other sights he’d seen flashing by the van window that morning on his way to court.
He didn’t have long to wait. A jangling of keys and an unlocking of endless doors and he emerged out into the Court of Criminal Appeal. To David it seemed more like a vast, cavernous library than a courtroom. Shelves of antique leather-bound books rose up on all sides from the floor to the distant wood-panelled ceiling, while far away to David’s right three old men in black gowns and horsehair wigs were sitting on tall high-backed chairs at a long polished wooden table on an elevated dais. Their bony hands were strangely illuminated by the green subaqueous light from their reading lamps, but otherwise the courtroom was a dark, shadowy place, inspiring in David not hope but despair.
After a moment the familiar hawk-like figure of the prosecutor, Sir Laurence Arne, rose from a bench below the judges and began to speak: ‘My lords, I have asked for this case to be called on today in advance of its appeal date as it appears that there has been a serious miscarriage of justice, not just in the lower court but also in relation to the defendant’s conviction on another murder charge in 1958. Inspector Trave of the Oxfordshire police has produced to me certain documents, which leave me in no doubt that Mr Swain has been the victim of a wide- ranging conspiracy to make him take the blame for not just one murder but two…’
David swayed in the dock, unable to believe what he was hearing. It was a fantasy, a dream from which he would wake in a moment, a final trick of the cruel and malevolent fate that had pursued him for the last three years. The prosecutor’s words washed over him until finally a light dawned inside his head and he understood. It was over. He was free. The nightmare was at an end.
His mother was waiting for him outside the court. He didn’t recognize her at first because her face was lit up like he had never seen it before. It was as if all the years of worry and toil had been magically lifted from her in one transcendent, cleansing moment. And beside her, gazing up at his half-brother through those same extraordinarily thick glasses, was Max.
‘I’m very happy you’re free,’ said Max seriously. ‘Because I have a lot of things to show you at home. Not just robots; other things too. I’ve made some of them. You are coming home with us, aren’t you, David?’
‘Yes, Max,’ said David, taking a firm grip of his half-brother’s hand and smiling over Max’s head at their mother. ‘I’m coming home.’
CHAPTER 30
Vanessa drove Trave to the ferry in her Citroen 2CV. She had become very attached to the car since her escape from Claes in it a month earlier, and swore that she intended to keep it until it died a natural death.
‘And then I suppose you’ll bury it in the back garden?’ said Trave with a smile.
And Vanessa started to laugh too, but then stopped because there was no outside space at her flat, and he could only be referring to the garden of their old home in North Oxford.
But then the awkwardness passed as they came out onto a wide stretch of road with fields of wheat on either side waving in the breeze, and it was impossible not to feel happy about the coming of spring. There was a warmth between them now that sometimes reminded Trave of the days when they were young and had travelled through France and Italy in a car like this one, putting up at tiny auberges or even sometimes sleeping out in the open under the Mediterranean moonlight.
They were older now, scarred with their different experiences and kept awake at night by different kinds of guilt. But what they had both been through also made them more understanding of each other, and for the first time in their lives it seemed like they were really friends.
Trave worried about Vanessa. There was nothing he could do to change the fact that she had been seduced by Osman and had failed Katya in her hour of need, but he knew that he had failed Vanessa too. He had abandoned her when she needed him after their son died. And this time he was not going to make the same mistake. She needed comfort and support, but he also knew she needed space and time to think. She still stayed most nights in her flat, and he understood why that was important to her. Like her job, the flat was an achievement, an expression of her ability to be a person in her own right, outside her husband’s shadow. And in fact he enjoyed the evenings when he went to dinner there at her invitation, amazed by her newly developed culinary skills and the pictures on the walls that spoke of a talent and passion that he had hardly guessed at until now.
Trave encouraged his wife quietly and comforted her when she grieved, and he tried hard to live in the moment and hope for the best. Creswell had rushed through his reinstatement, which was accompanied by a fulsome letter of apology from the chief constable himself, and the return to work gave Trave’s life a renewed purpose. Sometimes he caught Clayton, newly promoted to the rank of detective sergeant, looking at him out of the corner of his eye, anxious that his boss was about to have another hunch, but so far there had been nothing to disturb their working harmony. Crime in Oxford this March was considerably down from the previous year.
Trave and Vanessa stopped for lunch on the way and got to Harwich with only minutes to spare, so that Trave was almost the last passenger to board the boat. He carried his small suitcase down the gangway and waved to his wife from the deck. ‘Next time you’ll come too,’ he shouted, but his voice was drowned out by the sound of a horn. And almost immediately the ship moved off, groaning as it left its moorings. Trave smelt the sea in his nostrils and was suddenly exhilarated. ‘I love you,’ he called to Vanessa’s receding figure, and this time he was sure she’d heard him. He saw her face light up with a smile as she put up her hand and waved back, and he thought that she had never looked as beautiful as at that moment, with her dark brown hair blown up around her face in the gathering wind.
He got to Antwerp in the early evening and went to bed early. He’d arranged with Aliza to pick her up in the hired car at nine o’clock the next morning, and he wanted to be rested for the day ahead.
Aliza was as he remembered her — old and frail and extraordinarily alive. As before she was dressed in black, but today she had a coloured prayer shawl over her shoulders. She looked straight ahead as he drove, as if preparing herself for what lay ahead.
‘It is hard to know I was so wrong about Titus. It hurts my faith in human nature,’ she said quietly, breaking the silence when they were halfway to Mechelen. Trave had phoned straight away to tell her about Osman’s death and Jacob’s arrest, and since then he had written her a long letter describing how the truth about Osman and Claes had emerged afterwards. And it was in response to that letter that she had invited him to Antwerp.
‘It’s your faith in human nature that has enabled you to survive,’ said Trave. ‘And I admire you for that.’
‘I survive because I survive,’ said Aliza sadly. ‘There is no secret to it. Some of us do and some of us don’t. But I thank God and your deputy, Mr Clayton, for sparing me my grandson. Do you know how much longer he must remain in prison, Inspector?’
‘Not too long, I hope. He will have to do some gaol time for the burglaries, but the court should give him credit for pleading guilty and will have to take account of his motivation for committing the crimes. It’ll be hard for the court to be too severe on him when he was simply trying to obtain a justice that the legal system played such a role in denying him.’
‘I hope you are right. He has written several times to say that he will return to me when he is released, and I am already weary with waiting,’ said Aliza with a smile that belied her words. Trave couldn’t imagine impatience getting the better of the old lady. He felt he had never in all his life met a person who radiated such inner calm.
‘Follow the road by the river,’ she directed when they arrived in the outskirts of Mechelen a few minutes later. ‘It’ll take you there.’ And she was right — Trave didn’t need any further directions.
He parked in a corner of the square and held Aliza’s arm as they crossed the road and stood across from the entrance to the barracks. He was surprised by the building — it was an eighteenth-century classical design, pleasing to the eye and very different to the soaring gabled Renaissance Gothic architecture that dominated the rest of the town. There were three storeys with rectangular windows at symmetrical intervals all around the four enclosing white-painted walls, and inside, through an arched entrance, Trave could see a quadrangle in which men in uniform were walking to and fro. He remembered what Jacob had told him — that the barracks were now used as a training centre for the Belgian army.
‘We come here in September,’ Aliza said softly. ‘And stand in a circle with candles and say the names of our dead. Because this is where the railhead was, where they put them on the trains. This is where they left Belgium never to return.’
