The King of Diamonds

SIMON TOLKIEN

The King of Diamonds

Dedication

For Priscilla Tolkien

with love and gratitude

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This novel was conceived in Tenerife, plotted in London, and written in Southern California. Anna Tolkien, Tracy Tolkien, Nicholas Tolkien, Marly Rusoff, Michael Radulescu, Thomas Dunne, Natasha Hughes, David Brawn, Lizzy Kremer, John Garth, Kevin Sweeney, Angela Gibson, and Anne Bensson have all helped in different ways with bringing it to fruition, and Peter Wolverton has, as always, been a quite wonderful editor. I am grateful to all of them.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PROLOGUE: THE OLD BAILEY - 1958

PART ONE - 1960

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

PART TWO - 1961

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

AFTERWORD

THE INHERITANCE BY SIMON TOLKIEN

PART ONE - 1959

CHAPTER 1

About the Author

Also by Simon Tolkien

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

THE OLD BAILEY

1958

‘And so, Mr Swain, everybody might be guilty of this crime. Everybody except you? Is that right?’

The voice of Sir Laurence Arne, counsel for the prosecution, was laced with sarcasm as he uncoiled himself from his seat, slowly drawing himself up to his full height so that he was able to look down on the accused, to dominate him even before he had begun his cross-examination. He was a tall man, tall and thin, with a wide forehead set over small dark eyes. The boniness of his build and a long aquiline nose completed the birdlike effect that so many of Arne’s fellow barristers had commented on over the years.

Like a bird of prey, thought the officer in the case, Detective Inspector Trave, sitting at a table at the side of the court behind the row of prosecution exhibits – the evidence that he’d carefully assembled during his investigation – handwritten note, knife, rent bloody clothing, each neatly tagged with its own case number. Yet again Trave was surprised to feel a stirring of sympathy for the defendant. David Swain looked like he hadn’t slept in days. He shifted constantly from foot to foot in the witness box, running his hands through his unruly hair, unable to keep his focus on anyone or anything for very long. He was no match for Arne and Arne knew it. Now the prosecutor seemed to be almost playing with the defendant, like a spider before the kill.

‘Because that’s what you seem to have been saying in your interview with the police,’ Arne persisted when the defendant didn’t respond to his first question. ‘Not me; not me; anyone but me.’

‘Well, it’s true. It wasn’t me. And I was upset, disorientated. Anyone would have been in my situation,’ said Swain. There was that same note of defiance in the young man’s voice, of special pleading that Trave remembered from before. It wasn’t going to win him any friends among the jury.

‘But that’s the point, isn’t it?’ Arne countered quickly, sensing the opening. ‘Nobody else was in your situation. Nobody else had the motive you had; nobody else had the opportunity.’

‘You don’t know that. Ethan had found out something. That’s why he wrote that letter to his brother before he came back – about needing to talk to him but it being too dangerous to put in a letter.’

‘Someone wanted to shut Mr Mendel up before he could talk and so they framed you for the murder. Is that what you’re saying?’

‘Yes. A murder isn’t enough; you need a murderer too.’

‘I see. A nice turn of phrase,’ said Arne, allowing himself a thin smile. ‘Did you prepare that for our benefit, if you don’t mind me asking?’

It was a cheap shot, thought Trave, but it had the desired effect. There was some nervous laughter in the courtroom, and Swain flushed deep red, his anger rising.

‘All right, Mr Swain,’ Arne went on after a moment. ‘Let’s look at your account of events and see whether what you say makes any sense, shall we? Let’s see if we can find out who the real murderer was?’

Swain bit his lip, clenching and unclenching his hands on the top of the witness box. He clearly had no capacity whatsoever to conceal his emotions: anger and fear were written all over his pale face. And it didn’t help that the hot-water pipes were doing such good work, overcompensating for the unseasonable temperatures in the world outside. Beads of sweat were forming in the defendant’s hairline and over his forehead, and involuntarily he put up his hands and rubbed his knuckles in his eyes, trying to get some relief from the glare of the overhead lights illuminating the windowless courtroom.

‘You admit to having been in a relationship with Katya Osman throughout most of last year, don’t you?’ asked Arne in a matter-of-fact tone of voice.

‘Of course I do. She was my girlfriend,’ said Swain, who was still trying to regain his composure.

‘Until Mr Mendel came along.’

‘Yes.’

‘And then you lost control of yourself?’

Swain dropped his eyes, refusing to answer the prosecutor’s question.

‘Didn’t you?’

Swain nodded. ‘It hurt what happened. Anybody would have felt bad.’

‘Ah, there you go again, Mr Swain: anybody and everybody. But we’re not talking about anybody, are we? We’re talking about you.’

‘All right. Me. I felt bad – deep down bad. Is that what you want?’

Arne smiled, not answering the question. It was that same thin, humourless smile from before, and Trave noticed that Swain’s hands had started to shake.

‘And you felt so bad that you wrote letters to Miss Osman, threatening to kill her and Mr Mendel, didn’t you, Mr Swain?’ asked Arne after a moment. ‘Not one letter, not two letters – lots of letters. And each one more violent than the last. You remember the letters, don’t you? Miss Osman was kind enough to read some of them to us the day before yesterday.’

The defendant kept his eyes on the floor, refusing to meet the prosecutor’s eye.

‘No? You don’t remember? Well, let me refresh your memory with some examples. March fourteenth – “I’ll show you what pain is. You don’t know the meaning of the word.” April eighth – “If I can’t have you, nobody can.” And undated but received by Miss Osman on the twenty-ninth – “The last thing you’ll see in this world will be that Belgian bastard’s empty dead eyes.” Not exactly ambiguous, these threats, are they, Mr Swain?’ asked Arne, looking up at Swain from over the gold-rimmed, half-moon glasses that he had put on to read the letters.

It was a masterful performance. Arne had picked up one document after another from the pile on the desk in front of him, reading from them apparently at random, although Trave was quite sure that the prosecutor had in fact prepared each quotation carefully in advance. He was known for his thoroughness, his attention to detail.

‘So would you have killed Miss Osman too if you’d had the chance?’ he asked when Swain remained silent. ‘That certainly seems to be what you are saying to her in these letters?’

‘No, of course not,’ said Swain, blurting out his answer.

‘Well, that’s certainly reassuring. You’d been to Mr Osman’s boathouse before, yes?’

‘Yes, I used to meet Katya there.’

‘Because it was a private, out-of-the-way place where you knew you wouldn’t be disturbed?’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘Miss Osman’s uncle didn’t keep any of his belongings there?’

‘No.’

‘And you could get there without going through the main gate?’

‘Yes, you go over a fence and then there’s a footpath going round the lake. It wasn’t locked.’

‘In short, an ideal place for you to carry on your relationship with Miss Osman?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘And after she ended the relationship it would have been natural for you to assume that she would meet your replacement, Mr Mendel, there for the same purpose?’

‘No, I don’t know what you mean,’ said Swain, stammering over his words.

‘Oh, come on, Mr Swain, of course you do. You heard Miss Osman’s evidence – she saw you in the trees. But that wasn’t the only time, was it? You went right up to the window and watched them, didn’t you? Watched them tangled up together in the same place where you had been with her only a few months before. Lying where you used to lie; doing what you used to do. How did it feel, Mr Swain? Tell us how it felt.’

‘No, no, no!’ shouted the defendant, finally losing control. ‘No, I didn’t. I swear I didn’t.’ He shouted – almost screamed – the words at Arne, but the prosecutor didn’t respond. He didn’t need to. He knew what the jury would believe.

It was a brilliant piece of cross-examination, thought Trave. Arne had no proof that Swain had watched Katya Osman and Ethan Mendel making the beast with two backs on the floor of the boathouse, but then again he didn’t need any. The defendant’s uncontrolled reaction to the accusation was enough. The picture was too powerful to be ignored. It was enough to drive a man to murder.

‘You saw them and something broke inside you, didn’t it? You decided to murder Mr Mendel. That was the only way to stop the pain, wasn’t it?’

‘No.’

‘But then he went away. That must have been hard for you, Mr Swain – having to wait?’

The defendant didn’t answer, and Arne went on relentlessly: ‘Except that suddenly, out of the blue, he came back and asked you to meet him at the very place where he’d hurt you so badly . . .’

‘Yes. Why would he do that?’ asked Swain loudly, interrupting.

‘I don’t know. I’m not Mr Mendel. But you obviously didn’t give him a chance to explain, did you? Because he’d provided you with your opportunity. That’s all you cared about. An opportunity to get even with him forever. In the very place where you had been betrayed. The place where your heaven had turned to hell. With a knife in the back. It must have felt like sweet revenge.’

‘No, it didn’t. I didn’t kill him. I swear I didn’t.’

‘I can’t hear you, Mr Swain. You’ll have to speak louder.’

It was indeed hard to understand what Swain was saying. He was half-bent over in the witness box, and his words escaped from him in gasps. He was like a wild animal that had been wounded by a crack-shot hunter, thought Trave. He’d go on for a little while, but before long he’d be finished.

‘I didn’t murder Ethan,’ he said, looking up at the prosecutor through reddened eyes. ‘Someone else did.’

‘At just about the same time that you were with him? That’s the time-of-death evidence. You heard the doctor that came to court. You’re not disagreeing with him, are you?’

‘No, of course I’m not.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. So let me get this right. You’re beside the body of a man that’s just been murdered, a man that you have repeatedly threatened to kill. And yet you’re not the murderer. It’s someone else. Is that your evidence?’

‘Yes.’

‘So why, if you’re not the murderer, did you run away when Mr Claes told you to stop?’

‘Because I knew how it would look. Because he had a gun.’

‘No, Mr Claes shooting the gun is what made you stop. You ran because you were guilty, because you’d been caught red-handed. That’s the truth, isn’t it, Mr Swain? You’re guilty as charged.’

Arne sat down without waiting for Swain to answer. He’d done all that he needed to. And the jury didn’t take long to convict the following day. Trave remembered the end of the trial for a long time afterward. The way Swain collapsed in on himself; the way he had to be half-supported, half-carried out of the dock and down the stairs to the cells to begin his life sentence; the silence in the courtroom after he’d gone.

‘Good work, Mr Trave,’ the prosecutor told Trave afterward as he shook him by the hand on the courthouse steps. ‘That boy’s damn lucky not to swing. If he’d used a gun it would’ve been different.’ Trave nodded glumly, wishing that he could share Arne’s certainty that justice had been done. In spite of all the evidence, something still nagged at him about the case: a lingering doubt that no one else seemed to share. Policing was a lonely, miserable business at the best of times, he thought, as he headed across the road toward the car park and pulled his collar up against the biting wind.

PART ONE

1960

CHAPTER 1

Outside it was late summer. The red-brown leaves hung heavy on the trees in the woods beyond the house, and in the front courtyard silver water splashed down from the stone mermaids’ open mouths into the blue-grey basin of the fountain to be reabsorbed, pumped back up and out again in an endless cycle. The courtyard was empty and it was the only sound. Above, the last golden light of the sinking evening sun glinted here and there in the polished glass of the three symmetrical rows of sash windows that ran along the façade of Blackwater Hall. All of them the same, except for one window high up on the left, a window with steel bars inside the reinforced glass. Behind it Katya Osman sat at her desk writing in her diary.

She wrote sideways with her body leaning over the book as if to conceal its contents, but this was clearly from force of habit, not necessity, since there was no one else in the room and the door was locked. Her long, unbrushed blonde hair fell down over the desk, and every so often she pulled it back behind her head with an irritated gesture. She was concentrating hard and she bit down on her lower lip as she wrote, occasionally looking up and out into the darkening sky beyond the bars of her window as if in search of inspiration. She had always been pretty but suffering had changed her. Her bright blue eyes, swollen from too much crying, had become larger and more luminous than ever before in her gaunt and ravaged face, and in the last few days she had almost stopped eating so that her clothes had now begun to hang off her body, as if they had grown out of her. She wore them carelessly – the buttons on her grey dress were unevenly fastened, and there were stains around the collar.

The room too was a mess. Clothes, dirty and clean, were everywhere, falling out of drawers, draped over the open doors of the wardrobe in the corner, and an overflowing ashtray competed for space with a framed photograph and a plate containing a half-eaten apple and an untouched sandwich on top of a crowded bookcase by the door.

‘I cannot bear the pain any more,’ she wrote. ‘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 . . .’

Katya stopped writing suddenly, her pen suspended in mid-air. Outside she could hear footsteps. She knew the sound of them – patent leather soles clicking on the wooden floor. They were coming down the corridor toward her door. Quickly she crossed to the bookcase and pulled out a thick book from the bottom shelf. Back in happier days Katya had hollowed out its interior to create a perfect hiding place for her secret diary. And then for years it had lain there forgotten until she’d begun to keep it again in recent weeks, adding almost daily entries in her tiny, spidery writing.

She’d just finished replacing the book and got back to her chair when she heard the key turn in the lock behind her and a tall thin woman dressed entirely in black came into the room.

Jana Claes had never been pretty, but then again she’d never claimed to be. Her nose was too big and her eyes too small for her pallid face, and her lack of any figure emphasized an enduring impression of semi-masculinity. She was almost fifty now, more than twice Katya’s age, and, just as she had always done since she was a girl, she wore her hair, now greying, tied up in a severe bun at the back of her head. Katya had never seen her let it down; just as she had never seen her dressed in anything but black. Unmarried, Jana wore no jewellery except a small silver crucifix that hung on a thin chain around her neck. Bloody hypocrite, Katya always said to herself whenever she saw it.

The eldest of a family of five, Jana had had domestic responsibility for her siblings since the age of thirteen, when her mother was admitted to hospital one winter afternoon suffering from scarlet fever and had never come back home again. Life was a serious business. There was no room in it for frivolity or vanity. And in all the years that she had known the elder woman, Katya had never once heard her laugh.

Jana stood in the doorway surveying the room with her thin lips drawn back in an expression of unconcealed disgust.

‘Why don’t you clear this up?’ she asked, speaking with the thick Flemish accent that Katya had come to dislike so much.

‘Because I choose not to,’ said Katya defiantly.

‘It’s horrible,’ said Jana, advancing into the room and closing the door behind her. ‘You have no self-respect.’

‘Nor do you. You’re nothing but a common gaoler. That’s all you are.’

‘It is for your own good.’

Katya snorted with contempt. ‘Have you got a light?’ she asked after a moment, taking a cigarette out of a battered packet lying on the desk. It humiliated her to have to ask, but she had no choice. Jana had taken her matches away after an accident with the bedclothes a week earlier, and she badly needed to smoke. Her hands were shaking as she held out the cigarette.

‘No. Not now. I need to give you something to make you sleep,’ said Jana, taking a syringe out of her pocket and removing the cover from the needle. ‘Your uncle is worried about you. If you carry on having no sleep, you will be ill. It won’t hurt, I promise. Just a little prick – that’s all.’

Katya had gone white at the sight of the syringe. Her defiance disappeared like air from a burst balloon, and she backed away into the far corner of the room, terrified.

‘No. Not that. Please not that,’ she pleaded with her trembling hands held out in front of her in a gesture combining resistance and supplication in equal measure. ‘It made me sick last time, don’t you remember?’

‘It was fine. You went to sleep and then you woke up and you felt a whole lot better,’ said Jana, advancing slowly toward Katya with the syringe in her hand, the needle pointed at the ceiling. She tried to inject a soothing tone into her voice, but her words only seemed to make Katya more hysterical. She regretted coming alone now. There was a crazy look in the girl’s eye like she was toppling over the edge into madness, and Jana wished that she’d brought her brother, Franz, with her, but she hadn’t wanted to bother him. Like Titus, Katya’s uncle, he had a lot of things on his mind. She’d wanted to show her brother that he could rely on her, and last time it had been easy with Katya. She’d been ill in bed and there’d been no trouble.

Reaching Katya, Jana took sudden hold of her arm and forced her down onto the bed. Katya felt the strength in Jana’s hand. It was like a vice on her wrist, temporarily paralysing her. She felt the prick as the needle pierced her skin, and, as if in slow motion, she watched Jana’s thumb move to press down on the stopper of the syringe. But then, at that precise moment, it was as if some outside force suddenly possessed her: a surge of adrenaline coursed through her body like a charge of electricity, filling her with an overpowering determination not to allow this withered old woman to treat her like she was nothing, a body to be drugged and starved and imprisoned in an attic room at someone else’s whim. She pulled her arm away and pushed up suddenly with all her strength into Jana’s chest, taking the older woman by surprise and sending her reeling back against the corner of the desk, where she sank down onto the floor. The syringe, half-full, fell out of Jana’s hand and rolled away under the bed.

Getting to her feet, Katya looked down at her adversary. Jana wasn’t moving. Perhaps she’d hit her head on the side of the desk. Quite deliberately Katya took aim and kicked Jana hard in the small of the back. Jana cried out and curled herself up into a ball on the floor.

‘You deserved that,’ said Katya with grim satisfaction. ‘I’m not a fool: I know why you’re trying to drug me. It’s because someone’s coming, isn’t it? Just like before. And you don’t want them to see me, don’t want them to know what you’re doing to me up here. Well, too bad. This time I’m going to talk. I’m going to tell them everything you’ve done. And when I’ve finished, I hope they lock you up and throw away the key. So you’ll know what it feels like.’

Katya felt like kicking Jana some more but resisted the temptation. Glancing out the window, she saw that the courtyard was still empty, but nevertheless she felt sure that a car would soon be pulling up. And if she was to stand a chance of telling the visitor her story, she needed to find somewhere to hide until he or she arrived. For a moment Katya remained in the centre of the room, swaying backward and forward on the balls of her feet, her brow furrowed in concentration, but then, drawing a deep breath, she seemed to make up her mind.

Crossing to the door, she smiled. The key was still in the lock. Jana hadn’t taken it out when she came in, and so she wouldn’t have to search the older woman’s pockets and run the risk of another fight. It seemed like a good omen. With one backward glance, Katya closed the door, locked it, and then, with the key in her hand, ran away down the corridor. But before she’d reached the end she felt her legs buckle beneath her as the drug started to take effect, and she had to lean on the wall for support before she turned the corner and started down the stairs.

The first thing that Jana felt when she came to was the intensity of the pain in her head. Her right temple was throbbing so hard that she felt it would burst. It terrified her. Involuntarily she put her hand up to her hairline and felt blood seeping between her fingers. She opened her eyes and the room started to turn, spinning round and round, faster and faster. Quickly she closed them again tight shut, but it was too late. She was turning herself now, and, as she felt her stomach heaving upward, she leant over to the side and was violently sick onto Katya’s ruby-red carpet. The movement and the retching made her suddenly conscious of a new hurt low in her back. For a while she lay motionless on the floor facing her own vomit while the two pains fought each other for supremacy until finally they fused together into one solid agony. And the pain was mixed up with shame and fear. She knew what she had done: she had messed everything up. She shuddered as she thought of what Franz would say when he found her. She had to get up, to warn them before this Vanessa woman arrived. Because she didn’t know where Katya was. Not in the room certainly. The terrible, shameful retching had at least cleared her head and she found she could open her eyes now without the furniture rising up to meet her. She took in the unmade bed, the syringe that had rolled away underneath it, a photograph of Katya’s dead parents on top of the bookcase, and beyond it the door. It was closed. She felt in her pockets for the key, without success. Like a fool she must have left it in the door when she came in, and, if so, Katya would almost certainly have locked her in as she fled.