desk and another one upstairs. Thank God the police came, or I don’t know what would have happened.’
‘Who was it?’
‘Ethan’s brother, Jacob Mendel. It’s not the first time he’s been here. He blames me for Ethan’s death. I don’t know why. The police need to catch him before he does something really stupid.’ Vanessa caught the note of anxiety in Titus’s voice. It was strange when he was usually so confident, so much the master of the situation.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t have come if I’d known it was a bad time. I wanted to talk to you because I saw Bill, like you asked me to. I had coffee with him in town yesterday morning and…’ Vanessa hesitated, searching for the right words.
‘Did he agree — to the divorce?’ Osman asked, suddenly eager.
‘Yes.’
‘I told you he would,’ said Osman, smacking the side of the sofa with his open hand. ‘He’s…’
‘A decent man,’ said Vanessa, remembering the word she’d used to describe her husband to Titus on the day that she’d agreed to marry him. Now she felt ashamed of its inadequacy, it felt obscurely like a betrayal. It was Titus’s triumphalism that was making her uneasy, she realized. It made her feel cheap, as if she was a prize won in a game of chance, as if Bill’s agreement to the divorce was Titus’s victory, not hers.
‘There’s something else,’ she said. ‘I agreed to give evidence myself.’
‘Give evidence. What evidence?’ asked Osman, not understanding her meaning.
‘About what Katya said. About people trying to kill her.’
‘You can’t,’ said Osman, horrified. ‘You can’t do that to me, Vanessa. You said you wouldn’t.’
‘I know I did, and I shouldn’t have done. I have to do this, Titus,’ she said sadly. ‘I can’t be with you otherwise.’
Osman got up and walked away to the window. He stood with his back to her for a moment, looking out, and Vanessa could sense him battling to keep control of his emotions.
‘Your husband put you up to this, didn’t he?’ he said finally, turning round. There was a cold, hard edge to his voice that Vanessa had never heard before. It frightened her, but the fear only made her more determined to go through with her decision. She knew she would have no peace otherwise.
‘He made me see what I should have seen for myself. That’s all,’ she said.
‘Very clever,’ said Osman. Again Vanessa had that fleeting sense that Titus was playing a game, reacting to a surprise move of his opponent. ‘Wasn’t going to Macrae enough?’ he asked angrily.
‘Macrae! How do you know about Macrae?’ asked Vanessa. Now it was her turn to be astonished.
‘Because he told me. Macrae wants to do what’s right, unlike your husband, who’ll do anything to hurt me. Can’t you see that?’
Vanessa shook her head and got up from the sofa, heading toward the door. She wanted the scene to be over. She wanted to be on her own. But Titus blocked her path, taking hold of her arm.
‘I love you,’ he said desperately. ‘Doesn’t that mean anything to you at all? Why do you have to ruin everything? Swain killed Katya. Everyone knows that.’
Vanessa heard the appeal in her lover’s voice, and perhaps she would have answered it if at that moment the door hadn’t opened. It was Claes. No doubt he’d heard the raised voices coming from inside. Vanessa looked at him and remembered what she’d read in the newspaper minutes earlier, and she thought of what he had said about the war that day at lunch the previous month. He was a Nazi. She knew he was. It didn’t matter what Titus said. She wanted to be gone, far away from Claes and his limp and his scar and his thin-lipped, silent sister. Pulling away from Titus, she ran to the door and then out through the hall and down the steps to her car and drove away without a backward look.
CHAPTER 23
Trave drove up to the Old Bailey immediately after seeing Vanessa on the Monday morning and then spent the entire afternoon pacing the police room, waiting to give evidence, but the summons to attend court never came, and he had to wait until the next morning to take the stand.
Almost all his testimony was going to be uncontroversial, but the jury still needed to hear about what he’d found at Blackwater Hall on the night of the murder and the various investigations that he’d carried out and ordered until Creswell took him off the case. The previous week he’d insisted on making a further statement about John Bircher’s connections with Claes and Eddie Earle, realizing that the defence would then be able to elicit this information from him in cross-examination, but he didn’t seriously anticipate that this would make any major difference to the outcome of the case, given the strength of the evidence against the defendant. The jury would dismiss Bircher’s involvement as a minor coincidence, just as the allegations of collaboration with the Nazis that the defence had thrown at Claes the day before — using the material sent by Jacob — would do no more than muddy the waters.
Trave had heard from Clayton when he got back from court the day before about Jacob’s botched break-in at Blackwater Hall, but he thought it unlikely that the young man had found anything worthwhile in the house, given that Osman’s safe had apparently survived intact. It might conceivably make a difference to the outcome of the trial if Jacob came to court himself and told the jury that he’d sought out Katya a month before her death and asked her to search Osman’s house for incriminating evidence, but Trave wasn’t holding his breath about the likelihood of Jacob’s showing up. According to Clayton, Jacob had disappeared into thin air after the break-in, and there was no way of knowing where he was now holed up.
Vanessa, on the other hand, would give evidence — Trave knew his wife well enough to be sure that her conscience would not allow her to do otherwise. But Trave doubted that her testimony would be enough to save Swain. The prosecution would recall Osman to explain away Katya’s words, and Vanessa’s continuing determination to marry Osman would provide him with a gold-plated character reference. And that would be that. One fine morning David Swain would have his neck broken for him in Pentonville Prison, and Trave’s wife would marry the man whom Trave believed should be hanging there instead. Trave felt the frustration pressing hard down onto his chest like a physical weight, but there was no relief to be had from the pain. And he knew he was running out of time.
It was the same Old Bailey courtroom in which David Swain had been tried for the murder of Ethan Mendel two and a half years earlier, and Trave found the sense of deja vu almost overpowering. There was a different judge and defence counsel this time around, but hawk-like Laurence Arne had again been instructed for the prosecution. Unwinding himself from behind the files of evidence that covered his table, he was just as imposing and dominant as before, and he seemed even more determined to secure a conviction now that the defendant faced the ultimate penalty for his crime. Hanging was the prescribed punishment for a murder by shooting, and Swain could expect no mercy given that this was the second time he’d killed with premeditation.
Trave looked over at the defendant, sitting between two prison officers in the dock. It was the first time he’d seen Swain since their desperate meeting in the cricket pavilion the previous October. Surprisingly, Swain looked better than he had then, notwithstanding his terrible predicament. The wild, haggard look had disappeared from his face, replaced by an air of quiet resolution. Dressed in a sombre dark suit, he gazed at Trave intently, leaning forward on the railing of the dock as Trave answered the prosecutor’s questions. Trave found it hard to concentrate. He felt a terrible guilt about his inability to help an innocent man, about his unwitting role in Swain’s capture.
During a pause in the questioning, he glanced over and caught the eye of Macrae, who was sitting at the same side table where Trave had sat when he had been the officer in the case at the first trial. The look of unconcealed triumphant glee on his successor’s face was intolerable. It made Trave want to be sick. He felt suddenly claustrophobic in the windowless courtroom, with its wood-panelled walls and bright white lights, and longed to be outside in the bracing winter air.
And yet he lingered for some reason in the empty courtroom after his evidence was over and everyone had left for lunch. He sat in Macrae’s chair at the police table and stared over at the witness box, trying to reconstruct a memory of Katya that had been on the edge of his consciousness ever since his conversation with Vanessa the previous day. He remembered the girl lying on her narrow bed in that sparse, cleaned-up room at the top of Blackwater Hall — so thin she had been and fragile and gone forever. It was a vision that never left him, waiting always on the surface of his subconscious, ready to spring out at him like a permanent reproach. But this was
