The Inheritance Read online

  “Maybe he didn’t look hard enough?”

  “No, he did. I promise you he did. He went to Marjean as well, but the place is a ruin and everyone in the village said the same thing: no survivors. Same with the local police.”

  “Why couldn’t you go yourself?”

  “Because that’s not what I do,” said Swift, trying to keep the exasperation out of his voice. “I’m in court almost every day, and I can’t do two different jobs even if I wanted to. The man we sent is one of the best. You can take my word for it.”

  “But didn’t you tell me before that some of the records got destroyed when the Germans invaded?” asked Stephen, unwilling to leave the subject.

  “Only for the two years up to 1940, which aren’t relevant. The rest were in secure archives. Monsieur Rocard was an only child. His wife was from Marseilles and had a couple of brothers, but they were killed in the war. They married late and didn’t have any children. End of story. We did what you asked us to do, and it’s not really taken us anywhere, Stephen. We need something more than that your father had a murky past.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like an alternative suspect to you. Somebody real. Somebody the jury can believe in. Not some phantom foreigner who’s run away from a speeding ticket.”

  “Well, there isn’t anybody else,” said Stephen.

  “Yes, there is. Your brother Silas had just as much of a motive to kill your father as you did. You heard what the solicitor said. He was going to be disinherited too.”

  “No,” insisted Stephen, suddenly angry again. “My brother wouldn’t kill anyone. He always got on better with our father than I did, for God’s sake.”

  “Perhaps he was better at concealing his true feelings than you were.”

  “No. I know him.”

  “Do you, Stephen? How can you be so sure? He’s not your blood brother, is he?”

  Stephen’s brow was creased with thought but he didn’t respond, and after a moment Swift got up, noticing the gaoler waiting impatiently outside the glass door of the interview room. Then, as Stephen was being handcuffed, Swift made one last effort to get through to his client. “Silas will be in the witness box the day after tomorrow, Stephen. If I’m to help you, I need you to help me.”

  But Stephen didn’t reply. Instead he turned away from his barrister and allowed himself to be led away down the whitewashed corridor and out of sight.

  Swift climbed up the stairs from the cells and found Stephen’s girlfriend, Mary, waiting for him in the foyer of the courthouse. She was clearly agitated, and her cheeks were flushed. It made her seem even prettier than he remembered.

  “Have you seen him?” she asked.

  “Yes. Just now. Down in the cells.”

  “How is he?”

  “All right. I’d say he’s bearing up pretty well, all things considered. There’s a long way to go yet.”

  “He’s going to get off, isn’t he?” she asked. “He’s going to be all right.”

  “I certainly hope so,” said Swift, inserting a note of optimism into his voice that he was far from feeling. His interview with Stephen in the cells had left him more downcast about the case than ever before. He smiled and turned to go, but Mary put her hand on his arm to detain him.

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “I need to know. What are his chances?”

  Swift paused, uncertain how to answer the girl. Was she looking for reassurance or an assessment of the evidence? Catching her eye, he decided the latter was more likely.

  “It’s an uphill struggle,” he said. “It would help if there was somebody else in the frame.”

  Mary nodded, pursing her lips.

  “Thank you, Mr. Swift,” she said. “That’s what I thought.”

  FOUR

  Moreton Manor in the morning was a pleasing sight. The dappled early autumn sunlight glistened on the dew covering the newly mown lawns and sparkled in the tall white-framed sash windows that ran in lines around the manor’s classical grey stone façade, which rose in elegant symmetry above the ebony-black front door to a slanting, tiled roof surmounted by tall brick chimneys. A single plume of white smoke was rising into a blue, cloudless sky, but otherwise there was no sign of life apart from a stray squirrel running in unexplained alarm across the Tarmac drive, which cut the lawns in half on its way down to the front gate. An ornamental fountain in the shape of an acanthus plant stood in the centre of the courtyard, but it was a long time since water had flowed down through its basin. The professor had found the sound of the fountain an unwanted distraction from his studies, and without it the silence in the courtyard seemed somehow solemn, almost oppressive.

  Trave stood lost in thought, gazing up at the house. He’d been awake since before the dawn, restless and unable to sleep. He kept on turning over the events of the previous day in his mind: Stephen in his black suit looking half-ready for the undertakers; old Murdoch, angry and clever up on his dais; and the barristers in their wigs and gowns reducing a murder, the end of a man’s life, to a series of questions and answers, making the events fit a pattern neatly packaged for the waiting jury. But it was all too abstract: a postmortem without a body. There was something missing. There had to be. Trave knew it in his bones.

  And so he’d driven out to Moreton in the early light and now stood on the step outside the front door, hat in hand, waiting. It was Silas who answered, and once again Trave was struck by the contrast between Stephen and his brother. Silas was just too tall, just too thin. His sandy hair was too sparse and his long nose spoilt his pale face. But it wasn’t his physical appearance that predisposed Trave against the elder brother; it was the lack of expression in the young man’s face and his obvious aversion to eye contact that struck Trave as all wrong. Silas was concealing something. Trave was sure of it. God knows, he had as much motive for the murder as his brother. They were both going to be disinherited. But then Silas wasn’t the one in his father’s room with the gun. That was Stephen, the one who reminded Trave so forcibly of his own dead son.

  “Hullo, Inspector. It’s a bit early, isn’t it?” There was no note of welcome in the young man’s flat, expressionless voice.

  “Yes, I’m sorry, Mr. Cade. I was just passing. On my way to London for the trial.”

  Silas’s eyebrows went up, and Trave cursed himself for not thinking of a better excuse.

  “I just wanted to check a couple of things if it’s not inconvenient,” he finished lamely.

  “Where?” asked Silas.

  “Where what?”

  “Where do you want to check them?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. In the study, the room where your father died.”

  “I know where my father died,” said Silas, opening the door just enough to allow the policeman to pass by him and come inside.

  The room was just the same as Trave had described it in court the day before. And yet there was something else, something he was missing. His eyes swept over the familiar objects: the ornate chess pieces on the table, the armchairs and the desk, the thick floor-length curtains. And now Silas, standing and watching him by the door, the door his brother had unlocked on the night of the murder.

  “Did you like your father?” Trave asked, catching the young man’s eye for the first time.

  “No, not particularly. I loved him. It’s not the same thing.”

  “And what about your brother? How do you feel about him?”

  “I feel sorry for him. I wish he hadn’t killed my father.”

  “Your father?”

  “Our father. What difference does it make? What’s done is done.”

  “And now someone has to pay for it.”

  “Yes, Inspector. Someone does. Look, is there anything else I can help you with? I have things to do. This isn’t a good time.”

  Silas made no effort to keep the impatience out of his voice, but Trave wouldn’t allow himself to be put off so easily.

  “Is there something you’re not telling me, Mr. Cade? Is there somethi
ng you know that I don’t?”

  Again Trave caught Silas’s eye, but it was only for a moment before the young man looked away.

  “No, Inspector,” he said quietly. “I believe I made a very full statement to the police back in June. I’ve nothing to add.”

  As Silas led him back along the corridor, Trave wondered to himself what it was he had seen in Silas’s face. Guilt or fear, anger or remorse? He couldn’t put his finger on it; the glance had been too fleeting. Outside, Trave tried one last time.

  “You know where I am, if you think of anything else?”

  “Yes, Inspector. I know where you are,” said Silas, closing the door.

  Back in his bedroom, Silas stood at the window and bit his lip as he watched the policeman drive away. He already felt nervous about having to give evidence, and Trave’s visit had broken the fragile calm that he’d worked so hard to achieve in recent weeks. Once again he felt the familiar sense of half-controlled panic that had engulfed him so often since the night of his father’s murder. It was the house that was the problem. It was his inheritance and his curse. He felt it weighing on him even when he took refuge outside. In fact, out there it was just as bad. The house seemed to be watching him. In defiance he had started taking pictures of it, concentrating particularly on the shadowy times of day—just before dusk and after the dawn—and had then found himself examining his prints for apparitions. He remembered a story he’d once heard about a haunted castle in Scotland where one afternoon the guests at a huge house party had gone to every room and waved coloured handkerchiefs out of every window all at the same time. The people watching down below had seen one empty window, but afterward no one could ever find out which one it was. Silas didn’t believe in ghosts, but part of him knew that he couldn’t come to terms with the death of his father.

  Not that John Cade had been his real father. Silas had never been left in any doubt about that. He was adopted because Clara Cade couldn’t have children of her own, or thought she couldn’t—until Silas was three and his adoptive mother was forty-one, at which point Stephen appeared, kicking and screaming his way into the world. Silas had been forgotten in the drawing room downstairs, and he had sat undetected in an armchair three times his size while his father walked the length of the room and back. Up and down, again and again. His father loved his mother but he didn’t love Silas, and so Silas was quiet. Children were to be seen very little and to be heard not at all, except that the rules didn’t seem to apply to the new arrival. It was as if the experience of carrying a baby and giving birth had made Clara realise the lack of a bond between herself and her first son. Nothing was the same for Silas after Stephen was born.

  And now they were all dead. All except Stephen, and he was going to die too, once the lawyers had finished with him. Silas was the one who had survived, and the house would soon be his. His alone. Strange then that he could not enjoy it but was instead haunted through sleepless nights and long, restless days. Perhaps this was the lot of survivors the world over. Silas didn’t know.

  He crossed to the window and looked down into the empty courtyard. He closed his eyes and saw his parents waving to him from the front door on the day he went away to boarding school. Stephen was between them, and his mother had her hand in his unruly blond hair. His brother had supposedly been sick that day, or at least that was the reason his mother gave for the change of plan. She had to stay home. Silas would understand. Clarkson, the driver, was completely reliable, and the housemaster would take care of Silas when he got to school. Silas had never forgiven her. For sending him away. For keeping Stephen at home when he reached the same age. For never visiting him, except once when she and his father were passing that way anyway, en route to some country-house weekend. They went to a fancy restaurant and talked about people that Silas had never heard of.

  Silas didn’t resent his father in the same way. He was selfish with everyone, not just Silas. Looking after his own creature comforts. Blinking in the sunlight like an overfed cat. Silas had watched him, listened to him, observing the perfect egoism of the man. The key to Professor John Cade was quite simple. He wanted to own. He had exquisite taste and knew the value of things, and he wanted to possess the best. Like his wife. John Cade had owned Clara Bennett from the date of their marriage. He had bought her, and he had put her on display with the rest of his possessions through the long summer evenings after the war, to show the world what he had and they didn’t. The dust was gathering now on the heavy Victorian furniture in the dining room, but ten years earlier the silver had glittered on the polished mahogany surfaces, when Silas had gone outside into the night and stared in through the window, watching his father watching his mother. Professor Cade wore evening dress, and his wife sparkled with white jewels clipped in her beautiful fair hair and hanging round her perfectly shaped neck.

  Silas pictured the elaborate dresses that his mother wore so effortlessly as she moved among her guests, the cream of university society, unaware of her adopted son only a few yards away on the other side of the window. And Stephen would be upstairs, sleeping in his nursery, surrounded by a hundred furry animals. John Cade’s brow always creased with momentary irritation when his wife left to check on her little soldier, as she insisted on calling her younger son. But the professor swallowed his annoyance. The boy made his wife happy, and her happiness increased her beauty. John Cade never seemed to get tired of looking at his wife, and in Silas’s memory she never changed. She was always young and lovely, right up until the day she died.

  It was Christmas Eve, and 1951 was almost at an end. Soon the country would have a new queen, and Clara Cade had promised her fourteen-year-old younger son a new five-speed bicycle for Christmas. When it didn’t arrive, she took her husband’s car and drove into Oxford to collect it herself. Silas had watched her departure from the same bedroom window where he was standing now. She was wearing a heavy black fur coat and a hat with a veil, and she’d come down the front steps almost at a run, half tripping at the bottom on her high heels. The snow had been falling for most of the night, and after she drove away, Silas had gone down into the courtyard and stood in her footprints.

  She never came back. Clara’s own car was in the garage being serviced, and she was unused to the heavy Rolls-Royce. On the way back from Oxford, she lost control halfway down a steep hill, and the car swerved off the road at high speed, hitting a telegraph pole. Clara Cade flew through the windscreen and died instantly, or at least that’s what the police told her husband. Silas wasn’t so sure. He pictured his mother revisiting the scenes of her life, her blood seeping away into the snow. Perhaps Silas needed the consolation that she had regretted her treatment of him for a moment or two at the last.

  He had visited the scene of the crash with his father the following day. It was still snowing, and the fields were white and silent. It was as if his mother had never been there at all. She seemed to leave no mark on the world.

  Silas remembered when the police came. He didn’t know why, but he had known what had happened as soon as the black cars had drawn up in front of the house and the men in uniform started getting out. The car doors had shut one after the other like reports from a gun, and Silas had watched as his father came out through the french windows of his study, bareheaded into the snow. Moments later he had sagged at the legs, held up between two policemen, and it was then that Silas had noticed the bicycle in the back of the police van, just before his father did. Stephen’s present had survived its purchaser’s death intact, and there it was, bright and gleaming, ready for Christmas.

  The sight had enraged John Cade. He had pulled himself free of the policemen’s hands, crossed to the van, and seized the bicycle. Then, holding it half above his head, Cade had gone almost at a run up the steps of his house, into the drawing room where Stephen was lying on the floor by the fire reading a book. The Christmas tree was big and full of lights behind him. Clara and her younger son had spent the day before decorating it with coloured globes and swans and silver tr
umpets until it was perfect, and now Stephen wanted to be near it all the time. His childhood was almost over, and the tree’s magic kept its end suspended for a little while longer.

  Cade stood in the doorway watching his son for a moment, and then, using all his strength, he threw the bicycle at the tree. Silas, standing behind his father in the hall, watched the Christmas decorations crash to the floor all around his brother, shattering into thousands of tiny pieces, meaningless shards of brightly coloured glass.

  Two weeks after the funeral, Stephen was sent away to join Silas at his boarding school in the west of England, and Sergeant Ritter and his silent wife came to live at the manor house. There was no turning back the clock.

  Silas never saw his father display such energy again after the day he threw the bicycle. He became watchful and reclusive, spending his days analysing complex chess problems in his study or gazing at the old hand-painted manuscripts that he kept catalogued and ordered in the long gallery at the top of the stairs. Watching him, Silas often thought of the silent, solitary monks who had copied and painted the sacred texts a thousand years before. Such a contrast to his father, with his love of sweet food and wine and his constant preoccupation with his failing health. Much good that it did him. Silas looked across to the east wing and remembered his father dead in his leather armchair. Silas had taken photographs. Of the dead man. Of the room. In the evenings he took them out and ran his index finger along the outlines of the body. He didn’t know why. Perhaps he was seeking a closeness with his father that had eluded him in life.

  Now the front door of the house opened, and Sasha came out. Silas stiffened as he stepped back, almost involuntarily, from the window of his room. It was second nature to him to seek concealment, to watch without being seen.