A Place of Hiding (30 page)

Gallery,
she wrote,
top of the house with Guy. Guy showing off pictures, posing for camera. Adrian shows up. Just arrived. Introductions all around.

Grounds,
she continued,
Guy and me. Talk about taking pictures of the place. Talk about
Architectural Digest
. Explain about doing things on spec. See the buildings and the different gardens. Feed the koi.

Cherokee's room,
she continued,
him and me. Talk about whether to stay or go.

On and on she had written, in what appeared to be a dogged and detailed account of what had gone on in the days leading up to Guy Brouard's death. Deborah read it all and tried to look for key moments that could have been spied upon by someone else who used them for an end that had brought China into her present situation.

“Who's Paul F.?” Deborah asked.

China explained: a protégé of Guy Brouard's. Sort of a Big Brother thing. Did the Brits have Big Brothers like they had in the States? An older man taking on a young kid without a decent role model? That was the deal between Guy Brouard and Paul Fielder. He never said more than ten words at a time. Just looked at Guy with goo-goo eyes and followed him around like a dog.

“How old a boy?”

“Teenager. Pretty poor by the looks of his clothes. And his bike. He showed up pretty much every day on this rattletrap thing, more rust than anything else. He was always welcome. His dog, too.”

The boy, the clothes, and the dog. The description matched the teenager she and Simon had come upon on their way to the bay. Deborah said, “Was he at the party?”

“What, the night before?” When Deborah nodded, China said, “Sure. Everyone was there. It was sort of the social event of the season, from what we could figure.”

“How many people?”

China considered this. “Three hundred? More or less.”

“Contained in one place?”

“Not exactly. I mean, it wasn't an open house or anything, but there were people wandering around all night. Caterers were coming and going from the kitchen. There were four bars. It wasn't chaos, but I don't think anyone was keeping track of who went where.”

“So your cloak could have been pinched,” Deborah said.

“I suppose. But it was there when I needed it, Debs. When Cherokee and I were leaving the next morning.”

“You didn't see anyone when you were leaving?”

“Not a soul.”

They were silent then. China emptied the grocery bags into the tiny fridge and the single cupboard. She rooted round for something to place the flowers in and finally settled on a cooking pot. Deborah watched her and wondered how to ask what she needed to ask, how to put the question in a way that her friend wouldn't read as suspicious or unsupportive. She had difficulties enough already.

“Earlier,” Deborah said, “on one of the previous days I mean, did you go with Guy Brouard for his morning swim? Perhaps just to watch?”

China shook her head. “I knew he went swimming in the bay. Everyone admired him for it. Cold water, early morning, the time of year. I think he liked how people would be in awe that he'd swim every day no matter what. But I never went to watch him.”

“Did anyone else?”

“I think his girlfriend did, from the way people talked about it. Sort of ‘Anaïs, can't you do
something
to talk reason into that man?' And, ‘I do try to whenever I'm there.' ”

“So she would've gone with him that morning?”

“If she'd stayed the night. But I don't know if she did. She hadn't stayed over while we were there, Cherokee and me.”

“But she did stay sometimes?”

“She made it pretty obvious. I mean, she made sure I knew. So she
may
have stayed over on the night of the party, but I don't think so.”

The fact that China refused to colour what little she knew in such a way that might guide suspicion onto someone else was something that Deborah found comforting. It spoke of a character much stronger than her own. She said, “China, I think there're lots of directions the police could have taken looking into this.”

“Do you? Really?”

“I do.”

At this, China seemed to let go of something big and unnamed that she'd been holding within since the moment Deborah had come upon her and her brother in the grocery. She said, “Thank you, Debs.”

“You don't need to thank me.”

“Yes, I do. For coming here. For being a friend. Without you and Simon, I'd be anyone's victim. Will I get to meet him? Simon? I'd like to.”

“Of course you will,” Deborah said. “He's looking forward to it.”

China came back to the table and took up the legal pad. She studied it for a moment, as if thinking something over, then extended it to Deborah as impulsively as Deborah had earlier handed over the lilies.

She said, “Give this to him. Tell him to go over it with a fine-tooth comb. Ask him to grill me whenever he wants to and as many times as he thinks he needs to. Tell him to get to the truth.”

Deborah took the document and promised to hand it over to her husband.

She left the flat feeling buoyed. Outside, she walked back round the building, where she found Cherokee lounging against a railing across the street and in front of a holiday hotel that was closed for the winter. The collar of his jacket was turned up against the chill and he was drinking from a take-away cup of something steaming as he watched the Queen Margaret Apartments like an undercover cop. He pushed himself away from the railing when he spied Deborah, and he came across to her.

“How was it?” he asked. “Things go okay? She's been on edge all day.”

“She's all right,” Deborah said. “Bit anxious, though.”

“I want to do something, but she won't let me. I try, and she just flies off the handle. I don't think she should be in there alone, so I hang around and say we ought to go for a drive or take a walk or play cards or watch CNN and see what's happening at home. Or something. But she just freaks.”

“She's scared. I don't think she wants you to know just how much.”

“I'm her
brother.
”

“That may be why.”

He thought about this, emptying the rest of his cup and crushing it between his fingers. He said, “It was always her taking care of me. When we were kids. When Mom was . . . well, being Mom. The protests. The causes. Not all the time but when someone needed a body willing to tie herself to a redwood tree or carry a placard for something. Off she'd go. Weeks at a time. Chine was the strong one all through that. It wasn't me.”

“You feel indebted to her.”

“Big time. Yeah. I want to help.”

Deborah considered this: his need balanced against the situation they faced. She glanced at her watch and decided there was time.

“Come with me,” she said. “There's something you can do.”

Chapter 12

T
HE MORNING ROOM OF
the manor house was fitted out with an enormous frame, St. James saw, similar to that used for making tapestries. But instead of weaving, what apparently went on at this device was needlepoint on an unthinkable scale. Ruth Brouard said nothing while he observed this frame and the canvas-like material stretched upon it, looking from it to a finished piece that hung on one of the walls of the room, a piece not unlike the one he'd seen earlier in her bedroom.

The enormous needlepoint seemed to depict the fall of France during the Second World War, St. James noted, with the Maginot Line beginning the story and a woman packing suitcases ending it. Two children watched this woman—a boy and a girl—while behind them a bearded old man in a prayer shawl stood with a book open on his palm and a woman his own age wept and appeared to be comforting a man who might have been her adult son.

“This is remarkable,” St. James said.

On a drop-front desk, Ruth Brouard placed a manila envelope she'd been holding when she answered the door. “I find it therapeutic,” she said, “and far less expensive than psychoanalysis.”

“How long did it take?”

“Eight years. But I wasn't as quick then. I didn't need to be.”

St. James observed her. He could see the disease in her too-careful movements and in the strain on her face. But he was reluctant to name or even mention it to her, so intent did she seem upon maintaining the pretence of vitality.

“How many have you planned?” he asked, giving his attention next to the unfinished work stretched upon the frame.

“As many as it takes to tell the whole story,” she replied. “This one”—with a nod at the wall—“this was the first. It's a bit crude, but I got better with practice.”

“It tells an important story.”

“I think so. What happened to you? I know it's rude to ask, but I'm quite beyond that sort of social nicety at this point. I hope you don't mind.”

He certainly would have done had the question come from someone else. But from her, there seemed to be a capacity for understanding that superseded idle curiosity and made her a kindred spirit. Perhaps, St. James thought, because she was so clearly dying.

He said, “Car crash.”

“When was this?”

“I was twenty-four.”

“Ah. I'm sorry.”

“That's completely unnecessary. We were both drunk.”

“You and the lady?”

“No. An old school friend.”

“Who was driving, I expect. Who walked away without a scratch.”

St. James smiled. “Are you a witch, Miss Brouard?”

She returned his smile. “I only wish I were. I'd've cast more than one spell over the years.”

“Upon a lucky man?”

“Upon my brother.” She turned the desk's straight-backed chair to face the room, and lowered herself to it, one hand on its seat. She indicated an armchair nearby. St. James took it and waited for her to tell him why she wanted to see him a second time.

She made it clear within a moment. Did Mr. St. James, she asked, know anything about the laws of inheritance on the island of Guernsey? Or, for that matter, was he aware of the restrictions these laws placed upon the disposition of one's money and property after one's death? It was rather a byzantine system, she said, one that had its roots in Norman Customary Law. Its primary feature was the preservation of family assets within the family, and its distinguishing mark was that there was no such thing as disinheriting a child, wayward or otherwise. One's children had the right to inherit a certain amount of property, no matter the condition of their relationship with their parents.

“There were many things my brother loved about the Channel Islands,” Ruth Brouard told St. James. “The weather, the atmosphere, the powerful sense of community. Of course, the tax laws and the access to good banking. But Guy didn't like being told by a legal system how he was meant to distribute his property after his death.”

“Understandable,” St. James said.

“So he looked for a way round it, a legal loophole. And he found it, as anyone who knew him would have predicted he would.”

In advance of their move to the island, Ruth Brouard explained, her brother had deeded all of his property over to her. He kept for himself a single bank account, into which he deposited a substantial sum of money which he knew he could not only invest but also live on quite nicely. But otherwise his every possession—the properties, the stocks, the bonds, the other accounts, the businesses—had been placed into Ruth's name. There had been only one proviso: that once on Guernsey she herself should agree to signing a will that he and an advocate would draw up for her. Since she had no husband or children, she could do with her property whatever she wanted upon her death, and in this way her brother would be able to do with his property what he wanted since she would write a will guided by him. It was a clever way to get round the law.

“My brother had been estranged from his two younger children for years, you see,” Ruth explained. “He couldn't see why he should be forced to leave both the girls a fortune simply because he'd fathered them, which is what the island's inheritance law required him to do. He'd supported them through into adulthood. He'd sent them to the best schools, pulled strings to get one into Cambridge and the other into the Sorbonne. In return he'd got nothing. Not even a thank-you. So he said enough is enough and he sought a way to give something to those other people in his life who'd given so much to him when his own children hadn't. Devotion, I mean. Friendship, acceptance, and love. He could give to them generously, those people—as he wished to—but only if he filtered everything through me. So that's what we did.”

“What about his son?”

“Adrian?”

“Did your brother want to cut him off as well?”

“He didn't wish to cut any of them off completely. He just wanted to lower the amount he'd be required by law to give to them.”

“Who knew about this?” St. James asked.

“As far as I know, just Guy, Dominic Forrest—that's the advocate—and me.” She reached for the manila envelope then, but she didn't unfasten its metal tabs. Instead, she set it on her lap and smoothed her hands across it as she went on. “I agreed to it in part to give Guy peace of mind. He was terribly unhappy about the sort of relationships his wives allowed him to have with his children, so I thought, Well, why not? Why not allow him to remember those people who'd touched his life when his own family wouldn't come near him? You see, I didn't expect . . .” She hesitated, folding her hands with care, as if considering how much to reveal. Then she appeared to take resolve from a study of the envelope she held, for she went on. “I didn't expect to outlive my brother. I thought when I finally told him about my . . . my physical situation, he'd more than likely suggest that we rewrite my will and perhaps leave everything to him. He'd've been hobbled by the law again at that point with regards to his own will, but I do think he might have preferred that to being left with only a single bank account, some investments, and no way of replenishing either should he need to do so.”

“Yes, I see,” St. James said. “I see how it was intended to be. But I take it that it didn't quite work that way?”

“I hadn't got round to telling him about my . . . situation. Sometimes I'd catch him looking at me and I'd think, He knows. But he never said. And I never said. I'd tell myself, Tomorrow. Tomorrow I'll speak to him about it. But I just never did.”

“So when he died suddenly—”

“There were expectations.”

“And now?”

“There are understandable resentments.”

St. James nodded. He looked to the great wall-hanging and its depiction of a vital part of their lives. He saw that the mother packing suitcases was weeping, that the children clung to each other in fear. Through a window, Nazi tanks rumbled across a distant meadow and a division of goose-stepping troops advanced down a narrow street.

“I don't expect you've asked me here to advise you what to do next,” he said. “Something tells me you already know.”

“I owe my brother everything, and I'm a woman who pays her debts. So yes. I haven't asked you here to tell me what to do about my own will now that Guy's dead. Not at all.”

“Then may I ask . . . ? How can I help you?”

“Until today,” she said, “I'd always known exactly the terms of Guy's wills.”

“In the plural?”

“He rewrote his will rather more often than most people do. Every time he had a new one drawn up, he'd arrange a meeting for me with his advocate so that I knew what the terms of that will were going to be. He was good that way and he was always consistent. On the day the will was meant to be signed and witnessed, we went to Mr. Forrest's office. We'd go over the paperwork, see if any changes were required in my own will as a result, sign and witness all the documents, and afterwards go to lunch.”

“But I take it that didn't happen with this last will?”

“It didn't happen.”

“Perhaps he hadn't got round to it yet,” St. James suggested. “He clearly didn't expect to die.”

“This last will was written in October, Mr. St. James. More than two months ago. I've gone nowhere off the island in that time. Neither has
—had—
Guy. For this last will to be legal, he had to have gone into St. Peter Port to sign the paperwork. The fact that he didn't take me with him suggests he didn't want me to know what he planned to do.”

“Which was?”

“Cut out Anaïs Abbott, Frank Ouseley, and the Duffys. He kept that as a secret from me. When I realised that, I saw how it was possible he'd kept other things from me as well.”

They'd come to it now, St. James saw: the reason she'd asked to see him again. Ruth Brouard unclasped the fasteners of the envelope on her lap. She brought forth its contents and St. James saw that among them was Guy Brouard's passport, which was the first thing the man's sister handed over.

“This was his first secret,” she said. “Look at the last stamp, the most recent one.”

St. James flipped through the little booklet and found the relevant immigration markings. He saw that, in contradiction to what Ruth Brouard had told him during their earlier conversation that day, her brother had entered the state of California in the month of March, through Los Angeles International Airport.

“He didn't tell you about this?” St. James asked her.

“Of course not. I would have told you otherwise.” She next handed him a pile of documents. St. James saw that these comprised credit card bills as well as hotel bills and receipts from restaurants and car hire firms. Guy Brouard had stayed five nights in the Hilton in a town called Irvine. He'd eaten at a place called Il Fornaio there, as well as at Scott's Seafood in Costa Mesa, and the Citrus Grille in Orange. He'd met with someone called William Kiefer, attorney-at-law, in Tustin, to whom he'd paid just over one thousand dollars for three appointments in five days, and he'd kept that lawyer's business card along with a receipt from an architectural firm called Southby, Strange, Willows, and Ward.
Jim Ward
had been scrawled on the bottom of this credit slip along with
mobile
and the relevant phone number.

“He seems to have made his museum arrangements in person, then,” St. James noted. “This fits in with what we know his plans were.”

“It does,” Ruth said. “But he didn't
tell
me. Not one word about this trip at all. Don't you see what that means?”

Ruth's question was fraught with a sinister undertone, but St. James saw only that the information meant her brother might well have wanted a bit of privacy. Indeed, he could possibly have taken a companion with him and not wished his sister to know about that. But when Ruth went on, he realised that the new facts she had come across were not so much disconcerting her as they were confirming what she already believed.

She said, “California, Mr. St. James. She
lives
in California. So he had to have known her before she got to Guernsey. She came here having planned it all.”

“I see. Miss River. But she doesn't live in this part of California,” St. James pointed out. “She's from Santa Barbara.”

“How far from this can that be?”

St. James frowned. He didn't actually know, having never been to California and being completely unfamiliar with its towns other than Los Angeles and San Francisco, which, he knew, were more or less at opposite ends of the state. He
did
know, however, that the place was vast, connected by an incomprehensible network of motorways that were generally glutted with cars. Deborah would be the one to offer an opinion on the feasibility of Guy Brouard's having made a journey to Santa Barbara during his time in California. When she'd lived there, she'd done a great deal of traveling, not only with Tommy but also with China.

China. This thought tweaked his mind into recalling his wife's telling him about the visits she'd made to China's mother, to China's brother as well. A town like a colour, she'd said: Orange. Home of the Citrus Grille, whose receipt Guy Brouard had tucked among his papers. And Cherokee River—not his sister China—lived somewhere in that area. So how unlikely was it that Cherokee River, not China, had known Guy Brouard before coming to Guernsey?

St. James thought about what this implied and said to Ruth, “Where were the Rivers staying in the house those nights they were with you?”

“On the second floor.”

“Their rooms facing which direction?”

“The front, the south.”

“A clear view to the drive? The trees along it? The Duffys' cottage?”

“Yes. Why?”

“What made you go to the window that morning, Miss Brouard? When you saw the figure following your brother, what was it that made you look out in the first place? Was that normally what you did?”

She considered his question, finally saying slowly, “I generally wasn't yet up when Guy left the house. So I think it must have been . . .” She looked pensive. She folded her thin hands together on top of the manila envelope and St. James saw how papery her skin was, stretched like tissue across her bones. She said, “I'd actually heard a noise, Mr. St. James. It woke me, frightened me a bit because I thought it was the middle of the night still, with someone creeping about. It was so dark. But when I looked at the clock, I saw it was nearly the time Guy swam. I listened for a few moments, then I heard him in his room. So I assumed he'd made the noise himself.” She saw the direction St. James was heading and said, “But it could have been someone else, couldn't it? Not Guy at all, but someone already up and about. Someone about to head out to wait by the trees.”