Read an extract from The Inheritors by Hannelore Cayre

Hannelore Cayre is a French writer, director and criminal lawyer. The Godmother won the European Crime Fiction Prize and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, and has been shortlisted for a Crime Writers’ Association Dagger award. Her latest novel is called The Inheritors and has been translated from its original French into English by Stephanie Smee.

Spanning two centuries, from Paris on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War to the modern day, this unforgettable family saga about a bitter woman who inherits an incredible amount of money lays bare the persistent and poisonous injustice of inequality. Scroll down to read an extract from the very first chapter …

Hannelore Cayre

CHAPTER ONE

From the minute I boarded the TGV, I had the shits with everything.

I don’t like having people in my space, so I never sit in my allocated seat. I can’t stand my legs touching my neighbour’s, not to mention having to do battle over the armrest. I prefer the flip seats near the doors, even if you rarely get any peace there because the space is often crammed with idiots letting rip or old people who, having just got on, are busy phoning to say they’re on their way – I can’t hear you anymore, can you hear me? Hello?

That day it was four girls who looked like they’d stepped straight out of a rap video, taking selfies from every possible angle. Curious, I checked out #TGVParis-Brest on Instagram to see how they’d glorified themselves, and to see what attributes they’d unveiled to the grand twenty-first-century fairground of seduction. But there, amid those images of curvy booty and pouting, swollen lips ready for every sort of stimulation imaginable, somebody – without my realising – had taken a photo of me looking on, and posted it.

There I was, in my black mini dress with pockets, my bomber jacket, my legs fitted out with their orthoses and my little heeled ankle boots, lost in a cloud of rainbow- coloured parrots. The total casting error. Emily the Strange invited to the hos’ birthday party.

And to top it all off, I was pulling one of those faces . . .

I’ve got to say, I wasn’t feeling at the top of my game. I’d just been put on compulsory sick leave because I’d narrowly avoided being sliced in two, width-wise, by the doors of a metro train and, to make matters worse, I was on my way to the ultimate bore of a destination, namely my father’s eighty-fifth birthday.

And the trip was a long way from over: once I’d made it to Brest, I would still have an hour by bus and an hour and a half by boat over wild seas to go. And since I knew that as soon as I arrived I’d just be in the way, you can imagine my enthusiasm.

I knew the script by heart: once I was there, my father would pretend to be happy to see me, then, after the customary banalities – Did you eat anything on the train? Were there a lot of people on the boat? When are you leaving again? – he’d have nothing more to say to me. I’d be all, And you? How are things with you? knowing all the while that I’d be opening the floodgate to a litany of grievances. Granny Soize calls it the kaleidoscopic whinge: sentences which, when taken in isolation and uttered in a neutral tone, sound purely informative – You know, I was at the doctor . . . When I eat in the morning, I get vertigo . . . You remember Dédé, they’re going to cut off his hands and feet because of his diabetes – and yet when they’re all gathered together produce a terrifying pattern of the fate about to befall him. He swivels it a bit, and wham! everything gets rearranged and off we go again. The most awful thing is, it never stops.

It was raining at Brest, just for a change. A biblical horizontal rain driven by the wind from the open sea that whips you in the face as soon as you step off the train. It was then that I noticed them for the first time, the three Parisians, there on the platform. It must be said they were the only thing you noticed, standing there in their pretty little shower-proof raincoats in an attempt to ward off the torrents of water. Two hirsute hipsters, one of whom was wearing glasses, as well as a fairly plain, tall girl with long, glossy hair.

I limped to the bus station as quickly as I could and climbed into the bus, which stank of wet dog. And then every oldie on board fell all over me. What a long time it’s been! You’re as white as a baby’s bottom, aren’t you! And what about your daughter, where is she? Blah, blah, blah . . . Fortunately, in this part of the world, it’s only one kiss you cop, not four, because I had to make my way down the whole aisle. The door shutting in the faces of the three dripping Parisians was met with general indifference, seeing as the bus was intended primarily for those from the island who were heading home.

Once we arrived at the port, everybody got off in a single movement and rushed to the ferry terminal to wait out of the rain until we were able to embark.

My old friend Tiphaine was there, sitting on a bench, busy yelling at her children to stop mucking about with the coffee dispenser. It was only when I saw how tall her youngest was that I realised it had been eons since I’d been back to see my father. All I remembered was a little infant where now there was a little girl with curls piled on top of her head standing firmly on her own two feet and staring at me as I interposed myself between her and her mother.

I kissed my friend, embracing her generous, full body in a hug, and was struck with a flash of realisation that I had been missing my island.

Generally speaking, when you see old friends after a long separation, you tend to feel a little uncomfortable, as if prisoner of a bond that isn’t always easy to reignite, but that’s never the case with people from around here. I think it’s because our families have been split in two for centuries, the men at sea either in the Navy or the Merchant Marine, and the women left behind ashore looking after the children. Living on the island then meant we developed a special gift for communicating with those who were absent.

So, after merely wondering where I had left off in the great ongoing drama that was the island . . . Was it before they rebuilt the cemetery wall or after the Spar super- market had closed down? . . . she just said, ‘Oh, right, yeah. It really is quite a while since you’ve been back!’

The weight of time that had passed since my previous visit required Tiphaine to address the basics: who had died, who was having an affair with whom, who had drowned, who had been evacuated by helicopter – so many tragedies for such a small place – she might have been accused of over-egging the number of dramatic incidents, but no. It really is like that around here; terrible stuff happens all the time!

We all made our way on board in the pouring rain, including the three tourists, who arrived by taxi in a state of chaos.

I headed straight for the bow of the boat and stretched out on a row of four seats, eyes closed, head resting on a sweater. Yes, I get seasick. I’ve tried everything: pharmaceuticals, hypnosis, simulator, even the thing where you take a nap under an apple tree; all of which is to say, I have fought it, but my body, not content with being a fractious, recalcitrant hack, has assigned me to shore duty.

The Parisians were sitting a few metres away from where I had lain down and, as I had nothing else to do on the crossing but listen to them, I allowed myself to be soothed by their conversation.

I worked out that they were a couple who had brought along their friend, the bespectacled hipster, in an attempt to take his mind off things. The tall, plain girl had concocted an itinerary, which she spelled out item by item, pointing out the places to visit on a map of the island. Somebody had died: it seemed to have been the girlfriend of glasses-man, because he was talking angrily about the father of his late sweetheart – a conservative member of parliament whom he called the Super Prick – and about his attitude at the funeral. It seems he had used the ceremony as he would a garden party, making his way from group to group, flanked by a waiter who was handing out glasses of champagne, trying to extricate himself and his son from the morass of their legal difficulties. Then there was talk of an earthquake in Nepal. They mentioned towns I’d never heard of. While the couple, who appeared to be involved in humanitarian work, were talking about a sanitation disaster, the one who had lost his girlfriend bitterly quoted the law of deaths to kilometres: the further away the event, the more victims are required in order to stir the interest of a minimum number of people. Nobody had given a shit about the earthquake in Nepal with its hundreds of victims – his chick among them – crushed under tonnes of rocks.

For whatever reason, I fell asleep with two lines of Philippe Muray’s ‘Tomb for an Innocent Tourist’ ringing in my head:

There’s nothing so beautiful as a blonde tourist

Right before her head falls off in the jungle.

My father had sent his mate Fañch in his Renault 14 to fetch me from the boat. Fañch threw my bag into the back and hardly had I plonked myself down in the passenger seat before he started giving me grief.

‘You know, he’s old, your father, he won’t be having too many more birthdays, you have to come more often, other- wise one day you’ll regret it . . . And when you do come, stay for longer and bring your daughter with you . . .’

It’s crazy the way this community tries to slip leg irons on you every time you come home, I thought to myself.

‘He told you he was missing me, is that it?’ I gave it right back to him. He grumbled something in reply, his florid drunkard’s conk buried deep in the fur of his spaniel, who was perched between him and the steering wheel. And then he was silent.

It must be said that everybody has an opinion on what we shall call the topic of Blanche on this pebble of an island, where everybody feels responsible for everyone else’s kids, if only because in that environment, shut off from the rest of the world, they all grow up right under your nose, so nobody is indifferent to the topic of Blanche.

There’s one in every generation in a closed-off community, the one who’s a pain in the neck. The sort of ratbag who’s always involved in the latest scandal. Whenever a holiday house is broken into or a car set alight . . . Whenever lobsters disappear from the traps or the jetty walls are tagged in high season with filthy comments attacking tourists . . . To put it bluntly, for the generation of those born in the ’80s, that historical pain in the arse was me: Blanche de Rigny.

—The Inheritors by Hannelore Cayre, translated by Stephanie Smee, (Black Inc. Books) is out now.

The Inheritors

by Hannelore Cayre & Stephane Smee (Translator)

Blanche de Rigny has always considered herself the black sheep of the family. And a black sheep on crutches at that. But it turns out her family tree has branches she didn’t even know existed. And many of them are rotten to the core. As Blanche learns more about the legacy left by her wealthy Parisian ancestors, she decides a little family tree pruning might be in order.

But great wealth also brings great responsibility – a form of richesse oblige, perhaps – and Blanche has a plan to use her inheritance to cure the world of its ills...

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