The Inheritance

by Simon Tolkien

  Once again Trave stopped at Moreton Manor on his way to London, but he was coming to see Sasha this time, not Silas who was still in hospital, recovering from the surgery on his foot.

  It was a grey overcast day, and the manor house seemed more desolate than ever. The shootings were still fresh in Trave’s mind, troubling his sleep, and he would have preferred not to come, but he felt he had no choice. Sasha had been so impassive as she’d given her statement at the police station two days earlier, just as if she was reciting lines she’d stayed up too late at night to learn, and he wanted to see if he could shake her, crack this alibi of Silas’s. It made no sense. Why would Sasha want to protect Silas of all people? He might have saved the man’s life, but in his current mood even the mention of Silas’s name made Trave shudder.

  A maid answered the door, and as she took Trave’s hat and coat, he thought of Jeanne Ritter hanging another man’s hat and coat on this same stand four months earlier. If only she had told the truth from the outset she might be alive today, Trave reflected bitterly.

  “Miss Vigne’s in the library. Would you like me to take you up?” asked the maid. She’d become nervous, her hands twitching, ever since Trave had shown her his badge on the doorstep.

  “No. I’d prefer to see her down here, if you don’t mind,” he replied quickly. “Anywhere’ll do.” The thought of going upstairs made Trave grimace. He had no wish to revisit unnecessarily the place where Ritter’s body had fallen so heavily to the floor, and he wondered at Sasha’s cold-blooded ability to stay on at the manor house after what had happened. But then his eye alighted on three brown suitcases standing in the corner of the hall and he realised he’d been wrong. He’d got here just in time.

  Sasha came slowly down the stairs, patting her elaborately coiffured brown hair into place, and Trave was struck by how pretty she looked: her radiant brown eyes sparkled against her pale complexion, and her generous mouth, dimpled chin, and full figure invited admiration. And yet at the same time Trave remembered her disfigurement and realised forcibly that this was the opposite of the impression she intended to give. Her body was taut and her expression severe: she meant to repel attention, not attract it.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, Miss Vigne. I know you’re busy.”

  “I’m not busy. I’m leaving,” Sasha said brusquely, pointing at her bags standing by the front door.

  “Well, I’ll try not to delay you too long,” said Trave, adopting a friendly tone. “Is there somewhere we could talk?”

  Reluctantly, Sasha gestured toward a small parlour next to the kitchen, and Trave followed her in. In contrast to the rest of the house, this room was sparsely furnished and had the air of not having been used in a long time. Two button-backed Victorian armchairs stood on either side of an empty fireplace, and a single framed photograph hung over the simple wooden mantelpiece. It was a picture of Stephen and Silas and their parents taken outside the manor house nine years earlier: the date 1950 was written in black ink in the bottom right-hand corner. John Cade was resting his hand on his wife’s shoulder, and he was looking at her with pleased proprietorship as she gazed determinedly ahead, straight at the camera. The boys were in front, standing on the lower step, dressed in identical tweed suits, but it was obvious that they were not real brothers. Stephen looked just like his mother. He had her bright blue eyes and fair straw-textured hair, and he was smiling un-self-consciously, expecting the best of the world in contrast to his brother, who stood awkwardly, keeping his grey eyes turned downward to the ground. Nothing had changed. So what was it that made Sasha do Silas’s bidding? Trave asked himself for the hundredth time since Silas had announced his alibi in a trembling voice as he was being carried out to the ambulance in the aftermath of the shooting.

  “Happier times,” said Trave, pointing up at the photograph.

  “Perhaps,” said Sasha. “Some people aren’t born lucky, I guess.” Her tone was guarded and she sat perched on the edge of her chair as if ready to make her escape at the slightest provocation.

  “Maybe,” said Trave. “But Stephen isn’t where he is because of luck. You know that, Miss Vigne. Someone’s put him there.”

  “No, I don’t know that, Inspector. He put himself there. He shot his father.”

  “But I don’t believe he did. And that’s why I’m here. I want you to help me.”

  “How?”

  “By telling the truth. About Silas Cade; about what happened that night.”

  “I have told the truth,” Sasha said angrily. “You’ve got my statement.”

  “Yes, I do. And I don’t believe it. Not a word of it.”

  “That’s not my affair.”

  “Your affair! Your nonexistent affair with Silas Cade, you mean. What would a woman like you want with someone like him?”

  Sasha flushed. For some reason she felt touched by the policeman’s compliment, perhaps because it was so obviously unintended.

  “I’m sorry, Inspector. I don’t think I can help you,” she said quietly, adjusting her dress as she prepared to get up.

  “No, wait. Please wait,” said Trave quickly, putting out his hand in an almost pleading gesture as he silently cursed himself for his stupidity. This was not how he had intended the interview to go at all. He was more upset by the place, by what had happened than he’d realised. That was the problem.

  “Look, I know this is difficult,” he said. “I just want you to think about what you’re doing. That’s all. Before it’s too late.”

  Sasha didn’t respond, refusing to meet his eye.

  “Too late for Stephen,” said Trave, pointing up at the photograph. “They’ll hang him, you know. If he’s convicted.”

  Sasha grimaced, biting her lip. The thought of the hangman frightened her, and she screwed up her eyes, trying to suppress it.

  “Maybe he won’t be. I’m not accusing him of anything, am I?”

  “No, you’re just exonerating his brother.”

  Again Sasha didn’t respond, but Trave’s mind was racing in the silence, searching for a way through.

  “How did it happen?” he asked, changing tack. “Who did it to you?”

  “What?”

  “Your neck,” he said, pointing. “Who did that?”

  For some reason that Sasha couldn’t understand she wasn’t angry. Perhaps it was because she knew that Trave wasn’t repelled by her, that he wanted to connect.

  “A man,” she said. “A teacher at my school. He tried to touch me and I pushed him away. It had happened before. Lots of times. There was water boiling on the stove, and he threw it at me. I suppose I was lucky it didn’t hit my face.”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Trave. He wished he could think of something else to say. It seemed so unfair, so unjust that a person’s life could be spoilt so quickly, so completely. For nothing.

  “What happened to him?” he asked.

  “He was put away. Somewhere in the country. A place for crazy people who do things like that.”

  “It doesn’t help, though, does it?” said Trave.

  “What?”

  “The punishment.”

  “No, you make your own life. That’s all. Make sure you’re not dependent anymore.”

  “Dependent on whom?”

  “On men I suppose. Not you, Inspector. You seem different somehow. I don’t know why.”

  “Perhaps because I’ve lost something too.”

  “Perhaps. But I can’t help you, you know. I wish I could, but I can’t.”

  Trave detected a note of sadness, almost regret, in Sasha’s voice—a chink in her armour perhaps. He had to try again.

  “Why?” he asked. “What is it that you owe Silas Cade? At least tell me that.”

  “It’s not what I owe him. It’s what I owe myself. My life has a meaning too, you know. I matter.” There was defiance in Sasha’s voice. Trave felt her moving out of reach.

  “Of course you do,” he said. “But the truth matters too. Why won’t you tell the truth, Miss Vig
ne?”

  “I have told the truth. I had an affair with Silas Cade, and he was in my room on the night of the murder. I hold to my statement, Inspector,” said Sasha in a flat voice, getting up.

  “He knows something or he has something, something you want. It must be that,” said Trave, following her across the hall. It made no sense to him: this alibi in which he could not believe.

  Standing on the front steps in his hat and coat, Trave turned to try to get through to Sasha one last time, but she held up her hand, forestalling him.

  “Do you know what my mother told me, Inspector, after I got burnt?” she asked.

  Trave shook his head.

  “She said it was a blessing, God’s blessing. Now that I was ugly I would have no more use for the world, and I could happily become a nun and contemplate God’s great mercy.”

  “That’s crazy. You’re not ugly.”

  “Maybe; maybe not. But I’m no nun. I have things to accomplish in this world, Inspector. Other purposes.”

  There was a faraway look in Sasha’s eye as she closed the door that Trave didn’t understand. More than ever he felt that there was something he was missing. It was as if he could only see one half of the puzzle and didn’t know where to look for the other pieces.

  Trave was early. His meeting with the prosecutor was fixed for twelve o’clock, but it was only just after eleven thirty when he parked his car in an underground garage across the river from the Temple and crossed Waterloo Bridge, heading toward Gerald Thompson’s chambers.

  As he passed through the gate at the back of the Queen Elizabeth Building, Trave felt as if he was entering enemy territory. It was the same each time he came here. As representatives of the Crown, the lawyers and he supposedly shared a common purpose, but it didn’t make him trust them. All they seemed to care about were each others’ opinions. The rest of the world, policemen and criminals alike, were a sort of underworld that they had to visit from time to time, in order to earn their bread and butter. The barristers in their robes and horsehair wigs made Trave uncomfortable and even angry sometimes, and he knew himself well enough to realise that this arose from a fundamental feeling of inferiority. There was no basis for it. Trave had got a perfectly reasonable university degree, and he could just as easily have set out to become a lawyer all those years ago, but instead he had wanted to be a policeman. The job made sense. He was trying to bring order to a disordered world. Barristers were hired guns. Men without principle, available to whomever could afford their inflated hourly rates. But still, sometimes Trave felt that he was in the wrong job. The lawyers had the final say. Prosecuting innocent men and letting the guilty ones go. Maybe if he’d got a promotion, he’d have had more clout. But he had never been good at making people like him, particularly superior officers. He had remained a middle-ranking detective inspector for fifteen years, marooned on a rate of pay that had had his wife, Vanessa, on his back almost every week until she had left him. He got good work to do, because everyone knew that he was one of the best detectives on the force, but the final decisions were out of his hands.

  And this case had begun to trouble him more than any he had ever worked on, until now it was almost an obsession. He had killed Reg Ritter, but it was the man’s wife whom Trave couldn’t forget. He kept seeing her lying dead on her bed in the manor house. She had seemed so small and abandoned, laid out in the centre of the white counterpane with little pink flowers that just reached all the edges of the mattress beneath. She was obviously a person who cared intensely, almost disproportionately, about the way things looked, and she had made her bed so neatly before she left for London with her husband in the morning. Little did she know then that it was her deathbed she was preparing and that the counterpane would be her winding sheet.

  Trave shook his head and tried to forget all the dead faces: Ritter and his wife and Cade himself and, soon, if Thompson would not listen, Stephen as well, dangling on the end of a rope somewhere in Wandsworth Prison.

  Trave was now inside the enclosure of medieval buildings known collectively as the Temple. Some of it had been bombed during the war, and rebuilding was still continuing in various places. But much of it was unchanged since Dickens’s day. Little alleyways opened unexpectedly into grand squares with fountains and tall beech trees and distant views of the river. Hare Court, Pump Court, and Doctor Johnson’s Buildings. Everywhere the Temple was a hub of activity: barristers coming and going, their clerks tottering down the cobbled lanes under mountains of papers tied up with different-coloured ribbon. Red for defence work and white for prosecution. Most barristers defended and prosecuted, but Tiny Thompson was an exception. The government had secured his exclusive services, and he only prosecuted capital cases. He got results too. The hangman was busier than ever.

  Trave had taken a roundabout route to kill time, walking up to Fleet Street and past Temple Bar, where the authorities displayed the heads of executed criminals as late as the eighteenth century. But he was still ten minutes early when he knocked on the door of Number 5 King’s Bench Walk and was shown into a waiting room in which a coal fire was giving off very little heat. The scuttle was empty, and there was no sign of any wood.

  Trave picked up a magazine off the table in the centre of the room and flicked the pages, but he could not concentrate. He was remembering a day when he and Vanessa and Joe had come here just after the end of the war. God knows why they had chosen the Temple, unless it was just that it was one of the few places that Trave knew in London. But Joe had loved it, running ahead of his parents and jumping out of hidden doorways to scare them. Until they turned a corner and found that he had completely disappeared. Trave had shouted for his son, but he wasn’t really worried. He knew Joe couldn’t have gone far. But Vanessa didn’t see it that way. The look of abject terror on her face had shaken Trave at the time, and now, in retrospect, it seemed like it was a premonition. Trave remembered how they had gone to a tea shop on the Strand afterward, and he had tried to console her while Joe ate his way through an entire chocolate cake. But her confidence had snapped, and she hadn’t touched her food. And then, at the end, just as he was paying the bill, she’d taken his hand and told him what she felt, and the words had stayed with him ever since.

  “We’re walking on ice, Bill. All the time on thin ice, and we just don’t know it. We think it’s solid ground, until it breaks.”

  And ten years later the ice had broken. Joe had died and now Vanessa had left Trave for another man. It was as if she held him responsible for what had happened. She’d given him the son he craved, and he hadn’t protected that son. He’d failed her, and so she’d left him.

  Trave’s contempt for his own self-pity didn’t make him feel any better or more prepared for Gerald Thompson, who now appeared in the doorway of the waiting room, looking down at Trave over gold half-moon spectacles that he wore forward on his nose, enhancing a naturally supercilious expression.

  But to Trave’s surprise, the barrister seemed disposed to be friendly. He shook Trave’s hand quite warmly, before guiding him down a corridor into his office. It was a beautiful room with light wood-paneled walls and a roaring fire in the corner, a marked contrast to its counterpart in the waiting room.

  Thompson went to the door and called to an invisible assistant to make coffee, while Trave took in more of his surroundings. Everything was neat: books arranged in descending order of height on the shelves and papers tied up with ubiquitous white ribbon. The big kneehole desk with drawers on either side was devoid of photographs, but, between two of the bookcases, a six-foot-high mirror had been set into the wall, and Trave imagined Tiny Thompson in his robes, preening himself in front of it, standing slightly on tiptoes to achieve the best effect.

  “You’re quite a hero, Inspector,” said Thompson, returning to his seat on the other side of the desk. “It’s not every day that I get to drink coffee with a man of action like yourself.”

  Trave forced a smile, uncertain how else to respond to being complimented on ki
lling another human being. Even if it was a man like Ritter.

  “I hear you felled friend Ritter with just one shot.” The prosecutor spoke in the same clipped, almost feminine, voice that had so grated on Trave’s nerves during the trial, and his words were laced with irony, but Trave was nevertheless grateful that Thompson was not hostile before he’d begun. Maybe the barrister would listen to what he had to say.

  “Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Thompson,” he said. “I appreciate it’s short notice.”

  “Gerald, please,” interrupted Thompson, smiling.

  “Gerald.” Trave found it hard to get the name out. It would have been easier to call the prosecutor Tiny. “Gerald, I wanted to talk to you about the case.”

  “Yes, I imagined you would,” said Thompson. “It’s going well, I think. I’ve had the new statements from Sasha Vigne and Silas Cade, saying they were together in her room on the night of the murder. Obviously Silas will have to be recalled now that he’s changed his evidence, but I don’t see that as too much of a problem.”

  “So the trial’s going ahead? There won’t need to be a new jury?” Trave sounded surprised—shocked, even. It was not what he had expected.

  “No. No need for one. I spoke to friend Swift yesterday. He doesn’t want to start again. He’d lose the evidence of poor Mrs. Ritter if he did. The defence’ll obviously be attacking Silas for all they’re worth from now on, but I doubt it’ll do them much good. His injuries should make him more sympathetic to the jury. Not less.”

  “But what about the prosecution?”

  “What about it?”

  “Don’t you want to start again?”

  “No, I’d lose my star witness if I did that.”

  Trave looked perplexed, and Thompson laughed.

  “Come on, Inspector. You should know who I’m talking about. You’re the one who got rid of Sergeant Ritter, after all. I’m just glad that you waited until after he’d given his evidence.”

  “I had to do it. It wasn’t a choice,” said Trave, unable to contain his irritation at being depicted as some sort of trigger-happy gunman. The prosecutor’s evident amusement at his discomfiture only increased Trave’s annoyance.