“The question can be put another way. Was Silas Cade in the courtyard, or was he with Sasha Vigne in her bedroom? They both admit that they lied to the police, and Silas says that he lied to you when he first came here to give evidence. Perjury is a very serious offence not to be taken lightly, but both these witnesses have explained why they lied. Do you believe them? Again it is a matter for you, members of the jury. Silas told you that his fingerprints are not on the gun or the key. His brother’s are. And it was Stephen Cade who told their father that he deserved to die. You must decide who is telling the truth about this and the other questions that I have posed for you. And the answers should guide you down the road toward reaching a verdict on which all of you must be agreed. You shall have all the time you need for that purpose.”
The judge nodded to the two jury bailiffs who had taken up a position at each end of the jury box. Now they in turn held up a copy of the King James Bible and swore to keep the jury in a private and convenient place and not to ask its members anything about the case except if they were agreed upon their verdict.
And suddenly it was over. The jurors gathered up their notes and filed out of court, soon followed by the judge, who disappeared through a door behind his dais. There was a sound of chairs being pulled back and of conversations starting up in different corners of the courtroom as Stephen was led down the stairs at the back of the dock into the subterranean world of clanging gates and fluorescent lighting, where he would have to sit and wait for as long as it took for twelve strangers to decide his fate.
The jury was silent all afternoon, and at half past four Judge Murdoch called an end to the trial for the day and sent the jurors to a hotel for the night. Stephen went back to Wandsworth, and after walking up and down in his cell for the best part of an hour, he threw himself down on his bunk and fell into a fitful sleep. But he got no rest, tossing and turning all night in the grip of nightmares and apparitions. He dreamt he was back at home, searching for something. He knew it was there, but he couldn’t find it. He went from room to room turning the furniture upside down, but there was nothing. His father was dead downstairs and the murderer was still in the house, but Stephen couldn’t find what he was looking for.
There was shouting coming from down below. People were running this way and that. The housemaid, Esther, was at the top of the stairs. She was bleary with sleep, pulling a nightgown around her shoulders. And looking past her down the stairs, Stephen could see Jeanne Ritter picking up a hat and coat and hanging them on the stand by the door. He had no trouble recognising them. They belonged to his brother. But where was Silas? Here. Running across the hall. He looked up for a moment, and Stephen saw the expression on his face. The self-contained mask had slipped. Stephen saw fear and panic, but was Silas frightened because of what he knew or because of what he did not know? Where had he come from? Had he gone to his room after dropping the hat and coat? Or perhaps someone else had worn Silas’s clothes?
There was no time to try and understand, because here was Sasha Vigne coming down the stairs. She didn’t look like she had been to bed. Always so immaculately dressed. Trouser suits and high collars. And it was no different now. Who was she? Just his father’s personal assistant or something more? She’d said very little on each of the times that Stephen had been out to Moreton. But she had looked watchful at dinner. Was she waiting for an opportunity?
And lastly Mary. God, she was beautiful. Her chestnut-brown hair was tousled, framing the perfect oval of her face, and Stephen longed to put out his hand to stop her, but she passed beside him, almost through him just as if he wasn’t there.
The hall was empty now, and the shouting had died down. Stephen walked to the end of the hall and turned right into the corridor leading to his father’s study. There were people in the doorway, but he passed through them. Ritter was by the desk talking on the telephone. He was heavy-heavy and hard. And his hands were balled up into big fists like slabs of old meat. Stephen felt the stinging pain on his cheek where the sergeant had hit him as he effortlessly joined his shadow to himself and stood hopelessly by the french windows, looking down at his dead father and a game of chess.
What he was looking for was here in this room. Stephen was certain of it. It was right in front of him, but he couldn’t see it. Desperately he ran his eyes across the study. Past the hat and coat that he had left behind in the far corner, over by the window where Silas and he had eavesdropped two years before. Past the green reading lamp on the desk and the big black telephone. He saw the gun on the table by the door and the key that he had turned in the lock. He smelt the scent of jasmine on the air coming in from outside, and he examined the small round bullet hole in the middle of his father’s head.
The newspaper cutting lay on the low table beside the big chess box where his father had left it. Man fallen from train. Sudden death outside Leicester. And all around were the chess pieces spread out over the board and the table. Taken pieces and untaken pieces. Stephen had never realised how beautiful they were. The delicate carving of the knights’ heads and the queens’ crowns. The feel of the ivory between the fingers, and the richness of the black-and-white colours. It was another language. One his father spoke like a native but he and Silas could never learn. They had never understood one another. They had never been a family at all.
The police were coming. Stephen could hear the sound of a car on the drive. Jeanne Ritter left the doorway and walked away toward the front door. She was the housekeeper, after all. It was her job to let them in. There was no time left. Stephen couldn’t bear it. He looked at the chess pieces again. They held the key to what he needed. He was sure of it. But what key? Stephen couldn’t work it out and suddenly he felt too tired to think anymore, too tired to move. He leant against the wall for support and took hold of one of the thick curtains that were half drawn across the french windows. And then he stood there swaying, waiting for the police to come and take him away.
Stephen was fully awake now. In truth he had only ever been half asleep, and the feeling of frustration stayed with him, although the details of his dream faded. He felt more certain than ever that he had missed something. It was just beyond his reach, but try as he might, he couldn’t get to it.
Somewhere out in the half darkness the bells of Wandsworth Church rung out the hour of six. It was the beginning of another day, and Stephen wondered not for the first time how many he had left before the hangman came for him. But still there was hope. Stephen felt momentarily buoyed by the grey early-morning light seeping through his cell window. There was surely enough doubt for the jury to let him off. If it wanted to. But that was reckoning without the old judge, who seemed to want to squeeze the life out of him just because he was young. Stephen couldn’t understand it. Thompson too with his mean, pitiless little eyes. They had got to the jury. Stephen felt sure of it. Thompson had pushed him back and back until he’d done just what Swift had told him not to do. He’d lost his temper. And then Murdoch had gone in for the kill. The old judge was clever. Everything seemed fair and evenly balanced, but that was an illusion. He’d told the jury what to do as much as if he’d given them a written order to convict.
But maybe they’d refuse to do what they were told. There was hope yet. Summoning up all his energy, Stephen washed, brushed his hair, and put on the black suit and tie that his lawyers had brought to the prison before the trial. Then, on the way out, he glanced over at his reflection in the small mirror hanging over the sink. But just as quickly he turned away, trying to escape from the unwanted thought that he looked exactly like a man on the way to his own funeral.
They came for him at just after three.
“It’s a verdict,” one of the gaolers said. It was their custom. The jury could come back to ask a question or to receive a direction from the judge. Men awaiting their fate should be able to prepare themselves as they walked down the basement corridors and then up the steep stairs that led to the courts.
Emerging into the dock, Stephen felt the sudden f
orce of the silence in the courtroom. Downstairs there had been constant noise: keys turning in old locks and gates clanging, the screws’ shouts echoing off the damp, whitewashed walls. But here there was silence. There must have been nearly a hundred people in the courtroom, but not one of them spoke. They were still as statues, waiting for what was to come. It was always like this just before a verdict came in on a capital charge, but Stephen wasn’t to know that. The tension frightened him. It was like ice on his soul.
Everyone was staring at him. He could feel their eyes. He closed his own, but it made him sick. When he opened them again, the jury was filing back into court.
“You’ve got to watch if they look at you. If they do, it’s all right.” A prisoner in the cell across from him at Wandsworth had told Stephen this the night before like it was gospel truth. And several of the jurors did. They definitely glanced in his direction as they took their seats. There was no mistaking it. Stephen felt a sudden hope soaring inside him. It could all be over in a few seconds. Two words, and he would be going home. To Mary and the sunlight.
“The defendant will stand,” said the clerk of the court. But it was hard. Stephen’s legs felt like dead weights. He had to hold on to the front of the dock to pull himself up.
“Members of the jury, have you reached a verdict upon which you are all agreed?” asked the clerk. Stephen swayed gently from side to side.
“Yes, we have,” said a dapper little man with a bow tie who had got to his feet at the far end of the jury box. He was not one of those that had looked at Stephen as they came in.
“On the single count of murder, how do you find the defendant? Guilty or not guilty?”
The moment of crisis: Caesar’s thumb suspended in midair, and Stephen trembling in the dock with his eyes fixed on the lion and unicorn above the judge’s head. Not guilty, not guilty, not guilty, he prayed. The two words filled his head like a drumbeat, but the foreman of the jury couldn’t hear them. He was too far away.
“Guilty,” he said. Just one word and Stephen’s fate was decided.
The judge nodded. It was almost imperceptible, but it conveyed all the steely satisfaction that Murdoch felt inside. He looked straight into the eyes of the broken young man in the dock, and he felt no pity at all.
“Stephen Cade,” he said in a harsh voice that filled the courtroom. “Have you anything to say why sentence of death should not now be pronounced upon you?”
Stephen tried to speak, but the words stuck in his throat. It was too dry, and there was no time.
“Because I am innocent,” he eventually managed to say in a hoarse whisper. “I didn’t kill my father.”
“You are not innocent,” said the judge flatly. “You have been convicted by this jury of a heinous crime. The sentence is prescribed bylaw.”
A tall thin man in a frock coat stepped out from behind the judge’s chair. There was something in his hands. A small square of black silk. Delicately he placed it on top of the judge’s wig and then stepped back into the shadows, leaving Murdoch to speak the final words.
“Stephen Cade, you are sentenced to be taken hence to the prison in which you were last confined, and from there to a place of execution where you will suffer death by hanging, and thereafter your body shall be buried within the precincts of the prison, and may the Lord have mercy upon your soul.”
The judge spoke the words slowly and deliberately. It was at these moments he felt most alive. He became the law in all its cold majesty. He personified it.
But Stephen didn’t hear his sentence. His legs gave way beneath him, and the prison officers on either side had to support him until the judge had left the courtroom, and it was time to stumble down the stairs at the back of the dock and begin his journey into oblivion.
PART THREE
TWENTY-ONE
Sasha visited her father six times during the two weeks after she first brought him the Marjean codex and Cade’s sheet of mysterious numbers. The visits were not a success. He didn’t have any answers to give her, and she found it almost impossible to contain her frustration. And her eagerness to crack the code alarmed him. He feared what would happen to her if she went after St. Peter’s cross. Cade’s search had ended with a bullet. Why should Sasha fare any better? And yet Andrew Blayne could not resist the lure of the codex for very long. It was such a beautiful thing, and in his heart he wanted to know its secret as much as his daughter did. It was as if the monk who had painted the Latin words on to the calfskin all those hundreds of years before was trying to talk to him across time, trying to make him understand. Alone in his attic room, Blayne stayed up night after night, poring over the Gospel of St. Luke, using up all his reserves of physical energy until he looked like a ghost of himself. His hands shook more than ever, and there was a white pallor to his face that Sasha was too preoccupied to notice.
On her last visit, Blayne had become angry with his daughter. It was unlike him, and the experience shook her. She had taken the codex away to the sofa and was trying in vain to make some connection between Cade’s list of numbers and the Latin text in front of her when, without warning, Blayne came up behind her and snatched the book out of her hands.
“Why don’t you leave me alone, Sasha?” he shouted. “You’re in my way. Can’t you see that? How can I work when you’re in my way?”
Sasha had left him alone after that. He had her address, and she felt confident he would get in touch when he had something to tell her. She felt angry too, bruised by the change in her father. And the need to break the code blinded her to almost every other consideration. If leaving him alone was the way to get what she wanted, then she would do just that. She didn’t go back to see her father for a week, and when she did, he was gone.
She realised something was wrong as soon as she got to the top of the stairs and found the door to his room ajar. It was quite late in the evening, and she could feel the force of the cold air even before she went inside. The window over the bed had blown open, and her breath hung in the air like so much white smoke.
Her father wasn’t in the room, and yet he never went out after dark. Fighting down the mounting panic that she felt inside, Sasha ran down to the antiquated bathroom on the half landing below. But it was empty except for her father’s shaving kit and his old green toothbrush planted in a white enamel mug above the discoloured sink. The sight of it made her cry out her father’s name, even though she knew inside that he was nowhere in the house, and the noise brought the tenant of the bed-sit on the floor below to her door. She was a young woman with a wrinkled face, whom Sasha dimly remembered from several previous encounters on the stairs. A baby was crying somewhere in the background.
“Are you all right?” asked the woman, looking up at Sasha, who nodded, unable to speak for a moment because of a sob that was stuck in her throat.
“You’re his daughter, aren’t you? I’ve seen you here before.”
“Yes. Do you know where he’s gone?”
“They took him to hospital this morning. I was the one who went for the ambulance. He was out on the landing when I was going out to buy my milk, and he called down to me. It gave me quite a shock, I can tell you.”
“Why did he call down to you? What was wrong with him?” asked Sasha, hanging on to the stair rail for support as the woman’s words sank into her consciousness.
“Some sort of stroke is what they said. Meant he couldn’t get down the stairs. Strokes do that, you know.”
“Do what?”
“Paralyse you all down one side. I reckon that’s what happened to your dad.”
“You don’t know that,” said Sasha, suddenly angry at the woman’s morbid assumption of the worst. “It might just be something temporary, for all you know.”
“Well, I know he couldn’t hardly move himself,” said the woman defiantly. “He’s been overdoing it, if you ask me, and that’s what’s brought this on. I’ve heard him every night this week, pacing up and down, and he’s looked awful. But you wouldn’t know, of cou
rse. You haven’t been round here for a while, have you?”
Sasha swallowed hard, refusing to rise to the woman’s spiteful challenge.
“Which hospital did he go to?” she asked. “Do you know that?”
“Radcliffe Infirmary. That’s what they said.”
“Thank you,” said Sasha. “And thank you for calling the ambulance.” But the woman had already closed her door, leaving Sasha alone on the landing in the semidarkness.
Outside the front door Sasha remembered the codex. But she didn’t go back. She felt clutched by a terrible guilt. The woman was right. She had neglected her father-set him a task that was always going to be beyond his powers, and then left him to it. Alone in a cold attic room with no coal for the fire and no food in the fridge. She’d pretended that her search for the codex and the cross was for his benefit, but that had been a lie, an excuse for neglecting him when he was too old and sick to look after himself. The search was a curse. She’d sacrificed Stephen and now perhaps her father to its demands, and all it had given her in return was an old painted book and a dead man’s list of meaningless numbers.
The Inheritance itadc-1 Page 25