Simon Tolkien - The King of Diamonds

Clayton got to the crash site moments later, but he didn’t stay long with the wreckage. Leaving Wale to radio in a report to the police station, he delivered the shocked, white-faced lorry driver into the care of the old married couple who ran the grocery store at the crossroads and then squatted down beside Claes’s corpse, staring for a moment into the dead man’s wide-open eyes. And then, almost as an afterthought, he leant down and felt inside Claes’s pockets. There was nothing on the right side, but in the left jacket pocket he found a snub-nosed, silver-plated revolver. It was a Colt Detective Special — a different gun to the one Claes had had before. Clayton didn’t need to check to know it was loaded.

‘What do you want with that?’ asked Wale, looking down at the gun over Clayton’s shoulder. ‘It’s evidence.’

‘None of your business,’ said Clayton, straightening up and returning to their car. ‘Did you get through to the station?’

‘Yeah,’ said Wale. ‘But don’t think I won’t tell Macrae about that gun,’ he added. ‘Because I will.’

‘Good,’ said Clayton viciously, swinging the car into a violent three-point turn before heading back toward the Hall at breakneck speed.

Up ahead, around the turn in the road, Vanessa was entirely unaware of what had happened back at the crossroads. All she knew was that there had been lights blazing into her car from behind and then from the right, and suddenly they were all gone. Now she was alone in the mist, careering along a deserted road with the car’s accelerator pedal pinned to the floor beneath her foot. If it had been Claes behind her, she didn’t know what had happened to him, but she wasn’t going to go back and find out. Instead she leant forward in her seat, yearning for her first glimpse of the spires of Oxford.

She was sure she didn’t want to go back to her flat. That was where Claes would come looking for her. Instead she realized that her unconscious mind had already made a decision about her destination: she was heading back to her old home in North Oxford, the one she’d left behind for a new life two years earlier. It was Bill who had sent her into the jaws of death to look for this diary, so let him be the first one to see whether the risk had been worth taking.

She parked the car with a screech of the brakes and then, clutching the diary in one hand, she rang the doorbell over and over again until her husband answered. And, once inside the house, she fell rather than sat on the old sofa in the living room. She was shaking uncontrollably, and she spoke in a rush with her words tumbling over one another as she told her husband all that had happened.

Trave felt dreadful, sick with remorse. He wrapped a blanket around Vanessa and poured her a glass of brandy and wondered how on earth he could have put the person he loved most in all the world into such terrible danger. It was worse than what Jacob had done to Katya — much worse because Trave had the benefit of hindsight. He tried to apologize, but Vanessa waved his inadequate words away. She felt at sea in a storm of emotions — remembered fear; something that bore a strange resemblance to happiness about being back in her old home, or perhaps it was just relief; and above all, a consuming curiosity about what was contained in the little red book that she had taken such a terrible risk to obtain.

With a trembling hand she extracted Katya’s diary from inside Alice in Wonderland and handed it to her husband. ‘You read it,’ she told him. ‘Start at the beginning and tell me what she wrote.’ And she laid her head back against the sofa cushions and closed her eyes, preparing to listen.

Trave soon found that the first half of the diary had been written years before. Alongside the entries there were pencil sketches of the boathouse and the Hall and of David and later Ethan, and a particularly good one of Osman sitting at his desk with a benevolent smile on his face and a half-smoked cigar burning between his fingers. Then, after Ethan’s death, there were several pages of rapid writing in which Katya had recorded her intense distress, and after that the diary was silent for more than two years until it began again the previous August.

Trave found it hard at first to decipher Katya’s tiny, spidery writing, but gradually he got used to it, and his voice quickened as he read:

August 17th, 1960:

I think it’s time to start writing in this diary again; time to start keeping a record. I’ve neglected it far too long, just like I’ve neglected myself. It’s time for turning a new leaf, beginning a new page…

I saw Ethan’s brother, Jacob, yesterday. We sat in a cafe in St Clement’s and he told me things about Franz that made me want to be sick. He showed me pictures of Franz with those Nazi pigs and it was like I was in two places at once — in Belgium with those poor people being rounded up and sent off in cattle trucks and here in Oxford drinking sweet coffee in the sunshine. And I thought of how I lived with Franz all those years when I was a girl and I felt unclean, like I could never wash the shame of it away. Not ever.

And suddenly I knew it wasn’t David who had killed Ethan; it was Franz. I don’t know why I knew. I just did. It was like I was Saint Paul on the road to Damascus. The scales were lifted from my eyes and I could see. I was in the same place, the same cafe, and the earth was going round the sun, but the earth was different and the sun was too. Everything was changed.

But then Jacob made it worse. He said my uncle was involved with Franz, that they had killed his parents and other Jews for their diamonds, and that they’d killed Ethan too when he found out about Franz. He told me that they’d set up David to take the blame. And I didn’t believe him; I couldn’t believe him; I didn’t want to. Titus is my uncle. He brought me up; gave me a home. Without him I would have nothing. But then Jacob told me about a letter that Ethan had sent him from Munich just before his death saying he’d discovered something vitally important, and I remembered how Titus had got me to leave with Jana to go shopping before Ethan came back. Was he trying to get me out of the way? Is he part of a conspiracy? Could he be? I don’t know now. All I know is I have to find out.

‘I’ll skip the next bit,’ said Trave, looking up. ‘It’s just a list of names — German officials that Claes was involved with in Belgium. Jacob must have told Katya about them.’

‘There’s no proof in any of this, you know,’ said Vanessa, catching Trave’s eye. ‘Not against Titus.’

Trave didn’t respond, just nodded, and then went back to the diary.

Jacob said he had already tried to break into the house to find evidence but he’d got nowhere — Franz had been on to him as soon as he came through the window of Titus’s study. He told me it had to be someone on the inside looking. He said it was worth the risk because the proof was there. He was sure of it. Proof of what they’d done — to his and Ethan’s parents, to Ethan, to David. And I didn’t have to think before I agreed. It was easy. My life has a purpose again. And I’ll use this diary to record what I find. I’ll hide it when I’m not writing in it. In the old place. For the first time in as long as I can remember I am almost happy.

Trave turned the page, going on to the next entry:

August 20th:

I was sick with stopping the drugs for two days but now I’m better. I closed the door and said goodbye but then I realized there was nothing to say goodbye to. These people I know in Oxford — they’re not my friends. And I don’t need friends because now I have my mission. I can’t bring Ethan back — I know that — but I can do something for him — I can bring him justice. And justice for David too, except I don’t want to think about that, about the way he looked at me when I gave evidence against him at the trial. I didn’t know, David. I didn’t know…