LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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