A Place of Hiding (12 page)

Paul cried out and tore the shirt from her hands. He flung it away. Taboo barked sharply.

“Why, Paul,” Valerie said in surprise, “I didn't mean to . . . It's not an
old
shirt, love. It's really quite—”

Paul snatched up the rucksack. He looked left and right. The only escape was the way he'd come, and escape was essential.

He tore back along the path, Taboo at his heels, barking frantically. Paul felt a sob escape his lips as he emerged from the pond path out onto the lawn with the house beyond it. He was so tired of running, he realised. It seemed as if he'd been running all his life.

Chapter 4

R
UTH
B
ROUARD WATCHED THE
boy's flight. She was in Guy's study when Paul emerged from the bower that marked the entrance to the ponds. She was opening a stack of condolence cards from the previous day's post, cards that she hadn't had the heart to open until now and she heard the dog barking first and then saw the boy himself pounding across the lawn beneath her. A moment later Valerie Duffy emerged, in her hands the shirt she'd taken to Paul, a limp and rejected offering from a mother whose own boys had fledged and flown far before she had been prepared for them to do either.

She should have had more children, Ruth thought as Valerie trudged back towards the house. Some women were born with a thirst for maternity that nothing could slake, and Valerie Duffy had long seemed like one of them.

Ruth watched Valerie's progress till she disappeared through the door to the kitchen, which was beneath Guy's study, where Ruth had taken herself directly after breakfast. It was the one place she felt that she could be close to him now, surrounded by the evidence that told her, as if in defiance of the terrible manner in which he'd died, that Guy Brouard had lived a good life. That evidence was everywhere in her brother's study: on the walls and the bookshelves and sitting on a fine old credence table in the centre of the room. Here were the certificates, the photographs, the awards, the plans, and the documents. Filed away were the correspondence and the recommendations for worthy recipients of the well-known Brouard largesse. And displayed prominently was what should have been the final jewel needed to complete the crown of her brother's achievements: the carefully constructed model of a building that Guy had promised the island which had become his home. It would be a monument to the islanders' suffering, Guy had called it. A monument built by one who had suffered as well.

Or such had been his intention, Ruth thought.

When Guy hadn't come home from his morning swim, she'd not worried at first. True, he was always punctual and predictable in his habits, but when she descended the stairs and didn't find him dressed and in the breakfast room, listening intently to Radio News as he waited for his meal, she merely assumed that he'd stopped at the Duffys' cottage for coffee with Valerie and Kevin after his swim. He would do that occasionally. He was fond of them. That was why, after a moment's consideration, Ruth had carried her coffee and her grapefruit to the telephone in the morning room, where she rang the stone cottage at the edge of the grounds.

Valerie answered. No, she told Ruth, Mr. Brouard wasn't there. She hadn't seen him since the early morning when she'd caught a glimpse of him as he went for his swim. Why? Hadn't he returned? He was probably on the estate somewhere . . . perhaps among the sculptures? He'd mentioned to Kev that he wanted to shift them about. That large human head in the tropical garden? Perhaps he was trying to decide where to put it because Valerie knew for certain that the head was one of the pieces that Mr. Brouard wanted to move. No, Kev wasn't with him, Miss Brouard. Kev was sitting right there in the kitchen.

Ruth didn't panic at first. Instead, she went up to her brother's bathroom where he would have changed after his exercise, leaving his swimming trunks and his track suit behind. Neither was there, however. Nor was a damp towel, which would have given further evidence of his return.

She felt it then, a pinch of concern like tweezers pulling at the skin beneath her heart. That was when she remembered what she'd seen from her window earlier as she'd watched her brother set off towards the bay: that figure who'd melted out from beneath the trees close to the Duffys' cottage as Guy had passed.

So she went to the phone and rang the Duffys again. Kevin agreed to set off for the bay.

He'd returned on the run but not to her. It was only when the ambulance finally appeared at the end of the drive that he came to fetch her.

That had begun the nightmare. As the hours passed, it only grew worse. She'd thought at first he'd had a heart attack, but when they wouldn't let her ride to the hospital with her brother, when they said she would have to follow in the car that Kevin Duffy drove silently behind the ambulance, when they whisked Guy away before she could see him, she knew something had dreadfully and permanently changed.

She hoped for a stroke. At least he would still be alive. But at last they came to tell her he was dead, and it was then that they explained the circumstances. From that explanation had come her waking nightmare: Guy struggling, in agony and fear, and all alone.

She would have rather believed that an accident had taken her brother's life. Knowing that he'd been murdered had cleaved her spirit and reduced her to living as the incarnation of a single word:
why.
And then:
who.
But that was dangerous territory.

Guy's life had taught him that he had to grasp for what he wanted. Nothing was going to be given to him. But more than once he had grasped without considering if what he wanted was what he should actually have. The results had brought suffering down upon others. His wives, his children, his associates, his . . . others.

You can't continue like this without someone being destroyed, she'd told him. And I can't stand by and let you.

But he'd laughed at her fondly and kissed her forehead. Headmistress Mademoiselle Brouard, he called her. Will you rap my knuckles if I don't obey?

The pain was back. It gripped her spine like a spike that was driven through the nape of her neck and then iced till the horrible cold of it began to feel exactly like fire. It sent tentacles downward, each one an undulating serpent of disease. It sent her from the room in search of rescue.

She wasn't alone in the house, but she felt alone, and had she not been in the grip of the devil cancer, she might have laughed. Sixty-six years old and untimely ripped from the womb that a brother's love had provided her. Who would have thought it would come to this on that long-ago night when her mother had whispered,
“Promets-moi de ne pas pleurer, mon petit chat. Sois forte pour Guy.”

She wanted to maintain the faith with her mother that she'd maintained for more than sixty years. But the truth was what she had to deal with now: She couldn't see a way to be strong for anyone.

 

Margaret Chamberlain hadn't been in her son's presence for five minutes before she wanted to give him instructions: Stand up straight, for the love of God; look people in the eye when you talk to them, Adrian; don't for heaven's sake keep banging my luggage about like that; watch out for that cyclist, darling;
please
signal for your turns, my dear. She managed, however, to hold back this deluge of commands. He was the most beloved and the most exasperating of her four sons—that latter a fact that she put down to his paternity, which was different to the other boys—but since he'd only just lost his father, she decided to overlook the least irritating of his habits. For the moment.

He met her in what went for the arrivals hall at the Guernsey airport. She came through pushing a trolley with her cases piled on it, and she found him lurking by the car hire counter where worked an attractive red-head to whom he could have been chatting like a normal man, had he only been one. Instead, he was making a pretence of studying a map, losing yet another opportunity that life had placed squarely in front of him.

Margaret sighed. She said, “Adrian.” And then,
“Adrian,”
when he failed to respond.

He heard her the second time and looked up from his scrutiny. He slunk over to the car hire counter and replaced the map. The red-head asked if she could help him, sir, but he didn't reply. Or even look at her. She asked again. He pulled up the collar of his jacket and gave her his shoulder instead of a reply. “Car's outside,” he said to his mother by way of hello as he hoisted her suitcases from the trolley.

“How about ‘Nice flight, darling Mum?' ” Margaret suggested. “Why don't we just wheel the trolley to the car, dear? It would be easier, wouldn't it?”

He strode off, her cases in hand. There was nothing for it but to follow. Margaret cast an apologetic smile in the direction of the car hire counter in case the red-head was monitoring the welcome she'd received from her son. Then she went after him.

The airport comprised a single building sitting to one side of a single runway just off a series of unploughed fields. It had a car park smaller than her own local railway station's in England, so it was an easy matter to follow Adrian through it. By the time Margaret caught him up, he was shoving her two suitcases into the back of a Range Rover which was, she discovered in very short order, just the wrong sort of car in which to be riding round the threadlike roads of Guernsey.

She'd never been to the island herself. She and Adrian's father had long been divorced by the time he retired from Chateaux Brouard and set up house here. But Adrian had been to visit his father numerous times since Guy's removal to Guernsey, so why he was driving round in something nearly the size of a pantechnicon when what was
clearly
called for was a Mini was beyond her comprehension. As was the case with a number of things that her son did, the most recent being his termination of the only relationship he'd managed to have with a woman in his thirty-seven years. What was
that
all about? Margaret still wondered. All he'd said to her was “We wanted different things,” which she didn't believe for a moment, since she knew—from a private and very confidential conversation with the young woman herself—that Carmel Fitzgerald had wanted marriage, and she also knew—from a private and very confidential conversation with her son—that Adrian had considered himself lucky to find someone youthful, moderately attractive, and willing to unquestioningly hook up with a nearly middle-aged man who'd never lived anywhere but in his mother's house. Save, of course, for that dreadful three months on his own while he tried to go to university . . . but the less
that
was thought of the better. So, what had happened?

Margaret knew she couldn't ask that question. At least, not now with Guy's funeral coming fast upon them. But she intended to ask it soon.

She said, “How's your poor aunt Ruth coping, darling?”

Adrian braked for a light at an ageing hotel. “Haven't seen her.”

“Whyever not? Is she keeping to her room?”

He looked ahead to the traffic light, all his attention locked on to the moment the amber would show. “I mean I've seen her but I haven't seen her. I don't know how she's coping. She doesn't say.”

He wouldn't think to ask her, of course. Any more than he would think to talk to his own mother in something more direct than riddles. Margaret said, “She wasn't the one who found him, was she?”

“That would be Kevin Duffy. The groundsman.”

“She must be devastated. They've been together for . . . Well, they've always been together, haven't they.”

“I don't know why you wanted to be here, Mother.”

“Guy was my husband, darling.”

“Number one of four,” Adrian pointed out. It was tiresome of him, really. Margaret knew very well how many times she'd been married. “I thought you went to their funerals only if they died while you were still married to them.”

“That's an incredibly vulgar remark, Adrian.”

“Is it? Good God, we can't have vulgarity.”

Margaret turned in her seat to face him. “Why are you behaving like this?”

“Like what?”

“Guy was my husband. I loved him once. I owe him the fact that I have you as a son. So if I want to honour all that by attending his funeral, I intend to do it.”

Adrian smiled in a way that indicated his disbelief and Margaret wanted to slap him. Her son knew her only too well.

“You always thought you were a better liar than you actually are,” he said. “Did Aunt Ruth think I'd do something . . . hmm . . . what would it be? unhealthy? illegal? just plain mad without you here? Or does she think I've already done that?”

“Adrian! How can you
suggest . . .
even as a joke . . .”

“I'm not joking, Mother.”

Margaret turned to the window, unwilling to listen to any more examples of her son's skewed thinking. The light changed and Adrian powered through the intersection.

The route they were following was strung with structures. Beneath the sombre sky, postwar stucco cottages sat cheek by jowl with run-down Victorian terraces which themselves occasionally butted up against a tourist hotel that was shut for the season. The populated areas gave way to bare fields on the south side of the road, and here the original stone farmhouses stood, with white wooden boxes at the edge of their properties marking the sites where their owners would deposit homegrown new potatoes or hot-house flowers for sale at other times of the year.

“Your aunt phoned me because she phoned everyone,” Margaret finally said. “Frankly, I'm surprised you didn't ring me yourself.”

“No one else is coming,” Adrian said in that maddening way he had of altering the course of a conversation. “Not even JoAnna or the girls. Well, I can understand JoAnna . . . how many mistresses did Dad go through while he was married to her? But I thought the girls might come. They hated his guts, of course, but I reckoned sheer greed would light a fire beneath their bums in the end. The will, you know. They'd want to know what they're getting. Big money, no doubt, if he ever got round to feeling guilty about what he did to their mum.”

“Please don't talk about your father like that, Adrian. As his only son and the man who will one day marry and have sons to carry on Guy's name, I think you might—”

“But they're not coming.” Adrian spoke doggedly and louder now, as if with the wish to drown his mother out. “Still, I thought JoAnna might show up, if only to drive a stake through the old man's heart.” Adrian grinned, but it was more to himself than to her. Nonetheless, that grin caused a chill to shoot through Margaret's body. It reminded her too much of her son's bad times, when he pretended all was well while within him a civil war was brewing.