The Inheritance (31 page)

“No, I’ll be all right,” said Blayne. “It was only to tide me over until the end of the month.”

Sasha wondered if he would last that long, but there was nothing she could do if he would not let her help him. She leant over and pulled the codex out of the briefcase, placing it in her father’s trembling hands.

“Here’s something to take your mind off your troubles,” she said. “Beautiful, isn’t it? It’s the real thing.”

“The codex of Marjean.” Blayne said the words like they were a prayer or some magical incantation. Tears stood out in the corners of his watery blue eyes as he slowly turned the thick vellum pages.

“Where did you get it, Sasha?” he asked. There was fear in his eyes now, supplanting the first look of wonder.

“Cade had it all the time,” she said. “It’s a long story, and I can’t tell it to you now. I need you to look at this.”

Carefully, Sasha opened out the folded sheet of notepaper with the series of numbers in columns that she had first seen in Cade’s study, when Silas had taken the codex out of his father’s chess box.

“This was inside the codex,” she said. “I need to know what it means.”

“It’s Cade’s handwriting. I recognize the way he wrote his sevens. They were always distinctive,” said Blayne, examining the paper. “It must be his key to the code.”

“I know that,” said Sasha impatiently. “What do you think I’ve been doing for the past three days? I’ve tried everything, but they’re numbers, not letters. You can’t read numbers.”

“The numbers must be telling you the position of the letters in the codex,” said Blayne quietly. He was holding the piece of paper in one hand and comparing it with the first page of the codex. “How extraordinary,” he went on after a moment. “It must have taken him more than ten years to get this far.”

“How do you know?”

“Because of the dates. We can assume Cade got possession of the codex in 1944, and then he went to France and got shot in 1956. Twelve long years. And all the time he can’t have known that there
was
a code to break at all. He was in the dark. The frustration must have been terrible.”

“You don’t know it was twelve years. It’s just a guess that he went to Mar-jean in 1956 because of the codex.”

“Maybe. But it’s a good guess.”

“I don’t care what kind of guess it is,” said Sasha, unable to contain her irritation. “I haven’t got twelve years. I need to know what these numbers mean now.”

“Well, the first thing you need to do is stop thinking like that, Sasha. Good codes are like the insides of old clocks. You have to work on them slowly. And you need to get inside the mind of the man who made the code in the first place. He didn’t think like we do.”

Sasha clenched her fists, trying to hold back her exasperation, and her father smiled.

“You used to do that when you were a child,” he said. “Look, don’t despair,
Sasha. We have Cade’s key. And with it the knowledge that there is a code and that it can be cracked. There will be pleasure in this for me. It will make me forget my landlady for a little while. I’m very grateful to you.”

Sasha couldn’t help laughing. She felt relieved: if anyone could decipher Cade’s key, it would be her father. She could tell from the look in his eye that his curiosity was aroused. She didn’t need to worry that he wouldn’t do his best.

She got up to leave, but at the door he called her back. There was a look of anxiety on his face, and he had put the codex back on the table. His hands were trembling more than ever.

“What if I do crack this code, Sasha? What will you do then?” he asked. His voice was full of fear.

Sasha stood in the doorway without answering. She didn’t need to. Blayne knew the answer to his own question.

“You’ll go to France just like he did, won’t you?” he said. “And something terrible will happen to you.”

“No, it won’t. I can look after myself.”

“How? You’re a woman on your own, and he had that man Ritter with him. From what you tell me, he was lucky to come home alive.”

“I’ll be more careful. I’ve told you before, Daddy. I’ve come too far to stop now.”

“Maybe. But I haven’t. I don’t need to look at this book,” said Blayne, making a show of pushing it away.

“Ah, but you will,” said Sasha with a smile, “I know you too well. It’s in your blood. And whatever you find out, you owe it to me to tell me.”

“So you can kill yourself with my blessing?”

“No, I won’t kill myself,” said Sasha, crossing over to her father and putting her hand on his shoulder. “I tell you what I’ll do. If you crack the code, we’ll decide what to do with it together. And, in the meantime, you must take this, and I’ll go to the pawnbroker and get your things back.”

Sasha had put three ten-pound notes on the codex as she spoke, and now she picked up the pawn ticket and kissed her father on the crown of his head before turning to leave.

“It probably won’t matter anyway,” he muttered. “The codex didn’t take Cade to the cross, and he cracked the code.”

Sasha opened her mouth to respond, but then thought better of it. Let her father console himself with such reflections if he wanted to, she thought. They did no harm. And there was no reason why she needed to tell her father how much she believed in the codex. The book would take her to the cross. She was sure of it. Cade’s failure didn’t deter her. He had simply taken a wrong turn somewhere. That was all.

At the door she glanced back into the room and saw that he had picked up Cade’s sheet of notepaper again and was running his shaking finger up and down the list of numbers.

The sight renewed Sasha’s optimism, and she took the stairs two at a time. Outside she made for the High Street. She could get a bus there to take her home. She smiled at the word. A bed, a chair, and a wardrobe didn’t make a home. But the room was safe and warm. And she could close her eyes and go to sleep, secure in the knowledge that Silas and his cameras were far away and that she had got from him all that she had ever wanted.

She leant against a recess in the wall opposite Queen’s College and idly watched the passing cars. It was the rush hour and the traffic was moving slowly in both directions. Soon a red light farther down the road brought the flow on her side to a complete halt, and her eyes rested on a black Jaguar that had stopped almost parallel with where she was standing. There was a man driving, and a woman beside him in the passenger seat. They were obviously arguing. The woman was gesticulating almost violently with her hands, and the man kept twisting around toward her to deliver a flurry of angry words before turning back to check the road in front of him.

With a start Sasha recognised Stephen’s girlfriend, Mary. She hadn’t seen her since the night of the murder. And now here she was, arguing with this strange foreign-looking man inside an expensive car. There was something about his high cheekbones and narrow eyes that made Sasha uneasy. Of course there was nothing wrong with Mary’s finding another man to spend her time with, given where Stephen was heading. But the choice seemed strange. Mary had struck her as so sweet natured and devoted to Stephen when she had visited the manor house in the week before Cade’s murder, and yet here she was now with this hard-looking man. He looked capable of anything. Involuntarily, Sasha turned away from the car and faced the wall, pretending to look for something in her empty briefcase. Without knowing why, she realised that
she didn’t want Mary to see her. The ploy seemed to have been successful, for when she turned back a minute later, the Jaguar had disappeared from view, and her bus was coming up the road toward her.

Sasha settled herself into a corner seat and thought of the Marjean codex open on her father’s table. He would translate Cade’s numbers into letters. She was sure of it. And the letters would tell her the way to St. Peter’s cross. Cade had failed to find it, but she wouldn’t make the same mistakes. It was her destiny to have it. She knew it was. Closing her eyes, Sasha pictured the cross in her hands. The wood was ancient, cut from one of the oak trees that used to grow in such profusion on the hills around Jerusalem. Jesus Christ had been nailed to it by the Jews, and Simon Peter had worn it around his neck until the Romans crucified him too. The jewels had come later. They authenticated the cross and made it heavy, too heavy to wear according to the old authors. They spoke of great uncut rubies and emeralds, sapphires and diamonds, and Sasha imagined the lights of the gemstones mixing together in the candlelight of Charlemagne’s church to create a precious rainbow, an earthly representation of the lights of heaven. Sasha longed for the cross. It was a wonder of the world, worth nothing less than everything to obtain.

By the time she got back to her room, Sasha had entirely forgotten about Mary Martin and the man in the car. As so often happened, the thought of the codex and the cross had driven every other experience right out of her head.

Above all Stephen felt a sensation of weight. The air itself seemed heavy, pressing down on his chest, making it difficult to breathe. It wasn’t at all how he had imagined it was going to be. He had pictured the witness box as an opportunity, his chance to convince the doubters, to win them over to his side. But it was nothing like that. He directed his answers at the jury just as his barrister had told him to, but the jurors’ faces remained impassive. There were no connections to be made. He was surrounded by people hanging on his every word, and yet he was completely alone.

Swift had let him tell his story. It was the same one he’d told the police on the day after his father died. And time hadn’t made it any more credible than it had been then. If only he hadn’t gone back to the study. If only he hadn’t picked up the gun. Every choice that he’d made had taken him further down the wrong road. And Stephen didn’t need to be told where that road led. It was why everyone was here. To see if he was going to live or die.

The moment had arrived. Gerald Thompson got to his feet and gazed at Stephen over the top of his gold-rimmed half-moon spectacles, allowing the silence to build around the accused. Standing in the witness box, waiting to be attacked, Stephen felt a curious sense of disassociation from himself. It reminded him of a scene that seemed to happen so often in the war movies he had watched insatiably as a child. The man from the gestapo would come
into the interrogation room, carefully removing his black leather gloves as he approached the table. It was always immediately obvious that he was an entirely different species of man from the soldiers that had been asking the prisoner questions up to then. For a start, he wore no uniform. Just an immaculately pressed double-breasted suit under his heavy tan mackintosh, with a small swastika on the lapel. He carried a small briefcase and looked just like a businessman arriving for a company meeting. There was nothing strong or hardy about him, and he never raised his voice. But the battle-hardened soldiers all instinctively shrank away from the new arrival. They knew that he was capable of things that they would prefer not to even imagine, and the cinema audience was left in no doubt that it was all over for the brave British airman sitting handcuffed to the chair with his back to the door. Thompson would’ve gone far in the gestapo, thought Stephen. He looked over at the prosecutor and realised with a shudder that the little man desired his death just as much as he himself wanted to live. It pushed Stephen onto the back foot before the cross-examination had even begun.

“How would you describe your relationship with your father in the last two years of his life?” Thompson began at last. There was a measured deliberation about the question, as if it was the first move in a long-planned game of chess.

But Stephen answered immediately without considering his reply. “We were estranged,” he said. “We had no relationship.”

“And that was because of your anger against him, yes?”

“It was more shame than anger. I couldn’t cope with what he had done. He’d killed people in cold blood. And it was obvious he felt no remorse.”

“And your feelings were strong enough that you cut off all contact with him?”

“Yes. I felt I had no choice.”

“So you left. Stayed away for two whole years. Did your father make any effort to contact you all the time you were away?”

“No, I think he was glad to be rid of me. He blamed me for my mother’s death. It was like he hated me.”

Stephen cursed himself as soon as the words were out of his mouth. It was what Swift had told him not to do. To volunteer information, to provide openings. Thompson wasn’t slow to take advantage.

“And you’d done nothing to deserve your father’s hatred,” he said. “The injustice must have made you very angry.”

“I tried not to think about it.”

“But did you succeed? Isn’t the reality, Mr. Cade, that as the months passed and turned into years, you became more angry with your father, not less?”

“No. Like I told you, I didn’t think about him.”

“I see. Well, why then did you go back to your father in the middle of last year, if you’d been so successful in putting him out of your mind?”

“Because of what Silas told me. That he didn’t have long to live. Knowing that made everything seem different.”

“Yes. Particularly if you were going to be disinherited. That was the real reason you went back to Moreton, wasn’t it? To stop your father from changing his will. By any means possible.”