her the girl would still be alive. She’d been Katya’s last chance, and yet she had done nothing, just left Katya to her fate.
Titus had lied to her about everything — even perhaps about the existence of his dead wife and child, and she had believed him because she had wanted to; because she was flattered by his attention and wanted to be the new Mrs Osman, living the good life out at Blackwater Hall. Vanessa looked down at her hand and pulled Osman’s beautiful diamond ring from her finger and threw it away into a corner of the room. But it didn’t help; it didn’t change anything. The ring was still there, glittering by the skirting board, an indestructible symbol of her complicity, and she knew that she’d never stop feeling ashamed of herself until she was dead and buried and couldn’t feel anything any more.
‘You want to know why I betrayed your parents?’ asked Osman, staring into Jacob’s eyes.
‘Because they were Jews?’
‘No; they could have been Hindus for all I cared. Guess again.’
‘For their diamonds?’
‘Yes,’ said Osman. ‘You know the answer. Of course you do, but you don’t understand it. Look, look, where you threw them on the floor.’ Osman gestured with the gun down at the gemstones glittering like tiny stars all over the pale blue carpet at their feet.
‘They’re bits of rock. That’s all. They’re not alive,’ said Jacob. ‘Not like your victims were.’
‘Yes,’ said Osman. ‘You’re right. They’re not like flesh and blood; they don’t decay; they don’t rot. Diamonds are forever.’
Osman smiled, and Jacob knew suddenly what was going to happen next. He thought of shouting but knew instinctively that he wouldn’t get the words out of his mouth before the bullet entered his head. Osman would be able to say it was in self-defence — everyone down below in the courtyard had already seen Jacob at the window threatening the owner of the house with a gun.
‘Do people mean nothing to you?’ Jacob asked, playing for time. ‘Katya was your flesh and blood. She was almost like your daughter
…’
‘She was a fool. That’s what she was. Just like you. She couldn’t help herself: she had to peep through the keyhole; she had to go where she was forbidden — and for that there’s a price to pay; there’s always a price to pay. And you know what that price is, don’t you, Jacob?’ asked Osman. His voice was gentle, almost sad, but the gun was steady in his hand.
Jacob knew what was coming. He closed his eyes, shutting out Osman’s hateful face, waiting to hear the gun’s explosion in his ears — the last sound that he would ever hear, but instead he heard a familiar voice shouting ‘Stop’ somewhere to his left. He opened his eyes and saw Adam Clayton standing in the doorway, holding Claes’s gun shaking in his hands.
And then everything happened in a whirl of motion that neither Clayton nor Jacob could really unravel afterward. Jacob threw his body against Osman as Osman turned and fired at Clayton, missing the policeman by a hair’s breadth. And in response, without thinking, Clayton squeezed the trigger of Claes’s gun and killed Titus Osman with a bullet that passed through his heart and flew out through the already-broken window of the bedroom, embedding itself in a high branch of one of the tall pine trees at the top of Osman’s drive. It was the first time that Clayton had ever fired a gun, and afterwards he hoped it would be the last.
‘Give me the diary, Bill,’ said Vanessa, holding out her hand. ‘I need to see what happened in the end.’
At first Trave resisted. He was frightened for Vanessa, frightened of what the last entries in the dead girl’s diary might do to her peace of mind now that she knew who Osman really was and what he had done. In his moment of vindication Trave felt no sense of triumph at all. He just wished that none of it had ever happened, but, as he’d realized long ago, that was his lot in life. Like all murder detectives he always arrived too late.
Reluctantly he handed the diary over. Vanessa had more right to it than he did after what she had gone through to get it. He sensed that she wanted to be alone, and so he went upstairs to phone Creswell. Osman and Claes and Claes’s sister needed to be arrested before anyone else got hurt.
He put his hand on his wife’s shoulder briefly as he passed behind the sofa, feeling that he had never loved her as much as he did at that moment and yet had never been more powerless to make her happy.
Once the door closed, Vanessa turned the pages quickly, looking for the entry for September 15th, the day of her encounter with Katya in the drawing room. She soon found it:
September 15th:
I cannot bear the pain any more. I feel like I’m going mad. I think it would be better to die than to carry on like this. But how? That’s the question. Perhaps I can steal the matches from Jana when she comes in to feed me and then we’ll die together, she and I. Burn until there’s nothing left. There would be justice in that. But I know that at the last moment I won’t be able to go through with it; I’ll draw back — I know I will. Why? Why, in God’s name, why? It’s not fear of death that stops me. I know that. It’s hope; hope for life. Hope is my curse. It always has been. I see that now. God, how much better I would be without it. How much…
Vanessa realized that Katya must have written this entry earlier in the day, before she fought with Jana in her room and escaped downstairs, but none of those events was recorded in the diary. It was like that night had been a watershed. The entries on the pages that followed grew shorter, no longer a record of the days but rather sporadic thoughts and expressions of desperate emotion. Vanessa wondered whether Katya had worried about having the diary open too long at any one time, but it was more likely, she thought, that the girl had just run out of energy and perhaps at the end even hope. There was only one reference to Vanessa by name. It came two days later and consisted of only a few words, but they stabbed Vanessa to the heart with a pain that she felt would never go away:
Will Vanessa help me? Did she listen to me? Or was all I did in vain?
And the last entry in the book was undated — a one-line scrawl:
What’s the bloody point?
Vanessa closed the book and looked up at her husband standing wide-eyed in the doorway.
‘What is it?’ she asked, getting to her feet. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Claes is dead,’ he said. ‘He was hit by a lorry in Blackwater village. It must have been when he was chasing you. Died instantly apparently. Are you all right, Vanessa?’ he asked, noticing how his wife’s face had gone white with shock. She shuddered uncontrollably several times and then exhaled deeply.
‘Yes,’ she said, swallowing. ‘It’s a surprise. That’s all. He’d have killed me if he’d caught me. I know he would. And I never thought I’d hear myself say this about another human being, but I’m glad he’s dead. He was evil, Bill, wicked through and through. It wasn’t just Katya and Ethan whom he murdered, you know. There were many more in the war — Jews he helped send to the gas chambers without a second thought.’
‘How do you know?’
‘He worked with Adolf Eichmann. I’m not sure in what way, but I know he did. Titus got angry with him at lunch today and said something about what the Israelis should do to Eichmann. It was deliberate, and Franz looked crazy suddenly, like he was going to kill Titus or something. I think that’s why they murdered Ethan, you know — because of what he found out in West Germany about Franz. That’s what Jacob told Katya and I think he was right.’
Vanessa looked at her husband, noticing how he was shifting his weight from foot to foot, looking away from her to hide his discomfort.
‘There’s something else,’ she said. ‘Something you’re not telling me. It’s Titus, isn’t it?’ she asked, her voice rising hysterically as she instinctively guessed at the truth. ‘He’s dead too, isn’t he?’
Trave nodded. And walked slowly over to his wife, putting his arms out to comfort her as she collapsed in tears on the sofa that they had bought together years before.
‘I’m sorry, Vanessa,’ he said. ‘You deserved so much better than this.’
And he held her gently as her body was rocked with wild sobs and she gave way to a terrible grief.
Cara waited under her master’s bed for several minutes after Clayton and Jacob had left the room. She sat wide-eyed in the darkness with her heart beating fast, waiting for the silence to return. And then, as the winter sun outside the window sank gently down toward the western horizon, she stepped out, picking her way carefully among the glittering diamonds scattered across the floor until she came to her master’s corpse. There she stopped, staring unblinking down into his dead eyes for a few moments before she laid herself slowly down, stretching her warm body over the blood-red stain that was still spreading out across the left side of his starched white shirt.
