reunite them with her father. But it had been a childish dream. On the platform, Sasha’s mother would not go near her husband, not even to pass the time of day. Sasha remembered how her father had taken a few hesitant steps toward them until his wife’s evident antipathy stopped him in his tracks. Sasha’s mother said nothing. She didn’t need to. The arrangements had already been made by letter. She just looped Sasha’s hand around the handle of her small tan suitcase and pushed her forward toward her father. It had been like crossing a border between enemy countries, Sasha thought now as she stood in the same place where she had been twenty years earlier. She’d been too young for such an ordeal.
Her father had been working at an obscure art college in the suburbs, filling in for somebody else for very little money. He had no car and there were no buses at the station, so they walked for what seemed like hours through the rain, with him carrying her suitcase, until they got to the dingy little flat that was his temporary home. The next day Sasha woke up on a camp bed with a fever and had to go back to her mother’s early. Soon afterward Sasha’s visits to her father had stopped altogether and her mother had not seen fit to even inform her absent husband when Sasha was assaulted by the teacher at her school. In fact, she had even found a way to blame Sasha’s father for what had happened, and in later years it became an article of faith for Sasha’s mother that the vivid burn mark covering her daughter’s neck and shoulders had been put there by God as a punishment for the sins of her husband.
Sasha also believed that the burn was no accident. But unlike her mother, she didn’t think it had anything to do with her father. The disfigurement made her different from other people, and she believed that she had been singled out because it was her destiny to achieve something special. She was going to find the cross that should have been her father’s. She had known from the first that it would not be easy, but she was determined that no one would stand in her way. Cade deserved exactly what he had got: a bullet in the head. And now she had the codex. It was the key to the cross’s hiding place. She was certain of it. She would make better use of it than he ever had.
Sasha hailed a taxi outside the station and gave the driver an address in North Oxford. It was good to have a place of her own at last, even if it was only a bed-sit in someone else’s house. She had left the manor house immediately after Inspector Trave’s visit, while Silas was still in hospital, and had rented the room under an assumed name. It felt safe. No one would find her there.
She told the taxi to wait and went upstairs. The book was where she had left it, hidden among her clothes, with Cade’s mysterious sheet of notepaper tucked inside. She put it in a briefcase that she’d bought for the purpose and went back down the stairs. Twenty minutes later she was standing outside the door of her father’s room. There was no reply to her knock, and so she turned the key and went inside.
Andrew Blayne was sleeping in his chair. His head had fallen forward onto his chest, and his mouth was slightly open. His breath was uneven, and Sasha, watching from the doorway, felt for a moment like she was waiting for him to die. There seemed no good reason why another breath should come to rattle his thin, fragile frame. Except that it did. Again and again. His body’s mechanism would tick on until everything was worn away. It seemed cruel to Sasha. At least his trembling hands were still while he slept. Better perhaps that everything should be still and that her father’s pain should end forever.
The room was cold, and Sasha went over to the fireplace and tried without much success to stir the coals back into some semblance of life. The noise woke her father.
“Half your books are missing. And where’s the gramophone?” she asked, but she already knew the answer to her question. There was a pawnbroker’s ticket on the mantelpiece next to where she was standing. “I’ve got money,” she said. “For God’s sake, let me give you some, Daddy.”
“No, I’ll be all right,” said Blayne. “It was only to tide me over until the end of the month.”
Sasha wondered if he would last that long, but there was nothing she could do if he would not let her help him. She leant over and pulled the codex out of the briefcase, placing it in her father’s trembling hands.
“Here’s something to take your mind off your troubles,” she said. “Beautiful, isn’t it? It’s the real thing.”
“The codex of Marjean.” Blayne said the words like they were a prayer or some magical incantation. Tears stood out in the corners of his watery blue eyes as he slowly turned the thick vellum pages.
“Where did you get it, Sasha?” he asked. There was fear in his eyes now, supplanting the first look of wonder.
“Cade had it all the time,” she said. “It’s a long story, and I can’t tell it to you now. I need you to look at this.”
Carefully, Sasha opened out the folded sheet of notepaper with the series of numbers in columns that she had first seen in Cade’s study, when Silas had taken the codex out of his father’s chess box.
“This was inside the codex,” she said. “I need to know what it means.”
“It’s Cade’s handwriting. I recognize the way he wrote his sevens. They were always distinctive,” said Blayne, examining the paper. “It must be his key to the code.”
“I know that,” said Sasha impatiently. “What do you think I’ve been doing for the past three days? I’ve tried everything, but they’re numbers, not letters. You can’t read numbers.”
“The numbers must be telling you the position of the letters in the codex,” said Blayne quietly. He was holding the piece of paper in one hand and comparing it with the first page of the codex. “How extraordinary,” he went on after a moment. “It must have taken him more than ten years to get this far.”
“How do you know?”
“Because of the dates. We can assume Cade got possession of the codex in 1944, and then he went to France and got shot in 1956. Twelve long years. And all the time he can’t have known that there was a code to break at all. He was in the dark. The frustration must have been terrible.”
“You don’t know it was twelve years. It’s just a guess that he went to Mar-jean in 1956 because of the codex.”
“Maybe. But it’s a good guess.”
“I don’t care what kind of guess it is,” said Sasha, unable to contain her irritation. “I haven’t got twelve years. I need to know what these numbers mean now.”
“Well, the first thing you need to do is stop thinking like that, Sasha. Good codes are like the insides of old clocks. You have to work on them slowly. And you need to get inside the mind of the man who made the code in the first place. He didn’t think like we do.”
Sasha clenched her fists, trying to hold back her exasperation, and her father smiled.
“You used to do that when you were a child,” he said. “Look, don’t despair, Sasha. We have Cade’s key. And with it the knowledge that there is a code and that it can be cracked. There will be pleasure in this for me. It will make me forget my landlady for a little while. I’m very grateful to you.”
Sasha couldn’t help laughing. She felt relieved: if anyone could decipher Cade’s key, it would be her father. She could tell from the look in his eye that his curiosity was aroused. She didn’t need to worry that he wouldn’t do his best.
She got up to leave, but at the door he called her back. There was a look of anxiety on his face, and he had put the codex back on the table. His hands were trembling more than ever.
“What if I do crack this code, Sasha? What will you do then?” he asked. His voice was full of fear.
Sasha stood in the doorway without answering. She didn’t need to. Blayne knew the answer to his own question.
“You’ll go to France just like he did, won’t you?” he said. “And something terrible will happen to you.”
“No, it won’t. I can look after myself.”
“How? You’re a woman on your own, and he had that man Ritter with him. From what you tell me, he was lucky to come home alive.”
“I’ll be more careful. I’ve told you before, Daddy. I’ve come too far to stop now.”
“Maybe. But I haven’t. I don’t need to look at this book,” said Blayne, making a show of pushing it away.
“Ah, but you will,” said Sasha with a smile, “I know you too well. It’s in your blood. And whatever you find out, you owe it to me to tell me.”
“So you can kill yourself with my blessing?”
“No, I won’t kill myself,” said Sasha, crossing over to her father and putting her hand on his shoulder. “I tell you what I’ll do. If you crack the code, we’ll decide what to do with it together. And, in the meantime, you must take this, and I’ll go to the pawnbroker and get your things back.”
Sasha had put three ten-pound notes on the codex as she spoke, and now she picked up the pawn ticket and
