The Inheritance (2 page)

It was cool inside. Crossing the hall, Rocard started up a narrow staircase in the corner and Ritter, following behind, found himself stepping from light into semidarkness and back, again and again, as they crossed pools of evening sunlight let in by the small rectangular windows set high in the walls of the house. In the rooms on either side Ritter could see evidence of the Germans’ recent occupation—a photograph of the Führer hanging slightly askew on a whitewashed wall, a trestle bed lying overturned on its side, and papers, both handwritten and typed, strewn about everywhere. On one of the desks Ritter noticed the remains of someone’s supper—a crust of black
bread and a half-eaten German sausage. The man who’d been eating it only an hour before was now lying in a pool of blood halfway down the drive, baking in the last of the sun. The thought made Ritter smile. Life was a funny thing sometimes.

They carried on up the stairs to a room at the very top. It was almost an attic, and Ritter had to half stoop to get through the door. This was evidently where Rocard and his wife slept—the only place left to them after the house was occupied, and the bed was the main piece of furniture. It was old and ornate, with elaborate carving on its four posters, but it had lost its canopy and the coarse army-issue blankets covering it were out of keeping with its grand design. It took all Rocard’s strength to move it away from the wall, but he didn’t ask for any help, and he didn’t try to hide what he was doing when he pulled up one of the rough floorboards that he had exposed. Underneath, Ritter saw over the Frenchman’s shoulder that the hollow space contained an old thin book in a heavy leather binding. Wasting no time, he seized the book out of Rocard’s hands.

On the way back down, the Frenchman remained compliant until they turned a corner of the stairs and started down the final flight into the hall. Then, suddenly, there was an outbreak of shouting from beyond the entrance to the living room, and a second later Ritter caught sight of Carson framed in the doorway, and below and to the side of him an old man half shouting, half kneeling on the floor. He looked to be in his seventies, but he could have been older. Time seemed to have been kind to him up until now. He’d kept his teeth, and his hair hadn’t fallen out but had instead turned bright white with age. Now, however, Carson was using it to half drag, half pull him toward the front door. Halfway across the flagstones, Carson noticed Ritter on the stairs and laughed.

“Here’s the old sod that let the dog out,” he shouted to make himself heard above the old man’s cries of pain. “The colonel saw him peeping out the window and sent me in to bring him out. On all fours was my idea. Just like his fucking dog.”

Carson’s antics enraged the Frenchman. Seeing his old servant reduced to a howling animal, he started forward down the stairs, and Ritter had to drop the book and seize Rocard by the collar of his shirt to pull him back. At the same time he thrust the barrel of the gun hard into the small of Rocard’s
back, and now the Frenchman stood almost doubled up with pain at the foot of the stairs, powerless to help his old servant as Carson dragged him out of the house, administering several kicks to the old man’s back and ribcage before he dumped him on the ground at the colonel’s feet, beside the dead dog.

“He was hiding behind one of the big heavy curtains in there,” said Carson, pointing back at the house. “And it was him that let the dog out. I found him with this bit of rope in his hands. Why don’t we use it to string him up? What do you say, Colonel? Let’s teach these Frenchies a lesson.”

“That won’t be necessary, Corporal,” said the colonel acidly. Carson was joking, but he had no time now for the man’s petty sadism. All his attention was focused on Ritter and the Frenchman. “Did you get it, Reg?” he asked. “Show me what you got.”

“Just this old book. He had it under the floorboards,” said Ritter, handing over the thin leather-bound volume that he had seized from the Frenchman up in the attic. “Is that what you wanted?”

The colonel didn’t reply. His hands were shaking as he took the book from Ritter and let go of the Frenchman’s wife. She immediately went over to the old servant and raised him unsteadily to his feet. He couldn’t stand unsupported, but Carson did nothing to help her. He was still trying to control his laughter.

The colonel turned the pages quickly but carefully, ignoring the dust that flew up into his eyes.

“It’s the codex, all right,” he said as if to himself. “From the moment I read that letter in Rome, I knew it was here. Here all the time.”

“Colonel,” interrupted Ritter. They needed to decide what they were going to do with these people before someone from the regiment came looking for them.

“Colonel, it’s getting late,” he tried again a moment later.

This time Cade looked up from the book. “Where did you say it was, Reg?” he asked, as if he hadn’t heard Ritter’s question.

“In a hollow space under one of the floorboards in their bedroom,” said Ritter.

“Was there anything else in there? In the space?”

“No. I checked.”

Still, the colonel seemed dissatisfied. He closed the book and began speaking
to the Frenchman in his own language again. Quickly. Question after question. Ritter could understand almost nothing of what was being said, but it was obvious that the colonel was getting angry. He kept repeating a word that sounded like
roi
or
croix
in a voice that demanded a response, but it was a one-way conversation. The Frenchman raised his hands several times in a gesture that seemed to imply that he didn’t understand what the colonel was talking about, and then after a while he just looked away.

Suddenly the colonel took hold of the woman again, squeezing her wrist and saying that same word over and over again.
Croix
or
roi
.
Roi
was a king, and Ritter didn’t know what a king had to do with it, but perhaps that wasn’t the word. The woman struggled, and Ritter was about to go over to help restrain her, when she threw her head back and spat at the colonel full in his face. It made him drop the book, and he used his freed hand to slap her hard across both cheeks. They were hard blows and she fell to the ground, weeping.

“We’ve got to decide what to do, Colonel,” said Ritter. He felt worried now. The sun had almost set and they needed to stay in radio contact with the camp. The colonel seemed to be getting nowhere with the Frenchies.

“All right, Reg, I know that,” said the colonel. “It’s just that they know more than they’re saying. A little bit longer and I can get it out of them. I can feel it. Help me take them over to the church. We can work on them in there. And you, Carson, come up there with us and keep a lookout. We won’t be long.”

1959

Detective Inspector William Trave of the Oxfordshire CID felt the pain as soon as he’d passed through the revolving entrance doors of the Old Bailey and had shaken the rain out from his coat onto the dirty wet floor of the courthouse. It hurt him in the same place as before—on the left side of his chest, just above his heart. But it was worse this time. It felt important. Like it might never go away.

There was a white plastic chair in the corner, placed there perhaps by some kind janitor to accommodate visitors made faint by their first experience of the Old Bailey. Now Trave fell into it, bending down over his knees to gather the pain into himself. He was fighting for breath while prickly sweat poured down in rivulets over his face, mixing with the raindrops. And all the time his brain raced from one thought to another, as if it wanted in the space of a minute or two to catch up on all the years he had wasted not talking to his wife, not coming to terms with his son’s death, not living. He thought of the lonely North Oxford house he had left behind at seven o’clock that morning, with the room at the back that he never went into, and he thought of his ex-wife, whom he had seen just the other day shopping in the covered market. He had run back into the High Street, frightened that his successor might come into view carrying a shared shopping bag, and had ducked into the Mitre in search of whisky.

Trave wanted whisky now, but the Old Bailey wasn’t the place to find it. For a moment he considered the possibility of the pub across the road. It was called The Witness Box, or some fatuous name like that, but it wouldn’t be open yet. Trave felt his breath beginning to come easier. The pain was better, and he got out a crumpled handkerchief and wiped away some of the sweat and rain. It was funny that he’d felt for a moment that he was actually going to die, and yet no one seemed to have noticed. The security guards were still patting down the pockets of the public just like they had been doing all morning. One of them was even humming a discordant version of that American song, “Heartbreak Hotel.” A rain-soaked middle-aged policeman sitting on a chair in the corner, gathering his breath for the day ahead, was hardly a cause for distraction.

A sudden weariness came over Trave. Once again he felt weighed down by the meaninglessness of the world around him. Trave always tried to keep his natural nihilism at bay as best he could. He did his job to the best of his ability, went to church on Sundays, and nurtured the plants that grew in the carefully arranged borders of his garden—and sometimes it all worked. Things seemed important precisely because they didn’t last. But underneath, the despair was always there, ready to spring out and take him unawares. Like that morning, halfway down his own street, when a young man in blue overalls working on a dismembered motorcycle had brought back the memory of Joe as if he had gone only yesterday. And fallen apples in the garden at the weekend had resurrected Vanessa stooping to gather them into a straw basket three autumns before. It was funny that he always remembered his wife with her back turned.

Trave gathered himself together and made for the stairs. When he got time, he’d go and see his doctor. Perhaps the GP could give him something. In the meantime he had to carry on. Today was important.
Regina v. Stephen Cade
, said the list on the wall outside the courthouse. Before His Honour Judge Murdoch at twelve o’clock. Charged with murder. Father murder—patricide, it was called. And the father was an important man—a colonel in the army during the war and a university professor in civilian life. If convicted, the boy would certainly hang. The powers that be would see to that. The boy. But Stephen wasn’t a boy. He was twenty-two. He just felt like a boy to Trave. The policeman fought to keep back the thought that Stephen
was so much like Joe. It wasn’t just a physical resemblance. Joe had had the same passion, the same need to rebel that had driven him to ride his brand new 600cc silver motorcycle too fast after dark down a narrow road on the other side of Oxford. A wet January night more than two years ago. If he’d lived, Joe would be twenty-two. Just like Stephen. Trave shook his head. He didn’t need the police training manual to know that empathising with the main suspect in a murder investigation was no way to do his job. Trave had trained himself to be fair and decent and unemotional. That way he brought order to a disordered world, and most of the time he believed there was some value in that. He would do his duty, give his evidence, and move on. The fate of Stephen Cade was not his responsibility.

Up in the police room, Trave poured himself a cup of black coffee, straightened his tie, and waited in a corner for the court usher to come and get him to give his evidence. He was the officer in the case, and, when the opening statements were over, he would be the first witness called by the prosecution.

The courtroom was one of the oldest in the Old Bailey. It was tall, lit by glass chandeliers that the maintenance staff needed long ladders to reach when the bulbs blew out. On the wood-paneled walls, pictures of long-gone nineteenth-century lawyers stared out on their twentieth-century successors. The judge sat robed in black in a leather-backed armchair placed on a high dais. Only the dock containing the defendant and two uniformed prison officers was at the same level. Between them, in the well of the court, were the lawyers’ tables; the witness box; and, to right and left, the benches for the press and the jury. The jurors were now in place, and Trave felt them slowly relaxing into their new surroundings. Their moment in the limelight, when they stumbled over their oath to render a true verdict in accordance with the evidence, had come and gone. Now they could sit in safe anonymity while the drama of the murder trial played out in front of them. Everyone—members of the press, the jurors, and the spectators packed together in the public gallery above the defendant’s head—was focused on the prosecutor, Gerald Thompson, as he gathered his long black gown around his shoulders and prepared to begin.

“What time did you arrive at Moreton Manor, Inspector?” he asked, “on the night of the murder?”

“Eleven forty-five.” Trave spoke loudly, forgetting for a moment the acoustic qualities of the Old Bailey.

“Were you the first policeman on the scene?”

“No. Officers Clayton and Watts were already there. They’d got everyone in the drawing room. It’s across from the front hall.”

“And the victim, Professor Cade—he was in his study. On the ground floor of the east wing.”

“Yes. That’s right,” said Trave.

There was a measured coldness and determination in the way the prosecutor put his questions, which contrasted sharply with his remarkable lack of stature. Gerald Thompson couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. Now he took a deep breath and drew himself up to his full short height as if to underline to the jury the importance of his next question.