A Place of Hiding

by Elizabeth George

  “Dads are protective that way,” Deborah said. “He probably didn't mean—”

  “Oh, he meant it. And that's what Guy was like anyway.”

  “Getting you to bed on a bet?” China exchanged an unreadable look with Deborah.

  Cynthia hastened to correct her. “Wanting to show me what it could be like. He knew I'd never . . . I told him. He talked about how important it was for a woman's first time to be . . . he said . . . exultant. Exultant. And it was. Like that. Every time. It was.”

  “So you felt bound to him,” Deborah said.

  “I wanted him to live forever, with me. I didn't care he was older. What difference did it make? We weren't just two bodies on a bed shagging. We were two souls that found each other and meant to stay together, no matter what. And that's how it would've been if he hadn't . . . he hadn't . . .” Cynthia put her head back on the arm of the chair and began to weep again. “I want to die, too.”

  Deborah went to her. She stroked her head and said, “I'm so sorry. To lose him and then not to have his baby either . . . You must feel crushed.”

  “I feel destroyed,” she sobbed.

  China remained where she was, a few feet away. She crossed her arms as if to protect herself from the onslaught of Cynthia's emotion. She said, “It probably doesn't help to know it right now, but you will get through this. You'll actually even feel better someday. In the future. You'll feel completely different.”

  “I don't want to.”

  “Nope. We never do. We love like crazy and it seems like if we lose that love, we'll shrivel up and die, which would be a blessing. But no man's worth us ending up dead, no matter who he is. And anyway, things don't happen that way in the real world. We just muddle on. We finally get through it. Then we're whole again.”

  “I don't want to be whole!”

  “Not right now,” Deborah said. “Right now you want to grieve. The strength of your grieving marks the strength of your love. And letting grief go when the time comes to do it honours that love.”

  “Really?” The girl's voice was a child's, and she looked so childlike that Deborah found herself wanting to fly to her protection. All at once, she understood completely how this girl's father must have felt when he learned Guy Brouard had taken her.

  “That's what I believe,” Deborah said.

  They left Cynthia Moullin with that final thought, curled beneath her blanket, her head pillowed on one arm. Her weeping had left her exhausted but calm. She would sleep now, she told them. Perhaps she'd be able to dream of Guy.

  Outside on the shell-strewn path to the car, China and Deborah said nothing at first. They paused and surveyed the garden, which looked like something a careless giant had trampled upon, and China stated flatly, “What a godawful mess.”

  Deborah glanced at her. She knew that her friend wasn't talking about the decimation of whatever crusty ornaments had once decorated the lawn and the flowerbeds. “We do plant landmines in our lives,” she commented.

  “More like nuclear bombs, you ask me. He was something like seventy years old. And she's . . . what? Seventeen? That ought to be God damned child abuse. But oh no, he was careful about that one, wasn't he?” She drove her hand through her short hair in a gesture that was rough, abrupt, and so like her brother's. She said, “Men are pigs. If there's a decent one out there, I'd sure as hell like to meet him sometime. Just to shake his hand. Just to say howdy-fucking-do. Just to know they aren't all out for the great big screw. All this you're-the-one and I-love-you bullshit. Why the hell do women keep going for it?” She glanced at Deborah, and before Deborah could reply, she went on with “Oh. Forget it. Never mind. I always forget. Getting trampled by men doesn't apply to you.”

  “China, that's—”

  China waved her off. “Sorry. Sorry. I shouldn't have . . . It's just that seeing her . . . listening to that . . . Never mind.” She hurried towards the car.

  Deborah followed. “We all get handed pain that we have to deal with. That's just what happens, like a by-product of being alive.”

  “It doesn't have to be that way.” China opened her door and slumped into the car. “Women don't have to be so stupid.”

  “We're groomed to believe in fairy tales,” Deborah said. “A tormented man saved by the love of one good woman? We're fed that idea from the cradle.”

  “But we didn't exactly have the man-in-torment in this scenario,” China pointed out with a gesture towards the house. “So why'd she fall for him? Oh, he was charming. Decent-looking. He was in good shape, so he didn't seem like seventy. But to be talked into it . . . I mean as your first . . . Any way you cut it, he could've been her grandfather. Her great-grandfather, even.”

  “She seems to have loved him all the same.”

  “I bet his bank account had something to do with that. Nice house, nice estate, nice car, nice whatever. The promise of being lady of the manor. Great vacations all around the world for the asking. All the clothes you want. Y' like diamonds? They're yours. Fifty thousand pairs of shoes? We can manage that. Want a Ferrari? No problem. That, I bet, made Guy Brouard sexy as hell to her. I mean, look at this place. Look at where she comes from. She was easy pickings. Any girl from a place like this would've been easy pickings. Sure, women have always gone for the tormented idiot. But make them the promise of heavy money, and they're going to go for that big time.”

  Deborah heard all this, her heart beating light and fast in her throat. She said, “Do you really believe that, China?”

  “Damn right I believe it. And men know the score. Flash the cash around and see what happens. Chances are it'll be just like flypaper. Money means more to most women than whether the man can even stand upright. If he's breathing and he's loaded, say no more. Let's sign the deal. But we'll call it love, first. We'll say we're happy as hell when we're with him. We'll claim that when we're together, the birds sing right in our ears and the earth starts trembling and the seasons shift. But scrape away all that and it comes down to the cash. We can love a man with bad breath, one leg, and no dick, just as long as he can support us in the manner we'd like to become accustomed to.”

  Deborah couldn't reply. There were too many ways in which China's declarations could be applied to herself, not only to her relationship with Tommy that had come so hard upon the heels of her broken-hearted abandoning of London for California all those years ago, but also to her marriage, which fell some eighteen months after the affair with Tommy had ended. On the surface it all looked like something that was the very image of what China was describing: Tommy's considerable fortune wore the guise of initial lure; Simon's much lesser wealth still served to allow her freedoms most women her age never had. The fact that none of it was what it seemed . . . that money and the security it offered sometimes felt like a web that had been spun round her to keep her entrapped . . . not her own woman . . . having nothing to contribute anywhere at all . . . How could that be said to matter when it was placed beside the great good fortune of having once had a wealthy lover and now a husband who was able to support her?

  Deborah swallowed all of this down. Her life, she knew, was of her own making. Her life, she knew, was something China had little knowledge of. She said, “Yes. Well. One woman's true love is another's meal ticket. Let's get back to town. Simon should have spoken to the police by now.”

  Chapter 24

  ONE BENEFIT OF BEING the close friend of an Acting Superintendent in CID was having immediate access to him. St. James waited only a moment before Tommy's voice came over the line, saying with some amusement, “Deb managed to get you to Guernsey, didn't she? I thought she would.”

  “She actually didn't want me to come,” St. James replied. “I managed to convince her that playing Miss-Marple-Goes-to-St.-Peter-Port was not in the best interests of anyone.”

  Lynley chuckled. “And it goes . . . ?”

  “Forward but not as smoothly as I'd like.” St. James brought his friend up-to-date with the independent investigation that he and Deborah were a
ttempting to effect while simultaneously staying out of the way of the local police. “I don't know how much longer I'll be able to carry on on the dubious strength of my reputation,” he concluded.

  “Hence the phone call?” Lynley said. “I spoke to Le Gallez when Deborah came to the Yard. He was perfectly clear: He doesn't want the Met messing about with his case.”

  “It's not that,” St. James hastened to reassure him. “Just a phone call or two you might make for me.”

  “What sort of phone call?” Lynley sounded wary.

  St. James explained. When he was done, Lynley told him that the Financial Services Authority was the UK body that truly ought to be involved in any questions about English banking. He would do what he could to wrest information from the bank that had received the wire transfers from Guernsey, but it might come down to a court order, which could take a bit more time.

  “This all may be perfectly legitimate,” St. James told him. “We know the money went to a group called International Access in Bracknell. Can you go at it from that end?”

  “We may have to. I'll see what I can do.”

  The call concluded, St. James descended to the hotel lobby, where he privately admitted to himself that he was long overdue for a mobile phone as he attempted to impress upon the receptionist the importance of her tracking him down should any phone calls come to him from London. She took down the information and she was none-too-happily assuring him that she'd pass any messages along when Deborah and China returned from their trip to Le Grand Havre.

  The three of them went to the hotel lounge, where they ordered morning coffee and exchanged information. Deborah, St. James saw, had made a number of not unrealistic leaps with what she'd gathered. For her part, China did not use these facts to try to mould his thinking about the case, and for that St. James had to admire her. In the same position, he wasn't sure he could have been so circumspect.

  “Cynthia Moullin talked about a stone,” Deborah said in conclusion. “She said she'd given Guy Brouard this stone. To protect him, she said. And her dad wanted it back from her. Which made me wonder if this was the same stone that was used to choke him. He has a loud-and-clear motive, her dad. He even had her locked up until her period started so he could see she wasn't pregnant by Guy Brouard.”

  St. James nodded. “Le Gallez's conjecture is that someone may have intended to use the skull-and-crossed-bones ring to choke Brouard but changed course when it turned out that Brouard was carrying that stone.”

  “With that someone being Cherokee?” China didn't wait for an answer. “There's no why to that any more than there was a why to it when they pinned it on me. And don't they need a why, Simon? To make it stick?”

  “In the best of all worlds, yes.” He wanted to add the rest of what he knew—that the police had found something that would be as important to them as a motive—but he wasn't willing to share that information with anyone. It wasn't so much that he suspected China River or her brother of the crime. It was more that he suspected everyone and the way of caution was to hold one's cards close.

  Before he could go on—choosing between temporising and outright prevaricating—Deborah spoke. “Cherokee wouldn't have known Guy Brouard had that stone.”

  “Unless he saw him with it,” St. James said.

  “How could he?” Deborah countered. “Cynthia said Brouard carried it with him. Doesn't that suggest he'd have it in a pocket rather than in the palm of his hand?”

  “It could do, yes,” St. James said.

  “Yet Henry Moullin did know he had it. He'd explicitly asked his daughter to hand it over, which's what she told us. If she told him she'd given her good-luck charm or protection from the evil eye or whatever it is to the very man her father was up in arms about, why wouldn't he march right over there and demand it back?”

  “There's nothing to say he didn't do that,” St. James pointed out. “But until we know for sure—”

  “We pin the tail on Cherokee,” China finished flatly. She looked at Deborah as if to say See?

  St. James didn't like the suggestion of girls-versus-boys that this look implied. He said, “We keep our minds open. That's all.”

  “My brother didn't do this,” China said insistently. “Look: We've got Anaïs Abbott with a motive. We've got Henry Moullin with a motive, too. We've even got Stephen Abbott with a motive if he wanted into Cynthia's pants or wanted to separate his mom from Brouard. So where does Cherokee fit? Nowhere. And why? Because he didn't do it. He didn't know these people any more than I did.”

  Deborah added, “You can't discount everything that points to Henry Moullin, not in favour of Cherokee, can you? Not when there's nothing that even indicates he might've been involved in Guy Brouard's death.” She appeared to read something on St. James's face as she made the final remark, though, because she went on to say, “Unless there is something. And there must be, because why else would they have arrested him. So of course there's something. What've I been thinking? You went to the police. What did they tell you? Is it about the ring?”

  St. James glanced at China—who leaned towards him attentively—and then back at his wife. He shook his head and said, “Deborah,” and then concluded with a sigh that breathed his apology. “I'm sorry, my love.”

  Deborah's eyes widened as she seemed to realise what her husband was saying and doing. She looked away from him and St. James could see her pressing her hands into her lap as if this gesture would contain her temper. Evidently, China read her as well because she stood, despite her coffee going undrunk. She said, “I think I'll go see if they'll let me talk to my brother. Or I can find Holberry and send a message in with him. Or . . .” She hesitated, her gaze going to the door of the lounge, where two women loaded with Marks & Spencer bags were coming in for a break in their morning shopping. Watching them get settled, listening to their easy laughter and chatter, China looked bleak. She said to Deborah, “I'll catch you later, okay?” She nodded to St. James and grabbed her coat.

  Deborah called out her name as she hurried from the room, but China didn't turn. Deborah did, on her husband. “Was that completely necessary?” she demanded. “You as much as called him a murderer. And you think she's in on it as well, don't you? Which is why you wouldn't say what you have, not in front of her. You think they did it. Together. Or one of them. That's what you think, isn't it?”

  “We don't know they didn't do it,” St. James replied, although this wasn't really what he wanted to say to Deborah. Instead of responding, he knew he was reacting to his wife's tone of accusation despite realising that this reaction came from irritation and was a first step on the path of arguing with her.

  “How can you say that?” Deborah demanded.

  “Deborah, how can you not?”

  “Because I've just told you what we've come up with, and none of it has to do with Cherokee. Or with China.”

  “No,” he agreed. “What you've come up with doesn't have to do with them.”

  “But what you have does. That's what you're saying. And like a good little detective, you're keeping it to yourself. Well, that's just fine. I may as well go home. I may as well just let you—”

  “Deborah.”

  “—handle it all on your own since you're so intent on doing that.” Like China, she began to put on her coat. She struggled with it, though, and was unable to make the dramatic exit she no doubt wished to make.

  He said, “Deborah. Sit down and listen.”

  “Don't talk to me like that. I'm not a child.”

  “Then don't act like—” He stopped himself at the edge and raised his hands, palms towards her in a gesture that said Let's call this to a halt. He forced himself to be calm and forced his voice to be reasonable. “What I believe isn't important.”

  “Then you do—”

  “And,” he cut in determinedly, “what you believe isn't important either. The only thing that is important is the facts. Feelings can't intrude in a situation like this.”

  “Good God, you'v
e made your decision, haven't you? Based on what?”

  “I haven't made any decision at all. It's not my place to do that, and even if it were, no one's asking for my decision.”

  “Then?”

  “Things don't look good. That's what it is.”

  “What d'you know? What do they have?” When he didn't answer at once, she said, “God in heaven, you don't trust me? What d'you think I'm going to do with the information?”

  “What would you do if it implicates your friend's brother?”

  “What sort of question is that? What d'you think I'd do: tell him?”

  “The ring . . .” St. James hated to say it, but it had to be said. “And as it turned out, he recognised it from the first but still said nothing at all. How do you explain that, Deborah?”

  “I'm not meant to explain it. He is. He will.”

  “You believe in him that much?”

  “He's not a killer.”

  But the facts suggested otherwise, although St. James couldn't take the risk of revealing them to her. Eschscholzia californica, a bottle in a field, fingerprints on the bottle. And everything that had gone on in Orange County, California.

  He pondered for a moment. Everything pointed to River. But there was one detail that still did not: the movement of money from Guernsey to London.

  Margaret stood at the window and made a sharp exclamation each time a bird so much as flew by the house. She'd made two more phone calls to the States police, demanding to know when they could expect something to be done about that “miserable little thief,” and she was anticipating the arrival of someone who would listen to her story and take the appropriate action. For her part, Ruth tried to concentrate on her needlepoint.