The Inheritance

by Simon Tolkien

  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.

  There was a message from Adam Clayton pushed under his door, asking him to call when he got in, but it was past midnight and Trave decided to wait until morning. His head was throbbing when he got up, and the phone line was bad. Standing in the hotel lobby, Trave had to shout to make himself heard, and the other residents eating their breakfast in the hotel’s miniature dining room glared at Trave until he turned his back on them. Above the crackling Clayton sounded almost ebullient. He’d found Cade’s key ring, and one of the keys on it did fit the study door. Trave felt a tremor of excitement. It was as if he had uncovered the footprint of an invisible man. His instinct had been right. The key with Stephen’s fingerprints on it had been a copy. The question was, Who had made it? Trave was about to tell Clayton what to do next but Clayton preempted him. He had already started making the rounds of Oxford locksmiths.

  Buoyed, Trave packed his bag and drove over to the records office. But he didn’t get the
death certificates that he’d applied for the previous day until the afternoon. There were four of them, each neatly typed and signed and edged with a black border. Henri Rocard, aged forty-eight; his wife, Mathilde, aged fifty-two; and an old servant called Albert Blanc were each described as having been shot by the enemy in Marjean Church on August 28, 1944. The fourth victim, Marguerite Blanc, clearly the wife of Albert, had been burnt by the Germans in the château on the same day.

  There was also a copy of a letter with the certificates in which the chief registrar in Rouen informed the lawyers for Stephen Cade in London that all the existing records had been checked, and they disclosed no evidence that either the Rocards or the Blancs had any close living relatives at the time of their deaths.

  Existing records. Trave asked the man behind the desk why that word had been used. Why not just records? He was a different official from the day before. More helpful but just as self-important. He explained, in slow French for Trave’s benefit, that the records for 1938, 1939, and early 1940 had been destroyed when the Germans invaded northern France, but those before that had survived because they had been kept in a secure archive immune from enemy bombing. A disaster of this kind would not happen again, added the clerk in a self-satisfied tone, because procedures had improved since the war. It was almost as if he was expecting the Germans to start bombing Rouen again anyday now.

  Trave drove out of the town, gripped with a sense of mounting frustration. He’d half known, of course, that the records office wouldn’t help him. Swift’s man had been there already after all. But his policeman’s instincts had told him to be thorough, and now he regretted his decision. He should have gone straight to Moirtier and Marjean, but as it was, he had wasted nearly two days and was no further forward, while all the time the clocks in Wands-worth Prison ticked remorselessly on.

  Moirtier-sur-Bagne called itself a town, but really it was little bigger than a large village, built on either side of a tiny tributary of the Seine. There was one hotel with a café on the ground floor, which faced the mayor’s office and police station across the village square, where a group of men in berets were playing bowls under the plane trees in the late afternoon. Trave bought a glass of wine and sat down near the game, watching the black balls being tossed through the air to land in the sandy dirt. The players hardly ever spoke and showed no apparent interest in Trave, even when he tried unsuccessfully to strike up a conversation with them. Eventually, despairing of an opening, he asked them outright if they knew anything about the killings at Marjean Château fifteen years before. But this just made things worse. They shook their heads and turned their backs on him, muttering to one another in a fast French that he could not understand, until he gave up and went inside.

  It was the same with everyone he approached in Moirtier both that day and the next. The reactions ranged from incomprehension to outright hostility, and he fared little better in Marjean itself, which turned out to be an even smaller place than Moirtier, a few houses built around the crest of a low hill surrounded by vineyards, with a view across a long dark lake to a ruined house and church encircled by encroaching woods.

  The police station in Moirtier was closed on the day of Trave’s arrival, but the following morning, a Friday, he found a young gendarme sitting behind an iron desk, laboriously typing out something official on an ancient typewriter.

  “You make me feel like I’m at home again,” said Trave with a smile.

  “Seventeen Hill Road, Oxford, England,” said the young man, without looking up.

  “How do you know that?” asked Trave, astonished.

  “Your registration card at the hotel,” said the young man, waving it in the air like a conjuror. “They pass it on to us, and we make a record in triplicate. One stays here, one goes to Rouen, and one to Paris. Don’t ask me why. It’s the law and I do what I’m told. Fortunately, I don’t have to do it too often. Not too many foreigners put up at the Claire Fontaine these days, particularly in the winter.”

  The young man’s friendliness was a welcome change after the reticence Trave had encountered from the other villagers. “I’m here for a reason,” he said.

  “So I hear. Asking questions and getting no answers. This is a small town, Mr. Trave. People don’t like outsiders.”

  “But you don’t feel that way?”

  “You’re a policeman and so am I. We have something in common.”

  “Not enough, I’m afraid,” said Trave with a smile. “You’re too young to be able to help me.”

  “With what?”

  “The real story of what happened at Marjean Château fifteen years ago. You’d still have been in school in 1944.”

  “But that doesn’t mean I can’t help,” the gendarme said. “It’s no great secret. It’s the same as I told the lawyer’s man who came out here from London a few months back: the owners were killed by the Germans. Some people here say they were collaborators, but even if it’s true, they didn’t deserve to die that way. Herded into the church and shot like animals. The Nazis burnt the house too. It’s a ruin now.”

  “I know all that. But I’m here because I need to find out whether there were any survivors, anyone who saw what happened. It’s important. Some-body’s life depends on the answer.”

  “That’s what the other man said. But, as I told him, I’ve never heard of there being any survivors. Still, as you say, I was only a boy back then. You could ask my inspector, I suppose. He’d know one way or the other. He’s been here since before the war.”

  “Did the man from England talk to him?”

  “No. He was away then. It was during the summer. Everyone deserves a holiday some time, don’t they, Inspector?” said the gendarme, smiling.

  “Where is he now?” asked Trave, smiling in agreement.

  “Gone to Lille to see his sister. She’s not well and he visits her most weekends, but this time he’s taken the Friday off as well. He’ll be back on Monday. You can talk to him then.”

  “Can’t we call him? Doesn’t his sister have a telephone?”

  “No. She lives outside the city. No telephone, I’m afraid.”

  “What about a telegram?”

  “I don’t have the address. Come back on Monday morning, Inspector. You can talk to him then.”

  “Monday’s too late.”

  “I’m sorry.” The gendarme opened his hands in a gesture of deprecation, and then turned away to resume his typing.

  Trave realised that he had gone as far as he could. Perhaps the inspector’s sister did have a telephone, but the gendarme was not going to tell him the number. He was probably under strict orders not to reveal such information. Trave would have to wait until Monday. There was no point in going back to England before then anyway. Clayton didn’t need his help to visit a few locksmiths’ shops. And Stephen’s execution was not until Wednesday morning. There would still be time to get back to England and go with Swift to see the powers that be, as Creswell called them, if he found out something useful on Monday. At present he didn’t have anything. He didn’t need a lawyer to tell him that. Stephen could have copied the key, and the name in the atlas was just a curious coincidence.

  The next day Trave drove to Marjean, parked his car at the foot of the hill, and walked out to the ruined château along the side of the lake. It was a longer distance than it had looked when he set out, and the path was muddy in places, forcing him to take detours through the adjacent scrub. There was a glassy darkness to the water, an absence of movement on its surface that Trave found oddly disquieting. Several times before he reached the end of the path, he thought of turning back, and only his natural obstinacy kept him going.

  Eventually he found himself standing on the far side, looking up at the grey stone church and bell tower built on the top of a small hill, sloping up from where he stood at the water’s edge. Beyond the church the ground ran down again to the ruins of what had once been the château. It was sadly dilapidated. The glass in all the windows was broken and most of the roof
had fallen in. It was a desolate place, but incongruously, unexpectedly, a white truck was parked in front of the main door, which hung precariously off its hinges, swinging backward and forward in the slight breeze.

  As Trave stood looking at the car, wondering who it might belong to, two people came out of the church and began walking quickly down the path to the house. They had their backs to him, but Trave could see from their dress that they were male and female. The man was carrying what looked like two crowbars and the woman was holding a piece of paper. It was impossible to be sure as long as her back was turned, but Trave had the sense that she was angry about something. She was gesticulating with her hands, and her walk seemed unnaturally fast. There was something vaguely familiar about her figure, and Trave ran along the side of the hill toward the house, eager to see who she was. Just before she reached the car, the woman must have become aware of his approach, because she turned round to face him. Trave recognised her straightaway. It was Sasha Vigne.