A Place of Hiding (21 page)

“There's been no architect n-named in the will,” Nobby said. “You can depend on that.” He mopped a handkerchief against his face, and this movement seemed to help him bring his speech back under control. “Given enough time to think about things, Guy would have changed to the Guernsey plans, believe me, Frank. You know his loyalty was to the island. The idea that he'd choose a non-Guernsey architect is ridiculous. He would have seen that eventually. So now it's just a matter of our sitting down and drawing up a coherent reason why the choice of the architect has to be changed, and that can't be difficult, can it? Ten minutes with the plans and I can point out every problem he's got in his design. It's more than just the windows, Frank. This American didn't even understand the nature of the collection.”

“But Guy already made the choice,” Frank said. “It dishonours his memory to alter it, Nobby. No, don't speak. Listen for a moment. I know you're disappointed. I know Guy's choice is one you don't like. But it was Guy's choice to make, and it's up to us to live with it now.”

“Guy is dead.” Nobby punched every syllable into his palm as he said it. “So regardless of
whatever
he decided about the look of the place, we can now build the museum the way we see fit.
And
the way that's most practical and suitable. This is your project, Frank. It's always been your project. You have the exhibits. Guy just wanted to give you a place to house them.”

He was very persuasive for all his oddity of appearance and speech. In any other circumstance Frank might have found himself being swayed to Nobby's way of thinking. But in the present circumstance, he had to remain firm. There would be hell to pay if he didn't.

He said, “I just can't help you, Nobby. I'm sorry.”

“But you could talk to Ruth. She'd listen to you.”

“That might be the case, but I actually wouldn't know what to say.”

“I'd prepare you in advance. I'd give you the words.”

“If you have them, you must say them yourself.”

“But she won't listen to me. Not the way she'd listen to you.”

Frank held out his hands, empty, and said, “I'm sorry. Nobby, I'm sorry. What more can I say?”

Nobby looked deflated, his last hope gone. “You can say you're sorry enough to do something to change things. But I suppose that's far too much for you, Frank.”

It was actually far too little, Frank thought. It was because things had changed that they were standing where they were standing right now.

 

St. James saw the two men duck out of the procession heading towards the grave site. He recognised the intensity of their conversation, and he made a mental note to learn their identities. For the moment, however, he followed the rest of the mourners to the grave.

Deborah walked beside him. Her reticence all morning told him that she was still smarting from their breakfast conversation, one of those senseless confrontations in which only one person clearly understands the topic under discussion. He hadn't been that person, unfortunately. He'd been talking about the wisdom of Deborah's ordering only mushrooms and grilled tomatoes for her morning meal while she'd appeared to be reviewing the course of their entire history together. At least, that was what he finally assumed after listening to his wife accuse him of “manhandling me in
every
way, Simon, as if I'm completely incapable of taking a single action on my own. Well, I'm tired of that. I'm an adult, and I wish you'd start treating me like one.”

He'd blinked from her to the menu, wondering how they'd managed to get from a discussion of protein to an accusation of heartless domination. He'd foolishly said, “What are you talking about, Deborah?” And the fact that he hadn't followed her logic had set them on the path to disaster.

It was disaster only in his eyes, though. In hers it was clearly a moment in which suspected but unnamable truths were finally being revealed about their marriage. He'd hoped she might share one or two of them with him during their drive to the funeral and the burial afterwards. But she hadn't done so, so he was relying upon the passage of a few hours to settle things down between them.

“That must be the son,” Deborah murmured to him now. They were at the back of the mourners on a slight slope of land that rose to a wall. Inside this wall a garden grew, separated from the rest of the estate. Paths meandered haphazardly, through carefully trimmed shrubs and flowerbeds, beneath trees that were bare now but thoughtfully placed to shade concrete benches and shallow ponds. Among all this, modern sculptures stood: a granite figure curled foetally; a cupreous elf—seasoned by verdigris—posing beneath the fronds of a palm; three maidens in bronze trailing seaweed behind them; a marble sea nymph rising out of a pond. Into this setting at the top of five steps, a terrace spread out. Along the far end of it, a pergola ran, trailing vines and sheltering a single bench. It was here on the terrace that the grave had been dug, perhaps so that future generations could simultaneously contemplate the garden and consider the final resting-place of the man who had created it.

St. James saw that the coffin had already been lowered and the final parting prayers had been said. A blonde woman, incongruously wearing sunglasses as if in attendance at a Hollywood burial, was now shooing forward the man at her side. She did it verbally first, and when that didn't work, she gave him a little push towards the grave. Next to this was a mound of earth out of which poked a shovel with black streamers hanging from it. St. James agreed with Deborah: This would be the son, Adrian Brouard, the only other inhabitant of the house aside from his aunt and the Rivers siblings on the night before his father had been murdered.

Brouard's lip curled in reaction. He brushed his mother off and approached the mound of earth. In the absolute hush of the crowd round the grave, he scooped up a shovelful of soil and flipped it on top of the coffin. The thud as the earth hit the wood below it resounded like the echo of a door being slammed.

Adrian Brouard was followed in this action by a birdlike woman so diminutive that from the back she could easily have been mistaken for a pre-adolescent boy. She handed the shovel solemnly over to Adrian Brouard's mother who likewise poured earth into the grave. When she herself would have returned the shovel to the mound next to the grave site, yet another woman came forward and grasped the handle before the sunglassed blonde could release it.

A murmur went through the onlookers at this, and St. James studied the woman more intently. He could see little of her, for she wore a black hat the approximate size of a parasol, but she had a startling figure that she was making the most of in a trim charcoal suit. She did her bit with the shovel and handed it over to a gawky adolescent girl, curve-shouldered and weak-ankled in platform shoes. This girl made her bow at the grave and tried to give the shovel next to a boy round her age, whose height, colouring, and general appearance suggested that he was her brother. But instead of performing his part in the ritual, the boy abruptly turned away and shoved through those standing closest to the grave. A second murmur went up at this.

“What's that all about?” Deborah asked quietly.

“Something that needs looking at,” St. James said. He saw the opportunity given to him in the teenager's actions. He said, “D'you feel easy sussing him out, Deborah? Or would you rather head back to China?”

He hadn't met her yet, this friend of Deborah's, and he wasn't sure he wanted to, although he couldn't quite put his finger on the reason for his reluctance. He knew their meeting was inevitable, however, so he told himself that he wanted to have something hopeful to report to her when they were finally introduced. In the meantime, though, he wanted Deborah to have the freedom to go to her friend. She hadn't done that yet today, and there was little doubt the American and her brother would be wondering what their London friends were managing to accomplish.

Cherokee had phoned them early in the morning, afire to know what St. James had learned from the police. He'd kept his voice determinedly cheerful at his end of the line as St. James told him what little there was to tell, and from that it was clear that the other man was making the call in the presence of his sister. At the conclusion of their conversation, Cherokee signaled his intention to attend the funeral. He was firm in his desire to be part of what he called “the action,” and it was only when St. James tactfully pointed out that his presence might provide an unnecessary distraction that would allow the real killer to fade into the crowd that he agreed reluctantly to remain behind. He'd be waiting to hear what they were able to uncover, though, he told them. China would be waiting, too.

“You can go to her if you like,” St. James said to his wife. “I'll be sniffing round here for a while. I can get a ride back into town with someone. It shouldn't be a problem.”

“I didn't come to Guernsey just to sit and hold China's hand,” Deborah replied.

“I know. Which is why—”

She cut him off before he could finish. “I'll see what he has to say, Simon.”

St. James watched her stride away in pursuit of the boy. He sighed and wondered why communicating with women—particularly with his wife—was frequently a case of speaking about one thing while trying to read the subtext of another. And he pondered how his inability to read women accurately was going to affect his performance here on Guernsey, where it was looking more and more as if the circumstances surrounding Guy Brouard's life and his death were crawling with significant females.

 

When Margaret Chamberlain saw the crippled man approach Ruth near the end of the reception, she knew he wasn't a legitimate member of the congregation who'd been at the funeral and the burial. First of all, he hadn't spoken to her sister-in-law earlier at the grave site as had everyone else. Besides that, he'd spent the reception afterwards wandering from open room to open room in the house in a manner that suggested speculation. Margaret had at first thought he was a burglar of some sort, despite the limp and the leg brace, but when he finally introduced himself to Ruth—going so far as to hand her his card—she realised he was something else altogether. What that something was had to do with Guy's death. If not that, then with the distribution of his fortune which they were
finally
going to learn about as soon as the last of the mourners left them.

Ruth hadn't wanted to see Guy's solicitor before then. It was as if she was aware that there was bad news coming, and she was trying to spare everyone from having to hear it. Everyone or someone, Margaret thought shrewdly. The only question was who.

If it was Adrian whose disappointment she was hoping to postpone, there was definitely going to be hell to pay. She'd drag her sister-in-law to court and shake out every piece of dirty laundry there was if Guy had disinherited his only son. Oh, she knew there'd be excuses aplenty coming from Ruth if that's what Adrian's father had done. But let them just
try
to accuse her of undermining the relationship between father and son, let them just
make
a single attempt to depict her as the responsible party for Adrian's loss . . . There'd be a real season in hell coming when she trotted out all the reasons she'd kept them apart. They each had a name and a title, those reasons, although not quite the kind of title that redeems one's transgressions in the eyes of the public: Danielle the Air Hostess, Stephanie the Pole Dancer, MaryAnn the Dog Groomer, Lucy the Hotel Maid.

They
were the reason that Margaret had kept the son from the father. What sort of example was the boy to see? she could easily demand of anyone who asked her. What sort of role model did she have a duty to provide an impressionable lad of eight, or ten, or fifteen? If his father lived a life that made lengthy visits from his son unsuitable, was it the son's fault? And should he now be deprived of what he was owed by blood because his father's daisy chain of mistresses throughout the years had gone unbroken?

No. She had been within her rights to keep them well apart, doomed to quick or interrupted visits only. After all, Adrian was a sensitive child. She owed him the protection of a mother's love, not exposure to a father's excess.

She watched her son now as he lurked at the edge of the stone hall, where most of the post-burial reception was being conducted in the warmth of two fires that burned at either end of the room. He was trying to edge his way to the door, either to escape altogether or to duck along to the dining room where an enormous buffet spread across the fine mahogany table. Margaret frowned. This would not do. He should have been mingling. Rather than creeping along the wall like an insect, he should have been doing something to act like the scion of the wealthiest man the Channel Islands had ever seen. How could he expect his life to be anything more than it already was—confined and described by his mother's house in St. Albans—if he didn't put himself out, for God's sake?

Margaret wove her way through the remaining guests and intercepted her son at the door to the passage that led to the dining room. She put her arm through his and ignored his effort to pull away, saying with a smile, “
Here
you are, darling. I knew there was someone who could point out the people I've still to meet. One can't hope to know them all, of course. But surely there are important individuals I ought to meet for future reference?”

“What future?” Adrian put his hand on hers to disengage her, but she caught his fingers, squeezed them, and continued smiling as if he weren't trying to escape.

“Yours, of course. We must set about making certain it's secure.”

“Must we, Mother? How d'you propose to do that?”

“A word here, a word there,” she said airily. “It's amazing the kind of influence one can have once one knows the proper person to talk to. That glowering gentleman over there, for instance? Who is he?”

Instead of replying, Adrian started to move away from his mother. But she had the advantage of height over him—of weight as well—and she held him where he was. “Darling?” she asked him brightly. “The gentleman? The one with the patches on his elbows? Attractive in an overnourished-Heathcliff sort of way?”