The Inheritance (38 page)

After a moment, the superintendent sighed and pushed Thompson’s letter to the side of his desk, where it joined a growing pile of unanswered correspondence.

“I can’t stop you from taking a holiday, Bill,” he said resignedly. “You’re due for one. But remember this: It’s your trip and not mine. You’re not taking anyone else down with you if down is where you’re going. I’ll see to that. And don’t claim any expenses,” he added as Trave got up to go.

Trave nodded. “Thank you, sir,” he said, and he meant it. Creswell could have made it a lot harder for him if he’d chosen to, although it wouldn’t have stopped his leaving. Trave had made his mind up, and he’d have disobeyed a
direct order to stay in Oxford if he’d had to. But that didn’t stop him from being grateful it hadn’t come to that.

Trave took Clayton out to lunch at a nearby pub. In recent weeks he’d warmed to the young man. He made mistakes, but there was an innocent, wide-eyed enthusiasm about him that Trave had grown to like. Clayton asked questions and worked late because he was doing what he’d always wanted to do, not because he had his eyes set on the next promotion, like so many of the other young detectives on the force. And there was a human side to the boy that made Trave feel almost fatherly toward him. He hadn’t forgotten Clayton’s sudden nausea at Cade’s postmortem or his panic outside the courtroom in London. The memory of these episodes made Trave smile as he paid for two pints of Oxford bitter and took them over to a table by the fire.

“There’s something that I want you to do for me while I’m away,” he said, wiping the froth of the beer away from his lips after taking his first sip.

“Sure. Shoot.”

Trave smiled at the Americanism. Clayton had clearly been watching too much television on his days off. “It’s about one of the exhibits in the Cade case,” he said. “The key to the study door.”

“The one with our man’s fingerprints on it?”

“Yes. That’s the one. Not surprisingly, our friend Mr. Thompson attached a great deal of importance to it at the trial, because Sergeant Ritter heard Stephen turning the key in the lock before he opened the door. And both the Ritters said that the professor never locked the internal door of the study, so the jurors were left to infer that Stephen must have done so himself sometime before he unlocked it to let Ritter in. Pretty incriminating on the face of it, you have to admit.”

“Unless someone else locked the door after Stephen left the room and then didn’t have time to remove the key before Stephen came back,” said Clayton slowly.

“Yes, exactly,” said Trave, pleased by Clayton’s understanding. “Neither of the Ritters ever said anything about Cade’s leaving the key in the door, and in fact there’s no reason for him to have done so if he never locked it. He was an orderly man, and so he’d have kept the key on the ring in his desk drawer. And that’s not all. This murder was premeditated. I know it was. You don’t bring a gun to an interview unless you’re intending to use it. This killer
didn’t lose his temper, Adam. He did what he came to do. And if he locked the door to stop anyone from following him in, he wouldn’t have relied on there being a key in the door waiting for him to use. He’d have brought one with him.”

“Which he would’ve had copied before.”

“Yes. Using either Cade’s key or Mrs. Ritter’s for the purpose. It’s a long shot, Adam, but what I want you to do is get hold of Cade’s key ring. It should still be with the other exhibits up at the Bailey. If one of the keys on it fits the study door, then the one with Stephen’s prints on it is a copy, and you’ll need to start checking with all the locksmiths in the area. I’ll call you tomorrow evening after I’ve arrived, and you can tell me how you’ve got on. But keep your enquiries quiet. The superintendent isn’t exactly wild about what we’re doing.”

“How long are you going for?” asked Clayton.

“I don’t know. It would help if I knew what I was looking for. I told Creswell that I’d be back by the end of the week, but maybe it’ll take longer. Not much, though, or there won’t be any point. Stephen Cade’ll be dead.”

“When’s the execution fixed for?” asked Clayton, feeling his blood run suddenly cold as the reality of the situation got through to him.

“Nine days’ time is what I’ve heard. Wednesday week at eight in the morning. We’re his only hope, Adam, if Swift can’t get the home secretary to come through with a reprieve, and I wouldn’t hold your breath over that happening. This is the most right-wing government we’ve had since the war.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Clayton, feeling slightly sick as he finished his drink.

“And all his saints,” agreed Trave. But his mind was already looking ahead, thinking about his journey the next day. Although many of his colleagues would have taken Trave for the epitome of a little Englander, he was in fact surprisingly widely traveled, and he spoke French quite well for a man who’d learnt the language off long-playing records on weekday evenings after work.

It was French, in fact, that had first brought Trave and his wife together. They’d met at a class that he’d taken for a while when he’d gone as far as he could with the records. The teacher had divided her students into pairs so that they could practise talking about a day on the beach or visiting the cultural sites of Paris. Some pairings were more successful than others, but theirs was inspired. Trave and Vanessa never changed partners after that first day. The
class became the highlight of their weeks. They laughed at each others’ mistakes and encouraged each others’ efforts, and slowly but surely their laboured conversations turned into actual plans. They visited Paris first and then went south in search of the sun, and as soon as the first holiday was over they were planning the next one. Those were the happiest days of Trave’s life. They’d scrimped and saved and gone third class on trains, camping out at night under the stars and waking in the mornings with the cathedrals of Chartres or Tours or Rheims waiting for them on the horizon. They’d fallen in love with France and fallen in love with each other, and the experience had brought Trave out of himself, temporarily expunging his natural shyness. And it occurred to him now, as he prepared to return to a country that he hadn’t seen for more than four years, that he had been in headlong retreat from himself since Joe’s death, putting back up the shutters that he had first taken down when he started going to French classes at the Lycée on the Banbury Road all those years ago.

Trave could have flown to Paris, but he had opted instead to go on the ferry to Le Havre and then drive across Normandy to Rouen, and now, standing on deck, feeling the sea spray flying up into his face, blown on the back of a big southwesterly wind, Trave felt pleased with his decision. He disliked aeroplanes. Perhaps it was the memory of the bombers flying high across the skies of southern England during the war or just that he liked to physically travel his journeys, measuring the passage of earth or water beneath his feet. Whatever the reason, he always found an excuse to avoid air travel if he possibly could, and he enjoyed ferries or trains all the more because he wasn’t up in the air.

And he had no wish to see Paris again. Vanessa and he had gone there more times than he could remember, visiting the same little restaurants down side streets in the Latin Quarter until the proprietors got to know them by name or sitting under café awnings in the Jardins du Luxembourg, listening to the jazz players in the late afternoon. Paris belonged in the past with a thousand other memories, thought Trave, as the north coast of France rose up toward him out of the sea mist. There was no going back.

Rouen. Vanessa and he had never been there. God knows why. It was less than an hour from the capital on the train, and they had both always loved Monet’s pictures of the cathedral in the sunset, with the architecture dissolving into blue and gold. It was just one of the places that they’d happened
to miss, and Trave was glad of that now. It allowed him to concentrate on the job in hand. His instinct told him that there was a connection between this tract of northern France and what had happened in the old English manor house outside Oxford five months earlier. What it was he didn’t know. Everything was murky. He had a hundred different questions but no answers. Who, for example, was the man in the black Mercedes parked opposite the manor-house gates on the night of the murder? Trave was sure that he wasn’t a figment of Stephen’s imagination. Clayton had seen a car there, after all, when he responded to Ritter’s emergency call. But was the driver the man who shot John Cade? Or was he just waiting for the murderer to come out? Was the Mercedes a getaway car to be used if needed? And was that why the door of the telephone box was wedged open—so that the real killer could telephone through instructions to his accomplice from inside the house? But no telephone calls had been made that evening. Trave had had the log printed out and there was nothing until Ritter called the police at ten forty-six.

Was Silas the man on the inside? Now that almost two days had passed since their evening interview, Trave’s doubts about the new owner of Moreton Manor had started to resurface in abundance. As he had told Clayton the day before, Trave felt certain that Cade’s murder was premeditated. And Silas fitted the profile of a cold-blooded killer. He had found his father murdered in his chair, and his first reaction had been to go and get his camera. Except of course that John Cade hadn’t been Silas’s real father. Silas was adopted. Patricide had to be an easier crime to commit when there was no biological link between the killer and his victim. And Trave remembered how shifty Silas had looked in the witness box the second time around, when Swift had gone for the jugular. His alibi was false. Trave had always been certain of that. And if he hadn’t been with Sasha Vigne, then where had he been on the night of his father’s murder? Waiting to enter the study as soon as his brother had left it, with a key in one gloved hand and a gun in the other? Hiding behind the thick green curtains when Stephen unexpectedly returned, and then slipping away across the stone courtyard unseen by anyone except his lover as she sat brushing her hair at the upstairs window while her fat husband lay snoring in the bed behind her?

Was this how it had been? What was it that Swift had called Silas? A puppet master. Perhaps Silas already knew that there had been no survivors
of what had happened at Marjean Château in the summer of 1944—no survivors and no relatives of those who had died. Perhaps there was no French connection. Trave was hit by a sudden wave of anxiety that he had been sent on a wild-goose chase. He’d spoken to Swift before his departure about the investigation work that the defence team had done in Normandy, and it was clear that their man had done a thorough job. Perhaps the best he could hope for would be the same blank answers to his questions from unhelpful French officials, while Stephen’s last days on this earth would drain fruitlessly away on the other side of the Channel as his brother sat in Moreton Manor valuing his ill-gotten gains.

It was almost enough to make Trave turn back. And perhaps he would have done so if he hadn’t thought of the atlas that Silas had opened on his table. Moirtier-sur-Bagne. Three miles from Marjean. And almost the same name that the Mercedes driver had given when he was stopped on the road to Oxford. An alias given on the spur of the moment or a signature on the night’s events? Whatever it was, Silas had not made up the name. It was in the policeman’s notebook. Trave had to go on. Rouen first, to look at the records, and then on to the towns themselves. Moirtier and Marjean. There was still time, and he had to follow his instincts.

Trave got to Rouen early on Tuesday evening and put up at a cheap hotel called the Jeanne d’Arc, down by the docks. The expenses for this trip weren’t going to be repaid, and he needed to watch his money. The centre of Rouen around the cathedral had already been extensively rebuilt, but down by the Seine the effects of the Allied bombing were still everywhere to be seen. It was a barren, ruined landscape for which Trave had been ill prepared. He slept uneasily in his dingy room and dreamt that Joe was still alive, running from German soldiers across the churned-up land, dodging bullets among the broken buildings. There was nothing that Trave could do except watch them gaining on his son, and he was shamed by the sense of relief that he felt in the morning when he woke up covered in sweat and realised that Joe was dead and buried, gone beyond the reach of evil men.

The records office in Rouen opened at nine o’clock on the dot, but that was where its efficiency ended. Certificates of birth, death, and marriage had
to be requested from an unseen holy of holies deep inside the building, and Trave was told that it would take at least a day to process his application. Waving his police badge in front of the expressionless bureaucrat in the front office was a complete waste of time. The procedures were inflexible, and Trave soon gave up the argument.

He had even less luck finding any contemporary documents. Rouen had been occupied by the Germans until two days after the killings at Marjean, and local news reporting in the summer of 1944 appeared to have been virtually nonexistent. Trave could find no account anywhere to either contradict or support the British military report that Cade had shown Stephen after the arrival of the blackmail letter at Moreton Manor two years earlier.

Trave wandered around feeling depressed and frustrated. Even the cathedral failed to lift his spirits, and in the evening he drank too much red wine on an empty stomach, sitting in the corner of a deserted riverside café until it finally closed its doors for the night. Afterward he walked unsteadily back to his hotel through the unlit backstreets, and narrowly avoided being run over by a speeding motorcycle as he missed his footing on the edge of a broken pavement.