Simon Tolkien - The Inheritance

They stopped at the bottom of the stairs, and it took a few moments for Ritter to realise the scale of the room that he had now entered. The crypt ran the whole length of the church, and each wall was lined with tombs. Some were plain stone coffins, while others were surmounted with life-size sculptures of their occupants, but each tomb seemed to have an inscription on the wall beside it. Names and dates that were illegible in the torchlight.

“Who are they?” asked Ritter. He had never seen a place like this before and never wanted to again. It reminded him of the Nottinghamshire mines that he had run away from to join the army when his father died.

“Abbots, mostly. There was a monastery here once. The church is pretty well all there’s left of it.”

The anger had gone out of Cade’s voice and his tone was businesslike as he lit a paraffin lamp hanging down from the centre of the ceiling.

Then, at the colonel’s direction, Ritter pulled two chairs out of a corner and sat the Frenchwoman and the old man down under the lamp. It was still swinging slightly from when Cade had lit it, and it felt to Ritter for a moment like they were in the bowels of a ship. Ritter had always hated the sea.

The old man was mumbling incoherently, and Rocard’s wife seemed almost lifeless. Cade tried smacking her again, but it had no effect. Bruises were already beginning to come up around her eyes, and her cheeks were red weals.

“This is useless,” said Cade. “Give me your whisky flask, Reg. Maybe that’ll work.”

Surprisingly it did. Ritter held the woman’s head back while Cade dropped the alcohol into her mouth. After a moment she began coughing and spluttering, and the anger and grief reappeared in her eyes.

Cade began talking to her in French. His face was inches from hers, and he kept repeating that same word that Ritter had heard him use outside the house.

“Ou est le roi?” Or was it “Ou est la croix?” But the Frenchwoman just shook her head from side to side like a metronome. It was as if she had lost the energy for words.

It went on like this for a minute or maybe two. Cade’s unanswered questions echoed off the stone walls, so that it seemed to Ritter like the dead monks were mocking them, until finally Cade fell silent and walked away into a corner of the crypt, where he stood leaning against the wall.

“There’s no time for any more of this. And the bitch probably doesn’t know anything anyway.” Cade spoke softly, and it was as if he was talking to himself rather than to Ritter. He still had the whisky flask in his hand, and now he raised it to his lips and took a hard swallow before passing it back to the sergeant.

“Finish it,” said the colonel. “We’ve got dirty work to do.”

Cade had the German pistol in his hand, and the Frenchwoman began to tremble, remembering how he’d held it to her temple outside the house. The vicious little round opening pressed into her flesh, the sound the gun had made when he killed the dog.

Cade leant over her shoulder, whispering in her ear, while he let the gun play back and forth over her body. Ritter could feel her fear, but still she said nothing, just shook her head from side to side. Perhaps she was too frightened to talk, or perhaps she didn’t have any answers. It didn’t matter. Cade had had enough.

Abruptly he stood up to his full height, and her eyes followed the gun as he turned it away from her and on to the old man.

“Dis-moi,” he said. “Tell me.” But she didn’t. And Cade pulled the trigger.

She tried to get up from the chair, but Cade pushed her back, holding her down with one hand, while he pointed the gun at her head with the other.

“Ou est la croix?” Cade spoke slowly, pronouncing each word separately so that Ritter, standing by the doorway out of the way of flying bullets, understood the question quite clearly this time. But it was impossible to say if the Frenchwoman did. She seemed beyond speech, and Ritter wondered afterward if she had had some kind of stroke or heart attack before Cade finally killed her.

“They had to die,” Cade said in a matter-of-fact tone of voice as they went back up the narrow stairs. “Once you killed the Frenchman, there was no choice. You see that, don’t you, Reg?”

And Ritter did. He accepted the responsibility. He’d have killed them himself if the colonel had asked him to, although he’d have chosen somewhere else. Anywhere would have been better than this God-forsaken church and its black crypt.

Back upstairs, Ritter stooped to pick up Rocard’s body, but Cade stopped him with a gesture of his hand.

“That’s where the Germans killed him,” he said. “Leave him be. It’s the trucks that we need to move. After that you can radio in, and then we can search the house while we’re waiting. Maybe we’ll find something there, although I doubt it somehow. If either of them knew anything, they’d probably have told me.”

It was a sort of forgiveness, and Ritter felt an almost irrational gratitude, which he knew better than to express. There was no time anyway. The firing began before they got to the door. Two rifles, it sounded like. One answering the other. Backward and forward, and then silence.

Ritter and Cade stood behind the door of the church, listening to the footsteps approaching. God knows who was outside. Friend or foe. The truth was that they weren’t ready for either. The Germans would kill them, and the British would find them with the Germans’ guns.

It was almost dark in the church now, and Ritter could only just make out the outline of Rocard’s body on the floor behind him. He cursed the whole sorry business under his breath and felt that he would give almost anything to get outside into the open. The church was bad luck. That much was obvious.

Suddenly the door began to move. Ritter and Cade flattened themselves against the wall behind them, holding their guns out with both hands in readiness, and Ritter would probably have shot Carson if he hadn’t called out the colonel’s name before he came into view. Instead Ritter reached forward and pulled him roughly inside.

“What was that?” asked the colonel. “Who was firing out there?”

“Me. There was someone in the house and he took a couple of potshots at me. Almost hit me too.” Carson spoke in a rush, and his hands were shaking.

“So where are they now?”

“I don’t know. I think maybe I got him. There was a lamp in one of the windows, and I saw someone moving behind it. I fired two or three times and he didn’t shoot back after that.”

“All right. Let’s take a look.”

Cade led them outside, and then almost immediately began running down the hill toward the house. There were flames leaping up in two of the ground-floor windows, and by the time he reached the door, they had spread to a third. Ritter was slower than the colonel even though he was the younger man, and he didn’t follow Cade inside. He was too busy catching his breath. And it didn’t take long for Cade to come back out anyway.

“The place is going up like a fucking tinderbox,” he said. “I can’t stop it.”

“What about whoever it was that shot at me?” asked Carson, who’d arrived outside the house last.

“It was an old woman. Probably the wife of the old man. And she’s dead. Or if she isn’t, she will be in a minute or two. Burnt up with the house and all its contents. Courtesy of Corporal Crackshot here. You’re a fucking idiot, you know that, Corporal. A fucking idiot.” Cade didn’t raise his voice, but Ritter could sense how angry he was. The colonel rarely swore.

“What was I supposed to do?” said Carson defensively. “How was I supposed to know it was some old woman?”

“You weren’t. But it doesn’t take a genius to know what happens if you shoot a rifle at a kerosene lamp.”