Fatal Inheritance

by Rachel Rhys

  Laurent himself hasn’t been back to France since the Victor Meunier incident. The last Eve heard, he had bought an island in the Caribbean and was building a luxury hotel there, and a casino. She doubts it will hold his interest for long. Though no charges have ever been brought against him, Eve imagines his return would be tempting fate.

  When she’d first heard Gloria was coming to France, Eve had hoped Sully might come too. After all, he had written the film script and was as much a part of Hollywood now as Gloria herself. But no. It would be hellish to be so close to her and yet worlds apart in all the ways that count, he wrote in his last letter. Who knew love would turn out to be such a burden?

  ‘And who else?’ Eve quizzes Henrietta. ‘Who else is coming?’

  Eve knows she should stop this constant testing, trying to probe the depths of Henrietta’s troubled mind, to measure the damage wrought by both the madness itself and the treatment of it.

  ‘Jack Collett,’ answers Henrietta obediently. ‘Sweet Jack.’

  Eve smiles. Jack has been in the South of France all summer, researching his thesis on the Riviera’s burgeoning post-war art scene, and she already knows both of them will miss him terribly when he returns to England in a week’s time for the final year of his postgraduate degree.

  ‘And Libby,’ Henrietta continues, pressing her hands together in excitement just like a child. Eve, watching, feels a sharp pang of jealousy. Oh, not of Libby. Who could ever be jealous of Libby, who remains, as ever, fiercely and incontrovertibly herself? No, she is jealous of the uncomplicatedness of the relationship that has grown between Henrietta and Libby, the joy they find in each other’s company, the hundred different ways they make each other smile. Sometimes, in her less lucid moments, Henrietta imagines Libby is the daughter she lost all those years before – the younger Eve – and smothers her with kisses, and Eve has to find an excuse to leave the room.

  At these times, Diana, if she is here, will catch Eve’s eye and raise an eyebrow and there will pass between them a look of understanding, and Eve will feel surprised all over again that she should have found in Diana Lester so unlikely an ally. Too early yet to say ‘friend’. But soon, perhaps.

  Between Eve and Henrietta things are getting better all the time, but occasionally the past still gets in the way. It’s hard to completely shake off that persistent alternative narrative where a mother’s love overcame a widow’s grief, where Eve grew up wanted, cherished, safe, rather than a daily reminder of a ripped-to-shreds heart.

  She has forgiven – for the most part anyway. It was not Henrietta’s fault. But forgetting will take longer.

  At least the nights are better now. For the first six months after Eve finally persuaded the hospital trust to release Henrietta to her care – thanks largely to the eagerness of the newly formed National Health Service to launch itself into the mid-twentieth century and find modern solutions – Henrietta hadn’t been able to sleep alone. Instead she and Eve had shared a room, with Eve often kept awake by the older woman shouting out in her sleep.

  ‘You should be under no illusions as to what you are letting yourself in for,’ the hospital trust’s assistant head of psychiatric services had told her. ‘There can be no cure for long-term patients like your mother. There will be night terrors. She might be taciturn, withdrawn, maybe even hostile. Are you prepared for this?’

  On the whole, very little of that bleak picture has come to pass, and Henrietta now sleeps in her own room, although she still wakes up screaming from time to time. Yet life is not entirely straightforward. Eve and Henrietta are still finding their way with each other, which is why Eve’s heart tugs a little when she sees Henrietta’s delight at Libby’s name.

  But that’s all right.

  Baby steps.

  ‘And who else?’ she prompts now, bending to sniff a sweet basil plant on the middle terrace, not because she needs it for dinner but to hide her expression when Henrietta answers, ‘Noel Lester.’

  It isn’t that Eve is embarrassed about her relationship with Noel. Just that she wishes to protect it. Once, when she was working for the Women’s Voluntary Service, she was assigned to accompany a photographer commissioned with taking pictures of smiling recipients of donated furniture for a government campaign. He showed her around his darkroom and she was struck by the patience required to hold off from snatching the photographs out of the trays just as soon as the image started showing. Well, it’s like that with her and Noel. Whatever this is, it needs to be left alone to develop.

  Noel doesn’t agree. ‘Why won’t you marry me?’ he asked just a few days before, as they lay entwined together in the hammock under the pepper tree on the lowest terrace. And Eve had given her usual answer: ‘Because I’m still technically married.’

  Clifford is dragging his feet over the divorce, as she knew he would. He tells people she is in the South of France on account of her mother’s health, which, like all good lies, contains some elements of truth.

  When a new buyer for Villa La Perle was eventually found, Clifford had tried to lay claim to Eve’s share of the money, but for once Eve held firm. She could not forget about the money he’d already appropriated and lost, and besides, she was well aware that Henrietta’s long-term care would come at a cost. She had threatened to halt the sale of the villa by refusing to sign the papers. ‘Which would leave me without funds to pay the inheritance tax and goodness knows what other duties,’ she’d told Clifford. ‘And by me, of course I mean you, as we are still married, after all.’

  Sometimes she is astounded by the person she has become.

  With her share of the profits from the sale, Eve was able to buy this little house in the hills between Cabris and Grasse, which she loves with every fibre of her heart and soul, even if Clemmie did say on her first and only visit, ‘Charming, but where’s the main house?’ Clemmie says things for effect, as Eve is discovering. The trick is not to take any of it to heart.

  Besides, Clemmie and Duncan are moving soon. Back to England, away from the temptations of the Riviera’s casinos – and out from the shadow of his father and brother. On the whole, Duncan has managed to steer clear of the card tables since his debts were paid off, but he knows it’s only a matter of time if he stays.

  What Eve doesn’t tell Noel is that she has no wish to be married a second time. She loves being able to go for a walk without anyone fussing that it looks like rain and shouldn’t she take an umbrella, or to cook an experimental soup of vegetables from her own little plot without worrying that it has the look and texture of mud.

  ‘What about children?’ Noel had asked her out here on the hammock.

  ‘I was a child once,’ she told him. ‘Why would I inflict that fate on another poor soul?’

  She meant to be frivolous, but the fact is, her childhood is a sore Eve just can’t seem to make heal. The things her mother never told her. The secrets that festered like mould in the dark corners of that house in Banbury.

  Only Henrietta harbours no grudges.

  ‘How can you have forgiven her?’ Eve asked only the day before, when Henrietta was on unusually expansive form.

  ‘I did her a great wrong,’ came the answer. ‘Mary had a hard life, with only one thing that made her happy, and I stole it from her.’

  ‘But she would have kept you locked up in that asylum for life.’

  ‘Mary loved Francis so much, Eve. And passion drives away reason.’

  Even so, Eve herself cannot forgive. Growing up without love creates a void inside a person that can never entirely be filled, for all you try to stuff it full of new friends and family and tender kisses from someone who tells you every day that you’re their world.

  Still, she is edging closer towards fulfilment, particularly since she started giving English lessons to some of the locals in Cabris. The warmth that spreads through her veins from seeing understanding dawn on a child’s face, or holding a halting conversation with a former soldier who left school at fourteen, is something she never e
xpected.

  On the desk in Eve’s little bedroom sits the carved wooden box that Diana gave her when Villa La Perle was sold. It’s the same box that had once held the love letters Henrietta wrote to her dead husband. Inside the box is an envelope with Eve’s name on it, written in blue ink in her mother, Mary’s, angry, cramped script.

  An explanation of sorts, she supposes.

  It arrived two or three months ago, having been sent first to Bernard’s office. Marie turned up at the house with it, announcing herself as ever with the frustrated roar of a car engine attempting the hill in the wrong gear.

  ‘I did not know if I should bring this to you,’ Marie told Eve, guessing correctly who it was from.

  One day she will open it. Just not yet.

  Eve has decided to attempt a local dish for dinner tonight – estoficada, a kind of fish stew that involves cooking dried cod for hours with tomatoes and olives and handfuls of fresh herbs. She busies herself around the garden picking fennel, marjoram, parsley, thyme and bay, while Henrietta lies back in her chair, her eyes closed under the outsized brim of her hat.

  A beetle crawls out from the clump of freshly picked summer savory in her left hand and Eve shakes it to the ground, which is laid with old honey-coloured flagstones around which grow the last of the year’s wildflowers – globe thistle, pink autumn crocuses and tiny yellow Spanish broom.

  For a few moments, Eve tracks the beetle’s unhurried progress across the terrace, admiring its ability to adjust to the sudden change in its fortunes, its blind faith that in spite of everything, where it is going will end up being where it wants to be.

  Then she rouses herself and heads back up the stone steps and in through the house to the tiny kitchen, to make a head start on dinner before the first of her guests arrives.

  Acknowledgements

  Fatal Inheritance is dedicated to Fraser Macnaught, dear friend and long-term French resident, who acted as guide, driver, translator and cutter-through of bullshit while I was carrying out research for this book, despite his being part-way through treatment for lung cancer at the time. One of my abiding memories of Fraser is sitting on the terrace of the beautiful Hotel Les Belles Rives in Cap d’Antibes with my partner, Michael – his childhood friend – watching the sun set over the Mediterranean and drinking staggeringly expensive cocktails. It was mid-May 2017, four months before Fraser died, and one of us broached the subject of his prognosis. ‘Put it this way,’ he said, ‘we’re burning the expensive candles.’

  That’s not a bad mantra for life, it seems to me.

  Thanks to Fraser’s wonderful wife Nathalie, for her help and her kindness and courage, and to her father Daniel for attempting to answer my ill-thought-out questions about trains and timetables and sunrises in Cannes.

  Big thanks to Clare Griffiths and her fiancé Denis Girard for help with French language questions, and to the extended Griffiths clan (Steve, Sally, Nicole, Peter, Fabienne) for always making us feel so at home in the South of France.

  French inheritance laws are hugely complex, as I found to my cost. Thank you to notaries Laurence Molière-Sambron and Richard Poulin for helping me navigate my way through them. Any mistakes that remain are entirely my own.

  Gloria Hayes was an utter delight to write and I am grateful to Bill Browne and Aymee Fretwell Gandy for reading through her dialogue, checking for anything that sounded too jarring to a sensitive Southern ear.

  The name Ruth Collett was given to me courtesy of the real-life Ruth Collett, who won the chance to have a character named after her as a prize at a local CLIC Sargent fundraiser auction. CLIC Sargent is a remarkable charity that supports children and young people with cancer and I couldn’t have been more thrilled that Ruth won. Not just because she’s been one of my son Jake’s closest friends since they started primary school together, but also because the fundraiser was inspired by her selfless determination to give back to the charity that supported her through her own cancer treatment.

  Thanks as ever to the teams of people who make my books the best they can be and try to get them into as many readers’ hands as possible. To my amazing agent Felicity Blunt, and everyone else at Curtis Brown, especially Melissa Pimentel.

  Thanks also to my US agent Deborah Schneider, who works tirelessly to bring my books to America and who found such a happy home for my last book, Dangerous Crossing, with Atria Books, and to Sarah Cantin.

  Special thanks to Transworld Publishers, who have championed my books relentlessly, particularly my unflappable editor Jane Lawson and the inimitable Alison Barrow: publicist, friend and font of all book knowledge. Thanks also to Kate Samano, and to the sales team, who are the unsung heroes of the publishing process.

  Thanks to my friends and my family (even my wayward dog), and to the book clubs, the booksellers, the bloggers and, above all, the readers.

  I’ll be thinking of you all while I burn an expensive candle tonight.

  RACHEL RHYS is the pen-name of a much-loved psychological suspense author. Fatal Inheritance is her second novel under this name. Her debut A Dangerous Crossing, a Richard and Judy Book Club pick, was published around the world. Rachel Rhys lives in North London with her family.

  Keep in touch with Rachel:

  www.tammycohen.co.uk

  MsTamarCohen

  @MsTamarCohen

  Also by Rachel Rhys

  A Dangerous Crossing

  A DANGEROUS CROSSING

  Rachel Rhys

  It was a first class deception that would change her life forever …

  1939, Europe on the brink of war: Lily Shepherd leaves England on an ocean liner for Australia, escaping her life of drudgery for new horizons.

  She is instantly seduced by the world onboard: cocktails, black-tie balls and beautiful sunsets. Suddenly, Lily finds herself mingling with people who would otherwise never give her the time of day.

  But soon she realizes her glamorous new friends are not what they seem. The rich and hedonistic Max and Eliza Campbell, mysterious and flirtatious Edward and fascist George are all running away from tragedy and scandal even greater than her own.

  And by the time the ship docks in Sydney, two passengers are dead, war has been declared, and life will never be the same again …

  With its intoxicating mix of murder mystery and a fateful love story, A Dangerous Crossing is an enthralling novel in the great tradition of Agatha Christie and Patricia Highsmith.

  AVAILABLE NOW

  A Bantam book

  Published by Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060

  penguin.com.au

  First published in Great Britain by Doubleday, an imprint of Transworld Publishers, in 2018

  First published in Australia by Bantam in 2018

  Copyright © Rachel Rhys 2018

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Penguin Random House Australia.

  Addresses for the Penguin Random House group of companies can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com/offices.

  ISBN: 9780143783220

  Cover design by Blacksheep

  Cover images: Figure © Lee Avison/Arcangel; palm tree © brians101/Depositphotos; sun bed © Delphotos/Alamy.

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