and order without it. They should use it more, not less. And for scum like Swain the rope’s too quick, if you ask me. They should throttle him to death for what he did.’
Vanessa looked up, appalled by Claes’s sadism, and was in time to see a look of fury on Titus’s face before it vanished, replaced by a thin smile.
‘Well, I suppose there are exceptions,’ he said in a measured voice, keeping his eyes on Claes. ‘Colonel Eichmann for instance. Have you been following that story, Vanessa?’
‘Yes, a little.’ Vanessa wasn’t going to admit it, but she’d read a great deal about Adolf Eichmann since his capture by the Israeli secret service in Buenos Aires the previous May. There had been an international outcry about the kidnap, but Vanessa had been overjoyed. Now his trial was fast approaching in Jerusalem and there’d be a chance for some tiny measure of justice for the millions of men, women, and children that the monster had had transported across Europe to their deaths in the Nazi concentration camps.
‘Perhaps there are some criminals whose crimes are so, how do you say, heinous — yes, that’s the word — that they should suffer the ultimate punishment,’ Osman went on, speaking in the same precise way, as if he was taking part in an organized debate. ‘What do you think, Franz?’
Vanessa glanced over at Claes and saw that livid red spots had appeared in the centre of each of his pale cheeks and that his hands were clenched into tight fists. He looked Osman in the eye, but he didn’t reply.
‘Well, perhaps we should change the subject and discuss something more pleasant,’ said Osman, shrugging his shoulders. ‘Have you been doing any painting, Vanessa?’
But Vanessa had no chance to respond. The doorbell rang, and a minute later Detective Clayton and Constable Wale were shown into the dining room by a housemaid.
‘I’m sorry to bother you, sir,’ said Clayton awkwardly, ‘but we wanted you to know we were here, taking a look around.’ He spoke to Osman but glanced over at Vanessa, as if surprised by her presence.
‘Thank you. I appreciate your consideration, Detective,’ said Osman. ‘Have you any particular reason for thinking Mr Mendel’s going to be showing up here today?’ he asked in an apparently casual tone, although Vanessa could tell that he was more interested than he was letting on.
‘Just that when I talked to him before in his flat he seemed to attach a great deal of significance to the outcome of the trial up in London,’ said Clayton, picking his words carefully.
‘Significance — what significance?’ demanded Claes.
‘Well, he said that if Mr Swain was convicted, then “they’ll have won; they’ll have got away with everything”. Those were his words,’ said Clayton reluctantly. ‘He implied that he would have nothing left to lose.’
‘And we are they, of course,’ said Osman with a faint smile. ‘Well, that certainly sounds rather ominous, Detective. I hope that you and Constable Wale manage to find Mr Mendel before he does anything else stupid.’
Vanessa looked past Clayton to where Wale was standing in the doorway. She remembered him now from when she’d gone to visit Inspector Macrae at the police station and he’d shown her out. He’d had that same ugly, smirking smile on his face then as he had now. It felt like he was mentally undressing her, and she turned away with a shudder.
‘Are you all right, Mrs Trave?’ asked Clayton, noticing Vanessa’s grimace without understanding its cause. He’d seen how nervous she looked when he first came in.
‘I’m fine,’ she said, refusing to meet his eye. She was all too aware of Claes staring at her across the table.
‘Bloody foreigners! They get all the luck,’ said Wale with a harsh laugh once they were back outside. ‘I bet Trave finds it difficult getting much shut-eye at night thinking about his missis tucked up with old Casanova in there. She’s quite a looker for her age, I’ll give you that.’
‘Shut up, Jonah. And keep your foul thoughts to yourself,’ said Clayton angrily.
‘All right, keep your hair on,’ said Wale, getting into the police car beside Clayton. ‘You’re a grumpy sod, aren’t you?’
Clayton stayed quiet, sensing the car’s suspension settling down under Wale’s weight. He knew better than to allow himself to be needled, knowing that he’d only be providing Wale with free entertainment, but even after a week in Wale’s company he still found it hard to get used to the mean, crude way in which the man’s mind worked.
Their complete lack of success in tracking down Jacob Mendel hadn’t helped Clayton’s mood either. But he had an instinctive feeling that today would be the day that Jacob would show himself if he was ever going to, and he was determined to make as thorough a search of the grounds as the fog would allow. Ignoring Wale’s complaints therefore that it was ‘a bloody waste of time’, Clayton drove down to the road and parked under the trees by the path that led up to the boathouse. And then, leaving Wale in the car, he climbed the fence and set off into the mist.
Back in the dining room of Blackwater Hall, Vanessa had had enough. The policemen’s visit had unnerved Osman, and now he and Claes were talking anxiously about Jacob’s possible whereabouts. Vanessa knew it was now or never. Maybe there was no diary, but soon she would run out of courage and would never know one way or the other.
She got up from the table, announcing casually that she was going to the bathroom. Osman raised his hand in brief acknowledgement, and Claes went on talking, apparently unaware of her departure. Outside, she turned quickly down the corridor leading to the hall, and then ran up the staircase to the first floor. At the top of the stairs a corridor opened out in both directions. She knew she wasn’t yet on the top floor, but she couldn’t see the way up. Blindly she ran to her right, and at the end, round the corner, she found what she was looking for — another flight of stairs going up. She took them two at a time and started down another corridor, narrower than the one down below. Now she went slower, counting the doors on her left until she was halfway along. Tentatively, she pushed open the half-closed door and saw a bed but no bookcase. Perhaps this had been Katya’s room; perhaps the bookcase had been moved; perhaps the girl’s books had been sold or thrown out now that their owner had no further use for them. With an effort Vanessa pushed her doubts to the back of her mind — she’d come too far to stop now. The next door down could still count as halfway. This one was shut. Slowly she turned the handle, and there it was, right in front of her — an old brown bookcase filled to overflowing with books of different sizes, and on the top a silver-framed photograph of a middle-aged couple standing by the sea.
Vanessa closed the door and began to search. Bill had said the book was big, and so there was no point looking in the top two shelves, which were lower in height and mostly filled with dog-eared paperbacks. It had to be in one of the bottom two shelves if it was anywhere. One by one Vanessa took the larger books out and rifled their pages, looking for a hollowed-out interior. Soon she had a pile of them beside her on the ruby-red carpet, and she was running out of time. Claes would come up the stairs and find her, and she’d have no explanation for what she was doing. Her hands shook as she began work on the bottom shelf. Still nothing: Tolstoy’s War and Peace; volume 4 of a children’s encyclopedia; a thick atlas of the world that had her briefly excited since it seemed just the right size to conceal a diary; a book of Van Gogh’s paintings; and then, just as she’d given up hope, she saw at the back of the shelf, standing on its side, a big hardback copy of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. She recognized the book — she’d had the same illustrated edition herself since she was a child, and instinctively she knew it had to be the one. It had been deliberately hidden behind the other books — she’d only found it after taking out all the books in front of it, practically emptying the bottom shelf onto the carpet.
She sat back on her haunches and turned the first few pages, past a picture of Alice falling down the well, and came to the cut in the paper. And there it was — a small square red book no bigger than the size of her hand, sitting neatly inside the mutilated Alice in Wonderland. With the edge of her fingernail Vanessa lifted the front cover and read the handwritten inscription with a beating heart:
Katya Osman
My Diary
Keep Out
The diary was real. Bill had been right. Now all she had to do was get it out of the house, except that that wasn’t going to be so easy. She knew she was running out of time, and so she quickly shoved the books back into the shelves, calculating that no one would notice they had been moved as long as they were in the bookcase. And then, getting to her feet, she opened the door and came face-to-face with Jana Claes.
All the time she’d been in the house Vanessa hadn’t once thought of Claes’s silent sister. She’d seen her so rarely on her visits to Blackwater Hall, and today her thoughts had all been concentrated on Claes himself. Vanessa cursed her stupidity. She should never have made so much noise going through the books: that’s what must have
