Simon Tolkien - The Inheritance

“Please,” he said. “I’ll do anything.”

“All right,” said Ritter, standing over him with an expression on his face that seemed almost like happiness. “All right, Silence, you can do something. You can crawl.”

On his hands and knees, Silas edged toward the half-open door. Perhaps he would escape after all. Miracles happened all the time. But behind him Ritter laughed.

“You’re a snake, Silas,” he said, “and you know what we do with snakes, don’t you? We shoot them.”

The bullet went straight through Silas’s left foot and lodged in the wooden floor below. The pain was unbearable. He screamed, and somewhere inside he could hear himself screaming, could feel his lungs uselessly contract and expand, as he watched Ritter reloading his gun. He looked up into the barrel and saw his own extinction, and then, just as he closed his eyes, the room exploded again, and Ritter fell down almost on top of him. Trave had aimed for the sergeant’s chest and had ended up shooting him in the head. Ritter was dead before he hit the ground.

Trave felt shocked-shocked to his core. The obvious necessity for his action didn’t change its significance. He felt a great emptiness inside; he felt Ritter’s weight on his soul.

But for now he didn’t have to think. He pushed Ritter’s big body away and leant down over Silas, removing the remains of his shoe and sock. The foot was a mess, and Trave tied his handkerchief around the wound to try and stop the bleeding. He couldn’t think of anything else he could do.

“Is he dead?” Silas asked. His voice was very faint.

“Yes.” Trave was sure of it. He’d turned on the lights in the gallery, and he could see Ritter’s eyes gazing sightlessly up at the ceiling. They hadn’t moved at all.

“Thank you,” Silas whispered, and Trave felt oddly touched. He had saved Silas’s life. It didn’t matter that Silas had probably killed his father.

“Stay quiet,” he said. “The ambulance’ll be here soon.”

But Silas had something else he needed to say. Something that wouldn’t wait.

“I didn’t tell the truth,” he said. “About when my father was killed. I was with Sasha. I didn’t want to say before. But now it’s different.”

“Why?” Trave was shaken, unprepared for what Silas was saying.

“Because of Jeanne. She was jealous. That’s why she said those things in court.”

Silas’s voice trailed away and he closed his eyes. Trave wanted to shake him, wake him up, cross-examine him about this new story, because he didn’t believe it. Not for a moment. It was too damn convenient.

Trave forgot the poignancy of Ritter’s death and Silas’s survival. He was a policeman again, with a mission to ferret out the lies and extract the truth. But at the last moment he pulled back his hand, knowing he had to let Silas be. Nothing he said now could be used in evidence. A statement could wait until after the doctors had done their work. Silas wasn’t going anywhere.

On the floor, the wounded man was no longer conscious of the policeman leaning over him or the dead man behind his head. The pain in his foot was still there, but it seemed to belong to someone else. Not just the gallery, but the whole house was full of bright blue water. His arms were strong, and he swam through the rooms like an arrow. Upstairs and downstairs, he could go where he pleased. Until the ambulancemen bent down to put him on a stretcher, and he came rushing back up to the surface and remembered who he was and how much everything hurt.

But worse than the pain was the knowledge that he’d lost something while he was underwater. It was on the edge of his mind but he couldn’t grasp it. Trying to reach it only made it seem further away. With a supreme effort of will, Silas concentrated his mind and realised it was why he’d lost consciousness upstairs. He was missing something. It was about Sasha. She was standing at the bottom of the stairs, and he was floating down toward her. He wanted to shout to get her attention, but all that came out was a whisper. It didn’t matter. She came over and stood by him for a moment. She wanted to know where the book was, but he shook his head. He wasn’t going to tell her that. Not yet. He needed to be sure of her first. And now it came to him what it was he’d forgotten.

“My room or yours?” he asked, but he couldn’t be sure that she had heard, and there was no time to repeat the question. He was going forward out into the dusk, and she was staying behind.

Now they were at the back of the ambulance opening the door, and suddenly she was there again, on the edge of his vision. He could hardly hear what she was saying. It sounded like “mine.” Silas raised himself on the stretcher, and she said it again. “Mine.” It was all right. They understood each other. And Silas sank back into the blue water again as the ambulance drove away.

Once again Trave stopped at Moreton Manor on his way to London, but he was coming to see Sasha this time, not Silas who was still in hospital, recovering from the surgery on his foot.

It was a grey overcast day, and the manor house seemed more desolate than ever. The shootings were still fresh in Trave’s mind, troubling his sleep, and he would have preferred not to come, but he felt he had no choice. Sasha had been so impassive as she’d given her statement at the police station two days earlier, just as if she was reciting lines she’d stayed up too late at night to learn, and he wanted to see if he could shake her, crack this alibi of Silas’s. It made no sense. Why would Sasha want to protect Silas of all people? He might have saved the man’s life, but in his current mood even the mention of Silas’s name made Trave shudder.

A maid answered the door, and as she took Trave’s hat and coat, he thought of Jeanne Ritter hanging another man’s hat and coat on this same stand four months earlier. If only she had told the truth from the outset she might be alive today, Trave reflected bitterly.

“Miss Vigne’s in the library. Would you like me to take you up?” asked the maid. She’d become nervous, her hands twitching, ever since Trave had shown her his badge on the doorstep.

“No. I’d prefer to see her down here, if you don’t mind,” he replied quickly. “Anywhere’ll do.” The thought of going upstairs made Trave grimace. He had no wish to revisit unnecessarily the place where Ritter’s body had fallen so heavily to the floor, and he wondered at Sasha’s cold-blooded ability to stay on at the manor house after what had happened. But then his eye alighted on three brown suitcases standing in the corner of the hall and he realised he’d been wrong. He’d got here just in time.

Sasha came slowly down the stairs, patting her elaborately coiffured brown hair into place, and Trave was struck by how pretty she looked: her radiant brown eyes sparkled against her pale complexion, and her generous mouth, dimpled chin, and full figure invited admiration. And yet at the same time Trave remembered her disfigurement and realised forcibly that this was the opposite of the impression she intended to give. Her body was taut and her expression severe: she meant to repel attention, not attract it.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Miss Vigne. I know you’re busy.”

“I’m not busy. I’m leaving,” Sasha said brusquely, pointing at her bags standing by the front door.

“Well, I’ll try not to delay you too long,” said Trave, adopting a friendly tone. “Is there somewhere we could talk?”

Reluctantly, Sasha gestured toward a small parlour next to the kitchen, and Trave followed her in. In contrast to the rest of the house, this room was sparsely furnished and had the air of not having been used in a long time. Two button-backed Victorian armchairs stood on either side of an empty fireplace, and a single framed photograph hung over the simple wooden mantelpiece. It was a picture of Stephen and Silas and their parents taken outside the manor house nine years earlier: the date 1950 was written in black ink in the bottom right-hand corner. John Cade was resting his hand on his wife’s shoulder, and he was looking at her with pleased proprietorship as she gazed determinedly ahead, straight at the camera. The boys were in front, standing on the lower step, dressed in identical tweed suits, but it was obvious that they were not real brothers. Stephen looked just like his mother. He had her bright blue eyes and fair straw-textured hair, and he was smiling un-self-consciously, expecting the best of the world in contrast to his brother, who stood awkwardly, keeping his grey eyes turned downward to the ground. Nothing had changed. So what was it that made Sasha do Silas’s bidding? Trave asked himself for the hundredth time since Silas had announced his alibi in a trembling voice as he was being carried out to the ambulance in the aftermath of the shooting.