Trave was sounding like a member of the Spanish Inquisition, not a policeman investigating a crime. This was England — Miss Claes’s religious beliefs were her own affair.
‘How well did you know Miss Osman?’ he asked.
‘I know her a lot. I look after her,’ said Jana, switching her attention to the younger policeman with obvious relief.
‘How do you mean? Look after her?’ asked Clayton, surprised by Jana’s choice of words.
‘I give her meals. I clean her room. I wash her clothes. I look after her.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? Because Titus asks me to. It is for a woman, not a man to do this.’
‘But why did Miss Claes need looking after? That’s what I’m asking you.’
‘She was not well. She had done bad things.’
‘And so you kept her a prisoner in her room to stop her doing them again. Is that right?’ asked Trave, returning to the attack. ‘With bars on the windows and a key in the door?’
‘No. No key.’
‘And fed her bread and water. That was for her own good too, was it?’ went on Trave remorselessly. There was a tough edge to his voice now, as if he’d decided to blast the truth about Katya out of Jana Claes with a full frontal assault.
But Jana was unyielding. ‘I give her good meals. On a tray,’ she said, sounding genuinely annoyed. She’d let go of her walking stick now and was clasping and unclasping her hands in her lap. ‘It is not my fault she does not eat what I give her.’
‘And what else did you do?’ asked Trave. ‘Did you inject her with drugs? In her left arm, above her elbow?’
‘I gave her a sedative to help her sleep. Before; not tonight.’
‘How many times?’
‘Twice. That’s all.’
‘Think carefully about what you’re telling me, Miss Claes,’ said Trave slowly, fixing Jana with a hard stare. ‘I’ll ask you one more time. Is there something you want to tell me about Katya Osman, about what happened here tonight?’
‘No!’ Jana Claes almost spat out the word. She looked angrily from one policeman to the other and then took hold of her walking stick and got up.
‘I am tired,’ she said. ‘I need to rest.’ Clayton went over to the door and held it open for her, and as she went slowly by, he could have sworn that she was biting her lip and that there was a tear in the corner of her eye.
David Swain sat at the top of a small hill with his back to a big horse-chestnut tree, looking down on the road below, which was illuminated by the lights of a myriad of police cars and vans parked in a long line running almost the whole length of Osman’s property. The house behind was also lit up, like a beacon in the night, and to the left the moon was palely reflected in the dark waters of Blackwater Lake.
The police were searching the grounds. David could hear them, their voices calling to one another in the woods. They had to know about his wound, or at least suspect, or they wouldn’t be hunting him like this, like some wounded fox gone to ground with a telltale blood trail left behind. Soon they would cross to his side of the road and start climbing up the hill, and by then he would have to be gone. But where? Yet again David searched his mind for a plan, but he could think of nothing beyond the here and now. The pain in his left shoulder was too great. He had no idea whether Claes’s bullet had hit him or merely grazed him as he turned the corner at the top the stairs. All he knew was that it hurt and that his arm felt soft: it made him sick to his stomach to even touch it. When he’d got to the top of the hill he’d ripped away the left arm of his already-torn shirt to make a tourniquet, but it didn’t seem to have stopped the blood. He could feel it seeping down the side of his body, and, reaching across, he took the wad of money out of the left pocket of his trousers and transferred it to the right. It was all he had: the money and the gun and a head start.
David shivered: in the last few minutes he had started to feel icy cold despite the fact that it was a reasonably warm night for the time of year, and he wished now that he’d been able to bring his jacket from the prison, but Eddie had insisted on using them for the dummies in the beds. Stupid bastard! Yet again David cursed his erstwhile friend through his chattering teeth. Why hadn’t Eddie waited like he said he would? David knew from his watch that he’d only been gone twenty-five minutes — less than the half hour they’d agreed, but there’d been no sign of the car when he’d got back to the road. Nothing at all: just the empty woods and an owl hooting overhead. Easy Eddie! — easy with his word, easy with his friends. David clenched his fists in anger and felt the pain in his shoulder shoot down his arm. He knew he had to stop thinking about Eddie. It was only sapping his strength, and, God knows, he had little of that left.
He lay back against the tree and closed his eyes. Unconsciously he ran his fingers over the smooth red-brown surface of one of the chestnuts that were lying strewn on the ground at his side. It felt reassuring somehow, perhaps because it reminded him of his childhood. At school he and his friends had threaded thin pieces of string through the soft centres of the conkers, as they called them, and then fought with them in the playground, taking it in turns to smite the other’s chestnut until one of them burst and the other survived to fight another day. Conkers. David remembered an especially hard nut that had once been his most treasured possession, the veteran of countless fights, a legend in its own time but now long forgotten — in a drawer somewhere perhaps, mouldering. In that house on the other side of Oxford, where his mother, old before her time, lived with Ben Bishop, who drove a bus and treated him like he didn’t exist. It wasn’t David’s home any more, hadn’t been for a long time, but for now he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. Ben worked on Sundays, and he needed someone to clean his wound, to let him rest for a few hours and get back his strength while he decided what to do, and surely to God his mother couldn’t deny him that. The police would come looking of course, but maybe not tonight, not while they were busy searching for him in the undergrowth. It was a bad plan. He knew that. But it was better than no plan at all.
Using the trunk of the chestnut tree for support, David hauled himself to his feet and took a last look at the road below and the lights from the house hidden in the trees: Osman’s house and inside it Katya, dead with a bullet in her head. Then, with a heavy sigh, David tucked the gun in the waistband of his jeans, pushed the wad of banknotes deep into his pocket, and set off down the other side of the hill towards Blackwater village.
It was difficult to see his way even in the moonlight, and once or twice he stumbled, almost losing his footing on the uneven ground. With each step he felt more light-headed, weaker at the knees, and, when he looked up, the stars seemed to be rushing through the sky as if he was looking at them through a black-and-white kaleidoscope. Reaching the empty road, he staggered a few hundred yards to a crossroads at the beginning of the village and then sank to the ground, exhausted, in the shadow of a garden hedge.
He was awoken in the first grey light of dawn by the noise of a lorry’s engine only a few feet away from where he was. The driver waited a moment or two, no doubt for the cross-traffic to pass, and then drove away into the night. Across the road in the light from a street-lamp David could see the Blackwater village store. There was food in the window — biscuits and loaves and even a birthday cake, and David suddenly felt ravenously hungry. He hadn’t eaten since six o’clock the night before, and not much then. Saturday-night dinner in Oxford Prison was always the worst of the week: the cooks went home for the weekend, and the cons got food reheated from the night before.
David remembered the shop now: he’d passed it on the bus ten times or more on his way to meet Katya at the boathouse in happier times. Katya and he had even been in there once, on a hot summer’s day more than three years ago now, standing in line behind a gaggle of children from the village as they queued to buy peppermints and ice creams from Mrs Parsler, who had to climb up on a tiny stepladder to reach down dusty jars of sweets from a shelf high above her head. Her husband’s name was on the sign above the door, and no doubt the two of them were now fast asleep behind the drawn curtains in their flat overhead. David was so hungry that he thought for a moment of smashing the shop window and taking the food from inside, but he resisted the temptation: if he was going to be caught, it wouldn’t be for something as stupid as that. Sleep had at least temporarily cleared his head, and he realized that he hadn’t any more time to waste. He needed help with his shoulder and he was too weak to go on much longer; certainly he was too weak to walk into Oxford. And there was no point trying to steal a car since he had no idea how to hot-wire the ignition. No, he’d have to get someone to drive him, and there was only one way of doing that.
He stood waiting in the shadows, holding the gun inside his pocket. Nothing moved. The village was entirely quiet, its inhabitants blissfully unaware that they would be on the front page of the national news by the end of the
