The Inheritance (32 page)

“No,” said Stephen. “The will was only one of the reasons.”

But Thompson didn’t let him finish. “You’d had enough, hadn’t you, Mr. Cade?” he went on, pressing home his advantage. “Two years of thinking about the injustice and the rejection, and then your brother tells you that your father’s going to disinherit you. It made you want to kill him, didn’t it? You’d had enough.”

“No, I wanted to talk to him. That’s all.”

“Are you sure about that? Remember what you said to Inspector Trave in your interview. That you told your father he deserved to die. Is that what you said?”

“Yes. But I didn’t mean it.”

“Didn’t you? It’s just a coincidence then that your father was murdered that evening?”

“Yes; I didn’t kill him.”

“So you say. But then who did?”

“Silas—it had to be Silas.” Stephen couldn’t keep the desperation out of his voice. “He must’ve hid in the curtains and slipped out after I came back. Jeanne Ritter saw him in the courtyard.”

“So she said. But she had a reason to lie. And so do you, Mr. Cade. From the outset you’ve tried to blame everybody but yourself. First of all it was the mysterious man in the Mercedes, and then you changed your mind and said it was your brother. Who will it be next?”

“I just know it wasn’t me.”

“Because you were there. Well, perhaps you better tell us again what happened between you and your father that evening.”

“We talked.”

“About what?”

“The will. Him dying. He said he wouldn’t discuss those things with me. I asked him for money for Mary, my girlfriend, because her mother needed to have an operation, but he refused to give it to me. He said I was lying to him. That I needed the money to pay debts, but that wasn’t true at all. He was just being cynical like he always was. So we argued, and then he said that I could have the money if I beat him at chess. It was ridiculous. He was just playing with me, like he used to do when I was a kid. He’d be black and play without one of his pieces, but he always won. And that evening was just the same. I don’t know why I went through with it. Perhaps I thought he’d do the decent thing for once.”

“And lose?”

“Yes. I know I was stupid.”

“And how did you feel when he didn’t do the decent thing?”

“I was upset. Obviously. The money meant nothing to him and everything to me.”

“Why everything?”

“Not everything. I’m exaggerating,” said Stephen nervously. “Mary said she’d have to go and look for work up in London if I couldn’t get the money from my father. I didn’t want her to go.”

“Because you were in love with her?”

Stephen didn’t answer, and the judge was quick to intervene.

“Answer the question,” he demanded, fixing Stephen with an unfriendly glare.

“Yes, I loved her,” said Stephen finally. “I still do.”

“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.

“Members of the jury, you are the only judges of the facts in this case,” he began, leaning back in his high-backed chair and allowing his eyes to travel up and down the jurors as if he was a general inspecting his troops before they went into battle. “The verdict is yours and yours alone. So you should ignore any comments that I make on the evidence if they do not assist you. Use them only if they help you. It is your opinion that matters, not mine.”

Swift could not help admiring the judge’s false modesty. He made the jurors
listen to what he had to say by flattering their importance. He didn’t need to remind them that he had the experience of presiding over hundreds of the most serious criminal trials. He had seen it all before. It was their decision, but they would be fools to ignore the help that he had to offer them.

“So let us begin with the Crown’s case against this defendant,” said Murdoch. “Is it strong or is it weak? Has it been undermined by the defence? Remember, the Crown must make you sure of his guilt. Nothing less will do. Put another way, you must have gone beyond reasonable doubt. We can start with what is agreed. Stephen Cade and his father were estranged for the two years leading up to the murder. There is no dispute about that. The defendant has told you that he felt ashamed of his father and also harboured strong feelings of rejection. Whether he was right to do so is not what matters. You are concerned with his state of mind.

“At the end of this two-year period the defendant suddenly asks to see his father again. Why, members of the jury? I suggest that this is a vital question for you to answer. Was he concerned about his father’s failing health as he claims, or was he inflamed by the news brought by his brother, Silas, that he was about to be disinherited? Professor Cade was clearly a very rich man, and the defendant faced the loss of all his prospects at a stroke of his father’s pen.

“It is also apparent from the defendant’s evidence that this bombshell could not have come at a worse time. Young Mr. Cade had particular need of money last summer if he was going to keep his girlfriend, Miss Martin, from leaving Oxford. You will need to bear these matters in mind, members of the jury, when you come to decide what Stephen Cade’s intentions were when he sought a private interview with his father on the fateful night of the fifth of June. Was he quiet in his mind or had he had enough, as Mr. Thompson put it? And did his father’s insensitive behaviour with the chess pieces drive his son over the edge, or merely exasperate him to the point where he felt the need for a little evening air to cool his understandable annoyance?

“Nobody can read a man’s mind, members of the jury. Science cannot help you. No; what you must do is look at the evidence and use your common sense to draw inferences. There is quite enough material before you, I would suggest, to enable you to reach clear conclusions about what was in this defendant’s mind on the evening of the fifth of June, and those conclusions should help
you decide what happened when Professor Cade won their rather one-sided game of chess.