‘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
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 facade 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.