Clayton asked him if he’d heard anything untoward.
‘There wasn’t a mark on him that I could see,’ Clayton told Trave a week later when his doubts and anxiety had driven him over to his ex-boss’s house for the first time since Swain’s arrest.
‘But you don’t need to leave a mark if you know what you’re doing,’ Trave said, laughing at Clayton’s naivete. ‘There’s other ways of breaking a man…’
‘Like what?’
‘Squeezing his genitals, half-drowning him in a bucket of water, threatening his family. It wouldn’t have taken much to break Swain. I saw him, remember, and he was already on his last legs in that cricket pavilion. And Macrae’s not averse to a bit of coercion where it suits his purpose.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because a few years back he put an innocent man in gaol for a murder he didn’t commit. The man did three years before the conviction was overturned and he got a Queen’s pardon.’
‘Did you have something to do with that?’ asked Clayton, remembering the oblique references that Trave and Macrae had both made earlier in the investigation to some kind of shared past.
‘Yes, by accident at first,’ said Trave. ‘I had a murder down here in which the killer left the same calling card as in Macrae’s case.’
‘What was it?’ asked Clayton, curious.
‘A shilling coin on the victim’s tongue. You know, like they used to do in Roman times to pay the ferryman to take the dead across the River Styx. Don’t you kids learn anything in school any more?’ asked Trave, shaking his head in response to Clayton’s look of bemusement. ‘Anyway, I remembered about the other murder up north, and I went and looked up the evidence. It was really weak apart from a confession extracted by guess who?’
‘Macrae?’
‘Exactly. And once I was able to tie my man to the first murder, then that was it for Macrae’s conviction.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘Macrae? Nothing as far as I know. The man who got the pardon said that Macrae had tortured him into confessing, but there was no physical evidence of that and the fact that his confession was false didn’t prove that Macrae had forced it out of him.’
‘It just made it very likely,’ said Clayton.
‘Yes. And that obviously didn’t help Macrae’s climb up the greasy ladder, for which he’s blamed me ever since. This Osman case was his chance for payback, and you can’t take it away from him — he grabbed the opportunity with both hands,’ said Trave with a rueful smile.
‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’ asked Clayton.
‘Because Creswell asked me not to, and I agreed with him. I didn’t want Macrac transferred down here, but once it happened I wasn’t going to make things worse by a lot of backstabbing. It had been a long time since I’d crossed swords with him and I didn’t realize that he’s a Scotsman with a long memory.’
The conversation with Trave increased Clayton’s sense of unease about the case, and his anxieties intensified soon after when the ballistics report came back from the lab with the news that Swain’s gun could have fired the bullet that killed Katya Osman but was now entirely loaded with blank ammunition. Clayton had expected Macrae to be concerned at this development, but he dismissed it with a shrug of his shoulders.
‘It’s an old trick, lad,’ he said. ‘Kill your man with a gun, load it with blanks like it never happened, and then play the innocent.’
‘But where would he get the blanks?’
‘Anywhere. It’s not difficult. The evidence is self-serving. It won’t make any difference.’
And then, just as he was turning away, Macrae noticed the look of disappointment on Clayton’s face.
‘Don’t go lily-livered on me, Constable,’ he said with a sneer. ‘You don’t want to end up like old Trave, do you? Flushed down the toilet at fifty?’
There seemed to be nothing Clayton could do to change the direction of events. Swain was charged with murder, and Eddie got an even better deal than Trave had dangled before him. The charges for the assault on the girl in London were dropped and leniency was promised for the escape, in return for Eddie’s testifying at trial about the threats he’d heard Swain make against Katya and about how he’d seen Swain enter the grounds of Blackwater Hall at around half past midnight on the morning of Sunday, 25 September, armed with a handgun.
Swain had pleaded not guilty, but everyone at the station agreed that the trial would be a formality and that it was only a matter of time before Swain went to meet his maker.
‘It’s not like the old days with all that dangling and strangling,’ said Macrae, sounding disappointed. ‘They’ve got it scientific now so it snaps their necks in a second.’
They were in Macrae’s office on the morning after the arraignment. Suddenly Clayton jumped, hearing a loud snap. And then he looked back over his shoulder to where Jonah was sitting in the corner. Wale met Clayton’s stare and then leaned forward and snapped his fingers again hard. And Macrae laughed like it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen.
After this episode Clayton started going over to Trave’s house a lot more in the evenings after work. But it didn’t help. Trave was depressed and felt as impotent as Clayton. And then Christmas came and the new year, and John Bircher fell off the top of a multi-storey car park and broke his head into three different pieces on the concrete down below.
‘Perhaps he jumped,’ said Clayton without conviction. ‘That’s what Macrae says.’
‘What? Felt sorry for his sins, couldn’t stand to live with himself any more?’ asked Trave with a hollow laugh. ‘I don’t think so. Bircher was as black-hearted as they come: look at his rap sheet. No, someone got worried because he knew too much — arranged to meet him and then gave him the heave-ho.’
‘It wouldn’t be that easy. Bircher was a big man, you know.’
‘Maybe whoever did it had a gun.’
‘Like Claes, you mean?’
‘Maybe. But you’ll never prove it.’
They were sitting on either side of the old dining table in Trave’s living room, each nursing a glass of neat whisky. Trave sighed and relapsed back into his own thoughts; and then, as if coming to a decision, he got up and went over to an open-top bureau in the corner of the room and brought back a thick file crammed with well- thumbed, typed papers. There was a label on the front: regina versus david john swain, central criminal court, 1958.
Trave dropped the file on the table in front of Clayton and leant down over him, rapidly turning the pages until he got to one towards the end headed evidence of jacob mendel.
‘Here, read this,’ said Trave. ‘And then we’ll talk.’ And Clayton began to read:
DEFENCE COUNSEL, MR RELTON: You are the younger brother of the victim in this case, Ethan Mendel?
WITNESS: Yes.
COUNSEL: When did you last see your brother?
WITNESS: November last year. He left our home in Antwerp to go to England.
COUNSEL: Why?
WITNESS: He was going to see Titus Osman.
COUNSEL: Why?
WITNESS: Osman knew my father before the war. They both dealt in diamonds. My family — we are Jews, and after the German invasion it became unsafe. More and more unsafe. Osman — he was called Usman then — helped my brother and me escape with our grandmother to Switzerland in 1942, but my parents waited. I don’t really know why. And then the next year, when Osman tried to help them, they were caught crossing the border into France and the Germans sent them to the deportation camp at Malines. And from there they went on a train to Auschwitz. And they died. Ethan wanted to know more about what happened to them and so he went to see Osman in England.
COUNSEL: Did you hear from Ethan after he left?
WITNESS: Yes, he telephoned my grandmother and me at Christmas, and he wrote us postcards. He said that he was staying longer than he’d expected and that he had met a girl, Katya, who was Osman’s niece. He said he was happy. And then at the start of May I got a letter from Ethan which was different. He said that he had found out something important, too important to tell me about except face-to-face. He said that I should come to England
