to understand.’
‘My husband. What’s my husband got to do with it?’ asked Vanessa, not understanding the connection for a moment.
‘He’s the man in charge, what you English call the officer in the case,’ said Titus bitterly. ‘I know — it’s crazy,’ he added, seeing the look of surprise on Vanessa’s face. ‘Anyone else would have handed the investigation over to another detective given his personal interest. But oh no, Bill Trave knows best.’
‘What’s he done?’ asked Vanessa, feeling alarmed.
‘Interrogated me and my family like we were the criminals. That’s what. He accused us of deliberately starving Katya, of hurting her. And he even asked Jana, my sister-in-law, why she didn’t take communion or go to confession when she went to church. Can you imagine? The other policeman stopped him, or I don’t know what else he’d have said.’
‘That’s not like Bill,’ said Vanessa, shaking her head. ‘He always took pride in his work. That’s the one thing that kept him going, I think.’
‘Well, maybe his jealousy of us has changed all that. I am sorry for what has happened to him. Truly I am. I bear him no ill will, but I need him to be a policeman now, to catch this maniac who has done this terrible thing, not use my niece’s death as an opportunity to
…’
‘Settle the score,’ Vanessa said, finishing Osman’s sentence for him when he couldn’t seem to find the right word. ‘I have to say I find all this hard to believe, Titus. That Bill should be so unfair. He was on the radio while I was waiting for you to come over, appealing for help finding Swain. It’s a pity you didn’t hear him. It might have made you feel better.’
‘It does make me feel better,’ said Titus, sounding just as upset as before. ‘Once Swain is under lock and key then maybe everything will settle down. But, in the meantime, Vanessa, I need to ask you something. A favour. You have to help me.’
‘Help you how?’ asked Vanessa, looking puzzled.
‘Help me by not telling your husband about what Katya said to you. She was out of her mind with misdirected anger and grief that night like I told you before, and she didn’t know what she was saying. The evidence against Swain is overwhelming. He was in Katya’s room with a gun — Franz and Jana heard him fire it. But your husband refuses to see it that way. I know it’s wrong, but I didn’t feel able to tell him that I was keeping Katya at home against her will. It was for her own good, but I know he’d just have used it against me. I know what he’s trying to do — he’s looking for any excuse to build a case against me because he hates me, Vanessa. You know he does.’
Titus looked hard at Vanessa, willing her to look him in the eye and give him what he asked, but she looked away into the fire, knitting her brow. She didn’t like it. She’d been brought up to tell the truth and this felt all wrong. But then again Titus wasn’t asking her to tell a lie, only to keep information to herself, and maybe the thought of it made her feel bad just because anything less than one hundred per cent truthfulness always made her uncomfortable. And Titus was right — the case against this Swain man did seem overwhelming. Why did she need to make Titus’s life hell for no reason just when he needed time and space to recover from the terrible wound that Swain had inflicted upon him? What would it do to their relationship if she got Titus into trouble just when he needed her the most, if she denied him the first major sacrifice he’d ever asked of her? Vanessa still hadn’t made up her mind whether she wanted to marry Titus, but she had no doubt in her mind that she didn’t want to lose him.
And yet it was unlike Bill to be unprofessional. And it certainly was a strange coincidence that Katya should have been so convinced that nameless people were trying to kill her less than two weeks before she met a violent death. Vanessa thought of Franz Claes’s cold smile and shivered, wondering not for the first time if Titus knew his brother-in-law as well as he claimed.
‘Let me think about it,’ she said, looking up. ‘I know this has been a terrible shock for you, Titus. But it’s a shock for me too.’
‘I understand,’ said Titus, drawing a deep breath as he tried to hide his disappointment. ‘Will you talk to me before you do anything, though, Vanessa? Can I ask you that much?’
‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘If you only knew how much I want to help you, Titus, if you only knew…’
She stopped, struggling with her emotions.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘You don’t need to tell me. I already know.’
And as they sat hand in hand on the sofa watching the fire burn down to glowing broken embers, Vanessa felt she’d never loved anyone as much as she loved Titus Osman at that moment.
CHAPTER 10
David Swain hurried through the deserted streets in the early light. He felt cold and hungry, but none of the shops or cafes that he passed were open yet, and most of them would stay closed all day. Sunday was not a good day to be on the run, he thought, with sour humour. And his shoulder was hurting worse than ever, with pains that shot down his arm and left him weak at the knees so that all he could think about was his mother’s house and the distance that still separated him from his destination. It wasn’t a solution — he knew that. His trick at the train station might buy him a little time, but the police weren’t going to assume he’d gone to London forever. Sooner rather than later they’d come knocking at his mother’s door, and his stepfather would hand him over without a second’s thought. Because Ben Bishop hated him and his mother did what her husband told her to do, which had to be why she’d never visited him in gaol even after he’d been moved back to Oxford Prison at the beginning of the year. She wrote to him, she’d even sent him a couple of bars of chocolate, but she never came to see him. And what use were letters? No use, except that in her last one she’d told him about Ben getting a bit more money from working on weekends, driving his Number 19 bus round the Oxfordshire countryside, ‘providing a service to rural areas’ as David remembered his stepfather pompously describing his work when he’d first appeared on the scene seven or eight years ago in his ill-fitting suit and tie, trying to worm his way into David’s mother’s affections. And it hadn’t taken him long, thought David bitterly; less than a year to move in and take over, to wipe the past from David’s childhood home like it had never existed. But on Sundays he worked, and David’s mother couldn’t refuse to help her son for a few hours. That’s all he needed: enough time to clean up the wound, eat, and grab a little sleep, and then he’d be on his way like he’d never been in the house at all. Ben would never need to know.
David was utterly exhausted by the time he got to the turning to his mother’s street. He felt himself tottering from side to side, hanging on to street lamps and garden walls for support like he was a drunk on his last legs returning from an unusually excessive night out on the town. He looked down at his watch — half past six. He’d have to wait and keep watch — his stepfather couldn’t have left for work yet. Crossing the road, he retrieved yesterday’s Daily Express from a litter bin and sat down on a bench with the newspaper held up over his face to hide his features. He was too tired to read more than the headlines: US presses ahead with Polaris submarine program: More nuclear missiles fired from underwater. The bomb, always the bomb — the shadow over all their lives. There were times when he was younger when David had thought about nothing else. He’d seen the pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and read the reports of what had happened after the atomic bombs were dropped on the unsuspecting Japanese down below, and fear of the Russians had kept him up through countless sleepless nights, thinking about the Politburo leaders in their brown fur caps standing on top of the Kremlin wall, watching the tanks roll by on May Day with unreadable expressions on their Slavic faces. But now for a moment he almost welcomed the thought of a war that would wipe everything out, leaving nothing behind.
He woke up with the sun in his eyes. More than an hour had gone by, and now he had no way of knowing whether his stepfather was still in the house. Cursing his stupidity, David threw the newspaper off his chest, turned the collar of the stolen jacket up around his neck, and started to walk slowly down the street toward his mother’s house. Stopping just before the low box hedge in front of the next-door neighbour’s garden, he knelt down as if to tie his shoelaces and peered round the corner. He took in the front garden — a postage stamp patch of carefully mown grass bordered by two rows of red chrysanthemums growing at precisely equal distances from each other, and beside it, parked on the tiny drive, his stepfather’s brand new lilac-green Ford Anglia motor car, its owner’s proudest possession, gleaming in the early morning sunshine. And then, edging forward, the front bay window of
