The Inheritance (25 page)

But worse than the pain was the knowledge that he’d lost something while he was underwater. It was on the edge of his mind but he couldn’t grasp it. Trying to reach it only made it seem further away. With a supreme effort of will, Silas concentrated his mind and realised it was why he’d lost consciousness upstairs. He was missing something. It was about Sasha. She was standing at the bottom of the stairs, and he was floating down toward her. He wanted to shout to get her attention, but all that came out was a whisper. It didn’t matter. She came over and stood by him for a moment. She wanted to know where the book was, but he shook his head. He wasn’t going to tell her that. Not yet. He needed to be sure of her first. And now it came to him what it was he’d forgotten.

“My room or yours?” he asked, but he couldn’t be sure that she had heard, and there was no time to repeat the question. He was going forward out into the dusk, and she was staying behind.

Now they were at the back of the ambulance opening the door, and suddenly she was there again, on the edge of his vision. He could hardly hear what she was saying. It sounded like “mine.” Silas raised himself on the stretcher, and she said it again. “Mine.” It was all right. They understood each other. And Silas sank back into the blue water again as the ambulance drove away.

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 Vigne?”

“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.