The Inheritance (22 page)

But there was nothing Trave could do. That much was obvious to him as his companion hurried down Blackfriars Road toward the underground station, intent only on getting away from him. He couldn’t guard her if she didn’t want to be guarded, and even if she did, it was probably outside his job description.

The station was crowded, and she had to queue for a ticket.

“Are you sure you’ll be all right?” he asked, as if in need of some kind of blessing for leaving her alone. But she didn’t answer. She was looking in her purse for coins, and Trave felt as if he’d already been left behind.

At the foot of the stairs, Trave turned back, hoping to get a last glimpse of her at the turnstiles, but she was gone, swallowed up into the throng of
afternoon travelers, and so he climbed back up into the day and walked out onto Blackfriars Bridge.

The great grey river washed against its stone banks, too dirty to reflect the solid nineteenth-century buildings rising up on either side. And, despite the sunshine, there was almost no river traffic. Just a police launch approaching fast from the east, looking for something or someone. London was an easy place to end your life, if that’s what you had in mind.

Trave felt the old familiar depression settle down onto his shoulders, although there was no return of the pain in his chest that had brought him to his knees on the first day of the trial. He’d almost have welcomed it, because the sense of desolation told him a different story. He’d live for many more years yet in his big old North Oxford house, thinking about his son who had died and his wife who had left him for another man. He’d hear the echo of things that had gone forever until he couldn’t stand it anymore. The echo of playing the piano in an empty room or mowing the lawn in an empty garden. Keeping going for no good reason at all.

Trave’s work had been his salvation ever since his son died. He was good at it, and it had kept his demons at bay, for most of the time at least. But this case had changed things. Standing, looking down into the grey river, Trave realised that now. He’d begun to make mistakes. He should have pressed Ritter’s wife more when she made her statement. He should have had enough experience to know if she was lying to him. Stephen’s guilt was too easy an explanation, but he’d ignored the personalities and concentrated on the facts. It didn’t matter how strong the evidence was. He should have known better. He should have kept an open mind. Instead he’d got it wrong. And now a boy might hang for something he probably never did. And a woman might die tonight. And it seemed like there was nothing he could do.

Trave turned away from the river with a sense of despair, but then thought better of stopping at the pub on the corner for a whisky. He had work to do, and he needed a clear head. First of all, he had to find Adam Clayton, if he was still in the courthouse. The gossip in the witness room was clearly what had driven the Frenchwoman to change her story. And of course Clayton’s evidence about what had happened that afternoon would help Gerald Thompson persuade the jury that she’d invented her new account on the spur of the
moment, in order to punish Silas by accusing him of the murder. Clayton would help put the rope back round Stephen Cade’s neck, and Trave understood himself well enough by now to know that he would do almost anything to save the boy. Anything except not do his job. His duty was to provide the evidence, not to withhold it, and then it was for the jury to decide who was guilty and who was not.

Perhaps Jeanne Ritter had told him the truth back on that late summer’s day when he had gone to visit her at Moreton and they had sat so awkwardly at either end of the heavy mahogany table in the dining room, never once making eye contact. In court today, he’d believed her, but now he wasn’t so sure. She’d been angry as well as desperate until Thompson had got the better of her. There were questions that still needed answers. Had she seen Stephen coming back into the study just before his brother crossed the courtyard? She’d have been at the window because she was doing her hair, but would she have seen him? If he’d come along the side of the house, he’d have been out of her view—and maybe out of her hearing too if the window was closed. There was a wind, and she’d never said she heard the gunshot. But then again, perhaps she hadn’t mentioned Stephen because he never did come back. Perhaps he was in the study all the time, killing his father, and the rest was just a figment of the Frenchwoman’s overactive imagination.

Trave shook his head from side to side, as if to rid himself of his thoughts. His mind was going round and round in circles, posing questions to which he had no answers. But at least Adam Clayton hadn’t gone. He was waiting for the inspector outside the courthouse.

“Where have you been?” he asked, sounding nervous and excited all at once. “People in there were saying that Ritter’s wife fainted and that’s why the court rose early.”

“Yes. I’ve just been taking her to the underground. She’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

“But that can’t be right,” said Clayton, clearly surprised. “She just went by here only a couple of minutes ago. She was with her husband. He was shouting at her, calling her names.”

“What names?” asked Trave, looking horrified.

“He called her a whore. And a bitch too, I think. He was pulling her
along, and so I didn’t get to hear much. Perhaps I should have stopped him, but I didn’t, because she is his wife, after all,” Clayton ended uncertainly.

“No, I’m the one who should have done that.” Trave realised what a fool he’d been. Why hadn’t he seen her onto a train? Instead he might just as well have handed her over to her murderous husband. Ritter had obviously followed them down into the underground station, and then calmly waited until Trave had left before taking hold of his wife and dragging her back the way she’d come, while Trave gazed down into the River Thames, wallowing in self-pity. God knows where they were now.

“Did Ritter say anything else?” Trave asked.

“He said she was going to show him. Whatever that meant.”

“Show him,” repeated Trave, sounding puzzled, and then suddenly he understood. “Come on,” he shouted. “He’s taking her back to Moreton. And he’s driving. Otherwise he wouldn’t have come back here.”

“How do you know it’s Moreton?” asked Clayton, speaking between panting breaths, as he struggled to keep up with the inspector.

“Because that’s where she betrayed him with scrawny Silas Cade. He’s probably going after him too.”

The Rolls-Royce glided down the fast lane of the motorway, headed for Oxford. Silas was driving at close to one hundred miles per hour, but the car showed no sign of stress. Cocooned inside, Silas’s mind was racing. He had very little time to make a plan, and he needed something that would work.

Jeanne’s evidence had come as a complete shock. Only the day before she’d been her normal self. Ritter had gone into Oxford and they’d met in the trees by the west wall. And afterward she’d clung to him, fantasising about a future he knew they would never have. But it didn’t matter. He’d let her get on with it, building her castles in the air. Ritter would take her away once the trial was finished and Silas was the undisputed lord of the manor. In the meantime, there was no need to rock the boat.

But then she’d got up in court and practically accused him of murdering his father. She must have found out about the photographs of Sasha. There was no other possible explanation. Somebody must have told her about them. But who? Silas had asked himself this question a hundred times or more since he’d slipped out of the back of the courtroom in the middle of Jeanne’s evidence, but forty miles down the highway, he was still no nearer to an answer.

He’d known from the first that the photographs were his Achilles’ heel. He should have had the sense to destroy them before the police searched the
house. But they had been very understanding when he’d gone down to the station in Oxford to ask for them back. They’d got their man, and the pictures weren’t relevant to the case. He’d burnt them when he got home, but that didn’t mean he could erase them from people’s minds. The whole bloody Oxfordshire police force must have been laughing at him for months, thought Silas bitterly—calling him a voyeur, a dirty little peeping Tom. But it didn’t matter. What mattered was that now, thanks to Jeanne, he was a murder suspect. He needed an alibi. And there was only one person in the world who could provide him with one. Silas looked up into the empty afternoon sky and prayed to a god in whom he didn’t believe that just this once Sasha would be home.

He found her in the manuscript gallery on the second floor. He hadn’t seen her at first. The high polished oak bookcases, which the professor had had specially constructed by a firm of Oxford craftsmen a decade earlier, divided the gallery into self-contained aisles, connected by several open archways. The central aisle was the widest, but those at the sides had tables set under the high leaded windows, to enable the professor and his assistants to work using natural light. Sasha was sitting at one of these now, poring over some Latin text or other. She had turned on a green reading lamp, but a few final shafts of late afternoon sunlight still penetrated the library, illuminating motes of dust in the still air, picking out the gold titles on the spines of the old leather books on the highest shelves.

Silas had come quietly up the central aisle and now stood watching the woman he wanted from the other side of the archway between them. She had taken off the jacket of her grey suit and pushed her hair back over her shoulders. With an imaginary hand, he traced the line of her soft white neck down beneath her starched white shirt, on to the high mound of her right breast, and then round, behind, to where she was most vulnerable. Forgetting himself, Silas moved slightly, adjusting his weight from one foot to the other, and Sasha looked up, startled. Surprise and then irritation replaced the previous expression of rapt concentration on her face, and then, almost immediately, she reached back and put on her jacket. It was always the same. She could never rid herself of the consciousness of her disfigurement, and Silas imagined that it must itch her all the time, like eczema.

“What are you doing? Something interesting?” he asked, glancing down
at the papers spread out on the table between them. There was no time, but he needed her calm before they talked.

“Just work. It wouldn’t interest you.” Sasha was ruder than she intended, unable to keep the annoyance out of her voice. Silas always seemed to appear out of nowhere, as if he’d been watching her for a while before he finally approached.

“Why not?” he asked. “Maybe I know what you’re looking for.”

Sasha suddenly became very still while her mind raced. What was he talking about? Perhaps Silas did know something about the codex. Perhaps he’d seen something. What a fool she’d been, allowing her dislike of the man to get the better of her common sense. If anybody could be relied on to pry out people’s secrets it was Silas, and yet she’d spent the last six months trying to avoid him.

“I’ve been watching you, Sasha,” he said. “I’ve seen what you do, late at night down in my father’s study, when you think no one is looking. Opening this, opening that, tapping on walls. And all the time what you’re searching for is sitting right there in front of your eyes.”

Silas laughed, but Sasha forced herself not to respond. His tone angered her as much as his words. She hated the thought of his knowing her so well, but she needed to know what he was going to say.

“It’s the book you’re after, isn’t it?” he said. “The one that my father stole from those people in France.” Silas knew there was no time left to fence about. He needed to engage Sasha, and all the time he was listening with one ear for the sound of police cars screeching to a halt outside. Jeanne’s evidence made it inevitable that they’d be coming after him.

“What is it you want, Silas?” asked Sasha, trying to keep the excitement out of her voice. At that moment there was almost nothing she wouldn’t have done to get her hands on the codex.

“I want to make a trade,” he said.

“A trade?”

“Yes, that’s what they call it in the secret service, you know. We each have something the other one wants. We make an exchange, and then we both live happily ever after. That’s how it works.”

“And what have I got that you want?” Sasha asked warily.

“Evidence.”

“Evidence.” She repeated the word as if she didn’t understand it. It was not the answer she had been expecting.

“Yes. I need an alibi.”

“For what?”

“For killing my father.”

It was Sasha’s turn to laugh. The thought of Silas as the Moreton Manor murderer had never even occurred to her. Silas was like Hamlet without the speeches. He never
did
anything. He just took photographs.

“Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “I didn’t do it, if that’s what you’re thinking. We’ve got my brother to thank for that. No, I’ve just been accused of it, that’s all.”

“By whom?”

“Jeanne Ritter. She gave evidence today. Said she saw me crossing the courtyard from the study to the front door, just before Stephen started shouting.”

“And did you?”

“No, of course not. I was up in my room, like I told the police.” Silas lied easily. It was something that came naturally to him.

“So what’s the problem?”

“She’s the problem. It’s my word against hers. And they’re going to believe her because I’ve got no one to back me up. Unless you help me.”