Simon Tolkien - The King of Diamonds

The weekend finally came to an end, and work on Monday morning did help provide some temporary distraction from her inner turmoil. For the next two days she stayed long hours in the office, filing and refiling her employer’s correspondence, answering letters that didn’t need answering, but under her professional exterior she was finding the uncertainty of the trial’s outcome harder and harder to cope with. And on Wednesday, after reading two newspaper summaries of the judge’s summing up of the mountain of evidence against the defendant, she decided she couldn’t stand it any more and stayed home from work. All day she paced the rooms of her flat like they were a prison cell, listening to the hourly news broadcasts on the radio, until the verdict was finally announced at five o’clock, complete with a description of the pandemonium that had broken out in the courtroom when a member of the public had thrown her shoe at the judge, just when he was halfway through pronouncing the defendant’s death sentence.

Now Vanessa didn’t hesitate. She knew what she had to do. She turned off the radio and rang up Titus. He sounded ecstatic to hear from her.

‘I’ve been worrying about you,’ he said. ‘You didn’t answer my calls. Have you been all right?’

‘I had some kind of virus,’ she lied, ‘so I went to bed and took lots of medicines and unplugged the telephone, but I’m better now. Can I see you?’

‘Of course you can. When?’

‘Tomorrow for lunch? I can get the day off.’

‘Wonderful,’ he said. She’d never heard him sounding so happy.

‘Good, I’ll see you then.’

She rang off, realizing that she’d said nothing about the verdict, and that she hadn’t even asked about the man with the gun whom Titus was so worried about. Still, she knew there’d be plenty of time to discuss these topics and others at lunch the next day — before she found an excuse to slip away and look for Katya’s diary at the top of the house.

She awoke the next morning to a dense white fog that had enveloped the city in a damp, sightless embrace. The red brick neo-Gothic towers of Keble College that usually dominated the view from her living room window were now no more than vague shapes in the mist. All morning she hoped that the fog would clear, but if anything it was thicker than before when she finally screwed up her courage and got in her car to go to Blackwater.

The journey took much longer than usual since she had to drive very slowly, feeling her way tentatively along the roads, and Osman was waiting anxiously for her when she finally pulled up in the courtyard and turned off her headlights. He came hurrying down the steps, opened her door, and, taking her arm, steered her through the haze into the warmth of the hall. She felt a surge of relief as she took off her coat and preceded her lover through the door of the drawing room, but then stopped dead in her tracks as she caught sight of Claes standing in front of the fire. She was rooted to the spot, unable to go forward to take Claes’s outstretched hand, but Claes didn’t seem in the least put out by her rudeness. Instead he smiled broadly, and the tightening of his facial muscles stretched the white scar running down beside his left ear and the mutilated red skin below his jaw, giving him an almost obscene appearance that Vanessa felt sure was a calculated effect, since there was no warmth in his grey eyes to back up the smile on his lips. She felt as if some invisible portion of the fog had followed her inside, wrapping its tendrils around her body.

Osman didn’t seem pleased with Claes’s presence either, but Claes remained apparently impervious to his companions’ obvious wish to be alone. Lunch in the dining room was a miserable affair. Vanessa kept looking towards the door, getting ready to excuse herself so she could go upstairs and search for the diary, but then each time she was about to open her mouth, she caught Claes looking at her out of the corner of his eye. She felt irrationally certain that he could read her mind. And so she dropped her eyes to the table and watched his bony hands holding his knife and fork as he methodically cut up the meat on his plate, and imagined him cutting into her flesh too, sawing her, watching her bleed.

She couldn’t eat. She felt weak, helpless in the face of her fear of Claes. What if there was no diary? she asked herself. What if Swain was guilty — just like the jury had said? But then she remembered the way Swain had mouthed ‘thank you’ at her as she left the court, and she thought of how young he was — not much older than her own son who had died. She imagined him on the gallows, waiting for the trap to give way beneath his feet, and she went back to toying with her food.

‘Have you heard about the verdict, Mrs Trave?’ Claes asked, breaking the silence.

‘Yes,’ she said, refusing to meet his eye.

‘And what do you make of it?’ he asked. ‘You must be disappointed in the outcome after your efforts for Mr Swain’s defence.’

‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s for the jury to decide, not me.’

‘Quite right, my dear,’ said Osman, coming to her rescue. ‘These trials are very unpleasant. We have to do our duty and give evidence, whether it’s for the prosecution or the defence, but that doesn’t mean we enjoy the experience or what comes after. Personally I do not like the death penalty, but I understand why some people think it’s necessary.’

Claes snorted, as if unable to believe his ears. ‘What are you talking about?’ he asked. ‘You can’t have law and order without it. They should use it more, not less. And for scum like Swain the rope’s too quick, if you ask me. They should throttle him to death for what he did.’

Vanessa looked up, appalled by Claes’s sadism, and was in time to see a look of fury on Titus’s face before it vanished, replaced by a thin smile.

‘Well, I suppose there are exceptions,’ he said in a measured voice, keeping his eyes on Claes. ‘Colonel Eichmann for instance. Have you been following that story, Vanessa?’

‘Yes, a little.’ Vanessa wasn’t going to admit it, but she’d read a great deal about Adolf Eichmann since his capture by the Israeli secret service in Buenos Aires the previous May. There had been an international outcry about the kidnap, but Vanessa had been overjoyed. Now his trial was fast approaching in Jerusalem and there’d be a chance for some tiny measure of justice for the millions of men, women, and children that the monster had had transported across Europe to their deaths in the Nazi concentration camps.

‘Perhaps there are some criminals whose crimes are so, how do you say, heinous — yes, that’s the word — that they should suffer the ultimate punishment,’ Osman went on, speaking in the same precise way, as if he was taking part in an organized debate. ‘What do you think, Franz?’

Vanessa glanced over at Claes and saw that livid red spots had appeared in the centre of each of his pale cheeks and that his hands were clenched into tight fists. He looked Osman in the eye, but he didn’t reply.

‘Well, perhaps we should change the subject and discuss something more pleasant,’ said Osman, shrugging his shoulders. ‘Have you been doing any painting, Vanessa?’

But Vanessa had no chance to respond. The doorbell rang, and a minute later Detective Clayton and Constable Wale were shown into the dining room by a housemaid.

‘I’m sorry to bother you, sir,’ said Clayton awkwardly, ‘but we wanted you to know we were here, taking a look around.’ He spoke to Osman but glanced over at Vanessa, as if surprised by her presence.

‘Thank you. I appreciate your consideration, Detective,’ said Osman. ‘Have you any particular reason for thinking Mr Mendel’s going to be showing up here today?’ he asked in an apparently casual tone, although Vanessa could tell that he was more interested than he was letting on.