The King of Diamonds

‘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.’