The Inheritance (35 page)

Sasha smiled back at her father through her tears, and for a moment there was a complete understanding between them. Then, when the moment was over, he told her what he knew, pausing to muster his failing strength at the end of almost every short sentence.

“The codex is unusual,” he said, “and not just because it’s beautiful. In one way it’s almost unique.”

“In what way?” asked Sasha when her father didn’t go on.

“Well, you know that generally only the first letter of the chapter headings is decorated in medieval Gospels, but in the Marjean codex it’s different. The beginning letters of certain other paragraphs are embellished as well. I counted how many times it happens. The answer’s twenty-six.”

“And there are twenty-six numbers on Cade’s list,” cried Sasha. “You count from the start of each paragraph and that gives you the letters. Is that how it works?”

“Almost, but not quite. Cade encoded his own numbers. But that wasn’t too difficult to break. And then I had the answer without knowing how I’d got there, which wasn’t good for my vanity.” Andrew Blayne laughed, which brought on a coughing fit. His face was momentarily twisted by a spasm of
violent pain, but he fought it down and carried on where he had left off. “In the end I made the connection by thinking about the codex itself. The Gospel of St. Luke. One of the books of the New Testament. And without Revelation, but counting all the letters of St. Paul, there are twenty-six books in the New Testament. And the number of letters in each book is how far you go from each decorated initial. It’s as simple as that.”

“So what do the letters say? What is the message?” asked Sasha, unable to contain her impatience any longer.

But her father didn’t answer her question. “I’m so tired, Sasha,” he said after a moment. “I have to sleep a little. Just a little. And then we can talk some more.” His voice was faint and seemed to come from far away. He closed his eyes, and in the silence Sasha noticed the shallowness of his breathing. There was a tremor too in his right cheek. The lines on the screens behind her father’s head rose and fell as before, but she couldn’t remember if they were higher or flatter now than when she had first come in.

“Isn’t there anything you can do?” she asked, turning to the young doctor who had appeared in the doorway on the other side of the bed.

“We can do quite a lot to stop the pain. But not the bleeding, I’m afraid. I can’t tell you how long it will take. An hour, a day. It’s better if he rests. There’s a room down the hall where you can get a cup of coffee, and one of the nurses will call you when he wakes up.”

Sasha got up and looked down at her father. She felt suddenly uncertain about whether she should kiss him. Would it disturb the flow of electronic signals running from his body to the machines behind his bed? She glanced over at the doctor, and it was as if he could read her mind.

“Go on,” he said. “I’ll be outside if you need me.”

Sasha gently brushed away two stray locks of her father’s straggly white hair and thought back on his life. It had promised so much, only to descend into sickness and poverty once John Cade had intervened. The professor’s cold, cruel face flashed across Sasha’s consciousness, and she involuntarily clenched her fists. Given the chance, she’d have murdered him herself all over again at that moment. But instead she willed herself to forget Cade and the codex and to remember her father instead. He had loved her all her life. Even when they were separated through so much of her childhood, Sasha had never doubted him. And now he was going to leave her forever. A terrible premonition of her
own future loneliness swept over Sasha and she turned away, groping a path toward the door through the mist of her returning tears.

In the little room at the end of the hall, she was too tired to get coffee. She just sat down on a chair in the corner, closed her eyes, and within less than a minute was asleep. She dreamt that Cade and Ritter were alive again. They knew who she was and everything she had done. She was walking in Oxford, and they were following her down this lane and that through the warren of narrow cobbled streets behind the Cornmarket. Their footsteps echoed off the thick stone walls, and she could feel them gaining on her all the time. She looked up at the overcast sky and gargoyles with ghastly faces grinned down at her from the rooves of churches and colleges. Breathless, she turned into the run-down courtyard where her father lived and ran up the stairs to his attic room. She took them two at a time, but it was no use. Cade and Ritter were right behind her now. She could almost feel their hands on her clothes, on the ravaged, burnt skin under her shirt. She opened the door and the air was cold as ice, forcing her to a standstill. There was an old crackly record of
The Threepenny Opera
playing on the gramophone. “Well, the shark has pretty teeth, dear,” sang a German voice singing English. And over on the bed in the corner alcove, her father was stretched out, dressed in a shiny black suit and tie. His patent leather shoes looked strange lying on the starched white bed sheet, and it took Sasha a moment before she noticed the silver half-crown pieces placed over his eyes. She bent down to take them away, but a voice behind her, the sergeant’s voice, told her to leave the coins alone. Andrew Blayne belonged to them now. He wasn’t her father anymore.

Sasha woke with a start. The doctor was gently shaking her shoulder, trying to get her attention.

“A bad dream?” he asked, smiling.

“Yes. It doesn’t matter. How’s my father?”

“He’s slipping away, I’m afraid, and so I thought I should wake you. I’ve had to give him more painkilling drugs, and that makes it less likely that he’ll regain consciousness. But I don’t know. He might.”

“Mysteries of the organism,” said Sasha.

“Mysteries of what?”

“I’m sorry. It was just something funny he said when we were talking in
there before. How long have I been asleep?” she asked, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand.

“An hour. Maybe a little more.”

Sasha followed the doctor into her father’s room. Immediately she could see that he was worse, much worse. His breathing was very laboured now, and she sat holding his hand until the end came less than twenty minutes later.

Just before he died, he opened his eyes and looked at her. She was sure he knew who she was, and it seemed like he was trying to say something, but the words would not come. He gave up, and she leant over and kissed him on each sunken cheek.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you for being my father.”

She didn’t know whether he had heard her or not, and a minute later the lines on the screens flattened out, and she knew that he was gone.

And that was the end of it. She sat by her father’s corpse for another fifteen minutes and then got up to go. But at the end of the corridor, the doctor called her back.

“You’re forgetting something,” he said. “Your father brought a bag with him. The ambulance men packed it for him before he came here. There’s what looks like a valuable book inside it. I don’t think you should leave it here.”

Sasha mumbled her thanks. The doctor deserved better for his kindness, but for now she was too preoccupied to talk, and he seemed to understand. Was this what her father had been trying to say at the end when the words would not come? she asked herself as she went down the hospital stairs. That the codex was in his bag, or was he telling her to leave the book alone? She would never know. He had chosen to tell her the book’s secret, and knowing what it meant would be their last connection.

She was too impatient to wait until she got home. It was nearly midnight, and the big reception area of the hospital was half-empty. She sat down beside a tank of somnolent tropical fish and opened the codex on her knee. There was no sign of Cade’s list, but she didn’t look for it. It wouldn’t be right to use a crib, and besides her father had said that Cade had encoded his own numbers. It was easier to spell out the Latin names: The four evangelists and then the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of St. Paul to the Corinthians and the Thessalonians and to Timothy. As the letters slowly emerged, Sasha
wrote them down one by one. After nine books she had the first two words: “Crux Petri,” “The cross of Peter.” A shiver ran down her back.

Slowly and methodically she carried on, reading the old monk’s code under the hospital’s strip lighting, oblivious to the murmuring voices of the sick men and women around her. A few minutes later, and she had the message complete. “Crux Petri in manibus Petri est,” it read. “The cross of Peter is in the hands of Peter.” What could it possibly mean? Who was the second Peter, and where were his hands?

Leaving the last decorated initial behind, Sasha read the last page of the Gospel of St. Luke to herself. Jesus led them out as far as Bethany and blessed them, and while he blessed them, he parted from them and ascended into heaven. “Ascendit in caelum.” She turned the page, and there was Cade’s list of numbers tucked into the back of the book, and at the bottom in her father’s handwriting was a list of his own under the heading, “Abbots of Marjean.” There were four names and four sets of dates: Marcus 1278–1300. Stephanus Pisano 1300–05. Bartholomeus 1306–21. Simeon 1321–27. The last name was twice underlined. Simon, abbot of Marjean. Was he the second Peter of the coded message? Peter after all was Christ’s name for the apostle Simon. He called him
petrus
, or
stone
, because Simon was the rock on whom Christ chose to build his church—the same Simon Peter who betrayed Christ three times before the cock crowed on the day of the crucifixion.

Was St. Peter’s cross lying in the hands of Simon, abbot of Marjean? There was a crypt under the church with tombs on either side. She’d been there and seen it all two years earlier. The church had not been damaged by the fire that had gutted the château at the end of the war. Could it be possible that the cross had lain undetected in a stone tomb for nearly seven hundred years before Cade went there in 1956?

The thought of her father’s nemesis brought Sasha back to earth. Even forgetting that it made no sense that Cade had taken so long to break the code, she could not ignore the fact that he had gone to Marjean in 1956 and had come away empty-handed. He hadn’t found the cross, or he wouldn’t have hired her eighteen months later to search for it everywhere except where it ought to be: beneath the church at Marjean. Unless he had missed something. She had to go and look for herself. She must bury her father, and then she would take the ferry to Le Havre and hire a car. Her father had all but
told her where to go, even though he knew the dangers. As she had told him weeks before, when she first brought him Cade’s diary: She had gone too far to stop now.

The radio was playing in the taxi that took Sasha home from the hospital. Late-night news repeated every hour. The second item was the Moreton Manor murder. “Stephen Cade’s appeal due in court tomorrow,” announced a toneless voice from the dashboard. “Will death sentence be upheld?”

Sasha felt suddenly sick. She leant forward in her seat, clutching her knees as the world turned over. She was powerless to stop her brain from summoning up the same image that had come to her before: the image of Stephen sitting alone in his cell in the early morning, watching the clock for the appointed hour, waiting for the hangman to come. Her sense of responsibility clutched her like a vice. She thought fleetingly of telling the taxi driver to turn round, to take her to the police station so she could confess her sins to that weathered old policeman who had come to visit her at the manor house, pleading with her to tell the truth. But she knew she couldn’t. It was too late now. Perjury in a capital case was a serious crime: she didn’t need a lawyer to tell her that. They’d imprison her for what she’d done and the prize would slip from her grasp. She’d never find out what lay “in manibus Petri.” And anyway it would do no good. What was done was done. Stephen was beyond saving and her father was dead. The only way was forward: She had to go on.

Exhausted, Sasha wound down her window and lay back in her seat, letting the cold night air play over her face. The headlines were over on the radio, and she finished her journey to the accompaniment of an American called Elvis Presley singing something loud and insistent called rock and roll.

“At least it keeps you awake,” said the taxi driver, apologetically, as he took her money.

“Yes, it does that,” agreed Sasha with a thin smile, before she turned away with the bag containing the codex and its deciphered code held tightly in her hand.

Someone tapped Trave on the shoulder as he was waiting outside the Court of Appeal. It was John Swift, ready once more to go into battle. It wasn’t the first time the two had spoken: Swift had written Trave a note to thank him for the statement from the maid, Esther Rudd, and they had had a drink together after the verdict to commiserate on what had happened.

“Don’t get your hopes up, Inspector,” said Swift. “This hearing isn’t about the facts, remember, it’s about whether everything was done legally over at the Bailey. And Old Man Murdoch’s no fool. He kept everything on the legal side of bias just like he always does. We’re firing blanks, I’m afraid.”

Trave would’ve responded, but just then Tiny Thompson bustled past them through the door of the court, looking outraged at the spectacle of the officer in the case locked in discussion with his opposite number.

“Someone looks happy this morning,” said Swift, raising his eyebrows, and turned to follow Thompson into court. The case had been called on.