The Inheritance (30 page)

Sasha didn’t want to admit it to herself, but part of her had almost enjoyed her sparring match with the defence barrister, at least while it was happening. The point about lying was that it took practice, and God knows she’d had enough of that. She’d worked with John Cade eight hours a day, five days a week, for more than eighteen months, and he’d never once guessed who she really was. Perhaps it was because he needed to trust her. There was, after all, nobody else at the manor house who understood the significance or the value of what he owned. And she was his lifeline to the outside world. He never went outside the gates himself, and so he had to rely on her to go to libraries and visit the auction houses. At the end, she was all he had to rely on in his long, hopeless search for the jewelled cross of St. Peter, and so he had had no
choice but to trust her. It was as if he had been taken in by all Ritter’s boasts about his state-of-the-art security system. Cade viewed everything and everybody outside his gates with a distrust bordering on paranoia, but once someone had got inside the enclosure, his suspicions seemed to vanish. Ritter and his wife had been quite right when they testified that Cade never locked the internal door of his study.

Once or twice Sasha had come close to exposing herself, although it was Ritter, not Cade, whose watchfulness she feared. The worst time had been only a month or two before Cade’s death. They had been sitting at dinner in the big dark dining room. It was a dismal place with shadowy portraits on the walls and heavy mahogany furniture that had long since lost its shine. The lights in the half chandeliers overhead were always too dim, and conversation was a struggle against the silence. Except for Ritter. The dining room was where he was at his most animated. Because it was the one room from which Silas could not escape. It guaranteed Ritter a victim and an audience for at least half an hour every day.

But on this particular evening Ritter went too far. Perhaps he had drunk too much, but his insinuations about Silas’s sexuality turned to outright accusation, and Cade pulled the sergeant up short.

“You’re out of line, Reg,” he said. “Silas may not have the balls to say ‘boo’ to a goose, let alone a girl, but that doesn’t make him queer. If he was, I’d kick him out of here without thinking twice about it.”

Ritter was silenced. He couldn’t respond, not even when Silas shot him a look of triumphant hatred across the table. And meanwhile, Cade was warming to his theme. He was usually silent in the evenings, letting Ritter run the conversation, but to night was different. He’d got two bottles of vintage red wine up from the cellar, and the food had been less heavy and stodgy than usual.

“Queers are all the same, you know,” said Cade, sitting back in his chair at the end of the table and twirling his glass of wine in his hand. “They’ve all got one thing in common.”

“They can’t be trusted,” said Ritter, trying to recover his employer’s approval.

“That too. But what they really can’t do is control themselves. I had first-hand experience of this before the war, you know.”

“Where?” asked Ritter.

“Here in Oxford. There was a fellow over at Worcester College. Blayne, he was called. Taught medieval art just like me and put himself forward for the university professorship when old Spencer died in thirty-seven.”

“At the same time as you?” asked Silas.

“That’s right. Anyway, we were both being considered by the selection panel when one of Blayne’s students came forward and said that Blayne had been having relations with him.”

“You’re joking,” said Ritter, laughing.

“No, I’m not. At three o’clock every Tuesday. Once a week for three months. During their one-on-one tutorials. That was the end of Blayne’s candidacy, of course.”

“I should hope so,” said Ritter.

“Yes. But my point is the man couldn’t control himself. He knew how important it was to stay out of trouble when he was applying for the professorship, but he just couldn’t keep his hands off the first pretty boy that came along. And why not? Because he was queer. That’s why.”

Cade smiled complacently and poured himself another glass of wine, and it was all that Sasha could do to stop herself reaching over and throwing it in his mottled corrupt old face. Instead she bit her lip until the blood flowed inside her mouth, and, unseen, she stabbed her nails into the palms of her hands under the table. But, when she looked up, she saw Ritter staring at her and felt for a moment entirely naked under his gaze, as if he knew exactly what she was thinking.

“Are you all right, Sasha?” he asked. “You look very pale all of a sudden.”

“I’m fine,” she replied, answering a shade too quickly. “It must have been quite convenient for you, Professor,” she said, turning to Cade.

“What?”

“This Blayne man turning out to be a homosexual. Didn’t it get rid of your rival for the professorship?”

“I suppose so,” said Cade languidly. “But he wasn’t really a rival, you know. He’d published very little and what he had was rather second-rate. He didn’t have the same reputation as me.”

“I’m sure he hadn’t,” said Ritter, laughing. “He was a nancy boy, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. But he had a wife and daughter too, you know, although whether
that was for cover or because he couldn’t acknowledge the truth about himself, I don’t know.”

“What happened to them?” asked Sasha, unable to resist asking the question, although it cost her an almost superhuman effort to keep her voice steady.

“The wife left him. And he lost everything. His fellowship too. The last I heard he was lecturing miners’ sons in South Wales.”

“Well, he’d better watch himself if he tries molesting them,” said Ritter. “Or he’ll end up underground for good.”

Sasha couldn’t stand it anymore. While Cade and the sergeant were still laughing, she got up, pushing her chair back against the wall behind her.

“I think maybe the sergeant’s right. I’m not feeling so well after all,” she said, holding her napkin up to her face to hide the tears that were starting in her eyes. “I think I’ll go and lie down for a while.”

“You do that, my dear. And I hope you feel better soon,” said Cade benevolently. “We’ve got important work to do tomorrow.”

Sasha hated Cade more than ever after that evening. She could not look at him without thinking of her father shambling around Oxford in his old unmended clothes. In the evenings, Cade would sometimes lean on her shoulder as they came down the stairs from the manuscript gallery, and she would think how easy it would be to push him forward and watch him break up like an old doll as he turned and turned, bouncing off the bannisters until he hit the ground at the bottom with a final thud.

But she did nothing. The stakes were too high, and Cade was her only hope of finding the codex and the cross. And so she watched herself even more closely than before, burying her hatred beneath a cool, professional exterior that deceived even Ritter. He was the one that she always feared. She couldn’t rid herself of the sense that he suspected her. But perhaps he had that effect on everyone. There was only one person he had ever been loyal to, and that was Cade. Still, they were both dead now. And Jeanne too, although Sasha didn’t want to think about Jeanne. It was too horrible what had happened. She wished she could’ve done something more to protect the poor woman from her monstrous husband, but at the same time she realised her own impotence. The sense of defeat that she had felt after trying to confront Ritter in the kitchen was still fresh in her mind. The man was a force of nature, and she was glad he was dead.

And she had the codex. That was what mattered. She’d fulfilled her bargain with Silas, although more than once in the last few days she’d considered throwing him over. The thought of his watching her from a distance, taking pictures of her body, revolted her. She remembered how his eyes had always been drawn to her disfigurement. That was what he’d photographed. She didn’t need to see the pictures to know that. Silas had told her that he’d burnt them. He’d given her his word about that, and she was minded to believe him. But still they had existed. Policemen had leered at them together. She knew they had. And all because of Silas. Sasha hated him almost as much as his father, but yet she had given false evidence for him. She’d given him his alibi and possibly condemned his brother to a horrible death, she thought bitterly.

It was all too much. She’d think about Stephen some other time, she told herself. When she was feeling stronger. But in her heart she knew that the only way to survive was to cut him out of her consciousness forever. It was a small price to pay for the codex, even if it meant diminishing herself, and she knew that there would almost certainly be other even more difficult sacrifices she would have to make if she was ever to get her hands on the cross of St. Peter.

The train drew into Oxford, and Sasha gathered her things together. The railway station reminded her, as it always did, of the time she’d come here as a little girl to visit her father. She’d been too young to travel alone, and so her mother had accompanied her on the journey. But her mother had made her feelings clear by dressing in black, complete with a veil, just as if she was going to a funeral, and she had ignored her daughter all the way, immersing herself instead in a thick book of Catholic sermons. When they got to Oxford, her father was waiting on the platform in the rain. He looked bedraggled and unkempt in an old mackintosh, and his thinning hair stuck to his skull in clumps. Sasha had been looking forward to seeing him for weeks, but when she saw him she felt ashamed. She didn’t run to him when he recognised her but instead hung back, taking her cue from her mother’s look of contemptuous disdain.

Sasha understood now, all these years later, how important that day had been for her, which is why she remembered it so clearly. She had been hoping that the train taking her mother and her toward Oxford would also reunite them with her father. But it had been a childish dream. On the platform,
Sasha’s mother would not go near her husband, not even to pass the time of day. Sasha remembered how her father had taken a few hesitant steps toward them until his wife’s evident antipathy stopped him in his tracks. Sasha’s mother said nothing. She didn’t need to. The arrangements had already been made by letter. She just looped Sasha’s hand around the handle of her small tan suitcase and pushed her forward toward her father. It had been like crossing a border between enemy countries, Sasha thought now as she stood in the same place where she had been twenty years earlier. She’d been too young for such an ordeal.

Her father had been working at an obscure art college in the suburbs, filling in for somebody else for very little money. He had no car and there were no buses at the station, so they walked for what seemed like hours through the rain, with him carrying her suitcase, until they got to the dingy little flat that was his temporary home. The next day Sasha woke up on a camp bed with a fever and had to go back to her mother’s early. Soon afterward Sasha’s visits to her father had stopped altogether and her mother had not seen fit to even inform her absent husband when Sasha was assaulted by the teacher at her school. In fact, she had even found a way to blame Sasha’s father for what had happened, and in later years it became an article of faith for Sasha’s mother that the vivid burn mark covering her daughter’s neck and shoulders had been put there by God as a punishment for the sins of her husband.

Sasha also believed that the burn was no accident. But unlike her mother, she didn’t think it had anything to do with her father. The disfigurement made her different from other people, and she believed that she had been singled out because it was her destiny to achieve something special. She was going to find the cross that should have been her father’s. She had known from the first that it would not be easy, but she was determined that no one would stand in her way. Cade deserved exactly what he had got: a bullet in the head. And now she had the codex. It was the key to the cross’s hiding place. She was certain of it. She would make better use of it than he ever had.

Sasha hailed a taxi outside the station and gave the driver an address in North Oxford. It was good to have a place of her own at last, even if it was only a bed-sit in someone else’s house. She had left the manor house immediately after Inspector Trave’s visit, while Silas was still in hospital, and had rented the room under an assumed name. It felt safe. No one would find her there.

She told the taxi to wait and went upstairs. The book was where she had left it, hidden among her clothes, with Cade’s mysterious sheet of notepaper tucked inside. She put it in a briefcase that she’d bought for the purpose and went back down the stairs. Twenty minutes later she was standing outside the door of her father’s room. There was no reply to her knock, and so she turned the key and went inside.

Andrew Blayne was sleeping in his chair. His head had fallen forward onto his chest, and his mouth was slightly open. His breath was uneven, and Sasha, watching from the doorway, felt for a moment like she was waiting for him to die. There seemed no good reason why another breath should come to rattle his thin, fragile frame. Except that it did. Again and again. His body’s mechanism would tick on until everything was worn away. It seemed cruel to Sasha. At least his trembling hands were still while he slept. Better perhaps that everything should be still and that her father’s pain should end forever.

The room was cold, and Sasha went over to the fireplace and tried without much success to stir the coals back into some semblance of life. The noise woke her father.

“Half your books are missing. And where’s the gramophone?” she asked, but she already knew the answer to her question. There was a pawnbroker’s ticket on the mantelpiece next to where she was standing. “I’ve got money,” she said. “For God’s sake, let me give you some, Daddy.”