The Inheritance

TEN

Detective Constable Clayton wouldn’t have admitted it for the world, but the truth was he felt intimidated by the Old Bailey. He was only five years out of police training college, and he’d never given evidence at a murder trial before. It was just luck that had got him involved in the case in the first place. He and Watts had started the nighttime roster less than two hours before the call came in to attend at Moreton Manor. Clayton remembered his first sight of the victim. There was very little blood. Just a small hole in the middle of his forehead. The study looked like it was a theatre set down at the Oxford Playhouse, with the professor in his armchair at the centre of the stage.

They’d waited for Trave to arrive and then gone to work: asking questions of the people in the house, looking through their rooms, searching for evidence. Not that they’d found anything to move the finger of suspicion away from the main suspect. Clayton had felt sorry for him at the time. Stephen Cade seemed so young, even though he was in fact less than five years younger than Clayton. He and Watts had taken turns guarding him in the kitchen. He’d been noisy at first, shouting out his innocence and demanding to see a lawyer, but by the time it was Clayton’s turn, Stephen had subsided into a quiet misery, sitting slumped at the long deal table with his head in his hands.

It was funny, his lack of bravado. He had to have planned the murder. The gun wouldn’t have just been sitting in the study waiting for him to use it. He would have had to buy it from some black marketeer, weigh it in his hand, practice with it a few times, setting up a target in some deserted place, and then wait for his opportunity. Strange, then, that he should be so distraught after the event.

But that wasn’t evidence. You had to concentrate on the facts and follow them where they led, and this was a fairly simple case: Stephen Cade had been caught red-handed. Most of the work had seemed to involve filling in endless forms, tapping away on the old Remington typewriter that had seen better days even before it became the property of the Oxfordshire Police. Still, it had been a privilege to work with Trave, and Adam Clayton hoped he’d have the chance to do so again. Trave was something of a legend in the local force. He was very good at his job. Everyone agreed about that. He got results, but he did not inspire affection. He had no nickname, and no one seemed to have ever visited his house. Trave’s fellow officers knew where his lines were, and they took care not to cross them. He was a loner, and perhaps this was why he had not achieved promotion above the rank he’d held for the last fifteen years.

But Clayton had seen another side of Trave. It was standard practice for two policemen to attend autopsies, and Clayton had been picked to accompany Trave to the Cade postmortem. He’d thought he was prepared for the experience but had found to his shame that he wasn’t. He’d felt violently sick even before the first incision and had been unable to conceal his distress. Trave hadn’t wasted time asking him if he was all right. He’d just told the pathologist to wait, taken Clayton by the arm, and walked him out into the air. They’d crossed the road to a pub where Trave had ordered two whiskies and then waited for the younger man to regain his composure. And after that it had been all right. Not great, but all right. With Trave’s help, he’d got through it.

Clayton half wished that Trave was with him now, but Trave had already given his evidence at the start of the trial, and so there was no reason for him to be in the witness waiting room. It was an airless place on the fourth floor of the courthouse with a row of small grimy windows above head height, which let in precious little light. Clayton sat at a Formica table with his back to the door, trying to distract himself with a copy of yesterday’s Daily Mail.

“Mind if I join you?” Bert Blake, the police photographer, sat down opposite Clayton without waiting for an answer to his question. Some of the coffee from his Styrofoam cup spilled onto the table as he settled his large bulk into the chair, but he made no move to clear it up even when it began to drip down onto the floor between them.

Clayton groaned inwardly. Blake was a gossip. Always ferreting out information and then passing it on to people he hardly knew. He was a lonely man and gossip made him feel important, even though his indiscretions had already got Blake into serious trouble on several occasions. He was kept on because he was one of the best at what he did. His photographs left nothing to the imagination.

“When are you on?” asked Blake. His coffee was hot, and he spoke in between noisy sips.

“I don’t know. They said it wasn’t likely before this afternoon.”

“Which means tomorrow,” said Blake, with the knowledgeable air of someone who spent a good part of his working life lazing around in courthouse cafeterias waiting to give evidence.

“Do you think so?” Clayton was unable to keep the anxiety out of his voice, and Blake was quick to pick up on it.

“Is this your first time here?” he asked.

“No.”

Surprisingly, Blake seemed to accept the lie and transferred his attention to a bar of half-melted chocolate that he had extracted from the pocket of his crumpled suit jacket. Clayton watched mesmerised as Blake slowly separated the runny brown chocolate from its purple wrapping, and he didn’t notice Ritter and his wife come through the door behind him and sit at a table in the corner.

“Why do you say tomorrow?” Clayton repeated.

“Well, they’ve got the brother in there now-you know, the one with the funny name.” Blake stopped and scratched his head as he made a vain search through the junkyard of his memory.

“Silas. Silas Cade,” said Clayton.

“That’s right. Silas. Well, I wouldn’t mind betting that he’s going to take some time.”

“Why?” asked Clayton, curious in spite of himself.

“You know what I’m talking about. Your lot found some pictures in his room, which I’d be proud of. Naughty pictures. Taken with a telephoto lens.”

“Who told you that?”

“A friend of a friend,” said Blake mysteriously. He swallowed the piece of chocolate that he had just fitted into the corner of his mouth, and then leant forward conspiratorially toward Clayton.

“Did you see them?” he asked.

“No, I didn’t search the rooms on that side of the house.”

“But you heard about them, didn’t you?” asked Blake with a leer.

“I heard that there were some photographs found but that they were returned to Mr. Cade because they weren’t relevant.”

The photographer’s sudden proximity repelled Clayton. He pulled his chair away from the table and raised his voice instead of lowering it as he answered Blake’s question. He wanted to keep Blake from coming any closer, but instead he succeeded in drawing everybody in the room into their conversation.

In the corner Ritter noticed the sudden alertness in his wife. She had been listening with a bowed head as he gave her a few last-minute reminders on how she was to give her evidence, and he had begun to be irritated as usual by the way in which she continually entwined her arms and hands. But now she became motionless, listening intently to the conversation between the big man in the dirty suit and the young policeman whom Ritter recognised from the night of the murder.

Blake was aware of the interest he’d aroused, and he seemed to enjoy the attention almost as much as he did Clayton’s discomfort.

“They may not have been relevant,” he said. “But they were certainly revealing. I can tell you that much. Slippery Silas must have had a tripod set up in the woods with the camera fixed on that girl’s bathroom, trying to catch her getting out of the shower before she drew the curtains. That was his game.”

In the corner, Jeanne Ritter blushed crimson. She was no longer a girl, but still she had no doubt that the fat man was talking about her. It all made sense. Silas avoided her because he was frightened of Ritter, but that didn’t mean he didn’t love her. He was watching her through his camera the entire time. She glanced up and met her husband’s gaze for a moment, and then turned away. She could see his brain working, and it scared her. She didn’t know what he would do if he ever found out about Silas.

Clayton saw none of this. He was fully occupied by his own embarrassment and remained completely unaware that two of the most important witnesses in the case were sitting only a few feet behind him. Hoping that his obvious lack of interest would stem the flood of Blake’s revelations, Clayton picked up his newspaper and turned a page, but his clumsy attempt at a rebuff had the opposite effect of what he intended. Blake became even more voluble than before.

“He’s obviously a pervert. Most of these amateur photographers are,” said Blake, who obviously thought of himself as a model professional.

“I thought he had a shop,” said Clayton, returning to the conversation reluctantly.

“Oh, yes. In some street off Cowley Road. It’s probably just a front for him to sell dirty pictures under the counter.”

“You’ve got no evidence for that.” Clayton couldn’t contain his irritation at Blake’s air of self-satisfied certainty.

“I don’t need any. There’s a big market for that sort of thing, you know, particularly in a place like Oxford, with all those weird university types. Apparently this girl over at the manor had some tropical skin disease or something like that. A lot of people like that. Adds to the price.”

Blake smirked, amused by the look of disgust written across Clayton’s face. There was nothing he liked more than getting a rise out of police officers who were a bit green behind the ears. It was a small revenge for being stuck in a dead-end job. Police photographers remained just that. There was no promotion ladder for them to climb.

Clayton was still trying to think of some clever one-liner that would shut Bert Blake up once and for all, when Jeanne Ritter finally lost her self-control. Her husband had watched the colour drain from her face as she took in the impact of what the fat man was saying. Perhaps she would have been able to absorb the shock if she hadn’t thought that he had been talking about her before. But now her eyes were opened, and she realised what a fool she had been. Silas had been avoiding her for months. Love struck, she had put it down to his fear of Ritter, when it should have been obvious even to her that he’d just lost interest.

Except that it was worse than that. Silas had got bored of her because he wanted Sasha Vigne. Jeanne felt wave upon wave of angry jealousy grip her body like electricity. She needed to get out into the open, and she pushed her chair violently back against the wall and ran out of the room.

Ritter got up as if to follow her but then resumed his seat. His wife was highly strung, and he knew she was worried about giving evidence, but that didn’t seem enough to explain her strange behaviour. Still, there’d be time to ask questions later. For now, he had to stay put in the waiting room. The usher had told him on the way up that he was the next witness due in court.

Clayton followed Jeanne out. He’d turned around in time to see her sudden departure, and he felt he needed to talk to Trave about what had happened. The photographer watched Clayton leave with a grin and then turned his attention to the policeman’s newspaper.