The King of Diamonds

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‘And you’ve got a licence for it, have you?’

‘You know I have, Inspector. It’s the same gun I had two years ago. It’s not the first time we’ve discussed it, you know,’ said Claes with a half-smile. It was not an attractive smile, thought Clayton. It was partly the way in which the tightening of Claes’s facial muscles threw into sharper relief the ugly scar that ran down the left side of his face, but it was also because there was no warmth in the man. His eyes were cold too, grey and watchful and somehow disconnected.

Trave had been quiet for a moment, but now he pursed his lips as if coming to a decision.

‘All right, Mr Claes. You tell us what happened in your own words. I’ll try not to interrupt you.’

‘Thank you,’ said Claes with a nod. ‘Once outside my room I heard someone walking on the floor above, and so I climbed the stairs and looked around the corner. There was a candle burning on the floor outside Katya’s room. It’s about halfway down the corridor on the left-hand side. Her door was half-open and the light was on inside. It was then that I heard the shot. Almost immediately a man came out. I could see it was Swain. I recognized him from when I stopped him before down by the lake, and from his trial. He was standing still for a moment, and I shot at him, but he saw me and ducked back behind the door. And immediately he ran away down to the end of the corridor, toward the other set of stairs, and I fired again, but I don’t know whether I hit him or not. And then he disappeared.’

‘What was he wearing?’ asked Clayton, speaking for the first time.

‘A blue-and-white shirt, some jeans maybe. I’m not sure about the trousers.’

‘Were the clothes torn?’

‘I don’t know. There was no time to see things like that.’

Trave looked at Clayton impatiently, drumming his fingers on his knee as Clayton made a note in his report book.

‘So Mr Swain disappeared,’ Trave said, leaning forward. ‘Did you follow him?’

‘Yes, but not to catch him up. It would have been impossible: he was running and I have a problem with my leg’ – Claes tapped his left knee – ‘so I shouted down to Titus to warn him, and then I went downstairs myself. Titus was in the corridor outside his bedroom. We looked down here and it seemed like Swain was gone, so we went back up to Katya’s room.’

‘Together?’

‘No, Titus went first. I looked in all the rooms first because I wanted to make sure Swain wasn’t hiding somewhere.’

‘What would you have done if you’d found him?’

‘Whatever was necessary, of course,’ said Claes. There was a cold, clipped tone to his voice that Clayton found oddly disconcerting, chilling even.

‘And so when you didn’t find him, you went back upstairs and found Miss Osman shot in the head. How did that make you feel, Mr Claes?’ asked Trave.

Claes didn’t answer for a moment. It was as if he was nonplussed by the question, as if he’d prepared himself to say what had happened but not how he felt about it. Clayton didn’t think that Claes was the type of man who spent much of his life discussing his feelings.

‘I was sorry. Of course I was sorry,’ he said slowly. ‘But there was nothing I could do.’

‘No, there wasn’t, was there?’ said Trave, sounding unconvinced. ‘Miss Osman hasn’t exactly been a high priority in this house recently, has she?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘The doctor says she’s badly undernourished; she’s got puncture marks all the way up one arm; and there are steel bars on her windows. What have you got to say about that, Mr Claes?’

‘She had got herself into trouble in the town,’ said Claes, choosing his words carefully. ‘My brother-in-law was looking after her, but she was unwilling.’

‘Unwilling?’

‘Yes, often she would not eat. She was not grateful.’

‘Grateful! For being kept a prisoner in her own home?’

Claes shrugged his shoulders.

‘Why did you try to shoot Mr Swain?’ asked Trave, changing the subject.

‘Because I was frightened of what he was going to do next. Titus was downstairs and he had already shot Katya.’

‘You didn’t know that.’

‘He was coming out of her room. I’d heard the shot. Anyone would have assumed it.’

Clayton silently agreed, thinking that he’d have definitely taken a shot or two if some armed man was running around his house shooting people. But then again he didn’t keep a gun in his bedroom. Not like Franz Claes.

‘It’s not the first time you’ve tried to put a bullet in Mr Swain, is it?’ Trave observed.

But Claes was ready for this.

‘No, Inspector, it is the first time. After Mr Mendel was murdered, I fired my gun to stop Mr Swain running away, not to hit him. This time it was different.’

Trave didn’t argue. He was stroking his chin again, thinking, and Clayton was just wondering whether this might be the signal for him to take over, when Trave asked his next question. It was not one that Clayton had expected.

‘Where does your sister sleep, Mr Claes?’

‘On the top floor, further along the corridor from Katya’s room.’

‘I see. Further down the corridor. Well, then let me ask you this: Why did you fire twice down that corridor when you must have known that there was a serious risk that she would come outside and be hit?’

Claes didn’t answer. There was a flush in his cheeks: it was the first time during the interview that he’d looked really discomforted.

‘You could have killed her, couldn’t you?’ said Trave, pressing the point.

‘It was a moment of stress,’ said Claes, finally answering. ‘I didn’t have time to think,’ he finished lamely.

‘You didn’t think,’ repeated Trave with a withering smile. ‘Well, thank you, Mr Claes, for your assistance. That’ll be all for now. But please don’t leave the house without telling us. We may be needing you again.’

Claes stood, bringing his polished shoes together with an audible click; nodded his head once to the two policemen; and limped to the door. He went out without looking back.

‘Slippery bastard,’ said Trave. ‘He’s play-acting with that limp. He walked a lot quicker last time I saw him.’

‘Why do you dislike him so much, sir?’ Clayton felt compelled to ask the question. He hadn’t warmed to Franz Claes during the interview, but most of what the man said made sense, even though it was strange he hadn’t thought of his sister when he fired those shots. It was Trave’s hostility that was more puzzling.

‘It’s not that I like or dislike him; it’s that I don’t trust him. He’s got secrets – that much I can tell you.’

‘Secrets?’ repeated Clayton, surprised.

‘All right, a secret,’ said Trave. ‘He was picked up in a vice raid a few years back – before the Mendel murder. A man called Bircher was running a whole lot of underage boys out of an old tenement house in Cowley. The detective I talked to said they were going to charge Claes, but then orders came down to let him off with a talking to, because it was a first offence or something like that. I don’t know the ins and outs of it, but Osman obviously got involved – spun some sob story or other, made a donation to the police benevolent fund. I don’t know. It’s ancient history now. Let’s see what the sister’s got to say.’

CHAPTER 8

Out in the hall Jana Claes sat on a high-backed wooden chair awaiting her turn in the drawing room. She had had time to get dressed and was now wearing her usual coal-black outfit with her greying hair tied up in a bun at the back of her head. Her pale face was even more wan than usual, but otherwise there was little to indicate that it was the middle of the night and that she had been woken by a murder committed only a few yards away from where she slept, except perhaps that the stillness of her hands seemed forced, as if inside she was rigid rather than relaxed, trying hard to hold herself in check.

She kept her eyes on the ground, only looking up when her brother came out of the drawing room and stopped for a brief moment beside her chair.

‘Be careful of the old one. He’ll try to trap you,’ he said, speaking in an undertone in rapid Dutch. ‘Remember what I said.’

She nodded: a small but clear inclination of her head, and Claes turned away toward the stairs, apparently satisfied, just as Clayton came out into the hall.

‘Miss Claes,’ said the policeman, holding the door of the drawing room open. ‘We’re ready for you now.’

Reaching behind her shoulder, Jana unhooked the handle of a walking stick from the back of her chair and got slowly to her feet.

‘Do you need a hand?’ asked Clayton, reaching forward instinctively to help Jana up.

‘No!’ Jana almost shouted the word, recoiling from the policeman’s touch, and Clayton gave her a wide berth as she went past him into the drawing room.

Trave was standing in front of the fireplace with his back to the door. He’d been thinking about his wife and Osman; imagining them standing in this room where he was now; picturing Osman’s long, tapering fingers on Vanessa’s arm as he showed her his possessions. Trave shuddered. He knew the man. Osman was a collector, and now Vanessa was being added to the collection. Involuntarily Trave picked up a pretty Dresden china ornament from the mantelpiece, a milkmid with a jug, and held it in his fist, thinking about how satisfying it would be to throw it down, smash it in the fireplace at his feet, but at that moment Jana, entering the room, caught sight of Trave’s reflection in the mirror above the fireplace, and, perhaps sensing what was going through his mind, she shouted at him from the doorway: ‘Put it down.’

Trave was surprised at himself afterwards that he so meekly obeyed the woman’s command. Perhaps it was an association with his childhood – his mother had hated him touching her ornaments, her ‘precious things’ as she called them.

He didn’t turn round immediately but instead took a moment to pull himself together, watching Claes’s sister in the mirror as she came slowly into the room, leaning heavily on her stick. She hesitated after a few steps, perhaps embarrassed at her outburst, before going on to the sofa, where she sat awkwardly, keeping firm hold of the stick as if ready to get up and leave at a moment’s notice. She looked out of place in the room, and Trave thought he knew why. This was Osman’s territory, and Jana would only come in here to clean and dust, not to sit on the sofa and make conversation.

‘I am sorry,’ she said, speaking slowly and with a heavy foreign accent. ‘The china, it is expensive and I look after it.’ The apology was reluctant, Trave thought. She would have remained silent if she’d felt she had a choice.

‘I quite understand,’ said Trave, resuming his seat beside Clayton on the sofa opposite. ‘All this must be very distressing for you.’

‘Yes.’

Trave looked at Jana Claes with interest. He’d interviewed her two years before when he took her statement after the Mendel murder, but she’d had little to say then. Her evidence had been straightforward: she’d gone out shopping with Katya in the afternoon and so neither of them had been present when Mendel met his death down by the boathouse. She knew very little of the murdered man and had never met his assassin, David Swain. And yet now it was different. Jana Claes had been living with Katya Osman for years. She knew things: how the house worked, what Katya’s life had been like in her last months, and it was Trave’s job to get the information out of her if he could. But it wouldn’t be easy. That much was obvious. With her eyes fixed on the carpet, she looked the very image of an unwilling witness.

‘Okay,’ he said, beginning his questions in a far more friendly tone than he’d adopted with Jana’s brother. ‘Detective Clayton and I are trying to put together a picture of what happened here tonight, and so we’d like you to tell us everything you remember.’

‘I went to bed. I woke up because there was a shot. Then there were more, two more. And people running. And then it was quiet again. Titus, Mr Osman, came into my room and took me to Katya. Then my brother, Franz, was there too. I did not touch her. They said to wait. After, I got dressed and you came.’

Trave watched Jana carefully. There was a rehearsed feel to her words, and he was struck by her failure to articulate any emotional response to the murder. Was it shock or her difficulties with the language or something else?

‘You sleep only two rooms away from Miss Osman. Isn’t that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘So the gunshots must have been very loud?’

‘Yes.’

‘How long would you say there was between the first shot, the one that woke you up, and the others?’

‘I don’t know. I was sleeping.’

‘Enough time to get out of bed?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you didn’t go outside?’

‘No, I was frightened.’

‘Yes, I can understand that.’ Trave nodded and then stayed silent for a moment, with his forehead creased as he debated where to go next with his questions.

‘Tell us what you do here, Miss Claes. Other than look after the china,’ he said with a smile.

‘I take care of the house. I tell the servants what to do. My brother-in-law, Mr Osman, he likes things done . . .’ Jana stopped, searching for the right word, and Trave came to her assistance.