A Place of Hiding (46 page)

“Let me,” Cherokee said, and before Graham Ouseley could voice a protest, he got to his feet. “You tell your story, Mr. Ouseley. I'll make the coffee.” He gave the old man an appealing smile.

This appeared to be enough to mollify him, because Graham remained where he was as Cherokee saw to the coffee, moving round the kitchen to find cups, spoons, and sugar. As he brought things to the table, Graham Ouseley rested back in his chair. He said, “It's quite a tale, you two. Let me tell you about it,” and he proceeded to do so.

His story took them back more than fifty years, to the German occupation of the Channel Islands. Five years living under the bleeding jackboot, he called it, five years of trying to outwit the damn Krauts and to live with dignity despite degradation. Vehicles confiscated right down to bicycles, wireless sets declared
verboten,
deportation of longtime residents, executions of those deemed “spies.” Slave camps where Russian and Ukrainian prisoners worked to build fortifications for the Nazis. Deaths in European labour camps, where those who defied German rule were sent. Documents studied into the time of one's grandparents to ascertain whether there was Jewish blood to be purged from the populace. And quislings aplenty among the honest people of Guernsey: those devils willing to sell their souls—and their fellow islanders—for whatever the Germans promised them.

“Jealousy and spite,” Graham Ouseley declared. “They sold us out for that as well. Old scores settled by whispering a name to the devil Nazis.”

He was glad to tell them that most of the time it was a foreigner betraying someone: a Dutchman living in St. Peter Port who became wise to someone's hidden wireless, an Irish fisherman from St. Sampson who witnessed a midnight landing of a British boat down near Petit Port Bay. While there was no excusing that and even less forgiving it, the fact that the quisling was foreign born made the betrayal less of an evil than when a native islander did it. But that happened as well: a Guernseyman betraying his fellows. That was what had happened to gift.

“Gift?” Deborah asked. “What sort of gift?”

Not gift,
G.I.F.T.,
Graham Ouseley informed them, an acronym for Guernsey Independent From Terror. It was the island's underground news-sheet and the people's only source of truth about Allied activities during the war. This news was meticulously gleaned at night from contraband radio receivers that were tuned to pick up the BBC. The facts of the war were typed up on single sheets of paper in the wee hours by candlelight behind the shrouded windows of the vestry of
St. Pierre-du-Bois,
and then distributed by hand to trusted souls who were hungry enough for word of the outside world that they were willing to risk Nazi interrogation and the aftermath of Nazi interrogation in order to have it.

“Quislings among them,” Graham Ouseley declared. “Should've known, the rest of us. Should've taken more care. Should never've trusted. But they were of
us.
” He thumped his chest with his fist. “You understand me? They were of
us.
”

The four men responsible for
G.I.F.T.
were arrested upon the word of one of these quislings, he explained. Three of those men died as a result of that arrest—two in prison and the other attempting escape. Only one of the men—Graham Ouseley himself—survived two hellish years incarcerated before being freed, one hundred pounds of skin, bones, lice, and tuberculosis.

But they destroyed more than just the creators of
G.I.F.T.,
those quislings who betrayed them, Ouseley said. They informed on those who sheltered British spies, on those who hid escaped Russian prisoners, on those whose only “crime” was to chalk a V for victory on the cycle-seats of Nazi soldiers as they drank at night in hotel bars. But the quislings were never forced to pay for their misdeeds, and that's what rankled with those who'd suffered at their hands. People died, people were executed, people went to prison and some never returned. For more than fifty years, no one spoke up publicly to name the names of those responsible.

“Blood on their hands,” Graham Ouseley declared. “I mean to make them
pay.
Oh, they'll fight against it, won't they? They'll deny it hot and loud. But when we spread out the proof . . . And tha's how I want to do it, you two. Names first in the paper, and let 'em deny the whole thing and get themselves advocates to set things right. Then the proof comes, and we watch them squirm like they damn well should've squirmed when Jerry finally surrendered to the Allies.
That's
when all of this should've come out. The quislings, the bloody profiteers, the Jerrybags, and their bastard Kraut babies.”

The old man was working himself into a lather, his lips wet with spittle. Deborah began to fear for his heart as his skin took on a bluish tinge. She knew it was time to make him understand that they were not who he thought they were, which was apparently reporters come to hear his story and to print it in the local newspaper.

She said, “Mr. Ouseley, I'm terribly afraid—”

“No!” He shoved his chair back from the table with a surprising strength that sloshed the coffee from their mugs and the milk from its jug. “You come with me if you don't believe the story. My boy Frank and I, we've got us the proof, you hear that?” He struggled to his feet, and Cherokee surged up to help him. Graham shook the assistance off, however, and trundled unsteadily towards the front door. Once again, there seemed nothing for it but to follow him, to mollify him, and to hope that his son arrived back at the water mill before the old man suffered from his exertions.

 

St. James stopped at the Duffys' cottage first. He was unsurprised when no one was there. In the middle of the day, both Valerie and Kevin would doubtless be at work: he somewhere in the grounds of
Le Reposoir
and she in the manor house itself. She was the person he wanted to talk to. The undercurrent that he'd felt during his previous conversation with her needed clarifying now that he knew she was the sister of Henry Moullin.

He found her, as he expected, in the big house, which he was allowed to approach once he identified himself to the police who were still searching the grounds. She answered the door with a bundle of sheets crumpled under her arm.

St. James didn't waste time with social niceties. They would rob him of the advantage of surprise and allow her to marshal her thoughts. Instead, he said, “Why didn't you mention when we spoke earlier that there's another fair-haired woman involved?”

Valerie Duffy made no reply, but he could see the confusion in her eyes, followed by the calculation going on inside her head. She shifted her gaze from him as if she wished to seek out her husband. She would have liked his support, St. James surmised, and he was determined that she should not have it.

She said faintly, “I don't understand.” She set the sheets on the floor inside the doorway and retreated to the interior of the house.

He followed her into the stone hall, where the air was icy and tinctured with the smell of dead fires. She stopped by the enormous refectory table in the room's centre, and began to gather up dried leaves and fallen berries from an autumnal floral arrangement that was offset with tall white candles.

St. James said, “You claimed that you saw a fair-haired woman following Guy Brouard to the bay on the morning of his death.”

“The American—”

“As you'd like us to believe.”

She looked up from the flowers. “I saw her.”

“You saw someone. But there are other possibilities, aren't there? You merely failed to mention them.”

“Mrs. Abbott's fair.”

“And so, I suspect, is your niece. Cynthia.”

To her credit, Valerie didn't move her gaze from his face. Also to her credit, she said nothing till she made certain she knew how much he himself knew. She was nobody's fool.

“I've spoken to Henry Moullin,” St. James said. “I believe I've seen your niece. He'd like me to think she's on Alderney with her grandmother, but something tells me that if there's a grandmother living, Alderney isn't where I'd find her. Why does your brother have Cynthia hidden away in the house, Mrs. Duffy? Does he have her locked in her room as well?”

“She's going through a difficult stage,” Valerie Duffy finally said, and she went back to the flowers, the leaves, and the berries as she spoke. “Girls her age go through them all the time.”

“What sort of stage requires imprisonment?”

“The sort where there's no talking to them. No talking sense, that is. They don't want to hear it.”

“Talking sense about what?”

“Whatever their current fancy is.”

“And hers is . . . ?”

“I wouldn't know.”

“Not according to your brother,” St. James pointed out. “He says she confided in you. He gave me the impression the two of you are close.”

“Not close enough.” She took a handful of the leaves over to the fireplace and tossed them in. From a pocket in the apron she wore, she drew out a rag and used it to dust off the top of the table.

“So you approve of his locking her in the house? While she's in this stage of hers?”

“I didn't say that. I
wish
Henry wouldn't . . .” She paused, stopped her dusting, and seemed to be trying to gather her thoughts once again.

St. James said, “Why did Mr. Brouard leave her money? Her and not the other girls? A seventeen-year-old being left a small fortune at the expense of her benefactor's children and her own siblings? What was the purpose of that?”

“She wasn't the only one. If you know about Cyn, you've been told about Paul. They both have siblings. He has even more than Cyn. None of them were remembered. I don't know why Mr. Brouard did it like that. Perhaps he fancied the thought of the disruption a load of money could cause among young people in a family.”

“That's not what Cynthia's father claims. He says the money was meant for her education.”

Valerie dusted a spotless area on the table.

“He also says Guy Brouard had other fancies. I'm wondering if one of them led to his death. Do you know what a fairy wheel is, Mrs. Duffy?”

Her dusting hand slowed. “Folklore.”

“Island folklore, I expect,” St. James said. “You were born here, weren't you? Both you and your brother?”

She raised her head. “Henry isn't the one, Mr. St. James.” She said it quite calmly. A pulse fluttered in her throat, but she gave no other indication of being bothered by the direction St. James's words were taking.

“I wasn't actually thinking of Henry,” St. James said. “Has he a reason to want Guy Brouard dead?”

She flushed completely at that and bent back to her needless task of dusting.

“I noticed that he was involved in Mr. Brouard's museum project. In the original project, by the look of the drawings in his barn. I'm wondering if he was supposed to be involved in the revised project as well? Do you know?”

“Henry's good with glass” was her reply. “That brought them together in the first place. Mr. Brouard needed someone to do the conservatory here. It's large, complicated. An off-the-peg conservatory wouldn't do. He needed someone for the greenhouses as well. And the windows when it came down to it. I told him about Henry. They spoke to each other and found common ground. Henry's worked for him ever since.”

“Is that how Cynthia came to Mr. Brouard's attention?”

“Lots of people came to Mr. Brouard's attention,” Valerie said patiently. “Paul Fielder. Frank Ouseley. Nobby Debiere. Henry and Cynthia. He even sent Jemima Abbott to modeling school in London and gave her mum a helping hand when she needed it. He took an interest. He invested in people. That was his way.”

“People usually expect a return on their investments,” St. James pointed out. “And not always a financial one.”

“Then you'd be wise to ask each of them what Mr. Brouard was expecting in return,” she said pointedly. “And p'rhaps you can start with Nobby Debiere.” She balled up her duster and returned it to the pocket of her apron. She moved back in the direction of the front door. There she scooped up the linen she'd deposited on the floor, and she balanced it on her hip and faced St. James. “If there's nothing
else . . .”

“Why Nobby Debiere?” St. James asked her. “That's the architect, isn't it? Did Mr. Brouard ask something special from him?”

“If he did, Nobby wasn't looking too inclined to give it to him on the night before he died,” Valerie announced. “They were arguing by the duck pond after the fireworks. ‘I won't let you ruin me,' Nobby was saying. Now, I wonder what he meant by that?”

This was too obvious an effort to direct him away from her own relations. St. James wasn't about to let matters go so easily. He said, “How long have you and your husband worked for the Brouards, Mrs. Duffy?”

“Since the first.” She shifted the bed linen from one arm to the other and looked at her watch meaningfully.

“So you were familiar with their habits.”

She made no immediate reply to this, but her eyes narrowed a millimetre as she sorted through the possibilities that were implied by this statement. “Habits,” she said.

“Like Mr. Brouard's morning swim, for example.”

“Everyone knew about his swim.”

“About his ritual drink as well? The ginkgo and green tea? Where was that kept, by the way?”

“In the kitchen.”

“Where?”

“In the pantry cupboard.”

“And you work in the kitchen.”

“Are you suggesting that I . . . ?”

“Where your niece came to chat? Where your brother—at work on the conservatory, perhaps—came to chat as well?”

“Everyone friendly with Mr. Brouard would've been in and out of the kitchen. This isn't a formal house. We don't make pretty distinctions between those who work behind the green baize door and those who loll round in front of it. We don't have a green baize door or anything that could possibly signify one. The Brouards aren't like that, and they never were. Which was why—” She stopped herself. She gripped the sheets more firmly.