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.

The pain came back in waves, and for a moment she thought she would pass out again, and perhaps she might have if she hadn’t heard the sound of a car driving up and parking in the courtyard below. Now she knew she had almost no time left – a minute or two at most – before Titus opened the front door and brought his guest inside. And so, gritting her teeth, she dragged herself across the carpet to the door and then, putting her hand up to the handle, she found her worst suspicions confirmed. It was indeed locked. But she’d already thought of what to do. She reached down and took off her shoe and then, using all her strength, banged it on the door frame again and again, while she shouted out for help. After half a minute she came to the end of her strength and fell back in a swoon. But it was enough.

Two doors down and one floor below, Jana’s brother, Franz, was sitting on his bed, polishing a pair of expensive black shoes. They were spotless, gleaming, and clearly didn’t need polishing, but he still shined them every night, enjoying the ritual, the backward and forward strokes. He was in full evening dress, apart from his tie, and, just as he had been doing all day, he was thinking resentfully about Titus’s ill-considered association with the policeman’s wife, searching his brain for a way to get Titus to break off the relationship. Franz had his door shut, so he didn’t hear Jana fall or Katya running in the corridor up above. He did, however, hear Vanessa Trave drive up into the courtyard and Titus come out to greet her. And it was probably the way he strained to hear their conversation down below that enabled him to catch the sound of his sister banging on Katya’s door, crying out for help.

He ran upstairs, but he couldn’t release her straightaway. He had spare keys to all the rooms in the house, even Titus’s study, but they were back in his room, and so he had to return there to get the spare for Katya’s bedroom. Once inside, he helped his sister onto the bed and listened patiently while she explained what had happened. He wasn’t angry with Jana; instead he blamed himself. He ought to have gone with her to give Katya the injection. The fact that the girl hadn’t resisted last time didn’t mean she’d always be that way. And she’d obviously kicked Jana in the small of the back while Jana was down on the ground. He’d have a score to settle with little Katya when he found her, which had to be quickly. Vanessa Trave was downstairs, and she couldn’t be allowed to know what was going on. Once again Franz clenched his fists in angry frustration. Why wouldn’t Titus do what he asked? The woman was married to a police inspector for Christ’s sake, the same police inspector who’d asked all those awkward questions after Ethan died, poking his nose into other people’s business. So what if she and Trave were separated! They probably still talked to each other. Couldn’t Titus at least have taken her somewhere else? No, no, always no. Titus was a law unto himself.

Franz looked down at his sister, trying to decide what to do. She was too badly hurt to help with the search. That much was obvious. And there was no time to lose.

‘Stay here, Jani, I’ll come back when I find her,’ he said, speaking in Dutch. His voice was gruff but not unkind, and Jana picked up on her brother’s use of his pet name for her.

‘Yes, I’m sorry, Franz,’ she said, sounding relieved. ‘She went crazy. I didn’t expect it.’

‘I know. Rest now. I’ll be back soon.’ He picked up his sister’s hand, held it lightly for a moment, and then let it go.

It was the nearest Franz Claes could get to tenderness or affection. Such emotions didn’t come naturally to him. But he was fond of his elder sister. They went back a long way. And the idea of her being pushed around and kicked by bloody little Katya made him angry inside. He could feel the rage building like a knot in his stomach. But he had it under control. It was something he prided himself on – he was always in control of his emotions.

Franz went out into the corridor and stood there for a moment, listening intently. With his left forefinger he stroked a long white scar that ran down from the hairline above his left ear to a blotch of red puckered skin just below his jaw, but otherwise he was entirely still. Titus and the Trave woman were somewhere downstairs, too far away to be audible from where he was. It was Katya he was listening for. But he could hear nothing except the sound of his sister’s painful breathing in the room behind him. He looked from one end of the corridor to the other, trying to decide which way to go. The house was old, full of unused cupboards and recesses where Katya could be hiding, and there were two staircases going down, one at each end of the corridor. After a moment he shrugged his shoulders and went to the right.

A few minutes later he began to be seriously concerned. He’d gone from room to room, systematically searching every crevice, every corner, but he could find no trace of Katya anywhere. What if he was wasting his time? What if she had got out of the house and was even now heading down towards the gate? The doors and windows were locked, but she could have slipped out the front door and past her uncle when he went out to greet Vanessa. He knew Titus wouldn’t welcome an interruption before dinner, but he felt he had no choice. There wasn’t any time to spare, and he needed help if he was going to find the damned girl before she caused any more trouble.

As he’d anticipated, Titus and his guest were downstairs in the drawing room. It was the handsomest room in the house, with its views through high windows onto the rose garden and the valley beyond – a good place for a romantic encounter, Franz thought bitterly. As a rule of thumb, he didn’t like women, but this one he disliked more than most. She was in the way, and she was a security risk. He wished that Titus had never clapped eyes on her.

He took a deep breath, knocked at the door, and went in. They were standing in front of the fireplace. Titus was holding Vanessa’s hand but dropped it when Franz came in.

‘What is it, Franz? It’s surely not time for dinner yet,’ he said, glancing over at the golden ormolu clock ticking sedately beneath the oval Venetian mirror on the mantelpiece. It was just after six o’clock.

‘I know. I’m sorry, Titus, Mrs Trave. Something has come up. It won’t take a moment.’

‘Oh, very well. I won’t be long, my dear.’ Titus Osman made it a point never to raise his voice, never to depart from the elaborate rules of courtesy that he’d set for himself, but under an apparently unruffled exterior he was seriously annoyed by Franz’s intrusion. For several weeks now he’d felt the right moment was approaching for a marriage proposal to Vanessa. The timing had to be right, and Titus was nothing if not patient, but she seemed particularly receptive this evening. The weather helped, of course. A warm late summer evening with the sun sinking gently into the pine woods beyond the lake. Perhaps he would take her out into the rose garden after dinner. Smoke a cigar; walk the carefully tended pathways hand in hand in the moonlight; tell her how he felt. But then again – perhaps not the cigar. The smoke might get in the way, particularly if they kissed. He liked the slow courtship that they had been engaged in, and he had enjoyed planning each move forward, continually adjusting his words and suggestions depending on her response, but now it was time to take their budding relationship to another level. He felt sure of it. Tonight was the night.

Of course, if Vanessa said yes, that still wouldn’t be the end of the story. She’d need a divorce, and Titus knew how much Vanessa’s husband hated him. But he had a strange feeling that that might make it more likely, not less, that Trave would cooperate if Vanessa asked him. The inspector had too much self-love not to want to take the moral high ground if it was offered to him. He was what the English liked to call ‘an honourable man’.

However, Titus realized he was getting ahead of himself. First he had to deal with Franz, whose anxiety was obvious. Titus noticed how two bright red spots had appeared in the centre of Franz’s pale cheeks, a sure sign of trouble. They talked in the hall. There was no chance Vanessa could hear. Titus had been careful to shut the door of the drawing room when they left.

‘Katya locked Jana in her room,’ said Franz. ‘She attacked her when Jana tried to give her the injection. I don’t know where she’s gone. I can’t find her. I’ve looked almost everywhere.’

‘Christ, Franz. Can’t I rely on anyone?’ asked Titus angrily.

‘We wouldn’t have had the problem if you hadn’t brought her here,’ said Franz, gesturing with his thumb toward the drawing room door.

‘It’s my house. I’ll do what I want in it.’

Franz met Titus’s eye but otherwise didn’t respond, and Titus paused, took a deep breath, and nodded.

‘Is your sister hurt?’ he asked.

‘Yes, but she’ll be all right. The point is she can’t help us now. That’s why I fetched you. It needs two of us to find the girl.’

‘Yes, you were right. Could she have got outside?’

‘Maybe, when you opened the door. But I think it’s more likely she’s hiding somewhere. If we don’t find her, I’ll go after her in the car. She can’t get far; she’s got no money.’

‘All right. You carry on upstairs. I’ll look down here after I’ve told Vanessa. I’m sorry, Franz. You were right to tell me.’

Katya stood at the back of a small closet under the stairs on the other side of the entrance hall from the drawing room. The coat rail running down the centre of the closet was only half-filled and she’d pushed the coats and mackintoshes to the front, creating a hiding place for herself at the back. One coat in particular reached down almost to the floor, and so she’d been all but invisible when Franz had peered inside a moment before. Now she stood holding on to the rail with both hands for support while she listened intently to Franz and her uncle through the half-open door. She felt terrible. Her right arm hurt constantly where Jana’s needle had gone into her vein. The bitch – Jana deserved exactly what she’d got. Katya wished she’d kicked Jana a few more times when she’d had the chance. But some of the sedative must have got into her system. She had been fighting drowsiness ever since she got downstairs, and now she felt almost grateful for the pain throbbing in her arm since it was at least keeping her awake – but for how much longer she didn’t know. Releasing her left hand from the rail, she squeezed her right wrist hard. Pain was good, and she wished that she had nails to dig into her skin, but she had bitten them all down to the quick long ago.

Damn them; damn them all! What right did they have to treat her like this? She wished Ethan was here to help her. More than two years later and she still missed him as much as ever. So much for time as the great healer, she thought bitterly. She remembered how they had stood together in this same hall and how she had put her arms around his waist and buried her head in his chest and felt for a moment that her life was perfect – nothing needed to be added; nothing needed to be taken away. Everything was exactly right. But it had all been an illusion, a chimera made of delicate crystal glass that had shattered into a thousand tiny pieces a long time ago. Ethan had died with a knife in his back and she’d gone down to skid row and ended up a prisoner in her own bedroom, starved and terrified, without a friend in the world.

Except that now she had a chance, a small chance but a chance nonetheless. If she could just stay awake and escape detection long enough to tell this woman what had happened, then maybe someone would come and help her. So what if the woman had something going with her uncle. From what she’d overheard in the last few minutes, this Vanessa sounded normal, nice even. And Franz and her uncle didn’t want Vanessa to know she was here. That much was obvious. Why else would they have got Jana to give her the injection?

Another wave of exhaustion swept over Katya. She hung desperately on to the coat rail, but there was no strength left in her arms and her legs were giving way beneath her. But then, just as she felt sure she was going to fall, she heard Franz above her head going up the stairs. She knew it was him because she could hear the unevenness of his steps; it was unmistakable the way he always dragged his left leg behind him as he walked. A war wound like the scar below his ear. Katya just wished that whoever had inflicted those injuries had had a truer aim and put an end to Franz Claes once and for all.

Franz was gone, but what about her uncle? Carefully she reached past the coats, pushed the closet door open a little further and peered out into the hall. Her uncle was standing with his back to her, stroking his beard as if lost in thought. It was unbearable. He’d told Franz he was going to search for her, so why didn’t he? Instead, after a moment he turned and went back into the drawing room. Katya swayed from side to side. She needed air desperately. It was stuffy in the closet and the narrowness of the hiding place had started to make her claustrophobic. And she needed to know what her uncle was saying to this woman he’d invited over. Throwing caution to the winds, she went out into the hall and stood in a recess to the right of the drawing room door, listening. She was taking a terrible risk. She was in plain view from across the hall, and Franz or Jana would have seen her straightaway if they’d come down the stairs, but instinctively she knew that it was now or never if she was going to make her move. The sedative had taken hold, and she only had a little time left.

‘I’m sorry, Vanessa. Something has come up and Franz needs my help for a few minutes. It can’t be avoided, I’m afraid. Will you be all right?’ It was her uncle’s voice, and Vanessa answered.

‘Of course I will,’ she said. ‘But would you prefer me to go? We can always rearrange.’

No, thought Katya desperately, clasping her hands together in silent prayer. No, please don’t go. But she needn’t have worried – her uncle came instantly to her rescue.

‘Absolutely not, my dear,’ he said. ‘You would be breaking my heart if you were to go now. I’ve been looking forward to this evening all week.’ Always the elaborate courtesy, Katya thought. He never changed.

‘And so have I,’ said Vanessa, sounding pleased. ‘I’ll be fine. How could I not be with this wonderful view to look at?’

‘Thank you for being so understanding. I won’t be long. Help yourself to another drink if you want one. Everything’s over there on the sideboard.’

Katya couldn’t believe how relaxed her uncle sounded. There was not a hint of panic in his voice. But he was a different person once he was outside in the hall. He glanced quickly from side to side, but not behind him, where Katya was standing, and then headed purposefully toward his study and the rooms at the back of the house. She had no time to lose. She went into the drawing room and closed the door softly behind her.

Vanessa had moved away from the mantelpiece and was now standing in front of the far window looking out into the twilight with a glass of wine in her hand. She turned around, putting her glass down when she heard the door open, and looked shocked when she saw Katya. The girl’s haggard appearance was certainly alarming. White as a sheet, Katya stood swaying from side to side with a half-crazed, desperate look in her eye, and then suddenly leant forward, gripping the back of a sofa in order to stay upright.

Vanessa was frightened and her first instinct was to shout for help, but Katya saw this coming. Desperately she put her right forefinger up to her mouth, fastening onto Vanessa’s eyes with her own, and the cry died in Vanessa’s throat.

‘Who are you?’ Vanessa asked instead. And then, just as she’d finished the question, she realized she knew the answer. The girl was Titus’s niece. She’d been at the dinner party here at Blackwater Hall that Bill had taken her to after David Swain’s conviction – the first night she’d met Titus. She remembered being struck then by how pretty the girl was with her luminous blue eyes and her long blond hair arranged in an elaborate chignon. And her cheeks had been brightly flushed, perhaps from drinking too much champagne but also because she was excited at the outcome of the trial. There was nothing wrong with that. It was the reason for the gathering after all. But Vanessa remembered how it had seemed so personal for the girl. Swain, her previous lover, had killed Katya’s new boyfriend in a fit of jealousy, and she clearly hated him for it. She’d almost been saying that life imprisonment wasn’t enough, that the man deserved to hang. Perhaps she had actually said that. Vanessa couldn’t remember. Well, the girl had certainly changed since then. Vanessa thought she would never have recognized this wraithlike apparition as Katya Osman if the girl’s presence in Titus’s house hadn’t provided her with the connection.

Katya opened her mouth to speak but the words stuck in her throat. She felt sick and faint, and the room had started to revolve. Two great tears sliding slowly down her sunken cheeks bore silent witness to her inner distress.

Recovering from her initial shock, Vanessa crossed the room and put her arm around Katya, helping to hold her up.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked. ‘What can I get you?’

‘Water,’ Katya whispered. ‘Water.’

Vanessa couldn’t hear her the first time and had to listen hard before she understood what Katya was saying.

‘Yes, of course,’ she said, getting up and going over to the drinks tray on the sideboard, but as soon as her back was turned Katya collapsed to the floor, taking a small ornamental table with her. Vanessa couldn’t see any water and so she instinctively seized hold of a soda fountain, pulled down on the mother of pearl handle, and sprayed a jet of foaming water in the general direction of the girl’s mouth. After a moment Katya coughed and opened her eyes, but she hardly seemed to know where she was. Vanessa knelt down beside Katya, supporting the girl’s head in her hands. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, repeating her earlier question.

Katya could hear Vanessa’s voice, but it was very far away. She was sinking to the bottom of a deep, dark pool and knew that talking would soon be beyond her, and so, with one last superhuman effort, she launched herself upward through the thick black darkness and into the light of her uncle’s drawing room. She had come too far to stop now.

‘They’re . . .’

‘Yes?’ said Vanessa, putting her ear close to Katya’s mouth so that her cheek brushed the wet soda water on the girl’s upturned face.

‘They’re trying to kill me,’ said Katya in a rush. But the struggle to get out the words was too much. The sedative that Jana Claes had half-injected into her vein upstairs finally did its work, and Katya collapsed back into Vanessa’s arms, dead to the world.

CHAPTER 2

Vanessa reached up and took a cushion off the sofa and placed it under the girl’s head, and then, letting go of Katya, she sat back on her haunches, wondering what the hell to do next. She’d come out for a pleasant romantic evening and had ended up within ten minutes of her arrival holding her lover’s niece in her arms while the girl accused nameless assailants of trying to kill her. Vanessa closed her eyes, trying to think. It was all just so crazy. She knew Titus – he was a good man. She couldn’t conceive of him as a murderer. And yet the girl had seemed so insistent, as if she would have done anything to tell Vanessa her message. ‘They’re trying to kill me,’ she had said. But who was they? Perhaps it wasn’t Titus at all, but his brother-in-law, Franz, whom the girl had been talking about. Franz and someone else. Certainly there was no blood relationship between Katya and Franz. Titus had told Vanessa very little of his family history, but she knew that Katya was the daughter of Titus’s sister, whereas Franz was the brother of Titus’s dead wife, about whom he never spoke.

Vanessa had met Franz Claes quite a few times during the last year and she had never warmed to the man. Titus didn’t like to drive, and sometimes Franz would act as chauffeur, driving him and Vanessa to restaurants in the back of Titus’s Bentley. She could make no criticism of his behaviour – Franz was always polite, and yet he never failed to make her feel uneasy when she was in his company. It wasn’t his wounds, or at least she hoped it wasn’t. Rather it was the way he avoided her eye and yet always seemed to be watching her. She’d noticed how he always kept everything razor sharp: his too short slicked-down, jet-black hair; the crease in his trousers; the polish on his shoes. Everything was defiantly masculine, except that he felt feminine somehow underneath. He gave Vanessa the creeps when she thought about him. Not that she had very much. Franz Claes had been at the periphery of her life up until now.

She needed to talk to Titus. That was what she needed to do. He’d make sense of all this for her. She thought about going to look for him, but she didn’t want to leave the girl on her own. Getting up, she went over to the door, opened it, and called out Titus’s name several times. But there was no response. It felt awkward shouting in someone else’s house, and she was just about to give up when she heard Titus’s voice on the stairs, although she couldn’t make out the words, and moments later he came into view. She went out into the hall to meet him.

As always, he looked entirely calm and self-possessed. There was not a wrinkle in his evening dress and he was coming down the stairs at his own pace, without rushing. The sight of her lover reassured Vanessa. Since the death of her teenage son, her only child, in a motorcycle accident three years earlier, Vanessa had convinced herself that the world was an entirely frightening, hostile place and that survival, not happiness, was the most that could be hoped for from life. Her husband hadn’t supported her at all with her grief. Bill Trave might be good at his job, but he was hopeless at expressing his emotions or helping his wife to cope with hers. He’d locked himself away in a dark, inaccessible place after Joe died, taking refuge in his police work. Every day he’d acted like their son had never existed, turning in on himself to hide his grief, until she couldn’t stand it any more. It was a crime – it was like killing their child all over again. Joe might only have been on the earth nineteen and a half years but they were the most important years of her life. He was her own personal miracle, wound about her heart forever, and she couldn’t forgive her husband for denying him. She’d left her husband eighteen months earlier because she’d had to. She’d have died otherwise. And all she’d expected from life once she was on her own was some small easing of her sense of oppression. But instead Titus had come along and lifted her right up off her feet. The happiness was difficult, of course: it made her feel guilty because of Joe and because of her husband, and it didn’t help that she’d met Titus because he’d been a witness in one of Bill’s cases. But Bill was going to hate whomever she took up with, and she deserved the chance of a little joy before age caught up with her. Her new life might not be perfect, but it was certainly better than the death in life she’d been experiencing before. And recently she had begun to embrace it with both hands. Titus made her feel safe, and he made her feel desirable when she had never expected to feel that way again. He made her feel that she mattered.

‘Are you all right, my dear?’ asked Titus, seeing the anxious expression on Vanessa’s face as she looked up at him from down below. ‘I’m sorry to have kept you so long.’

‘No, it’s not that. It’s your niece.’

‘Katya?’

‘Yes, she’s in there,’ said Vanessa, pointing toward the drawing room behind her. ‘She was in a bad way. I gave her some soda water but she passed out.’

For the first time since she had known him, Titus went ahead of Vanessa through a door. Katya was where Vanessa had left her over by the sofa, and, as far as Vanessa could see, she was still unconscious. It was better that way, Vanessa thought instinctively. The expression of terror had left the girl’s face and she looked quiet now, peaceful even.

Titus knelt beside his niece on the carpet and gently brushed her long, tousled fair hair back behind her head. Vanessa noticed the tenderness of his touch; she saw the intense worry and concern plainly written all over his face. It was obvious Titus didn’t mean his niece any harm. The idea was ludicrous, thought Vanessa, looking down at the two of them on the floor. Titus was Katya’s protector, not her enemy.

In one fluid movement he picked Katya up in his arms and got to his feet. Vanessa noticed how little effort this seemed to require. Katya was a waif of a person, light as a feather. Titus laid her down softly on the sofa, keeping the cushion under her head to act as a pillow.

‘Shouldn’t we call a doctor?’ asked Vanessa.

‘No, it’s not necessary. She has no fever. Come, you can see,’ said Titus, beckoning Vanessa over and placing her hand on his niece’s forehead. He was right. It felt cool, and she was breathing easily.

‘This has happened before,’ he went on after a moment. ‘It is too little sleep that is the problem. You English have a word for it.’

‘Insomnia?’

‘Yes, insomnia. It is terrible for my Katya. She goes for many hours without sleeping and it makes her crazy. This evening my sister-in-law . . . no, is that right? The sister of my brother-in-law is my sister-in-law? Yes?’

‘Yes, I suppose so,’ said Vanessa, smiling in spite of herself. He often spoke to her like this, like a student of English asking questions of a teacher, and she sometimes felt that that he was half-teasing her, that he knew the answers to his questions before he asked them. Like now for instance. But she didn’t mind. She knew that he was trying to calm her down, and she appreciated his thoughtfulness.

‘Thank you,’ he said with a small bow. ‘So this evening my sister-in-law, Jana, tried to give Katya a sedative to help her sleep, but Katya struggled and became very angry. It is not fair because Jana was only trying to help.’

Vanessa had never met Franz’s sister. Usually she and Titus met in town, and Jana had never come downstairs on the occasions when Vanessa had visited Blackwater Hall. In fact, looking back, Vanessa couldn’t remember Titus ever referring to his sister-in-law before. It had been like she didn’t exist. In other circumstances she would have liked to ask him more about Jana, but now wasn’t the time.

‘And yet it is not Katya’s fault either,’ said Titus, looking down sadly at his niece. ‘She has never recovered from poor Ethan’s death, you know.’

‘Yes, I was remembering that that’s when I last met her. It was here at the dinner party you gave after the trial.’

‘The night when I first met you. A night I will never forget,’ said Titus, bending over and kissing Vanessa’s hand. She smiled again, but went on with her thought.

‘She was so angry. That’s what I remember. Furious with that man, Swain, for what he had done.’

‘Yes, she wanted to kill him. Not that that would have brought Ethan back, of course. Having Swain convicted at the trial was the next best thing. But then, after it was over and Swain had got his sentence, she felt empty. There was nothing more to do and it was time for everyone to get on with their own lives again. But Katya couldn’t. She had no sense of direction – she was like a ship without a rudder. And so she went into Oxford and lost control of herself. This is a beautiful city, but like all cities it has a bad side, an underbelly!’

Titus stopped for a moment, savouring the word, as if pleased that he knew such an obscure piece of English vocabulary.

‘She went to places where a young girl should not go and she did things she should never have done,’ he went on after a moment. ‘She took drugs, Vanessa. Here, look.’ Gently, Titus lifted the sleeve on Katya’s left arm up to the shoulder and pointed to the needle marks dotting the skin above her elbow. ‘And that’s not all. She sold herself.’ Titus’s voice broke, and he put his hand up to his eyes.

‘I’m sorry, Titus. I had no idea. You don’t have to tell me this,’ said Vanessa. She felt appalled, horrified, by what Titus had had to bear.

‘I’m telling you because I want to,’ said Titus, reaching out and taking Vanessa’s hand. ‘Because I don’t want there to be any secrets between us. Because you matter to me, Vanessa. You know that, don’t you?’

Titus looked into Vanessa’s eyes, sensing her response. But then suddenly the connection between them was broken as she looked away over his shoulder with a grimace, and, turning round, he came face-to-face with Franz, standing behind him in the doorway. Like my damned shadow, he thought angrily. Franz was in the way as usual, spoiling everything, just when he had had that instinctive sense that the moment had at last arrived to make a declaration to Vanessa. But then he remembered Katya lying unconscious on the sofa and he felt the injustice of his reaction. Franz was right to interrupt them. The girl couldn’t stay here. She needed to be put to bed. There would be plenty of time for romance later.

‘I’m sorry, Franz. I didn’t see you,’ he said in an even voice. ‘I was just coming to find you to say that Katya was all right. Vanessa here has been kindly looking after her.’

Franz nodded toward Vanessa without saying anything. It was a formal gesture, like a military salute, empty of personal meaning.

‘I’ll take her up,’ he said, crossing over to Katya, but Titus put up his hand in an authoritative gesture before Franz could take hold of her.

‘No, Franz. This is a job for me, I think.’

Franz winced, stepping back as if he’d been struck. Vanessa wondered at his sensitivity but then guessed intuitively that he didn’t like being given orders in front of her.

Again Vanessa was struck by how light Katya seemed to be in Titus’s arms. It wasn’t just sleep the girl needed; it was food and drink. Vanessa knew it wasn’t her place to interfere but she felt she’d have to say something to Titus later when they were alone.

‘I’ll be back in a moment, my dear. Just as soon as I’ve got my Katya tucked up in bed,’ said Titus as he was going out of the door.

‘No problem,’ said Vanessa. ‘I’m fine here.’ But Titus was gone by the time she’d finished her sentence, and she found herself speaking instead to his brother-in-law, who stood facing her with his hand on the door handle.

He looked at her for a moment without speaking and then, bringing his feet together as if standing to attention, he bowed his head but not his back before turning around and leaving the room, pulling the door shut behind him. Vanessa half-expected to hear a key turning in the lock, but nothing happened, and she was left alone in a sudden strange silence.

A phrase she’d read years ago in some forgotten book floated unbidden into Vanessa’s mind: ‘Politeness is one of the most potent weapons in a civilized society.’ Franz Claes didn’t just make her feel uneasy, she realized. She actively disliked him as well.

Vanessa screwed up her eyes and shook her head, doing her best to clear all thoughts of Claes from her head. She preferred to think of Titus. She often found it difficult to summon an image, to accurately visualize a place or a person when they were not there in front of her, but with Titus it was different. He had impressed himself on her mind’s eye from the first, long before they had started seeing each other. Nobody could say that he wasn’t a fine figure of a man. An inch more than six foot from the top of his thick wavy silver hair down to his Italian leather shoes. Generally she had never been attracted to men with beards, but with Titus it was different. The carefully groomed beard and moustache were an extension of his beautiful hair, and she liked the rough texture of it under her fingers.

She didn’t know his exact age but she guessed him to be in his late fifties, and yet he was clearly physically very fit and never seemed tired or deflated. His bright blue eyes, perhaps his most attractive feature, were constantly alert, and sometimes it seemed as if they sparkled, lighting up his face.

He had beautiful taste. His clothes, his house, his possessions – everything was perfect. And yet worn and possessed with an effortlessness that Vanessa had never encountered before. He liked to show her things – between two high bookshelves in his study, for example, a tiny, terrifying painting of the Gorgon’s head by Caravaggio that gazed at her malevolently out of its dark frame, or in the drawing room a silver box embossed with Cyrillic letters and a royal crest in which the last tsar had kept his cufflinks.

‘You know the Bolsheviks told the imperial family to get ready to go out before they shot them. Perhaps this was the last of his possessions that the tsar touched at Ekaterinburg that morning.’

Vanessa remembered how Titus had held the box lightly between his two fingers, holding it up to the afternoon light, as he brought its significance to life with his words. It was the objects themselves, their beauty and their provenance, not his ownership of them, that he seemed to care about. He clearly knew an extraordinary amount about many different things and yet he always seemed interested in Vanessa’s opinion; he was always trying to find out what she really thought. He would press her if he sensed she was just being polite until she had told him her true opinion, and then he would weigh her words, sometimes agreeing, sometimes disagreeing with her point of view.

On a visit to the house two weeks earlier he had elicited a lukewarm response from her to a standard-quality Italianate landscape hanging in the hall, and now on this visit she noticed it had been replaced with a wonderfully vivid, brightly coloured picture of one of the smaller canal bridges in Venice. She knew the place because she’d been there years before with her husband, and the memory had upset her for a moment before she rejected its poignancy with a surge of anger against the man she had left. She remembered the long silences at mealtimes, the empty space between them in their double bed; the way Bill had worked later and later hours down at the police station. He had had no interest in her opinion; he’d made her feel unwanted, useless, a dead weight. Not like Titus, who made her feel so vital – alive in every part of her mind and body.

And Titus was mysterious. She had to admit that was part of the attraction. She liked his foreignness, his elaborate courtesy and the slow deliberation with which he spoke, choosing his words carefully, as if weighing each one of them before use. She realized, of course, that she knew almost nothing more about Titus than what her husband had told her and what she had read about in the newspapers at the time of the Swain trial two years earlier. He was from Antwerp. He had made a fortune dealing in diamonds and had helped Jews escape from Belgium during the war, and then afterwards he had come to England, to Oxford, and become a philanthropist and an art collector, a man of influence and standing, well respected in the town, moving in its highest social circles. So why then would he want her? Vanessa had asked herself this question a thousand times since Titus first started showing interest in her eighteen months earlier, but she had never been able to come up with a satisfactory answer. Perhaps it was the thrill of the chase, the fact that she was so obviously unavailable; perhaps it was the challenge of bringing a smile to the face of someone who was so sad and lost; or perhaps it was just that Titus found her attractive. Perhaps she was beautiful and fascinating just like he said, lost to the world all those years, sitting at home in her North Oxford house, unhappily married to her misanthropic husband.

Vanessa got up from the sofa and went and stood in front of the fireplace, examining herself detachedly in the beautiful oval gold-leaf mirror that hung over the mantelpiece. Yes, she did look different. She could see that now. Better than she’d done in a long time. There was colour in her cheeks, a new lustre in her dark brown hair, and more flesh in her face and on her body, replacing that worn-down boniness that had made her avoid her reflection for so long. The truth was that she’d begun to look after herself since leaving her husband the previous year. She’d discovered she was a good cook. Bill had always seemed to want solid British fare, but now she was free to experiment. She enjoyed shopping in the Covered Market off the High Street, buying herbs and spices with exotic names and trying out recipes that she would never have dreamt of attempting back home in North Oxford. Sometimes her concoctions ended in disaster, but it didn’t matter if there was no one there to criticize. It was all a learning experience, and by the time that Titus started coming to dinner, she found that she knew what she was doing, and it was obvious that the compliments he paid her on her cooking were genuine. Such a contrast to her husband, who had never said anything about the food she put in front of him; he was too self-absorbed to care about what he put in his mouth or what his surroundings looked like.

And she’d also begun to paint again for the first time in as long as she could remember, taking advantage of the long summer evenings after work to ride her bicycle out onto Port Meadow with a folded-up easel across her back and her watercolours and paper in a canvas bag hanging from the handlebars. She’d been quite good once, or so her tutor at the art school that she’d attended for a year after college had told her, and she’d enjoyed the paintings and sketches she’d made on the sunlit holidays in France and Italy that she’d taken with Bill in the years after they were first married. In fact she didn’t really know why she had stopped. Lack of encouragement perhaps. Whatever the explanation, it was certainly Titus’s encouragement that had got her started again. She had hung one or two of her old pictures on the walls of the little flat that she’d rented behind Keble College, and he’d stood admiring them on his first visit, wanting to know the name of the artist. And then when he found out it was her, he’d insisted on taking her to an art supplies shop he knew down a tiny side street off George Street and buying her the materials to start again.

‘It’s a crime,’ he’d told her in a voice that brooked no argument, ‘to waste such God-given talent.’

And since then she hadn’t looked back. The painting made her happy, and when she painted, she thought of Titus.

Vanessa’s paintings now covered the walls of her flat, lighting it up with colour and life. It was a small place, just enough for her needs, but she’d grown to like it more and more as the months passed. She’d deliberately rented the flat unfurnished and then bought the furniture herself piece by piece. She didn’t have much money. The temporary job that she’d taken on as a secretary and personal assistant to an overworked professor in the university’s English faculty didn’t pay well, but she had come to relish the challenge of shopping on a shoestring, finding treasures in secondhand stores that she’d never previously heard of, down narrow side streets in parts of Oxford that she’d never visited before. She’d made her own home and she was proud of it. The flat, of course, was a million miles away from the grandeur of Blackwater Hall, but Titus genuinely seemed to like it there when he came to visit.

He had a way of making her seem special, and in his company she had begun to come alive again. It had been more than three years now since Joe died and she still felt the pain. It was there all the time but it was dulled. After it happened she’d spent more than a year feeling that the world was entirely without point, dragging herself through every day in a grey blur. She’d contemplated suicide more than once, even weighed up the pros and cons of the different possible methods of putting an end to her pain, but she saw now that she had never been truly serious. The will to live was too strong inside her. It had flickered for a while like a guttering candle, but it wasn’t going to be extinguished. And her anger against her husband’s silence, his refusal to try to move forward, was in a way the first sign of her recovery. Titus had arrived at just the moment when her desire for life had first begun to outweigh her guilt at living. And now she was halfway to falling in love.

CHAPTER 3

‘You can’t let them get to you, Davy. That’s the point. Whether it’s that bitch who put you in here, whether it’s the screws, or whether it’s the other cons, you’ve got to remember it’s your life, not theirs. And you’ve got to keep it that way.’

Just as he had done every night for the previous two weeks, David Swain lay on his back in the dark listening to the voice of Eddie Earle coming down to him from the bunk above his head, and, as always, he felt that same odd mixture of irritation and gratitude. Irritation because Eddie kept calling him Davy – a nickname that nobody else had ever used and that David really didn’t like – and because Eddie never seemed to stop telling him how to live his life. Gratitude because he gave David a sense of security that he’d been missing ever since he’d first arrived in prison following his arrest more than two years earlier.

It had got worse after his conviction – much worse. The judge had thrown away the key, had called him a coward, a knife-in-the-back murderer, and sent him down for life. And overnight David had become a number, an object to be moved around without explanation from cell to cell, from wing to wing, from gaol to gaol, until he’d ended up back where he’d started – in Oxford Prison. Days, months, years of terrible food and waiting in cold corridors, of boredom and claustrophobia banged up in tiny airless cells, had brought David full circle.

It didn’t surprise him that he’d ended up back in Oxford. Nothing much surprised him any more. Prison was cruel, and here, locked away in the centre of his own hometown, it was just a bit more painful than anywhere else. That’s all. A few hundred yards away on the other side of a thirty-foot brick wall surmounted with barbed wire, the world he’d left behind was going on without him, impervious to his absence. In the mornings he could hear the bells ringing in Magdalen Tower and in the afternoons he could see the tallest spires of the city’s churches from the prison exercise yard. So near and yet so far; the proximity of the world outside was an exquisite torture.

And he was very different now from the man he’d been when he’d begun his sentence, less and less able to cope with the despair that was eating him up from the inside. Physically, he had survived. There had been pushes, punches, even a few kicks along the way, but he had got through them. And it could have been worse. David knew all about the mindless violence that was always waiting as a possibility around the next corner – God knows he’d seen it often enough, but so far he had avoided the worst by keeping his head down, not answering back, not getting involved.

Spiritually and emotionally, however, it was a very different story. Over time he had learnt to accept the arbitrariness of prison life: the endless petty rules that existed only to be broken, the lack of choice. And he had tried to get used to the strange combination of noise and isolation, his twin companions through the endless long days and sleep-interrupted nights. But underneath he had lost hope and purpose. His personality, already fragile and damaged at the time of his arrest, had disintegrated under the stress of prison life, and the anger and despair that raged inside him were now only kept in check by fear. He longed for someone to cling to as he sank, for someone to hold him up, and then, entirely unexpectedly one day, a friend appeared. He was called Eddie Earle.

With a smile David remembered the day that his new cellmate had arrived. He’d been alone for over a week, ever since O’Brien, the previous occupant of the top bunk, had been transferred to the punishment block in D Wing for attacking another prisoner with a pool cue in the rec room. O’Brien had not been a bad cellmate. Tall, taciturn, and religious, with a permanent furrow etched across his massive brow, he’d actually gone so far as to give David a book called JESUS FOR PRISONERS. David hadn’t yet read more than the first paragraph but he appreciated the thought. Gifts weren’t a daily occurrence in HM Prison Oxford.

O’Brien’s problem was his temper. It was what had got him put away in the first place. And he had an enemy on B Wing who’d been goading him for weeks. Something about taking too much food in the canteen, something stupid, but still O’Brien shouldn’t have reacted. He only had himself to blame. And his departure had meant that David had had to start worrying again about who would be coming in next to share his ten-by-ten cell and stinking chamber pot. Not some crazy, he prayed after lights-out to a God he had no faith in whatsoever. Not some fucking crazy psychopath. But he needn’t have worried. Eddie Earle, Easy Eddie as he liked to be known among his friends, was nothing like that at all.

Eddie had self-respect. If David had had to name one quality that singled out his new cellmate, that would’ve been the one he picked. He refused to be a number; he refused to give in to the system. David thought at first that this would lead to endless problems with the screws, problems that he could do without. But that wasn’t how it worked out. Eddie had an easy way with him – it must have been how he’d got his nickname, and the screws laughed at his jokes and didn’t seem to pick on him like they did with the other prisoners. Almost immediately this started to bring benefits for David because Eddie seemed to be able to get hold of anything he put his mind to. Soft toilet tissue, fresh fruit, magazines, and even on one memorable occasion two cans of beer appeared like magic in the cell. The screws turned a blind eye, and Eddie shared everything he got with David. ‘Because that’s what cellmates do,’ he said.

‘You’ve got to take care of yourself. That’s the secret,’ Eddie announced on that memorable afternoon when they’d sat on David’s bunk and raised their cans of Special Brew in a toast to the poster of Elizabeth Taylor in a sultry, low-cut dress that Eddie had put up on the opposite wall.

‘Liz has to, you know,’ he went on musingly. ‘Imagine the time she spends every evening with her paint bottles and stuff getting ready to go out to one of them Hollywood parties. Monty Clift’s outside, walking up and down getting all sweaty and impatient, but, oh no, she’s got to get it right. Eyebrows, makeup, lipstick. Not a fucking hair out of place. And you know why, Davy? You know why?’

It was a rhetorical question and David sat sipping his beer, halfway to heaven with the taste of it, waiting for the answer.

‘Because she cares about herself. That’s why.’

‘Not that easy in here though, is it?’ said David, sounding a note of realism. It was a long way from HM Prison Oxford to Beverly Hills, California.

‘No, it ain’t,’ said Eddie, agreeing. ‘But I’ll tell you this much – looking after yourself when you’re inside is where it’s most important. Because in here is where they’re trying to take your pride away every minute of the day. I should know – I’ve been in prison enough times. The point is, Davy, it doesn’t matter where you are – Hollywood or Her Majesty’s pleasure. You’ve got to keep your head up. That’s what I do. And it’s what you’ll do if you’ve got any sense. Why do you think I’m working out down in the gym during association? Why do I try and eat proper food?’ said Eddie, jabbing his finger over at the two rows of apples and pears carefully arranged on the rickety shelves under Elizabeth Taylor’s poster.

‘I’ve noticed you spending a lot of time looking in the mirror, Eddie. I suppose that’s the same thing,’ said David, trying to inject a lighter note into the conversation. He didn’t really disagree with Eddie’s take on how to survive prison life but it was instinctive for him to rebel a little whenever he found himself being lectured about anything. And Eddie was indeed almost obsessive about his personal appearance. He spent ages every morning stooped in front of the broken piece of glass screwed to the wall at the back of the cell, combing his jet-black hair until the parting was razor straight, and he insisted on the barber who came round to shave the prisoners every morning taking extra care with the long sideburns that he’d grown in the style of Elvis Presley. David had learnt very early in their relationship that the two great loves of Eddie’s life were America and show business.

David regretted his words as soon as they were out of his mouth. Sipping his beer, he felt more warmly disposed to Eddie than ever before at that moment and he had no wish to rock the boat or give him offence. But he needn’t have worried. Eddie had a very thick skin.

‘Yes, taking care of what you look like’s important too. Of course it is, like I said before,’ said Eddie, refusing to be put out of his stride. ‘It’s like my old auntie used to say when I was a kid – take care of your skin if you want to feel comfortable in it.’

David had begun to notice in recent days how Eddie’s aunt, like Elizabeth Taylor, was becoming an increasingly frequent visitor to their conversations.

But it wasn’t all Eddie. He knew how to listen too, and perhaps it was this quality more than any other that drew David to his new cellmate. David had two years of anger and frustration built up inside him, and it helped to let some of it out. Or rather he thought it helped. Talking about Katya and Ethan had seemed like a relief to begin with. He’d not been able to talk to anyone about how he felt until now. People didn’t discuss personal stuff in prison. It was one of the unwritten rules. But Eddie was different. He wanted to know about what had happened, every last detail of it.

Lying on their bunks after lights-out, they had long, whispered conversation into the small hours. Their positions, one on top of each other, so close and yet invisible to each other, disembodied voices in the semi-darkness, made it easier to talk somehow. And so David had told Eddie his story, or his version of it at least – about how Katya had thrown him over and how that made him feel, about Ethan, and about Katya’s coming to court and reading out his letters one after the other, looking over at him in the dock with such hatred in her eyes.

And Eddie was sympathetic, so sympathetic in fact that his words of comfort made the pain worse, not better, turning David’s slow-burning anger into rage so that he couldn’t sleep at night for the thought of Katya and what she had done to him.

Sometimes, waking up in the pale light of day, David did draw breath and wonder why Eddie seemed to care so much, but then Eddie himself provided the explanation. David’s experience with Katya fitted in with Eddie’s whole view of the opposite sex. It was another proof for his well-developed theory that women were the root of all evil. He made an exception for his dead aunt and a screen goddess or two, but the rest of them were all the same. They teased men with their tight skirts and their painted faces, promising paradise with a look of the eye or a turn of the hip, and then, once they had their victims hooked, they turned them loose just to watch their pain.

‘For the fun of it, just for the fucking fun of it,’ said Eddie, whose first experience of evil women had been his tart of a mother who had abandoned him at his grandmother’s so she could carry on with the life of debauchery that her pregnancy had briefly interrupted. And then the grandmother had not been much better, beating Eddie with her stick whenever he came home late from school and dosing him with horrible homemade medications to keep his insides clean. Only his great aunt, his grandmother’s younger sister, had shown him a little kindness, but that was only when the old woman’s back was turned, and it hadn’t been enough to stop him running away at the first opportunity. He’d gone to his mother but she wouldn’t have him. And from there he’d begun a series of relationships that all ended in disaster, culminating in marriage to a cook in one of the colleges, who’d turned him in to the police when she found out he was using the basement of the matrimonial home as a warehouse for fencing stolen goods.

‘Fucking bitch. The only thing I miss about her is her apple pie,’ said Eddie, who then promptly turned and spat out the unwanted memory into a corner of the exercise yard. The night was over, giving way to a cold, miserable morning with the sun lost behind a thick blanket of grey clouds, and the prisoners of A Wing had been turfed out into the open after an unappetizing breakfast of overcooked porridge and dried toast. David shivered, wishing he’d brought his coat from the cell.

‘Visit; visit for Earle!’

One of the screws was shouting down at them from the top of the staircase leading up to the new building over beyond B Wing, the one housing the rec room and the gym.

‘Aren’t you the lucky one? That’s your second in a week,’ said David, unable to keep the envy out of his voice. He couldn’t remember when he’d last had a visit. His mother was too ashamed to come and his friends all seemed to have forgotten him. Out of sight; out of mind.

‘It’s business, Davy. I told you that before,’ said Eddie, clapping David on the shoulder as he turned to go. ‘Just because I’m banged up in here doesn’t mean I ain’t got things going on on the outside; things I need to hear about from time to time.’

Left on his own to make a final circuit of the yard, David lit his last cigarette and inhaled the smoke deep into his lungs in an effort to blot out his frustration. Eddie had business on the outside because he was going to be getting out in a year or two. He had something to look forward to, unlike David, who had a lifetime of barbed wire and prison walls in front of him. Like being buried alive, he thought bitterly.

On the way back to A Wing he felt a tap on his shoulder and turned round to find his ex-cellmate, O’Brien, towering above his head. He looked thinner than before and his eyes were sunk deep in their sockets. D Block had clearly not agreed with him.

‘You got a new cellmate, I hear,’ said O’Brien as they approached the white wrought-iron stairs leading up to the landings above.

‘Yeah, Earle; Eddie Earle. He’s all right,’ said David defensively. It wasn’t his fault O’Brien had had to move out.

‘No, he’s not all right. I know him. He’d sell your bloody grandmother if he had the chance,’ said O’Brien. There was an urgency in his voice and a wild look in his eye that David found alarming.

O’Brien moved away as they reached his landing, but, turning round, had time for one last warning before he went into his cell: ‘You watch your back, Swain, you hear me. Or he’ll have you.’

Back in his own cell, David felt unnerved by his encounter. O’Brien did seem a little crazy, but then again why should he be so worried about Eddie? The question gnawed at David for the rest of the afternoon, partly because he too had his doubts about his new cellmate. Why was he so friendly? Why was he so interested in David’s life story? Why did he seem to care so much? David needed answers. And the only way of getting them was to ask Eddie himself.

‘Good visit?’ asked David, looking up from jesus for prisoners as Eddie was let back into the cell an hour later.

‘Yeah, all right. What you been doing?’

‘Nothing much. Talking to O’Brien.’

‘Who?’

‘Irish guy who was in here before you. Big guy, into Jesus, got a temper. He doesn’t like you.’ ‘Oh?’

‘Yeah, says I ought to watch my back.’

‘And so you should, Davy. So you should. Anyone who doesn’t do that in here’s a fucking idiot.’

David couldn’t see Eddie’s expression. He had his back to the bunks, doing something over by the shelves.

‘Do you know him?’ David asked

‘Yeah, I think I know who you mean, if it’s the same guy. Jesus Joe he was called when I last saw him. Down in Winchester nick a couple of years back. We’ve crossed paths once or twice. He doesn’t like me and I don’t like him. That’s all. Nothing to write home about.’

There was a casual note in Eddie’s voice that sounded forced somehow. It was like he knew more than he was saying.

‘Why doesn’t he like you?’ asked David, persisting with his questions.

‘I don’t know. He’s stupid and I’m not. I nick stuff and he listens to the Ten Commandments. Thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain,’ said Eddie, imitating O’Brien’s deep Irish voice surprisingly well. ‘You know what I mean.’

Turning round, Eddie stood looking down at his cellmate for a moment and then came and sat down beside him on the bottom bunk.

‘Got you worried, has he, this Irish bloke?’ he asked, looking David in the eye.

‘No, not really. It’s not that. It’s just, well, it’s just I don’t get why you’re so interested in me, why you keep asking me all these questions, why you’re nice to me. I mean other cons aren’t like that. Some of them are all right, but . . .’

‘They’re not like me?’ said Eddie, finishing David’s question for him.

‘Yes.’

David felt good and bad all at the same time. Good because he’d got out the question that he needed to ask. Bad because he didn’t want to give Eddie offence, and he hoped he hadn’t. Eddie was the only friend he’d got in this God-forsaken place and he didn’t want to lose him.

‘So, if I say I’m nice out of the goodness of my heart, it won’t do for you?’ asked Eddie with a smile.

David shook his head, feeling relieved. At least Eddie didn’t seem to be taking it the wrong way.

Eddie eyed David meditatively for a moment. He looked like a bookmaker weighing up the odds. And then, as if making a decision, he leaned over and clapped David on the shoulder.

‘All right, Davy, I’ll tell you why I’m nice. But don’t you go blabbing if you don’t like what I say.’

He put his forefinger up to his lips, and David nodded.

‘Okay. I’m nice to you because I like you, but it’s also because I need you.’

‘Need me!’ David sounded shocked. It was the last thing he’d expected to hear. Eddie was the resourceful one, able to get almost anything he wanted from God knows where. What could he possibly need David Swain for?

‘To escape,’ said Eddie, answering the question.

Escape. It was the thought that was always at the outer edge of David’s consciousness, that he wouldn’t let in because he knew there was no way out of this hell and thinking about it would send him crazy. And yet here it was, spoken aloud as if it was something possible, something that could actually happen. David felt his heart beating like a hammer inside his chest; he put out his hand and held on hard to the metal ladder leading up to the top bunk as if to prevent himself falling, even though he was sitting with his feet on the ground.

‘I need you because it’ll take two of us to get out of here, and I think you want it as much as I do. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt it’s that you’ve got to want to escape more than anything else in the whole world if you’re going to have any chance of success. Do you want it that much, Davy? Do you?’

David didn’t answer and so Eddie went back on the attack.

‘Don’t you want to see that Katya woman one more time and tell her what you think, tell her how you feel? Or maybe you’re happy to let her sit there in that great fine house of hers laughing at you while you rot away in here?’

Eddie looked at his cellmate expectantly. David swallowed hard but he still didn’t respond. And yet Eddie knew he’d found his mark. There was a fire in David’s eyes. They were wider open than they’d been since his arrest. He’d been thinking of the world outside – of air and water and trees and grass, but now he thought of Katya and his mouth twisted in a grimace. Eddie was right. She had these things every minute of the day. Fuck her, he thought savagely. Fuck her.

‘Yes, I want out of here,’ he said. ‘I want it so much it hurts.’

‘All right,’ said Eddie, looking pleased. ‘That’s what I thought. But you’ll have to do as I say. It won’t be easy. Escaping’s no piece of cake.’

David nodded and then looked up instinctively at the tiny window set high in the back wall of the cell. It was tiny, far too small for a man to fit through, even if he could find a way of sawing through the three thick metal bars cemented inside the frame. There was a ventilation shaft in the ceiling above the window, but that too was a hopeless cause. The aperture was a third the size of the window. And the cell door was three inches of solid steel that couldn’t be unlocked from the inside. The only opening in it was a spy hole near the top, the so-called Judas hole, through which the screws could watch their charges without being seen themselves.

Not easy! Getting out of here was downright impossible. It was stupid to even think about it.

Eddie smiled. He knew what David was thinking. He’d watched his cellmate’s expression change from hope to despair as his eyes travelled around the cell.

‘Don’t worry, Davy,’ he said. ‘It’s not this cell we’re getting out of. It’d take more than a year to dig your way out of here. Even if we had the tools, which we don’t.’

‘How then?’

‘You know they’re going to be painting the gym and the rec room over in the new block next week?’

‘No.’

‘Well, they are. They’re putting up scaffolding tomorrow on the top floor. They need it because the ceilings are so high.’

‘How do you know?’

‘A little bird told me. It doesn’t matter how I know. What matters is they’re doing it,’ said Eddie impatiently.

‘Sorry.’

‘The point is, Davy, the scaffolding’s an opportunity for us. And opportunities are your best chance. Not tunnelling away for a year and a half just to find yourself moved to another wing when you’re still chiselling away in the small hours.’

‘How’s it an opportunity?’

‘Because we can use it to get at the rec room ceiling, punch a hole in that, and climb out onto the roof. And then down into the rear yard.’

‘But that’s thirty feet. More maybe.’

‘Twenty-eight I reckon. We’ll use dust sheets. They put down plenty of them when they painted the canteen last month, and they’re bigger than the sheets we have in the cells.’

‘How do we get out of the rear yard?’ asked David, growing more sceptical by the minute. ‘There are two bloody great walls to go over once you’re out there. If you get out there. And the perimeter one’s more than thirty feet. I know it is. I’ve seen the top of it over the roof of the new block from the back of the exercise yard, so it’s got to be higher than the rec room. How do we go thirty feet up in the air, Eddie? I doubt the builders left too many footholds.’

‘We don’t need any footholds. There’ll be a rope ladder and a car on the other side. I’ve got connections, or have you forgotten that?’

‘So why do you need me if you’ve got connections?’

‘Because they’re on the outside, not in here,’ said Eddie, sounding as if he was running out of patience. ‘Until we get to the perimeter wall we’re on our own. And so I’ll need you to keep a lookout and help me over the first wall. I’m a lot more worried about that one than the other one, to be honest.’

‘Why?’

‘Because we’ve got to find a way to get up it without a ladder. Down’s easy, it’s up that’s the problem. But don’t worry. I’m working on it,’ said Eddie, tapping the top of his head with his forefinger.

David sat back heavily, resting his head on the wall behind him, trying to digest the information he’d been given. He felt like he’d been put through a wringer, catapulted from one conflicting emotion to another with no time to catch his breath and think. He’d felt excitement at first as he dared to think about escape for the first time as a real possibility, then doubt and anger too that he had let down his defences and allowed himself to be suckered into believing in miracles, and then the beginning of a new thought – that maybe Eddie did know what he was talking about, that maybe he could get them out of here.

‘How do you know about all this escaping stuff?’ he asked.

‘Because I’ve done it before.’

‘What? Got out?’

‘Once yes, twice no. You need some luck too, you know. And I don’t use violence. Not like your religious friend,’ said Eddie, pointing over at David’s discarded copy of jesus for prisoners.

‘Does violence help?’

‘Sometimes, but it’s hard to get weapons in from the outside. You can fake them, of course. Dillinger got the better of fifteen Indiana state troopers back in the Thirties. Used a dummy gun he’d made in the carpentry shop; whittled it out of wood and blackened it with shoe polish. But I prefer not to be seen on the way out if I can help it.’

‘Why do you do it?’

‘Escape, you mean? Because it gives you hope, keeps you alive. It’s easy to lose yourself in here. Why do you think they have those suicide nets hanging under the landings out there? And this time it’s also because I need to. I’ve got debts I couldn’t collect before I got sentenced and now I’m running out of time.’

Eddie got up and went and stood under the window, looking down at his cellmate. He took a shilling coin from his pocket and passed it up and down between the fingers of his hand several times before he broke the silence.

‘So, are you in?’ he asked. ‘I need to know, Davy, because that scaffolding’s not going to be there forever and I need to make my plans. And if it’s not you I’m going with, I’ll need to find someone else.’

David didn’t answer at first. Part of him still didn’t believe escape was possible. This prison was like a bloody fortress even if it was in the middle of the town. But then again, what did he have to lose? So what if he got a few more years added on to his life sentence. He’d be an old man anyway if he ever got out, way past his sell-by date.

‘All right, I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘But once we’re out, I want money and a gun. Not a fake one like that American bloke’s. A real one with bullets inside. Can you get that for me?’

Eddie looked hard at his cellmate, pursing his lips. Once again David was reminded of a bookmaker weighing up the odds. And then all at once Eddie seemed to make up his mind. He nodded, walked over to David, and held out his hand to seal their agreement.

CHAPTER 4

Vanessa smiled at her reflection in the mirror above the drawing room fireplace and then closed her eyes, willing Titus to return. And, as if in answer to her prayer, the door behind her opened and she turned around to find him crossing the room toward her.

‘I’m sorry, my dear. This wasn’t what I had in mind for our evening,’ he said, taking Vanessa’s hand and leading her over to the sofa where Katya had been lying prostrate a few minutes before.

‘Is she all right? She seemed ill, Titus, really ill. Shouldn’t she go to hospital?’ Vanessa spoke in a rush. It was as if she hadn’t realized until now how much Katya’s sudden appearance and collapse had upset her.

‘No, she’s fine now. She’ll sleep through until morning. She’s had a sedative. Katya’s her own worst enemy, you know. She won’t eat; she won’t sleep. She could be back to her old self if she just tried a little, but she won’t. As I said before, it’s like something snapped inside her after Ethan died and now she’s determined to go the same way. Except that I won’t let her,’ Titus added defiantly.

Vanessa squeezed Titus’s hand, unsure of what to say. She wasn’t used to him opening up to her like this. She felt the pain in his voice, his vulnerability, and her heart ached in sympathy. The last thing she wanted to do was to upset him further, but she felt she had no choice. Certainly it seemed far-fetched that Franz or anyone else was plotting to murder the girl behind Titus’s back, but Titus deserved to be told what his niece had said. But then, just as she was about to speak, Titus forestalled her.

‘When Katya was down here did she say anything, Vanessa, you know, before she passed out?’

Vanessa didn’t answer immediately, taken aback by the apparent telepathy between them. It was uncanny the way their minds seemed to be moving in tandem.

‘I only ask because I have to know what she’s planning to do. I’m the only one stopping her from going back on the streets. And I don’t think she’d survive another relapse.’

‘She said: “They’re trying to kill me.” She didn’t say who. But she really meant it. I could see that. It cost her a lot to get the words out.’

‘Did she say anything else?’

‘No, just that. But who did she mean, Titus?’ Vanessa asked, suddenly urgent. ‘Could it be your brother-in-law’s doing something to her without you knowing? I don’t like the way he looks at me sometimes. It’s like he hates me for some reason.’

Vanessa gripped Titus’s hand as she spoke. She’d kept a lid on her aversion to Franz Claes for too long and now it suddenly erupted into the open. She felt Titus stiffen beside her, taken aback by the intensity of her emotion. He didn’t reply at first but instead released her hand gently, picked up her glass and his own, and went over to the sideboard, where he methodically mixed them two more drinks, standing with his back to her. Then, picking up one of her hands, he wrapped it around her glass.

‘Drink,’ he said. ‘You need it. We both do.’

Vanessa did as he asked. The alcohol did make her feel better, but she continued to look up at Titus expectantly.

‘Two questions, Vanessa, which both need answers,’ said Titus. He spoke slowly, choosing his words with care. ‘As to the first one, no, no one in this house is trying to kill my niece, least of all Franz. And yet it doesn’t surprise me to hear that this is what she believes. She is being kept in this house against her will, and without the drugs that she craves, she has to use her mind and think, which is terrible for her.’

‘Why?’

‘Because she is what you English call highly strung and her thoughts are full of pain – the death of her parents in the war, the loss of her home, the murder of Ethan, her guilt over his death.’

‘Why should she feel guilty? It wasn’t her fault that that man Swain went crazy.’

‘No, but she thinks it is. And I can understand why she feels responsible. If she’d not started a relationship with Ethan, then Ethan would still be alive today.’

‘But that makes no sense. We’re not Hindus. People have to be allowed to decide who they want to be with.’

‘Like you and me,’ said Titus with a half smile. ‘I wonder what your husband would have to say about that.’

‘He doesn’t like it – of course he doesn’t – but that doesn’t mean he thinks people shouldn’t be free to choose.’

‘Even when they’re married?’

‘Yes, even when they’re married. And your niece wasn’t,’ Vanessa added pointedly.

‘Yes, you’re right,’ said Titus with a sigh. ‘Katya shouldn’t feel guilty, but that doesn’t change the fact that she does. I just wish I could get her to see things differently. As I said, she’s her own worst enemy.’

‘Well, what about getting someone else to talk to her? Maybe a psychiatrist could help?’

‘Don’t you think I’ve tried?’ said Titus bitterly. ‘She won’t speak to anyone.’

‘There must be something you can do.’

‘Only what we are doing. Giving her our love and keeping her out of harm’s way. And hoping that time will heal her wounds, of course. I’m a great believer in that.’

Titus was silent, lost in his troubles, but Vanessa stayed quiet, certain that he had more to say. It was unusual for him to talk about himself and she didn’t want to interrupt his train of thought. And yet when he spoke again it was to change the subject.

‘You asked me about Franz,’ he said. ‘I am sorry you don’t like him. He’s not an easy person, I know. And he’s not at his best with women. But it’s not because he doesn’t like them or doesn’t like you. I assure you of that. It’s rather that he feels uncomfortable because he doesn’t know what to say. You see, his mother died when he was very young and his father was away, and it was really left to his older sister, Jana, to bring him up. She did her best, but she couldn’t be his mother – if nothing else she was too young. And then afterward he was in the army . . .’

‘The Belgian army?’

‘Yes. For ten years before the war. He did well, but it left its mark. I suppose you could say he has all the virtues and the vices of the well-trained military man. He can be awkward in company, especially with the opposite sex, and he tends to see everything in – how do you say? – in black and white. But he is loyal and true; a man of honour. And there is nothing he would not do for me, Vanessa.’

‘Why?’

‘Because years ago I was able to help him when he needed help, because once upon a time I was married to his sister, because . . .’

Titus broke off in midsentence as if turning away from an unwanted memory. Vanessa couldn’t remember how she had first heard that Titus was a widower, but she’d known it for as long as she’d known him. And yet his dead wife had always been an invisible presence. There were no family photographs in the house that she’d ever seen and he’d never mentioned her until now.

‘What was her name?’ Vanessa asked. Her voice was quiet, almost a whisper, and she felt for a moment like a child pushing open a forbidden door.

‘Amélie.’

‘Was she beautiful?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you miss her?’

‘Sometimes. My child too. But it is painful and so I try not to think about them.’

‘Your child! I never knew you had a child.’ Vanessa was rigid with astonishment.

‘Yes, a son like you, but younger. It is part of what draws me to you, I think, Vanessa. That we have both suffered, both lost what was dear to us. Life is never the same after that.’

‘But why didn’t you tell me before? When I told you about Joe?’

‘Because that conversation was about you, not me. I wanted to know how you felt, not to tell you about me.’

Vanessa sat back in the sofa, trying to cope with the confusion of her emotions. It made no sense that Titus should not have told her about his loss when she told him about hers, and yet it also made perfect sense because of the person he was. She vividly remembered the evening sitting up late in front of the fire in her flat when she’d described the terrible night of the motorcycle accident to Titus and told him in broken words about the shroud of meaninglessness that had hung over her ever since. She remembered the way he’d listened to her so quietly, so intently, so that she felt able to talk about what had happened, about what it meant, for really the first time since the accident. And she realized now that she couldn’t have talked like that, couldn’t have unburdened her soul, if the conversation had been about him as well as her. She felt a sudden wave of emotion, of gratitude toward this man about whom she still knew so little.

‘What happened to them? Your wife and child?’ she asked, leaning toward Titus with sympathy and concern written all over her face.

‘They died in the war. Back at the beginning when the Germans came in. Nothing special about it. There was a lot of bombing and many people lost their families back then. You go out, you go to work, you come back, and what do you find? Rubble. Yes, you English have the right word for it. Le mot juste. In the morning a house, a home; in the evening rubble.’

Titus had closed his fist while he was speaking, and now he suddenly opened it empty, like a circus conjuror. And with a bitter, twisted smile he got up and went over and stood by the window, looking out. It was almost dusk and hard to see past the lawn and the rose beds to the lake and the line of trees beyond.

‘Tramonte the Italians call it,’ he said musingly.

‘What?’

‘The twilight, the in-between time. It means “across the mountains” in English. And I suppose you could say that that’s where I’ve come from, Vanessa. Across the mountains. Bringing what I could out of the flames. Katya, my niece, more damaged than I am, whom I must try to protect however much she hates me for it, and Franz and Jana. Yes, Franz, Vanessa,’ said Titus, looking at her apologetically. ‘He is my family too, and I cannot turn my back on him even if I wanted to.’

‘But I wasn’t asking you to do anything like that,’ said Vanessa, raising her hands in protest. ‘Your life is your own; it’s not for me to interfere.’

‘But that’s where you’re wrong, my dear,’ said Titus, coming back over to the sofa and raising her right hand to his lips. ‘I want you to interfere; I want you to be a part of my life. Not just now but for always.’

Vanessa looked into Titus’s bright blue eyes and knew exactly what he was saying. She felt like a swimmer being borne out to sea on a riptide. She was falling in love with a man whom she hardly knew. Whom she hardly knew – an inner voice repeated the words inside her head, holding her back almost against her will.

‘I’m married, Titus,’ she said in a soft voice.

‘Yes, and your husband hates me,’ said Titus with a sigh.

‘No, he doesn’t. He just hates what you represent. Bill’s always been a fair man. It’s one of the things he prides himself on.’

‘Well, then maybe he’ll be fair to us and give you a divorce. Won’t you ask him, Vanessa?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Vanessa, sounding upset. It distressed her to hear Titus talking about Bill. Because she’d spoken no less than the truth. She did believe her husband was a fair man. He might be unable to express his emotions or to cope with his son’s death; he was certainly unbearable to live with; and yet he was fundamentally decent – good even. It wasn’t that she wanted to go back to him. She was sure of that, but she and Bill had been through a lot together; they’d been happy once, and something inside Vanessa rebelled at the thought of the divorce court, of a legal end to everything that had gone before.

And yet here was Titus offering her a new life, entirely unlike the one she’d left behind. He would take care of her; love her; encourage her to express herself in a way in which her husband had never been able to do. He was wealthy, influential, a man of the world. There would be no more scrimping and saving at the supermarket, no more worrying about the next bank statement. Surely her marriage was over? It was eighteen months since she’d left her husband. Did her independence, her tiny little flat, mean so much to her that she’d turn down the chance of becoming Mrs Osman? Or was it simply that she no longer believed in happiness, didn’t want to put the possibility of it to the test?

‘I don’t know,’ she said softly. ‘I don’t know, Titus. You must give me more time.’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘All the time that you need, dearest Vanessa. It’s enough for me that you will think about it. Love will take care of the rest.’

Titus got to his feet with a smile. He was not discouraged. He’d watched the storm of conflicting emotions pass across Vanessa’s face, and he sensed how close he was to obtaining his heart’s desire.

CHAPTER 5

‘Why do you want a gun?’ asked Eddie as they completed another circuit of the exercise yard. Several hours had gone by since they had reached their agreement to escape, but they were both still in a state of unnatural excitement.

‘Because that bastard Claes had one,’ said David. ‘On the night I didn’t kill Ethan Mendel. You remember.’

‘So you’re going back there?’

‘Yeah, but not for long. You don’t have to take me if you don’t want to.’

‘No, I’ll take you. It’s on the way out of Oxford. But what you do in there’s your business.’

‘Fine.’

Here, in the exercise yard, they were in the very centre of the prison and the high walls of the wing buildings surrounding them formed a barrier against the wind that was blowing hard across the city outside, but they still wore the collars of their jackets turned up high against the unseasonable cold, leaning their heads close together when they spoke to hear what the other was saying. Halfway round each circuit, David glanced up at the top of the rec room block on the other side of the yard. It seemed impossibly high to come down from, but at least the roof was reasonably flat so there was less risk of slipping down the tiles on the other side and breaking one’s neck on the ground below.

And Eddie had been right about the scaffolding. A gang of workmen had just been finishing carrying the poles in through the door to the gymnasium on the ground floor when they’d come out for afternoon exercise, and now David could see their heads moving across the barred rec room windows up at the top of the building as they assembled the scaffold.

‘How are we going to get in there? The rec room’s going to be out of bounds while they’re painting it,’ he asked, leaning toward Eddie again and pointing across the yard.

‘Yeah, but not the gym,’ said Eddie. ‘They’re painting the rec room first and then the gym. That’s what I heard and it makes sense if you think about it. One’s on top of the other, and they don’t want both out of use at the same time; otherwise, what are they going to do with us? So all we’ve got to do is slip up the stairs from the gym during evening association and then wait until everyone’s back in their cells.’

‘Except us! How the hell are we going to get past the head count?’ asked David, suddenly raising his voice so that several prisoners nearby turned and looked over at them with curiosity. He couldn’t believe that he hadn’t thought of this before. The screws went round the cells, landing by landing, every evening before lights-out counting the prisoners, making sure they were all there. Except that he and Eddie wouldn’t be; they’d be hiding under a dust sheet over in the rec room, waiting to be caught. Like sitting ducks.

‘Keep your fucking voice down, can’t you?’ said Eddie angrily, pulling David over toward a set of steps leading up to B Wing, where they sat down. ‘People have ears, you know. Of course I’ve thought about the count. Do you think I’m an idiot? We’ll make dummies and put them in our beds, and then we’ll go at the weekend when they’re understaffed. Association’s later on Fridays and Saturdays and they do a lot less checking.’

‘Yeah, but what happens if they talk to us, ask us something?’ asked David, refusing to be reassured.

‘Well, we’ll be asleep with the lights out and we’ll just have to hope they don’t. Like I told you before, you need some luck to succeed with something like this.’

David sighed, thinking about the succession of events that had brought him to where he was now. If there was one thing he wasn’t, it was lucky.

Uncharacteristically, Eddie went to sleep early that night, but David tossed and turned in his bunk, thinking of Katya. Now that he had allowed himself to start thinking of escaping his prison walls, David’s obsession with the girl who had betrayed him had returned in full force. Once again the vision of her locked in naked embrace with that Belgian bastard returned to haunt him. The thin, hawkeyed prosecutor at his trial hadn’t known that he’d looked in at them through the grimy boathouse window; he’d only guessed. But it had been a bull’s-eye guess. David had lied at his trial – said he’d never seen them together. How could he have done otherwise? But he couldn’t hide behind the lie now. The memory of that spring afternoon returned in Technicolor to haunt him, and he saw them again, coupling like a pair of beasts on the ground. Two or three seconds he’d looked. No more than that, but it was enough for the memory to last a lifetime.

David remembered how he’d fallen back from the windowsill and run blindly down to the lakeside, fallen on his knees, and vomited his lunch down into the grey water. There they were behind him in the boathouse intertwined, interlocked. In the same place where Katya had met with him the year before. But they hadn’t writhed on the floor like animals. Kissing, holding hands, but nothing like that. It wasn’t an act of love; it was an act of hate. That’s what it was. A way of saying he didn’t exist. And it was the same hate she’d shown him in the courtroom when she’d read out his letters with such contempt, when she smiled at him after he got his sentence and was led off to the cells like a dog. He hated her himself now; with every fibre of his being he hated her, just as much as he’d loved her before. She’d trampled on him, robbed him of everything he had, and now she was going to have to look him in the face and tell him why. Suddenly still, David closed his eyes tight shut, clenching his body in anticipation of that moment.

Two nights later, working by torchlight in the darkness, they started work on the dummy heads. Eddie had been busy in the interim purloining what he needed, and, not for the first time, David was impressed by his cellmate’s resourcefulness. He had got carrots and flour from the kitchens and a spare prison-issue blue-and-white shirt from the laundry, which he had torn into small pieces.

‘That’s for the inside of the heads when I’ve got the outsides ready,’ said Eddie, who was standing over the sink in the corner mixing his ingredients. Page by page, he was tearing up O’Brien’s Jesus for Prisoners and adding it with practised hands to the flour and water mush to make papier-mâché.

‘What are the carrots for then?’ asked David curiously.

‘To give the heads some flesh colour.’

‘What about hair?’

‘Paintbrushes! I got two out of the rec room last night. The workmen leave them behind when they go home,’ said Eddie, looking even more pleased with himself than usual as he pulled back his mattress to reveal his ill-gotten gains. ‘You can start pulling the bristles out while I’m doing this.’

‘How was it over there?’ David asked. They’d been working steadily for a little while and David had now finished with the first paintbrush and started work on the second.

‘Great,’ said Eddie, breaking off from humming a discordant version of Elvis Presley’s ‘Love Me Tender’ as he looked up from the sink. ‘They’ve got all the dust sheets we need in there, which helps because we can’t use the sheets in here – we’ll need them for covering the dummies. The scaffolding’s up near the ceiling, just where we want it, and there’s an old half-broken tubular chair in a corner that’ll work perfectly for a grapple. You know, to get over that first wall. It’s looking good, Davy, really good.’

An hour later Eddie was ready with the first head. He’d sculpted out a crude nose and ears and now he used a tube of glue that he’d stolen from God knows where to add bristles from David’s pile to make hair and eyebrows.

‘It’ll do,’ he said, turning the head from side to side. ‘We can use a pen to touch them up at the end after they’ve dried.’

‘How long’ll that take?’

‘Twenty-four, thirty-six hours maybe. Don’t worry. We’ve got time. It’s the screws finding them that bothers me. We’ll have to keep them under the bunks and hope there isn’t a cell search. That’s all.’

‘Hope we’re lucky, you mean?’

‘Yeah, and stop sounding like a doubting Thomas all the time, okay? It’s getting on my nerves.’

It was unlike Eddie to sound so irritated for no reason. The tension must be getting to him too, David realized.

They went as planned on the Saturday night. When the cell doors were opened for evening association, Eddie had the dummies ready in the bunks. They’d broken up their two wooden chairs and covered them with their jackets and bunched up bedclothes to simulate their bodies, and then they’d laid the papier-mâché heads in profile on the pillows. The effect was better than David had anticipated, but Eddie, eyeing his handiwork with a professional detachment, was less confident.

‘They’ll work okay if the screws are just doing a quick check through the Judas hole, but if they come in here, we’ve had it,’ he said, giving the dummies a final dissatisfied look before they left the cell for what they hoped would be the last time. David’s heart was beating so fast he felt it would burst.

Eddie had been right: There were less screws on duty than usual – just one out in the yard and another at a desk in the corner reading a newspaper, nowhere near the doorway at the other end of the gym that opened onto the darkened stairs leading up to the rec room above. And there’d been no head count going in, which made it a lot less likely there’d be one going out. But these positive developments didn’t help David calm down, and he soon began to find the waiting almost unbearable. Eddie had been adamant that they should stay downstairs until almost the last minute since there would be far less chance of their being missed that way, and he seemed to have no problem passing the time chatting to the other prisoners and joining in a game of basketball down the other end of the gym, but David couldn’t take his eyes off the clock on the wall. Time seemed to have stopped; the minute hand didn’t move at all, and he kept looking toward the stairs and then over at Eddie, waiting for him to give the signal for them to go.

At quarter past seven, fifteen minutes before the end of association, Eddie came over. He looked furious.

‘What the hell are you doing, Davy?’ he asked in an angry whisper. ‘Hopping from one leg to the other gazing up at the bloody clock – you might as well go and tell that screw over there exactly what we’re planning. Do something for Christ’s sake. Anything. Just stop looking shifty.’

Eddie moved away before David could answer, and for the next ten minutes David walked the perimeter of the gym, keeping his head down, only glancing up occasionally at Eddie, never at the stairs. Until, at twenty-five past seven, he felt a tap on his shoulder and, seconds later, saw Eddie slip through the doorway and up the stairs. No one seemed to have noticed, and a minute or two later, he followed.

Eddie was at the top of the stairs holding a small half-sized gym mat folded up in his hand.

‘What do you want that for?’ David asked.

‘You’ll see.’

The door to the rec room was locked, but Eddie seemed to have expected that. He took a thin piece of wire from out of his pocket, fiddled inside the keyhole for a moment, and then opened the door with a gentle push.

‘Piece of cake,’ he whispered before beckoning David to follow him inside. The rec room looked very different from when David had last seen it. Dust sheets covered the furniture, the pool and the ping-pong tables, and a scaffold on wheels stood in the corner, leaning up against the far wall. There were no ladders. The workmen must have taken them with them when they left for the day. Outside the windows the sun had almost set over the exercise yard, leaving the big room in an eerie twilight.

Through the open door they heard the guard’s whistle down below, signalling the end of association, and then came the sound of the prisoners spilling out into the exercise yard and crossing over to A Wing, until finally the door of the gym shut with a bang, a guard’s voice shouted ‘goodnight’, and they were left alone in sudden silence.

‘All right. Let’s get to work,’ said Eddie, crossing over to the scaffold with a determined look on his face. ‘Come on; give us a hand, Davy. We need to move this. We don’t want to be visible through the windows, do we?’

Gently, they trundled the scaffold over to the centre of the wall and then, once Eddie was satisfied with its position, he started clambering up its side toward the top. Halfway up he stopped, bent down, picked something up from one of the planks, and then let out a suppressed whoop of delight. He had something metal in his hand, but in the half-light David couldn’t make out what it was.

‘We’re in luck,’ said Eddie, waving the thing in the air like it was some kind of trophy, his face creased with a wide smile.

‘What is it?’ asked David from below, irritated by his own incomprehension.

‘A scaffolding clip, you idiot. They must have had one over that they didn’t use.’

‘How does it help us?’

‘For making a hole so we can get up through there,’ said Eddie, pointing at the ceiling. ‘It’s going to have a bit more weight behind it than our paint brush handles, isn’t it?’

David nodded. He resented being spoken to like he was some bottom-of-the-class schoolboy, but he could see the point. The clip would help; it was a good omen.

Once he was up on the top of the scaffold, Eddie beckoned down to David to follow. It was a high room and the ceiling suddenly seemed impossibly far away, and David cursed the workmen under his breath for taking away their ladders. It didn’t take him long to realize that he was a far less skilful climber than his cellmate. He lacked the strength in his upper arms to haul himself up between the bars and he found it hard to balance on the narrow footholds. Two-thirds of the way up, he got stranded, unable to go up or down, and Eddie had to come down and help him the rest of the way.

‘Now maybe you can see the point of why I work out in the gym every day,’ said Eddie with a self-satisfied smile as he pulled and lifted David up onto the top level. He seemed to have forgotten his earlier ill humour now that he’d found the clip and they were under way with the escape.

‘What about keeping a lookout?’ asked David.

‘No point. If anyone comes up here, we’ve had it anyway. Unless you can think of an explanation of why we’re making a bloody great hole in the rec room ceiling after lights-out, of course,’ Eddie added with a grin.

Now, lifting the clip above his head, Eddie punched it up into the ceiling, and David joined in beside him using the wooden paint brush handle that he’d brought from the cell. Almost immediately a great cloud of white plaster mixed up with horsehair fell on their heads, half-blinding them. Wiping the dust from their eyes, they looked at each other and burst out laughing.

A pair of snowmen up to no good, that’s what we are, thought David. The adrenaline coursed through his veins and he suddenly felt absurdly happy.

Bit by bit the plaster came away, and soon the hole above their heads was large enough for them to see through to the roof space above.

‘I’m going up to take a look,’ said Eddie. ‘I won’t be long.’

Standing on David’s hands, he hauled himself up through the opening onto the rafters above, and for a moment all David could see from below was the beam of Eddie’s pocket torch travelling across the timber underside of the roof. It seemed a long way away.

But Eddie had lost none of his confidence when he came back down.

‘It’ll work,’ he said. ‘There are a couple of planks across the beams where we can stand. We’re lucky it’s a flat roof. It’s going to make it a lot easier. You finish off the hole. I’m going down to get the dust sheets and the chair.’

‘What chair?’

‘The one over there in the corner. The one for the grapple, remember?’ said Eddie, pointing down to a cheap swivel chair behind the door. It was missing one of its wheels, and David was surprised it hadn’t been thrown away.

Clambering up and down the scaffold like a human monkey, Eddie brought the gym mat and four of the dust sheets up from below, and then tied a last one around the base of the chair and pulled it up to the top, where he positioned it under the hole in the ceiling that David had just finished widening.

‘Right, you first. I’ll hand you the stuff once you’re up there,’ said Eddie, holding the chair steady as David got on it and put his head up into the dark roof space above, feeling with his hands for the rafters on either side so he could lever himself up. But then he froze. Down below, someone, it had to be a screw, was rattling the handle of the gymnasium door.

For what seemed an eternity but was in fact less than a minute, David stood motionless on the swivel chair, his feet and legs in the rec room, his head and upper body in the roof space above.

What an idiot, he thought to himself. What an idiot I was to think we could get away with something as harebrained as this. He’d not yet done any time in the punishment block, but he’d heard enough about it to feel sick to his stomach at the prospect.

But then Eddie’s voice came from below his feet.

‘It’s all right, he’s gone. Just some screw doing his rounds, checking the doors are locked. That’s all.’

Relief flooded through David, leaving him weak at the knees, and he had to use all his strength to haul himself up through the hole. But there was no time to relax as Eddie started handing him up the mat and the dust sheets straightaway before following himself, pulling the swivel chair up after him by the dust-sheet rope to which it remained attached.

‘I thought we’d had it,’ said David, wiping the sweat from his brow. His hands were shaking uncontrollably.

‘Yeah, well, you were wrong. You need to calm down, keep your nerve. That’s what you need to do. Because up there we’re going to have to be even more careful,’ said Eddie, shining his torch over the underside of the roof above their heads. ‘We can’t risk even one of those slates falling off. You hear me?’

‘Yeah, I hear you,’ said David, breathing deeply in a vain attempt to slow his racing heartbeat.

What helped was work, and soon they set to again, punching up through the timber frame of the roof and prising away the tiles one by one. It was harder work than it had been with the ceiling down below, and David felt mentally and physically exhausted when they finally got up onto the roof an hour later. But the evening air revived him. He inhaled it deep into his lungs and felt the excitement rekindling in his chest as he looked out over the lights of the city. Nearby, the thick stone walls of St George’s Tower, the ancient keep of Oxford Castle, loomed out of the shadows, and above them the moon hung high in the eastern sky, shedding a pale light on the prison buildings down below. On one side was the exercise yard from which they’d come, on the other an open courtyard with buildings on three sides, and beyond that the two high walls that stood between them and freedom.

‘Okay, we need to get back down out of sight,’ said Eddie after a moment, looking at his watch. ‘We’ve got two hours to wait before they’re here. And I hope to God there’s some cloud cover when we go. We’ll be sitting ducks if we have to cross that yard in this light,’ he added with an angry backward glance at the moon.

The waiting was awful, worse than anything that had gone before. Sitting, perched precariously on a crossbeam in the semi-darkness, David watched as Eddie worked and reworked the knots in the two dust-sheet ropes.

‘There must be easier ways of doing this,’ he said, adjusting his position for the hundredth time. He’d never felt more uncomfortable.

‘There are,’ said Eddie, nodding. ‘Impersonation’s the best if you can get away with it, but you need a lot of luck. Johnny Allen, the mad parson, was the best. You must’ve heard of him. He was in all the papers a few years back.’

David shook his head.

‘It was brilliant. He was a strangler, one of those ones that can’t help themselves, and so they put him in Broadmoor, you know the loony bin for the criminally insane. High security though – guards round the clock and all that. Well, he was a bit of a song-and-dance man Johnny was, and he used to entertain the crazies on Saturday evenings with a vicar routine, dressed up in an old black suit and a stock and dog collar. And this went on for nine or ten years until one Sunday morning he got out of bed, got into his outfit, and just walked out. Simple as that. Screws didn’t recognize him and thought he’d been holding a service or something. Bye-bye maximum security, hello London,’ Eddie added with a grin.

Above their heads the church bells out in the city tolled three times, and Eddie glanced at his watch, looking suddenly serious.

‘Quarter to twelve,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Time to go.’

Moving carefully, they climbed back up onto the roof, hauling their equipment after them. The moon was just as bright as before and Eddie shook his fist at it half-heartedly.

‘Well, I suppose at least we’ll be able to see what we’re doing. Even if half the prison can too,’ he said, sounding resigned.

Slowly, laboriously, Eddie paid out the first of his dust-sheet ropes until the bottom hung three or four feet above the ground.

‘Are you sure it’ll hold?’ asked David, looking over doubtfully at the nearby drainpipe to which Eddie had tied the top end.

‘Yeah, and I’ll be holding on to it too. I’m the one who should be worried. It’ll just be me and that drainpipe when I go down. Now get on with it. We haven’t got all day.’

Halfway down the wall, David stopped, hanging on to the rope for dear life. He remembered his first swimming lesson and his father telling him how nothing was as bad as it looked. Well, he was wrong, he thought. Halfway down the rope it looked a lot worse than it had done from on top. He had too much imagination. That was the problem. He could feel his bones shatter on the concrete down below even while he was still hanging here in mid-air. Eddie’s voice, hissing down at him from above, broke through his panic.

‘Listen, Davy, keep going or I’m letting go. You hear me, you fucking idiot?’

David heard. Half-grabbing, half-falling down the dust sheet, he hit the ground a second later, shaken, bruised, but with nothing broken as far as he could tell.

There was no time to recover. Eddie was already lowering the swivel chair on the end of the second dust sheet. It turned quicker and quicker as it made its descent, knocking several times against the windowless wall of the gymnasium, but eventually David had it in his hands, and Eddie let go of the rope, letting it fall to the ground. Quickly he followed, coming hand over hand down the dust sheet on which David had hung suspended a minute earlier, waiting to die. He had the small gym mat folded up inside his shirt.

‘What the fuck happened back there?’ he asked in an angry whisper as soon as he reached the ground. ‘Are you trying to get us caught?’

‘No, of course not. I panicked. That’s all. I’m not a climber like you.’ David sounded as if he was about to cry.

‘All right, all right. I’m sorry,’ said Eddie, swallowing his annoyance as he realized that it wasn’t helping anyone. ‘Look, the wall over there’s a lot lower than this one. It’s only the wire we’ve got to worry about and that just hurts, it’s not scary.’

‘And then?’ asked David, looking over at the wall beyond, the perimeter wall of the prison. It was way higher than the first; higher than the wall he’d just come down.

‘There’ll be ladders. I already told you that. But we’ve got to get there at twelve,’ said Eddie, glancing anxiously at his watch. ‘That’s the time they said they’d put them over, and they can’t leave them hanging there for long or someone’ll see them. So come on, let’s go. Follow me and keep your head down, for Christ’s sake.’

‘What about this?’ asked David, tapping the end of the rope they’d just come down.

‘It’ll just have to stay there. I know. I don’t like it any more than you do, but we’ve got no choice. With any luck, we’ll be out of here before anyone sees it.’

And so, leaving the dust-sheet rope hanging down from the roof behind them, a hostage to fortune, they took off round the edges of the courtyard, staying in the shadow of the buildings and doubling down almost to their hands and knees as they passed underneath lighted windows. One was open and they could hear voices inside laughing, but somehow they got past it without incident until finally they crossed open ground to the wall they had to climb. Eddie ran along the side of it a little way, looking for the place they’d be least exposed. Then, once he’d made his decision, he got up on David’s shoulders, raised the swivel chair above his head while David held the dust-sheet rope to which it was attached, took several practice swings, and then threw the chair up and over the wire on the top of the wall. The noise of its impact on the other side was louder than they’d expected and they froze for a moment in a strange eight-foot tableau of man on man, but nothing happened, and Eddie dropped back down to the ground.

‘Okay, start praying,’ said Eddie in a whisper as he took the rope from David and started gently pulling the invisible chair back toward him. At the top of the wall it wobbled and then caught in the wire. Eddie pulled it harder but it didn’t move; it was secure. Silently he pumped his fist, and drew a deep sigh of relief. Still no one seemed to have heard them.

‘All right, I’m going up first, and I’m going to put this down on the wire. It’ll make it easier to get over,’ he whispered, pointing to the folded-up gym mat inside his shirt. ‘Don’t worry, okay. Just do what I say, and you’ll be fine.’

Whatever the reason, whether it was Eddie’s words of encouragement for which he felt absurdly grateful, or whether it was that he found going up easier than going down, David got up to the top of the wall without a problem. And then the moonlight helped with finding a place to stand on the mat while Eddie switched the dust-sheet rope to the other side of the wall. The barbs tore into David’s shirt and trousers, digging into his skin as he began his descent, but he hardly noticed the pain as he concentrated on lowering himself down to the ground.

And then, standing under the wall at the bottom, he suddenly felt hope surge again inside his chest. The prison was out of sight behind his back and they were so close to freedom now that he felt he could almost touch it with his hand. Never in all his life had David been through so many mood swings in such a short space of time.

But Eddie seemed more worried, not less. He kept walking up and down, looking up at the wall above them and then glancing at his watch.

‘Five past bloody midnight,’ he burst out. ‘Where the hell is he? That’s why we waited, so as not to have to sit here in the fucking sterile area waiting to be caught.’

‘Sterile area?’

‘Yeah, sterile. No prisoners allowed. Just screws, walking up and down with fucking guard dogs. God, I hate dogs. Come on, come on,’ he said, hopping from one leg to the other, gazing up at the wall.

And suddenly, as if in direct answer to Eddie’s call, a man appeared in the moonlight above them and threw down two rope ladders toward them.

‘Okay, go, go!’ shouted Eddie.

David didn’t know why he suddenly shouted when he’d been always whispering up to now. Perhaps he’d already seen the guard and the dog coming round the corner, but David was only a little way up when he heard the mad barking just beneath his feet. There was the sound of a whistle and people were calling, screaming, crying out, but he couldn’t make out the words. All he knew was that he had to climb. Near the top he felt someone, it had to be the screw, pulling at the rope from down below and he was half-blinded as a searchlight beam swung round and picked him out. He looked up and there was Eddie taking aim with his pocket torch in his hand. It came down past his head and it must have hit its mark because David heard a cry and suddenly felt the tugging stop. He climbed two rungs, three rungs, forcing his feet forward up the ladder and then suddenly Eddie’s hands were around his wrists pulling him up on to the top of the wall where the man had put down a piece of old carpet to cover the wire.

‘Stop! Come back now!’ someone was shouting at them from down below, but his voice was drowned out by the noise of dogs barking and running feet. David didn’t wait. He was already halfway down the ladder on the other side when the prison alarm bells started to go off. He’d never heard anything like it. It was a noise like the end of the world, and the bells were still ringing in his ears when he got to the ground and jumped in through the open back door of the waiting car.

CHAPTER 6

Immediately the car screamed into motion, throwing David back in his seat as it hurtled down the street and around the corner.

‘We did it; we did it!’ shouted Eddie, punching his hand up into the roof of the car in celebration. It must have hurt but Eddie didn’t seem to notice. He was wild with delight. But the driver, the man who’d saved them, showed no emotion. He sat hunched over the wheel, his eyes fixed on the road ahead.

David felt numb, but looking down, he saw that his hands were trembling uncontrollably. He couldn’t believe they’d actually escaped – it had been such a close-run thing. He could still hear the shouting and the barking and the alarm bells reverberating in his ears, and he kept looking back over his shoulder expecting to see police cars in pursuit.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Eddie, catching his eye. ‘They won’t have seen our number plates. The wall was in the way. And thank God for my torch, eh? I thought you’d had it there for a moment when that screw was pulling on the end of your ladder. But then Corporal Crackshot here takes aim and hits the bastard right on the nose.’

David smiled weakly. As always, Eddie was at his happiest when he was singing his own praises, but David didn’t begrudge his friend his moment of triumph. He knew that without Eddie he’d be rotting back in gaol, one more day into his life sentence, whereas now he was free, free to go where he chose, and he knew where he was going. The outside air rushed against his face through the open window as they sped down New Inn Hall Street, and he clenched his fists, breathing in deeply as he thought of Katya and what lay ahead.

They parked in the station car park. The driver of their car had still said nothing and Eddie had made no effort at introductions. Sitting behind him in the back seat, David had not even seen the man’s face. Now, without turning around, he reached in the pocket of his coat and took out a set of keys, which he handed to Eddie.

‘Which one?’ Eddie asked. It was curious the way Eddie and the driver seemed to have so little to say to each other, thought David.

‘The red Triumph. The one over there,’ said the man, pointing to his right. ‘It’s got a full tank.’

‘Thanks. Come on, Davy,’ said Eddie, opening his door and beckoning David to follow. ‘We need to get a move on.’

Shutting the door, David looked back through the car window, anxious to get at least one look at this stranger who had done so much to help him escape, but it was as if the man had read his mind. In the minute since he’d parked, he’d turned the collar of his coat up around his ears and pulled his hat down over his forehead so that all David got to see was a flash of the man’s black beard before he was gone, driving back down to the road and picking up speed as he went around the corner and disappeared from sight. But the man’s voice stayed in David’s head. It had been high-pitched, effeminate sounding, not at all what he would have expected from one of Eddie’s friends.

‘Who was that?’ asked David, getting into the Triumph beside Eddie, who already had the engine on.

‘You don’t need to know,’ said Eddie in a voice that brooked no argument. ‘Do you still want to go to this Blackwater Hall place?’

‘Yes. That was the deal, remember. You promised me, Eddie,’ said David. There was an edge of panic to his voice, as if he was about to lose his self-control.

‘All right, all right, I remember. There’s no need to get all crazy about it. Just try and relax, okay?’

Eddie drove out of the city over Magdalen Bridge and headed out on the Cowley Road at a precise thirty miles per hour. David still kept looking over his shoulder, scanning the night for police cars.

‘Can’t you go any faster?’ he asked impatiently.

‘And get caught for speeding after all we’ve been through? No way. That’s a sucker’s game.’

David leaned forward, drumming his fingers on the dashboard.

‘Where’s the gun?’ he asked feverishly. ‘You promised me a gun.’

‘In there under your fucking fingers. And can’t you stop doing that? It’s driving me crazy.’

‘Sorry,’ said David, opening the glove compartment and taking out the nickel-plated revolver that was lying inside.

‘Christ, there’s a whole lot of money in here too,’ he said, holding up a see-through bag containing a large bundle of banknotes.

‘What the hell?’ said Eddie, sounding angry suddenly. ‘That’s not supposed to be in there.’

‘Where’s it supposed to be then?’

‘With our clothes in the back, away from the gun,’ said Eddie, keeping his eyes on the road as he jerked his thumb behind his head toward a small suitcase lying on the back seat. ‘The gun’s loaded, so be careful, okay?’

David nodded, barely listening. A strange calm had settled down on him since he’d taken hold of the small snub-nosed revolver that he now held cradled in the palm of his hand. Having it made him feel different inside. It meant the end of being told what to do; he could give the orders now. He thought of Claes’s scarred, waxy face, and his hand clenched involuntarily around the handle of the gun. The polished wood felt smooth and hard. It would be different this time.

They passed the Morris car factory on the left, its blue towers illuminated by the moonlight, and David remembered how the bottom of the Cowley Road used to be full of bicycles at five o’clock as the workers swarmed out of the factory on their way home. Like India, or how he imagined India anyway. But now the road was deserted and they were all alone in the night. Under a bridge and past a few straggling houses and they were out in the open countryside. David felt his heart hammering inside his chest: Katya was out there in the darkness only a mile or two away with no idea of what was coming her way.

‘Left, left,’ he shouted at the last moment as the turn to Blackwater came into view, but Eddie seemed to know already, and soon they were climbing the hill that David remembered so well. Past the church and out of the village until they came to the bend in the road and the fence beside the path that led up to Osman’s boathouse; the last place that he’d been as a free man.

‘All right, turn off here,’ said David. ‘You can park under the trees. If you keep your lights off no one’ll see you from the road.’

‘Unless they’re looking,’ said Eddie. ‘I’m waiting here half an hour, okay, like we agreed. Until five past one. Provided no one comes. If you’re longer than that, it’s your lookout because I’m out of here.’

‘Fair enough,’ said David. ‘But then I’ll need this too.’

Reaching into the glove compartment, he opened the bag with the money and helped himself to a wad of notes. Looking at Eddie defiantly, he stuffed them in his pocket.

‘Just in case,’ he said. ‘I won’t be long.’

But he never saw Eddie again as a free man.

David was grateful for the moonlight, but still there was little risk of his getting lost. He’d been down the path to the boathouse many times. Always the boathouse, never the house, he reflected bitterly, except on that one occasion when Katya had had the place to herself and even then she was as nervous as a cat. Because her uncle didn’t think he was good enough, didn’t like the fact that he didn’t go to the university and had a common name like Swain. Not like that bastard, Ethan. To the manor born he was, until he got that knife in his back. Just there. Standing outside the boathouse, David looked down to the water’s edge, to where Ethan’s body had lain, and then beyond to where the moon was shining silver ripples down onto the black surface of the lake. Everything was quiet. There was no wind in the trees, just the sound of the dark water gently lapping against the dock. It was an evil place, David thought. Beautiful but evil. Like Katya.

Gripping the gun in his hand, David turned away from the lake, heading into the woods. He picked his way carefully, but it wasn’t long before he came out into the open and paused, looking across the lawn toward the side of the house. There were no lights on in the windows that he could see, and there was no sound either. The mermaid fountain in the front courtyard must have been switched off for the night. This was the best place to cross the lawn, but still David hesitated, hating to risk himself out in the open, imagining unseen eyes watching from the shadows. But he had no choice. He knew that. He’d come too far to stop now. And so, steeling himself, he burst from the trees, running with his head down across the moonlit grass. He made it to the other side, but in his haste he’d forgotten about the rosebushes growing under the windows. They tore into his prison shirt and trousers and he had to bite his lip hard to stop crying out as he disentangled himself from the thorns.

He was outside the window of Osman’s study. He tried opening the sash without success – he could see it was fastened by a catch in the centre. But if he could just reach his hand through the pane above, he could open it. One blow would surely break the glass, and if everyone was asleep upstairs, and the door was shut, then maybe no one would hear. He had to take the chance. The first time he hit the pane with the butt end of the gun it only cracked, but the next time the glass shattered. David stood motionless in the darkness, waiting for lights, waiting for shouts, but nothing happened. Somewhere out in the trees an owl hooted, but otherwise the silence was as complete as before. Nothing stirred. Quickly he knocked the rest of the broken glass out of the pane and then, wrapping his hand in the sleeve of his torn shirt, he reached through the opening and turned the clasp, pulling the bottom half of the window gently up toward him.

Carefully, he climbed inside and then extended his arms in front of him, moving gingerly forward like a blind man. Katya had shown him the room when she gave him a tour of the house on that day when her uncle was away, and he thought he remembered a reading lamp on the corner of the desk. Seconds later he felt its shade and pressed down, searching for the switch. It clicked and suddenly the study was bathed in a pale green light. David blinked, getting his bearings. There was a big painting over the mantelpiece above the fireplace, some biblical scene it looked like. Probably valuable like everything else Osman owned, David thought bitterly, taking in the rich luxury all around him – the thick Axminster carpet, the rows of leather-bound books with golden titles on their spines, the silk curtains. David remembered his damp, dark, evil-smelling cell back in Oxford Prison and the contrast between the two rooms made him angry, made him want to smash something. But that wasn’t why he was here. He needed a torch, some light to guide him through the house. But there was nothing on the desk apart from the lamp and a telephone, and the drawers were just full of useless papers except for the top one in the centre that was locked. Stealthily, David ventured out into the corridor, leaving the door open behind him to give a little light, enough to see the shape of the long oval table in the room opposite. And on the table were candles, a whole line of them: tall white candles in high silver candlesticks. More suited to an altar than Osman’s dining table, David thought inconsequentially as he felt in his pocket for his matches.

Now, with the light, everything was easier. With a candle held aloft in one hand and the gun gripped in the other, he walked slowly down the corridor to the front hall, and stopped suddenly stock still at the foot of the wide ornamental staircase, gazing up into the luminous green eyes of a black cat sitting in the middle of the fourth stair up, barring his way. The animal seemed disembodied, indivisible from the surrounding darkness. For a moment they stared at each other without moving, but then David sensed the cat’s back beginning to arch as if it was about to spring, and instinctively raised the gun and candlestick in front of his face to ward off its attack, but instead it ran past him down the stairs. He felt its fur against his leg before it disappeared behind him into the shadows on the other side of the hall.

David felt his legs trembling underneath him and breathed deeply several times, exhaling his fear into the darkness before he steeled himself to the task ahead and began slowly to climb the stairs. Pictures and portraits lined the walls, but David looked neither to his right nor his left, concentrating all his attention instead on the ground beneath his feet, taking each step as if it might be his last. He knew where he was going. Katya had taken him to her room on that day when she had shown him the house. It was halfway down the top-floor corridor on the left. You had to lean down when you went inside because there was a slope in the ceiling. He remembered lying on her narrow bed; he remembered the taste of her kisses on his mouth. Her nervousness about him being there, about her uncle coming home and finding them, had made the afternoon more exciting than any of their previous encounters. His heart had pounded inside his chest like it was going to burst. Just like now.

Walking down the corridor almost on tiptoe, he thought he heard something – a rustling or a movement behind him. He turned, hesitating whether to go forward or back. Perhaps it was someone sleeping behind one of the closed and half-closed doors that he had passed. He had no idea who else slept up here. But now all was quiet again. Softly, he moved forward, coming to a halt outside Katya’s door.

Here comes a candle to light you to bed,

Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.

The words of the old nursery rhyme came unbidden into his head, and he smiled as he placed the candlestick carefully on the floor, put out his hand, and opened the door.

CHAPTER 7

Detective Inspector Trave woke with a start. He’d been deeply asleep, fighting the noise of the telephone ringing insistently beside his bed.

‘What is it?’ he asked blearily, still half-inhabiting the dream he’d been having: a bad dream that had been recurring lately in which shapeless shadows were coming toward him on a cliff’s edge and there was nowhere left to hide. His Dunkirk dream he called it, remembering 1940, when the world had gone up in flames. Who was to know if it wouldn’t happen again?

‘Sorry to wake you, sir,’ said a young, brisk voice on the other end of the line. ‘It’s a murder: young female shot in the head. At a place called Blackwater Hall. It’s outside Blackwater village on the London Road.’

‘Blackwater Hall,’ Trave repeated, coming fully awake.

‘Yes, that’s right. Do you want directions? I’ve got them here.’

‘No, I know Blackwater Hall. Get hold of Adam Clayton for me, will you? Tell him to meet me there.’

‘He’s already on his way, sir. He was on night duty when we got the call.’

‘Good. Thanks,’ said Trave, replacing the receiver.

Homicide at Blackwater Hall. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard those words. And people aren’t murdered in the same place twice for no reason, he thought as he got dressed, made himself a triple-strength cup of coffee, drank it in three gulps, and went out into the night.

Trave drove quickly through the empty streets and out into the dark countryside while his mind raced, remembering people and events that he’d been trying for a long time to forget. It was like the door of a lumber room had finally given way under the weight of what was stacked up behind it. Images from the past passed quickly in front of his mind’s eye like a succession of ghosts – Ethan Mendel lying dead, with the lake water lapping around his dark hair and his outstretched arms; David Swain’s hollow face collapsing in on itself as the jury foreman announced the guilty verdict; Titus Osman’s smug eyes twinkling behind his manicured beard as he entertained his guests at that dinner party after the trial, with Vanessa sitting on his left, listening to the bastard’s tall tales with such rapt attention.

Why had he taken Vanessa that night? Trave asked himself the same useless question for the thousandth time. Useless because he knew the answer. He hadn’t wanted to go. The Mendel case had left him feeling obscurely dissatisfied, a viewpoint evidently not shared by the jurors, who had taken less than two hours to convict. But Creswell, his boss, had insisted, and Trave had taken Vanessa with him to Blackwater Hall because he didn’t want to go on his own and because he felt guilty that she never went out; that he’d not been able to help her at all through those long, hard months and years after their son, Joe, died. Trave had had his job to fall back on, but she’d had nothing. Just him, and he’d been no support, worse than no support in fact. They’d grieved soundlessly and separately, trying to avoid each other in the passages and corridors of their empty house until their marriage withered away and died. Not with a shout; not even with a whimper. In a cold and weary silence.

He and Vanessa were finished long before the night that he took her to Osman’s to celebrate the end of another successful case. He realized that now. And yet she had looked so delicate, so fragile, that evening in a white dress that she hadn’t worn in years. He remembered her laughing in the bedroom before they left, saying that perhaps losing weight wasn’t such a bad thing after all, and he remembered how she’d bent her head to allow him to fasten the faux pearl necklace that he’d bought her as a present twenty years earlier, after Joe was born. His hands on her neck replaced by Osman’s hands – Osman, who could afford to pay more for a necklace than Trave earned in a year. Trave shuddered, braking hard to avoid the line of police cars with flashing lights parked in a line on the road up ahead. They must be searching the woods, he thought, as he turned through the open gate and drove up between the tall, moonlit trees to Osman’s house.

Clayton was waiting for him in the entrance hall. The whole place was ablaze with lights, and there was the sound of people running up above, although the hall itself was temporarily empty except for a uniformed policeman standing guard outside the closed door of the drawing room. It was a room that Trave vividly remembered from his previous visits to Blackwater Hall, when he was investigating Ethan Mendel’s murder. The views across the gardens and the woods to Blackwater Lake were among the most beautiful he’d seen from any house in the county. But for now the drawing room could wait; he had other business to attend to.

‘Where is she?’ he asked, dispensing with any greeting. He was a man in a hurry tonight.

‘Who?’ asked Clayton, thrown off balance for a moment by the suddenness of the question.

‘Katya Osman. I assume she’s the young female shot in the head who’s brought us all out here tonight.’

‘Yes, that’s right. She’s in her bedroom up on the top floor. It looks like she was shot while she was asleep. The owner’s in there,’ said Clayton, pointing to the door of the drawing room on the other side of the hall. ‘With the other two residents: Mr Claes and his sister.’

‘They can wait,’ said Trave curtly, making for the stairs.

‘They say it’s a David Swain who broke in here and killed her,’ said Clayton, running to catch up with his boss.

‘He can’t have done. He’s in gaol serving a life sentence. I’m the one who put him there.’

‘I know. They’re saying he’s escaped.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve got Samuels making enquiries. Mr Osman thinks he was transferred back to Oxford Prison earlier this year.’

‘Oh, he does, does he? How do you know about Swain?’

‘Well, everyone was talking about his trial at the station a couple of years back when I first got posted down here. About him and this girl and the Belgian bloke he knifed – a sort of love triangle gone wrong is what I heard.’

‘You could call it that, I suppose,’ said Trave with a grimace, thinking of his own situation.

‘So when they mentioned Swain down there, I remembered that this was the place. Where it happened, I mean.’

‘Well, good for you,’ said Trave. He could feel the anger growing inside his chest as they got closer to the top floor, but lashing out at his subordinate didn’t make him feel any better. It was a useless anger born out of years of frustration. In his experience most murders could have been prevented before they happened, but by the time he arrived on the scene it was always by definition too late. He could find the killers and get them locked up in a cell somewhere, but he couldn’t bring the dead back to life.

And it was worse when he knew the victim and she was young like Katya Osman, he thought, as he stood beside her bed, looking down at her pale, ravaged, pretty face, at the neat little hole in the centre of her forehead rimmed crimson with her dried-up blood.

Bedrooms were private places; in bed you were supposed to be safe, inviolate, free from the attentions of the bogeyman. ‘Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John guard the bed that I lie on.’ He remembered the prayer from his childhood: his mother’s voice intoning the words in the semi-darkness; his voice following hers. But no one had guarded Katya’s bed when it mattered. No one had been there to protect her.

It was unbearable. Trave swallowed and closed his eyes hard, feeling for a moment like one of those parents that he had to take down to the hospital morgue from time to time to identify the remains of their dead child. And yet his days as a parent were over. He was a policeman now. That was what was left to him. He looked down again at the dead girl on the bed, past her sunken cheeks and into her unseeing blue eyes. He remembered Katya’s eyes. They had been her best feature. Large and luminous, eyes a young man could fall into. But now the light had gone out of them and they stared sightless up at the ceiling.

‘You were wrong about her being asleep, Adam,’ he said without turning around. ‘She saw whoever it was before she died. She saw the gun. She wasn’t spared a thing. She knew.

‘If the eye was like a camera and we could just unroll the film,’ he went on musingly, talking to himself as he leant over and closed Katya Osman’s eyes forever.

He was about to turn away, but something made him linger, picking up the girl’s hand from where it lay, lifeless, on the coverlet.

‘Look at that,’ he said, beckoning Clayton over to join him at the bedside.

‘What, sir?’

‘Her nails. They’re bitten down to the quick. And she must weigh half of what she did when I last saw her,’ he added, pulling back the quilt to expose Katya’s upper body.

‘Close to malnutrition I’d say,’ said a voice behind him. It was Davis, the police doctor, standing behind them in the doorway, dressed in his own personal uniform of brown corduroy jacket and silk bow tie. The outfit never changed – in all the years he’d known him, Trave couldn’t recall ever seeing Horace Davis wear anything else.

‘Not the first time we’ve run across each other here after hours, Bill,’ said the doctor drily, taking Trave’s place beside the dead girl.

‘No,’ said Trave. They were alone now. Clayton had left the room to talk to a uniformed policeman who’d been waiting outside in the corridor for some time, trying to attract his attention.

‘Who is she?’ asked the doctor.

‘Katya Osman. She is or was the girlfriend of the corpse you were here for last time.’

‘And them?’ asked Davis, nodding toward the photograph that Trave had idly picked up from the top of the bookcase: a laughing woman with a scarf around her head holding on to the arm of a bald-headed man wearing an old suit and round-rimmed glasses; behind them the sea and a sense that the wind was blowing them off balance.

‘Her parents.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I asked her about them before. She showed me the photograph.’

‘And where are they now?’ asked the doctor, continuing his examination of the dead girl as he carried on the conversation.

‘Dead. In the war. I don’t know how.’

Davis looked up, picking up on the bitterness in Trave’s voice.

‘Different, this one, is it?’ he asked.

Trave put back the photograph, saying nothing, but Davis nodded as if he understood.

‘She was beautiful,’ he said, looking down at Katya. ‘It’s a waste. That’s what it is. A bloody awful waste.’

He turned away from the bed, resuming his professional air as he snapped his battered old medical bag shut.

‘She’s been dead just over an hour, so I’d put the time of death at about half past twelve, give or take a few minutes. And whoever did it knew what they were doing, although I suppose that’s obvious,’ he added, pointing to the wound in the centre of Katya’s forehead.

‘Oh, and you should also take a look at this,’ he said, beckoning Trave back over and pulling up Katya’s left sleeve to expose the puncture marks above the elbow. ‘She’s been injecting or someone else has been doing it for her.’

‘Are any of those from tonight?’ asked Trave.

‘I don’t know. But the autopsy’ll tell us. I’ll let you know. I hope you catch the bastard, Bill,’ Davis added, looking back for a moment as he went out of the door. ‘Whoever did this isn’t one of our usual punters.’

‘No,’ said Trave to himself. ‘No, that he’s not.’

Clayton waited patiently while Trave stood over by the window, looking out into the night. There were other things he needed to explain, including the news he’d just heard outside, but he knew better than to interrupt his boss while he was lost in a train of thought.

‘Something’s been happening in here,’ said Trave without turning round.

‘Happening, sir?’ Clayton repeated, sounding mystified. Of course something had happened. A young woman had been shot in the head.

‘It’s too damned tidy. I remember when I went round the house after the Mendel murder, this room didn’t look anything like it does now. Everything was strewn about everywhere: clothes, makeup, magazines, books – you name it. A typical girl’s bedroom. This is like a room in a hospital. Or a gaol,’ he added, taking hold of the steel bars over the windows with his hand. ‘What the hell are these for, I wonder?’

Clayton had no idea.

‘All right, so tell me about Swain. Anything new?’ asked Trave, turning back from the window with a sigh.

‘Yes, he’s definitely escaped. And it was from Oxford Prison. Samuels got through to them a few minutes ago. Swain’s with a man called Earle, apparently. They got over the wall.’

‘Earle. Eddie Earle?’

‘Yes, that’s right. Edward James Earle. Doing five years for deception,’ said Clayton, glancing down at the piece of paper in his hand. ‘Do you know him?’

‘Yes, I know him. He’s a confidence trickster, quite a good one, specializes in conning old ladies out of their life savings. Easy Eddie he likes to be called – easy with other people’s money.’

‘They had help,’ said Clayton. ‘Apparently someone threw rope ladders over the perimeter wall, and they think there was a getaway car.’

‘How long ago? Have you got a time?’

‘Just after midnight. They’d have had time to get here, sir.’

‘I know,’ said Trave. It made no sense but Clayton thought he sounded disappointed.

‘All right,’ Trave went on after a moment. ‘So where are they now?’

‘Earle, I don’t know. No one’s seen him as far as I know. And I’m pretty sure Swain’s not in the house. I’ve had the place searched from top to bottom. But he could be somewhere out in the grounds. I’ve got people looking, but it’s difficult in the dark. To be sure, I mean. And he may be wounded. We don’t know.’

‘Wounded?’

‘Yes. The owner’s brother-in-law, Franz Claes, says he fired two shots at him in the corridor out there. The first one hit the door and the second one hit the wall at the far end, just by the turning to the stairs, but it may have touched Swain on the way. It was too dark for Mr Claes to see, apparently. But the bullet holes match his story.’

‘We’ll need to get ballistics to compare the bullets with the one over there,’ said Trave, pointing at Katya. ‘Not that I’m holding my breath.’

‘Sir?’

‘Nothing. Don’t worry about it. How did Swain get in?’

‘He broke the window in the study downstairs, and I reckon that’s how he got out too. All the other doors and windows seem to have been locked when we got here. Oh, and he tore his clothes on the rosebushes outside. There’s a bit of shirt we’ve recovered. Blue-and-white stripe, like prison uniform. I’ll have it checked out.’

‘Anything missing?’

‘Can’t be sure yet, but the owner hasn’t noticed anything, except a silver candlestick that the intruder took upstairs from the dining room, to light his way. He left it outside the door before he came in here. I’ve got it being dusted for fingerprints. And the study too, sir. Photographs as well.’

‘Good. You’ve been very professional, Adam. Just what I would have hoped. Well, I suppose we’d better go and talk to our friends downstairs. See what their story is,’ said Trave, making for the door.

Clayton felt pleased. He didn’t often get praise from his boss, so when it came, it was worth savouring. But he also felt uneasy. There was something Trave wasn’t telling him, he thought, as they went downstairs. In normal circumstances he’d have expected the inspector to have a modicum of sympathy for the owner and his family after what they’d just been through, but instead, Trave’s attitude seemed to be bordering on hostile before he’d even clapped eyes on them.

‘Who do you want to see first?’ asked Clayton once they were back in the hall. ‘There are just three of them – the owner and his brother-in-law and sister-in-law. No servants – none of them live in apparently.’

‘Claes – the one with the gun,’ said Trave immediately. ‘Doesn’t he say he was the first one on the scene?’

Clayton nodded and was halfway to the drawing room door when Trave’s voice stopped him in his tracks.

‘Wait. We haven’t decided where to interview them yet. Where’s more important than the order they go in right now.’

‘You don’t want to interview them where they are?’ asked Clayton, looking puzzled.

‘Osman? No, anywhere but in there. That’s his lord-of-the-manor room.’

‘His what?’

‘The place where he struts about entertaining high society, feeling like a million dollars. No, we need to put him on edge, put him at a disadvantage when we talk to him.’

Trave stroked his chin musingly, and Clayton kept quiet. None of this made much sense as far as he was concerned. The training book said you should put witnesses at ease in order to get as much out of them as possible, not put them through the third degree. Unless they were suspects, of course, but Titus Osman wasn’t that. If anything, he was a victim. His niece had just been murdered, for God’s sake. However, Clayton knew better than to question his boss’s methods. Trave was the best detective on the Oxford force when it came to getting results.

‘What about Osman’s study?’ Trave asked, looking up. ‘Are forensics still working in there?’

‘Yes. I told them to start downstairs so you and the doctor could see the deceased first. I hope that was right?’

‘Yes, no problem,’ said Trave distractedly. ‘But tell them to finish in the study before they go anywhere else. We’ll interview Claes and his sister in the drawing room, and then see Osman in the study when forensics are done in there. We may have to wait a bit but that doesn’t matter.’

Franz Claes sat bolt upright on the edge of the sofa, facing Trave and Clayton, who sat side by side on the matching sofa opposite. The empty fireplace was between them. Claes was short, no higher than five foot two or three, and his forward position meant that he could at least keep his feet on the floor, although Clayton felt that Claes would have preferred a straight-backed wooden chair to the comfort of the sofa in any event. He was that type of man.

‘When did you get dressed, Mr Claes?’ asked Trave.

‘After calling the police and making sure Swain was no longer in the house.’

It was a strange first question to ask, thought Clayton, but Claes didn’t appear surprised by it. He seemed alert, ready for anything that might be thrown at him. And to be fair, Clayton had been surprised too when Claes had answered the door dressed semi-formally as he was now, in blazer, starched white shirt, and trousers, with not a hair out of place. He even looked as if he had shaved. His cheeks were entirely smooth and hairless even though it was the middle of the night.

‘And so you were the first to see Mr Swain?’ Trave continued.

‘Yes, I heard him as he went past my bedroom door. It was slightly open.’

‘It’s on the first floor as I recall,’ said Trave.

‘Yes, at the opposite end of the corridor to Mr Osman.’

‘Why do you call him Mr Osman? He’s your brother-in-law, isn’t he?’

‘Titus then,’ said Claes, nodding as if he had lost an insignificant point in a game that had barely begun. ‘As I say, I heard a noise. My light was off but I had not yet fallen asleep, and so I got up and went outside.’

‘Wearing?’

‘Pyjamas. I took my gun with me.’

‘And where was that? Do you sleep with it under your pillow, Mr Claes?’

‘It was in the top drawer of my desk,’ said Claes, apparently unruffled by the close questioning. His English was surprisingly good, thought Clayton. He spoke slowly and with an accent, but he was clearly fluent.

‘Is this the gun?’ asked Trave, holding up a Smith and Wesson revolver now neatly packaged in a see-through plastic bag.

‘Yes.’

‘And you’ve got a licence for it, have you?’

‘You know I have, Inspector. It’s the same gun I had two years ago. It’s not the first time we’ve discussed it, you know,’ said Claes with a half-smile. It was not an attractive smile, thought Clayton. It was partly the way in which the tightening of Claes’s facial muscles threw into sharper relief the ugly scar that ran down the left side of his face, but it was also because there was no warmth in the man. His eyes were cold too, grey and watchful and somehow disconnected.

Trave had been quiet for a moment, but now he pursed his lips as if coming to a decision.

‘All right, Mr Claes. You tell us what happened in your own words. I’ll try not to interrupt you.’

‘Thank you,’ said Claes with a nod. ‘Once outside my room I heard someone walking on the floor above, and so I climbed the stairs and looked around the corner. There was a candle burning on the floor outside Katya’s room. It’s about halfway down the corridor on the left-hand side. Her door was half-open and the light was on inside. It was then that I heard the shot. Almost immediately a man came out. I could see it was Swain. I recognized him from when I stopped him before down by the lake, and from his trial. He was standing still for a moment, and I shot at him, but he saw me and ducked back behind the door. And immediately he ran away down to the end of the corridor, toward the other set of stairs, and I fired again, but I don’t know whether I hit him or not. And then he disappeared.’

‘What was he wearing?’ asked Clayton, speaking for the first time.

‘A blue-and-white shirt, some jeans maybe. I’m not sure about the trousers.’

‘Were the clothes torn?’

‘I don’t know. There was no time to see things like that.’

Trave looked at Clayton impatiently, drumming his fingers on his knee as Clayton made a note in his report book.

‘So Mr Swain disappeared,’ Trave said, leaning forward. ‘Did you follow him?’

‘Yes, but not to catch him up. It would have been impossible: he was running and I have a problem with my leg’ – Claes tapped his left knee – ‘so I shouted down to Titus to warn him, and then I went downstairs myself. Titus was in the corridor outside his bedroom. We looked down here and it seemed like Swain was gone, so we went back up to Katya’s room.’

‘Together?’

‘No, Titus went first. I looked in all the rooms first because I wanted to make sure Swain wasn’t hiding somewhere.’

‘What would you have done if you’d found him?’

‘Whatever was necessary, of course,’ said Claes. There was a cold, clipped tone to his voice that Clayton found oddly disconcerting, chilling even.

‘And so when you didn’t find him, you went back upstairs and found Miss Osman shot in the head. How did that make you feel, Mr Claes?’ asked Trave.

Claes didn’t answer for a moment. It was as if he was nonplussed by the question, as if he’d prepared himself to say what had happened but not how he felt about it. Clayton didn’t think that Claes was the type of man who spent much of his life discussing his feelings.

‘I was sorry. Of course I was sorry,’ he said slowly. ‘But there was nothing I could do.’

‘No, there wasn’t, was there?’ said Trave, sounding unconvinced. ‘Miss Osman hasn’t exactly been a high priority in this house recently, has she?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘The doctor says she’s badly undernourished; she’s got puncture marks all the way up one arm; and there are steel bars on her windows. What have you got to say about that, Mr Claes?’

‘She had got herself into trouble in the town,’ said Claes, choosing his words carefully. ‘My brother-in-law was looking after her, but she was unwilling.’

‘Unwilling?’

‘Yes, often she would not eat. She was not grateful.’

‘Grateful! For being kept a prisoner in her own home?’

Claes shrugged his shoulders.

‘Why did you try to shoot Mr Swain?’ asked Trave, changing the subject.

‘Because I was frightened of what he was going to do next. Titus was downstairs and he had already shot Katya.’

‘You didn’t know that.’

‘He was coming out of her room. I’d heard the shot. Anyone would have assumed it.’

Clayton silently agreed, thinking that he’d have definitely taken a shot or two if some armed man was running around his house shooting people. But then again he didn’t keep a gun in his bedroom. Not like Franz Claes.

‘It’s not the first time you’ve tried to put a bullet in Mr Swain, is it?’ Trave observed.

But Claes was ready for this.

‘No, Inspector, it is the first time. After Mr Mendel was murdered, I fired my gun to stop Mr Swain running away, not to hit him. This time it was different.’

Trave didn’t argue. He was stroking his chin again, thinking, and Clayton was just wondering whether this might be the signal for him to take over, when Trave asked his next question. It was not one that Clayton had expected.

‘Where does your sister sleep, Mr Claes?’

‘On the top floor, further along the corridor from Katya’s room.’

‘I see. Further down the corridor. Well, then let me ask you this: Why did you fire twice down that corridor when you must have known that there was a serious risk that she would come outside and be hit?’

Claes didn’t answer. There was a flush in his cheeks: it was the first time during the interview that he’d looked really discomforted.

‘You could have killed her, couldn’t you?’ said Trave, pressing the point.

‘It was a moment of stress,’ said Claes, finally answering. ‘I didn’t have time to think,’ he finished lamely.

‘You didn’t think,’ repeated Trave with a withering smile. ‘Well, thank you, Mr Claes, for your assistance. That’ll be all for now. But please don’t leave the house without telling us. We may be needing you again.’

Claes stood, bringing his polished shoes together with an audible click; nodded his head once to the two policemen; and limped to the door. He went out without looking back.

‘Slippery bastard,’ said Trave. ‘He’s play-acting with that limp. He walked a lot quicker last time I saw him.’

‘Why do you dislike him so much, sir?’ Clayton felt compelled to ask the question. He hadn’t warmed to Franz Claes during the interview, but most of what the man said made sense, even though it was strange he hadn’t thought of his sister when he fired those shots. It was Trave’s hostility that was more puzzling.

‘It’s not that I like or dislike him; it’s that I don’t trust him. He’s got secrets – that much I can tell you.’

‘Secrets?’ repeated Clayton, surprised.

‘All right, a secret,’ said Trave. ‘He was picked up in a vice raid a few years back – before the Mendel murder. A man called Bircher was running a whole lot of underage boys out of an old tenement house in Cowley. The detective I talked to said they were going to charge Claes, but then orders came down to let him off with a talking to, because it was a first offence or something like that. I don’t know the ins and outs of it, but Osman obviously got involved – spun some sob story or other, made a donation to the police benevolent fund. I don’t know. It’s ancient history now. Let’s see what the sister’s got to say.’

CHAPTER 8

Out in the hall Jana Claes sat on a high-backed wooden chair awaiting her turn in the drawing room. She had had time to get dressed and was now wearing her usual coal-black outfit with her greying hair tied up in a bun at the back of her head. Her pale face was even more wan than usual, but otherwise there was little to indicate that it was the middle of the night and that she had been woken by a murder committed only a few yards away from where she slept, except perhaps that the stillness of her hands seemed forced, as if inside she was rigid rather than relaxed, trying hard to hold herself in check.

She kept her eyes on the ground, only looking up when her brother came out of the drawing room and stopped for a brief moment beside her chair.

‘Be careful of the old one. He’ll try to trap you,’ he said, speaking in an undertone in rapid Dutch. ‘Remember what I said.’

She nodded: a small but clear inclination of her head, and Claes turned away toward the stairs, apparently satisfied, just as Clayton came out into the hall.

‘Miss Claes,’ said the policeman, holding the door of the drawing room open. ‘We’re ready for you now.’

Reaching behind her shoulder, Jana unhooked the handle of a walking stick from the back of her chair and got slowly to her feet.

‘Do you need a hand?’ asked Clayton, reaching forward instinctively to help Jana up.

‘No!’ Jana almost shouted the word, recoiling from the policeman’s touch, and Clayton gave her a wide berth as she went past him into the drawing room.

Trave was standing in front of the fireplace with his back to the door. He’d been thinking about his wife and Osman; imagining them standing in this room where he was now; picturing Osman’s long, tapering fingers on Vanessa’s arm as he showed her his possessions. Trave shuddered. He knew the man. Osman was a collector, and now Vanessa was being added to the collection. Involuntarily Trave picked up a pretty Dresden china ornament from the mantelpiece, a milkmid with a jug, and held it in his fist, thinking about how satisfying it would be to throw it down, smash it in the fireplace at his feet, but at that moment Jana, entering the room, caught sight of Trave’s reflection in the mirror above the fireplace, and, perhaps sensing what was going through his mind, she shouted at him from the doorway: ‘Put it down.’

Trave was surprised at himself afterwards that he so meekly obeyed the woman’s command. Perhaps it was an association with his childhood – his mother had hated him touching her ornaments, her ‘precious things’ as she called them.

He didn’t turn round immediately but instead took a moment to pull himself together, watching Claes’s sister in the mirror as she came slowly into the room, leaning heavily on her stick. She hesitated after a few steps, perhaps embarrassed at her outburst, before going on to the sofa, where she sat awkwardly, keeping firm hold of the stick as if ready to get up and leave at a moment’s notice. She looked out of place in the room, and Trave thought he knew why. This was Osman’s territory, and Jana would only come in here to clean and dust, not to sit on the sofa and make conversation.

‘I am sorry,’ she said, speaking slowly and with a heavy foreign accent. ‘The china, it is expensive and I look after it.’ The apology was reluctant, Trave thought. She would have remained silent if she’d felt she had a choice.

‘I quite understand,’ said Trave, resuming his seat beside Clayton on the sofa opposite. ‘All this must be very distressing for you.’

‘Yes.’

Trave looked at Jana Claes with interest. He’d interviewed her two years before when he took her statement after the Mendel murder, but she’d had little to say then. Her evidence had been straightforward: she’d gone out shopping with Katya in the afternoon and so neither of them had been present when Mendel met his death down by the boathouse. She knew very little of the murdered man and had never met his assassin, David Swain. And yet now it was different. Jana Claes had been living with Katya Osman for years. She knew things: how the house worked, what Katya’s life had been like in her last months, and it was Trave’s job to get the information out of her if he could. But it wouldn’t be easy. That much was obvious. With her eyes fixed on the carpet, she looked the very image of an unwilling witness.

‘Okay,’ he said, beginning his questions in a far more friendly tone than he’d adopted with Jana’s brother. ‘Detective Clayton and I are trying to put together a picture of what happened here tonight, and so we’d like you to tell us everything you remember.’

‘I went to bed. I woke up because there was a shot. Then there were more, two more. And people running. And then it was quiet again. Titus, Mr Osman, came into my room and took me to Katya. Then my brother, Franz, was there too. I did not touch her. They said to wait. After, I got dressed and you came.’

Trave watched Jana carefully. There was a rehearsed feel to her words, and he was struck by her failure to articulate any emotional response to the murder. Was it shock or her difficulties with the language or something else?

‘You sleep only two rooms away from Miss Osman. Isn’t that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘So the gunshots must have been very loud?’

‘Yes.’

‘How long would you say there was between the first shot, the one that woke you up, and the others?’

‘I don’t know. I was sleeping.’

‘Enough time to get out of bed?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you didn’t go outside?’

‘No, I was frightened.’

‘Yes, I can understand that.’ Trave nodded and then stayed silent for a moment, with his forehead creased as he debated where to go next with his questions.

‘Tell us what you do here, Miss Claes. Other than look after the china,’ he said with a smile.

‘I take care of the house. I tell the servants what to do. My brother-in-law, Mr Osman, he likes things done . . .’ Jana stopped, searching for the right word, and Trave came to her assistance.

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