And Titus will be disgraced even though he is innocent. I ask you — is that justice?’ asked Franz, leaning forward and looking Vanessa in the eye. He hadn’t raised his voice, but she noticed how his bony hands were clenched together in his lap. She felt like he was looking inside her, and it made her heart beat fast. A cold sweat broke out on her forehead.
‘Titus has told me that he asked you to say nothing,’ Franz went on after a moment. ‘And he says that you are thinking about his request, but it is not enough to think, Mrs Trave. You must decide to do what is right; you must protect Titus from your husband.’
Vanessa drew a deep breath, trying to keep a lid on her inner turmoil. All week long she had been agonizing over what to do. She believed in Titus and wanted to help him, but then each time she resolved to do as he asked and stay silent, Katya’s desperate face appeared in her mind’s eye, and she remembered the terrible struggle that the girl had gone through to convey her message. ‘They’re trying to kill me’ — what if it was Claes and his invisible sister that Katya had been talking about? Was that why Claes was appealing to her now — not for Titus’s sake, but to protect himself?
‘Does Titus know about you talking to me about this?’ she asked.
Claes shook his head, and she was inclined to believe him. Titus was too considerate of her feelings to allow Claes to pester her — he knew how much she disliked his brother-in-law.
‘Well?’ Claes asked, looking at her expectantly. ‘Can we count on you?’
‘I’ll talk to Titus about it,’ she said. Claes flushed, but bit back the angry response he’d been about to make when the door opened and Titus came in.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, looking surprised. ‘I only just now saw your car outside, my dear. I had no idea you were already here. Has Franz been looking after you?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Vanessa holding up her glass. ‘He has been most attentive.’
After lunch, Titus lent Vanessa a pair of Wellington boots and they walked out across the lawn to where the path opened up in the pine trees leading down to the lake. Titus’s cat, Cara, followed them a little way but then turned aside, entering the woods at a different point, engaged on a hunting expedition in the undergrowth. Vanessa was not sorry to see the animal go. She found it unnerving the way the cat stared at her out of its unblinking green eyes whenever she visited the Hall. Once or twice she had tried to stroke the creature, but it had got up each time and stalked away, impervious to her well-intentioned advances.
It had been raining earlier and the ground was still wet underfoot. There were patches of thin mist floating in the damp air and the autumn cold tingled on Vanessa’s skin, making her feel irrationally nervous and uneasy. And yet Titus seemed in better spirits than she’d seen him since the murder. She’d been distressed by the change in him when she’d seen him the previous Sunday and then again in the middle of the week. Then there’d been thick dark circles under his eyes and he’d spoken in disjointed sentences as if his mind was constantly wandering away into desolate places where she could not follow. And afterwards, on her own, she’d thought of him as an old tree bent over to the ground in a winter storm. The image frightened her, making her worry whether he would recover from the blow of his niece’s violent death, as she selfishly realized how much she’d come to depend on her lover’s strength and self-assurance. But then today, as if in answer to her prayers, there was a spring in his step again and a glow in his eye. He seemed almost like his old self again.
‘Having you here makes such a difference,’ he told her, squeezing her hand as they passed under the trees and left the gardens behind.
‘I’m glad,’ she said. And she would have liked to have said more except that she felt self-conscious suddenly. It was as if another separate Vanessa was standing off to one side under the trees watching Titus and her pass by along the path. She hoped that he wouldn’t ask her about his marriage proposal or what she intended to do about what Katya had said. She felt upset by the pressure Claes had put on her back at the house — being in the drawing room had reminded her of Katya and how she’d suddenly appeared in the doorway ten days earlier swaying from side to side. It haunted Vanessa that Katya had known what was coming and yet nobody had been able to protect her from her fate.
‘I keep wishing I could have done something,’ said Osman, as if reading his companion’s mind. ‘I wish I’d known…’
‘About Swain? How could you have known he’d escape? Prisons are supposed to keep people in, not let them out,’ said Vanessa, quick with words of reassurance. ‘You can’t blame yourself.’
‘I know, but it’s hard sometimes,’ he said and then stopped, suddenly silent as the trees opened out in front of them and they found themselves standing on the edge of the lake. Here the mist was thicker, shrouding the far bank and absorbing a flock of geese into a grey-white invisibility almost as soon as the birds had passed overhead, leaving only their raucous calls borne back to Titus and Vanessa on the breeze. Vanessa shivered, and Titus put his arm around her.
‘Blackwater Lake can seem like an evil place on days like this,’ he said, ‘but then within an hour or two the wind will chase the clouds away, and it knocks me back with its beauty. Its changeability reminds me of home, I think. That’s why I like it so much.’
‘Home? Belgium, you mean?’
‘Yes. Antwerp and the River Scheldt and Flanders — where I came from, where I made my fortune.’
‘Selling diamonds?’ asked Vanessa, genuinely curious. Titus had never told her about how he had made his money before. The subject had not come up for some reason.
‘Yes, diamonds, always diamonds. I fell in love with them before I dealt in them and perhaps that was why they have been so good to me. They are in my blood, Vanessa. I can close my eyes here now and I’m back there, back in the attic workshops before the war with the rows of men on stools in their white shirts and black waistcoats cleaving the stones, sawing them, cutting them with a precision that you cannot imagine — each one of them an artist — or sitting among the dealers in the bourse or at the Diamond Club on the Pelikaanstraat, bent down over the jewels so all you could see were their wide-brimmed hats.’ Osman laughed, as if shaking off the intensity of his recollection.
‘Why don’t you go back there if you miss it so much?’
‘I don’t know. Because I have made a new life here; because I have enough money now to last me a lifetime; because there are too many bad memories over there, too many people that died when they shouldn’t have done. Except that now they are dying here too,’ added Titus with a bitter smile.
‘Come on, let’s go back,’ he went on after a moment. ‘You’re cold and this isn’t one of the lake’s better days.’
They walked slowly back through the woods without speaking, the sound of their footsteps muffled by the pine needles that carpeted the ground, each lost in their own thoughts, until, coming out on the other side, Titus shivered as he looked up toward his house and reached for Vanessa’s hand.
‘Thank God we’re together,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where I would be without you.’
Vanessa felt a sudden wave of protective love for Titus. She raised her head, waiting for his kiss, but the kiss never came. From across the lawn there was the sound of a car coming fast, much too fast, up the drive and then the screech of its brakes as it emerged into the front courtyard and screamed to a halt. Titus set off across the lawn at a run with Vanessa following in his wake, and she turned the corner of the house just in time to see her husband beginning a shouting match with Franz Claes at the foot of the front steps. Further back, a young man whom Vanessa recognized as her husband’s assistant, Adam Clayton, was standing beside the open door of Trave’s old Ford car, looking as if he knew that something bad was about to happen but was powerless to prevent it.
‘Where’s Bircher? Tell me where he is right now,’ shouted Trave. He was no more than a foot from Claes, who was standing ramrod straight, refusing to give ground.
‘I don’t know who you’re talking about,’ said Claes evenly. He seemed strangely calm, and there was even a faint smile playing around his thin lips: Vanessa sensed to her surprise that he was actually enjoying the situation.
‘You’re lying,’ yelled Trave. ‘Bircher was the one who set you up with those boys and he’s the one who you used to spring Swain out of gaol.’
‘Spring — what’s spring?’ asked Claes with a sneer. He spoke the word with derision. It was obvious that he was trying to provoke Trave, whose hands had bunched into fists, whereas Claes kept his hands firmly in the pockets of his trousers. Osman clearly sensed what was coming and chose this moment to intervene.
‘Inspector, please calm down. I’m sure we can sort this out,’ he said.
Trave wheeled round to his left, aware of Osman for the first time. He opened his mouth to speak and then
