The King of Diamonds. Simon Tolkien

one more violent than the last. You remember the letters, don’t you? Miss Osman was kind enough to read some of them to us the day before yesterday.’

      The defendant kept his eyes on the floor, refusing to meet the prosecutor’s eye.

      ‘No? You don’t remember? Well, let me refresh your memory with some examples. March fourteenth – “I’ll show you what pain is. You don’t know the meaning of the word.” April eighth – “If I can’t have you, nobody can.” And undated but received by Miss Osman on the twenty-ninth – “The last thing you’ll see in this world will be that Belgian bastard’s empty dead eyes.” Not exactly ambiguous, these threats, are they, Mr Swain?’ asked Arne, looking up at Swain from over the gold-rimmed, half-moon glasses that he had put on to read the letters.

      It was a masterful performance. Arne had picked up one document after another from the pile on the desk in front of him, reading from them apparently at random, although Trave was quite sure that the prosecutor had in fact prepared each quotation carefully in advance. He was known for his thoroughness, his attention to detail.

      ‘So would you have killed Miss Osman too if you’d had the chance?’ he asked when Swain remained silent. ‘That certainly seems to be what you are saying to her in these letters?’

      ‘No, of course not,’ said Swain, blurting out his answer.

      ‘Well, that’s certainly reassuring. You’d been to Mr Osman’s boathouse before, yes?’

      ‘Yes, I used to meet Katya there.’

      ‘Because it was a private, out-of-the-way place where you knew you wouldn’t be disturbed?’

      ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

      ‘Miss Osman’s uncle didn’t keep any of his belongings there?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘And you could get there without going through the main gate?’

      ‘Yes, you go over a fence and then there’s a footpath going round the lake. It wasn’t locked.’

      ‘In short, an ideal place for you to carry on your relationship with Miss Osman?’

      ‘I suppose so.’

      ‘And after she ended the relationship it would have been natural for you to assume that she would meet your replacement, Mr Mendel, there for the same purpose?’

      ‘No, I don’t know what you mean,’ said Swain, stammering over his words.

      ‘Oh, come on, Mr Swain, of course you do. You heard Miss Osman’s evidence – she saw you in the trees. But that wasn’t the only time, was it? You went right up to the window and watched them, didn’t you? Watched them tangled up together in the same place where you had been with her only a few months before. Lying where you used to lie; doing what you used to do. How did it feel, Mr Swain? Tell us how it felt.’

      ‘No, no, no!’ shouted the defendant, finally losing control. ‘No, I didn’t. I swear I didn’t.’ He shouted – almost screamed – the words at Arne, but the prosecutor didn’t respond. He didn’t need to. He knew what the jury would believe.

      It was a brilliant piece of cross-examination, thought Trave. Arne had no proof that Swain had watched Katya Osman and Ethan Mendel making the beast with two backs on the floor of the boathouse, but then again he didn’t need any. The defendant’s uncontrolled reaction to the accusation was enough. The picture was too powerful to be ignored. It was enough to drive a man to murder.

      ‘You saw them and something broke inside you, didn’t it? You decided to murder Mr Mendel. That was the only way to stop the pain, wasn’t it?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘But then he went away. That must have been hard for you, Mr Swain – having to wait?’

      The defendant didn’t answer, and Arne went on relentlessly: ‘Except that suddenly, out of the blue, he came back and asked you to meet him at the very place where he’d hurt you so badly . . .’

      ‘Yes. Why would he do that?’ asked Swain loudly, interrupting.

      ‘I don’t know. I’m not Mr Mendel. But you obviously didn’t give him a chance to explain, did you? Because he’d provided you with your opportunity. That’s all you cared about. An opportunity to get even with him forever. In the very place where you had been betrayed. The place where your heaven had turned to hell. With a knife in the back. It must have felt like sweet revenge.’

      ‘No, it didn’t. I didn’t kill him. I swear I didn’t.’

      ‘I can’t hear you, Mr Swain. You’ll have to speak louder.’

      It was indeed hard to understand what Swain was saying. He was half-bent over in the witness box, and his words escaped from him in gasps. He was like a wild animal that had been wounded by a crack-shot hunter, thought Trave. He’d go on for a little while, but before long he’d be finished.

      ‘I didn’t murder Ethan,’ he said, looking up at the prosecutor through reddened eyes. ‘Someone else did.’

      ‘At just about the same time that you were with him? That’s the time-of-death evidence. You heard the doctor that came to court. You’re not disagreeing with him, are you?’

      ‘No, of course I’m not.’

      ‘I’m glad to hear it. So let me get this right. You’re beside the body of a man that’s just been murdered, a man that you have repeatedly threatened to kill. And yet you’re not the murderer. It’s someone else. Is that your evidence?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘So why, if you’re not the murderer, did you run away when Mr Claes told you to stop?’

      ‘Because I knew how it would look. Because he had a gun.’

      ‘No, Mr Claes shooting the gun is what made you stop. You ran because you were guilty, because you’d been caught red-handed. That’s the truth, isn’t it, Mr Swain? You’re guilty as charged.’

      Arne sat down without waiting for Swain to answer. He’d done all that he needed to. And the jury didn’t take long to convict the following day. Trave remembered the end of the trial for a long time afterward. The way Swain collapsed in on himself; the way he had to be half-supported, half-carried out of the dock and down the stairs to the cells to begin his life sentence; the silence in the courtroom after he’d gone.

      ‘Good work, Mr Trave,’ the prosecutor told Trave afterward as he shook him by the hand on the courthouse steps. ‘That boy’s damn lucky not to swing. If he’d used a gun it would’ve been different.’ Trave nodded glumly, wishing that he could share Arne’s certainty that justice had been done. In spite of all the evidence, something still nagged at him about the case: a lingering doubt that no one else seemed to share. Policing was a lonely, miserable business at the best of times, he thought, as he headed across the road toward the car park and pulled his collar up against the biting wind.

      PART ONE

      1960

      CHAPTER 1

      Outside it was late summer. The red-brown leaves hung heavy on the trees in the woods beyond the house, and in the front courtyard silver water splashed down from the stone mermaids’ open mouths into the blue-grey basin of the fountain to be reabsorbed, pumped back up and out again in an endless cycle. The courtyard was empty and it was the only sound. Above, the last golden light of the sinking evening sun glinted here and there in the polished glass of the three symmetrical rows of sash windows that ran along the façade of Blackwater Hall. All of them the same, except for one window high up on the left, a window with steel bars inside the reinforced glass. Behind it Katya Osman sat at her desk writing in her diary.

      She wrote sideways with her body leaning over the book as if to conceal its contents, but this was clearly from force of habit, not necessity, since there was no one else in the room and the door was locked. Her