The Inheritance (13 page)

“Please stop the witness from speculating, Mr. Thompson,” said the judge, stirring in his seat.

“Yes, my lord,” said Thompson. “Tell us, Mr. Cade, what you and your brother decided to do about your father’s will.”

“We agreed that Stephen should try to end his quarrel with our father. He is the natural son, whereas I was adopted. He always got on better with our parents when we were younger, and I—we—felt that my father might listen to him. Stephen’s always been better at speaking his mind than I have.”

“So what did you do?” asked Thompson.

“Do?” Silas seemed momentarily lost, remembering a childhood that he always tried to forget.

“Yes,” said Thompson, failing to keep the impatience out of his voice. “What did you both decide to do in order to end your brother’s quarrel with your father?”

“Stephen wrote a letter, and I took it back with me to Moreton and gave it to our father. He agreed to allow Stephen to visit, and my brother came out for lunch on the following weekend. He brought Mary with him.”

“Was your father enthusiastic about the meeting?” asked the judge, holding up a hand to stop Thompson’s next question. “How did he respond to the olive branch?”

Silas didn’t answer for a moment, and when he did, he seemed almost surprised at what he was saying.

“I don’t know. It was like he was indifferent. He didn’t seem to care much what Stephen did. Whether he came or whether he stayed away.”

“Why?” The single word escaped from Stephen in the dock as if it was a sudden exhalation of breath, and it brought an immediate response from the judge.

“You will be silent, young man. Do you understand me?” Murdoch’s voice was harsh, meant to make Stephen realise the power arrayed against him. “If you are not silent, you will be removed.”

Murdoch stared at Stephen Cade a moment longer and then nodded to Thompson to continue.

“How did the lunch go?” asked the prosecutor.

“It was okay,” said Silas. He had looked up at his brother for a moment when Stephen had shouted, but now he had reverted to his former posture with his eyes fixed on the dark wood of the witness stand in front of him. “I mean, it was fairly awkward,” he went on, “but that was only to be expected. Stephen hadn’t seen my father for two years.”

“Was the will discussed on that day?” asked Thompson.

“No. I don’t think Stephen saw my father alone, and there was obviously nothing said about it at the lunch. Anyway, Stephen wasn’t going to talk to my father about the will straightaway. That only changed because of what I saw in his diary.”

“What was that?”

“An appointment for my father to see his solicitor at three o’clock on Monday, June eighth, about the will.”

There was something too precise about Silas’s recollection of time and date, thought Swift, leaning back in his chair. It was frustrating. He wanted the chance to rattle Silas Cade and see what came out, but his client wouldn’t let him. Swift was convinced that Silas knew more than he was letting on.

“Is this the entry you’re talking about?” asked Thompson handing up the same engagement diary that he had shown to the solicitor the previous day.

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

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

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

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

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

“What was the atmosphere like?”

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

“What time did the dinner end?”

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

“And where did you go then?”

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

“Where is your room, Mr. Cade?”

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

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

“Yes. Completely alone.”

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

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And did you believe it?”

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

“And that made Stephen angry?”

“Yes. Angry and ashamed.”

“And what did it make you feel?”

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

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

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

“What did the letter say?”

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

“Did he?”

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

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

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

“Carson,” said the judge repeating the name.

“Yes,” said Silas.

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

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

“Yes.”

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No. Not that I remember.”

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

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

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

“Yes.”

“How did your brother do?”

“I don’t remember.”

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

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

“And how did you do?”

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

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

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

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