The Inheritance

by Simon Tolkien

  The old man looked Trave full in the eye and then shrugged his shoulders. It was a gesture of contempt. He might just as well have spat on the floor. Trave felt certain that he knew something but equally certain that he was not going to talk about it. He turned away exasperated, but at the door the landlord called him back.

  “Mr. Policeman,” he said, “you tell me your name and your telephone number, and if I think of something, then I will call you. Okay?”

  Quickly, Trave wrote his details down on the back of a registration form and put it in the landlord’s calloused hand. But then he didn’t let go of the piece of paper. Instead he leant across the counter, bringing his face up close to the Frenchman’s.

  “A boy is going to hang for something he never did,” he said softly. “If you think of something, think of that.”

  Then, without waiting for a reply, Trave walked out of the door and made for his car. He was angry, and he didn’t look back. If he’d done so, he might have seen the landlord disappear back into the cubicle behind the reception area and pick up the telephone. He dialed a long-distance number, waited for a reply, and then began talking in rapid French to the person on the other end.

  Trave drove out of the village. Sasha had disappeared, and he knew instinctively that he wouldn’t find her again. And even if he did, he had no authority to ask her any questions. He was outside his jurisdiction, and he didn’t have any basis to invoke the help of the French police. And yet there was so much that he wanted to know. What was she doing here? Outside the church, she’d looked like someone who’d been searching for something and failed to find it. But that wasn’t the same as having a relation to the Rocards or their servants, having some reason for wanting revenge on John Cade for what he’d done here in 1944.

  She’d given Silas the alibi, or was it the other way round? Was she the one who’d killed her employer in his chair and then escaped across the courtyard in Silas’s mackintosh and hat? She had had the opportunity, and she was certainly cold-blooded enough to plan such a crime. But what was her motive, and why was she in the backwoods of Normandy now, looking for something she couldn’t find?

  Trave stopped at the church on the way back to Moirtier, but he couldn’t see anything unusual beyond the severed padlock hanging uselessly from one handle of the big oak door. A notice by the entrance advertised Holy Mass at nine o’clock every Sunday, and Trave decided to come back the next day. Perhaps the curé would know something. God knows, his luck had to change soon.

  In the evening he called Adam Clayton from the hotel. The young man sounded excited.

  “I found the locksmith,” he said. “He wasn’t in Oxford. He was in Reading. Our friend went halfway to London to copy the key. But he did it, Bill. You were right. It was four days before Cade’s murder. A Frenchman in his late twenties, early thirties, calling himself Paul Noirtier and speaking very poor English. Walked in off the street with three wax casts and came back the next day to collect the keys. I’m assuming he got one for the french windows to the study as well as the internal door, and the last key’s probably for the front door of the house. And there was also one duplicate apparently, although I obviously don’t know which door that one’s for. He paid cash apparently. I’ve got a description: tall, short black hair, clean shaven, and no glasses. Doesn’t tell us much. The locksmith says he didn’t like the look of him, but that’s probably because he doesn’t like foreigners.” Clayton laughed.

  “Was the man alone?” asked Trave.

  “I asked about that. The locksmith’s pretty sure there was a woman waiting outside the shop in a Mercedes, but he can’t describe her, and none of the photographs jogged his memory.”

  “Did you show him Sasha Vigne’s picture?”

  “Yes. I showed him pictures of everyone who was in the house. Like you said I should. And he drew a blank on all of them. Why Sasha Vigne particularly?”

  “Because she’s here.”

  “Where?”

  “In bloody Marjean. And I don’t know why.”

  “Can’t you ask her?”

  “She’s disappeared.”

  Clayton whistled. “There’s bad news about the home secretary, I’m afraid,” he said after a moment. “The defence barrister rang here yesterday, looking for you. He called to say the minister refused the reprieve. He seemed pretty upset—said something about the old bastard not knowing the meaning of the word. The execution’s on Wednesday morning at eight. Same as before.”

  “Can’t we take this statement from the locksmith to the Home Office?” Clayton asked anxiously when Trave stayed silent at the other end of the phone. “The name and the car link up with the Mercedes that was stopped on the murder night.”

  “It’s not enough,” said Trave flatly. “The man in the Mercedes could just as well have been Stephen’s accomplice as anyone else’s. I’ve got a couple more people to talk to here, but if nothing comes of that, I think we’ve had it, Adam. There’s no point in pretending. We’re damn near played out.”

  “Don’t say that. Something’ll turn up.”

  Trave said nothing. He suddenly realised that he wanted to cry, but he couldn’t. He’d felt the same after Joe died. It made him hate himself.

  “I’ll call you on Monday,” he said finally and was about to put the phone down, when Adam spoke again.

  “When are you going to come back?” he asked. “Creswell wants to know.”

  “Tell him Monday night,” said Trave. “I’ll know one way or the other by then.”

  After the call was over, he stayed by the telephone, tempted to ring the airlines and book the earliest flight home. But he didn’t. He knew that there was nothing to be gained by going back. Only evidence could help Stephen. And he felt sure that there was evidence here, if only he could find it in time.

  Trave remembered his father telling him when he was a boy that there was only one way to untie a knot, and that was to go back to the beginning. And the beginning was in one of these towns. Moirtier or Marjean. He felt the thread just beyond the tips of his outstretched fingers, but try as he might, he couldn’t get hold of it. The Frenchman and his accomplice were out there somewhere, waiting for the final chapter to unfold, and he was here, alone and confused, with three days left to find out who killed John Cade. And one of these days was a Sunday.

  Trave sat at the back of Marjean Church during the Mass. It was in Latin and the liturgy was far removed from the Book of Common Prayer that he was used to in his Anglican church at home. Unexpectedly, it lifted his spirits. Deum de deo. Lumen de lumine. Deum verum de deo vero. The singing reached into the rafters, mixing with the incense, muffling the sound of the rain beating against the windows, and Trave prayed to this unfamiliar Latin God to show him the way, to save an innocent boy from another Calvary. At the end he put a coin in the iron box by the door and lit two candles, one for Joe and one for Stephen, and then he waited while the congregation filed out into the rain and the curé changed out of his lawn-green surplice in the vestry.

  He was a young man in his early thirties with a long, angular face and wide open, bright blue eyes: a complete contrast to the shifty-looking landlord of the village inn on the other side of the lake. And he appeared entirely unruffled by the presence of an English policeman in his church who had obviously come to ask him questions. Without needing to be asked, he told Trave about the padlock on the door that had been cut the day before, but he had no idea what the intruder had been looking for. Nothing was missing from the church, and he had never heard of a young Englishwoman called Sasha Vigne.

  The curé insisted on giving Trave a guided tour of the church.

  “It’s one of the oldest in Normandy,” he said. “And we get people coming from all over France to look at the tombs. But then the château is a disgrace. It just falls down stone by stone, and no one lifts a finger to stop it. They say the government owns the place, but they’re not interested. Until some child gets killed by a falling mansard, of course. Then they’ll do something.
”

  “Where are the tombs?” asked Trave, in an effort to distract the curé from the subject of the ruined château, which was obviously his personal bête noire.

  “Down in the crypt,” said the curé, leading Trave through the vestry and down the narrow, winding stairs. “There was a monastery here once and this is where they buried their abbots.”

  “And isn’t it true that the owners of the château were killed here at the end of the war?” asked Trave, interrupting. He wondered whether he had shown too much eagerness to move the conversation on to what he really wanted to talk about, but the curé seemed perfectly happy to change the subject.

  “Yes, it was a terrible thing. Madame Rocard and the old manservant were killed down here,” said the curé, pointing to the middle of the stone-flagged floor. “Her husband died upstairs. He was probably trying to stop the Germans from bringing them down here, although I’ve never understood why they wanted to do that in the first place. Maybe the Nazis wanted to ask them questions, turn the place into one of their torture chambers. But they’d been camped out in the house for the best part of two years. Plenty of opportunity to interrogate the Rocards in that time, instead of waiting until the day of their departure when the British and Canadians were just up the road.”

  “What were they like? The Rocards?” asked Trave. Suddenly they seemed very close. He didn’t know why, but he felt more certain with every passing day that the murder of this middle-aged French couple in the summer of 1944 was the key to everything else. It was as if he needed to find out who killed them if he was ever going to discover who murdered John Cade fifteen years afterward.

  “I can’t tell you much about them, I’m afraid,” said the curé apologetically. “I only got appointed to this parish two years ago, and so they were before my time. And no one seems to want to talk about them for some reason. I don’t know why. Maybe people think they were collaborators. Memories tend to be long in places like this.”

  “Did the Germans kill everyone? Were there any survivors?” asked Trave, trying to keep the eagerness out of his voice. This was after all the question he’d come to ask.

  “No, I don’t think so. The Rocards had a little girl, but she died with the servant’s wife in the house when the Germans set fire to it before they left.”

  “What about any other relatives? Anyone who might bear a grudge because of what happened?”

  “No. None that I know of. Of course, it’s not the only time there’s been violence here. An Englishman was shot just outside the entrance door three years ago. But they never found out who did it, or whether it had anything to do with what happened here before. The inspector over at Moirtier said that the victim and his friend weren’t exactly helpful, but I don’t know the details. You know, he’s the man you want to talk to if you want to find out more about the Rocards. Marcel Laroche is his name. He’s been a policeman in this area since before the war. There’s very little that happens in Marjean or Moirtier that he doesn’t get to hear about. And now I’ve got to go, I’m afraid. I say Mass in Moirtier at eleven. Having two churches to look after doesn’t make my life that easy sometimes, although I mustn’t complain. This is a beautiful church.”

  The curé ushered Trave out the door with a smile and then bent down to attach a brand-new padlock to the handles.

  “That ought to keep the vandals out,” he said in a satisfied tone as he raised a big clerical black umbrella above their heads, sufficient to shelter Trave as well as himself from the heavy rain. They went down the hill in a huddle, and the curé held the umbrella up high for Trave as he got into his car.

  “It is beautiful, isn’t it?” the curé said, pointing with a sweep of his hand at the ruined château and the old grey stone church and, beyond them, the blue-black lake whose surface was now a mass of silver raindrops. “But it’s a strange place too. There’s an atmosphere here. Something you can’t quite put your finger on. I suppose if I believed in ghosts, I’d expect to find them here.”

  A faraway look had appeared in the curé’s eye for a moment, but he recovered himself with a laugh. “You must forgive me for being foolish,” he said. “Priests aren’t supposed to talk about ghosts. Go and see Marcel Laroche if you have time. You’ll like him, and maybe he can help you with some of your questions.”

  In the afternoon Trave walked out beyond Moirtier into the Norman countryside. The rain had stopped and the cold air smelt surprisingly fresh and full of promise, even though it was winter and the trees were black and leafless. A few cars passed every so often, and once a tiny aeroplane flew out toward the Channel, leaving a white line drawn high across the blue cloudless sky, but for most of the time everything was silent, and Trave walked to the sound of his own footsteps on the road.

  It had turned into a beautiful day, but Trave took in very little of his surroundings as his mind turned over and over the words of the curé back at Marjean Church. “The Rocards had a little girl, but she died.” Why then had he found no trace of her at the records office in Rouen? He remembered now. The clerk had said that the records for the two years before the invasion had been destroyed by enemy bombing. If the Rocards’ daughter had been born in 1938, then there would be no birth certificate in Rouen. And no wonder Stephen’s lawyers hadn’t looked any further for missing children. Madame Rocard had been childless up to the age of forty-five. There was no reason to think that she wouldn’t stay that way. The girl was a war child. Had Cade missed her too? Stephen had said that his father wanted something at Marjean. A valuable book. Even if he had gone there before the war to try to get it, he still wouldn’t have been able to go back until after D-day. A gap of four years or more. Perhaps Cade never knew about the Rocards’ little daughter.

  But the curé had said she was dead. And yet there was no death certificate. She hadn’t just died—she’d disappeared into thin air. Unless that was deliberate. What if all record of her had been removed so that she could grow up invisible, biding her time until she was ready to revenge herself on John Cade, who had killed her father and mother in cold blood? What if the elusive Frenchman in the Mercedes was her accomplice, waiting by the telephone box outside Moreton Manor in case he was needed on that Friday night back in June when Cade had been shot through the head? Executed with a single bullet.

  And who had been inside the manor house for eighteen months before that night, learning how everything worked, preparing for the appointed day when Cade would get his just deserts? Sasha Vigne. And it was Sasha who had run away the day before. She’d done that because she had something to hide, and she was still here somewhere. Trave was sure of it. Gone to ground in one of these little towns or villages, waiting for Stephen Cade to die and Trave to go home. Because with Stephen’s execution, her revenge would be complete. Father and son would have paid for the murder of her own mother and father. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Old Testament justice.

  A car horn sounded suddenly close behind Trave, shattering the peace of the day. He had unconsciously drifted into the middle of the road while he built his theories up like castles in the winter air, and now he had to step quickly back onto the verge to let a builder’s truck go by. For a moment he thought it was the same white van in which Sasha and her friend had accelerated away from Marjean Church the day before, but he soon realised his mistake. This truck was far bigger. The one yesterday had looked like a very run-down vehicle. And the frightened driver hadn’t been Trave’s idea of a cold-blooded conspirator who drove a Mercedes round the English countryside, plotting the murder of an Oxford University professor. No, he wasn’t Mr. Noirtier, and Sasha was probably not the Rocards’ daughter either. Because that girl was almost certainly dead. Burnt to death in her family home in the late summer of 1944, just like the curé had said.

  Whatever happened, this wild-goose chase would have to come to an end soon. He’d told Clayton that he’d be back in England by Monday evening, and Trave intended to keep to that. He’d see the policeman, Laroche, in the morning, and a
fter that he could do no more. Enough was enough. Turning back toward Moirtier-sur-Bagne, Trave realised with a start that the sun had almost set, and he had gone much farther down the road than he had intended. The temperature was colder now, and he would have to hurry if he was going to get back to his hotel before dark. He shivered, pulling his inadequate coat around him, and inside he felt the onset of a black despair. He’d been in France for almost a week now, and he’d accomplished nothing except to fritter away what little time was left before Stephen’s neck was broken. He cursed and swore, and his angry words made little volleys of white smoke in the thin, cold air, until he finally desisted, realising what a comical figure he must seem, a middle-aged man with unkempt hair and crumpled clothes scurrying through the deserted French countryside on a Sunday evening, swearing in English at nobody at all.

  Marcel Laroche was an imposing figure. He was six foot four and carried himself militarily erect even though he was in his late fifties. But it was more than sheer physical size that gave him such a commanding presence. He had fought with the Free French in North Africa during the first years of the war and had then been parachuted into northern France to help the Resistance around Caen in the preparation for D-day. He had seen things that others hadn’t, and his wartime experiences seemed to have given his character an unusual depth, which Trave found oddly attractive.

  He was expecting Trave, and as soon as the Englishman came through the door of the police station, Laroche picked up his hat and coat, clapped his subordinate on the shoulder, and took Trave across to the café on the other side of the square where they sat drinking hot black coffee by the open window.

  Laroche seemed genuinely touched when Trave asked after the health of his sister in Lille. “She’s dying,” he said simply. “But we don’t discuss it. And she won’t give in, which makes it harder. I hope for her sake that it will end soon. But you’re not here to talk about me, Inspector,” he added with a smile. “My deputy told me that you’re interested in the Rocards.”