The Inheritance Read online

  “Yes, I saw it on the Wednesday. I was in my father’s study getting something, and the diary was open on the desk.”

  “What did you do about what you’d seen, Mr. Cade?” asked Thompson, eager to move the story on.

  “I told my brother. He arranged to come out to Moreton on the Friday evening with Mary, and he told me that he was going to talk to my father in his study at ten o’clock. That was the night my father was murdered.”

  “All right, let’s deal with that night. Who was there at dinner?”

  “Stephen and Mary. My father. Jeanne, that’s Mrs. Ritter, and the sergeant. And me, obviously.”

  “What was the atmosphere like?”

  “Strained. Like I said before, Stephen and my father hadn’t been together for a long time.”

  “What time did the dinner end?”

  “Nine o’clock, maybe. I can’t be sure.”

  “And where did you go then?”

  “I went to my room. I had some work to do. I was in there for a couple of hours before I heard shouting coming from the east wing, and so I went downstairs. My father was dead in his study.”

  “Where is your room, Mr. Cade?”

  “It’s in the west wing, but it faces east looking down on the courtyard.”

  “And were you alone during the two hours that you were in your room after dinner?”

  “Yes. Completely alone.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Cade,” said Thompson. “That’s all I have to ask you. If you wait there, there’ll be some more questions.”

  “May I speak to my client a moment?” Swift asked the judge.

  “Very well. But don’t be too long about it. The jury is waiting,” said Murdoch.

  Swift leant over Stephen in the dock, enveloping him in an intimacy that excluded the prison officers on either side.

  “It’s not too late to change your mind,” he whispered. “Why don’t you at least let me put it to him?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?” he pressed. “Silas had a motive, and there’s something he’s holding back. I can feel it.”

  “I’m sure he didn’t kill my father,” said Stephen. His voice was soft but firm. “And I won’t have you accuse him of it.”

  Swift turned away. There was no time for further argument. He’d already spent an hour with Stephen in the cells before court, trying to persuade his client to change his instructions, but he’d got nowhere. The die was cast.

  “You have told us, Mr. Cade,” Swift began, “that your brother and your father had been estranged for two years prior to your father’s death.”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell us, please, what was the cause of that estrangement?”

  The question seemed to agitate Silas. He looked over at his brother for a moment and swallowed deeply.

  “I’d prefer not to answer that,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Cade, but I must insist,” said Swift. “It’s important that the jury has the full picture.”

  When Silas still did not answer, the judge intervened. “Answer the question, Mr. Cade,” he ordered. “You’re a witness in a murder trial. This isn’t some tea party.”

  “My brother believed that my father had killed a number of French civilians at the end of the war in order to steal a manuscript.” Silas spoke slowly and with visible reluctance.

  “And did you believe it?”

  “Yes. I had to. Stephen and I overheard my father and Sergeant Ritter talking about what they’d done. My father couldn’t deny it after that.”

  “And that made Stephen angry?”

  “Yes. Angry and ashamed.”

  “And what did it make you feel?”

  “I don’t know. I felt bad, but I lived with it. Perhaps I don’t expect as much from people as my brother does.”

  “I see,” said Swift. “Now, I want to ask you about a blackmail letter that your father received two years before his death. You and Stephen read this letter, did you not?”

  “Yes. That was when the trouble between them started.”

  “What did the letter say?”

  “That the person had seen what my father did at this place called Mar-jean. He wanted the manuscript if he was going to stay quiet. My father was supposed to take it to him in London.”

  “Did he?”

  “No. My father never left the house. Sergeant Ritter went. He said he was going to deal with the man. There were no more letters after that, or at least none that I knew of,” said Silas, correcting himself.

  “So Professor Cade and the sergeant seemed to know who had written the letter,” said the judge.

  “Yes. They were certain it was someone called Carson, who’d been with them at this place—Marjean. My father said he was the one who shot him in France.”

  “Carson,” said the judge repeating the name.

  “Yes,” said Silas.

  The judge made a note on a piece of paper and nodded to Swift to continue.

  “You told the court earlier that your brother decided to seek a reconciliation with your father about a week before his death,” said Swift.

  “Yes.”

  “And that this decision was because of what you’d told your brother about your father’s intention to change his will.”

  “Yes.”

  “But that wasn’t Stephen’s only reason for going to Moreton, was it, Mr. Cade?”

  Silas didn’t respond, and so Swift answered his own question.

  “You said to your brother when you visited him that you’d overheard your father telling Sergeant Ritter that he didn’t have long to live. Isn’t that right, Mr. Cade?”

  “I told Stephen a lot of things. That was just one of them.”

  “But it upset him, didn’t it, to hear that his father was going to die?”

  “He was upset by everything I told him,” said Silas. “Angry too.”

  “Angry,” repeated Swift. “But that doesn’t mean that he said that he was going to harm your father.”

  “No. We wanted to get our father to change his mind. About his will.”

  “Did you ever see your brother with a gun?” asked Swift, changing tack.

  “No. Not that I remember.”

  “Are you sure? Didn’t Sergeant Ritter make you and Stephen fire his pistol in the garden once?”

  “Yes,” said Silas after a moment. “I’m sorry, I forgot about that. We didn’t want to, but he made us.”

  “He nailed a target to one of the oak trees, and you and Stephen took turns shooting at it.”

  “Yes.”

  “How did your brother do?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “He missed every time, didn’t he, Mr. Cade? He didn’t even hit the target.”

  “I told you. I don’t remember. I was concentrating on what I was doing.”

  “And how did you do?”

  “I was better than my brother, but that doesn’t make me a marksman,” said Silas, suddenly defensive.

  “Thank you. No more questions,” said Swift, resuming his seat.

  EIGHT

  There was a table in the corner of Stephen’s unbelievably small cell deep inside Wandsworth Prison. It had no legs but instead opened out directly from the wall. Table legs could be used as a weapon, and the authorities were taking no chances. Stephen had arranged the few personal possessions that he had brought with him on the surface of this table, and in the centre was a framed photograph of Mary. It had been taken a few weeks after they first met, when the world had been an entirely different place and he’d been as happy as he’d ever been in all his life. She was standing on a bridge and the wind had blown up her brown hair into a whirl around her face. She was wearing a white cotton shirt and a linen skirt and she was laughing. Stephen remembered the moment. They had been walking across Port Meadow, and Mary’s straw hat suddenly blew away on the wind. Stephen had pursued it, jumping uselessly from tussock to tussock until it had sailed down into the water and been borne away on the current.
And Mary had laughed almost until she cried, making her look impossibly pretty, with her lips parted to reveal her perfect white teeth, her dark eyes full of life. Stephen had got out his camera and taken a photograph. Then they had continued on past the boats and the swans and the swaying poplar trees to a high stile, and when he had put out his hand to help her over, she had kept hold of it as they walked up the path to the Perch. Stephen remembered that day so clearly. They had sat outside in the pub’s garden drinking low-quality white wine and he had told her all about his family: his dead mother and his soon-to-be-dead father and the terrible crime that Colonel John Cade had committed fourteen years earlier in a small French village called Marjean.

  He had to tell someone, because the truth was that Stephen had never been able to get the place out of his head since that night when he and his brother had crouched below his father’s study window and heard the truth for the first time. God knows, he’d tried. From his first day at New College he’d thrown himself into student life. Politics was his passion—changing the world; and the river winding under the willow trees, the quiet quadrangles, and the college chapel with Epstein’s statue of Lazarus, who turned in white burial clothes while rising from the dead, were all invisible to him as he hurried through the medieval streets to some meeting of bearded socialists in the back of a crowded pub or rushed off to London to march against the bomb. Then, suddenly, he was at the end of the first year and the exams were upon him. He stayed up all night for a week and just scraped through. And in the summer he worked picking fruit for a month before he took off and traveled through Europe, eating almost nothing so that he’d have enough money for the train fares. He went through France and northern Italy and even a bit of Switzerland before he realised where he was really going and wound up outside the ruins of Marjean Château on a hot afternoon in late August. The sunlight glistened on the glassy dark blue surface of the lake, and blackbirds flew in and out of the empty paneless windows of the gutted house, and at the top of the hill the church was locked with a rusty padlock. Stephen had never experienced such emptiness. The people who had lived here and loved this place were all dead, and there was nothing he could do to redeem what had happened to them. He had nothing to offer, no solution to the terrible silence, and so, after only a few minutes, he turned tail and walked quickly back up the overgrown drive, ignoring the thorny branches that snapped back on him as he passed, cutting his bare arms and face. On the main road he thumbed down a passing truck and hitched a ride all the way to Rouen.

  Afterward he couldn’t get the place out of his head. He cursed his own curiosity, wished he hadn’t gone to Marjean. He was drinking more than a bottle of wine every day when he went to the Playhouse one afternoon early in the new year at the suggestion of his friend, Harry Brooks, and met a young actress called Mary Martin for the first time.

  Except that it wasn’t the first time. He was sure of that now. She’d been sitting on one of the stone seats in the college’s medieval cloister about a week before when he came round the corner one evening, burdened with two heavy bags of pamphlets that his action group had had printed at the University Press.

  Half the cloister was dark even on sunny days, since two of its four sides were in the shadow of a great oak tree growing in one of the corners, and it was long past sunset when he saw her. In fact, the only light came from the moon hanging overhead, and Stephen could hardly make out the woman’s features, although he stopped when he came upon her and dropped his bags on the ground, arrested by her unexpected presence, almost jumping to the conclusion that she was a ghost, the spurned wife or mistress of some long-dead professor. But then he’d remembered that he didn’t believe in ghosts and been about to apologise when the woman got up and walked away. They hadn’t exchanged a word, but still, looking back now, almost a year later, he was certain it was Mary whom he’d seen in the cloister.

  The strange part was that, all the time they were together, neither of them had ever referred to that first encounter. At the beginning he couldn’t be sure it was her, and later he’d forgotten all about it, but now he couldn’t get the memory of that January evening out of his mind.

  And then the following Saturday after that first meeting, Harry came to his rooms with two tickets for a play. It was some forgettable melodrama, and Stephen never went to the theatre. He had more important things to do. But Harry insisted. He’d met this pretty actress at a party and she’d given him the tickets for the matinée, with an invitation to come backstage afterward. Stephen went reluctantly, complaining all the way, but then, when the curtain went up, he sat transfixed by the girl with the beautiful chestnut hair and the liquid eyes, whom Harry pointed out was the actress from the party, the one who’d given him the tickets. Stephen felt sure he’d seen her before, but he couldn’t remember when. She was so alive, it was as if he could feel the red lifeblood pumping through the myriad of blue veins under her unblemished skin.

  Afterward, Harry took him backstage, and there she was, looking back at him from a mirror hung on the wall of the dressing room, with her blouse half unbuttoned so that he could see the beginnings of her breasts. She smiled at him, and he sensed her understanding of his confusion. He stammered out some compliment about her performance and she laughed. It was infectious and it came from deep inside, and he laughed too, forgetting his awkwardness in the doorway.

  “And so you must be Stephen,” she’d said, and he had never asked her then or later how she knew his name before they’d been introduced. He just assumed that Harry must have told her at the party. The way she said his name had made him feel that she had singled him out, selected him for whatever was going to happen next. Harry stood forgotten in the corner. He felt ill treated, but there was nothing he could do, and his friendship with Stephen didn’t survive that afternoon.

  But Stephen didn’t care. He was in love, and the next day, in the early morning, Mary met him outside the front gates of New College and they went cycling away into the countryside. Mary had brought wine and sandwiches, and once or twice they stopped to drink, sitting on the roadside grass, which was still wet with the morning dew. But Mary wouldn’t tell him where they were going, until she suddenly turned off the main road just outside the village of Burford and freewheeled down a grassy path to the ruins of a medieval manor house, standing on the bank of a fast-flowing river called the Windrush. She said the name of the house was Minster Lovell, and it reminded Stephen irresistibly of Marjean, although he didn’t mention that to Mary. The present was good: an escape from his father and the past.

  They sat in the shadow of a silver-grey tower with curving, well-worn steps that led up into thin air, and Mary told him the story of Francis, the last of the Lovells, who’d shut himself up in a secret room beneath the manor house after joining in a failed rebellion against King Henry VII at the end of the fifteenth century. An old servant had brought him food and all was well for a while, but then the servant died and Sir Francis Lovell, unable to get out of his hiding place from the inside, slowly starved to death. Two hundred years passed and no one knew his fate, until a party of workmen broke into the underground chamber by accident and found a skeleton sitting at a table with its hand resting on a pile of papers, which crumbled into dust with the sudden ingress of outside air.

  Mary delighted in stories like this. Another time she took Stephen to a little nondescript cottage down by the canal and told him about an Oxford bargeman who had once lived there with his young wife. One day he had come back home unexpectedly from work and found his wife in bed with his neighbour, and so he picked up a hammer and killed the man. He was restrained before he had time to start on his wife.

  “What happened to him?” Stephen asked.

  “They didn’t hang him because it was a crime of passion,” said Mary. “They locked him up for twenty-five years instead. But the wife was already pregnant with the other man’s child, and she gave birth just a few days after the trial.”

  “And then?” asked Stephen, realising that t
here was more to come.

  “The bargeman did his time and got released early for good behaviour, and the same day he got out he killed his wife and her son, even though twenty years had gone by and the young man had nothing to do with what had gone before.”

  “What a bastard,” said Stephen. “Did they hang him then?”

  “They didn’t need to. He killed himself. He’d done what he’d been waiting to do, you see? His revenge was complete. There was no more reason to stay alive.”

  “How do you know all this?” he asked.

  “Books. Chapters in guidebooks. They come with being a tourist.”

  “You’re not a tourist. You work here,” said Stephen, seeking reassurance that she wouldn’t be going away.

  “The play won’t go on forever,” she said. “I’ll have to find other work when it’s over.”

  But the season was extended and they didn’t return to the subject of separation for a while.

  They were terrible stories that Mary told him, the stuff of nightmares, but she never explained why she felt the need to tell them. Stephen just accepted the stories with everything else that came with his new girlfriend. She made the rules and he was only too happy to play by them, if it meant that he could be with her. He could think of nothing else. It was as if she had him under a spell. And in truth Stephen was happy to submit himself to Mary. She gave him back the love he’d lost when his mother died. She put the magic back into his life. And telling her about Marjean seemed to have exorcised his ghosts, at least for a while.

  But then sometimes she would disappear for days without a word. Stephen hated her absence, but he knew better than to complain, and anyway he wouldn’t have known where to look even if he had tried to track her down. She’d told him she was sharing a flat somewhere in North Oxford with another actress, but Mary never invited Stephen there, and he never met any of her friends or relations—except Paul, and that was only in passing.

  Paul was Mary’s brother. And the first Stephen knew of him was one morning soon after he and Mary had become lovers. He’d slept late into the morning, and not for the first time. Being with Mary seemed to have this effect, turning him from a virtual insomniac into a deep sleeper who sometimes slept ten hours a night.