A Place of Hiding

by Elizabeth George

  To which Cherokee replied, “Thanks. You're the best.”

  To which Deborah then said, “We're your friends, Cherokee.”

  At which point the man seemed struck with emotion. It flashed across his face for an instant. He managed only a nod and he gave that odd clenched-fist gesture that Americans tended to use to indicate everything from gratitude to political agreement.

  Or perhaps he used it in that moment for something else.

  St. James could not keep himself from that thought. Nor had he truly been able to since the moment he'd glanced up to the gallery in Courtroom Number Three and seen his wife and the American above him: the two of them shoulder to shoulder with Deborah murmuring to Cherokee's bent and listening head. Something wasn't right in the world. St. James believed that at a level he couldn't have explained. So the sensation of times out of joint made it difficult for him to affirm his wife's declaration of friendship to the other man. He said nothing, and when Deborah's glance in his direction asked him why, he offered her no answering glance as reply. This wouldn't, he knew, improve things between them. She was still at odds with him about their conversation in the Old Bailey.

  When they arrived in town, they established themselves in Ann's Place, where a former government building had long ago been converted into a hotel. There they parted: Cherokee and Deborah to the prison where they hoped to make contact with China in the remand section, St. James to the police station where he wanted to track down the officer in charge of the investigation.

  He remained uneasy. He knew very well that he didn't belong there, insinuating himself into a police investigation where he wouldn't be welcome. At least in England, cases existed to which he could refer a police force if he came calling and requesting information from them. You recall the Bowen kidnapping? he could murmur virtually anywhere in England . . . And that strangulation in Cambridge last year? Given enough opportunity to explain who he was and to seek a common river of knowledge in which to swim with the police, St. James had found that the UK officers were generally willing to part with what information they had while remaining unruffled in the face of any attempts he might make to find something more. But here things were different. Garnering if not the cooperation of the police then at least their grudging acceptance of his presence among those people closely connected to the crime would not be a matter of jogging their memories of cases he'd worked on or criminal trials in which he'd been involved. That put him in a place he didn't like to be, relying on his least developed skill to gain admittance into the fraternity of investigators: the ability to establish a connection with another person.

  He followed the curve of Ann's Place as it gave onto Hospital Lane and the police station beyond. He pondered the entire idea of connection. Perhaps, he thought, that inability of his which created a chasm between himself and other people—always and ever the cool damn scientist, always and ever looking inward and thinking, always considering, weighing, and observing when other people occupied themselves with just being . . . Perhaps that was the source of his discomfort with Cherokee River as well.

  “I do remember the surfing!” Deborah had said, her face altering in an instant when the shared experience came to her mind. “All three of us went that one time . . . D'you remember? Where were we?”

  Cherokee had looked reflective before he'd said, “Sure. It was Seal Beach, Debs. Easier than Huntington. More protected there.”

  “Yes, yes. Seal Beach. You made me go out and flail round on the board and I kept shrieking about hitting the pier.”

  “Which,” he said, “you weren't anywhere close to. No way were you going to stay on the board long enough to hit anything unless you decided to sleep on it.”

  They laughed together, another link forged, an effortless instant between two people when they acknowledged that a common chain existed that connected the present to the past.

  And that was how it was between everyone who shared any kind of history, St. James thought. That was just how it was.

  He crossed the street to the Guernsey police headquarters. It stood behind an imposing wall hewn from a stone that was veined with feldspar, an L-shaped building with four banks of windows climbing its two wings and the flag of Guernsey flying above it. Inside the reception room, St. James gave his name and his card to the special constable. Would it be possible, he asked, to speak with the chief investigating officer on the Guy Brouard murder enquiry? Or, failing that, with the department's Press Officer?

  The special constable studied the card, his face a declaration that indicated a few select telephone calls were going to be made across the Channel to ascertain exactly who this forensic scientist on their doorstep was. This was all to the good, because if phone calls were made, they would be made to the Met, to the CPS, or to the university where St. James lectured, and if that were the case, his way would be paved.

  It took twenty minutes while St. James cooled his heels in reception and read the notice board half a dozen times. But they were twenty minutes well spent, because at the end of them, Detective Chief Inspector Louis Le Gallez came out personally to lead St. James to the incident room, a vast hammer-beamed former chapel in which departmental exercise equipment vied with filing cabinets, computer tables, bulletin boards, and china boards.

  DCI Le Gallez wanted to know, naturally, what interest a forensic scientist from London had in a murder enquiry on Guernsey, especially in an enquiry that was closed. “We've got our killer,” he said, arms across his chest and one leg slung over the corner of a table. He rested his weight—which was considerable for a man so short—on the table's edge and he flipped St. James's card back and forth against the side of his hand. He looked curious rather than guarded.

  St. James opted for complete honesty. The brother of the accused, understandably shaken by what had happened to his sister, had asked St. James for help after failing to stimulate the American embassy into acting on his sister's behalf.

  “The Americans have done their bit,” Le Gallez countered. “Don't know what else this bloke's expecting. He was one of the suspects as well, by the way. But then, they all were. Everyone at that party Brouard had. Night before he bought it. Half the island was there. And if that didn't complicate the hell out of matters, nothing did, believe me.”

  Le Gallez took the lead as if fully aware of where St. James intended to direct the conversation upon that remark about the party. He went on to say that interviews had been conducted with everyone who'd been at the Brouard house on the night before the murder, and nothing had come to light in the days since Guy Brouard's death to alter the investigators' initial suspicion: Anyone who'd ducked out of Le Reposoir as the Rivers had done on the morning of the killing was someone who bore looking into.

  “All the other guests had alibis for the time of the killing?” St. James asked.

  That wasn't what he was implying, Le Gallez responded. But once the evidence was stacked up, what everyone else had been doing on the morning Guy Brouard met his death was germane to nothing related to the case.

  What they had against China River was damning, and Le Gallez seemed only too happy to list it. Their four scenes-of-crime officers had worked the location and their forensic pathologist had worked the body. The River woman had left a partial print at the scene—this was a footprint, half of it obscured by a broad blade of seaweed, admittedly, but grains that were the exact match of the coarse sand upon the beach had been imbedded in the soles of her shoes and those same shoes matched the partial print as well.

  “She might have been there at some other time,” St. James said.

  “Might have been. True. I know the story. Brouard gave them the run of the place when he wasn't running them round it himself. But what he didn't do was catch her hair in the zip of the track suit jacket he had on when he died. And I wouldn't put money on him having wiped his head on her wrap, either.”

  “What sort of wrap?”

  “Black blanket affair. One button at the neck, no sleeves.”
/>   “A cloak?”

  “And his hair was on it, just where you'd expect to find it if you had to lock your arm round him to hold him still. Silly cow hadn't thought to use a clothes brush on it.”

  St. James said, “The means of the killing . . . It's a bit unusual, wouldn't you say? The stone? His choking? If he didn't swallow it himself by accident—”

  Le Gallez said, “Not bloody likely.”

  “—then someone would have had to thrust it down his throat. But how? When? In the midst of a struggle? Were there signs of a struggle? On the beach? On his body? On the River woman when you brought her in?”

  He shook his head. “No struggle. But there wouldn't be the need for one. That's why we were looking for a woman from the first.” He went to one of the tables and fetched a plastic container whose contents he dumped into his palm. He fingered through them, said, “Ah. This'll do,” and produced a half-open roll of Polos. He thumbed one out, held it up for St. James to see, and said, “Stone in question's just a bit larger than this. Hole in the centre to go on a key ring. Some carving round the sides as well. Now watch.” He popped the Polo into his mouth, tongued it into his cheek, and said, “You c'n pass more than germs when you French it, mate.”

  St. James understood but was nonetheless doubtful. There was vast improbability implied in the investigator's theory as far as he was concerned. He said, “But she would have had to do more than just pass the stone into his mouth. Yes. I do see it's possible she could have got it onto his tongue if she was kissing him, but surely not down his throat. How would she have managed that?”

  “Surprise,” Le Gallez countered. “She catches him off guard when the stone goes into his mouth. One hand on the back of his neck while they're lip-locked and he's in the right position. The other on his cheek and in the moment he pulls away from her because she's passed him the stone, she's caught him in the crook of her arm, bent him back, and her hand's down his throat. So's the stone, for that matter. And he's done for.”

  “You don't mind my saying, that's a bit unlikely,” St. James said. “Your prosecutors can't possibly hope to convince . . . D'you have juries here?”

  “Doesn't matter. The stone's not intended to convince a soul,” Le Gallez said. “It's just a theory. May not even come up in court.”

  “Why not?”

  Le Gallez smiled thinly. “Because we've got a witness, Mr. St. James,” he said. “And a witness is worth a hundred experts and their thousand pretty theories, if you know what I mean.”

  At the prison where China was being held on remand, Deborah and Cherokee learned that events had moved forward swiftly in the twenty-four hours since he'd left the island to find help in London. China's advocate had managed to get her released on bail and had set her up elsewhere. Prison administration knew where, naturally, but they weren't forthcoming with the information.

  Deborah and Cherokee thus retraced their route from the States Prison towards St. Peter Port, and when they found a phone box where Vale Road opened into the wide vista of Belle Greve Bay, Cherokee leaped out of the car to ring the advocate. Deborah watched through the phone box glass and could see that China's brother was understandably agitated, rapping his fist against the glass as he spoke. Not adept at lip reading, Deborah could still discern the “Hey, man, you listen,” when Cherokee said it. Their conversation lasted three or four minutes, not enough time to reassure Cherokee about anything but just enough to discover where his sister had been delivered.

  “He's got her in some apartment back in St. Peter Port,” Cherokee reported as he climbed back into the car and jerked it into gear. “One of those places people rent out in the summer. ‘Only too happy to have her there' was how he put it. Whatever that's supposed to mean.”

  “A holiday flat,” Deborah said. “It would just stand empty till spring, probably.”

  “Whatever,” he said. “He might have gotten a message to me or something. I'm involved here, you know. I asked him why he didn't let me know he was getting her out and he said . . . You know what he said? ‘Miss River didn't mention telling anyone her whereabouts.' Like she wants to be in hiding.”

  They wound back to St. Peter Port where it was no easy feat to find the holiday flats where China had been installed, despite being in possession of the address. The town was a warren of one-way streets: narrow tracks that climbed the hillside from the harbour and swooped through a town that had existed long before cars had even been imagined. Deborah and Cherokee made several passes by Georgian town homes and through Victorian terraces before they finally stumbled upon the Queen Margaret Apartments on the corner of Saumarez and Clifton Streets, situated at the crest of the latter. It was a spot that would have afforded a holiday maker the sort of views one pays highly to enjoy during spring and summer: The port spread out below, Castle Cornet stood clearly visible on its spit of land where it once protected the town from invasion, and on a day without the lowering clouds of December, the coast of France would appear to hover on the far horizon.

  On this day, however, in the early dusk, the Channel was an ashen mass of liquid landscape. Lights shone on a harbour that was empty of pleasure craft, and in the distance the castle appeared as a series of crosshatched children's blocks, held haphazardly on a parent's palm.

  Their challenge at the Queen Margaret Apartments was to find someone who could point them in the direction of China's flat. They finally located an unshaven and odoriferous man in a bed-sitting room at the back of the otherwise deserted property. He appeared to act the part of concierge when he wasn't doing what he was currently doing, which seemed to be taking both sides in a board game that involved depositing shiny black stones into cuplike depressions in a narrow wooden tray.

  He said, “Hang on,” when Cherokee and Deborah turned up in his single room. “I just need to . . . Damn. He's got me again.”

  He appeared to be his opponent which was himself, playing from the other side of the board. He cleared this side of its stones in one inexplicable move, whereupon he said, “What c'n I do for you?”

  When they told him they'd come to see his tenant-in-the-singular—because it was certainly clear that no one else was occupying any of the Queen Margaret Apartments at this time of year—he feigned ignorance about the whole matter. Only when Cherokee told him to phone China's advocate did he give the slightest hint that the woman charged with murder was staying somewhere in the building. And then all he did was lumber to the phone and punch in a few numbers. When the party answered at the other end, he said, “Someone saying he's the brother . . . ?” And with a glance at Deborah, “Got a red-head with him.” He listened for five seconds. He said, “Right, then,” and parted with the information. They would find the person they were looking for, he told them, in Flat B on the east side of the building.

  It was no far distance. China met them at the door. She said only, “You came,” and she walked directly into Deborah's embrace.

  Deborah held her firmly. “Of course I came,” she said. “I only wish I'd known from the first that you were in Europe at all. Why didn't you let me know you were coming? Why didn't you phone? Oh, it's so good to see you.” She blinked against the sting behind her eyelids, surprised by the onslaught of feeling that told her how much she had missed her friend in the years during which they'd lost contact with each other.

  “I'm sorry it has to be like this.” China gave Deborah a fleeting smile. She was far thinner than Deborah remembered her, and although her fine sandy hair was fashionably cut, it fell round a face that looked like a waif's. She was dressed in clothes that would have sent her vegan mother into a seizure. They were mostly black leather: trousers, waistcoat, and ankle boots. The colour heightened the pallor of her skin.

  “Simon's come as well,” Deborah said. “We're going to sort this out. You're not to worry.”

  China glanced at her brother, who'd shut the door behind them. He'd gone to the alcove that served as the flat's kitchen, where he stood shifting from foot to foot and looking lik
e the sort of male who wishes to be in another universe when females are exhibiting emotion. She said to him, “I didn't intend you to bring them back with you. Just to get their advice if you needed it. But . . . I'm glad you did, Cherokee. Thanks.”

  Cherokee nodded. He said, “You two need . . . ? I mean, I could go for a walk or something . . . ? You got food here? You know, here's what: I'll go find a store.” He took himself out of the flat without waiting for a response from his sister.

  “Typical man,” China said when he was gone. “Can't deal with tears.”

  “And we haven't even got to them yet.”

  China chuckled, a sound which lightened Deborah's heart. She couldn't imagine what it would be like, trapped in a country that was not your own and charged with murder. So if she could help her friend not think about the jeopardy she faced, she wanted to do it. But she also wanted to reassure China: about the kinship she still felt for her.

  So she said, “I've missed you. I should have written more.”

  “You should have written period,” China replied. “I've missed you, too.” She took Deborah into the kitchen alcove. “I'm making us some tea. I can't believe how happy I am to see you.”

  Deborah said, “No. Let me make it, China. You're not going to start us off by taking care of me. I'm reversing our roles and you're going to let me.” She marched the other woman over to a table that stood beneath an east-facing window. A legal pad and a pen lay upon this. The top sheet of the pad bore large block letters of dates and paragraphs beneath them rendered in China's familiar looped scrawl.

  China said, “That was a bad time for you back then. It meant a lot to me to do what I could.”

  “I was quite a pathetic blob,” Deborah said. “I don't know how you were able to cope with me.”

  “You were nowhere near home and in big trouble and trying to figure out what to do. I was your friend. I didn't need to cope with you one way or another. I just needed to care. Which was pretty damn easy, to tell you the truth.”