Simon Tolkien - The Inheritance

“So the game of chess was for high stakes?” asked Thompson, carrying on where he’d left off.

“I suppose so. It didn’t make me do any better, though. My father was black and without a knight, but he still beat me. Easily. I should never have played him.”

“Because it just made you angrier than you’d been before, when he refused to give you the money in the first place.”

“Yes. It’s not a crime to be angry, is it?” said Stephen defiantly. But Thompson ignored the question.

“What happened after you lost the game?” he asked.

“He grinned at me. Said, ‘better luck next time,’ or something sarcastic like that. I told him that I’d had enough, that I’d expose him, make everyone know what he’d done. I meant it as well. It wasn’t like before.”

“This wasn’t the first time you’d threatened to expose him then?” asked Thompson. As he had anticipated, Stephen’s desire to talk about how he had been treated had got the better of the unnatural reticence that his barrister had forced on him. All Thompson had to do was to nudge him along, and Stephen would soon reveal the full depth of his rage against the dead man.

“No, it wasn’t the first time,” said Stephen. “I said I’d do it when I first found out what he’d done to those people in France. Silas and I were listening outside the window of the study, and he and Ritter were gloating about it. How they’d left no survivors, and so it had to be Carson who’d written the blackmail letter. I made my father promise to stop Ritter going after Carson, and I left it at that. He was telling me how it would disgrace the family name if I went to the police and how he was too ill to cope with a trial. He had a way with words, but I shouldn’t have listened to him.”

“And so then two years later you threatened to expose him again. How did he react?”

“He laughed at me. He said there were no witnesses now. Nobody except him and Ritter. Then he went over to his desk and got out a newspaper cutting about Carson’s death. It was from a few months before, and it was obvious that Carson hadn’t fallen off a train. Ritter had pushed him. And my father had lied to me again. He hadn’t done anything to stop Ritter from murdering Carson. It probably just took them longer to find him than they’d first thought. Maybe if I’d gone to the police when I first found out about Marjean, Carson would still be alive.”

“And all this went through your mind when your father showed you that cutting, didn’t it, Mr. Cade?”

“Yes, of course it did,” said Stephen, leaning forward in the witness box and throwing caution to the winds. “He disgusted me, sitting there looking so smug with all that blood on his hands. People’s lives meant nothing to him. Nothing at all.”

“Yours included?”

“Yes.”

“And that made you angry?”

“Of course it did.”

“Very angry?”

“I don’t know.” Stephen’s voice was suddenly quiet as if he had just realised where his answers had led him.

“I suggest you do know,” said Thompson, switching seamlessly on to the offensive. “You were angrier with your father than you’d ever been in your life before. Everything suddenly came together. The changing of his will, his refusal to give you the money for your girlfriend, the way he’d toyed with you over the chess game, the shame that he’d brought down on your head, and all the lies he’d told you.” Thompson ticked off John Cade’s sins on his fingers one by one, but he left the worst for last. “Above all, you couldn’t stand his smug indifference to everything you cared about,” he said. “It drove you crazy, didn’t it, Mr. Cade?”

“I was angry, like I said before. I wasn’t crazy,” said Stephen doggedly.

“Are you sure about that?” asked the prosecutor. “It was after your father showed you the newspaper cutting that you told him that he deserved to die. Isn’t that right?”

“I don’t know. I must’ve been referring to what Silas told me. That my father had said to Ritter that he didn’t have long to live. I was saying that that’s what he deserved.”

“No, you weren’t,” countered Thompson. “You’re the one who’s lying now, and you know it. You said in interview that you shouted at your father that he deserved to die. Shouted, Mr. Cade. You shouted because you’d lost your temper. And that’s when you took the gun out of your pocket and shot your father dead.”

“No.”

“Yes. You murdered him. And then you locked the door to give yourself some time to think.”

“No, I didn’t,” shouted Stephen, losing his self-control. “I never locked the door. And I never killed my father. I left him sitting in his armchair and I walked down to the gate. And when I came back, he was dead. That’s what happened.” Stephen was breathing loudly now, and his knuckles were white from gripping the top of the witness box with his hands. Thompson’s tactics had paid off. Stephen would never have reacted to the accusation with such obvious emotion if he had been hit with it straightaway.

“You’re angry now, aren’t you, Mr. Cade?” asked Thompson with a smile. Perhaps it was intentional. The prosecutor’s smugness reminded Stephen irresistibly of his father. The half-moon glasses they wore were the same too.

“Of course I am,” he said. “You’re accusing me of something I never did.”

“But they’re your fingerprints on the gun. No one else’s.”

“I saw it on the floor when I came back in. It was a natural thing to do to pick it up.”

“But the truth is that you never left the room in the first place, did you? If you had, you’d have taken your hat and coat with you. Unless you’re seriously suggesting that you intended to go back for them after your walk.”

“No, of course not. I forgot them. That’s all. I was angry and upset and I just wanted to get out in the air. I wasn’t thinking about my hat and coat. And it had stopped raining so I didn’t need them anyway.”

“You never went to the gate, Mr. Cade,” Thompson went on relentlessly. “You just made that up to try and escape responsibility for what you’d done.”

“No.”

“You had the motive, you had the anger, and you had the gun. Your fingerprints tell their own story. You are guilty of this crime. Guilty as charged,” said Thompson with finality. He sat down without waiting for Stephen to respond.

Too late, Stephen thought of all the things he had wanted to say. That he was a terrible shot, that he wouldn’t have played chess with his father if he’d brought a gun to kill him with, that he wouldn’t have opened the door to Ritter if he’d committed the crime. He’d have tried to escape. But it was too late now. Thompson had played him like a prize-winning angler with his catch. He’d let Stephen do his work for him, and then pulled him effortlessly ashore and left him exposed and struggling for breath. Waiting to die, thought Stephen, as he made his slow way back to the dock. Waiting to die.

The trial was virtually at an end. Thompson and Swift had argued for and against Stephen’s guilt to the jury, and hardly anyone in the press box felt able to say which way the verdict would go. Some speculated that the jury would be unable to reach a verdict and that the trial would have to begin all over again. Others wondered aloud whether the jurors would be able to stomach sending such a young man to the gallows. But, then again, the case against Stephen Cade was strong, and everyone was frightened of guns. There were scare stories in the papers every day about armed gangs roaming the streets just like they did in New York or Los Angeles. No one was safe in their beds.

The last word lay with the judge. It was his right to comment on the evidence in his summing up, and in a case like this Old Man Murdoch was unlikely to keep his powder dry.