Simon Tolkien - The Inheritance

The truck’s engine roared into life, and it jumped forward, almost stalling. But it didn’t. Instead Jean Marie took it around in a screeching 180-degree turn and then accelerated away into the woods, leaving Trave shouting uselessly in the dust that the truck had left behind.

As they careered up the track leading to the road, Sasha tried to persuade the hysterical Frenchman to take her back to Marjean. She cursed herself for having left the codex in her room, but it was too late now, and she had to go back. But he wouldn’t listen. Instead he drove like a madman down the road to Rouen and practically threw her out of his truck when they got to the cafe where they had first met less than an hour before. Her car was still in the parking lot, and she drove back to Marjean as fast as she could. With luck she’d still get there before Trave. There had been no car outside the church. He must have walked, and it was over a mile along the side of the lake. He looked too old to be able to run very far, and besides, the path was muddy. He’d fall in the water if he tried to go too fast.

She parked outside the inn and took the stairs to her room two at a time. There was a note that had been slipped under her door. She almost missed it, and there was no time to read it when she picked it up. She just threw everything into her bag and headed out onto the landing. At the top of the stairs, she heard Trave down below, asking the way to her room. She was sure that the landlord hadn’t seen her when she came in. He’d been in the cubicle at the back of the reception area talking on the telephone. Trave was coming up on the off chance. He didn’t know she was there. She backed away into the semi-darkness at the back of the landing and watched him come down the corridor toward her. But he wasn’t looking in front of him. His eyes were on the door of her room. He knocked twice before he tried the handle. When it turned, he went inside and the door swung to behind him. There was no time to lose. On tiptoe she ran across the landing, down the stairs, and out the door.

Trave was standing at the window of her room looking down into the street when he saw her. He didn’t move. There was no point. She had already started her car, and he pursed his lips, cursing softly as he watched her drive away.

Sasha had forgotten her coat. It hung forlornly in the wardrobe. The pockets were empty, and Trave left it where it was. Downstairs, the landlord appeared unconcerned by his guest’s sudden departure.

“She ran away because of you,” he said flatly. “Not because of the money. She will send me what she owes. The English, they always pay their bills.”

Trave didn’t argue. After all, the landlord was right about why Sasha had left. There was an implied accusation in his tone, however, that Trave felt obliged to answer. And the old man might know something. It wasn’t as if Trave could afford to leave any stone unturned.

“I’m a policeman,” he said. “From Oxford in England. Someone was killed near there, murdered, about six months ago, and I think it may have something to do with what happened here at the end of the war.”

“Nothing happened here.”

“No, I don’t mean here in the village. I mean over on the other side of the lake. In the church.”

“The Germans killed the people that lived there. They did the same everywhere. They were Nazis.”

The old man seemed entirely satisfied with his three-word explanation for the atrocity, but Trave persisted.

“The lady who was here, Miss Vigne, was at the house where the man was killed. And now she is here. Do you know why?” he asked.

The old man looked Trave full in the eye and then shrugged his shoulders. It was a gesture of contempt. He might just as well have spat on the floor. Trave felt certain that he knew something but equally certain that he was not going to talk about it. He turned away exasperated, but at the door the landlord called him back.

“Mr. Policeman,” he said, “you tell me your name and your telephone number, and if I think of something, then I will call you. Okay?”

Quickly, Trave wrote his details down on the back of a registration form and put it in the landlord’s calloused hand. But then he didn’t let go of the piece of paper. Instead he leant across the counter, bringing his face up close to the Frenchman’s.

“A boy is going to hang for something he never did,” he said softly. “If you think of something, think of that.”

Then, without waiting for a reply, Trave walked out of the door and made for his car. He was angry, and he didn’t look back. If he’d done so, he might have seen the landlord disappear back into the cubicle behind the reception area and pick up the telephone. He dialed a long-distance number, waited for a reply, and then began talking in rapid French to the person on the other end.

Trave drove out of the village. Sasha had disappeared, and he knew instinctively that he wouldn’t find her again. And even if he did, he had no authority to ask her any questions. He was outside his jurisdiction, and he didn’t have any basis to invoke the help of the French police. And yet there was so much that he wanted to know. What was she doing here? Outside the church, she’d looked like someone who’d been searching for something and failed to find it. But that wasn’t the same as having a relation to the Rocards or their servants, having some reason for wanting revenge on John Cade for what he’d done here in 1944.

She’d given Silas the alibi, or was it the other way round? Was she the one who’d killed her employer in his chair and then escaped across the courtyard in Silas’s mackintosh and hat? She had had the opportunity, and she was certainly cold-blooded enough to plan such a crime. But what was her motive, and why was she in the backwoods of Normandy now, looking for something she couldn’t find?

Trave stopped at the church on the way back to Moirtier, but he couldn’t see anything unusual beyond the severed padlock hanging uselessly from one handle of the big oak door. A notice by the entrance advertised Holy Mass at nine o’clock every Sunday, and Trave decided to come back the next day. Perhaps the cure would know something. God knows, his luck had to change soon.

In the evening he called Adam Clayton from the hotel. The young man sounded excited.

“I found the locksmith,” he said. “He wasn’t in Oxford. He was in Reading. Our friend went halfway to London to copy the key. But he did it, Bill. You were right. It was four days before Cade’s murder. A Frenchman in his late twenties, early thirties, calling himself Paul Noirtier and speaking very poor English. Walked in off the street with three wax casts and came back the next day to collect the keys. I’m assuming he got one for the french windows to the study as well as the internal door, and the last key’s probably for the front door of the house. And there was also one duplicate apparently, although I obviously don’t know which door that one’s for. He paid cash apparently. I’ve got a description: tall, short black hair, clean shaven, and no glasses. Doesn’t tell us much. The locksmith says he didn’t like the look of him, but that’s probably because he doesn’t like foreigners.” Clayton laughed.

“Was the man alone?” asked Trave.

“I asked about that. The locksmith’s pretty sure there was a woman waiting outside the shop in a Mercedes, but he can’t describe her, and none of the photographs jogged his memory.”

“Did you show him Sasha Vigne’s picture?”

“Yes. I showed him pictures of everyone who was in the house. Like you said I should. And he drew a blank on all of them. Why Sasha Vigne particularly?”

“Because she’s here.”

“Where?”