‘That had nothing to do with it,’ said Osman quickly.
‘And what about Katya? What did he think of her?’ asked Vanessa.
‘They didn’t get on very well. But that doesn’t mean anything. He’s not good with women. I already told you that. Swain committed both those murders, Vanessa. You’ve got to understand that,’ said Osman in a voice that brooked no opposition. He was holding his wine glass so tight that Vanessa thought it would break.
She nodded in apparent acquiescence, dropping her eyes, keeping her doubts to herself. Secretly she hoped that Swain would be acquitted of Katya’s murder, but she wasn’t going to tell Titus that. He obviously had a complete blind spot where his brother-in-law was concerned, and she had no wish to risk another quarrel. And yet, try as she might, she couldn’t contain her sense of unease. Over coffee she returned to the subject of Titus’s niece. The girl had a hold over her mind, and Vanessa didn’t seem able to stop thinking about her.
‘What was Katya like?’ she asked. ‘You never talk about her.’
‘It’s painful,’ said Osman. ‘We didn’t get on a lot of the time, and now that she’s gone I wish I’d handled our relationship differently. But it’s too late, and so I try not to think about it, even though I know that’s wrong.’
‘It’s understandable,’ said Vanessa sympathetically. ‘Why didn’t you get on?’
‘Because it was my duty to step into her parents’ shoes after they died, and she wouldn’t go along with that. She got into trouble at school and with boys, and I tried to stop her; and then, each time I crossed her, she resented me more. It got much worse at the end after Ethan died, but I already told you that. “You’re not my father” was her favourite phrase,’ said Osman sadly. ‘And we often didn’t seem to be able to get much beyond our angry words. But what’s done is done. You can’t bring back the dead.’
‘Did she leave anything behind? Anything that you could remember her by?’ asked Vanessa.
‘No, hardly anything. But she was like that — quick and darting and slender, like some wild bird. I had her photograph on my desk, but then I put it away. It was too painful.’
‘Painful’: it was the second time that Osman had used the word in connection with Katya in less than a minute, and Vanessa felt oddly dissatisfied by the inadequacy of his description of his niece. Vanessa had only met Katya twice, the second time for only a few moments before the girl fainted away, and yet she had left an indelible impression on Vanessa’s mind, and Vanessa knew instinctively as she got up to go that she would never have any peace of mind until she knew for certain who it was that had murdered the poor girl in her bed the previous September.
‘Why did Inspector Macrae tell you I went to see him?’ Vanessa asked as Osman went to kiss her goodbye at the end of the evening. ‘I thought it was confidential.’
‘I suppose he wanted to help me,’ said Osman slowly, thrown momentarily off-balance by the suddenness of the question. ‘He wanted me to know that he was doing all he could to make poor Katya’s murderer pay for what he’d done.’
‘By concealing evidence?’
‘Yes; he was wrong. And so was I,’ said Osman. ‘And you forgave me for that, remember?’
‘Yes, I remember,’ said Vanessa, and, putting both her arms around Titus’s neck, she kissed him long and hard. It felt that good to have him back.
CHAPTER 25
The trial was moving inexorably towards its end, towards the day when David Swain would finally know his fate. The evidence had all been heard, recorded word for word by the shorthand writer sitting crouched over at her table under the judge’s dais. All that remained now was for the judge to give his summing up and put the defendant in the charge of the jurors so that they could ‘render a true verdict according to the evidence’, and choose whether he would live or die.
The evidence included David’s testimony as well. He’d stood in the witness box for a day and a half at the end of the previous week, wearing the black suit and tie that his mother had brought him from Oxford, and told the silent jurors ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’. But his words had sounded flat and hollow and unconvincing even in his own ears, and he’d seen how they had kept their eyes averted as he spoke, looking everywhere except at him, refusing to connect, just like their predecessors had done when he was tried for Ethan’s murder in this same court two and a half years earlier. Just like before, the thin-faced prosecutor had been able to cleverly twist his words, and David realized now that the web that unseen hands had been spinning around him for so long was far too cunningly constructed for him to be able to escape its knots by mere assertions of his own innocence.
He knew instead that the only way out of the maze was to examine each link in the chain of events that had brought him to where he was now. There had to be a weakness somewhere — something he’d overlooked that would exonerate him and identify his tormentors. And so backwards in time he went, night after night, scouring his memory for clues, and each time he came face-to-face with the figure of one man — Franz Claes. At the critical moment, at the scene of each murder, Claes had been there waiting for him — limping round the corner of the boathouse, armed with his gun, just as David had taken hold of Ethan’s waterlogged body and felt the sticky blood seeping out onto his hands, or emerging from the shadows at the end of Blackwater Hall’s top-floor corridor, shooting at David’s back as David stumbled out of Katya’s bedroom, unable to comprehend the sight of her dead body. Claes; always Claes. And now it turned out that he was a Nazi, or as good as one: he’d spent the war working for the Belgian government, collaborating with Nazis, who were busy sending trainloads of Belgian Jews to the concentration camps. David felt sure that Claes was guilty of Ethan’s murder and Katya’s too. He just couldn’t prove it. That was the trouble.
And what about Titus Osman? Was he in league with Claes, or had Claes acted independently of his rich brother-in-law throughout? David didn’t know. At David’s first trial Osman testified that he’d seen Ethan for lunch before Ethan left for Oxford. Had Claes intercepted Ethan after he left the Hall or had Osman lied about Ethan’s departure? David remembered how Osman had banned him from Blackwater Hall because he wasn’t good enough for Katya, and he recalled the smooth, unemotional way Osman had given his evidence, but that didn’t amount to a case. Everything pointed to Claes as the man behind the curtain: his career in the Belgian government showed that he was clearly a resourceful man, more than capable of having orchestrated all the events that had brought David to his present sorry pass.
David understood now that all that had happened since Ethan’s death — the highs and the lows, the good luck and the bad — had been no more than his jerking about like a puppet on the end of a string, waiting until the hidden hand that controlled his fate returned to use him once again. That hand had been at work in Oxford Prison, tempting him toward escape: Eddie Earle had to have been involved in the conspiracy. He was connected back to Claes through this John Bircher character, who’d jumped off the top of a multi-storey car park — or been pushed…
David realized now how easy he had made it for Eddie. All that had been needed to fuel his anger to boiling point were the few inflammatory words and phrases that Eddie had dropped cleverly into their late-night conversations. Because anger had been the driving force of David’s life for as long as he could remember — he had been angry with his father for dying and his mother for remarrying, with Katya for rejecting him, and with Ethan for taking her away. Poor Ethan: David had stayed angry with his rival even after he was dead.
Anger had been David’s undoing. It gave him a motive, and it was the reason he’d been chosen to play the part of murderer not once but twice. He remembered every detail of the night of Katya’s murder like it was a film that he’d watched a thousand times and couldn’t get out of his head. He remembered the exhilaration of the prison escape — the terrible fear of being caught replaced by the explosion of ecstatic triumph as he reached the top of the perimeter wall and came down the other side, and then the unforgettable sensation of the cold night air beating against his face as Eddie drove them down the road to Blackwater, past the sleeping houses. He’d felt utterly alive at those moments because he was free, free when he had never expected to be free again.
What a fool he’d been! He’d taken such comfort in the gun he’d insisted on Eddie providing when he little knew that it was useless — loaded with blank ammunition. Claes had known he was coming. Bircher, the man with the beard, must have called Blackwater Hall straight after he’d left the railway station — those two unanswered calls to the Hall from a public phone box at 12.20 and a minute later had been a prearranged signal. David imagined Claes sitting on his bed in the darkness, nursing his gun in his hands, nodding with a knowing satisfaction as he
