repairs. But he got no reply. He wrote again but still heard nothing, and he was just about to go to Marjean again when the war broke out.”
“So he was cut off from the object of his desire for more than four years,” said Blayne musingly. “The professor must have been a very frustrated man by the time D-day came around.”
“Exactly,” said Sasha. “We know he went to that area in 1944 and the whole Rocard family died. I believe Cade killed them, and that he stole the codex at the same time. He’d already been there and done that, and that’s why he always acted like he was so uninterested in Marjean and the codex.”
“So where is the codex, if you’re so certain he had it?” asked Blayne.
“I don’t know. I thought you could help me. I’ve looked everywhere.” The frustration was back in Sasha’s voice.
Blayne looked hard at his daughter and shook his head.
“Leave it, Sasha. It’s dangerous. I can feel it. The man spent almost half his life searching for something, and now he’s dead. It’s not the first time he was shot, either. Somebody tried to kill him in France three years ago. You tell me it’s got nothing to do with the cross, but I’m not so sure. Let it die with him. Let it go.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” she blurted out and then immediately turned away from her father, trying to clear her mind. Again she had that same fleeting sense that he knew more than he was saying. Why hadn’t he been more surprised by her revelations-more excited? No one had suffered more at the hands of John Cade than her father. No one except Cade knew more about the codex. The codex and the cross.
“I don’t understand why you’re so calm about all this, so accepting,” she said, challenging him.
“Because I’m old,” he said. “Old before my time. Can’t you see that, Sasha?”
Blayne put his hand out toward his daughter, but she turned away and walked over to the window. She looked down into the stony courtyard, and her resolve hardened. “I’ll leave the diary here,” she said. “You can call me if you think of anything. I’ll find the codex. And after that I’ll find the cross.”
“And then?” asked Blayne, looking up sadly at his daughter. “What happens then, Sasha?”
She didn’t answer. Just lay her hand for a moment over her father’s shaking hand and then walked out the door.
SIX
“Widen the net… somebody the jury can believe in… not some phantom foreigner… your brother Silas…”
Stephen couldn’t sleep. His mind kept turning over Swift’s words, twisting them this way and that, seeking a way out. However hard he tried, Stephen couldn’t believe it of Silas. Couldn’t or wouldn’t. Stephen didn’t know. What he did know was that somebody who was not his brother had tried to kill their father. It was no phantom who had come to their house threatening John Cade with a pistol, no ghost who had put a bullet in his lung. That man was real. He had a name: Carson, Corporal James Carson, once of the British army in France. The only problem was that he was dead.
Stephen remembered the first time he’d met Carson. How could he forget? He’d just turned thirteen and had been out running, practicing for the cross-country season at his school. The man had been standing in the trees across the road from the front gate, looking up toward the house, and he had called to Stephen as he went past.
“Cold weather to be out running, young man,” he had said, stepping out into the road. He was wearing a heavy black army greatcoat with its collar pulled up around his ears, and yet he still seemed cold. There was a shiver in his voice, and when Stephen looked down, uncertain of what to say, he noticed a hole in the stranger’s boot.
Stephen muttered something indistinct and would have turned away if the man had not spoken again.
“Are you the colonel’s son?” he’d asked.
“The colonel,” Stephen had repeated, not following the stranger’s meaning.
“Colonel John Cade. He used to be a military man like me. But perhaps he’s too proud to remember old comrades.”
“Oh, yes. I’m sorry. Yes, I’m one of his sons.” Stephen had stumbled over his words. The man had made him nervous, as if Stephen realised even then that this stranger’s coming would cause trouble.
The man hadn’t stayed long after Stephen had walked with him up the drive and knocked on the door of his father’s study. The professor had not been pleased to see his visitor. That much was obvious. Carson had raised his hand to his forehead in a mock salute, but Cade had not returned the gesture. He’d just stared angrily at Carson for a moment or two, and when he eventually spoke, it was his son he addressed, not his visitor.
“Go to your room, Stephen,” he’d said. There was a harsh edge to his father’s voice that had frightened Stephen, and he had backed away into the corridor. A moment later his father crossed to the door and shut it with a bang that reverberated right round the east wing of the house.
Stephen had done what his father told him to. He had gone to his room and stood by the open window, looking down into the courtyard where the rain had started to fall. And it was no more than ten minutes later that the french windows of his father’s study opened and Carson came out. Cade had stood on the threshold behind him, and Stephen had heard his father say quite clearly:
“That’s all, Corporal. Don’t you come back here, because there’ll be no more. Do you understand me?”
“Right you are, Colonel,” the man had said, giving the same mocking salute that Stephen had seen earlier. Then he had walked away up the drive, making no effort to protect his head from the falling rain. Stephen had stood watching him until he disappeared from view.
Nearly a year passed before Stephen saw the man again. It was May, but he was wearing the same old greatcoat, and he had come into the courtyard shouting and waving a pistol in the air. He’d obviously been drinking. His sunken cheeks were bright red, and there was an alcoholic slur to his voice.
“Come on out, Colonel,” he’d shouted. “And bring your pretty wife too. I’ve got something to tell her about France. About being a war hero.”
Stephen had watched the pistol, wondering if it was loaded, but he never got to find out. His father came out of the front door holding a rifle and fired it twice, aiming just above Carson’s head.
The shock caused Carson to drop his pistol, and Cade walked over quite calmly and picked it up.
“You could have killed me,” said Carson, and Stephen, standing in the corner of the courtyard, could hear the fear and the anger equally present in the man’s voice.
“I will. Next time I will,” said Cade, and in one fluid movement he turned the rifle in his hands and hit Carson with the butt, full on the side of the head.
Carson fell to his knees, but amazingly the blow did not knock him out.
“You’ll have no more from me. I won’t tell you that again,” said Cade. “Now get off my property.”
Carson got up, holding his head, and began to stagger away down the drive. But after no more than a hundred yards, he turned around again.
“Watch your fucking back, Colonel,” he shouted. “I’ll find you when you aren’t looking. You’ll see.”
Stephen knew better than to ask his father about what had happened. Instead he had told his mother when she came back from the hairdressers in Oxford later that afternoon. Silas was away at school.
She had wanted to go to the police, but Cade wouldn’t hear of it.
“He needed to be taught a lesson. I’ve done that, and now he won’t come here again. You can trust me, my dear.”
And Clara had left it at that. She had always trusted her husband, and there was no reason to stop now. Except that Stephen felt sure that his father did not believe his own optimism. It was only two weeks later that electronic gates were installed at the manor house and Sergeant Ritter began work on a new security system. Not that that saved Stephen’s mother.
Stephen did not want to think about that black Christmas. He did what he always did when he started to remember it. He began to count quickly, thinking about anything except that. The day the lights went out.
After the funeral he’d been sent away to school. Stephen knew what his father was thinking. He looked too much like his dead mother, and if it hadn’t been for Stephen’s Christmas present, she’d still be alive. Cade had stayed in his room when the car had come to take his sons away, and when they came back at the beginning of the
