonder what Jacob was doing out there,’ said Trave musingly.

‘I don’t know. Let’s go and ask him,’ said Clayton. ‘That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?’

Trave nodded, smiling for what seemed like the first time in weeks. ‘You’d better drive,’ he said. ‘You’re the one who knows where we’re going.’

They arrived outside 78 Divinity Road ten minutes later. Clayton was driving his own car since it was a Sunday, and they parked right across the street from Jacob’s house. It was a residential neighbourhood that had clearly seen better days. The tall, narrow nineteenth-century houses that had once been home to affluent families had been split up into small one-bedroom flats after the war, and 78 was in no better or worse condition than its neighbours. Some of the paint was peeling from the stucco, particularly around the portico under which Trave and Clayton were now standing, and above their heads several electric wires hung loose where there had once been an outside light. A few pieces of washing were hanging from a makeshift clothesline rigged up inside the wrought-iron balcony that ran the length of the first floor, and the white garments flapped to and fro occasionally in the intermittent wind like a row of disconsolate ghosts, but there was otherwise no sign that anyone was at home. The sun had set and the last of its light was beginning to fade from the sky, but there were no lights on in any of the windows.

To Trave’s right, there were five doorbells with a handwritten name beside each one, and Edward Newman proclaimed himself in neat capital letters as the occupant of Number 5.

‘How do you know he’s Newman?’ asked Trave.

‘Because 5’s obviously the top flat, and I saw him in the window at the top of the house a couple of minutes after he got back. And I don’t think he’s Fiona Jane Taylor, who lives in Number 4.’

Trave nodded. ‘All right, let’s go and talk to him,’ he said, and rang the bell. They waited for nearly a minute, but there was no response, and so Trave tried again, pushing the bell longer and harder this time. Still nothing happened. The building remained dead to the world, and behind them an empty brown paper bag blowing this way and that across the deserted street was the only sign of life.

‘Makes my road look like the West End of London,’ said Trave, blowing on his hands to keep them from going numb.

Clayton laughed. ‘I doubt he’s gone far,’ he said. ‘We can come back.’

‘You can,’ said Trave. ‘I’m going in.’

‘You’re what?’ said Clayton, unable to believe his ears. ‘You haven’t got a search warrant.’

‘And I’m not exactly likely to get one, am I? A suspended policeman about to get his marching orders – I carry about as much weight as a wet rag, and you can’t do anything official without Macrae’s say-so. No, I’m not really too worried about doing things by the book any more, Adam, to be honest with you. You’d better get used to it if you want to stick around me. People are dead and a boy’s likely to swing for something he never did; so I’m going to do whatever I have to do to get at the truth. And right now that means breaking into this flat. I’d like to see what Mr Newman-Mendel’s got up there before he comes back. Are you coming or not?’