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The Inheritance
Simon Tolkien


When an eminent art historian is found dead in his study, all the evidence points to his estranged son, Stephen. With his fingerprints on the murder weapon, Stephen’s guilt seems undeniable.As the police begin to question five other people who were in the house at the time, it is revealed that Stephen’s father was involved at the end of World War II in a deadly hunt for a priceless relic in northern France, and the case begins to unravel.As Stephen’s trial unfolds at the Old Bailey, Inspector Trave of the Oxford police decides he must go to France and find out what really happened in 1944. What artefact could be so valuable it would be worth killing for? But Trave has very little time – the race is on to save Stephen from the gallows.









SIMON TOLKIEN

The Inheritance








For my mother, Faith Tolkien


Table of Contents

Title Page (#ue67090c1-be8f-5103-b321-d840a0b0ff33)

Dedication (#ud84e509b-9bd8-5db9-9e0a-d1908f218894)

Introductory Note (#u20d02b94-4852-58ff-8611-0a6474a89b44)

Prologue: Normandy 1944 (#uf4dcabd8-76c1-5786-827d-76b195a16996)

Part One: 1959 (#u43c43a05-fca1-5058-9cd5-8d36d3102fc9)

Chapter 1 (#u49392414-234e-53a4-a2eb-d4117f675c9b)

Chapter 2 (#u17135194-6c3f-59d0-9974-6b090d7662b3)

Chapter 3 (#ua3af3623-dadc-575d-ba50-51987b902333)

Chapter 4 (#u3a46043b-d5a1-52ce-af22-691ac9db459e)

Chapter 5 (#u32835063-7cb5-531c-8551-50516ceebac6)

Chapter 6 (#u751f91f2-8ee2-561e-9937-c5296c9eeced)

Chapter 7 (#uf7eb23ed-6ce8-59c4-8aa6-bce7ed02cdb8)

Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)

Part Two (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)

Part Three (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Simon Tolkien (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




INTRODUCTORY NOTE


The controversial executions of Derek Bentley and Ruth Ellis in the 1950s increased public pressure in the United Kingdom for the abolition of hanging, and this was answered in part by the passing of the Homicide Act in 1957, which limited the imposition of the death penalty to five specific categories of murder. Henceforward only those convicted of killing police officers or prison guards and those who had committed a murder by shooting or in the furtherance of theft or when resisting arrest could suffer the ultimate punishment. The effect of this unsatisfactory legislation was that a poisoner or strangler acting with premeditation would escape the rope, whereas a man who shot another in a fit of rage might not. This anomaly no doubt helped the campaign for outright abolition, which finally reached fruition with the passage of the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act in 1965.

Death sentences were carried out far more quickly in England in the 1950s than they are in the United States today. A single appeal against the conviction but not the sentence was allowed, and, if it failed, the Home Secretary made a final decision on whether to exercise the royal prerogative of mercy on behalf of the Queen, marking the file ‘the law must take its course’ if there were to be no reprieve. There was often no more than a month’s interval between conviction and execution. Ruth Ellis, for example, spent just three weeks and three days in the condemned cell at Holloway Prison in 1955 before she was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint for the crime of shooting her boyfriend.

There was thus very little time available for lawyers or other interested parties trying desperately to uncover new evidence that might exonerate a client sentenced to die. They were quite literally working against the clock.




PROLOGUE

NORMANDY

1944


They were safe in the trees, waiting for the Germans to come. Carson had driven the Jeep off the drive, and the silver-grey branches had crackled and broken as he’d wedged it into its hiding place. And now they waited on either side of the road with their fingers on the triggers of their American-made machine guns. Nothing. No wind in the trees, no movement in the air, until just after eight o’clock, when the dust came up in a yellow cloud and the two trucks came round the corner.

And then Ritter felt the bullets feeding through the magazine, the quick vibrations in his arms from the gun, and saw the men in the trucks jumping up and down like puppets. There was one young soldier at the end who ran away down the road, but Colonel Cade walked out of the trees with his rifle and shot him in the back of the head just before he reached the corner. It was a good ambush.

Afterwards, Carson and Ritter pushed the trucks into the woods, while the colonel selected rifles and pistols from the bodies of their dead owners. Three of each. He made them leave their own guns behind.

And so they walked on up to the house with the dead soldiers’ rifles slung over their shoulders and the snub-nosed German Mauser pistols in their pockets. They were a strange, ill-assorted group. Walking in the middle, the tall, thin colonel towered over his two companions. His pale blue eyes were almost opaque, revealing nothing of the man inside, and his long aquiline nose gave him an ascetic look that seemed oddly at variance with his uniform. And yet he carried himself with an air of natural authority that made it obvious that he was the man in charge.

On the colonel’s right, Sergeant Ritter was far more clearly a military man with his clipped black moustache and polished shoes and buttons. He was a big man and he had begun to sweat in the evening heat. But he didn’t complain. He knew that they had work to do. Looking past the colonel, Ritter glared over at Corporal Carson, who was walking with a deliberate swagger, swaying his narrow hips and shoulders as he expertly flicked a piece of chewing gum from one side of his mouth to the other in time with each step he took. The young man’s disrespect disgusted Ritter. But he kept his peace. Carson had been the only soldier he could find to do the job. He’d have to do.

They walked past green stony fields and rows of overgrown vines until they came to a fork in the drive and passed an old sign on which someone had once upon a time painted the words ‘Proprieté Priveé.’ It was nailed to the trunk of a plane tree, and Carson read it out loud in his cockney accent and laughed like it was some kind of joke. But the colonel ignored him. He had other things on his mind.

One more turning and the trees stopped suddenly on both sides, and there was the house. It was much smaller than Ritter had expected – not his idea of a château at all. The glass was broken in several of the small windows that appeared at regular intervals in the stone façade, and the guttering was hanging loose from one corner of the roof. Over to the left, a solitary black-and-white cow stood in the shade of a primitive lean-to. Her great red tongue was lolling out of her mouth, and she had clearly been suffering in the afternoon heat. It was unusual for the time of year, and Ritter wondered inconsequentially whether she was aware of the lake that stretched out like a sheet of black glass several hundred yards beyond the house. On the far shore, the town of Marjean shimmered in the distance.

The church stood on a ridge above the château, and it was clearly the more impressive of the two buildings. Even Ritter could sense its antiquity. The bell tower glowed silver in the translucent evening light, and the gargoyles – devils and apes with deformed backs and monstrous faces – gaped down at the world below.

There had been devils here already – German devils – but they seemed to have left the church well alone. A swastika flag hung limply from a pole standing near the corner of the house, and a litter of papers on the dried-up lawn bore witness to the suddenness of the Germans’ departure. But their hosts had remained behind, and Henri Rocard and his wife were already standing in the doorway of their house when the three British soldiers came out of the trees and walked across the grass towards them.

It was the colonel who did the talking, and Ritter understood almost none of it, but then again he didn’t need to. He knew already that the colonel wanted something from these people, and he was here to help the colonel get it, if the colonel needed help. Back at the camp outside Moirtier, Cade had already explained that he was prepared to pay good money for what he wanted. More than the thing was worth. It was Rocard who was being unreasonable.

Ritter didn’t like the look of the Frenchman. He was thick and short, built like one of those middleweights that Ritter had gone to watch in Nottingham when he was a boy. And his dark eyes were small, staring out suspiciously from his wrinkled face. He had probably not yet turned fifty, but the sun had burnt his skin to a pale leather, ageing him beyond his years.

Madame Rocard seemed to be a little older than her husband, but she remained an attractive woman. She stood up straight, and her black hair was pulled back severely from her well-shaped face. She was full-breasted and defiant, and Ritter would have liked to have pushed her back into the cool interior of her house, down onto the red flagstones in the hall, and fucked her until he’d had his fill. They were collaborators, and they deserved everything that was coming to them – unless they were reasonable. And the anger in the squat little Frenchman’s voice, his evident hostility towards the colonel, didn’t make a peaceful solution seem likely.

Suddenly the colonel went forward and took hold of the Frenchwoman’s arm, pulling her towards him. And in the same movement, he took the German pistol out of his pocket and pushed it hard against the side of her handsome head. But still Rocard refused to give way, even when Cade let go of the woman’s arm and used his free hand to pull back the hammer of the gun.

Quick movement and sudden stillness. This was how Ritter remembered it all afterwards. The silence in the trees shattered by the sudden rat-a-tat-tat of the machine guns. And now the angry foreign words, followed by the colonel’s seizure of the woman, seemed to leave them all immobilized, frozen in a tableau of fear.

It was the dog that broke the stand-off. It must have been barking for some time, tied up somewhere inside the house, and Ritter was surprised that he hadn’t heard it before. All his attention must have been focused on the scene in the doorway. It was a black mongrel dog almost as big as a Labrador, and it came at them suddenly, its lip curled back over its yellow teeth. But it never got to bite anyone. The colonel had wonderfully quick reactions back then, and he pulled the gun down from the Frenchwoman’s ear and killed the animal with a single bullet.

It was funny that it was the dead dog, and not the threat to his wife, that cracked the Frenchman’s resolve. Or perhaps it was the killing of the dog that made him believe that the colonel would really kill his wife. Whatever the truth, they did not need to do any more. Rocard agreed to give the colonel what he wanted.

‘He’s going to get something for me, from inside the house,’ said the colonel to Ritter. ‘You go with him, Reg, and watch what he does. Check he hasn’t got a gun, and make sure he doesn’t get one while he’s in there.’

The Frenchman didn’t react when Ritter patted him down. He just kept his eyes fixed on his wife and on the gun that the colonel had brought back up to the side of her head straight after he’d killed the dog. Rocard had nothing in his pockets. Not even a penknife. But Ritter didn’t trust him, and he kept close behind when the Frenchman went back into the house, pressing the muzzle of his gun into Rocard’s back, feeling out the concave hollow between his shoulder blades.

It was cool inside. Crossing the hall, Rocard started up a narrow staircase in the corner and Ritter, following behind, found himself stepping from light into semi-darkness and back, again and again, as they crossed pools of evening sunlight let in by the small rectangular windows set high in the walls of the house. In the rooms on either side Ritter could see evidence of the Germans’ recent occupation – a photograph of the Führer hanging slightly askew on a whitewashed wall, a trestle bed lying overturned on its side, and papers, both handwritten and typed, strewn about everywhere. On one of the desks Ritter noticed the remains of someone’s supper – a crust of black bread and a half-eaten German sausage. The man who’d been eating it only an hour before was now lying in a pool of blood halfway down the drive, baking in the last of the sun. The thought made Ritter smile. Life was a funny thing sometimes.

They carried on up the stairs to a room at the very top. It was almost an attic, and Ritter had to half-stoop to get through the door. This was evidently where Rocard and his wife slept – the only place left to them after the house was occupied, and the bed was the main piece of furniture. It was old and ornate, with elaborate carving on its four posters, but it had lost its canopy and the coarse army-issue blankets covering it were out of keeping with its grand design. It took all Rocard’s strength to move it away from the wall, but he didn’t ask for any help, and he didn’t try to hide what he was doing when he pulled up one of the rough floorboards that he had exposed. Underneath, Ritter saw over the Frenchman’s shoulder that the hollow space contained an old thin book in a heavy leather binding. Wasting no time, he seized the book out of Rocard’s hands.

On the way back down, the Frenchman remained compliant until they turned a corner of the stairs and started down the final flight into the hall. Then, suddenly, there was an outbreak of shouting from beyond the entrance to the living room, and a second later Ritter caught sight of Carson framed in the doorway, and below and to the side of him an old man half-shouting, half-kneeling on the floor. He looked to be in his seventies, but he could have been older. Time seemed to have been kind to him up until now. He’d kept his teeth, and his hair hadn’t fallen out but had instead turned bright white with age. Now, however, Carson was using it to half-drag, half-pull him toward the front door. Halfway across the flagstones, Carson noticed Ritter on the stairs and laughed.

‘Here’s the old sod that let the dog out,’ he shouted to make himself heard above the old man’s cries of pain. ‘The colonel saw him peeping out the window and sent me in to bring him out. On all fours was my idea. Just like his fucking dog.’

Carson’s antics enraged the Frenchman. Seeing his old servant reduced to a howling animal, he started forward down the stairs, and Ritter had to drop the book and seize Rocard by the collar of his shirt to pull him back. At the same time he thrust the barrel of the gun hard into the small of Rocard’s back, and now the Frenchman stood almost doubled up with pain at the foot of the stairs, powerless to help his old servant as Carson dragged him out of the house, administering several kicks to the old man’s back and ribcage before he dumped him on the ground at the colonel’s feet, beside the dead dog.

‘He was hiding behind one of the big heavy curtains in there,’ said Carson, pointing back at the house. ‘And it was him that let the dog out. I found him with this bit of rope in his hands. Why don’t we use it to string him up? What do you say, Colonel? Let’s teach these Frenchies a lesson.’

‘That won’t be necessary, Corporal,’ said the colonel acidly. Carson was joking, but he had no time now for the man’s petty sadism. All his attention was focused on Ritter and the Frenchman. ‘Did you get it, Reg?’ he asked. ‘Show me what you got.’

‘Just this old book. He had it under the floorboards,’ said Ritter, handing over the thin leather-bound volume that he had seized from the Frenchman up in the attic. ‘Is that what you wanted?’

The colonel didn’t reply. His hands were shaking as he took the book from Ritter and let go of the Frenchman’s wife. She immediately went over to the old servant and raised him unsteadily to his feet. He couldn’t stand unsupported, but Carson did nothing to help her. He was still trying to control his laughter.

The colonel turned the pages quickly but carefully, ignoring the dust that flew up into his eyes.

‘It’s the codex, all right,’ he said as if to himself. ‘From the moment I read that letter in Rome, I knew it was here. Here all the time.’

‘Colonel,’ interrupted Ritter. They needed to decide what they were going to do with these people before someone from the regiment came looking for them.

‘Colonel, it’s getting late,’ he tried again a moment later.

This time Cade looked up from the book. ‘Where did you say it was, Reg?’ he asked, as if he hadn’t heard Ritter’s question.

‘In a hollow space under one of the floorboards in their bedroom,’ said Ritter.

‘Was there anything else in there? In the space?’

‘No. I checked.’

Still, the colonel seemed dissatisfied. He closed the book and began speaking to the Frenchman in his own language again. Quickly. Question after question. Ritter could understand almost nothing of what was being said, but it was obvious that the colonel was getting angry. He kept repeating a word that sounded like roi or croix in a voice that demanded a response, but it was a one-way conversation. The Frenchman raised his hands several times in a gesture that seemed to imply that he didn’t understand what the colonel was talking about, and then after a while he just looked away.

Suddenly the colonel took hold of the woman again, squeezing her wrist and saying that same word over and over again. Croix or roi. Roi was a king, and Ritter didn’t know what a king had to do with it, but perhaps that wasn’t the word. The woman struggled, and Ritter was about to go over to help restrain her, when she threw her head back and spat at the colonel full in his face. It made him drop the book, and he used his freed hand to slap her hard across both cheeks. They were hard blows and she fell to the ground, weeping.

‘We’ve got to decide what to do, Colonel,’ said Ritter. He felt worried now. The sun had almost set and they needed to stay in radio contact with the camp. The colonel seemed to be getting nowhere with the Frenchies.

‘All right, Reg, I know that,’ said the colonel. ‘It’s just that they know more than they’re saying. A little bit longer and I can get it out of them. I can feel it. Help me take them over to the church. We can work on them in there. And you, Carson, come up there with us and keep a lookout. We won’t be long.’



PART ONE




CHAPTER 1


Detective Inspector William Trave of the Oxfordshire CID felt the pain as soon as he’d passed through the revolving entrance doors of the Old Bailey and had shaken the rain out from his coat onto the dirty wet floor of the courthouse. It hurt him in the same place as before – on the left side of his chest, just above his heart. But it was worse this time. It felt important. Like it might never go away.

There was a white plastic chair in the corner, placed there perhaps by some kind janitor to accommodate visitors made faint by their first experience of the Old Bailey. Now Trave fell into it, bending down over his knees to gather the pain into himself. He was fighting for breath while prickly sweat poured down in rivulets over his face, mixing with the raindrops. And all the time his brain raced from one thought to another, as if it wanted in the space of a minute or two to catch up on all the years he had wasted not talking to his wife, not coming to terms with his son’s death, not living. He thought of the lonely North Oxford house he had left behind at seven o’clock that morning, with the room at the back that he never went into, and he thought of his ex-wife, whom he had seen just the other day shopping in the Covered Market. He had run back into the High Street, frightened that his successor might come into view carrying a shared shopping bag, and had ducked into the Mitre in search of whisky.

Trave wanted whisky now, but the Old Bailey wasn’t the place to find it. For a moment he considered the possibility of the pub across the road. It was called The Witness Box, or some fatuous name like that, but it wouldn’t be open yet. Trave felt his breath beginning to come more easily. The pain was better, and he got out a crumpled handkerchief and wiped away some of the sweat and rain. It was funny that he’d felt for a moment that he was actually going to die, and yet no one seemed to have noticed. The security guards were still patting down the pockets of the public just like they had been doing all morning. One of them was even humming a discordant version of that American song, ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’ A rain-soaked middle-aged policeman sitting on a chair in the corner, gathering his breath for the day ahead, was hardly a cause for distraction.

A sudden weariness came over Trave. Once again he felt weighed down by the meaninglessness of the world around him. Trave always tried to keep his natural nihilism at bay as best he could. He did his job to the best of his ability, went to church on Sundays, and nurtured the plants that grew in the carefully arranged borders of his garden – and sometimes it all worked. Things seemed important precisely because they didn’t last. But underneath, the despair was always there, ready to spring out and take him unawares. Like that morning, halfway down his own street, when a young man in blue overalls working on a dismembered motorcycle had brought back the memory of Joe as if he had gone only yesterday. And fallen apples in the garden at the weekened had resurrected Vanessa stooping to gather them into a straw basket three autumns before. It was funny that he always remembered his wife with her back turned.

Trave gathered himself together and made for the stairs. When he got time, he’d go and see his doctor. Perhaps the GP could give him something. In the meantime he had to carry on. Today was important. Regina v. Stephen Cade, said the list on the wall outside the courthouse. Before His Honour Judge Murdoch at twelve o’clock. Charged with murder. Father murder – patricide, it was called. And the father was an important man – a colonel in the army during the war and a university professor in civilian life. If convicted, the boy would certainly hang. The powers that be would see to that. The boy. But Stephen wasn’t a boy. He was twenty-two. He just felt like a boy to Trave. The policeman fought to keep back the thought that Stephen was so much like Joe. It wasn’t just a physical resemblance. Joe had had the same passion, the same need to rebel that had driven him to ride his brand new 600cc silver motorcycle too fast after dark down a narrow road on the other side of Oxford. A wet January night more than two years ago. If he’d lived, Joe would be twenty-two. Just like Stephen. Trave shook his head. He didn’t need the police training manual to know that empathizing with the main suspect in a murder investigation was no way to do his job. Trave had trained himself to be fair and decent and unemotional. That way he brought order to a disordered world, and most of the time he believed there was some value in that. He would do his duty, give his evidence, and move on. The fate of Stephen Cade was not his responsibility.

Up in the police room, Trave poured himself a cup of black coffee, straightened his tie, and waited in a corner for the court usher to come and get him to give his evidence. He was the officer in the case, and, when the opening statements were over, he would be the first witness called by the prosecution.

The courtroom was one of the oldest in the Old Bailey. It was tall, lit by glass chandeliers that the maintenance staff needed long ladders to reach when the bulbs blew out. On the wood-panelled walls, pictures of long-gone nineteenth-century lawyers stared out on their twentieth-century successors. The judge sat robed in black in a leather-backed armchair placed on a high dais. Only the dock containing the defendant and two uniformed prison officers was at the same level. Between them, in the well of the court, were the lawyers’ tables; the witness box; and, to right and left, the benches for the press and the jury. The jurors were now in place, and Trave felt them slowly relaxing into their new surroundings. Their moment in the limelight, when they stumbled over their oath to render a true verdict in accordance with the evidence, had come and gone. Now they could sit in safe anonymity while the drama of the murder trial played out in front of them. Everyone – members of the press, the jurors, and the spectators packed together in the public gallery above the defendant’s head – was focused on the prosecutor, Gerald Thompson, as he gathered his long black gown around his shoulders and prepared to begin.

‘What time did you arrive at Moreton Manor, Inspector?’ he asked, ‘on the night of the murder?’

‘Eleven forty-five.’ Trave spoke loudly, forgetting for a moment the acoustic qualities of the Old Bailey.

‘Were you the first policeman on the scene?’

‘No. Officers Clayton and Watts were already there. They’d got everyone in the drawing room. It’s across from the front hall.’

‘And the victim, Professor Cade – he was in his study. On the ground floor of the east wing.’

‘Yes. That’s right,’ said Trave.

There was a measured coldness and determination in the way the prosecutor put his questions, which contrasted sharply with his remarkable lack of stature. Gerald Thompson couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. Now he took a deep breath and drew himself up to his full short height as if to underline to the jury the importance of his next question.

‘Now, tell us, Inspector. What did you find?’

‘In the study?’

‘Yes. In the study.’

Trave could hear the impatience in the prosecutor’s voice, but he still hesitated before beginning his reply. It was the question he’d asked himself a thousand times or more during the four months that had passed since he’d first seen the dead man, sitting bolt upright in his high-backed armchair, gazing out over a game of chess into nothing at all. Shot in the head. Detective Inspector Trave knew what he’d found, all right. He just didn’t know what it meant. Not in his bones, not where it mattered. Pieces of the jigsaw fit too well, and others didn’t fit at all. Everything pointed to Stephen Cade as the murderer, but why had he called out for help after killing his father? Why had he waited to open the door to his accusers? Why had he not tried to escape? Trave remembered how Stephen had gripped the table at the end of their last interview in Oxford Police Station, shouting over and over again until he was hoarse: ‘I didn’t do it, I tell you. I didn’t kill him. I hated my father, but that doesn’t make me a murderer.’

Trave had got up and left the room, told the sergeant at the desk to charge the boy with murder, and walked out into the night. And he hadn’t slept properly ever since.

Thompson, of course, had no such doubts. Trave remembered the first thing the prosecution counsel had told him when the case was being prepared for trial: ‘There’s something you should know about me, Inspector,’ he’d said in that nasal bullying tone with which Trave had now become so familiar. ‘I don’t suffer fools gladly. I never have and I never will.’

And Trave was a fool. Thompson hadn’t taken long to form that opinion. The art of prosecution was about following the straight and narrow, keeping to the path through the woods until you got to the hanging tree on the other side. Defence lawyers spent their time trying to sidetrack witnesses and throw smoke in the jurors’ eyes to keep them from the truth. Trave was the officer in the case. It was his duty not to be sidetracked, to keep his language plain and simple, to help the jury do its job. And here he was: hesitant and uncertain before he’d even begun.

Thompson cleared his throat and glowered at his witness.

‘Tell us about the deceased, Inspector Trave,’ he demanded. ‘Tell us what you found.’

‘He’d been shot in the head.’

‘How many times?’

‘Once.’

‘Where in the head?’

‘In the forehead.’

‘Did you find the gun?’

‘Yes, it was on a side table, with a silencer attached. The defendant said he’d put it there after picking it up from the floor near the French windows, when he came back into the study from the courtyard.’

‘That was the story he told you?’

‘Yes, I interviewed him the next day at the police station.

‘His fingerprints were on the gun. That’s right, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘And on the key that he admitted he turned in order to unlock the door into the corridor. The defendant told you that as well in his interview, didn’t he, Inspector?’

‘Yes. He said the door was locked and so he opened it to let Mr Ritter into the study.’

‘Tell us who Mr Ritter is.’

‘He was a friend of Professor Cade’s. They fought together in the war. He and his wife had been living at the manor house for about seven years, as I understand it. Mrs Ritter acted as the housekeeper. They had the bedroom above the professor’s study, overlooking the main courtyard.’

‘Thank you, Inspector. All the fingerprint evidence is agreed, my lord.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said the judge, in a tone that suggested he’d have had a great deal to say if it hadn’t been. His Honour Judge Murdoch looked furious already, Thompson noted with approval. Strands of grey hair stuck out at different angles from under his old horsehair wig, and his wrinkled cheeks shone even redder than usual. They were the legacy of a lifetime of excessive drinking, which had done nothing to improve the judge’s temper. Defendants, as he saw it, were guilty and needed to be punished. Especially this one. People like Stephen Cade’s father had fought in two world wars to defend their country. And for what? To see their sons rebel, take drugs, behave indecently in public places. Stephen Cade had made a mistake not cutting his hair for the trial. Judge Murdoch stared at him across the well of the court and decided that he’d never seen a criminal more deserving of the ultimate punishment. The little bastard had killed his father for money. There was no worse crime than that. He’d hang. But first he’d have his trial. A fair trial. Judge Murdoch would see to that.

‘Let’s stay with the interview for a little bit longer,’ said Gerald Thompson, taking up a file from the table in front of him. ‘You have it in front of you, if you need to refer to it, Inspector. It’s an agreed version. The defendant told you, did he not, that he’d been arguing with his father shortly before he found Professor Cade murdered?’

‘Yes. He said that he went to the study at ten o’clock and that he and his father played chess and argued.’

‘Argued about his father’s will? About his father’s intention to change that will and disinherit the defendant?’

‘Yes. The defendant told me they talked about the will but that their main argument was over the defendant’s need for money.’

‘Which his father was reluctant to give him.’

‘Yes …’

Trave seemed to want to answer more fully, but Thompson gave him no opportunity. ‘The defendant told you in interview that he became very angry with his father. Isn’t that right, Inspector?’ asked the prosecutor.

‘Yes.’

‘The defendant admitted to shouting at Professor Cade that he deserved to die.’ The pace of Thompson’s questioning continued to pick up speed.

‘Yes.’

‘And then he told you that he left the study and went for a walk. That’s what he said, wasn’t it, Inspector?’

Thompson asked the question in a rhetorical tone that made it quite clear what he, at least, thought of Stephen Cade’s alibi.

‘He said he walked up to the main gate and came back to the study about five minutes later, when he found his father murdered.’

‘Yes. Now, Inspector, did you find any footprints to support Stephen Cade’s account?’

‘No. But I wouldn’t have expected to. The courtyard is stone and the drive is Tarmac.’

‘All right. Let me ask you this, then. Did you find any witnesses to back up his story?’

‘No. No, I didn’t.’

‘Thank you. Now one last question,’ said Thompson, smiling as if he felt he’d saved his best for last. ‘Did you find any of the defendant’s belongings in the study?’

‘We found his hat and coat.’

‘Ah, yes. Where were they?’

‘On a chair beside Professor Cade’s desk.’

‘And the professor himself. Where was his body in relation to this chair and in relation to the entrance doors to the room? Can you help us with that, Inspector?’

‘Why don’t you give the jury a chance to look at all this on the floor plan, Mr Thompson?’ said the judge, interrupting. ‘It might make it clearer.’

‘Yes, my lord, I should have thought of that. Members of the jury, if you look at the plan, you can see the courtyard is enclosed on three sides by the main part of the house and its two wings. Professor Cade’s study is the last room on the ground floor of the east wing. It faces into the courtyard, and you can see the French windows marked. The internal door in the corner of the room opens out into a corridor which runs the length of the east wing. You can take it up from there, Inspector,’ said Thompson, turning back to his witness.

‘Yes. The deceased was seated in one of the two armchairs positioned in the centre of the study, about midway between the two entrances,’ said Trave, holding up the plan. ‘The desk and the chair with the defendant’s hat and coat were further into the room.’

‘So the professor was between the doors and the defendant’s hat and coat?’

‘Yes. That’s right.’

‘Thank you, Inspector. That’s what I wanted to know. No more questions.’

Thompson sat down with a self-satisfied expression on his face and stole a glance at the jury. He knew what the jurors must be asking themselves: Why would Stephen Cade have gone for a walk at half past ten at night? And if he did, why didn’t he take his hat and coat? It was obvious he hadn’t been wearing them, because not even he could pretend that he put them back on the other side of his dead father’s body on his return.

No, the truth was inescapable. Stephen Cade never went for any walk at all. He was in the study the whole time, arguing with his father about his will, threatening him, and finally killing him with a pistol that he had brought along for that precise purpose.

Then, the next day, he’d told the police a ridiculous story in order to try to save himself. But it wouldn’t wash. With a little help from the prosecution, the jury would see right through it. It’d find him guilty, and then Judge Murdoch would make him pay for what he’d done. With his neck.




CHAPTER 2


That same evening, after court, Stephen Cade’s girlfriend, Mary Martin, came to visit him in Wandsworth Prison.

Sitting in the car in the early October twilight, she blocked out her companion and his anger and focused instead on the prison walls, which reared up high, black, and imposing at the end of the side street of terraced Victorian houses on which they’d parked a few minutes before.

Beside her, Paul kept his eyes half-closed and his breath came slowly, as if he was visibly trying to calm himself after his outburst moments earlier. But the grip of his hands on the steering wheel hadn’t relaxed and the whites of his knuckles showed through. Yet Mary remained impervious, her mind concentrated on preparing for the ordeal ahead. The first day of the trial was always going to be stressful, and the prison intimidated her for some reason – more each time she came. But that only increased her resolve to go through with the visit. She’d promised, and she wasn’t one to break her word, however much Paul pressed her to stay away.

Pulling down the mirror in the sun visor above the dashboard, she inspected herself closely. She was wearing no jewellery or cosmetics, but she didn’t need to. She had good, regular features, yet there was more to her face than just that. The fullness of her lips and the curves of her figure spoke of a sensuality that was half-belied by something watchful, almost withdrawn in her eyes. It made her mysterious and somehow challenging, and at times it almost made her beautiful.

Mary knew this, but the knowledge gave her no particular pleasure. She was a person entirely without vanity. Her pretty face was an asset to be exploited in her career. Nothing more. It got her better parts than plainer girls could hope for. And for that she was grateful. She certainly had no wish to be a poor actress. The life was difficult enough without being unsuccessful.

Satisfied with her appearance, Mary ran her hand through her thick chestnut-brown hair one last time, took a deep breath, and opened the door of the car. It was cold outside and she walked away quickly without a word to Paul or even a backward glance.

Inside the prison Mary waited with the other visitors in a whitewashed room dimly lit by a dusty tube of fluorescent lighting that flickered overhead as if it was just about to give up the ghost. All the walls were decorated with poorly typed notices about what could not be brought into the prison and what could not be taken out, and the biggest sign over on the far wall listed the penalties for assisting a prisoner to escape. Underneath it a young mother with an old face was trying to calm a screaming undernourished baby, while a warder sat behind a metal desk near the door reading a tabloid newspaper with his blue cap tipped down over his wide forehead.

Time passed slowly, and Mary counted out the minutes on the old black institutional clock hanging above the warder’s head. One, two, three, four, five, until exactly half past six when an invisible bell rang and everyone got to their feet, shuffling out into the main courtyard of the prison. It was almost dark now and Mary stayed at the back, following behind two local South London women who seemed to know each other well.

‘That’s where it happens. That’s where they do it. Florrie told me when I was last here,’ said one, adopting a theatrical stage whisper as she pointed excitedly over towards a two-storey red-brick building close to the west side of the perimeter wall. Its ordinariness was what made it noticeable. That and the lack of windows. There was only one, high up near the roof.

The unit, as it was known, was approached through a door in a wire fence, to which had been affixed a prominent ‘No Entry’ notice. The instruction did not seem necessary. Everyone in the courtyard, prisoners and warders alike, seemed to instinctively avoid going anywhere near the death house.

‘I know all about it. I’ve been here a lot more times than you, you know,’ said the other woman irritably. ‘I’ve seen them putting up the notices on the prison door in the early morning, and I’ve watched the families waiting outside, which is more than you have, Ethel. Huddled up in their cars in the cold. Some days they don’t let us in when there’s been a hanging. The prisoners get restless and the screws can’t control them properly. My Johnny’s told me what happens.’

‘Is that when they do it then? At dawn?’ asked Ethel, who was obviously used to accepting her friend’s sharp words without complaint.

‘No. It’s usually seven or eight o’clock in the morning, after the poor sod’s been nicely softened up by a night in the death cell, vomiting up his last meal if he was stupid enough to eat it in the first place. And stop bloody talking about it, Ethel. People don’t do that in here. You should know that.’

Ethel was silenced, and the two women covered the rest of the walk to the visitors’ block in silence, leaving Mary alone with her thoughts. She had known, of course, that they carried out executions here, but she had successfully managed to avoid identifying the actual place where it happened during her previous visits. She’d somehow assumed that it would be out of sight, but now she knew better. Ethel and her friend had seen to that, and Mary accepted the knowledge like an obligation.

At the door to the visits hall she paused, blinking in the sudden bright artificial glare of the overhead lights. There were no dark corners here where contraband could be passed across, under, or around the wooden tables, which were ranged in long rows from one end of the hall to the other. And along each wall warders in blue serge uniforms stood watching, occasionally stepping forward to enforce the rules forbidding any form of physical contact between inmates and outsiders.

Waiting in line for her pass to be checked at the front desk, Mary thought that the ceaseless unified drone of all the voices in the hall made the place seem like a vast beehive, but then she realized the comparison was far from apt. There was nothing productive happening here, and for most of the people in the room the short time together only made the subsequent separation from their loved ones even harder to bear. In the grip of a sudden claustrophobia, Mary half-wished she hadn’t come.

Directed to a table at the far end of the hall, Mary caught sight of Stephen before he saw her. His bright blue eyes were wide open but clearly unfocused on his present surroundings. Always the dreamer, she thought as she walked towards him down the aisle.

He had changed out of the suit he’d worn for court into the standard-issue prison uniform of blue-and-white-striped shirt and jeans, and he was now sitting in a characteristic pose: his elbows resting on the table, his head resting on his hands, and his long, tapering fingers interlaced as if in prayer, while his thumbs rhythmically caressed his Adam’s apple and the stubble on the underside of his chin. The top of his shirt was open, exposing the whiteness of his throat, and Mary suddenly stopped in her tracks, fighting to hold back images of the executioner fitting a noose around her lover’s neck, of the snap as the trapdoor opened beneath his feet, of Stephen hanging in the air, twisting and turning this way and that. All trussed up and dead. Everything around her suddenly seemed too real, too brightly lit, and she steadied herself for a moment against an empty chair.

I shouldn’t have listened to those bloody women, she thought as she caught Stephen’s eye and drew the outline of a smile across her suddenly pale face.

But for Stephen there was no effort. His face lit up as soon as he saw her. And the sudden glow transformed his features. The stubborn line that sometimes seemed fixed around his mouth disappeared in the radiance of his smile as he got up to pull out the chair on the other side of his table and instinctively brushed it down with a prison-issue handkerchief extracted from the pocket of his trousers.

‘Quite the gentleman,’ said Mary.

‘It’s the training,’ said Stephen. ‘English public schools, dinner parties at home, you know.’

‘Not exactly the ideal preparation for life inside this place,’ she said, looking around her at the lines of broken-down men in their ill-fitting prison uniforms. Stephen’s, surprisingly, fitted him quite well. He seemed to have the knack of making any clothes he wore seem like they were tailor-made.

‘Well, that’s where you’re wrong,’ he said, smiling. ‘My school had a lot in common with prison as a matter of fact. Lousy food, endless rules and regulations, an all-male population thinking about what they can’t have. And a whole lot of men in uniforms making sure they don’t get it.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Mary, laughing. ‘This is Wandsworth Prison, for God’s sake.’

‘True. And I’m sorry. I’m not thinking as usual. I hate you having to come here. It’s a horrible place. I wish they’d let me see you at court.’

Instinctively Stephen stretched out his fingers and touched the top of Mary’s hand for a moment. She looked up into his eyes for the first time since her arrival and thought how strange it was that he should be so concerned for her welfare when he was the one shut up inside this God-forsaken place, on trial for his life. He’d changed since Oxford, she realized. He wasn’t a boy any more; prison had made him a man.

‘Kissing’s not allowed, I’m afraid,’ he said, holding her gaze. ‘Strictly against the rules.’

Mary could understand why. She could hardly fail to have noticed the lust in many of the prisoners’ eyes when she’d walked past them. Sexual frustration hung in the air like a cloud of atmospheric pressure.

‘You looked good in court today,’ she said. ‘I liked the suit.’

‘I’m glad. Can’t say I did much. Made me feel like I was going to my own funeral.’

They were silent for a moment, both back in the courtroom with the dwarflike prosecutor relentlessly outlining the evidence against the accused.

‘You mustn’t worry, you know,’ he said, as if reading her thoughts. ‘I’ll be all right. Truth will out, you’ll see. Old Murder can do his damnedest, but it’s not his decision at the end of the day.’

‘Old Murder?’

‘Oh, sorry – that’s what they call our judge in here. They say he’s the worst of the lot. But the nickname’s pretty good, don’t you think? He looked at me today like he’d got half a mind to come down off his bench and throttle me himself. God knows why. It’s not like he even knows me.’

Stephen fell silent, as if frightened at how doubt had so quickly replaced his earlier optimism. But then his lips tightened in defiance. ‘I didn’t do it, you know,’ he said suddenly. ‘I couldn’t have killed him even if I’d wanted to. He was my father, for Christ’s sake. It’d be like murdering part of myself.’

‘You said you hated him,’ she said.

‘Yes. And I loved him too. Love and hate aren’t so far apart, you know.’

Stephen was silent again for a moment, and there was a faraway look in his eyes when he went on: ‘There’s not a day goes by that I don’t feel guilty about leaving him alone that night. Opening the door for whoever it was to walk straight in there and put a bullet through his head.’

‘How were you to know?’

‘I wasn’t. I just wish I hadn’t left him, that’s all. No one deserves to die like that.’

‘What about that family in France?’ asked Mary, leaning forward across the table. ‘He herded them into a church like cattle. That’s what you told me. Did they deserve what happened to them?’

‘No, I know. You’re right. There are just too many ghosts. That’s the trouble. Too many unanswered questions,’ said Stephen, returning to the present with a half-forced smile. ‘Like who killed my father. My defence team doesn’t seem to be getting too far with that one unfortunately. And there’s not much I can do to help them while I’m sitting here.’

‘You’ve got to trust them,’ said Mary. ‘You’ve got a good barrister. Everyone says so.’

‘I know, I know. You’re right as usual. But enough about me. Tell me about yourself. Are you working?’

‘No, of course not. How could I come to court if I was acting as well? The stress is bad enough as it is.’

‘You’re right. It’s not easy.’

Mary bit her lip, unable to understand her irritation. What was she doing complaining about stress when Stephen was on trial for his life?

‘How’s your mother?’ asked Stephen, trying to keep up the conversation. ‘Is she any better?’

‘A little, maybe.’

‘I’m sorry. Have you been to see her again?’

‘Yes.’

‘And your brother. Did he go too?’

‘No. Yes. What do you want me to say? Why do you always keep asking me about Paul?’ asked Mary, irritated again.

‘Sorry,’ said Stephen defensively. ‘I guess it just felt a bit strange that you never wanted to introduce him to me. That’s all. It doesn’t matter now. Let’s talk about something else.’

But there was no time. A speaker on the wall crackled into life giving a two-minute warning. And it had the same effect as on Mary’s previous visits, pressurizing them both into an awkward silence.

‘I love you, Mary,’ said Stephen.

‘And I love you too,’ she replied.

But it was too pat. The place robbed their words of meaning. And there was no time left to explain, to connect, to try to work out where everything had gone wrong.

Mary got up to go. And afterwards, left on his own at the table, Stephen followed her with his eyes until she disappeared into the throng of other visitors leaving through the door at the back of the hall. And involuntarily he wondered whether she would be driving away from the prison alone or whether there would be someone waiting to meet her on the other side of the high wall surmounted with barbed wire that separated him so entirely from the life he’d left behind.




CHAPTER 3


In court the next morning, Gerald Thompson watched his opposite number get slowly to his feet. John Swift was a tall, willowy, good-looking man in his late forties. He’d been a pilot in the war, one of those who’d led a charmed life, guiding his Spitfire through everything the Germans and later the Japanese had been able to throw at him without once being shot down. Things came easily to him. As a barrister, he had an instinctive ability to see what mattered, to find what was persuasive in a case and get it across to a jury in a way that they could understand. Except in this case. Here, everything seemed to point towards the defendant’s guilt, and on top of that Stephen Cade was his own worst enemy. He was headstrong and unmalleable. And his interview with the police was a disaster.

Swift was the son of the second to last Lord Chancellor, born with a solid silver spoon in his mouth. He’d been educated at Eton and Oxford. He was rich and well liked. A true war hero. He was, in short, everything that Thompson was not, and Thompson hated him for it, hated him secretly and with a passion. This high-profile case was exactly what Thompson had been praying for. He’d get his conviction, and he’d make a fool of John Swift in the process. No one would call him Tiny Thompson after this or poke fun at his working-class origins behind his back. Swift sensed the prosecutor’s malevolence, but there were other, more pressing things on his mind as he began his cross-examination of Inspector Trave. He couldn’t get a handle on the case. He needed a way in and he couldn’t find one, though it wasn’t for want of trying.

‘My client was arrested on the same night that his father’s body was discovered. Is that right, Inspector?’ asked Swift.

‘Yes. On the fifth of June. He was arrested on the basis of what we were told by Mr Ritter at the scene. That the defendant had unlocked the door of the study from the inside to let him in.’

‘And Mr Ritter was the first to respond to my client shouting in the study?’

‘I don’t think I can answer that, I’m afraid. I can only tell you the reason why we arrested Stephen Cade. I can’t give direct evidence about what happened in the house before I arrived.’

‘Of course he can’t. You shouldn’t need a policeman to tell you that, Mr Swift,’ said Judge Murdoch irritably. ‘How can the inspector know who shouted, or if anyone shouted for that matter?’

‘He can’t, my lord. I’m sorry. Let me ask you about the cause of death, Inspector. Only one bullet had been fired from the pistol that you found on the side table. Is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘And it had entered the professor’s forehead?’

‘Yes. And lodged in his brain.’

‘To use a popular expression, he’d been shot between the eyes.’

‘Just above a point between the eyes.’

‘Thank you. It was an execution-type shooting. That’s my point. Would you agree with that description?’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘To achieve that kind of precision with a bullet, wouldn’t you need considerable skill as a marksman?’

‘I don’t know. I’m not an expert.’

‘No. Quite right, Inspector. You’re not,’ said the judge. ‘Is there evidence of the distance from which the shot was fired, Mr Thompson?’

‘About twelve feet according to the report, my lord,’ said the prosecutor, reading from one of his many files.

‘I see. Not exactly a great distance, Mr Swift.’

‘No, my lord. I’ve made my point. I’ll move on. You’ve told us about Mr and Mrs Ritter, Inspector. Who else was in the house on the night of the murder?’

‘The defendant’s girlfriend, Mary Martin; his elder brother, Silas Cade; and Sasha Vigne.’

‘Who’s she?’

‘She was Professor Cade’s personal assistant. The professor had a large collection of valuable manuscripts, which were housed in a gallery on the first floor of the main body of the house. It’s my understanding that she helped the professor with cataloguing them and with research for a book that he was writing on medieval art history.’

‘I see. Now where were these other people located in the house?’

‘Everyone was in the drawing room when I arrived. Awaiting questioning.’

‘No, that’s not what I meant, Inspector. Where were their bedrooms?’

‘All on the first floor of the west wing. Only the Ritters and Professor Cade himself slept on the east side.’

‘And what about the grounds? They’re quite extensive, aren’t they?’

‘Yes. There are stone terraces around the house with lawns beyond.’

‘And quite a lot of trees as well?’

‘Yes.’

‘The drive is tree lined, is it not?’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘We don’t need a National Trust tour of the Moreton Manor gardens, Mr Swift,’ interrupted the judge. ‘What’s the point you’re trying to make?’

‘That an intruder could hide in the trees, my lord.’

‘If there was an intruder. You’d better ask the inspector about the security system. It looks fairly state-of-the-art in the photographs.’

‘I was just about to,’ said Swift, keeping a smile stretched across his features by an extraordinary effort of will. ‘Please do as his lordship asked, Inspector. Tell us about the security system.’

‘The main gate is the only exit from the grounds,’ said Trave. ‘A Tarmac drive leads up to it from the courtyard. Otherwise there’s a high brick wall surmounted by broken glass and electric wiring surrounding the estate. The wiring is connected to an alarm system operated from inside the house.’

‘I see. The professor must have been very worried about the possibility of a break-in. Would you agree that the system would have cost a lot of money?’

‘Yes. I’d say so.’

‘And what about the main gate? How is that opened?’

‘It’s also operated electronically either from a unit beside the gate or by remote control from inside the house.’

‘Was the gate open or closed when police arrived?’

‘Officers Clayton and Watts were the first to attend. It’s my understanding that they found the gate closed.’

‘And what about the doors of the house itself?’

‘I entered through the main front door, which was half open when I arrived. All the other exit doors of the property were locked except for the French windows in the professor’s study, which were also partially open, and the door at the front of the west wing, which was closed but not locked.’

‘These French windows to the study. There are thick, floor-length curtains in front of them. Isn’t that right, Inspector?’

‘Yes. They were half drawn.’

‘And there would be space between the curtains and the doors for a person to hide if he wanted to?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Making him invisible to a person inside the room.’

‘Yes.’

‘Thank you. Now Mr Thompson asked you some questions about my client’s interview …’

‘One moment, Mr Swift,’ interrupted the judge. ‘I’m sure you want the members of the jury to have a full picture of this security system. Isn’t that right?’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘Well, perhaps the inspector can help us with whether there is any record of the alarm going off on the night of the murder.’

‘No record, my lord,’ said Trave.

‘And is there any forensic evidence of anyone breaking into the house or the grounds? Any disturbance to the broken glass on top of the perimeter wall that you were telling us about? Any cut wires?’

‘No, there was nothing like that.’

‘Thank you, Inspector. I just wanted to clear that up, Mr Swift.’

‘Of course, my lord,’ said the defence counsel, trying not to allow his irritation to creep into his voice. ‘Now, Inspector, you will recall that my client told you that he walked up to the main gate twice that evening.’

‘Yes. Once before his interview with his father and once afterwards.’

‘And on the first occasion he told you that he found the main gate open.’

‘Yes. He said that he closed it. And that it was still closed when he went back there after seeing his father.’

‘Thank you. Now, what else did my client tell you about his first visit to the main gate?’

‘He said that he saw a black Mercedes parked on the verge a little further down the road on the opposite side from the gate. It was parked beside a public telephone box, and the door of the kiosk seemed to be wedged open. He said that he saw the same thing when he went back there an hour later.’

‘Did he say that he saw the driver of the car on either occasion?’

‘He said he could see the figure of the driver but nothing more than that.’

‘Why are we hearing about all this now, Mr Swift?’ asked the judge. ‘Your client’s interview can be read to the jury at the appropriate time, and he himself can give evidence about what happened if he chooses to.’

The judge’s tone of voice made it clear that he thought the defendant might have very good reasons for not going into the witness box and exposing himself to cross-examination. But Swift was ready for the judge this time.

‘It’s a matter of timing, my lord.’

‘I know that. That’s what I just said.’

‘No, I don’t mean that. I believe that the inspector will have something else to say about the Mercedes car on the night of the murder, and it’s important that my client told the police about it before the further information became available to them.’

‘All right. Well, get on with it then.’

‘Thank you, my lord. Inspector, were there any other relevant reports of a black Mercedes in the vicinity of Moreton Manor on that night?’

‘Yes. There was a car of that type stopped for speeding on the road from Moreton to Oxford. It was stopped at 11:15 p.m. The driver gave his name as Noirtier and provided an address in Oxford, which subsequently turned out to be false. He did not respond to a summons to attend court, and there has been no trace of him since. The record of the stop says that he was aged about thirty and spoke with a thick foreign accent.’

‘Did you notice the black Mercedes when you arrived at the manor house, Inspector?’

‘No. But I wasn’t the first to arrive.’

‘Yes. Officer Clayton may be able to help us. Returning to my client’s account of events in interview, Inspector, he told you that he wore his hat and coat on his first visit to the main gate. Isn’t that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘But he then left them in the study after his interview with Professor Cade.’

‘Yes, that’s what he said.’

‘The weather conditions on that night are going to be relevant here, Inspector. Would you agree that there was some light rain in the early part of the evening?’

‘Yes, it died out about eight, and it was dry after that.’

‘And the temperature was in fact quite warm.’

‘I’d say it was average for the time of year. There was some wind, as I said earlier.’

‘Thank you. Now, there’s just one other area that I want to cover with you, Inspector. My client, Stephen Cade, told you in interview about somebody else with a motive and desire to kill his father. That’s right, isn’t it?’

‘He talked about certain events involving his father that occurred in northern France in the summer of 1944.’ Trave spoke slowly, as if he were choosing his words carefully.

‘Basically, Stephen told you that he and his brother Silas discovered about two years ago that their father and Sergeant Ritter, as he then was, had killed a French family and their servants at a place called Marjean, in order to obtain a valuable medieval manuscript known as the Marjean codex.’

‘Yes. That’s what he said.’

‘And that the professor was subsequently shot and wounded in his left lung during a visit to France in 1956, which was the cause of the serious ill health that he suffered from during the last three years of his life.’

‘I believe so.’

‘And finally that the professor received a blackmail letter the following year, threatening to expose him if he did not go to London and hand over the codex.’

‘Yes.’

‘Is that a fair summary of what the defendant told you in interview about this aspect of the case, Inspector?’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’ Trave looked uncomfortable.

‘Well, then, I’m sure you know what my next question is going to be. Why didn’t you go to Marjean to investigate for yourself who shot Professor Cade in 1956 and sent him the blackmail letter the following year?’

Trave gave Swift a look of quick penetration, and then closed his eyes hard, as if he wanted to blot something out of his consciousness. When he opened them again he was looking at Gerald Thompson, and he was still looking at the prosecutor when he gave his reply.

‘It was a prosecution decision,’ he said quietly.

‘But was it your decision?’

Gerald Thompson gave Trave no chance to answer Swift’s question. ‘With respect, Mr Swift’s question is an improper one, my lord,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘The decision to charge the defendant was based on very strong evidence of motive, opportunity, and fingerprint connection to the gun and the locked door of the study. The defendant’s interview did not change any of this, and it is not for the prosecution to build a defence.’

‘No, you’re quite right. It isn’t,’ said the judge nodding emphatically in agreement. ‘If you have an alternative explanation for the victim’s murder, then advance it in the proper way, Mr Swift. Don’t attack the prosecution for not doing your own work.’

Swift turned his head away from the judge’s glare and made a series of mental calculations. He itched to take on Murdoch, who seemed intent on conducting the trial on just the legal side of bias. But the unanswered question might play best on the jury’s mind if it remained unanswered, and he could make more mileage out of Marjean when it came to cross-examining Ritter. He had one good question left to ask the officer. He’d ask it and leave the French business hanging in the air for the present.

‘It’s right, isn’t it, Inspector, that my client, Stephen Cade, is a young man without any previous convictions? He had never been arrested before the night of his father’s murder and it was the first time he had been interviewed by the police.’

‘Yes, that’s true,’ said Trave. ‘He is a man of good character.’

Swift felt a note of resignation or even sadness in the policeman’s voice and half-wished that he had persisted with his questions about the investigation, but it was too late now. The policeman’s evidence was over.

It was the mid-morning recess and Trave waited for Thompson to come out of court. He knew he was wasting his time, but he still had to try.

‘What do you want, Inspector?’ asked the prosecutor. He didn’t make any attempt to conceal his irritation.

‘A moment of your time.’

‘Very well.’

The two men walked over to a corner of the great hall outside the court. Trave was at least a foot higher than the barrister, and his attempt to walk with a stoop so as to bring their heads closer together only accentuated Thompson’s consciousness of his shortness. The barrister’s irritation grew into outright anger.

‘What’s wrong with you, Trave?’ he said. ‘Are you trying to prosecute that young hooligan or are you trying to defend him?’

‘What are you talking about, Mr Thompson?’ Trave was unprepared for the prosecutor’s sudden verbal assault.

‘I’m talking about your evidence. About the doubt and uncertainty that you’ve been helping friend Swift throw around in there.’

‘I told the truth, Mr Thompson,’ said Trave, becoming annoyed himself. ‘And yes, I do have doubts. Frankly, I don’t understand why you don’t too. The truth is I didn’t investigate this case properly. I see that now and I feel bad about it. It’s not too late for me to go to France.’

‘Yes, it is.’ Thompson almost spat out the words. ‘Stephen Cade is guilty. I’ve got his fingerprints on the weapon and the key. Ritter heard him unlock the door. And in a few minutes the jury is going to hear from the victim’s solicitor about his motive. A powerful motive, Mr Trave. Now I’m not going to allow you or friend Swift in there to muddy the water. Do you hear me, Inspector? Stay out of it. Your work on this case is over.’

Thompson pushed past Trave, and the artificially heightened heels of his shiny black patent-leather shoes rang on the marble floor as he crossed to the door of the courtroom. After a moment Trave followed him. His work might be over, but he felt an obligation to see out its results. He sat down, waiting for Thompson to call his next witness.

Several minutes later a small balding man in a tight-fitting pinstripe suit came into court, fidgeting with his bowler hat.

‘Charles Blackburn’s my name. I’m a solicitor by profession,’ he announced in a slightly pompous voice after taking the oath.

‘Is it correct that one of your clients was the late Professor John Cade?’ asked Thompson, getting straight to the point.

‘That’s right.’

‘What work did you do for him?’

‘I looked after some of his business affairs. I drew up his will …’

‘When?’ asked Thompson, interrupting. ‘When did you do that?’

‘About seven years ago. The will had to be changed after Mrs Cade died. But it was still fairly simple. The residual beneficiaries were the professor’s sons, Stephen and Silas.’

‘And did you then have any further discussions about the will with the professor?’

‘Not until earlier this year. It would have been about a month or so before his death that we first discussed new arrangements.’

‘Tell us about those arrangements, Mr Blackburn,’ asked Thompson encouragingly.

‘Well, basically he was talking about setting up a trust to run Moreton Manor House as a museum, housing his collection of manuscripts.’

‘Who were the trustees going to be?’

‘The professor hadn’t finally decided. Sergeant Ritter was going to be one of them.’

‘What about the sons?’

‘Probably not. The effect of the change of will would have been to disinherit them.’

‘I see,’ said Thompson, pausing to allow the jury to absorb the full implications of the solicitor’s last answer. ‘Now I’d like to show you exhibit 14. It’s the professor’s engagement diary, which was found on the desk in his study. It was open at the entry for 8 June. Read us the entry please, Mr Blackburn.’

‘Blackburn. Will. Three o’clock.’

‘That’s right. Can you tell us anything about that?’ asked Thompson.

‘Yes. I had an appointment with Professor Cade at that time for him to give me final instructions, so that I could draw up the new will and trust documents.’

‘But his death prevented him from keeping the appointment.’

‘Yes.’

‘Thank you, Mr Blackburn. You’ve been most helpful. No more questions.’

Deep in the bowels of the Old Bailey, the gaolers allowed Swift a short interview with his client.

The barrister took off his horsehair wig and laid it down beside his file of papers on the iron table that separated him from Stephen. The headgear was useful sometimes for intimidating witnesses, keeping lines of division intact. But now Swift wanted to connect. He needed to get through to his client, make him understand that a change of direction was necessary.

‘The will gives them the motive, Stephen. That’s the problem.’

‘I wouldn’t have killed my father for money. Or anybody else for that matter. It’s so stupid. Can’t you see that?’ Stephen’s sudden anger took the barrister aback, even though it was not the first time that Swift had seen it. The trial was clearly beginning to take a toll on the young man.

‘Listen, Stephen,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to calm down. Take a few steps back. Get a little less passionate.’

‘Less passionate! You’d be passionate if you had to sit up there all day watching that old bastard twist everything round against me. I thought he was supposed to be impartial.’

‘He is. But there’s not much we can do about it at the moment, and your anger just plays into the prosecution’s hands,’ said Swift, putting sufficient urgency into his voice to make Stephen look him in the eye. ‘The jurors are watching you, Stephen. They can see you boiling over, and it makes them think you’re capable of doing what the prosecution says you did. Capable of killing.’

‘Whoever killed my father didn’t lose his temper. You made that point yourself when you were cross-examining that policeman. You called it an execution-type killing. Not the same as a crime of passion.’

‘No, it isn’t. But don’t bank on the jury being as clever as you, Stephen. The case against you is too strong for you to stay out of the witness box …’

‘I want to give evidence,’ said Stephen, interrupting. ‘I’d insist on it, even if you tried to stop me. They’re going to hear the truth from someone before all this is over.’

‘But the truth isn’t always enough in this place, Stephen. Can’t you see that? It’s what the jury decides is true that matters.’

‘No, I don’t see it. I’m not a cynic like you. I believe in something, even if you don’t.’

‘I believe in trying to keep you alive.’ Swift stopped suddenly. He’d have given a great deal to take back his words, but it was too late now. His need to get through to Stephen had got the better of his own judgement and had led him to break one of his most important rules: Never talk about execution to a client on a capital charge; keep him focused on the past and the present, but never the future. He’ll fall apart otherwise.

‘I’m sorry, Stephen,’ he said, breaking the awkward silence. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. Please forgive me.’

‘Okay,’ Stephen agreed softly. There was a tremor in his voice.

‘Let me start again,’ said Swift. ‘My point is that you have to keep your emotions in check, particularly when you come to give evidence. Thompson will try to provoke you into anger, and if he succeeds, he’ll turn it against you. He’s clever at what he does. I’ve seen him do it before. Many times.

‘You saw it, members of the jury, didn’t you?’ Swift said in sudden imitation of Thompson’s voice, and Stephen was struck by the accuracy of the impression. ‘You saw the way his fists clenched in rage when I asked him just a few simple questions. Imagine those hands on a pistol, members of the jury. Imagine the fingers clenching around the trigger.’

‘All right,’ said Stephen, holding up his hands. ‘I get the point. I’ll watch myself.’

‘Thank you. Now there’s one other thing. I need you to let me widen the net.’

‘What net?’

‘The net of possible suspects. This foreigner in the Mercedes just isn’t enough.’

‘But I’m not the only one who saw him. That police officer, the one who first came to the house, says in his statement that there was a car parked on the other side of the road. By the phone box.’

‘Officer Clayton?’

‘That’s right. He says that it drove off while he was buzzing to be let in at the gate.’

‘I know he does,’ said Swift patiently. ‘But the man could just have been making a phone call.’

‘Not all evening he wasn’t. I saw him twice earlier, remember.’

‘There’s only your word for that.’

‘Then what about the Frenchman in the Mercedes that was stopped for speeding? At 11:15. The time fits. You said that yourself.’

Swift could hear the anxiety creeping back into his client’s voice. He didn’t want to press Stephen any further, but he felt he had no choice.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Clayton will give evidence, and I’ll make all the points about the Mercedes – the one at the gate and the one that was stopped for speeding. But the driver’s still never going to be anything more than a sideshow, whatever I say.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, for a start, we can’t explain how he could’ve entered the house. He can’t have come through the gate because you closed it on him when you went up there before seeing your father, and any other route of entry is scotched by this damn security system. I’m sorry to have to tell you all this, Stephen, but it’s no use denying facts. I know you think everything’s related to the blackmail letter and what happened in France fifteen years ago. But it’s all just too tenuous. We did what you asked us to. I sent an investigator over to Rouen, and the records office told him there were no close living relatives of the murdered family or their servants.’

‘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 Marseille 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.’




CHAPTER 4


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 post-mortem 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.

‘Hello, 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 something 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 afterwards 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 realize 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 step 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 trumpets 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.

Sasha was wearing a sun hat that Silas had never seen before. Its wide brim concealed her face from Silas as he looked down on her from above and felt the usual agitation that she aroused in him. Sasha’s movements were erratic. She would spend days poring over manuscripts in the long gallery or in the professor’s study, and then would disappear without warning into Oxford. Silas had watched her, focusing his telephoto lens through the different windows, and it hadn’t taken him long to see that she was searching for something specific, something that she hadn’t yet found. Silas guessed at what it might be, but he hadn’t so far had the courage to talk to her about it. She was supposedly staying at the manor house to finish cataloguing the manuscripts, but that task must now be long done. Silas feared that any discussion of her reasons for remaining would force Sasha into an early departure, and that was something that he could not bear to contemplate.

Acting on impulse, he pushed up the lower part of the sash window and called down.

‘Where are you going, Sasha?’

Sasha jumped at the sudden noise breaking the stillness of the morning and put her hand on the crown of her head, as if to prevent her hat from falling off. It was the old preoccupation: Her elaborately structured brown hair and high collars were there to hide the livid red burn that disfigured her neck and shoulders. But the burn was too high, and she could never fully conceal it. Men were drawn to her brown eyes and full lips and the clear soft complexion of her face, but the contrast with the ravaged flesh below only increased their repulsion when they got closer to her. All except Silas, who seemed to follow her all the time. With his eyes. In person. Recently he’d seemed almost omnipresent. It was as if he was attracted by her disfigurement. She dreaded that one day he might ask her about it.

‘I’m going into Oxford. I need to do some things,’ she said, filling her voice with all the discouragement that she could muster.

But Silas was undeterred. Sasha’s upturned face and his position in the window above her gave him a sense of power.

‘Let me give you a lift. I can have the car out in a moment.’

It was his father’s car. The Rolls-Royce was the first concrete proof of his inheritance. He wanted Sasha inside it, the sense of her body resting against the soft grey leather of the seat beside him, so that he could take his hand off the steering wheel and caress that place at the nape of her neck where her perfect skin met its burnt counterpart.

Silas turned away from the window without waiting for Sasha to protest any further and ran down the stairs. Five minutes later he had his wish, and they were passing through the sleepy village of Moreton. In the valley below, the city of Oxford was spread out before them: rivers and parks and old stone buildings surrounded by high walls. The sun glinted on the silver and gold domes of the city’s churches, and Silas pressed his foot down on the accelerator and allowed the car to gather speed as it went down the hill and up again, past the scene of his mother’s death.

‘That policeman was here today,’ he said, making conversation.

‘Which policeman?’

‘Trave. The one in charge of the case.’

‘What did he want?’

‘I don’t know. Just poking around, asking stupid questions.’

‘About what?’

‘What I felt about my father. Things like that.’

‘What did you feel about him?’

‘I don’t know. He was selfish – I mean really selfish. But you know that. It was like he didn’t feel anything. And yet he was clever. He knew a lot, more than I’ll ever know.’

‘You admired him?’

‘In a way. He was my father.’

‘I know that.’ It sounded like an accusation.

They lapsed into an uneasy silence and Silas found it almost painful not to reach out and touch Sasha, who sat with her head turned away, willing herself towards her destination.

‘Have you seen the Ritters today?’ Silas asked, not because he was interested, but in order to get some reaction out of his companion.

‘Him, but not her. He said she was sick again.’

‘He probably hit her. Didn’t you hear the shouting two nights ago?’

‘Yes, he’s disgusting. Like an animal.’ Sasha spoke with sudden passion, and at the same time, two bright red patches appeared in the centre of her normally pale cheeks.

‘I’ll ask him to leave if you like.’ The idea had often crossed Silas’s mind since his father’s death, but he had never quite had the courage to go through with it.

‘That’s up to you. It’s your house. Perhaps you don’t want me there any more either.’

‘No, I do. Really I do.’

Silas cursed himself for raising the possibility of Sasha’s departure, and he turned round towards her to add emphasis to his words, taking his eye off the road as he did so.

‘Look out,’ Sasha shouted, and Silas was only just in time to slam his foot down on the brake and bring the car to a shuddering halt, inches away from an old woman crossing the road in front of them. His arm shot out across Sasha to prevent her being thrown forward, and he felt her breast against his hand for a moment, before she pushed him away.

‘You’re an idiot, Silas,’ she said angrily. ‘You could have killed that old woman, and us too.’

Silas said nothing. Instead he bent down to help Sasha, who was busy picking up the papers and books that had fallen out of her bag onto the floor. There was one yellowed document that caught his attention. It was covered with a spidery handwriting that Silas didn’t recognize. He noticed the date 1936 in the top corner and a name, John of Rome. It seemed to be a translation of some kind, but Silas had no chance to read any more before Sasha snatched the paper out of his hand.

‘Its part of our work on the catalogue,’ she said, even though Silas had not asked for any explanation. ‘Your father would have wanted me to finish it.’

They drove on into Oxford in silence, passing Silas’s little photographic shop and studio on the Cowley Road. He had spent hardly any time there since the murder, and he made a mental note to give the landlord notice at the end of the month. His inheritance at least meant that he wouldn’t need to earn his living as a humble portrait photographer any longer.

Sasha got out of the car almost without warning at a traffic light in Holywell and hurried away down a side street, clutching her shoulder bag tight to her side. Silas pulled over, half onto the pavement, and left the car unlocked as he ran after her. But she was already out of sight by the time he got to the first corner, and after a minute or two he gave up looking for her and went home.




CHAPTER 5


Sasha stepped out from behind the back gate of New College and looked around. Silas was nowhere in sight. She’d known instinctively that he’d try to follow her, although she still couldn’t understand his apparent infatuation. It repelled her, and she wished she could leave the manor house and never see its new owner again. Perhaps she should. In truth she was close to giving up on finding the codex. In the last five months, she’d turned the leaves of every manuscript that John Cade owned, but nothing had fallen out. She’d stared into every recess, tapped every wall, and found nothing – only the diary secreted in the hollow base of the study bookcase that she’d discovered two days ago.

Sasha held the book close to her as she hurried through a network of narrow cobbled lanes, turning left and right, apparently at random. She remembered her excitement when she first found it. The study had been dark apart from her torch, and for a moment she felt as if Cade was there, watching her from the armchair where he used to sit, slowly rotating his thick tongue around his thin lips as he turned vellum pages one by one. Sasha had never been a superstitious person, but still she’d shivered and hurried away with the book to study it in the privacy of her room. Pausing for a moment to take a key out of her pocket, Sasha remembered the disappointment she’d felt as the first grey light had filtered through her window and she’d realized that the diary had taken her no nearer to the object of her search. She felt certain now that the old bastard had had the codex, but she still had no idea where it was. It was a secret that he’d taken with him to the grave. Unless her father could help. He was her last chance.

Sasha had stopped outside a tall old house that had clearly seen better days. The paint was cracked and dirty, and a row of bells by the door pointed to multiple occupation. But she didn’t press any of them. Instead she used her key to unlock the door, and then climbed four flights of a steep, uncarpeted staircase to the very top of the house, knocked lightly, and went in.

A white-haired man in a threadbare cardigan sat in the very middle of a battered leather sofa in the centre of the room. He looked at least ten years older than his real age of sixty-seven. His whole body was painfully thin, his face was deeply lined, and he sat very still except for the hands that trembled constantly in his lap. In the corner, a violin concerto that Sasha didn’t recognize was playing on a gramophone balanced precariously on two towers of books. Everywhere in the room were similar piles, and Sasha had to navigate a careful path between them to reach her father. She arrived just in time to stop his getting to his feet. Instead, she kissed him awkwardly on the crown of his head and then went over to a rudimentary kitchen area beside the single dirty window and began making tea.

‘How have you been?’ she asked.

‘Not bad,’ said the old man just like he always did, speaking in the hoarse whisper that represented all that was left of his voice after the throat cancer he had fought off three years before. Now it was Parkinson’s disease that he was up against, and Sasha wondered how long his ravaged frame would hold out. She loved her father and constantly wished that he would allow her to do more, but he was obstinate, holding on fiercely to what was left of his independence.

‘You’ve brought something,’ he said, looking down at the bag that Sasha had left on the sofa.

‘Yes, it’s Cade’s diary. I found it hidden in his study. It’s only for five years though. From 1935 through to 1940. Nothing after that. I don’t know whether he stopped writing it or whether the next one’s hidden somewhere else.’

‘It was the war,’ said the old man. ‘Professor Cade became Colonel Cade, remember? No more time for autobiography.’

‘You’re probably right. The book’s pretty interesting, though. Except that there’s nothing in it about what he did to you. Look, here.’ Sasha opened the book and pointed to a series of entries dating from late 1937. ‘Anyone reading this would think that he won that professorship on merit. It’s vile. He called himself a historian, and yet he spent his whole life falsifying history. He knew you were going to win, and so he fabricated that story about you and that student.’

‘Higgins. He wasn’t very attractive.’ Andrew Blayne smiled, trying to defuse his daughter’s anger.

‘I thought I could get you back your good name.’

‘I know you did. But it doesn’t matter now. It’s all ancient history.’

‘It matters to me.’ Sasha’s voice rose as her old sense of outrage took over. She felt her father’s humiliation like it had happened only yesterday. Cade had persuaded one of his rival’s pupils to allege a homosexual relationship and the mud had stuck. Andrew Blayne had lost the contest for the chair in medieval art history and had then been forced by his college to resign his fellowship. Since then he had supported himself through poorly paid private tutoring and temporary lecturing jobs at provincial universities, until ill health had put a stop even to that.

His wife, Sasha’s mother, was a strict Roman Catholic and had chosen to believe every one of the scurrilous allegations against her husband. She’d left him in his hour of need, taking their five-year-old daughter with her, and had then stopped the girl from seeing her father for most of her childhood. Sasha had always found this cruelty harder to forgive than all her mother’s neglect, and Andrew Blayne had remained the most important man in his daughter’s life.

‘Clearing my name wasn’t the main reason why you ignored all my objections and went to work for that man, was it, Sasha?’ said Andrew reflectively, as he stirred the tea in his chipped mug. He noticed how Sasha had filled it only halfway to the top to avoid the risk of his spilling hot tea on his trousers. It suddenly made him feel like an old man.

‘You wanted to find the Marjean codex. Just like I did years ago. Because you thought it would lead you to St Peter’s cross,’ he went on when she did not answer. ‘You should be careful, my dear. You’re not the first to have followed that trail. Look what happened to John Cade.’

‘That’s got nothing to do with the codex,’ said Sasha, sounding almost annoyed. ‘Cade’s son killed him. He’s on trial at the Old Bailey right now, and I’ve got to give evidence next week. Don’t you ever read the newspapers?’

‘Not if I can avoid it. And plenty of innocent people get put on trial for crimes they didn’t commit, Sasha. They get convicted too.’

‘Not this one. The evidence is overwhelming. But look, I didn’t come here to talk about Stephen Cade’s trial.’

‘You came here to talk about the codex.’

‘Yes.’ Sasha’s voice was suddenly flat, full of her disappointment over all her fruitless searches of the last few weeks.

‘I’ll tell you again. I think you should leave it alone.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because the codex, the cross – they should be yours. He stole everything from you.’

‘No, he didn’t, Sasha. I could have looked for the cross if I’d wanted to, but I didn’t. I chose not to.’

‘With no money?’ said Sasha passionately. ‘What could you do after he’d taken your livelihood away?’

The old man didn’t answer. He looked up at his daughter and smiled, before using both hands to contrive a sip of tea from his mug. But Sasha wouldn’t let it go.

‘I want to make it all up to you, Dad. Can’t you see that?’

‘I know you do, Sasha. But can’t you see that I don’t need objects? They mean nothing to me any more.’

‘I don’t believe you. Not this object.’

Not for the first time her father’s quiet stoicism grated on Sasha. It was beyond her comprehension that he could be so indifferent to what had been taken from him. Did he know more than he was saying? about Cade’s death? about the codex? and the cross? Suspicion creased her brow.

‘Look, I can’t even hold a cup of tea properly in my hand,’ said Blayne, gesturing with his shaking hand.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know.’ She felt foolish for a moment, ashamed of herself, looking down at her father’s ravaged body. She felt as if her long, fruitless search for codex and cross had started to make her see shadows in even the brightest corners.

‘I just want to have you and for you to be happy. That’s all,’ said Blayne.

It was hard to resist the appeal in his quavering voice or the tears glistening in his eyes, but Sasha’s face hardened, and she turned away from her father. Her jaw was set, and her lips folded in on themselves. She looked almost ugly.

‘I have to find it,’ she said quietly. ‘I’ve gone too far to stop now.’

Father and daughter looked deep into each other’s eyes for a moment before Andrew Blayne let go of Sasha’s sleeve and allowed his head to fall back against the sofa. He seemed to concentrate all his attention on a stain on the corner of the ceiling, and he kept his gaze fixed there even when he started speaking again.

‘Perhaps you’re wasting your time,’ he said. ‘Perhaps Cade never even had the codex.’

‘But I know he did,’ said Sasha passionately. ‘That’s why this diary is so important. Look, let me show it to you. You remember that he supposedly hired me to help him with research for his book on illuminated manuscripts?’

‘The magnum opus.’

‘Exactly. But he didn’t really care about that at all. He was obsessed with St Peter’s cross. He kept sending me to this library and that, looking for clues. But it was a wild-goose chase, and I think he half-knew that deep down. He was like a man who’s followed a trail to its logical end and found nothing there. He goes back, taking every side turn that he passed before but without any faith that they’ll lead anywhere.’

‘And he needed you because he couldn’t do his own research. Because he wouldn’t go out.’

‘Yes, he was always frightened,’ said Sasha. ‘But the interesting part was that he was always looking for the cross in any place except the one where it ought to be.’

‘In Marjean?’

‘Yes. It was like he already knew it wasn’t there. I tested him once. I showed him the John of Rome letter. It was a risk that he’d connect me with you, but I don’t think he did. I said that I’d found a copy in the Bodleian Library. But he wasn’t interested. He said it was a false trail. A waste of time.’

‘I remember you telling me that,’ said the old man, becoming increasingly interested in spite of himself. ‘I was the one who showed him the letter back in 1936 when I thought we were friends. He pretended not to be interested then too.’

‘Except that he was,’ said Sasha excitedly, pointing to an entry in the diary. ‘Here it is. 13 May, 1936. He’s copied out the whole of your translation, word for word.’ Sasha held up the yellowed document covered with spidery blue handwriting that she’d snatched from Silas in the car. ‘Here’s your copy and that’s his. They’re the same.’

Blayne took the manuscript in his trembling hand and began to read it aloud. The hoarseness seemed to go out of his voice, and Sasha felt herself transported back five hundred years, out of her father’s disordered attic room in Oxford to a wood-panelled library in the Vatican.

Another old man in a black monk’s habit was writing a letter, dipping his quill in the inkwell at the top of his sloping mahogany desk. The sunshine sparkled on the Tiber and illuminated the parchment across which his old bony hand was moving steadily from side to side.

My dear brother in Christ,

Let me tell you then what I know of the cross of Saint Peter. It has long been lost, but is perhaps not destroyed. Perhaps you will one day see what I have never found.

Certain it is that the cross was made from a fragment of the true cross on which Our Lord suffered. Blessed Saint Peter, our first Holy Father, wore it when he took ship and crossed the great sea to spread the word of God. And he gave it to Tiberius Maximus, a citizen of this town and a good Christian before he, Peter, suffered death at the hands of the unbelievers. The people of God kept the holy relic safe through centuries of war and persecution, until it passed out of recorded history at the time of the invasions from the North, when this holy city was sacked by the barbarians.

Yet I have long believed that the cross survived and that it is the same as the famous jewelled cross that the great king Charlemagne kept in his royal chapel at Aachen in the eighth century. Many years ago I was working in the French king’s library in the city of Paris when I came upon an inventory of Charlemagne’s treasury made by a Frankish scribe. I attach a copy, and you will see that he speaks of the cross of Charlemagne as being the holy rood of Saint Peter made from the wood of the true cross.

It was adorned with gems, the like of which the world has never seen before or since. The great diamond at the centre of the cross was said to be the same white stone that Caesar once gave to Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, to seal their illicit union, and the four red rubies were taken from the iron crown of Alexander the Great. The Franks believed that the cross had magical powers. Charlemagne used it on feast days to heal his sick subjects. It was truly one of the wonders of the world.

My brother, I have travelled in many lands during my long life, and I have never found any other written record of the cross of Saint Peter. I had thought that perhaps it was lost when the pagans came into France four hundred years ago, but I do not now believe this to be true. There are men that I have spoken to in the city of Rouen who say that the monks of Marjean kept the cross of Charlemagne in a reliquary behind the high altar of the abbey church for generations, until an unsuccessful attempt was made to steal it and the cross was hidden.

The fate of the community at Marjean was no different than that of so many of the other monasteries of France. The great plague that many called the Black Death came there out of the east in the year of our Lord 1352, and there appear to have been no survivors. Marjean is indeed a desolate place, and I have taken no pleasure from my visits there. Some of the monastic library was preserved in a château nearby, but I found no record of the cross there or anywhere else. Only this. I passed through the town once more last year and found an old man living in the ruins of the monastery. He said that his father’s uncle was one of those monks killed by the great plague and that his father had told him when he was a child that the hiding place of the cross had been recorded in a book made by the monks. I asked the old man many questions about the book, and I formed the opinion that he was speaking of the holy Gospel of Saint Luke. I now feel sure that he was referring to the famous Marjean codex of which you will have doubtless heard yourself. But it too is missing, and I am no nearer to finding the cross of Saint Peter, if it does indeed still exist.

I am old in years, and I must turn away from the love of this world and make myself ready for the next. I leave to you this account, which is all that I know of Saint Peter’s cross.

May God be with you.

Andrew finished reading and handed the paper back to his daughter.

‘I remember when I first read that,’ he said. ‘In Rome before the war. I had gone there with Cade for a conference, but he wasn’t in the library when I found it. There was this little room at the back, and I don’t even know why I went in there. It was more like a cupboard, really. Shelves of old dusty religious commentaries and John’s letter neatly folded between the leaves of one of them. God knows how it got there. All I know is that it had been there for a long, long time. I remember it was early evening and I sat at a table in the summer twilight and made this copy, and then I showed it to Cade back at the hotel. I was excited. The city was ablaze with fires. Mussolini had just conquered Abyssinia, and I had found John of Rome. But Cade made me lose belief. The cross was an old wives’ tale, he said. An invention of jewel-crazy adventurers. It was a waste of time to even think of it.’

‘But he was lying. You knew that already, Dad. After all, it was you who told me that he was in Marjean at the end of the war. You thought he’d gone after the cross.’

‘I said it was possible.’

‘Well, it was more than possible. That was what he was doing. This diary proves it.’

‘I thought you said that it stopped in 1940.’

‘It does. But by then he’d visited Marjean twice and was planning a third visit. The war stopped him, but then the end of it gave him the opportunity to take what he wanted by force. That was when he stole the codex.’

‘Who from?’

‘From a Frenchman called Henri Rocard, who was the owner of the château at Marjean up until 1944, when he and his family were all murdered. Allegedly by the Germans.’

‘But you say it was Cade who did it?’

‘Yes, I’m sure of it. Him and that man Ritter. Look, go back to John of Rome’s letter. See near the end, where he talks about visiting Marjean? He says that some of the monastic library was preserved in a château nearby.’

‘But he also says that he found no record of the cross there or anywhere else,’ countered Blayne, reading from the letter.

‘Perhaps he didn’t look in the right places,’ said Sasha. ‘Cade realized early on that that was the most important sentence in the whole document. He says so in his diary. The year after you found the letter he went to Marjean and visited the château there. Henri Rocard was away from home, but Cade spoke to the wife. He describes her as proud and rude.’

‘Is that all?’ asked Blayne, laughing.

‘Pretty much. She didn’t invite him in. Said she knew nothing about the codex. Cade didn’t believe her, of course.’

‘So what did he do?’

‘He went to the records office in Rouen and settled down to do some research.’

‘On the Rocard family.’

‘Yes. And he got lucky. Not to begin with, but he was persistent.’

‘Always one of the professor’s qualities.’

‘He had no qualities. Look, let me tell you what’s in the diary, Dad,’ said Sasha impatiently. ‘There was no reference to the codex in the first place he looked. Land deeds and wills and the like from before John of Rome’s time right up until the Revolution. But then in 1793 there was something. Robespierre and the Jacobins were in power in Paris, and it was the time of the Terror, soon after the king was guillotined. Government agents sent out from Paris arrested a Georges Rocard as a counter-revolutionary, and a record was made of a search of his château at Marjean. Cade copied part of the record into his diary. It says that the government agents found no trace of the valuable document known as the Marjean codex.’

‘Just like John of Rome, when he searched for it four centuries earlier,’ said Blayne, sounding unimpressed.

‘But that’s not the point,’ said Sasha. ‘What’s important is that there were people at the end of the eighteenth century who believed that the codex was in the château at Marjean. There must have been some basis for that.’

‘Maybe,’ said her father, still unconvinced. ‘What happened to Georges Rocard?’

‘He didn’t escape, I’m afraid. Almost no one did. He was guillotined in Rouen a few weeks after his arrest. But his family got away to England, and Georges’s eldest son returned to Marjean and the château when the monarchy was restored in 1815. After the Battle of Waterloo.’

‘And this Henri Rocard was a descendant of his?’

‘Yes. Cade went back to the château, and this time Henri Rocard was there in person.’

‘Proud and rude like his wife?’

‘Worse, apparently. Rocard told Cade that he knew nothing about the codex, and when Cade persisted, Rocard and his old manservant set the dogs on him.’

‘Did they bite?’

‘I don’t know. The point is that the reception he got from Madame Rocard and then from her husband convinced Cade that they had the codex.’

‘So what did he do?’

‘He wrote to Henri Rocard offering to buy it. There’s a copy of his letter in the diary. He pointed out that the château was in a state of serious dilapidation and that the money could be used to carry out all the necessary repairs. But he got no reply. He wrote again but still heard nothing, and he was just about to go to Marjean again when the war broke out.’

‘So he was cut off from the object of his desire for more than four years,’ said Blayne musingly. ‘The professor must have been a very frustrated man by the time D-Day came around.’

‘Exactly,’ said Sasha. ‘We know he went to that area in 1944 and the whole Rocard family died. I believe Cade killed them, and that he stole the codex at the same time. He’d already been there and done that, and that’s why he always acted like he was so uninterested in Marjean and the codex.’

‘So where is the codex, if you’re so certain he had it?’ asked Blayne.

‘I don’t know. I thought you could help me. I’ve looked everywhere.’ The frustration was back in Sasha’s voice.

Blayne looked hard at his daughter and shook his head.

‘Leave it, Sasha. It’s dangerous. I can feel it. The man spent almost half his life searching for something, and now he’s dead. It’s not the first time he was shot, either. Somebody tried to kill him in France three years ago. You tell me it’s got nothing to do with the cross, but I’m not so sure. Let it die with him. Let it go.’

‘That’s easy for you to say,’ she blurted out and then immediately turned away from her father, trying to clear her mind. Again she had that same fleeting sense that he knew more than he was saying. Why hadn’t he been more surprised by her revelations – more excited? No one had suffered more at the hands of John Cade than her father. No one except Cade knew more about the codex. The codex and the cross.

‘I don’t understand why you’re so calm about all this, so accepting,’ she said, challenging him.

‘Because I’m old,’ he said. ‘Old before my time. Can’t you see that, Sasha?’

Blayne put his hand out towards his daughter, but she turned away and walked over to the window. She looked down into the stony courtyard, and her resolve hardened. ‘I’ll leave the diary here,’ she said. ‘You can call me if you think of anything. I’ll find the codex. And after that I’ll find the cross.’

‘And then?’ asked Blayne, looking up sadly at his daughter. ‘What happens then, Sasha?’

She didn’t answer. Just laid her hand for a moment over her father’s shaking hand and then walked out of the door.




CHAPTER 6


‘Widen the net … somebody the jury can believe in … not some phantom foreigner … your brother Silas …’

Stephen couldn’t sleep. His mind kept turning over Swift’s words, twisting them this way and that, seeking a way out. However hard he tried, Stephen couldn’t believe it of Silas. Couldn’t or wouldn’t. Stephen didn’t know. What he did know was that somebody who was not his brother had tried to kill their father. It was no phantom who had come to their house threatening John Cade with a pistol, no ghost who had put a bullet in his lung. That man was real. He had a name: Carson, Corporal James Carson, once of the British army in France. The only problem was that he was dead.

Stephen remembered the first time he’d met Carson. How could he forget? He’d just turned thirteen and had been out running, practising for the cross-country season at his school. The man had been standing in the trees across the road from the front gate, looking up towards the house, and he had called to Stephen as he went past.

‘Cold weather to be out running, young man,’ he had said, stepping out into the road. He was wearing a heavy black army greatcoat with its collar pulled up around his ears, and yet he still seemed cold. There was a shiver in his voice, and when Stephen looked down, uncertain of what to say, he noticed a hole in the stranger’s boot.

Stephen muttered something indistinct and would have turned away if the man had not spoken again.

‘Are you the colonel’s son?’ he’d asked.

‘The colonel,’ Stephen had repeated, not following the stranger’s meaning.

‘Colonel John Cade. He used to be a military man like me. But perhaps he’s too proud to remember old comrades.’

‘Oh, yes. I’m sorry. Yes, I’m one of his sons.’ Stephen had stumbled over his words. The man had made him nervous, as if Stephen realized even then that this stranger’s coming would cause trouble.

The man hadn’t stayed long after Stephen had walked with him up the drive and knocked on the door of his father’s study. The professor had not been pleased to see his visitor. That much was obvious. Carson had raised his hand to his forehead in a mock salute, but Cade had not returned the gesture. He’d just stared angrily at Carson for a moment or two, and when he eventually spoke, it was his son he addressed, not his visitor.

‘Go to your room, Stephen,’ he’d said. There was a harsh edge to his father’s voice that had frightened Stephen, and he had backed away into the corridor. A moment later his father crossed to the door and shut it with a bang that reverberated right round the east wing of the house.

Stephen had done what his father told him to. He had gone to his room and stood by the open window, looking down into the courtyard where the rain had started to fall. And it was no more than ten minutes later that the French windows of his father’s study opened and Carson came out. Cade had stood on the threshold behind him, and Stephen had heard his father say quite clearly:

‘That’s all, Corporal. Don’t you come back here, because there’ll be no more. Do you understand me?’

‘Right you are, Colonel,’ the man had said, giving the same mocking salute that Stephen had seen earlier. Then he had walked away up the drive, making no effort to protect his head from the falling rain. Stephen had stood watching him until he disappeared from view.

Nearly a year passed before Stephen saw the man again. It was May, but he was wearing the same old greatcoat, and he had come into the courtyard shouting and waving a pistol in the air. He’d obviously been drinking. His sunken cheeks were bright red, and there was an alcoholic slur to his voice.

‘Come on out, Colonel,’ he’d shouted. ‘And bring your pretty wife too. I’ve got something to tell her about France. About being a war hero.’

Stephen had watched the pistol, wondering if it was loaded, but he never got to find out. His father came out of the front door holding a rifle and fired it twice, aiming just above Carson’s head.

The shock caused Carson to drop his pistol, and Cade walked over quite calmly and picked it up.

‘You could have killed me,’ said Carson, and Stephen, standing in the corner of the courtyard, could hear the fear and the anger equally present in the man’s voice.

‘I will. Next time I will,’ said Cade, and in one fluid movement he turned the rifle in his hands and hit Carson with the butt, full on the side of the head.

Carson fell to his knees, but amazingly the blow did not knock him out.

‘You’ll have no more from me. I won’t tell you that again,’ said Cade. ‘Now get off my property.’

Carson got up, holding his head, and began to stagger away down the drive. But after no more than a hundred yards, he turned around again.

‘Watch your fucking back, Colonel,’ he shouted. ‘I’ll find you when you aren’t looking. You’ll see.’

Stephen knew better than to ask his father about what had happened. Instead he had told his mother when she came back from the hairdresser’s in Oxford later that afternoon. Silas was away at school.

She had wanted to go to the police, but Cade wouldn’t hear of it.

‘He needed to be taught a lesson. I’ve done that, and now he won’t come here again. You can trust me, my dear.’

And Clara had left it at that. She had always trusted her husband, and there was no reason to stop now. Except that Stephen felt sure that his father did not believe his own optimism. It was only two weeks later that electronic gates were installed at the manor house and Sergeant Ritter began work on a new security system. Not that that saved Stephen’s mother.

Stephen did not want to think about that black Christmas. He did what he always did when he started to remember it. He began to count quickly, thinking about anything except that. The day the lights went out.

After the funeral he’d been sent away to school. Stephen knew what his father was thinking. He looked too much like his dead mother, and if it hadn’t been for Stephen’s Christmas present, she’d still be alive. Cade had stayed in his room when the car had come to take his sons away, and when they came back at the beginning of the holidays, Sergeant Ritter was installed in the east wing with his silent, frightened wife.

Stephen thought that Ritter would have come to live at the manor house earlier if it hadn’t been for his mother. Clara had always had an aversion to the sergeant, and it was an aversion her sons shared. Particularly Silas. Ritter was an expert at identifying a person’s weaknesses and then probing them relentlessly until his victim could stand it no more. Except that Silas never allowed his obvious anger to get the better of him. Ritter called him Silent Silas, or sometimes just Silence, and the name became increasingly appropriate.

Stephen could never forget those long horrible evenings around the dinner table at the manor house in the years after his mother died. Ritter, with his short curly black hair and his huge double chin, dominated the conversation, asking Silas when he was going to get a girlfriend, wondering why he didn’t have one. Stephen felt desperately sorry for his brother but powerless to protect him. The sergeant was too clever, too frightening.

Cade, meanwhile, would sit at the top of the table with a half-smile playing across his features, and Ritter would watch him out of the corner of his eye until the professor gave an imperceptible nod, and Ritter ended his performance for another night. Stephen wondered if Silas had noticed their father’s control over the obnoxious sergeant. He must have. Perhaps Silas did hate his father. Perhaps Swift was right.

No. Stephen was not Cain, about to spill his brother’s blood. It wasn’t Silas who’d accused him of murder, and he had no right to accuse Silas, however convenient it might be for his barrister. Stephen wished he could speak to his brother, but Swift had explained that the law said prosecution witnesses must not talk to the defendant.

Stephen remembered how his brother never wanted to cross their father. Silas always wanted the old man’s approval. Like with the letter. Silas had refused to go with him to confront his father about what it said. It was Stephen who had broken with the old man and left the manor house estranged. Silas had remained behind, even though he knew what their father had done. To those poor defenceless people. They had survived the war, but they didn’t survive Colonel John Cade. Stephen shut his eyes, trying to hold back the anger and disillusionment that he always felt when he thought of his father’s crime. And shame too. A terrible shame that he was the son of the man who had killed the Rocards. Shame that he had remained silent for so long about what he knew. It felt too much like collusion.

It was nearly two and a half years ago now that the letter had come. June 1957. It was a year after Ritter had brought Stephen’s father back from France with a bullet wound in his lung, and Cade had been an invalid ever since, often sleeping in his study because he couldn’t make it up the stairs to his bedroom or the manuscript gallery on the first floor. He’d retired from the university and he had no visitors. He had had the respect of his academic colleagues but not their liking and, looking back, Stephen suspected that they must have been glad to see the back of him.

Moreton Manor had become a fortress that Cade never left. Ritter ran the house, patrolled its boundaries. More than once he’d cross-examined Stephen about the man in the greatcoat, but no one had seen the man since his last visit six years before.

Ritter seemed to be everywhere: at a turn in the staircase or at the end of a corridor, Stephen would suddenly come upon him. The brothers called him the tree frog because of his double chins, and he was truly an ugly man – big black glasses over his small mean eyes and his great stomach bulging inside huge trousers held up by wide, garishly coloured braces. But then he could move so quickly and quietly when he wanted to, turning up when you least expected him. Although he refused to admit it to himself, Stephen was secretly frightened of the sergeant, and perhaps he would not have had the courage to confront his father about the letter if Ritter had been home. But Ritter was away on business the day the letter arrived, and it was Stephen and the housemaid who had to help Cade to his bed when he suddenly felt sick and faint.

Returning to the dining room, Stephen found Silas sitting in their father’s place at the head of the table, reading the letter. Stephen had always disapproved of his brother’s interest in the private affairs of his fellow human beings. Spying and eavesdropping were not honourable activities in Stephen’s book, and at first he refused to read the letter that Silas held out to him.

‘All right, I’ll read it to you then,’ Silas had said impatiently, closing the door of the dining room.

It wasn’t a long letter, and Stephen could still remember its awkward wording, as if it had been written by a foreigner or someone trying to disguise his identity.

‘Colonel,’ the letter had begun. Not ‘Dear Colonel’ or ‘Colonel Cade.’ Just ‘Colonel’ – the same name that the visitor in the greatcoat had used for Stephen’s father six years earlier when he had emerged from the trees and stopped Stephen at the gate.

Colonel,

I saw what you did at Marjean. You thought no one saw and lived but I did. I saw the bodies and the fire, and I saw what you took. I want what you took. Bring the book to Paddington Station in London and put it in the locker that is marked 17. Bring it yourself and use the key that is in this letter. Do it on Friday. In the morning. If you do this, I will be silent. If you do not, I will go to the police. In France and in England. You know what will happen.

There had been no signature on the letter, and the message and the address on the envelope had been typed. It had been posted in London the day before, Monday. The envelope contained nothing else except a tiny silver key that Silas had already shaken out onto the tablecloth.

There was no time for the brothers to talk about the letter before Cade reappeared to reclaim it. And Stephen was astonished at the speed with which his brother replaced paper and key in the envelope as the door opened. Their father’s face was very pale, and he went to the drinks tray in the corner and poured himself a generous measure of whisky before he left with the letter in his hand. It was the only time that Stephen ever saw his father drink alcohol at that time of the morning.

Afterwards, Stephen spent the best part of an hour arguing with his brother about what to do, but Silas was adamant. He would not talk to their father about the letter. It was as if Silas knew more than he was saying about what the writer meant. Or perhaps it had just been Silas’s dislike of direct confrontation. He was certainly frightened of his father.

Ritter was due back on the following day, so Stephen decided not to delay. He needed to know what his father had done. The man was cold and distant, but he was also a genius and a war hero. Stephen had spent hours with his mother as a child, examining his father’s medals. In the young Stephen’s imagination, Colonel Cade had marched through France with Eisenhower and Montgomery, liberating the country from the Nazis. But what if it wasn’t true? What if his father was instead nothing more than a murderer and a common thief? What did that make Stephen? He had to know the truth.

He felt his heart pounding in his chest when he knocked at the door of his father’s study. He longed to run away but forced himself to stand still waiting for the door to open.

‘Stephen, I’ve been expecting you.’

Cade was smiling, and he put an arm around his son’s shoulder as he ushered Stephen to one of the leather armchairs in the centre of the room and sat down opposite him in the other. Stephen had never sat with his father like this, like they were equals, and it made his spirits soar. He had never wanted to believe in another human being as much as he did then.

‘You’re worried about that letter, aren’t you, Stephen?’

Stephen nodded, wondering how his father knew that he’d read it. Perhaps he’d overheard him talking to Silas.

‘Well, I can understand that,’ his father went on, without a word of reproof to Stephen for reading it. ‘But it’s not true, you know. Not one word of it. You remember that man, Carson, who came here? The one with the gun?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, he wrote it. He hates me.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know exactly. He was passed over for promotion. Fell on bad times. Blames me for some reason. It doesn’t really matter. The main point is that he tried to kill me last year. Damn near succeeded. And now he’d written this letter to try to lure me somewhere where he can have another go. But he won’t succeed, Stephen. Your old man’s not going anywhere.’

Cade smiled encouragingly at his son, and Stephen smiled back. He felt better already but he knew he couldn’t leave without asking about what the man had written in the letter. He needed to know that his father had done nothing wrong.

‘What’s Marjean, Dad?’ he asked, swallowing hard so that his question came out almost as a whisper.

Cade didn’t answer immediately but instead looked at his son meditatively as if deciding how far he could trust him.

‘I feel I owe you an apology,’ he said finally. ‘You’re a grown man now and I should have more confidence in you. I’ve tried to shelter you too much since your mother died. I see that now.’

‘Thanks, Dad.’

‘Marjean’s a little town in Normandy. No more than a village really. There’s a château and a church. I went there in the war with Carson and the sergeant. Carson was a corporal then.’

‘After D-Day?’

‘That’s right. It was a bad time. The Germans were a cruel lot at the best of times, but by that time they were losing and that made them vicious. They’d been using the house as a headquarters, and we ambushed them when they were leaving, but we were too late to save the family. It wasn’t the first time that happened or the last. War’s an ugly thing, Stephen.’

Cade got up and went over to a filing cabinet in the corner of his study and took out two documents fastened together with an old paper clip.

‘Here, read this,’ he said, giving them to Stephen. ‘Then you’ll understand.’

It was a British military report on the events at Marjean château on 28 August, 1944, and everything was set out in black and white. Before they left, the Germans had taken the owner of the château and his wife into the church that was no more than two hundred yards from the house. There was an old family servant there too, and the Germans had shot all three of them. Then they had set the house on fire and an old woman, perhaps the wife of the servant, had died in the flames. The Germans had even shot the dog. This was how they had repaid their hosts’ hospitality. They’d been thorough as always.

The report had been written by Cade and co-signed by another officer whose signature Stephen couldn’t read. Attached to it was a shorter handwritten document bearing the signature of a Charles Mason, Army Medical Officer. He stated simply that he’d been called to the church at Marjean by Colonel John Cade on August 28, 1944, and been asked to examine three dead bodies dressed in civilian clothing and located in the crypt. He had extracted bullets from each of the deceased and was able to say that they were of German origin, fired from Mauser pistols of the type then in use by the German army.

The documents seemed entirely authentic, and they were enough for Stephen. He wanted to believe his father, and so he did believe him. He had stayed on at school for an extra year and had got a place at New College to study history, and his father seemed proud of his achievement. The start of term was only two months away, and Stephen was busy planning how to decorate his rooms. Outside it was summer and everything seemed full of hope and possibility.

But Stephen’s mood didn’t last. One night less than a week later, he had just got into bed and turned out the light when Silas knocked on his door.

Perhaps if Stephen had known where they were going, he would have refused to follow his brother down the west-wing stairs, out through the door into the night, and round the back of the house. But Silas’s air of mystery drew Stephen forward, and when they got close to the study window, Silas’s hand on his arm meant that Stephen would have had to struggle to get himself free. The window was open, and Stephen was not prepared to risk discovery. And he needed to hear what Ritter and his father were saying. They were talking about the letter.

One time only Stephen raised his head above the windowsill to look in, before Silas pulled him back. There was no light in the room except from the green reading lamp on his father’s desk. Ritter and Cade sat in the leather-backed armchairs in the centre of the room with their heads close together. They were talking about what to do, and it didn’t take Stephen long to realize that he had been lied to. The men inside the room were cold-blooded killers, and they were about to kill again.

‘There wasn’t anyone else, Colonel. You know that as well as I do.’ It was Ritter talking. His voice was soft but pressing, with the usual tone of false jocularity entirely absent. It made Stephen feel cold inside, even though the night was warm.

‘I hope you’re right.’ Cade sounded anxious, petulant almost, like a man who craves reassurance but can’t accept it when it’s offered to him.

‘It’s the house that worries me, Reg,’ he went on after a moment. ‘You should have searched it before, when you got the book.’

‘Maybe I should’ve done. But you wanted to get them in the church straight away. It was your call.’

‘I wasn’t going to stand there asking them questions out in the open.’

‘And the church was safe. You knew that because you’d been there before.’ Stephen sensed a slight impatience in the sergeant’s voice as if he’d been over this ground many times before. ‘The point is that it didn’t make any difference,’ he went on after a moment. ‘No one left the house while we were in the church or Carson would’ve seen them. It wasn’t that dark, and he had a view of all the exits. I asked him about it afterwards, and he had no reason to lie.’

‘He had no reason to shoot me.’

‘That was twelve years later,’ said Ritter. ‘No one got away. I’m sure of it. You found everyone you expected to. You told me that yourself.’

‘I didn’t know about the old woman.’

‘Fine. And she burnt up like a stick of old firewood.’

Ritter laughed harshly, but Cade didn’t join in.

‘That was Carson too,’ he said, sounding even more agitated than before. ‘He caused that fire. He didn’t need to shoot back like that. He must have seen the lamp in the window. He knew the risk. Maybe what I really wanted was in that house. It hurts not knowing whether it was there or not. It’d be easier to know it was destroyed than not to know one way or the other. Part of me wishes there had been a survivor.’

‘Well, there wasn’t. Just you and me and Carson.’

‘I don’t know how he even made corporal,’ said Cade quickly. ‘I should have killed him when he came here before.’

‘You couldn’t. Not with the boy watching.’

‘No. Maybe not. But I didn’t realize then how persistent he would be,’ said Cade. ‘The best thing would have been not to have got the bastard involved in the first place.’

‘There’s no point in going over all that again, John. You thought we needed him at the time, and I agreed with you. We didn’t know how many Germans there would be, and we had to have a lookout. For afterwards.’

‘Afterwards,’ repeated Cade bitterly. ‘That’s when I talked about the book. And the cross. Babbling about them like some idiot schoolboy. Making out as if they were the most valuable things in the world. I wouldn’t have said anything if it hadn’t been for the fire.’

‘How valuable is the book?’ Ritter’s voice was suddenly much softer than Cade’s. It made Stephen shiver.

‘It’s worth money. But no more than some of the other manuscripts here. And that’s not why I wanted it. I needed it because of where I thought it would lead me. But it hasn’t. All it’s done is get me a bullet in the lung and this bastard Carson stalking me. I don’t think he even wants the codex. It’s double Dutch to him, and he couldn’t fence it even if he wanted to. He just wants to hurt me, because he’s got it in his head that I’m the reason he’s poor and unsuccessful. And shabby. God, you should have seen him when he came here the second time, Reg. He looked like a tramp.’

‘I wish I had,’ said Ritter. There was no mistaking his meaning.

There was silence for a moment before Cade spoke again, and then the fretful note was back in his voice.

‘You’re sure it’s him, Reg. Nobody else?’

‘I know it’s him. There were no witnesses and no survivors. Nobody except him. Look, give me that again.’ There was a sound of paper rustling. Ritter was obviously reading the blackmail letter. ‘Here. Paddington Station’s where you’re supposed to meet him. And he lives just round the corner from there. Or at least he used to. In some dive up above a paper shop. I visited him there once. And seventeen’s probably his lucky number.’

‘Was his lucky number.’ Cade laughed. ‘What are you going to do to him, Reg?’

The sadistic curiosity in his father’s voice was too much for Stephen. Swallowing the bile that had suddenly come up into his throat, he took an involuntary step back from the window. Several twigs had blown down with the leaves from the nearby grove of elm trees earlier in the day, and one broke now with a snap under Stephen’s foot. Inside the room Ritter reacted instantly, pushing back his chair and crossing to the window. But Silas was quicker, pulling his brother down and round the corner of the house into the darkness.

Less than six feet away from where they were standing, the brothers could sense Ritter at the window peering out into the night.

‘What is it?’ asked Cade from inside the room.

‘Nothing. Some animal,’ said Ritter. ‘Nobody’s going to get into these grounds any more. We’d hear the alarm if anyone tried.’

‘I hope you’re right. So what are you going to do to him?’ Cade repeated his question, once Ritter had come back from the window.

‘I’ll deal with him.’

Just four words, but so full of meaning. Ritter would murder Carson when he found him. Stephen was sure of that. After a hearty breakfast at some local café, he’d go upstairs to Carson’s flat and shoot him full of holes.

‘When?’ Cade’s voice was soft now too.

‘Soon,’ said Ritter. ‘I’ll leave tomorrow. If there’s anything I need to know, you can send a message to the usual place. But leave it to me. I’ll take care of him. It’ll be a pleasure.’

The next day, true to his word, Ritter was gone. Stephen didn’t see him leave. He’d been up most of the night, tossing and turning in his bed until he had fallen into an uneasy sleep just as the grey light of the early dawn had started to seep into his room.

In the far corner, Stephen’s collection of children’s books was carefully arranged on wall-length shelves. Most of them were about heroes. Stephen had known for a fact that his father was a hero for as long as he could remember. It explained why he could not get close to his father, however hard he tried. Heroes lived in their own world, an English version of Mount Olympus, and they couldn’t be expected to worry too much about mundane things like children. People like Stephen’s father had their hands full making discoveries and saving the world. Cade’s coldness had just made his younger son love him even more, and his wholesale rejection of the boy following his wife’s tragic death had done nothing to change Stephen’s inmost feelings.

Stephen never really knew what he was going to do when he grew up, but it would be something that would change the world. He would follow in his father’s footsteps. Except that now he knew where those footsteps led.

Stephen felt as if he had lost his hold on everything. His father’s shame was his shame. And yet he could not stand aside and do nothing. He had to make a stand. And for that he needed Silas.

Dressing quickly, he went in search of his brother and found him eventually, crouched over a tray of developing fluid in a makeshift darkroom that Silas had created in one of the unused cellars under the west wing. And Stephen had to practically force his brother out into the sunlight. He had no intention of discussing inside the confines of the house what they had overheard.

The brightness of the day did not accord with either brother’s mood. Stephen had torn a piece of green wood from the branch of an oak tree and was using it to behead the stalks of nettle and cow parsley growing in the hedgerows beside the road, while Silas walked with his head hunched over between his shoulders, as if hiding from the sun overhead.

‘I can’t believe it,’ said Stephen, angrily swishing his stick from side to side through the still air. ‘He lied to me about everything.’

‘What did you expect him to do?’

‘I expected him not to have killed those people. In a bloody church too.’

‘Well, I’m sorry you couldn’t keep your illusions. That’s part of growing up, I guess.’

‘What? Finding out our father’s a mass murderer?’

‘He’s not my father.’

‘Well, he’s the nearest you’ll ever get to one.’ Stephen paused, regretting his words. ‘Sorry, Silas,’ he went on after a moment. ‘I know it’s not easy being adopted, but it doesn’t mean you haven’t got a responsibility.’

‘For what?’

‘For saving this man Carson for a start. The sergeant’s already left. But perhaps you didn’t know that.’

‘Just because Ritter’s gone doesn’t mean he’s going to kill Carson,’ said Silas doggedly. ‘I don’t recall Ritter saying he was going to do that.’

‘Not in so many words. But that’s what he meant. It was clear as a pikestaff. Don’t be so bloody naïve.’

Silas glanced up, and it seemed like there was a ghost of a smile playing around his thin lips.

‘We’ve got to do something,’ said Stephen insistently.

‘What?’

‘I don’t know. Warn the man. Go to the police. Do something.’

‘We don’t know where he is to warn him. And you’d better think carefully before you go to the police.’

‘Why?’

‘Because of what’ll happen to Dad if you do. That’s why. Maybe you can get him to stop the sergeant.’

‘You! Why not we?’

‘Because I don’t want to,’ said Silas, raising his voice for the first time. ‘It’s all so easy for you, isn’t it Stephen? Running around like a knight in shining armour dealing out justice right, left, and centre. But you don’t know what it’s like to have as little as I have. Maybe, if you did, you wouldn’t be so happy to throw it all away.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I won’t get involved. That’s what.’

‘You weren’t so reluctant when it came to dragging me round to Dad’s window last night, were you?’

But Silas would say nothing more. It was as if a wall had gone up between them, and they walked back to the house in an angry silence.

Outside the front door Stephen put his hand on his brother’s arm, determined to make one last effort to get him to change his mind.

‘This is about more than you and me, can’t you see that, Silas? This is about right and wrong. You’ve got to draw the line somewhere. You’ve got to stand up and be counted.’

Stephen could feel Silas’s arm tighten under his hand. Silas hated to be touched. But Stephen didn’t let go. He needed an answer.

Finally Silas looked up into his brother’s eyes, and Stephen felt the distance between them open like a chasm.

‘Count me out,’ said Silas. He almost spat out the words.

And Stephen lost his temper. Letting go of Silas’s arm, he raised his open hand in one fluid movement and smacked his brother across the face. Immediately he regretted what he had done, but it was too late. Silas gave him one last look of pure hatred and ran into the house.

Sitting in his prison cell, Stephen remembered that look in Silas’s eye. Did his brother hate him still? Stephen didn’t know. The truth was that Stephen could not read Silas. He had always been the opposite of Stephen. He held everything back, while Stephen wore his heart on his sleeve. Stephen was always the favourite, and yet Silas never complained, never protested, not even about Stephen’s staying at home all the time he was away at school. There was something unknowable about Silas, and Stephen had always felt the distance between them as a reproach. He couldn’t help it that he was the natural son, the favoured child, but it still made him feel guilty. Stephen wanted to be a good person, and Silas made him feel that he wasn’t.

As he grew older, Silas had seemed to cultivate a studied politeness. He spoke slowly and carefully, as if he had thought out exactly what he was going to say before he said it, and sometimes he seemed just like a puppet master, watching events that he had set in motion but refusing to participate in any of them. It was Silas who had engineered Stephen’s estrangement from their father and had then reunited them less than a month before the old man’s murder. Why? John Swift wanted Stephen to point the gun at his brother, but Stephen wouldn’t – or couldn’t. To accuse Silas would be to betray himself. It wasn’t Silas who had shot their father in France or sent the blackmail letter. That was Carson. But Carson was dead. And if it wasn’t Carson who had shot John Cade, then who had? Who had?

Stephen had never forgotten that day when he broke with his father. For the first and last time in his life, he rushed into the study without knocking. And looking up from a manuscript, Cade had needed no more than a moment to know that the time for pretending was over. He sat back in his chair and sighed, waiting for what was to come.

‘You lied to me,’ Stephen shouted with tears in his eyes. ‘Everything you’ve ever said was lies.’

‘Who told you?’ asked Cade, ignoring his son’s accusation.

‘You did,’ said Stephen with a bitter laugh. ‘I heard you talking last night. In here. You’re guilty, Dad. Guilty of everything.’

But Cade did not react to Stephen’s anger. He sat silently, looking up at his son as if he was measuring him, and this only served to enrage Stephen further.

‘Why?’ he asked, half-shouting, half-crying. ‘Just tell me why!’

‘It was an accident,’ the old man said. ‘Things got out of hand.’

‘An accident! Killing all those innocent people. It was a massacre. That’s what it was.’

But Cade shrugged his shoulders and opened his hands, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. ‘It was a long time ago,’ he said.

Stephen was dumbstruck, horrified by his father’s apparent indifference to the enormity of his crime.

‘So what are you going to do, Stephen?’ the old man asked after a while, breaking the silence.

‘Do? I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.’

‘Well, before you do anything, think what a trial will do to me. It’ll kill me, you know. I’m not a well man, Stephen.’

Stephen looked at his father, disgusted by the pleading tone in his voice.

‘This isn’t about you,’ he said. ‘It’s about what’s right and wrong.’

‘All right. Well, think of your mother then, if you don’t care about me. Is this what she would have wanted? To have her family disgraced?’

‘It’s you who did that. Not me.’

‘Please, Stephen. I haven’t much longer to live. You know that. Going to the police won’t solve anything.’

Suddenly Stephen felt deflated. The fight went out of him as he realized that there was nothing he could do to change the past. His father was right. A trial would achieve nothing.

‘What about Carson?’ he asked in a flat voice, keeping his eyes on the floor.

‘What about him?’

‘If I keep quiet, Carson goes free. You’ll call that psycho off. Yes?’

‘Yes, I swear it. On Clara’s grave I swear it,’ said Cade, suddenly animated as he sensed the chance of escape for the first time.

Stephen didn’t know whether to believe his father or not. All he knew was that he had gone as far as he could go. He felt torn up inside. He couldn’t stand to spend another minute in the man’s presence.

‘You’re not my father,’ he said flatly. ‘Not any more. I’m going, and I’m not coming back.’

But it hadn’t been that easy. The shame had followed Stephen wherever he went, growing inside him like a tumour, until he had finally gone home and ended up sitting in this prison cell, fighting for his life, paying for his father’s crimes.




CHAPTER 7


Trave arrived late, anxious to avoid if possible another encounter with Thompson, and earned himself a malevolent glance from the judge as the swing door banged closed behind him and he took a seat at the side of the court.

Silas was already in the witness box, and he kept his eyes fixed firmly on the floor as he answered the prosecutor’s questions, studiously avoiding the eager stare of his brother, who was gazing at him expectantly across the well of the courtroom. Trave realized that it must be four months or more since the two had last met.

Unsurprisingly, Silas looked more ill at ease than when Trave had seen him at the manor house the day before, but there was the same lack of expression in his voice as he answered the prosecutor’s questions, and the way he always seemed to think before he spoke made Trave more sure than ever that the young man was hiding something. Not for the first time Trave wished that he’d had the chance to interrogate Silas in that same windowless interview room at the back of Oxford Police Station, where he had questioned Stephen on the day after the murder. The trouble was that the evidence against the younger brother was just too strong. Trave had had no option but to charge the boy, and that had put an end to further investigation. Trave stirred in his seat, trying unsuccessfully to shake off his frustration and concentrate on the evidence.

‘How would you describe the relationship between your brother, Stephen, and your father?’ asked Thompson, getting straight to the point.

‘When?’

‘Let’s say, in the last two years of your father’s life. I don’t think there’s any need to go back further than that.’

‘They were estranged.’

‘They didn’t speak to each other at all?’

‘Not as far as I know. My brother was at the university, and my father lived at home. He never went out,’ Silas added, as if it was an afterthought.




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