The Inheritance (39 page)

There was a message from Adam Clayton pushed under his door, asking him to call when he got in, but it was past midnight and Trave decided to wait until morning. His head was throbbing when he got up, and the phone line was bad. Standing in the hotel lobby, Trave had to shout to make himself heard, and the other residents eating their breakfast in the hotel’s miniature dining room glared at Trave until he turned his back on them. Above the crackling Clayton sounded almost ebullient. He’d found Cade’s key ring, and one of the keys on it did fit the study door. Trave felt a tremor of excitement. It was as if he had uncovered the footprint of an invisible man. His instinct had been right. The key with Stephen’s fingerprints on it had been a copy. The question was, Who had made it? Trave was about to tell Clayton what to do next but Clayton preempted him. He had already started making the rounds of Oxford locksmiths.

Buoyed, Trave packed his bag and drove over to the records office. But he didn’t get the death certificates that he’d applied for the previous day until the afternoon. There were four of them, each neatly typed and signed and edged with a black border. Henri Rocard, aged forty-eight; his wife, Mathilde, aged
fifty-two; and an old servant called Albert Blanc were each described as having been shot by the enemy in Marjean Church on August 28, 1944. The fourth victim, Marguerite Blanc, clearly the wife of Albert, had been burnt by the Germans in the château on the same day.

There was also a copy of a letter with the certificates in which the chief registrar in Rouen informed the lawyers for Stephen Cade in London that all the existing records had been checked, and they disclosed no evidence that either the Rocards or the Blancs had any close living relatives at the time of their deaths.

Existing
records. Trave asked the man behind the desk why that word had been used. Why not just
records
? He was a different official from the day before. More helpful but just as self-important. He explained, in slow French for Trave’s benefit, that the records for 1938, 1939, and early 1940 had been destroyed when the Germans invaded northern France, but those before that had survived because they had been kept in a secure archive immune from enemy bombing. A disaster of this kind would not happen again, added the clerk in a self-satisfied tone, because procedures had improved since the war. It was almost as if he was expecting the Germans to start bombing Rouen again anyday now.

Trave drove out of the town, gripped with a sense of mounting frustration. He’d half known, of course, that the records office wouldn’t help him. Swift’s man had been there already after all. But his policeman’s instincts had told him to be thorough, and now he regretted his decision. He should have gone straight to Moirtier and Marjean, but as it was, he had wasted nearly two days and was no further forward, while all the time the clocks in Wands-worth Prison ticked remorselessly on.

Moirtier-sur-Bagne called itself a town, but really it was little bigger than a large village, built on either side of a tiny tributary of the Seine. There was one hotel with a café on the ground floor, which faced the mayor’s office and police station across the village square, where a group of men in berets were playing bowls under the plane trees in the late afternoon. Trave bought a glass of wine and sat down near the game, watching the black balls being tossed through the air to land in the sandy dirt. The players hardly ever spoke and showed no apparent interest in Trave, even when he tried unsuccessfully to
strike up a conversation with them. Eventually, despairing of an opening, he asked them outright if they knew anything about the killings at Marjean Château fifteen years before. But this just made things worse. They shook their heads and turned their backs on him, muttering to one another in a fast French that he could not understand, until he gave up and went inside.

It was the same with everyone he approached in Moirtier both that day and the next. The reactions ranged from incomprehension to outright hostility, and he fared little better in Marjean itself, which turned out to be an even smaller place than Moirtier, a few houses built around the crest of a low hill surrounded by vineyards, with a view across a long dark lake to a ruined house and church encircled by encroaching woods.

The police station in Moirtier was closed on the day of Trave’s arrival, but the following morning, a Friday, he found a young gendarme sitting behind an iron desk, laboriously typing out something official on an ancient typewriter.

“You make me feel like I’m at home again,” said Trave with a smile.

“Seventeen Hill Road, Oxford, England,” said the young man, without looking up.

“How do you know that?” asked Trave, astonished.

“Your registration card at the hotel,” said the young man, waving it in the air like a conjuror. “They pass it on to us, and we make a record in triplicate. One stays here, one goes to Rouen, and one to Paris. Don’t ask me why. It’s the law and I do what I’m told. Fortunately, I don’t have to do it too often. Not too many foreigners put up at the Claire Fontaine these days, particularly in the winter.”

The young man’s friendliness was a welcome change after the reticence Trave had encountered from the other villagers. “I’m here for a reason,” he said.

“So I hear. Asking questions and getting no answers. This is a small town, Mr. Trave. People don’t like outsiders.”

“But you don’t feel that way?”

“You’re a policeman and so am I. We have something in common.”

“Not enough, I’m afraid,” said Trave with a smile. “You’re too young to be able to help me.”

“With what?”

“The real story of what happened at Marjean Château fifteen years ago. You’d still have been in school in 1944.”

“But that doesn’t mean I can’t help,” the gendarme said. “It’s no great secret. It’s the same as I told the lawyer’s man who came out here from London a few months back: the owners were killed by the Germans. Some people here say they were collaborators, but even if it’s true, they didn’t deserve to die that way. Herded into the church and shot like animals. The Nazis burnt the house too. It’s a ruin now.”

“I know all that. But I’m here because I need to find out whether there were any survivors, anyone who saw what happened. It’s important. Some-body’s life depends on the answer.”

“That’s what the other man said. But, as I told him, I’ve never heard of there being any survivors. Still, as you say, I was only a boy back then. You could ask my inspector, I suppose. He’d know one way or the other. He’s been here since before the war.”

“Did the man from England talk to him?”

“No. He was away then. It was during the summer. Everyone deserves a holiday some time, don’t they, Inspector?” said the gendarme, smiling.

“Where is he now?” asked Trave, smiling in agreement.

“Gone to Lille to see his sister. She’s not well and he visits her most weekends, but this time he’s taken the Friday off as well. He’ll be back on Monday. You can talk to him then.”

“Can’t we call him? Doesn’t his sister have a telephone?”

“No. She lives outside the city. No telephone, I’m afraid.”

“What about a telegram?”

“I don’t have the address. Come back on Monday morning, Inspector. You can talk to him then.”

“Monday’s too late.”

“I’m sorry.” The gendarme opened his hands in a gesture of deprecation, and then turned away to resume his typing.

Trave realised that he had gone as far as he could. Perhaps the inspector’s sister did have a telephone, but the gendarme was not going to tell him the number. He was probably under strict orders not to reveal such information. Trave would have to wait until Monday. There was no point in going back to
England before then anyway. Clayton didn’t need his help to visit a few locksmiths’ shops. And Stephen’s execution was not until Wednesday morning. There would still be time to get back to England and go with Swift to see the powers that be, as Creswell called them, if he found out something useful on Monday. At present he didn’t have anything. He didn’t need a lawyer to tell him that. Stephen could have copied the key, and the name in the atlas was just a curious coincidence.

The next day Trave drove to Marjean, parked his car at the foot of the hill, and walked out to the ruined château along the side of the lake. It was a longer distance than it had looked when he set out, and the path was muddy in places, forcing him to take detours through the adjacent scrub. There was a glassy darkness to the water, an absence of movement on its surface that Trave found oddly disquieting. Several times before he reached the end of the path, he thought of turning back, and only his natural obstinacy kept him going.

Eventually he found himself standing on the far side, looking up at the grey stone church and bell tower built on the top of a small hill, sloping up from where he stood at the water’s edge. Beyond the church the ground ran down again to the ruins of what had once been the château. It was sadly dilapidated. The glass in all the windows was broken and most of the roof had fallen in. It was a desolate place, but incongruously, unexpectedly, a white truck was parked in front of the main door, which hung precariously off its hinges, swinging backward and forward in the slight breeze.

As Trave stood looking at the car, wondering who it might belong to, two people came out of the church and began walking quickly down the path to the house. They had their backs to him, but Trave could see from their dress that they were male and female. The man was carrying what looked like two crowbars and the woman was holding a piece of paper. It was impossible to be sure as long as her back was turned, but Trave had the sense that she was angry about something. She was gesticulating with her hands, and her walk seemed unnaturally fast. There was something vaguely familiar about her figure, and Trave ran along the side of the hill toward the house, eager to see who she was. Just before she reached the car, the woman must have become aware of his approach, because she turned round to face him. Trave recognised her straightaway. It was Sasha Vigne.

He stopped dead in his tracks, and so for a moment did she. But she
recovered more quickly than he did, covering the last few yards to the car in a few rapid strides, before she yanked open the passenger door and joined her companion inside. Trave could hear her shouting at the man to drive: “Vite, vite.” The car’s motor gunned into life just as he reached her door, and the car shot forward toward the church, throwing him out of the way, before it turned half circle and disappeared down a track that seemed to lead straight into the woods. Trave ran after it a little way but then stopped with his hands on his knees, panting. His heart was racing but so was his mind. Sasha Vigne was the last person that he had expected to meet in this lonely place, far removed from all civilization.

He needed to find her again, but he had no car. Cursing his decision to walk to the château, Trave turned back the way he’d come and started to walk quickly down the path towards Marjean village, shimmering on its hilltop in the last of the winter sunshine.

Sasha had been the only mourner at her father’s funeral, which took just under twelve minutes to complete in Chapel number 2 at Oxford Crematorium’s Garden of Remembrance. She was given the last slot before lunch, and the minister was already running late when her father’s turn came around. There was thus little time available for meaningful reflection before the big red curtain was drawn electronically around the light oak coffin and Andrew Blayne made his final invisible journey down the crematorium’s carousel toward the central furnace, which had been belching smoke when Sasha arrived and was belching smoke when she left with her father’s ashes in a small white plastic urn half an hour later.

Andrew Blayne had left no instructions on whether he wished to be burnt or buried, but in the end Sasha had found the choice surprisingly easy to make. Sitting in his room on the day after his death, Sasha had tried to puzzle out what he might have wanted. But then a sudden breeze blowing through the open window had made up her mind for her, as it picked up the last scents of her father and dispersed them forever. The wind was like fire. Clean and quick and true. Not like the earth. The thought of her father’s body slowly decomposing in the wet soil had made Sasha sick to her stomach. God knows, he had known enough decay while he was still alive. The end was the end.
Sasha had never believed in the resurrection of the body. Not even when she was a little girl and her mother took her to church twice on Sundays.

And so she had made her booking with the undertaker and ended up outside the crematorium’s iron gates on a cold November day with a sense of complete isolation from everyone else in the world. But that of course was just what she wanted to feel. Her grief for her father was an event waiting to happen, but for now she was almost glad of his absence. Without him, there was nobody to deflect her from her purpose.

First thing the next morning, she cleared out her bank account and changed her money into French francs. She had already given notice to her landlord and packed her belongings into two suitcases. One she deposited in the left-luggage office at Paddington Station, and the other she took with her on the boat train. The codex was wrapped inside her clothes, and the urn was in an outer pocket. She had not yet found a place to scatter her father’s ashes, and it didn’t seem right to leave what was left of him behind. After all, she didn’t know when she would be coming back.

She got to Marjean late on Friday evening. Nothing had changed since her last visit two years before. There were no new houses, and just as few people in the narrow streets. The same single-track road wound down through the vineyards to the blue-black waters of the lake, and in the distance Sasha could just make out the silver-grey bell tower of Marjean Church, fading in the last rays of the sun.