The Inheritance (15 page)

Stephen banged his head against his hands in frustration, but there was no relief from the incessant pounding of the thoughts inside his brain. His life hung on the answer to a question, and he was no nearer to solving it than he had been on the night of his arrest.

Ritter had woken up as he always did at half past five. He didn’t need an alarm clock. His sleeping and eating were set to an internal timer that ticked away somewhere deep inside his big frame, measuring out the days of his life.

He got out of bed almost immediately, crossed to the window, and pulled back the curtains, allowing the early morning light to fill the room. He stretched for a moment and then walked into the bathroom. Stripping himself naked, he looked at his big bulk in the mirror, and an expression of self-satisfaction settled over his features. He washed noisily and shaved before settling to the detailed task of clipping back the tiny rogue hairs that had grown out of his military moustache during the night. Finally content, and clothed only in a towel, Ritter went back into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed nearest to his sleeping wife.

His
.
Mine
. The possessive pronoun was always uppermost in Ritter’s mind when he thought of Jeanne. She was pretty and foreign and desirable, and she belonged to him and nobody else. When he used violence against her, he took care never to leave any mark on her face or her hands or her calves. She was living proof that Reginald Ritter counted for something in the world. He owned her, and she was worth owning. Ritter wasn’t blind. He’d seen men looking at his wife, knowing they couldn’t have her because
she belonged to him. As always the thought acted on Ritter’s psyche like an aphrodisiac. He laid his hand on his wife’s shoulder and turned her over to face him. The force of the movement woke her, and he was in time to see the fear in her eyes before the usual unreadable mask descended over her face.

Roughly, Ritter used his right hand to pull open his wife’s nightdress while his left hand retained its grip on her shoulder.

“No, Reg. No. Not today.”

Ritter loved his wife’s voice. He loved the Frenchness in it. The way she rolled the
R
when she called him by his name. It inflamed him, and he climbed onto the bed and forced himself into her, even though he had previously intended to do nothing of the kind. Today was an important day. He and Jeanne were going to London to give evidence. Ritter relished the thought of it: all the lawyers and the newspapermen listening to him and Stevie in the dock waiting for the noose to be fitted round his neck.

Beneath him his wife lapsed into French. “Non, non.” The words came out in small cries, and Ritter ignored them just like he always did. Instead he gathered her white breasts in his big hands and thrust himself deep inside her one last time, before he subsided down onto her body, half crushing her with his weight.

Ritter had already chosen his wife’s dress for the day. Conservative black with a high collar. Ritter would have liked a veil too, but this was a court of law, not a church. Now he lay back on the bed, spent, and watched Jeanne move about the room, allowing his mind to wander back through their mutual past.

Fifteen years before, he’d found her standing in the remains of a kitchen in a burnt-out house in Caen. Incongruously, she’d been holding an umbrella, as if it might protect her from the catastrophe that had overtaken her family. Her mother was dead on the other side of the room, lying in a mess of apron and blood and broken china, and there was no trace of any other members of her family, even though she told Ritter afterward that her father and a lodger had also been living in the house. That was when she got her voice back. At first she could not speak at all. Ritter visited her every day in the hospital until the army moved east. She had looked at him and said nothing, but he felt that she belonged to him. After all, she had nowhere else to go.

All the time he was away, Ritter couldn’t stop thinking about her pale
blue eyes set in the small oval of her face and the way she kept entwining her fingers in her lap. She was waiting for him in Caen when he came back from Germany nine months later, and she looked just the same, except that the nuns at the hospital had cut off most of her long auburn hair. It made her look even more vulnerable than before, and Ritter wasted no time marrying her. The colonel had been their only witness.

Jeanne had become part of Ritter’s identity. But that did not mean that there was any real communication between them. Her English was far from perfect, and Ritter spoke almost no French. And in truth he had never had any idea how to talk to women. Perhaps it was that even more than his physical ugliness that explained his complete lack of success with the opposite sex until he found Jeanne. And she of course had had no choice.

Ritter missed the army. Its vertical ranking of men made sense to him. On civvy street after the war he’d drifted from one job to another, living in London bed-sits with Jeanne, eking out a living. The colonel had sent him money, and Ritter knew he’d have done more if it hadn’t been for his wife. She’d never liked Ritter. He was bad with children, and she was always obsessed with her younger son. Stevie this and Stevie that. Ritter didn’t know how the colonel had put up with it, although at least the younger boy had some spirit. The elder one just snuck about, taking photographs of people, listening at their keyholes. Ritter had enjoyed tormenting him on those long evenings after he and Jeanne had come to live at the manor—in the good days after the colonel’s wife died, smashed to bits in a car wreck. Silas had taken photographs of that too. Little bastard. And now he owned the place. One day he’d gather up enough courage to tell Ritter to leave, and there would be nothing that Ritter could do about it. He half wished that it was Silas, and not Stevie, who was on trial for murdering the colonel. Except that Silas would never have had the guts to kill anyone, let alone his father. And all the evidence pointed to Stevie. Ritter had caught him red-handed.

Ritter missed the colonel. He missed him terribly. He missed those long evenings in the study, sitting in the tall leather armchairs smoking cigars and remembering the war. The colonel had given him a home and an income and a place in the world. He’d made Ritter think well of himself. But now the sergeant was cut adrift, at the mercy of Silas Cade.

Downstairs in the kitchen, Ritter fried sausages and bacon on the stove.
He stood in his shirtsleeves, methodically turning the cooking food, enjoying the smell of the sizzling fat in his nostrils. He had the place to himself, and he basked in the solitude. The kitchen in the morning made him think of his own father. As a child in Nottingham, he’d sat on a stool in the corner watching his father eating, making big doorstep sandwiches, filling his flask for the mine, until one day when he didn’t come back and Ritter ran away to join the army. Anything was better than going underground.

Sasha came in when he was finishing his breakfast, sitting at the deal table under the window, and he looked up annoyed. Silas had stayed the night in London to be closer to the court, and Sasha was never usually around this early in the day. He hadn’t expected to be disturbed.

“You’re up early,” he said, wiping egg yolk from the corners of his mouth with an already-soiled napkin.

“Yes.” Sasha remained in the doorway, looking down at Ritter, making no effort to conceal her disgust.

“Do you want something?” he asked. He’d expected her to leave once she saw him, avoiding him as she usually did around the house, but today was different for some reason.

“Yes, I want you to leave your wife alone. That’s what I want,” she said defiantly. “She’s crying again upstairs in case you didn’t know. I heard her as I came down.”

“What did you say?” asked Ritter, unable for a moment to believe his ears. Sasha’s audacity astonished him, and he sat rooted to his chair with his mouth half open, gaping up at her.

“I said you better leave Jeanne alone. Because if you don’t, I’ll make sure you don’t.”

Sasha’s voice shook but she stood her ground and the threat jolted Ritter into life. A wave of anger swept over him. What he did with his wife was his business. Not bloody Sasha’s. He got to his feet, violently pushing his plate away so that some of the uneaten food spilt over onto the table.

“You’ll make sure I don’t, will you?” he shouted, advancing on Sasha across the room. “And who the hell are you to give me orders if you don’t mind me asking?”

“I’m a private citizen protecting another private citizen. That’s all. And if you hit me, you’ll just make it worse for yourself.”

Ritter paused. His arm had been raised, but now he lowered it to his side. Sasha was right. He didn’t need trouble. Not today of all days, when he and Jeanne were going to London to give their evidence. He breathed deeply, working to control his temper. It was something he was good at, and it didn’t take him long.

“It wouldn’t be the first time someone’s hit you, I suppose, would it, Miss Vigne?” Ritter’s voice was quiet now, almost casual sounding.

“What are you talking about?”

“That burn you’re so worried about. Always wearing high collars, changing your hair style, hoping we won’t notice. But we do notice, you know. We notice all the time. Everybody does.”

It was Sasha’s turn to become angry. Her cheeks flushed a deep red and she had to fight down the impulse to put her hand up to her neck in that same self-protective gesture that had become second nature to her over the years. Ritter smiled and his eyes glinted as he sensed her vulnerability.

“Funny to be so pretty and so ugly all at the same time,” he went on musingly.

“Damn you!” Sasha spat out the words. It was as if they had been physically expelled from deep inside her body.

“And fuck you too, Miss Vigne,” Ritter said evenly. “Not that that’s something very likely to happen anytime soon, I imagine.”

They stood staring at each other for a moment, their roles reversed. Ritter was now fully in control of the situation, and it was Sasha who was on the defensive. Enjoying his advantage, he picked up his napkin from the table and dabbed it around his moustache, watching Sasha’s hands clenching into fists at her sides.

“My advice to you, Miss Sasha Vigne, is to stay with your books. Much safer than poking your nose into other people’s business.”

There wasn’t room for the two of them in the doorway and Sasha instinctively backed out of the way, avoiding contact with Ritter’s big bulk as he went past her. It felt just like a defeat.

Upstairs, Jeanne cried a little as she washed away the traces of her husband from her body. Sometimes the marks he left couldn’t be removed so easily,
and inside she always ached with a dull pain that never quite went away. But over the years she had learnt to live with Ritter’s petty cruelties. She knew that showing fear or anxiety enraged him, and so she had grown a mask for her emotions that she rarely let slip. She had worked out how to survive, and she would no doubt have passively grown old that way if Silas Cade hadn’t made her realise there was an alternative.

At first she had only felt a dull sense of kinship toward the colonel’s elder son. He was her husband’s public victim; she suffered in private. At dinner she always said very little, keeping her head modestly bent down over her plate while her husband made bad jokes about Silas’s sexuality. In truth, she herself suspected that Silas was homosexual. He never seemed to look at her, and anyway it was none of her business. Life was something to be survived. She wasn’t looking for friends.

Then one day she was in the laundry washing her husband’s clothes. It was hot and steamy, and Jeanne pulled up the white sleeves of her blouse almost to her shoulders. The laundry was a place she could be alone, and she felt no risk that anyone might come in and see the red marks on the inside of her forearms that her husband had left the night before. The work was hard, and she didn’t hear Silas walking in the corridor outside or see him as he stood in the doorway watching her.

Afterward, Silas was amazed that he had spoken to Ritter’s wife. It was so unlike him. Women scared him. He thought about them all the time, but he never had the courage to approach them. He was almost painfully aware of his own physical shortcomings, and his rejection by his mother after Stephen’s birth had wreaked havoc on his inner sexuality. Her death had sealed him up complete with his damaged personality, and Ritter’s jibes in the years that followed had found their mark partly because Silas half believed them himself. His sexual experience was limited to a single night two years earlier, when he had got very drunk and visited a prostitute in Oxford. The result had been disastrous, and Silas had concentrated all his mental energy for weeks afterward on expunging the memory of his failure in that dingy third-floor bedroom overlooking the canal. He was still frightened that he would come face-to-face with the woman somewhere in the city, although it hadn’t happened yet.

The marks on Jeanne’s arms were what gave Silas the courage to cross the
threshold of the laundry and speak to her. He’d asked her what they were, even though he already knew the answer. If Ritter was a sadist at the dinner table, there was no reason why he should change his spots when he took his wife upstairs to bed.

Jeanne flushed and did not answer. Instead she pulled her blouse down to her wrists and turned away, and perhaps that would have been an end of it if her husband had not come calling. He’d lost a cufflink and wanted his wife to find it for him. Silas was still close enough to Jeanne to feel her aversion, the way she physically shrank away from her husband’s voice, and instinctively he reached out and pulled her back against the wall. A moment later Ritter was in the room, blinking against the steam. Silas sensed the sergeant on the other side of the open door. He felt the weight of the man, and he strengthened his hold on the sergeant’s wife. Silas had never before been so frightened or felt so alive. Jeanne’s heart was beating hard against his chest as she leant into him. It was as if their bodies had made a decision for them, and now they were powerless to stop the ongoing course of events.