Too late, she remembered that day in Oxford when she’d last seen Mary. She’d been in a Jaguar with this same man. Sasha recognised his cold narrow eyes and the strange high cheekbones that accentuated the boniness of his face. How stupid she had been to assume that Mary was alone. The cross had blinded her to what should have been so obvious. Mary had planned it all from start to finish. Even the padlock. Paul opened it now with a key and stood aside to let Mary pass.
But perhaps it was not too late. Sasha reached out toward the pistol lying on the ground, but Paul was watching her. With a quick movement he fired past Sasha’s outstretched hand, and the revolver exploded in a rain of metal fragments. Sasha froze in shock. She cowered against the wall of the church while Paul reloaded again and again, took aim with an unerring accuracy, and shot out the tires of her car one by one. The shots reverberated around the empty landscape, losing their final echoes in the encircling woods as the car subsided down onto its useless wheels.
Quite gently, Mary unlaced Sasha’s fingers from around the handle of her bag, and then extracted the codex and the cross from inside.
“You’ve had what we agreed,” she said. “You’ve seen the cross of St. Peter. Now I’m taking what is mine, paid for with my parents’ blood. Don’t try to follow me. You understand me, don’t you, Sasha?”
Sasha nodded. She had no doubt about what Paul would do if they met again. She’d seen the way he used the rifle. Now he was pointing it at her again, and instinctively she obeyed its command, backing away into the church.
Mary looked her in the eye one last time, and then she closed the door. A moment later Sasha heard the snap of the padlock and the sound of footsteps walking away down the path. She was a prisoner inside the church.
For several minutes she remained where she was, numbed by the shock of her unexpected defeat. But then she remembered what Mary had said about the windows in the tower. She needed to see outside. Maybe there would be somebody she could call to, somebody who would help her escape. She took the steps two at a time. The first window was the one looking down into the church that Mary had shown her earlier, and the second had a view toward the house. She looked down, but there was no one in sight. Just the car with its exploded wheels, a wreck beside the ruined house. Round the corner she came to the window on the other side. It was an extraordinary view. The ground sloped down toward the blue-black lake where a thin rowing boat was gliding across the still water toward the red tiled rooves of Marjean village. It was already too far away for Sasha to distinguish the faces of the two occupants, and soon it was barely more than a speck, almost invisible against the rays thrown by the bright winter sun as it sank toward the western horizon.
Marjean Church had given up its secret, and now Sasha was left alone with its ghosts. The silence weighed down on her as the light began to fade, and she felt a grey timeless despair settling down on her like so much dust. Sitting at the end of one of the pews in the centre of the nave, she stroked the scar tissue on her neck and shoulders and waited for the coming of the night.
TWENTY-NINE
Trave arrived at the pub first. He took his beer and went and sat down by the river. There were snowdrops and wild crocuses in the grass running down to the water, and there was a charge in the air that seemed to promise that winter would soon be over. The inspector felt changed by all that had happened, and yet everything was still the same. He still lived alone without any real hope of promotion, and it seemed now like Vanessa would never be coming back. There were even days when he didn’t think about her anymore. Not today, however: It was his son’s birthday, and Trave felt confused by the intense emotions that the anniversary had summoned up inside him. Birthdays were for the living: a celebration of continued life. You did not celebrate the birthdays of the dead, but did that mean that Joe’s day no longer had any significance except as an occasion for solitary recollection of half-forgotten presents and parties, fleeting moments that could never really be captured in the black-and-white photograph albums now gathering dust in a pile under the stairs? Trave had no answers. Time made him no wiser; its passing only helped dull the pain.
“Hullo, Inspector. I’m sorry I’m late.” Stephen Cade’s voice broke in on Trave’s reverie, and he was startled to realise that he had forgotten the reason he was here. Stephen had asked for the meeting, and Trave had agreed to it with some trepidation. He had done his best to save the boy from the gallows, but without Mary’s confession he would probably have failed. He was too honest not to admit this truth to himself.
Stephen seemed different from the young man that he remembered from before. The intensity hadn’t disappeared from his bright blue eyes, but it was cloaked in a new watchfulness. Trave noticed that he was drinking whisky, and the glass shook slightly in his hand. Several times while they were talking, Stephen looked over his shoulder, as if he was expecting some enemy to come looking for him. Prison had clearly left its scars.
“How have you been?” asked Trave, sounding falsely jovial. “How’s life as a free man treating you?”
“Not too bad,” said Stephen with a forced smile, but it didn’t last. “No, why lie? I can’t sleep and I can’t eat properly. I’m a bundle of nerves. I went up to London two days ago to see my barrister and tie up some loose ends, and, you know, I couldn’t go through with it. I got halfway to his chambers in a taxi and then I had to turn around. I had no choice. The ride along the river reminded me of the prison van. I rang him from the station and got on the first train home.”
“Was Swift understanding?”
“Yes, completely. He couldn’t have been nicer. Said he’d come and see me at the manor house next week. And he wrote me a letter after the pardon came through saying it meant more to him than any verdict he’d ever achieved. I was touched by that.”
“Yes,” said Trave. “He told me the same. He’s a good man.”
“Like you, Inspector. I’ve been lucky.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” said Trave. It felt like a serious understatement.
“No, perhaps not,” said Stephen with a wry smile. “All I seem to be able to do at the moment is drink too much and put off making any decisions about my future. The university says I can go back, but I can’t face it at the moment. All the students looking at me, pointing me out to their friends in the street. Like I was some weird exhibit at the circus. I’m nervous enough as it is. Still, I suppose it’s what you’d expect from someone who’s come so close to being strung up. The doctor says I’ll take time to heal. But you know, Inspector, I’m not sure that’s true. Sometimes I feel like there’s something broken inside me. Something final.”
Stephen’s sadness cut Trave to the quick. It was how he’d felt after Joe died. He felt responsible for what had happened.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have believed in you. I wish I’d gone to France when it all started. Then you might never have had to go through any of this.”
“Don’t say that,” said Stephen. “You did your best when it mattered. That’s why I wanted to see you. To thank you. And as for what happened before, if my own brother didn’t believe me until after I’d been sentenced to death, what were you supposed to think?”
“What’s happened to Silas?” asked Trave, genuinely curious. He’d heard nothing more from Stephen’s brother since the night that he came to the house with the old atlas and the photographs of his father’s last game of chess.
“He’s better than he was. Less reclusive, more at ease with himself somehow. It’s like, I don’t know, like he was ashamed of himself before, but he’s not now.”
“Well, he shouldn’t be,” said Trave. “It took a lot of courage for him to do what he did. You know he came to see me, don’t you? He was the one who got me to go to France.”
“Yes, he told me,” said Stephen with a smile. “He said you needed quite a lot of persuading.”
“That’s true. I thought he was the murderer,” said Trave ruefully. “I was sure of it.”
�
�I know. I tried to think the same for a while. Mr. Swift wanted me to, but deep down I could never really believe it,” said Stephen meditatively. “The truth is I don’t think Silas is capable of killing anyone, not even if he wanted to. He’s a watcher at heart, my brother, not an actor. It’s why he’s such a good photographer.”
“Perhaps that’ll be his redemption,” said Trave hopefully. “His way out.”
“Maybe. He’s certainly making a good job of photographing my father’s manuscripts. He’s got a darkroom rigged up in one corner of the gallery now and he seems to spend most of his time in there. The pictures will make a beautiful book if he can find the right publisher, but I think sometimes that it’s more than that, that he’s really doing it to keep a connection going with our father. He never gave up on loving the old man, you know. Not even when he found out who our father really was.”
“Perhaps he never had anything else to hold on to.”
“Perhaps. Although I can understand how he feels. Our father’s still our father, whatever he’s done. Except that there can be no forgiveness now because he’s dead—gone for good. There’s not a day goes by that I don’t wish I’d saved him.”
“There was nothing you could do. You know that. What you need is a new start. Somewhere completely different. Away from all these memories.”
“You’re right. If I had my way, I’d like to sell the house and put all the manuscripts up for auction. But Silas won’t hear of it, even though the money would make us rich. Sometimes I think they’re more his ghosts than mine at home. The Ritters and Sasha and the old man. He stands in their rooms sometimes with his eyes half closed, and I don’t know what he’s thinking.”
“Well, it can’t be easy for either of you being together,” said Trave sympathetically. “You both thought that the other one had committed the crime. You can’t take that back.”
“No, you can’t. But it’s also like the experience has brought us together as well,” said Stephen slowly. His brow creased as he tried to find the right words. “You see, it’s not just Silas who has suffered now; it’s me as well. I’m not the lucky one anymore. You could search pretty hard to find two people who are more unlike one another, and yet we are brothers. We weren’t before but we are now, and I don’t think that’ll change.”
“He told me the truth about his alibi the other day,” Stephen went on after a pause. “It was like he felt he had to.”
“That it was false?”
“No. More than that. It turns out he wasn’t in his room that night at all. He was out in the grounds taking photographs of Sasha. That’s why the west-wing door was open. He came back inside when he heard me shouting in my father’s study, and he forgot to lock it back up in all the commotion.”
Trave failed to suppress the look of disgust that sprang involuntarily to his face in response to this further revelation of Silas’s depravity. But it was soon replaced by a look of puzzlement. “Why did Sasha support him, though?” he asked. “That’s what I don’t understand.”
“Perhaps he paid her.”
“No, it’s more than that. There are things about this case that I just can’t fathom. Like what she was doing at Marjean Church on the day I went there. And why she ran away. I suppose I’ll never know. Not unless she decides to tell me, and that doesn’t seem very likely.”
“Why? Don’t you know where she is?”
“No. She’s still alive, because she writes letters to her mother from somewhere in France, but there’s never a return address. And I can’t trace her, because she’s done nothing wrong. Not like Mary Rocard or whatever she calls herself now.”
A cloud passed across Stephen’s face, and the trembling of his hand became far more noticeable than before. This was really why he was here, Trave realised with a start. For news of Mary. Surely he couldn’t still love her. Not after what she’d done to him. It defied all logic.
“Have you heard anything?” Stephen asked in a low voice.
“Not a whisper. Nothing since the first flurry of information came through from Laroche, the policeman in Marjean, at the end of last month. He found out that she went to a place near the Swiss border after her parents were killed back in 1944 and that it was the brother of the priest at Marjean who took her in. It turns out he was a rich man who made a fortune after the war in some kind of speculation. And his only child was our friend, Paul Martin. The two of them grew up together, and I expect they’re still together now. Where I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure they’ve got enough money to stay out of sight for a long time.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the landlord of the inn at Marjean knows something about them, but he’s not saying. I think he was the one who tipped them off that I was coming back to England. But there are no other leads. They’ve disappeared off the face of the earth. And if I had to guess, I’d say it’ll stay that way.”
Trave had not anticipated the effect that his final words would have on Stephen. The young man’s face seemed to collapse in on itself, and he began to cry in great shuddering gasps that visibly shook his thin, undernourished body from top to bottom.
Trave didn’t know what to do. He felt the normal English embarrassment in the presence of another person’s strong emotion, but he held himself still, resisting the temptation to get up and walk away.
Slowly Stephen pulled himself together. “She broke my heart,” he said, and the words didn’t seem melodramatic. Just a statement of fact. “I loved her like she was the sun and the moon and the stars. And all she was doing was playing with me. Setting me up to die on the end of a rope. I gave her everything I had and it meant nothing to her. Nothing at all.”
“But she changed her mind. She confessed to the crime in order to save you at the end. She didn’t need to do that. It was because she hated herself for what she’d done to you. She told me that,” said Trave, desperately seeking some consolation to offer his companion.
“Maybe. But it was also vanity. You know it was,” insisted Stephen. “A final gesture to show that she had the power of life and death in her hands. I hate her, and yet I love her too. It tears me apart every minute of the day.”
“We’re human beings. We don’t stop loving people just because they’re gone,” said Trave, thinking of his own lost son.
“No. But the trouble is I don’t know what to hold onto anymore. Everyone I ever cared about turned out to be someone I never knew. It’s a hall of mirrors I’m living in. Sometimes I wish old Murdoch had had his way and this was all over. It’d certainly be a lot easier.”
Trave leant over and gripped Stephen’s hand, lifting him from his chair.
“Come with me,” he said. “There’s something I need to show you.”
He walked quickly to his car, propelling Stephen along beside him. And then he drove fast, not needing to slow down to read the road signs. He knew exactly where he was going, even though he’d only been to the place twice in his life before.
Fifteen minutes later, he pulled over onto a muddy grass verge on the side of a narrow country road. It was nothing more than that. There were beech woods growing on either side over carpets of dead leaves left over from the fall, and a bunch of white chrysanthemums was tied to a tree trunk a little farther down the road. Vanessa had already been here, Trave realised. She knew the exact spot even better than he did.
“This is where my son died,” he said to Stephen once they had both got out of the car. “It was about this time of day. He came round the corner, lost control of his motorbike, and hit that tree over there. And then he died. I don’t know how quickly. The doctors couldn’t say. And I don’t know where he was going or why he was driving too fast. All I know is that he never came back.
“There was certainly no reason for his dying. None at all. It just turned out that way. And there’s no reason for what happened to you, Stephen. Except you lived. You didn’t die on the end of a rope. And now you’ve got to make something of your life, do you hear me? Precisely b
ecause there isn’t any meaning, because there might not be any God, it makes everything in this world all the more precious. And that’s why you have to live, Stephen. Not for me, not for anyone else. But for you. Do you understand me? Live. Nothing less will do.”
And Stephen did understand. He smiled, and his face was suddenly lit up by the beauty of who he really was. And for a moment, looking at him, Trave thought he saw his son again. For a moment it was as if Joe had never died.
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