Simon Tolkien - The King of Diamonds

‘Just that when I talked to him before in his flat he seemed to attach a great deal of significance to the outcome of the trial up in London,’ said Clayton, picking his words carefully.

‘Significance — what significance?’ demanded Claes.

‘Well, he said that if Mr Swain was convicted, then “they’ll have won; they’ll have got away with everything”. Those were his words,’ said Clayton reluctantly. ‘He implied that he would have nothing left to lose.’

‘And we are they, of course,’ said Osman with a faint smile. ‘Well, that certainly sounds rather ominous, Detective. I hope that you and Constable Wale manage to find Mr Mendel before he does anything else stupid.’

Vanessa looked past Clayton to where Wale was standing in the doorway. She remembered him now from when she’d gone to visit Inspector Macrae at the police station and he’d shown her out. He’d had that same ugly, smirking smile on his face then as he had now. It felt like he was mentally undressing her, and she turned away with a shudder.

‘Are you all right, Mrs Trave?’ asked Clayton, noticing Vanessa’s grimace without understanding its cause. He’d seen how nervous she looked when he first came in.

‘I’m fine,’ she said, refusing to meet his eye. She was all too aware of Claes staring at her across the table.

‘Bloody foreigners! They get all the luck,’ said Wale with a harsh laugh once they were back outside. ‘I bet Trave finds it difficult getting much shut-eye at night thinking about his missis tucked up with old Casanova in there. She’s quite a looker for her age, I’ll give you that.’

‘Shut up, Jonah. And keep your foul thoughts to yourself,’ said Clayton angrily.

‘All right, keep your hair on,’ said Wale, getting into the police car beside Clayton. ‘You’re a grumpy sod, aren’t you?’

Clayton stayed quiet, sensing the car’s suspension settling down under Wale’s weight. He knew better than to allow himself to be needled, knowing that he’d only be providing Wale with free entertainment, but even after a week in Wale’s company he still found it hard to get used to the mean, crude way in which the man’s mind worked.

Their complete lack of success in tracking down Jacob Mendel hadn’t helped Clayton’s mood either. But he had an instinctive feeling that today would be the day that Jacob would show himself if he was ever going to, and he was determined to make as thorough a search of the grounds as the fog would allow. Ignoring Wale’s complaints therefore that it was ‘a bloody waste of time’, Clayton drove down to the road and parked under the trees by the path that led up to the boathouse. And then, leaving Wale in the car, he climbed the fence and set off into the mist.

Back in the dining room of Blackwater Hall, Vanessa had had enough. The policemen’s visit had unnerved Osman, and now he and Claes were talking anxiously about Jacob’s possible whereabouts. Vanessa knew it was now or never. Maybe there was no diary, but soon she would run out of courage and would never know one way or the other.

She got up from the table, announcing casually that she was going to the bathroom. Osman raised his hand in brief acknowledgement, and Claes went on talking, apparently unaware of her departure. Outside, she turned quickly down the corridor leading to the hall, and then ran up the staircase to the first floor. At the top of the stairs a corridor opened out in both directions. She knew she wasn’t yet on the top floor, but she couldn’t see the way up. Blindly she ran to her right, and at the end, round the corner, she found what she was looking for — another flight of stairs going up. She took them two at a time and started down another corridor, narrower than the one down below. Now she went slower, counting the doors on her left until she was halfway along. Tentatively, she pushed open the half-closed door and saw a bed but no bookcase. Perhaps this had been Katya’s room; perhaps the bookcase had been moved; perhaps the girl’s books had been sold or thrown out now that their owner had no further use for them. With an effort Vanessa pushed her doubts to the back of her mind — she’d come too far to stop now. The next door down could still count as halfway. This one was shut. Slowly she turned the handle, and there it was, right in front of her — an old brown bookcase filled to overflowing with books of different sizes, and on the top a silver-framed photograph of a middle-aged couple standing by the sea.

Vanessa closed the door and began to search. Bill had said the book was big, and so there was no point looking in the top two shelves, which were lower in height and mostly filled with dog-eared paperbacks. It had to be in one of the bottom two shelves if it was anywhere. One by one Vanessa took the larger books out and rifled their pages, looking for a hollowed-out interior. Soon she had a pile of them beside her on the ruby-red carpet, and she was running out of time. Claes would come up the stairs and find her, and she’d have no explanation for what she was doing. Her hands shook as she began work on the bottom shelf. Still nothing: Tolstoy’s War and Peace; volume 4 of a children’s encyclopedia; a thick atlas of the world that had her briefly excited since it seemed just the right size to conceal a diary; a book of Van Gogh’s paintings; and then, just as she’d given up hope, she saw at the back of the shelf, standing on its side, a big hardback copy of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. She recognized the book — she’d had the same illustrated edition herself since she was a child, and instinctively she knew it had to be the one. It had been deliberately hidden behind the other books — she’d only found it after taking out all the books in front of it, practically emptying the bottom shelf onto the carpet.

She sat back on her haunches and turned the first few pages, past a picture of Alice falling down the well, and came to the cut in the paper. And there it was — a small square red book no bigger than the size of her hand, sitting neatly inside the mutilated Alice in Wonderland. With the edge of her fingernail Vanessa lifted the front cover and read the handwritten inscription with a beating heart:

Katya Osman

My Diary

Keep Out

The diary was real. Bill had been right. Now all she had to do was get it out of the house, except that that wasn’t going to be so easy. She knew she was running out of time, and so she quickly shoved the books back into the shelves, calculating that no one would notice they had been moved as long as they were in the bookcase. And then, getting to her feet, she opened the door and came face-to-face with Jana Claes.

All the time she’d been in the house Vanessa hadn’t once thought of Claes’s silent sister. She’d seen her so rarely on her visits to Blackwater Hall, and today her thoughts had all been concentrated on Claes himself. Vanessa cursed her stupidity. She should never have made so much noise going through the books: that’s what must have attracted the woman’s attention. And now it was too late: Jana was blocking her only route of escape.

‘What are you doing?’ Jana asked. She spoke with a thick foreign accent, but her hostility was obvious.

‘I was looking. That’s all. Just looking,’ said Vanessa weakly, unable to think of an excuse.

‘Looking for what?’

Vanessa didn’t answer, and the older woman’s glance fell to the big book that Vanessa was clutching to her chest.

‘What is that? Where did it come from?’ asked Jana. ‘You took it,’ she said, answering her own question a moment later. ‘Give it to me.’

Without warning Jana took hold of the book, wresting it away from Vanessa, who was taken by surprise, unprepared for the suddenness of the assault and Jana’s wiry strength. Perhaps Jana hadn’t expected to get hold of the book so easily either — she took several steps back, trying to regain her balance. And in that moment Vanessa lost her temper. She hadn’t come this far and risked everything just to be thwarted at the last by this dried-up woman who was probably just as guilty as her brother. Reaching out with both her hands she took hold of Jana by the shoulders and shoved her as hard as she could back against the wall behind her. Jana hit it with a thud and fell to the ground. She looked like she’d lost consciousness, but Vanessa didn’t care. Her mind was focused on one thing and one thing only — to escape the house with the diary. Stooping, she picked up Alice in Wonderland from where it had fallen on the ground and ran back down the corridor to the stairs. At the bottom she paused for breath. Still there was no sound from up above. Treading softly now, she made her way back to the top of the grand staircase leading down to the hall. She looked down, and there was nobody in sight except Osman’s black cat, sitting contentedly on the fifth stair up, licking her paws. Vanessa had seen the cat there before and knew why Cara liked the position: it had the widest viewpoint of anywhere in the house.