The Inheritance (26 page)

Trave had taken a roundabout route to kill time, walking up to Fleet Street and past Temple Bar, where the authorities displayed the heads of executed criminals as late as the eighteenth century. But he was still ten minutes early when he knocked on the door of Number 5 King’s Bench Walk and was shown into a waiting room in which a coal fire was giving off very little heat. The scuttle was empty, and there was no sign of any wood.

Trave picked up a magazine off the table in the centre of the room and flicked the pages, but he could not concentrate. He was remembering a day when he and Vanessa and Joe had come here just after the end of the war. God knows why they had chosen the Temple, unless it was just that it was one of the few places that Trave knew in London. But Joe had loved it, running ahead of his parents and jumping out of hidden doorways to scare them. Until they turned a corner and found that he had completely disappeared. Trave had shouted for his son, but he wasn’t really worried. He knew Joe couldn’t have gone far. But Vanessa didn’t see it that way. The look of abject terror on her face had shaken Trave at the time, and now, in retrospect, it seemed like it was a premonition. Trave remembered how they had gone to a tea shop on the Strand afterward, and he had tried to console her while Joe ate his way through an entire chocolate cake. But her confidence had snapped, and she hadn’t touched her food. And then, at the end, just as he was paying the bill, she’d taken his hand and told him what she felt, and the words had stayed with him ever since.

“We’re walking on ice, Bill. All the time on thin ice, and we just don’t know it. We think it’s solid ground, until it breaks.”

And ten years later the ice had broken. Joe had died and now Vanessa had left Trave for another man. It was as if she held him responsible for what had happened. She’d given him the son he craved, and he hadn’t protected that son. He’d failed her, and so she’d left him.

Trave’s contempt for his own self-pity didn’t make him feel any better or more prepared for Gerald Thompson, who now appeared in the doorway of the waiting room, looking down at Trave over gold half-moon spectacles that he wore forward on his nose, enhancing a naturally supercilious expression.

But to Trave’s surprise, the barrister seemed disposed to be friendly. He shook Trave’s hand quite warmly, before guiding him down a corridor into his office. It was a beautiful room with light wood-paneled walls and a roaring fire in the corner, a marked contrast to its counterpart in the waiting room.

Thompson went to the door and called to an invisible assistant to make coffee, while Trave took in more of his surroundings. Everything was neat: books arranged in descending order of height on the shelves and papers tied up with ubiquitous white ribbon. The big kneehole desk with drawers on either side was devoid of photographs, but, between two of the bookcases, a six-foot-high mirror had been set into the wall, and Trave imagined Tiny Thompson in his robes, preening himself in front of it, standing slightly on tiptoes to achieve the best effect.

“You’re quite a hero, Inspector,” said Thompson, returning to his seat on the other side of the desk. “It’s not every day that I get to drink coffee with a man of action like yourself.”

Trave forced a smile, uncertain how else to respond to being complimented on killing another human being. Even if it was a man like Ritter.

“I hear you felled friend Ritter with just one shot.” The prosecutor spoke in the same clipped, almost feminine, voice that had so grated on Trave’s nerves during the trial, and his words were laced with irony, but Trave was nevertheless grateful that Thompson was not hostile before he’d begun. Maybe the barrister would listen to what he had to say.

“Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Thompson,” he said. “I appreciate it’s short notice.”

“Gerald, please,” interrupted Thompson, smiling.

“Gerald.” Trave found it hard to get the name out. It would have been easier to call the prosecutor Tiny. “Gerald, I wanted to talk to you about the case.”

“Yes, I imagined you would,” said Thompson. “It’s going well, I think. I’ve had the new statements from Sasha Vigne and Silas Cade, saying they were together in her room on the night of the murder. Obviously Silas will
have to be recalled now that he’s changed his evidence, but I don’t see that as too much of a problem.”

“So the trial’s going ahead? There won’t need to be a new jury?” Trave sounded surprised—shocked, even. It was not what he had expected.

“No. No need for one. I spoke to friend Swift yesterday. He doesn’t want to start again. He’d lose the evidence of poor Mrs. Ritter if he did. The defence’ll obviously be attacking Silas for all they’re worth from now on, but I doubt it’ll do them much good. His injuries should make him more sympathetic to the jury. Not less.”

“But what about the prosecution?”

“What about it?”

“Don’t you want to start again?”

“No, I’d lose my star witness if I did that.”

Trave looked perplexed, and Thompson laughed.

“Come on, Inspector. You should know who I’m talking about. You’re the one who got rid of Sergeant Ritter, after all. I’m just glad that you waited until after he’d given his evidence.”

“I had to do it. It wasn’t a choice,” said Trave, unable to contain his irritation at being depicted as some sort of trigger-happy gunman. The prosecutor’s evident amusement at his discomfiture only increased Trave’s annoyance.

“It’s all right, Inspector. I know you only did what you had to do, as they say. Like I said outside, everyone thinks you’re quite the hero. Me included.” Thompson laughed and picked up his cup of coffee. Trave noticed with surprise that it was an antique, made of a delicately painted bone china. Thompson blew into the liquid several times before he took his first sip. It was like he was preparing a kiss.

“It’s in both our interests to carry on, you see, Inspector,” he said after a moment. “The defence have Mrs. Ritter, and we have her husband. The jurors may not have liked him, but they believed his evidence. And the key turning in the lock is the jewel in our crown, particularly when you add in the fingerprint evidence. No, I’m content. I understand your anxieties after what happened at the manor house last week, but you can rest calmer now, Inspector. We’re still on course.”

Trave stirred uneasily in his seat. The interview was not going at all as he’d anticipated. It was as if the prosecutor was deliberately misinterpreting
the reason for his visit. Trave wasn’t worried that Stephen Cade might be acquitted; it was the precise opposite that concerned him. After all that had happened, he felt sure that the boy was innocent, and he’d come to London to try to persuade Thompson that the prosecution should stop for good. Obviously he should have realised before he set out that it would be a wasted journey, but still, he was here now, and it was his duty to try.

“You say the defence have Mrs. Ritter, but what do you think about her evidence?” he asked. “What about the man in the courtyard?”

“I don’t really see her as a problem, to be honest with you, Inspector,” said Thompson patiently. “The Crown takes the view that the poor woman can no longer be seen as a witness of truth. It’s quite clear that she changed her evidence and perjured herself at the last moment, because of what she overheard in the cafeteria just before she went into court. Your colleague Detective Constable Clayton has provided us with a most helpful statement about what happened, and you yourself heard the Ritter woman admit her feelings for Silas when she was giving her evidence.

“Of course, it’s really unacceptable that prosecution witnesses aren’t kept isolated from one another in important cases like this. It’s something I’ve already raised with the people in charge over at the Bailey, although I doubt I’ll get anywhere. The court staff tend to be a law unto themselves. More coffee, Inspector?”

“I don’t think you understand what I’m trying to say, Mr. Thompson,” said Trave, ignoring the offer. “I actually believe Mrs. Ritter did see a man in the courtyard crossing to the front door. Her evidence fits with Stephen Cade’s interview. And Silas had a motive. He stood to be disinherited. Now, if we carry on, he’ll get everything. I don’t believe a word of his alibi, Mr. Thompson. Not a word of it.”

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that, Inspector,” said Thompson, taking off his glasses and fixing Trave with a cold stare. “Fortunately, however, you’re not the one conducting this case. That task has been entrusted to me. And I’m carrying it out without fear or favour, as is my duty. Perhaps you should bear that in mind, Inspector. You seem to have become rather clouded in your judgements recently, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“What the hell do you mean by that?” asked Trave angrily.

“I mean that you appear to have developed something of a personal interest
in the defendant in this case,” Thompson replied evenly. “I understand that you lost your only child in a motorcycle accident several years ago and that he would have been the same age as young Mr. Cade if he’d lived. It must have been terrible for you, Inspector.”

There was no sympathy at all in the prosecutor’s voice to match his words, and he continued to stare coldly at Trave across his desk.

“My son’s got nothing to do with it,” said Trave, trying to sound sure of himself, although he couldn’t prevent a flush of colour rising to his cheeks. The prosecutor’s well-directed thrust had cut right through his defences.

“Perhaps. Perhaps not,” said Thompson, with a thin smile. “Let’s just say that a reminder of where your duty lies should not go amiss, Inspector.”

“I am doing my duty and obtaining this statement was part of that,” said Trave, drawing two sheets of folded paper from the inside pocket of his jacket and banging them down on the desk so that the two cups rattled in their saucers.

“Please, Inspector. This isn’t one of your police stations,” said Thompson, injecting a note of contempt into his voice, designed to irritate Trave even further. “You’d better tell me what this is,” he said, nodding at the documents without picking them up. “I hope you haven’t done something you’re going to regret.”

“I’ve done my job. That’s all,” said Trave, finding it easier to regain his composure, now that Thompson had become so obviously rude. “The statement was made to me yesterday by Esther Rudd. I wrote it down and brought it to you, which is correct police practice, I think.”

“Who’s Esther Rudd?”

“She was a housemaid at Moreton Manor at the time of the murder.”

“Ah, yes. Now I remember. One of your colleagues took a statement from her. It wasn’t very helpful, as I recall. All about how she was a heavy sleeper and only came downstairs shortly before the police arrived. Have you helped her remember something else, Inspector? Is that what all this is about?”

“She’s saying that when she got to the top of the stairs, she looked down and saw Mrs. Ritter in the hallway by the front door with a man’s hat in her hand,” said Trave, ignoring Thompson’s accusation that he’d manipulated the witness. “There was no one else in the hall, and Mrs. Ritter hung the hat on the coat stand.”

“Whose hat was it?”

“She can’t say. She went straight to the east wing when she got to the bottom of the stairs because that’s where all the shouting was coming from. There was no reason for her to worry about Mrs. Ritter and a hat.”

“Which is, I suppose, why it didn’t find its way into her first statement.”

“Yes. But what she says now backs up Mrs. Ritter’s account. If Silas came running into the house after committing the murder, then he might well have dropped his hat on the floor before he went to his room.”

“If he went to his room. He says that he was with Miss Vigne in her room, and she backs up his account. Remember that this is not the only new statement that we have, Inspector,” said Thompson tartly. “Anyway, I better read what this Rudd woman has to say.”

It didn’t take the prosecutor long. He carefully put his glasses back on and held the statement between his thumb and forefinger as he read it, as if it was something offensive that it pained him even to look at, and then when he was done, he dropped the two sheets of paper back onto his desk with a look of derision.

“So the good Esther saw Madame Ritter with a hat,” he said, with a sneer. “She can’t say whose hat. Only that it was a hat. But with no coat to accompany it, as we might have hoped for. And she says nothing about anyone locking the front door. You remember Mrs. Ritter’s evidence, don’t you, Inspector? She saw Silas come inside, and so she went downstairs and put his hat and coat back on the hat stand and locked the front door. I don’t really think that any of this helps your friend in Wandsworth, Inspector. What’s missing from the statement is more significant than what’s in it.”

“Mrs. Ritter could already have locked the door,” said Trave. “The statement at least puts her in the right place at the right time. And why would she have the hat unless she was trying to cover for Silas?”

“I don’t know, Inspector. Perhaps because Mrs. Ritter was the housekeeper and didn’t like things lying around on the floor. And, more important, I don’t understand what you mean by ‘the right place.’ It was Stephen Cade who was in the right place, complete with gun and key and his dead father. He killed his father, and he’s going to have to pay for it. It’s as simple as that. And now I’m afraid I’ve got work to do, even if you haven’t,” said Thompson, getting up from his chair.

“So you’re not going to do anything about this?” Trave stayed where he was, meeting the prosecutor’s stare across the desk.