The Inheritance itadc-1

by Simon Tolkien

  “What’s her name?”

  “Sasha Vigne.”

  “I’ve never heard of her,” said Laroche, shrugging his shoulders.

  “But you know something about the girl, don’t you?” said Trave. He had noticed an alertness in the Frenchman ever since he first mentioned the Rocards’ daughter, as if Laroche was keeping something back all the while that he was insisting that she had died in the fire.

  “It’s probably nothing,” he said. “It was about three or four years after the end of the war. I can’t be sure of the date. A young man came into the police station. He can’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen. Called himself Paul Martin and said that he was originally from around here but had moved away when he was small. I found out afterward he was telling the truth about that. His uncle was old Pere Martin, who used to be the priest of Marjean. He died a couple of years ago. He was a good man.

  “Anyway, the boy claimed to be a friend of Madame Rocard, who was killed by the Nazis. Said the little girl had survived the massacre at the chateau, but she was too scared to come forward unless we guaranteed her safety.”

  “From whom?”

  “From the people who’d killed her parents. Paul said that she’d told him three English soldiers had done it. That’s why I looked at you the way I did when you said the same thing a minute ago. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard someone say that.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  “No, I didn’t. I thought he was a gold digger. The Rocards had left no will and no relatives, and so their house went to the state. That’s the way the law works in this country. You’ve seen the chateau. It’s a ruin. But there’s the land it’s built on. There would still have been a financial incentive for pretending to be the Rocards’ daughter.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I told him that I couldn’t help him. Not unless the girl came into the station, and I could check out who she was. And that was the last I ever heard of Paul Martin. I don’t know what became of him.”

  “He fell in love with an actress,” said Trave softly. “One last question, Inspector. Do you happen to know the first name of the Rocards’ daughter?”

  “Marie,” said Laroche without hesitation. “She was called Marie Rocard. And may she rest in peace.”

  Trave got up quickly and shook his companion’s hand.

  “You’ve been very helpful,” he said. “More helpful than you can know. Can I use your telephone?”

  Luck was on Trave’s side. Clayton was in his office and answered almost immediately.

  “Put out an alert,” said Trave. “For the arrest of Mary Martin and a man calling himself Paul Noirtier, although he’s probably changed his name by now. There’s a photograph of her on the file that you can use. You’ll have to use the locksmith’s description for him. Not that it’s much good. They’re both likely to be armed and they’re very dangerous.”

  “Why Mary Martin?” asked Adam, sounding perplexed at the other end of the line. “I thought you said it was Sasha Vigne whom you’d seen in Marjean.”

  “It was. But I got it wrong about her. It’s Mary Martin we’re after. She’s the Rocards’ daughter and she planned everything. From start to finish. With the help of this man Paul. It would’ve been her in the Mercedes when he went in to get the keys from the locksmith in Reading.”

  “What if we don’t find her?”

  “Then Swift’ll have to have another go at the home secretary tomorrow. You better call him now and fill him in on what’s happened. Maybe Swift can get the old bastard to grant a stay, but I wouldn’t hold your breath. I’ve got enough to convince myself that it’s her and not Stephen who killed John Cade. But a right-wing politician who doesn’t want to know? I’m not so sure. We have to find her, Adam.”

  “All right. I’ll get on to it,” said Clayton, sounding nervous. “Where are you now, Bill?”

  “I’m still in France. But I’m flying back this afternoon. And then I’m going straight home. I don’t know why, but I’m dead beat, and I need to get some rest. I’m hardly a more likely candidate to find our lady than the entire British police force. It’s wait-and-hope time now, Adam.”

  “Somebody called asking for you at lunchtime,” said Clayton. “Sounded foreign. I said you were getting back today.” But he didn’t go on. The dull, unchanging tone on the other end of the line made him realise that Trave had already hung up, and Clayton had no number to call him back on.

  The aeroplane was delayed leaving Paris, but Trave still got back into London by early evening, and from there he took the train back to Oxford and picked up his car at the station. He had told Clayton the truth about being dead tired. He couldn’t remember when he had last felt so exhausted. It must be the stress, he thought, as he drove home, because the journey had not been that difficult. He was thinking no further ahead than a bath and change of clothes. Mary Martin still had to be found, but Trave remained buoyed by what he had discovered in the morning, and he had a strange feeling that the future would take care of itself.

  As he turned the key in the door, he thought of how he had found Silas standing like an apparition under the streetlight nine days earlier and how he had resolved that evening to go to France and find things out for himself. Well, he had done that, and now he was home again. Home, sweet home. In the hallway Trave put out his hand to switch on the lights and felt instead a cold hand on his wrist and the muzzle of a gun thrust up against his heart.

  “Hello, Inspector,” said a voice that he recognised from a long time ago. “We’ve been expecting you.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  On that same Monday morning that Trave sat down with Inspector Laroche to drink coffee by the front window of the Claire Fontaine Hotel in Moirtier-sur-Bagne, Stephen Cade was led across the exercise yard of Wandsworth Prison to the visits hall, where Mary Martin was waiting for him.

  The warders were quiet, almost respectful, now that Stephen’s execution date was so close, and he was put in a special room off the main hall with just one prison officer sitting on a chair in the corner to ensure that nothing was passed to or from the condemned man.

  Stephen had been up all night, and there were rings of tiredness around his unnaturally bright blue eyes. He was moving all the time, squirming in his seat, and he talked in a rush, jumping haphazardly from subject to subject. Anything to fill the silence.

  “Swift came to see me on Friday,” he said. “Told me about the reprieve, or lack of one. He says it’s because they want to make an example of me. Show the youth of this country what happens if you shoot people. And I’m just what they want, apparently. Tailor-made for their requirements. A member of the privileged classes, born with a silver spoon in my mouth. The idea being that if someone like me ends up dangling from the end of a rope, then nobody can expect to get away with using a gun. I’m the government’s Christmas message to the criminal classes, Mary. Guaranteed front-page material.”

  Stephen laughed bitterly, and his anger beat against his old girlfriend, forcing her away from him, up against the back of her ugly wooden chair. In truth she looked little better than Stephen. Her nails were bitten to the quick and the tightness of her facial muscles showed the strain she was under as she fought to keep hold of her usual composure. All the day before Paul had tried to make her stay away from the prison, but she’d insisted on coming. Stephen had a right to know what they had done to him, she’d said; he had the right to an explanation, but now that she was here the words wouldn’t come, and every passing minute made it more difficult to find a way to begin.

  The truth was that it had all turned out wrong. Stephen hadn’t deserved any of this-she realised that now. It had just all seemed so much simpler before, when she was still in France and it was all about her parents, about getting them justice. Closing her eyes, Mary summoned up the image of her mother looking up at her in the window of the tower as she crossed the nave of Marjean Church for the last time. It was the memory that had haunted Mary and sustain
ed her for the last fifteen years. Her own mother leaving behind her dead husband, slumped on the stone-flagged floor of the church, as the two Englishmen, Cade and Ritter, pushed her and old Albert through the door of the vestry and down the narrow winding stairs to the crypt. Mary had waited for them to come back, but instead she had heard the shouting and the cries of pain and the gunshots and the silence afterward. Always the silence that went on and on and on forever. It demanded retribution; it required the oath that she had sworn with Paul on the deserted hill outside Dijon all those years ago.

  They had watched and they had waited, dreaming of a just revenge. And killing John Cade had been just that. She’d not felt one moment’s remorse for what she had done that night at Moreton Manor. She still rejoiced in it, when she wasn’t thinking about what had happened since, but almost from the outset this slow judicial murder of Cade’s son had begun to make her sick, until now she couldn’t stand it any longer. It was too cold-blooded, and Stephen wasn’t just Cade’s son anymore, either. She knew him too well, and, however hard she tried, she hadn’t been able to stay entirely detached from the part she’d played with him in the months before his arrest. The trouble was that he had nothing to do with what had happened to her at Marjean. It wasn’t his fault that John Cade was his father. God knows, Stephen had walked away from the man because of what he’d done to her parents.

  Mary had hoped that he’d be acquitted at the trial, but it hadn’t happened. The jury hadn’t bought Silas as the murderer, and now she could only save Stephen by exposing herself. And Paul wouldn’t hear of it. Not because he was frightened. That wasn’t in Paul’s nature. No, it was because of the plan. Always the plan. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth-not just Cade but his son as well, which was fine when you were far away, working out details on a piece of paper. It was very different when Cade’s son was a man who loved you, a young man with his whole life in front of him, a life that you were trying to take away.

  It was funny how Paul’s determination to carry out the plan to the letter seemed to have grown in direct proportion to the waning of her own enthusiasm for it. She and Paul had always been like brother and sister, but that didn’t mean that he hadn’t become jealous of Stephen. Looking back, even Mary had to admit that there had been times in Oxford when she had forgotten that she was an actress playing a part. But that was in the past. All Mary knew now was that the time had come to change the script, with or without Paul. She’d already worked out what had to be done, but first she owed it to Stephen to tell him the truth, and that was the difficult part, she now realised; the rest would be far easier.

  “It’s not over yet,” she said lamely, trying to buy time before she began her confession, but the remark infuriated Stephen.

  “Yes, it is,” he shouted. “Over and out. I’m going through that trapdoor on Wednesday unless the real murderer comes forward, and I don’t think that’s very likely. Do you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe…”

  Stephen shook his head violently, and Mary’s prepared speech died in her throat as she glimpsed the depth of his despair. He swallowed hard and looked up at the ceiling, fighting to keep back his tears. Brutally, he rubbed the back of each hand across his face, and then, blinking, he seemed to see Mary for the first time since he had come into the room.

  “You know, this is probably the last time we’ll ever be together,” he said, in a suddenly quiet voice. “Unless you believe in the afterlife, which I don’t. Since I was moved to the new cell, I’ve been reading the Bible at night when I can’t sleep. Trying to make sense of all this and failing. All that cursing and begetting. But I was wondering last night if that’s what all this is about.”

  “What?”

  “Being cursed through the generations. Like I’m dying, not for what I’ve done, but to atone for what my father did. As if his death wasn’t enough. It needs more blood to even up the scales.”

  “Your father was an evil man.”

  “Yes. But I’m not. I’ve always tried to do the right thing. And look where I’ve ended up. You know, I’ve always thought that this is about what happened to those people in France all those years ago. You and Swift persuaded me to accuse Silas, but I never thought he was capable of killing anyone, let alone our father. And I don’t think accusing him helped me at all in the end. It looked like opportunism, which is exactly what it was.”

  “You had to try it,” said Mary defensively. “The stuff about Marjean wasn’t working. You know that.”

  “No, I don’t,” said Stephen stubbornly. “That car was parked outside the gate for a reason that night. There was something about it. You’d know if you’d seen it. And the name the driver gave the police turns out to be almost the same as the next town up from Marjean. That’s not a coincidence. I know it’s not.”

  “How do you know about the name?”

  “It’s always been in the evidence. I just didn’t make the connection.”

  “Who did?”

  “Silas. He came to see me. I’m glad he did too. He said he didn’t believe I killed the old man anymore. He’s found out the chess pieces were changed after I left the study. Somebody else did that. And it wasn’t Silas.”

  “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know. Silas says the policeman in charge of the case has gone to France to ask questions. Maybe he’ll find out something.”

  Stephen’s face lit up as he clutched at this straw of hope.

  “You’ve been good to me, Mary,” he said. “You’ve always believed in me. Not like everyone else. You were all I ever asked for, and then this happened. It seems like such a waste. You know what I can’t stand? If I’ve got to die, I’d like to die for a reason. Not for nothing at all. I’m twenty years too late. That’s my problem. I remember the Spitfires and the Hurricanes up in the sky when I was a boy. Dogfights in the air. Pilots flying head over heels. They were real heroes. Dying for a reason. Not like this. Trussed up like a turkey, hanging on the end of a rope.”

  “I’m sorry, Stephen,” said Mary. “I’m sorry about what has happened. It wasn’t what I…”

  “No, Mary” interrupted her ex-lover, reaching out his hand. “Don’t say that. It’s not as if it’s your fault I’m here. You’ve nothing to be sorry for. Nothing at all.”

  Over on the other side of the exercise yard, Henry Crean, the Queen’s hangman, waited patiently while a warder made unusually heavy work of finding the right key to open the door of Stephen’s cell. Inside the prison he often seemed to have this effect on people, making them nervous and uncomfortable, but he knew that there was nothing he could do about it even if he had wanted to. It came with the territory. Anyway, his mind was focused on what lay beyond the door. Usually he prepared the gallows on the day before an execution, but his assistant, a young Welshman called Owen Jones, was new to the job, and in this instance Crean had decided that two dry runs were required before he sent Stephen Cade to his maker.

  Crean was a quiet, orderly man in his mid fifties, who took a professional pride in his work, and the thought of something going wrong was abhorrent to him. Press reporting of executions had long since been abolished, but news of a botched hanging had a way of leaking out, particularly in a case like this, where the public had got themselves so worked up about the condemned man. He was young and handsome, and the tabloid newspapers had recently taken to calling him Pretty Boy Cade. But Crean was oblivious to the character of his victim. In fact, he took pride in his detachment, knowing that pity made for hesitation and increased the risk of mistakes. In the last few moments of his life, the condemned prisoner’s best friend was a cold, quick executioner who knew exactly what he was doing.

  Stephen had been weighed every day for the past week, and most mornings Crean had watched him as well, pacing up and down the condemned cell, through the enlarged eyehole in the big iron door. Now, with two days left to go, Crean was confident that the Italian hemp rope was adjusted to just the right length to do what was required of it.

&nb
sp; Stephen had known for over a week that he was scheduled to die at eight o’clock on Wednesday morning, but he had no idea that the prison gallows were set up less than twenty feet from where he slept, divided from his bed by no more than a thin partition. He’d been moved to his new cell immediately after the trial was over, and at first he had not been unhappy with the change. It was a larger room than he had before, on the second floor of a separate block, with more of the sky visible from the high barred window. But the biggest difference was that there were no other prisoners anywhere near, so that the cell was almost silent at night, which for some reason made it much more difficult to sleep. Time passed, and Stephen remained unaware of the fact that he was now living on the top story of a death house purpose built according to standard specifications issued by the Ministry of Works in Whitehall. The wooden wardrobe on the far wall was designed to turn on its base, revealing a concealed door that led straight onto the gallows, and below the trapdoors was another room known as the pit, where Stephen would hang suspended in midair until the prison doctor pronounced him dead and Crean and his assistant came in to cut him down and take him to the autopsy room next door. The whole block was an assembly line of death, with the prisoner in his cell unaware of what lay beside and beneath him until the moment of his execution arrived.

  Once the wardrobe had been turned aside, Crean wasted no further time, leading his assistant through the door in the wall and out to the trapdoors. There was a T chalked in the middle to show where Stephen would need to be positioned, with warders standing on boards on either side to hold him in place.

  “That’s in case he faints,” said Crean. “They do sometimes. Anyway, I’ve already pinioned his wrists behind his back right at the start, and so this is where you strap his ankles, just like I showed you before. Quick as you can, while I put the hood over his head. Then the noose goes nice and tight under the jaw. Check everything’s okay, and I release the doors. And he’s gone.” Crean snapped his fingers to underline the quickness and totality of the fall.