The Inheritance (10 page)

“And then?” asked Blayne, looking up sadly at his daughter. “What happens then, Sasha?”

She didn’t answer. Just lay her hand for a moment over her father’s shaking hand and then walked out the door.

“Widen the net . . . somebody the jury can believe in . . . not some phantom foreigner . . . your brother Silas . . .”

Stephen couldn’t sleep. His mind kept turning over Swift’s words, twisting them this way and that, seeking a way out. However hard he tried, Stephen couldn’t believe it of Silas. Couldn’t or wouldn’t. Stephen didn’t know. What he did know was that somebody who was not his brother had tried to kill their father. It was no phantom who had come to their house threatening John Cade with a pistol, no ghost who had put a bullet in his lung. That man was real. He had a name: Carson, Corporal James Carson, once of the British army in France. The only problem was that he was dead.

Stephen remembered the first time he’d met Carson. How could he forget? He’d just turned thirteen and had been out running, practicing for the cross-country season at his school. The man had been standing in the trees across the road from the front gate, looking up toward the house, and he had called to Stephen as he went past.

“Cold weather to be out running, young man,” he had said, stepping out into the road. He was wearing a heavy black army greatcoat with its collar pulled up around his ears, and yet he still seemed cold. There was a shiver in his voice, and when Stephen looked down, uncertain of what to say, he noticed a hole in the stranger’s boot.

Stephen muttered something indistinct and would have turned away if the man had not spoken again.

“Are you the colonel’s son?” he’d asked.

“The colonel,” Stephen had repeated, not following the stranger’s meaning.

“Colonel John Cade. He used to be a military man like me. But perhaps he’s too proud to remember old comrades.”

“Oh, yes. I’m sorry. Yes, I’m one of his sons.” Stephen had stumbled over his words. The man had made him nervous, as if Stephen realised even then that this stranger’s coming would cause trouble.

The man hadn’t stayed long after Stephen had walked with him up the drive and knocked on the door of his father’s study. The professor had not been pleased to see his visitor. That much was obvious. Carson had raised his hand to his forehead in a mock salute, but Cade had not returned the gesture. He’d just stared angrily at Carson for a moment or two, and when he eventually spoke, it was his son he addressed, not his visitor.

“Go to your room, Stephen,” he’d said. There was a harsh edge to his father’s voice that had frightened Stephen, and he had backed away into the corridor. A moment later his father crossed to the door and shut it with a bang that reverberated right round the east wing of the house.

Stephen had done what his father told him to. He had gone to his room and stood by the open window, looking down into the courtyard where the rain had started to fall. And it was no more than ten minutes later that the french windows of his father’s study opened and Carson came out. Cade had stood on the threshold behind him, and Stephen had heard his father say quite clearly:

“That’s all, Corporal. Don’t you come back here, because there’ll be no more. Do you understand me?”

“Right you are, Colonel,” the man had said, giving the same mocking salute that Stephen had seen earlier. Then he had walked away up the drive, making no effort to protect his head from the falling rain. Stephen had stood watching him until he disappeared from view.

Nearly a year passed before Stephen saw the man again. It was May, but he was wearing the same old greatcoat, and he had come into the courtyard shouting and waving a pistol in the air. He’d obviously been drinking. His sunken cheeks were bright red, and there was an alcoholic slur to his voice.

“Come on out, Colonel,” he’d shouted. “And bring your pretty wife too. I’ve got something to tell her about France. About being a war hero.”

Stephen had watched the pistol, wondering if it was loaded, but he never got to find out. His father came out of the front door holding a rifle and fired it twice, aiming just above Carson’s head.

The shock caused Carson to drop his pistol, and Cade walked over quite calmly and picked it up.

“You could have killed me,” said Carson, and Stephen, standing in the corner of the courtyard, could hear the fear and the anger equally present in the man’s voice.

“I will. Next time I will,” said Cade, and in one fluid movement he turned the rifle in his hands and hit Carson with the butt, full on the side of the head.

Carson fell to his knees, but amazingly the blow did not knock him out.

“You’ll have no more from me. I won’t tell you that again,” said Cade. “Now get off my property.”

Carson got up, holding his head, and began to stagger away down the drive. But after no more than a hundred yards, he turned around again.

“Watch your fucking back, Colonel,” he shouted. “I’ll find you when you aren’t looking. You’ll see.”

Stephen knew better than to ask his father about what had happened. Instead he had told his mother when she came back from the hairdressers in Oxford later that afternoon. Silas was away at school.

She had wanted to go to the police, but Cade wouldn’t hear of it.

“He needed to be taught a lesson. I’ve done that, and now he won’t come here again. You can trust me, my dear.”

And Clara had left it at that. She had always trusted her husband, and there was no reason to stop now. Except that Stephen felt sure that his father did not believe his own optimism. It was only two weeks later that electronic gates were installed at the manor house and Sergeant Ritter began work on a new security system. Not that that saved Stephen’s mother.

Stephen did not want to think about that black Christmas. He did what he always did when he started to remember it. He began to count quickly, thinking about anything except that. The day the lights went out.

After the funeral he’d been sent away to school. Stephen knew what his
father was thinking. He looked too much like his dead mother, and if it hadn’t been for Stephen’s Christmas present, she’d still be alive. Cade had stayed in his room when the car had come to take his sons away, and when they came back at the beginning of the holidays, Sergeant Ritter was installed in the east wing with his silent, frightened wife.

Stephen thought that Ritter would have come to live at the manor house earlier if it hadn’t been for his mother. Clara had always had an aversion to the sergeant, and it was an aversion her sons shared. Particularly Silas. Ritter was an expert at identifying a person’s weaknesses and then probing them relentlessly until his victim could stand it no more. Except that Silas never allowed his obvious anger to get the better of him. Ritter called him Silent Silas, or sometimes just Silence, and the name became increasingly appropriate.

Stephen could never forget those long horrible evenings around the dinner table at the manor house in the years after his mother died. Ritter, with his short curly black hair and his huge double chin, dominated the conversation, asking Silas when he was going to get a girlfriend, wondering why he didn’t have one. Stephen felt desperately sorry for his brother but powerless to protect him. The sergeant was too clever, too frightening.

Cade, meanwhile, would sit at the top of the table with a half smile playing across his features, and Ritter would watch him out of the corner of his eye until the professor gave an imperceptible nod, and Ritter ended his performance for another night. Stephen wondered if Silas had noticed their father’s control over the obnoxious sergeant. He must have. Perhaps Silas did hate his father. Perhaps Swift was right.

No
. Stephen was not Cain, about to spill his brother’s blood. It wasn’t Silas who’d accused him of murder, and he had no right to accuse Silas, however convenient it might be for his barrister. Stephen wished he could speak to his brother, but Swift had explained that the law said prosecution witnesses must not talk to the defendant.

Stephen remembered how his brother never wanted to cross their father. Silas always wanted the old man’s approval. Like with the letter. Silas had refused to go with him to confront his father about what it said. It was Stephen who had broken with the old man and left the manor house estranged. Silas had remained behind, even though he knew what their father had done. To
those poor defenceless people. They had survived the war, but they didn’t survive Colonel John Cade. Stephen shut his eyes, trying to hold back the anger and disillusionment that he always felt when he thought of his father’s crime. And shame too. A terrible shame that he was the son of the man who had killed the Rocards. Shame that he had remained silent for so long about what he knew. It felt too much like collusion.

It was nearly two and a half years ago now that the letter had come. June 1957. It was a year after Ritter had brought Stephen’s father back from France with a bullet wound in his lung, and Cade had been an invalid ever since, often sleeping in his study because he couldn’t make it up the stairs to his bedroom or the manuscript gallery on the second floor. He’d retired from the university and he had no visitors. He had had the respect of his academic colleagues but not their liking and, looking back, Stephen suspected that they must have been glad to see the back of him.

Moreton Manor had become a fortress that Cade never left. Ritter ran the house, patrolled its boundaries. More than once he’d cross-examined Stephen about the man in the greatcoat, but no one had seen the man since his last visit six years before.

Ritter seemed to be everywhere: At a turn in the staircase or at the end of a corridor, Stephen would suddenly come upon him. The brothers called him the tree frog because of his double chins, and he was truly an ugly man—big black glasses over his small mean eyes and his great stomach bulging inside huge trousers held up by wide, garishly coloured suspenders. But then he could move so quickly and quietly when he wanted to, turning up when you least expected him. Although he refused to admit it to himself, Stephen was secretly frightened of the sergeant, and perhaps he would not have had the courage to confront his father about the letter if Ritter had been home. But Ritter was away on business the day the letter arrived, and it was Stephen and the housemaid who had to help Cade to his bed when he suddenly felt sick and faint.

Returning to the dining room, Stephen found Silas sitting in their father’s place at the head of the table, reading the letter. Stephen had always disapproved of his brother’s interest in the private affairs of his fellow human beings. Spying and eavesdropping were not honourable activities in Stephen’s book, and at first he refused to read the letter that Silas held out to him.

“All right, I’ll read it to you then,” Silas had said impatiently, closing the door of the dining room.

It wasn’t a long letter, and Stephen could still remember its awkward wording, as if it had been written by a foreigner or someone trying to disguise his identity.

“Colonel,” the letter had begun. Not “Dear Colonel” or “Colonel Cade.” Just “Colonel”—the same name that the visitor in the greatcoat had used for Stephen’s father six years earlier when he had emerged from the trees and stopped Stephen at the gate.

Colonel
,

I saw what you did at Marjean. You thought no one saw and lived but I did. I saw the bodies and the fire, and I saw what you took. I want what you took. Bring the book to Paddington Station in London and put it in the locker that is marked 17. Bring it yourself and use the key that is in this letter. Do it on Friday. In the morning. If you do this, I will be silent. If you do not, I will go to the police. In France and in England. You know what will happen
.

There had been no signature on the letter, and the message and the address on the envelope had been typed. It had been posted in London the day before, Monday. The envelope contained nothing else except a tiny silver key that Silas had already shaken out onto the tablecloth.

There was no time for the brothers to talk about the letter before Cade reappeared to reclaim it. And Stephen was astonished at the speed with which his brother replaced paper and key in the envelope as the door opened. Their father’s face was very pale, and he went to the drinks tray in the corner and poured himself a generous measure of whisky before he left with the letter in his hand. It was the only time that Stephen ever saw his father drink alcohol at that time of the morning.

Afterward, Stephen spent the best part of an hour arguing with his brother about what to do, but Silas was adamant. He would not talk to their father about the letter. It was as if Silas knew more than he was saying about what the writer meant. Or perhaps it had just been Silas’s dislike of direct confrontation. He was certainly frightened of his father.

Ritter was due back on the following day, so Stephen decided not to delay. He needed to know what his father had done. The man was cold and distant, but he was also a genius and a war hero. Stephen had spent hours with his mother as a child, examining his father’s medals. In the young Stephen’s imagination, Colonel Cade had marched through France with Eisenhower and Montgomery, liberating the country from the Nazis. But what if it wasn’t true? What if his father was instead nothing more than a murderer and a common thief? What did that make Stephen? He had to know the truth.