The Inheritance

by Simon Tolkien

  He stopped dead in his tracks, and so for a moment did she. But she recovered more quickly than he did, covering the last few yards to the car in a few rapid strides, before she yanked open the passenger door and joined her companion inside. Trave could hear her shouting at the man to drive: “Vite, vite.” The car’s motor gunned into life just as he reached her door, and the car shot forward toward the church, throwing him out of the way, before it turned half circle and disappeared down a track that seemed to lead straight into the woods. Trave ran after it a little way but then stopped with his hands on his knees, panting. His heart was racing but so was his mind. Sasha Vigne was the last person that he had expected to meet in this lonely place, far removed from all civilization.

  He needed to find her again, but he had no car. Cursing his decision to walk to the château, Trave turned back the way he’d come and started to walk quickly down the path towards Marjean village, shimmering on its hilltop in the last of the winter sunshine.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Sasha had been the only mourner at her father’s funeral, which took just under twelve minutes to complete in Chapel number 2 at Oxford Crematorium’s Garden of Remembrance. She was given the last slot before lunch, and the minister was already running late when her father’s turn came around. There was thus little time available for meaningful reflection before the big red curtain was drawn electronically around the light oak coffin and Andrew Blayne made his final invisible journey down the crematorium’s carousel toward the central furnace, which had been belching smoke when Sasha arrived and was belching smoke when she left with her father’s ashes in a small white plastic urn half an hour later.

  Andrew Blayne had left no instructions on whether he wished to be burnt or buried, but in the end Sasha had found the choice surprisingly easy to make. Sitting in his room on the day after his death, Sasha had tried to puzzle out what he might have wanted. But then a sudden breeze blowing through the open window had made up her mind for her, as it picked up the last scents of her father and dispersed them forever. The wind was like fire. Clean and quick and true. Not like the earth. The thought of her father’s body slowly decomposing in the wet soil had made Sasha sick to her stomach. God knows, he had known enough decay while he was still alive. The end was the end. Sasha had never believed in the resurrection of the body. Not even when she was a little girl and her mother took her to church twice on Sundays.

  And so she had made her booking with the undertaker and ended up outside the crematorium’s iron gates on a cold November day with a sense of complete isolation from everyone else in the world. But that of course was just what she wanted to feel. Her grief for her father was an event waiting to happen, but for now she was almost glad of his absence. Without him, there was nobody to deflect her from her purpose.

  First thing the next morning, she cleared out her bank account and changed her money into French francs. She had already given notice to her landlord and packed her belongings into two suitcases. One she deposited in the left-luggage office at Paddington Station, and the other she took with her on the boat train. The codex was wrapped inside her clothes, and the urn was in an outer pocket. She had not yet found a place to scatter her father’s ashes, and it didn’t seem right to leave what was left of him behind. After all, she didn’t know when she would be coming back.

  She got to Marjean late on Friday evening. Nothing had changed since her last visit two years before. There were no new houses, and just as few people in the narrow streets. The same single-track road wound down through the vineyards to the blue-black waters of the lake, and in the distance Sasha could just make out the silver-grey bell tower of Marjean Church, fading in the last rays of the sun.

  She checked in to the small inn on the edge of the village where she had put up before. The landlord was an old man with a brown weather-beaten face, and he made no comment as he took down the details from her passport, filling out the registration form in laborious block capitals. But a passing alertness in his pale blue eyes made her think that he recognised either her face or her name, and he smiled when she gave the purpose of her visit as tourism. It made her slightly uneasy, but the sensation was transient, and she forgot about the old man almost as soon as he had shown her to her room and left her with the key.

  Underneath her buttoned-up exterior, Sasha could hardly contain her excitement. But she knew that darkness would come quickly once the sun had set, and she had no option but to wait until morning before driving out to the church.

  She was restless at dinner and drank too much of the local red wine, trying not to think about John Cade, who had been this way already, armed with the same secret that she had worked so hard to discover. And yet he hadn’t found the cross. Just a bullet in the lung fired from a high-velocity rifle. Sasha remembered what her father had said when she first brought the codex to his attic room in Oxford: “You’ll go to France just like he did. . . . And something terrible will happen to you.” Sasha shivered. The words seemed like a prophecy.

  She wanted to believe that she had begun a completely new chapter in her life, that she had left the past entirely behind her on the other side of the English Channel, and yet unbeknownst to her, less than four miles down the dark road, Trave was pacing up and down in another hotel room, thinking just like Sasha about Marjean Church and what may or may not have happened there.

  At first light she drove out of the village, looking for the wrought-iron gate in the wall that ran along the right side of the road. She remembered it clearly from two years before, but now it had disappeared, and the entrance was virtually indistinguishable from other openings where the wall had fallen down and local people had carried away the stone for their own construction works. Sasha went straight past the gateway the first time and only realised her mistake when she found herself coming into Moirtier-sur-Bagne. Turning the car round, she drove back toward Marjean at a snail’s pace until eventually she found what she was looking for. She knew it must be right because the two white prancing horses on top of the gateposts were just visible beneath the fast-growing ivy. Beyond, the track was half-dark with overarching trees cutting off most of the sunlight, but there were no serious obstructions to her progress. Mass was still said at Marjean Church, and the curé made sure that his parishioners kept the way clear for his car.

  There was no opening in the woods on either side. Once Sasha thought she saw the head of a deer flashing between two tree trunks, but it was gone as quickly as it had appeared. And then there was nothing until the track turned to the right and she came out suddenly into the light. The ruined house was in front of her, and beyond it Marjean Church occupied a low ridge with the lake as a backdrop. Sasha parked at the bottom of the path leading up to the church, but she didn’t get out for a moment. The dead seemed to be all around her: the abbots and their monks who had worshipped God in this place for centuries, proud of their library and their church with the jewelled cross of St. Peter that hung sparkling above the high altar. Sasha closed her eyes and heard the night bells, summoning the tonsured monks from their dormitories to come shuffling through the candlelit darkness to the church for vespers, compline, prime, and lauds. There was nothing left of the monastery now except the remains of a few low walls in a clearing beyond the château. And nothing left of the monks’ library except the codex that lay wrapped up in her clothes back at the inn. And the cross—that was why she was here. To see if she could bring it back from the past, out of the hands of dead men.

  With a renewed sense of purpose, Sasha climbed the hill to the church. There was an old rusty padlock securing the door, but she had come prepared for that. She broke it easily with a pair of bolt cutters that she had bought in Le Havre the day before and went inside, crossing quickly to the vestry area at the back. And then down a winding, narrow staircase to the crypt. She had brought candles, but she didn’t need them. A power cable had been run down the stairs since her last visit, and with a flick of a switch the grey stone tombs of the abbots of Marjean were sudde
nly bathed in the cold electric light of the twentieth century.

  “Crux Petri in manibus Petri est.” Sasha took Cade’s list of numbers out of her pocket, looking for her father’s words at the bottom of the page. “Abbots of Marjean,” he had written in his own distinctive shaky Parkinson’s-affected script. “Marcus 1278–1300. Stephanus Pisano 1300–05. Bartholomeus 1306–21. Simeon 1321–27.” They were probably the last words he had ever written, before the stroke knocked him to the ground.

  Slowly, Sasha walked the length of the crypt, concentrating her attention on the tombs on the left-hand side. The inscriptions on the wall showed that these were the most recent. Seven from the end, she came to the name “Marcus” with the date 1278 written underneath: the same year that he had become abbot of Marjean. Like so many of his predecessors, he had been immortalised in stone. Except that the details of his face had been worn away with time, so that the expression was now unreadable. Sasha remembered that Marcus had also been Bishop of Rouen for a time. He had ruled the city with an iron hand, burning heretics in the cathedral square on an almost daily basis until the townsmen had had enough and petitioned the archbishop in Paris to have him removed. This abbot certainly had no right to rest in peace, but it was not him with whom Sasha was concerned.

  Beyond Marcus, the remaining tombs were sarcophagi without sculpture or adornment. These held the last abbots before the monastery was wiped out by the Black Death in 1352, little more than half a century after the death of Marcus in 1300.

  The names on the wall above the tombs corresponded exactly to Andrew Blayne’s list, and Sasha read them out loud as she passed each one. Stephanus Pisano, 1300; Bartholomeus, 1306; Simeon, 1321 1327. Her voice echoed off the thick walls of the crypt, and she could hear it trembling just like her hands as she came to a halt in front of the tomb of Abbot Simon. It was strange that there were two dates for him, whereas all the others only had one, but still, the dates were the same as those that her father had written down and underlined twice. She needed to open the tomb and see what was inside. It was not that she really expected to find the jewelled cross lying in the dead abbot’s hands. Cade had been here before, after all, and come away empty-handed. It was rather that she hoped for some sign that would take her forward. Something that Cade had missed.

  But try as she might, she couldn’t move the stone lid of the sarcophagus. She pushed as hard as she could, but it was useless. She needed help. A man with a crowbar could do it if she had one too. Sasha swallowed her frustration. Getting help meant taking someone into her confidence, and Sasha trusted no one. But this time she knew that she had no choice. She quickly turned over her options as she drove back down the track to the main road. People in Mar-jean used this church. They had kept it open since the end of the war, even though the château was a ruin and the church was a mile’s walk from the village. They were hardly likely to want to help a foreigner open up tombs in its crypt, however much money she offered them, and they probably wouldn’t just refuse. They’d go to the curé or, worse still, the police, and that would be the end of any chance she had of finding the cross. No, she needed to go farther afield to find someone without any local loyalties.

  Half an hour later she thought she had found the man she was looking for. She had driven through Moirtier-sur-Bagne and stopped at a café on the outskirts of Rouen. There was a builder’s truck parked outside, and she took it as a sign. The owner was at the bar, slightly the worse for drink. His wife had left him and his business was failing, and the café proprietor looked like he had had enough of listening to the man’s complaints. He cursed everybody and everything and seemed to hold Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary equally responsible for his troubles. Sasha shook out her long brown hair and took a seat beside the man at the bar. His name was Jean Marie, and he was like clay in her fingers. She puckered her lips and showed him some of her French francs, and twenty minutes later she was sitting beside him in his truck, giving him directions in her slow, grammatically correct French. Behind her on the backseat there were two crowbars under a blanket, and Sasha felt a warm glow of anticipation as they turned down the track leading to Marjean Church.

  But the man’s enthusiasm quickly waned once he’d got out of his truck. A stray dog was barking somewhere inside the ruined château and a light rain had begun to fall out of the grey, leaden sky. Down in the crypt under the cold electric light, Sasha could hardly get him to stay. Cursing Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary in a roadside café didn’t make Jean Marie an unbeliever, and he seemed to have no doubt that digging up the abbots of Marjean was a blasphemous act, for which he would suffer on both sides of the grave. Sasha had to double and then triple the money that she had already given him in the café before he was prepared to fit his crowbar under the lid of Abbot Simon’s tomb and join her in levering it up and around to the point where there was enough space for her to shine her torch down into the interior. The tomb was not empty. The pale white skull and bones of the once-holy abbot were there, but that was all. There was no cross, no jewels. Just the empty eye sockets of the dead man, staring up at Sasha in silent mockery.

  It was what Sasha had expected, but not what she had hoped for. There was something she was missing, but she did not know what it was. She needed time to think without this half-drunk Frenchman whining in the corner of the crypt. It was all she could do to get him to help her replace the stone cover of the tomb. Outside the church, he ran down the hill to his truck, and she had to call to him to stop, worried that he would leave her behind, even though she had only paid him half his money. Then, just as she got level with the château, she became aware of someone slightly below her, to her left. She turned to see who it was and stopped dead in her tracks. It was Inspector Trave, the policeman from Stephen’s trial, the one who’d come to visit her at Moreton to try to get her to change her evidence. He seemed as shocked as she was. Behind her, Jean Marie was already in the truck, and she knew he wouldn’t wait. Pulling herself together, she launched herself across the few remaining yards, pulled open the passenger door and told him the word that he most dreaded to hear. “Police,” she shouted. “Drive now. Quickly. Quickly. Go.”

  The truck’s engine roared into life, and it jumped forward, almost stalling. But it didn’t. Instead Jean Marie took it around in a screeching 180-degree turn and then accelerated away into the woods, leaving Trave shouting uselessly in the dust that the truck had left behind.

  As they careered up the track leading to the road, Sasha tried to persuade the hysterical Frenchman to take her back to Marjean. She cursed herself for having left the codex in her room, but it was too late now, and she had to go back. But he wouldn’t listen. Instead he drove like a madman down the road to Rouen and practically threw her out of his truck when they got to the café where they had first met less than an hour before. Her car was still in the parking lot, and she drove back to Marjean as fast as she could. With luck she’d still get there before Trave. There had been no car outside the church. He must have walked, and it was over a mile along the side of the lake. He looked too old to be able to run very far, and besides, the path was muddy. He’d fall in the water if he tried to go too fast.

  She parked outside the inn and took the stairs to her room two at a time. There was a note that had been slipped under her door. She almost missed it, and there was no time to read it when she picked it up. She just threw everything into her bag and headed out onto the landing. At the top of the stairs, she heard Trave down below, asking the way to her room. She was sure that the landlord hadn’t seen her when she came in. He’d been in the cubicle at the back of the reception area talking on the telephone. Trave was coming up on the off chance. He didn’t know she was there. She backed away into the semi-darkness at the back of the landing and watched him come down the corridor toward her. But he wasn’t looking in front of him. His eyes were on the door of her room. He knocked twice before he tried the handle. When it turned, he went inside and the door swung to behind him. There was no time to lose
. On tiptoe she ran across the landing, down the stairs, and out the door.

  Trave was standing at the window of her room looking down into the street when he saw her. He didn’t move. There was no point. She had already started her car, and he pursed his lips, cursing softly as he watched her drive away.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Sasha had forgotten her coat. It hung forlornly in the wardrobe. The pockets were empty, and Trave left it where it was. Downstairs, the landlord appeared unconcerned by his guest’s sudden departure.

  “She ran away because of you,” he said flatly. “Not because of the money. She will send me what she owes. The English, they always pay their bills.”

  Trave didn’t argue. After all, the landlord was right about why Sasha had left. There was an implied accusation in his tone, however, that Trave felt obliged to answer. And the old man might know something. It wasn’t as if Trave could afford to leave any stone unturned.

  “I’m a policeman,” he said. “From Oxford in England. Someone was killed near there, murdered, about six months ago, and I think it may have something to do with what happened here at the end of the war.”

  “Nothing happened here.”

  “No, I don’t mean here in the village. I mean over on the other side of the lake. In the church.”

  “The Germans killed the people that lived there. They did the same everywhere. They were Nazis.”

  The old man seemed entirely satisfied with his three-word explanation for the atrocity, but Trave persisted.

  “The lady who was here, Miss Vigne, was at the house where the man was killed. And now she is here. Do you know why?” he asked.