A Place of Hiding (54 page)

“I don' know what you're talking about.”

“No. You don't. You've made yourself forget. What else could you do when the lot of them died? You didn't expect that, did you? You thought they'd just do time and come home. I'll give you that much.”

“You've gone mad, boy. Let me out of this chair. Back away with you. Back away, I say, or I'll know the reason why.”

That paternal threat he'd heard as a child, so infrequently as to be nearly forgotten, worked on Frank now. He took a step back. He watched his father struggle out of the chair.

“I'm going to bed, I am,” Graham said to his son. “'Nough of this twaddle. Things to do tomorrow and I mean to be rested 'n order to do 'em. And mind you, Frank”—with a trembling finger pointed at Frank's chest—“don't you plan to stand in my way. You
hear
me? There's tales to be told and I mean to tell 'em.”

“Aren't you listening to me?” Frank asked in anguish. “You were
one
of them. You turned in your mates. You went to the Nazis. You struck a deal. And you've spent the last sixty years denying it.”

“I
never
. . . !” Graham took a step towards him, his hands balled into determined fists. “People
died,
you bastard. Good men—better than you could ever be—went to their deaths 'cause they wouldn't submit. Oh, they were told to, weren't they? Cooperate, keep the upper lip stiff, soldier through it somehow. King's deserted you but he
cares,
he does, and someday when this's all over, you'll get to see him doff his hat your way. Meantime, act like you're doing what Jerry says to do.”

“Is that what you told yourself? You were just
acting
like a bloke who's cooperating? Turning in your friends, watching their arrests, going through the charade of your own deportation when you knew all along it was just a sham? Where did they actually send you, Dad? Where did they hide you for your ‘prison term'? Didn't anyone notice when you got back that you looked just a little too well for a gent who's spent a year in gaol during wartime?”

“I had TB! I had to take the cure.”

“Who diagnosed it? Not a Guernsey doctor, I expect. And if we ask for tests now—the sort of tests that show you once had TB—how will they turn out? Positive? I doubt it.”

“That's rubbish, that is,” Graham shrieked. “It's rubbish, rubbish, rubbish. You give me that paper. You hear me, Frank? You hand it over.”

“I'll not,” Frank said. “And you'll not speak to the press. Because if you do . . . Dad, if you do . . .” He finally felt the full horror of it all descend upon him: the life that was a lie and the part that he'd inadvertently but nonetheless enthusiastically played in creating it. He'd worshipped at the shrine of his father's bravery for all of his fifty-three years, only to learn that his religion of one knelt before even less than a golden calf. The grief of this piece of unwanted wisdom was unbearable. The rage that went with it was enough to engulf and fracture his mind. He said brokenly, “I was a little boy. I believed . . .” and his voice cracked on the declaration.

Graham hitched up his trousers. “Wha's this, then? Tears? Tha's all you got inside you? We had plenty to cry about, we did, back then. Five long years of hell on earth, Frankie.
Five
years, boy. Did you hear us crying? Did you see us wringing our hands and wondering what to do? Did you watch us waiting like patient saints for someone to drive the Jerrys from this island? It wasn't like that. We resisted, we did. We painted the V. We hid our radio receivers in the muck. We clipped telephone lines and took down our street signs and hid slave labourers when they escaped. We took in British soldiers when they landed as spies and we could've been shot at a moment's notice for doing it. But cry like babies? Did we ever cry? Did we snivel and pule? No such thing. We took it like men. 'Cause that's what we were.” He headed for the stairs.

Frank watched him in wonder. He saw that Graham's version of history was so firmly rooted in his mind that there was going to be no simple way to extirpate it. The proof Frank held in his hands did not exist for his father. Indeed, he could not afford to let it exist. Admitting he had betrayed good men would be tantamount to admitting he was a homicide. And he would not do that. He would never do that. Why, Frank thought, had he ever believed Graham would?

On the stairs, his father grasped on to the handrail. Frank very nearly moved forward to assist Graham as he always did, but he found that he couldn't bring himself to touch the old man in his usual manner. He would have had to place his right hand on Graham's arm and to wind his left arm round Graham's waist, and he couldn't bear the thought of that contact. So he stood immobile and watched the old man struggle with seven of the steps.

“They're coming,” Graham said, more to himself than to his son this time. “I rang 'em, I did. It's time the truth was told right and proper and I mean to tell it. Names're being named round here. There's going to be punishment meted out.”

Frank's was the voice of powerless childhood as he said, “But, Dad, you can't—”

“Don't you tell me what I can and I can't!” his father roared from the stairs. “Don't you bloody dare
ever
tell your dad what his business is. We suffered, we did. Some of us died. And there's them that're going to pay for it, Frank. That's the end of it. You hear me? That is the
end.
”

He turned. He gripped the rail more firmly. He wobbled as he lifted his foot to climb another step. He began to cough.

Frank moved then, because the answer was simple, at the heart of things. His father spoke the only truth he knew. But the truth they shared—father and son—was the truth that said someone had to pay.

He reached the stairs and sprinted up them. He stopped when Graham was within his reach. He said, “Dad. Oh, Dad,” as he grasped his father by the turn-ups of his trousers. He jerked on them once, swiftly and hard. He stepped out of the way as Graham crashed forward.

The crack of his head against the top step was loud. Graham gave a startled cry as he fell. But after that he was completely soundless as his body slid quickly down the stairs.

Chapter 21

S
T.
J
AMES AND
D
EBORAH
had their breakfast the next morning by a window that overlooked the small hotel garden, where undisciplined knots of pansies formed a colourful border round a patch of lawn. They were in the midst of laying out their plans for the day when China joined them, the black she wore from head to toe heightening her spectral appearance.

She gave them a quick smile that telegraphed her apology for descending on them so early. She said, “I need to do something. I can't just sit around. I had to before, but I don't have to now, and my nerves are shot. There's got to be something . . .” She seemed to notice the tumbling quality of what she was saying because she stopped herself and then said wryly, “Sorry. I'm operating on something like fifty cups of coffee. I've been awake since three.”

“Have some orange juice,” St. James offered. “Have you had breakfast?”

“Can't eat,” she answered. “But thanks. I didn't say that yesterday. I meant to. Without you two here . . . Just thanks.” She sat on a chair at an adjoining table, scooting it over to join St. James and his wife. She looked round at the other occupants of the dining room: men in business suits with mobile phones next to their cutlery, briefcases on the floor by their chairs, and newspapers unfolded. The atmosphere was as hushed as a gentleman's club in London. She said in a low voice, “Like a library in here.”

St. James said, “Bankers. A lot on their minds.”

Deborah said, “Stuffy.” She offered China an affectionate smile.

China took the juice that St. James poured for her. “My mind won't stop the stream of if-onlys. I didn't want to come to Europe and if only I'd stayed firm . . . If only I'd refused to talk about it again . . . If only I'd had enough work going on to keep me at home . . . He might not have come either. None of this would have happened.”

“It doesn't do any good, thinking that,” Deborah said. “Things happen because they happen. That's all. Our job isn't to un-happen them”—she smiled at her neologism—“but just to move forward.”

China returned her smile. “I think I've heard that before.”

“You gave good advice.”

“You didn't like it at the time.”

“No. I suppose it seemed . . . well, heartless, really. Which is how things always seem when you want your friends to join you in a long-term wallow.”

China wrinkled her nose. “Don't be so rough on yourself.”

“You do the same, then.”

“Okay. A deal.”

The two women gazed fondly at each other. St. James looked from one to the other and recognised that a feminine communication was going on, one that he couldn't comprehend. It concluded with Deborah saying to China River, “I've missed you,” and China returning with a soft laugh, a cock of her head, and a “Boy, that'll teach you.” At which point, their conversation closed.

The exchange served as a reminder to St. James that Deborah had more of a life than was expressed by the stretch of years he had known her. Coming into his conscious world when she was seven years old, his wife had always seemed a permanent part of the map of his particular universe. While the fact that she had a universe of her own did not come as a shock to him, he found it disconcerting to be forced to accept that she'd had a wealth of experiences in which he was not a participant. That he
could
have been a participant was a thought for another morning when far less was at stake.

He said, “Have you spoken to the advocate yet?”

China shook her head. “He's not in. He would've stayed at the station as long as they were questioning him, though. Since he didn't call me . . .” She fingered a piece of toast from the rack as if she meant to eat it, but she pushed it away instead. “I figured it went on into the night. That's how it was when they talked to me.”

“I'll begin there, then,” St. James told her. “And you two . . . I think you need to pay a call on Stephen Abbott. He spoke to you the other day, my love,” to Deborah, “so I expect he'll be willing to speak to you again.”

He led the two women outside and round to the car park. There they spread out a map of the island on the Escort's bonnet and traced a route to
Le Grand Havre,
a wide gouge into the north coast of the island comprising three bays and a harbour, above which a network of footpaths gave access to military towers and disused forts. Acting as navigator, China would guide Deborah to that location, where Anaïs Abbott had a house in
La Garenne.
In the meantime, St. James would pay a call at the police station and glean from DCI Le Gallez whatever information he could regarding Cherokee's arrest.

He watched his wife and her friend drive off, their route established. They dipped down Hospital Lane and followed the road in the direction of the harbour. He could see the curve of Deborah's cheek as the car made its turn towards St. Julian's Avenue. She was smiling at something her friend had just said.

He stood for a moment and thought about the myriad ways he might caution his wife had she been willing and able to hear him. It's not what I
think,
he would have told her in explanation. It's everything that I do not yet know.

Le Gallez, he hoped, would fill in the gaps in his knowledge. St. James sought him out.

The DCI had just arrived at the police station. He still had on his overcoat when he came to fetch St. James. He shed this on a chair in the incident room and directed St. James to a china board, at the top of which a uniformed constable was attaching a line of colour photographs.

“Check them,” Le Gallez said with a nod. He looked quite pleased with himself.

The pictures, St. James saw, featured a medium-size brown bottle, the sort that often contained prescription cough syrup. It lay cradled in what looked like dead grass and weeds, with a burrow rising on either side of it. One of the pictures showed its size in comparison with a plastic ruler. Others showed its location with respect to the nearest live flora, to the apparent field in which it lay, to the hedgerow shielding the field from the road, and to wood-shrouded road itself which St. James recognised since he'd walked it himself.

“The lane that leads to the bay,” he said.

“That's the spot, all right,” Le Gallez acknowledged.

“What is it, then?”

“The bottle?” The DCI went to a desk and picked up a piece of paper that he read from, saying,
“Eschscholzia californica.”

“Which is?”

“Oil of poppy.”

“You've got your opiate, then.”

Le Gallez grinned. “That we do.”

“And
californica
means . . .”

“Just what you'd expect. His prints are on the bottle. Big as life. Clear and lovely. A sight for work-sore eyes, let me tell you.”

“Damn,” St. James murmured, more to himself than to the DCI.

“We've got our man.” Le Gallez sounded completely confident of his facts, every bit as if he hadn't been equally confident that they'd got their woman twenty-four hours earlier.

“How've you got it sorted, then?”

Le Gallez used a pencil to gesture to the pictures as he spoke. “How'd it get there, you mean? I figure it like this: He wouldn't have put the opiate in the Thermos the night before or even earlier that morning. Always the chance that Brouard might rinse it out before he used it for his tea. So he followed him down to the bay. He put the oil in the Thermos while Brouard was swimming.”

“Taking the risk of being seen?”

“What sort of risk was it? It's not even dawn, so he doesn't expect anyone to be out and about. In case anyone is, he's wearing his sister's cloak. For his part, Brouard's swimming out in the bay and he's not paying attention to the beach. No big deal for River to wait till he's swimming. Then he slips down to the Thermos—he was following Brouard, so he would've seen where he left it—and he pours the oil inside. Then he slips away wherever: into the trees, behind a rock, near the snack hut. He waits for Brouard to come out of the water and drink the tea like he does every morning and everyone knows it. Ginkgo and green tea. Puts hair on the chest and more important puts fire in the bollocks, which is what Brouard wants in order to keep the girlfriend happy. River waits for the opiate to do the trick. When it does, he's on him.”

“And if it hadn't done the trick on the beach?”

“No matter to him, was it?” Le Gallez shrugged eloquently. “It was still before dawn, and the opiate would take effect somewhere on Brouard's route home. He'd be able to get to him no matter where it happened. When it happened on the beach, he shoved the stone down his throat and that was it. He reckoned the cause of death would be labeled as choking on a foreign object, and indeed it was. He got rid of the poppy-oil bottle by tossing it into the bushes as he trotted home. Didn't realise that toxicology tests would be run on the body no matter what the cause of death looked like.”

There was sense to this. Killers invariably made some sort of miscalculation somewhere along the line, which was largely how killers got themselves caught. With Cherokee River's fingerprints on the bottle that had contained the opiate, it made sense that Le Gallez would turn his sights on him. But all the other details in the case remained to be explained. St. James chose one of them.

“How do you account for the ring? Are his prints on it as well?”

Le Gallez shook his head. “Couldn't get a decent print from it. A partial of a partial, but that was it.”

“Then?”

“He would've taken it with him. He may even have intended to shove it down Brouard's throat instead of the stone. The stone muddied the waters for us for a bit, and that would've been nice, to his way of thinking. How blatant would he want it to be that his sister was the killer after all? He wouldn't've wanted to hand it to us. He would've wanted us to work a little to reach the conclusion.”

St. James considered all this. It was reasonable enough—despite his wife's loyalties to the River siblings—but there was something else that Le Gallez wasn't talking about in his haste to close the case without pinning the crime on a fellow islander. He said, “You do see, I expect, that what applies to Cherokee River applies to others as well. And there are others who at least have motives for wanting Brouard dead.” He didn't wait for Le Gallez to argue, hastening on to say, “Henry Moullin has a fairy wheel hanging among his keys and a dream to be a glass artist—at Brouard's urging—that apparently came to nothing. Bertrand Debiere's apparently in debt because he assumed he'd get the commission for Brouard's museum. And as to the museum itself—”

Le Gallez cut in with a flick of his hand. “Moullin and Brouard were fast friends. Had been for years. Worked together to change the old Thibeault Manor to
Le Reposoir.
No doubt Henry gave him the stone at one time or another as a token of friendship. Way of saying, ‘You're one of us now, my man.' As for Debiere, I can't see Nobby killing the very man whose mind he hoped to change, can you?”

“Nobby?”

“Bertrand.” Le Gallez had the grace to look embarrassed. “Nickname. We were at school together.”

Which likely made Debiere even less a potential candidate for murderer in the eye of the DCI than he would have been merely as a Guernseyman. St. James sought a way to prise open the inspector's mind, if only a crack. “But why? What motive could Cherokee River have? What motive could his sister have had when
she
was your principal suspect?”

“Brouard's trip to California. Those months ago. River laid his plan then.”

“Why?”

Le Gallez lost patience. “Look, man, I don't know,” he said hotly. “I don't
need
to know. I just need to find Brouard's killer and I've done it. Right, I fingered the sister first, but I fingered her on the evidence he planted. Just like I'm fingering him on the evidence now.”

“Yet someone else could have planted all of it.”

“Who? Why?” Le Gallez hopped off his desk and advanced on St. James rather more aggressively than the moment warranted, and St. James knew he was inches away from being tossed unceremoniously from the station.

He said quietly, “There's money missing from Brouard's account, Inspector. A great deal of money. Did you know that?”

Le Gallez's expression altered. St. James seized the advantage.

“Ruth Brouard told me about it. It was evidently paid out over time.”

Le Gallez considered this. He said with less conviction than before, “River could have—”

St. James interrupted. “If you want to think River was involved in that—in a blackmail scheme of some sort, let's say—why would he kill the goose when the golden eggs are still coming? But
if
that's the case, if River was indeed blackmailing Brouard, why would Brouard accept him—of all people—as a courier selected by his lawyer in America? He would have
had
to be told the name by Kiefer prior to River's coming, else how would he have known who to fetch from the airport? When he was told and if the name was River, he would have put a stop to that at once.”

“He didn't know in time,” Le Gallez countered, but he was beginning to sound far less sure of himself.

St. James pressed forward. “Inspector, Ruth Brouard didn't know her brother was running through his fortune. My guess is that no one else knew, either. At least not at first. So doesn't it make sense that someone may have killed him to stop him from depleting his funds? If it doesn't suggest that, doesn't it suggest he was involved in something illegal? And doesn't
that
suggest a motive for murder far more ironclad than anything either of the Rivers have?”

Le Gallez was silent. St. James could see by his expression that the DCI was abashed by being presented with a piece of information about his murder victim that he himself should have had. He looked to the china board where the pictures of the bottle that had contained the opiate declared that his killer had been found. He looked back to St. James and seemed to ponder the challenge with which the other man had presented him. He finally said, “Right. Come with me, then. We've got phone calls to make.”