Simon Tolkien - The Inheritance

The physical pain had been bad, but the shame afterward was worse, far worse. Silas felt as if Ritter had looked deep down inside him-at his guts, his intestines, his liver and kidneys. And after he let go, Ritter only said one thing: “No more sneaking about, Silence, you hear me. You know what I’ll do if I catch you again, don’t you? You know what’ll happen next time.”

And Silas had known. He didn’t need to be told. He could imagine exactly what it would feel like when the sergeant’s big hand reached between his legs and took hold of him down there.

Silas was frightened, and so he was forever urging caution on Jeanne. It made her think that he didn’t really love her, and part of her didn’t want to be careful. It was almost as if she wanted her husband to know what she was doing to him. But now her meetings with Silas became less frequent, and when they met, they argued. Silas wanted to finish the affair, but he didn’t have the courage to tell her how he felt. He couldn’t let her reach the point where she had nothing left to lose.

In truth, he grew tired of Jeanne. It wasn’t in Silas’s nature to want what he already had. Instead he lay awake at night and thought of Sasha, who seemed so entirely indifferent to him. Now when he met Jeanne in the trees out near the west wall of the manor grounds, he would close his eyes and pretend that she was Sasha. And afterward, in the evening or the early morning, he would return to the same place with his camera and focus his telephoto lens on Sasha’s windows. Sometimes he’d get lucky. The curtains would remain undrawn, and he could take photographs. He kept them under lock and key in his room and gazed at them at night when everyone was asleep. There were several of Sasha in her robe, leaning over with her breasts partially exposed, and one where she was naked with her back to the camera. It was extraordinary, the contrast between her perfect neck and her burnt, ravaged shoulders.

Jeanne guessed nothing of all this. She knew that Silas often avoided her, but she put this down to his almost irrational fear of her husband. For her it was different. Now that she had begun to live a little bit, Ritter seemed less significant. Once or twice she even caught herself laughing at his situation. He guessed nothing of her infidelity. He carried on abusing her without once imagining that she was cuckolding him with the colonel’s son.

Jeanne stepped out into the corridor but then paused before going downstairs, looking out through a tall narrow window at the grey, overcast sky. A big wind was blowing the elm trees from side to side, and Jeanne felt glad of the coat that she carried over her arm. In the kitchen she could hear her husband washing the plates from his breakfast, but it wasn’t fear of him that made her hesitate in the hallway. She was too busy remembering the past. Closing her eyes, she could hear the running and the shouting all around her once again. She had stood exactly here, a few paces back from the thick front door, waiting for the right moment to pick up an overcoat and hat that had fallen on the floor. When everyone had gone, she’d hung them back on the rack and then stood waiting behind the locked door for the police cars to arrive.

“Wake up, Jeanne. You look like Lot’s wife. Not mine.”

Jeanne turned, startled out of her reverie. Ritter was inches behind her, his fat face creased with laughter. She hadn’t heard him coming. He must have crept up on her. It was a favourite trick of his. For a big man, he had an uncanny ability to move almost soundlessly, and he always enjoyed the moment of shock induced in his victim when he suddenly announced his presence behind them. It was juvenile, but Jeanne had long ago realised that her husband was at bottom extraordinarily immature. He pursued his own pleasure, usually at the expense of other people, and was able to do so with such single-mindedness because he had no capacity to imagine what they were feeling. He was entirely without empathy. It was what made him capable of first raping his wife before she had even had time to wake up, and then playing a practical joke on her half an hour later.

Ritter had never really grown up. That was the key to understanding him. It made him both strong and weak. He had considerable native cunning, and he was almost entirely unrestrained by conscience. But he wanted to be led-to be led and to be loved, and the colonel had given him what he needed. In the army and afterward. Now, with the colonel gone, Ritter felt lost. He ate even more than ever-big breakfasts like today-but it did nothing to fill the emptiness that he felt inside.

Ritter had understood nothing of the colonel’s manuscripts, but John Cade’s desire to own things and people had made perfect sense to him. The colonel’s ruthlessness and singularity of purpose had been the qualities that Ritter most admired in his leader. John Cade had made him feel special, and later, in the last years when the older man had become frail and frightened, Ritter had found fulfillment in protecting him. Except that he had failed. He could protect Cade from the outside world but not from his sons. The younger one had put a bullet in his father’s head, and the older one had probably put the younger one up to it. Ritter hated them both. He felt that he was Cade’s true son, and today was his day to honour the dead.

Ritter put his hands on his wife’s shoulders and turned her round as if she was on a pivot. By and large, he was satisfied with what he saw.

“You’ll give your evidence standing up,” he told her. “Don’t sit down even if they ask you if you want to. It puts you at a disadvantage. Every lawyer has his bag of tricks, so you be ready for them.”

“Yes, Reg,” said Jeanne, keeping her voice flat and compliant.

“And don’t pull at your hands and your sleeves like you do at home all the time.”

“No.”

“I’ll be watching you to see that you don’t. You’re to be a credit to me and to the colonel. Without us, you’d be nothing. You know that, don’t you, Jeanne?”

“Yes, Reg.”

“Turning tricks in some seedy French town. That’s what you’d be doing to make ends meet.”

This time Jeanne didn’t reply, but she didn’t need to. Ritter, amused by the image that he had summoned up from the depths of his imagination, had burst out laughing. And he was still laughing as he eased the car into second gear and turned out of the manor gates onto the road to London.

Detective Constable Clayton wouldn’t have admitted it for the world, but the truth was he felt intimidated by the Old Bailey. He was only five years out of police training college, and he’d never given evidence at a murder trial before. It was just luck that had got him involved in the case in the first place. He and Watts had started the nighttime roster less than two hours before the call came in to attend at Moreton Manor. Clayton remembered his first sight of the victim. There was very little blood. Just a small hole in the middle of his forehead. The study looked like it was a theatre set down at the Oxford Playhouse, with the professor in his armchair at the centre of the stage.

They’d waited for Trave to arrive and then gone to work: asking questions of the people in the house, looking through their rooms, searching for evidence. Not that they’d found anything to move the finger of suspicion away from the main suspect. Clayton had felt sorry for him at the time. Stephen Cade seemed so young, even though he was in fact less than five years younger than Clayton. He and Watts had taken turns guarding him in the kitchen. He’d been noisy at first, shouting out his innocence and demanding to see a lawyer, but by the time it was Clayton’s turn, Stephen had subsided into a quiet misery, sitting slumped at the long deal table with his head in his hands.