A Place of Hiding

by Elizabeth George

  She'd done a good job with the boy, he discovered. Despite her reticence, her compassionate nature gave her a way with people that he himself had never possessed. It had long suited her choice of profession—subjects far more willingly posed for their pictures if they knew the person behind the camera shared a common humanity with them—just as his even temperament and analytical mind had long suited his. And Deborah's success with Stephen Abbott underscored the fact that more than technique and skill in a laboratory were going to be needed in this situation.

  “So that other woman who came forward for the shovel,” Deborah concluded, “the one with the enormous hat? She was the current girlfriend, apparently, not a relation. Although it sounds as if she was hoping to be one.”

  “‘You saw what she's done,' ” St. James murmured. “What did you make of his saying that, my love?”

  “What she's done to make herself appealing, I expect,” Deborah said. “I did notice . . . well, it was difficult not to, wasn't it? And you don't see them often here, not like in the States, where large breasts seem to be something of a . . . a national fixation, I suppose.”

  “Not that she's ‘done' something else?” St. James asked. “Like eliminated her lover when he favoured another woman?”

  “Why would she do that if she hoped to marry him?”

  “Perhaps she needed to be rid of him.”

  “Why?”

  “Obsession. Jealousy. Rage that can only be quelled in one way. Or perhaps something simpler altogether: Perhaps she was remembered in his will and she needed to eliminate him before he had a chance to change it in favour of someone else.”

  “But that doesn't take into consideration the problem we've already faced,” Deborah noted. “How could a woman actually have forced a stone into Guy Brouard's throat, Simon? Any woman.”

  “We go back to DCI Le Gallez's kiss,” St. James said, “as unlikely as it is. ‘She'd lost him.' Is there another woman?”

  “Not China,” Deborah asserted.

  St. James heard his wife's determination. “You're quite certain, then.”

  “She told me she's recently broken off from Matt. She's loved him for years, since she was seventeen. I can't see how she'd get involved with another man so soon after that.”

  This, St. James knew, took them into tender territory, one that was occupied by Deborah herself as well as by China River. Not so many years had passed since Deborah had parted from him and found another lover. That they had never discussed the alacrity of her involvement with Tommy Lynley did not mean it wasn't the result of her sorrow and increased vulnerability. He said, “But she'd be more vulnerable now than ever, wouldn't she? Couldn't she possibly need to have a fling—something Brouard might have taken more seriously than she herself took it—to bolster herself up?”

  “That's not really what she's like.”

  “But supposing—”

  “All right. Supposing. But she certainly didn't kill him, Simon. You have to agree she'd need a motive.”

  He did agree. But he also believed that a preconceived notion of innocence was just as dangerous as a preconceived notion of guilt. So when he related what he'd learned from Ruth Brouard, he concluded carefully with “She did check for China in the rest of the house. She was nowhere to be found.”

  “So Ruth Brouard says,” Deborah pointed out reasonably. “She could be lying.”

  “She could indeed. The Rivers weren't the only guests in the house. Adrian Brouard was also there.”

  “With reason to kill his dad?”

  “It's something we can't ignore.”

  “She is his blood relative,” Deborah said. “And given her history—her parents, the Holocaust?—I'd say it's likely she'd do anything to protect a blood relative first and foremost, wouldn't you?”

  “I would.”

  They were walking down the drive in the direction of the lane and St. James guided them through the trees towards the path that Ruth Brouard had told him would lead to the bay where her brother had taken his daily swim. Their way passed by the stone cottage he'd observed earlier, and he noted that two of the building's windows looked directly onto the path. This was where the caretakers lived, he'd been told, and the Duffys, St. James concluded, might well have something to add to what Ruth Brouard had already told him.

  The path grew cooler and more damp as it dipped into the trees. Either the land's natural fecundity or a man's determination had created an impressive array of foliage that screened the trail from the rest of the estate. Nearest to the path, rhododendrons flourished. Among them half a dozen varieties of ferns unfurled their fronds. The ground was spongy with the fall of autumn leaves left to decompose, and overhead the winter-bare branches of chestnuts spoke of the green tunnel they'd create in summer. It was silent here, save for the sound of their footsteps.

  That silence didn't last, however. St. James was extending his hand to his wife to help her across a puddle, when a scruffy little dog bounded out of the bushes, yapping at both of them.

  “Lord!” Deborah started and then laughed. “Oh, he's awfully sweet, isn't he? Here, little doggie. We won't hurt you.”

  She held her hand out to him. As she did so, a red-jacketed boy darted out the way the dog had come and scooped the animal up into his arms.

  “Sorry,” St. James said with a smile. “We appear to have startled your dog.”

  The boy said nothing. He looked from Deborah to St. James as his dog continued to bark protectively.

  “Miss Brouard said this is the way to the bay,” St. James said. “Have we made a wrong turn somewhere?”

  Still the boy didn't speak. He looked fairly the worse for wear, with oleaginous hair clinging to his skull and his face streaked with dirt. The hands that held the dog were grimy and the black trousers he wore had grease crusted on one knee. He took several steps backwards.

  “We haven't startled you as well, have we?” Deborah asked. “We didn't think anyone would be . . .”

  Her voice faded as the boy turned on his heel and crashed back in the direction he'd come. He wore a tattered rucksack on his back, and it pounded against him like a bag of potatoes.

  “Who on earth . . . ?” Deborah murmured.

  St. James wondered himself. “We'll want to look into that.”

  They reached the lane through a gate in the wall some distance from the drive. There they saw that the overflow of cars from the burial had departed, leaving the way unobstructed so that they easily found the descent to the bay, some one hundred yards from the entrance to the Brouard estate.

  This descent was somewhere between a track and a lane—wider than one and too narrow to actually be considered the other—and it switched back on itself numerous times as it steeply dropped to the water. Rock walls and woodland sided it, along with a stream that chattered along the rough stones of the wall's base. There were no houses or cottages here, just a single hotel that was closed for the season, surrounded by trees, tucked into a depression in the hillside, and shuttered at every window.

  In the distance below St. James and his wife, the English Channel appeared, speckled by what little sun was able to break through the heavy cover of clouds. With the sight of it came the sound of gulls. They soared among the granite outcroppings at the top of the cliffs, which formed the deep horseshoe that was the bay itself. Gorse and English stonecrop grew in undisturbed abundance here, and where the soil was deeper, tangled thickets of bony branches marked the spots where blackthorn and bramble would prosper in spring.

  At the base of the lane a small car park made a thumbprint on the landscape. No cars stood in it, nor would any be likely to do so at this time of year. It was the perfect spot for a private swim or for anything that called for activity without witnesses.

  A bulwark fashioned from stone protected the car park from tidal erosion, and to one side of this a slipway slanted down to the water. Dead and dying seaweed knotted thickly across this, just the sort of decaying vegetation that at another time of year would
be infested with flies and gnats. Nothing moved or crawled within it in the middle of December, however, and St. James and Deborah were able to pick their way through it and thus gain access to the beach. The water lapped against this rhythmically, marking a gentle pulse against the coarse sand and the stones.

  “No wind,” St. James noted as he observed the mouth of the bay some distance from where they stood. “That makes it very good for swimming.”

  “But terribly cold,” Deborah said. “I can't understand how he did it. In December? It's extraordinary, don't you think?”

  “Some people like extremity,” St. James said. “Let's have a look around.”

  “What are we looking for, exactly?”

  “Something the police may have missed.”

  The actual spot of the murder was easy enough to find: The signs of a crime scene were still upon it in the form of a strip of yellow police tape, two discarded film canisters from the police photographer, and a globule of white plaster that had spilled when someone took a cast of a footprint. St. James and Deborah started at this spot and began working side by side in an ever-widening circumference round it.

  The going was slow. Eyes fixed to the ground, they wheeled round and round, turning over the larger stones that they came upon, gently moving aside seaweed, sifting through sand with their fingertips. In this manner, an hour passed as they examined the small beach, uncovering a top to a jar of baby food, a faded ribbon, an empty Evian bottle, and seventy-eight pence in loose change.

  When they came to the bulwark, St. James suggested that they begin at opposite ends and work their way towards each other. At the point at which they would meet, he said, they would just continue onwards so each of them would have separately inspected the entire length of the wall.

  They had to go carefully, for there were heavier stones here and more crevices in which items could fall. But although each of them moved at earthworm pace, they met at the middle empty-handed.

  “This isn't looking very hopeful,” Deborah noted.

  “It isn't,” St. James agreed. “But it was always just a chance.” He rested for a moment against the wall, his arms crossed on his chest and his gaze on the Channel. He gave consideration to the idea of lies: those people tell and those people believe. Sometimes, he knew, the people in both cases were the same. Telling something long enough resulted in belief.

  “You're worried, aren't you?” Deborah said. “If we don't find something—”

  He put his arm round her and kissed the side of her head. “Let's keep going,” he told her but said nothing of what was obvious to him: Finding something could be even more damning than having the misfortune of finding nothing at all.

  They continued like crabs along the wall, St. James slightly more inhibited by his leg brace, which made moving among the larger stones more difficult for him than it was for his wife. Perhaps this was the reason the cry of exultation—marking the discovery of something hitherto unnoticed—was given by Deborah some fifteen minutes into the final part of their search.

  “Here!” she called. “Simon, look here.”

  He turned and saw that she'd reached the far end of the bulwark at the point where the slipway dipped down to the water. She was gesturing to the corner where the bulwark and the slipway met, and when St. James moved in her direction, she squatted to have a better look at what she'd found.

  “What is it?” he asked as he came alongside her.

  “Something metallic,” she said. “I didn't want to pick it up.”

  “How far down?” he asked.

  “Less than a foot, I dare say,” she replied. “If you want me to—”

  “Here.” He handed her a handkerchief.

  To reach the object, she had to wedge her leg into a ragged opening, which she did enthusiastically. She crammed herself down far enough to grasp and then rescue what she'd seen from above.

  This turned out to be a ring. Deborah brought it forth and laid it cushioned by the handkerchief on the palm of her hand for St. James's inspection.

  It looked made of bronze, sized for a man. And its decoration was man-sized as well. This comprised a skull and crossed bones. On the top of the skull were the numbers 39/40 and below them four words engraved in German. St. James squinted to make them out: Die Festung im Westen.

  “Something from the war,” Deborah murmured as she scrutinised the ring herself. “But it can't have been here all these years.”

  “No. Its condition doesn't suggest that.”

  “Then what . . . ?”

  St. James folded the handkerchief round it, but he left the ring resting in Deborah's hand. “It needs to be checked,” he said. “Le Gallez will want to have it fingerprinted. There won't be much on it, but even a partial could help.”

  “How could they have not seen it?” Deborah asked, and St. James could tell she expected no answer.

  Nonetheless he said, “DCI Le Gallez considers the evidence of an ageing woman not wearing her spectacles sufficient unto the day. I think it's a safe bet to conclude he isn't looking as hard as he could for anything that might refute what she's told him.”

  Deborah examined the small white bundle in her hand and then looked at her husband. “This could be evidence,” she said. “Beyond the hair they found, beyond the footprint they have, beyond witnesses who might be lying about what they saw in the first place. This could change everything, couldn't it, Simon?”

  “It could indeed,” he said.

  Margaret Chamberlain congratulated herself for insisting upon the reading of the will directly after the funeral reception. She'd earlier said, “Call the solicitor, Ruth. Get him over here after the burial,” and when Ruth had told her Guy's advocate would be present anyway—yet another of the man's tedious island associates who had to be accommodated at the funeral—she thought this was far more than just as well. It was decidedly meant. Just in case her sister-in-law intended to thwart her, Margaret had cornered the man himself as he stuffed a crab sandwich into his face. Miss Brouard, she informed him, wanted to go over the will immediately after the last of the guests left the reception. He did have the appropriate paperwork with him, didn't he? Yes? Good. And would it present any difficulty to go over the details as soon as they had the privacy to do so? No? Fine.

  So now they were gathered. But Margaret wasn't happy about who constituted the group.

  Ruth had evidently done more than merely contact the solicitor upon Margaret's insistence. She'd also made sure that an ominous collection of individuals were present to take in the man's remarks. This could mean only one thing: that Ruth was privy to the details of the will and that the details of the will favoured individuals other than family members. Why else would she have taken it upon herself to invite an assembly of virtual strangers to join the family for this serious occasion? And no matter how fondly Ruth greeted and seated them in the drawing room, they were strangers, defined—according to Margaret's thinking—as anyone not directly related by blood or marriage to the deceased.

  Anaïs Abbott and her daughter were among them, the former as heavily made up as she'd been on the previous day and the latter as gawky and slump-shouldered as she'd been as well. The only thing different about them was their clothing. Anaïs had managed to pour herself into a black suit whose skirt curved round her little bum like cling film on melons, while Jemima had donned a bolero jacket that she wore with all the grace of a dustman in morning dress. The surly son had apparently disappeared, because as the company assembled in the upstairs drawing room beneath yet another of Ruth's tedious needlepoint depictions of Life As A Displaced Person—this one apparently having to do with growing up in care . . . as if she'd been the only child who'd had to endure it in the years following the war—Anaïs kept wringing her hands and telling anyone who'd listen that “Stephen's gone off somewhere . . . He's been inconsolable . . .” and then her eyes would fill yet again in an irksome display of eternal devotion to the deceased.

  Along with the Abbotts, the Duffys were p
resent. Kevin—estate manager, groundsman, caretaker of Le Reposoir, and apparently whatever else that Guy had needed him to be at a moment's notice—hung back from everyone and stood at a window where he made a study of the gardens below him, adhering to what was evidently his policy of never doing more than grunting at anyone. His wife Valerie sat by herself with her hands gripped together in her lap. She alternated between watching her husband, watching Ruth, and watching the lawyer unpack his briefcase. If anything, she looked utterly bewildered to be included in this ceremony.

  And then there was Frank. Margaret had been introduced to him after the burial. Frank Ouseley, she'd been told, longtime bachelor and Guy's very good friend. His virtual soul mate, if the truth be told. They'd discovered a mutual passion for things relating to the war and they'd bonded over that, which was enough to make Margaret observe the man with suspicion. He was behind the whole benighted museum project, she had learned. This made him the reason that God only knew how many of Guy's millions might well be diverted in a direction that was not her son's. Margaret found him particularly repugnant with his ill-fitting tweeds and badly capped front teeth. He was heavy as well, which was another mark against him. Paunches spoke of gluttony which spoke of greed.

  And he was speaking to Adrian at the moment, Adrian who obviously didn't have the sense to recognise an adversary when he was standing in front of him breathing the same air. If things worked out the way Margaret was beginning to fear they might work out in the next thirty minutes or so, she and her son could very well be at legal loggerheads with this dumpy man. Adrian might be wise enough to realise that, if nothing else, and to keep his distance as a result.

  Margaret sighed. She observed her son and noted for the first time how much he actually resembled his father. She also noted how much he did to play down that resemblance, cropping his hair drastically so Guy's curls weren't visible, dressing badly, shaving close to his skin to avoid anything that remotely resembled Guy's neatly trimmed beard. But he could do nothing about his eyes, which were so like his father's. Bedroom eyes, they'd been called, heavy-lidded and sensual. And he could do nothing about his complexion, swarthier than the average Englishman's.