“But she does have the right—”
“China and Mom?” Cherokee cut in. “They don't . . . Well, Mom was never much of a mom, not like other moms, and China doesn't want her to know about this. I think it's because . . . you know . . . other moms would catch the next plane out, but our mom? No way. There might be an endangered species to save. So why tell her in the first place? At least, that's what China's thinking.”
“What about her father? Is he . . . ?” Deborah hesitated. The subject of China's father had always been a delicate one.
Cherokee raised an eyebrow. “Locked up? Oh yeah. He's inside again. So there's no one to call.”
A step sounded on the kitchen stairs. Deborah put plates on the table and heard the uneven nature of someone's cautious descent. She said, “That'll be Simon.” He was up earlier than usual, far before her father, which Joseph Cotter wouldn't like. He'd cared for Simon throughout his long-ago convalescence from the drunken road crash that had crippled him, and he didn't like it if Simon denied him the chance to hover protectively over him.
“Fortunately, I'm making enough for three,” Deborah said as her husband joined them.
Simon looked from the cooker to the table where she had laid crockery. “I hope your father's heart is strong enough to sustain this shock,” he said.
“Most amusing.”
Simon kissed her and then nodded at Cherokee. “You look much better this morning. How's the head?”
Cherokee fingered the plaster near his hairline. “Better. I had a pretty good nurse.”
“She knows what she's doing,” Simon said.
Deborah poured the eggs into the pan and set about scrambling them efficiently. “He's definitely drier,” she pointed out. “After we eat, I've said I'll pop him over to the American embassy.”
“Ah. I see.” Simon glanced at Cherokee. “Guernsey police haven't notified the embassy already? That's unusual.”
“No. They have,” Cherokee said. “But the embassy didn't send anyone. They just phoned to make sure she had a lawyer to speak for her in court. And then it was Good, that's fine, she's being represented then, phone us if you need anything else. I said I do need you. I need you here. I told them we weren't even on the island when it happened. But they said the police would have their evidence and there was really nothing else they could do till things got played out. That's what they said. Till things got played out. Like this was a basketball game or something.” He moved away from the table abruptly. “I need someone from the embassy over there. This whole thing's a set-up, and if I don't do something to stop it from happening, there's going to be a trial and a sentence before the month's up.”
“Can the embassy do anything?” Deborah put their breakfast on the table. “Simon, do you know?”
Her husband considered the question. He didn't work often for embassies, more often instead for the CPS or for barristers who were mounting a criminal defence in court and required an outside expert witness to offset the testimony of someone from one police laboratory or another. But he knew enough to be able to explain what the American embassy would doubtless offer Cherokee when he put in his appearance in Grosvenor Square.
“Due process,” he said. “That's what the embassy works to ensure. They'll make certain that the laws of the land are applied to China's situation.”
“That's all they can do?” Cherokee asked.
“Not much more, I'm afraid.” Simon sounded regretful, but he went on in a more reassuring tone. “I expect they'll make sure she has good representation. They'll check the lawyer's credentials and make sure he wasn't called to the bar just three weeks ago. They'll see to it that anyone in the States whom China wants to have informed will be informed. They'll get her post sent to her in good time and they'll make her part of their regular round of visitations, I expect. They'll do what they can.” He observed Cherokee for a moment and then added kindly, “It's early days yet, you know.”
“We weren't even there when all this came down,” Cherokee said numbly. “When it all happened. I kept telling them that but they wouldn't believe me. They have to have records at the airport, don't they? Records of when we left? They have to have records.”
“Of course,” Simon said. “If the day and the the time of death conflict with your departure, that's something that'll come out quickly.” He toyed with his knife, tapping it against his plate.
Deborah said, “What? Simon, what?”
He looked at Cherokee and then beyond him to the kitchen window, where Alaska sat alternately washing his face and stopping to press his paw against the rain tracks on the glass as if he could prevent them from coursing downward. He said carefully, “You have to look at this with a level head. This isn't a third world country we're talking about. It's not a totalitarian state. The police on Guernsey aren't about to make an arrest without evidence. So”—he set his knife to one side—“the reality is this: Something definite has actually led them to believe they've got the killer they want.” He looked at Cherokee then and he studied his face in his usual dispassionate scientist's fashion, as if seeking reassurance that the other man could handle what he was about to conclude with. “You need to prepare yourself.”
“For what?” Cherokee reached as if unconsciously towards the table's edge.
“For whatever your sister may have done, I'm afraid. Without your knowledge.”
Chapter 3
“WINKLEWATER, FRANKIE. 'AT'S WHAT we called it. Never mentioned that, did I? Never talked much of how bad things got round the subject of food, did I, lad? Don't much like to think about those times. Bloody Krauts . . . What they did to this island . . .”
Frank Ouseley slipped his hands gently through his father's armpits as the old man maundered on. He eased him off the plastic chair in the bath and guided his left foot onto the tattered mat that covered the cold linoleum. He'd turned the radiator up as far as it would go this morning, but it still seemed frigid in the bathroom to him. So, one hand on his father's arm to keep him steady, he grabbed the towel from its rail and shook it out. He tucked it snugly round his father's shoulders, which were wizened as was the rest of him. Graham Ouseley's flesh was ninety-two years old, and it hung upon his frame like stringy bread dough.
“Threw everything into the pot in those days,” Graham went on, leaning his whippet's frame against Frank's own somewhat rounded shoulder. “Shredded up parsnips, we did, boy, when we could get 'em. Baked 'em first, o' course. Camellia leaves too, lime blossoms and lemon balm, lad. And then we threw bicarb in the pot to make the leaves go longer. Winklewater was what we called it. Well, we couldn't rightly call it tea.” He chuckled and his fragile shoulders shook. The chuckle segued into a cough. The cough turned into a wrestle for air. Frank grabbed his father to keep him upright.
“Steady on, Dad.” He grasped Graham's fragile body firmly, despite his own fear that one day clutching on to him to keep him from falling was going to do worse damage than any fall he might actually take, snapping his bones like a dunlin's legs. “Here. Let's get you onto the toilet.”
“Don't have to pee, boy,” Graham protested, trying to shake himself free. “Wha's the matter with you? Mind going, or something? Peed before we got into the bath.”
“Right. I know that. I just want you to sit.”
“Nothing wrong with my legs. I c'n stand with the best of them. Had to do that when the Krauts were here. Stand still and look like you're queuing for meat. Not passing 'long the news, no sir. No radio receiver in your dung hill, son. Look like you'd just a'soon heil Mr. Dirty Moustache as say God save the King, and they didn't bother you. So you could do what you liked. If you were careful.”
“I remember that, Dad,” Frank said patiently. “I remember your telling me about it.” Despite his father's protest, he lowered him onto the toilet seat, where he began to pat his body dry. As he did so, he listened with some concern to Graham's breathing, waiting for it to return to normal. Congestive heart failure, his doctor had said. There's medication,
naturally, and we'll put him on it. But truth to tell, at his advanced age, it's only a matter of time. It's an act of God, Frank, that he's lived this long.
When he'd first received the news, Frank had thought, No. Not now. Not yet and not until. But now he was ready to let his father go. He'd long ago realised how lucky he was to have had him around well into his own sixth decade, and while he'd hoped to have Graham Ouseley alive some eighteen months longer, he'd come to understand—with a grief that felt like a net from which he could never escape—that it was just as well this was not to be.
“Did I?” Graham asked, and he screwed up his face as he sorted through his memory. “Did I tell you all that afore, laddie? When?”
Two or three hundred times, Frank thought. He'd been listening to his father's World War II stories since his childhood, and most of them he could repeat by heart. The Germans had occupied Guernsey for five years, preparatory to their foiled plan to invade England, and the deprivations the populace had endured—not to mention the myriad ways they had attempted to thwart German aims on the island—had long been the stuff of his father's conversation. While most children nursed from their mother's breasts, Frank had long suckled at the teat of Graham's reminiscence. Never forget this, Frankie. Whatever else happens in your life, my boy, you must never forget.
He hadn't, and unlike so many children who might have grown weary of the tales their parents told them on Remembrance Sunday, Frank Ouseley had hung upon his father's words and had wished he'd managed to get himself born a decade earlier so that even as a child he could have been part of that troubled and heroic time.
They had nothing to match it now. Not the Falklands or the Gulf—those abbreviated, nasty little conflicts that were fought about next to nothing and geared to stimulate the populace into flag-waving patriotism—and certainly not Northern Ireland, where he himself had served, ducking sniper fire in Belfast and wondering what the hell he was doing in the middle of a sectarian struggle promoted by thugs who'd been taking murderous pot shots at each other since the turn of the last century. There was no heroism in any of that because there was no single enemy who could be identified and against whose image one could fling himself and die. They weren't like World War II.
He steadied his father on the toilet seat and reached for his clothes, which lay in a neatly folded stack on the edge of the basin. He did the laundry himself, so the undershorts and the vest weren't as white as they might have been but, as his father's eyesight was growing steadily worse, Frank was fairly certain Graham wouldn't notice.
Dressing his dad was something he did by rote, always easing his father into his clothing in the exact same order. It was a ritual that he had once found reassuring, giving a sameness to his days with Graham that made the promise, however false, that those days would continue indefinitely. But now he watched his father warily, and he wondered if the catch in his breath and the waxy nature of his skin presaged an end to their time together, a time that had now exceeded fifty years. Two months ago he would have quailed at that thought. Two months ago all he wanted was enough time to establish the Graham Ouseley Wartime Museum so his father could proudly cut the ribbon on its doors on the morning it finally opened. The passage of sixty days had changed everything unrecognisably, though, and that was a pity because gathering every memento that represented the years of German occupation on the island had been the mortar of Frank's relationship with his father for as long as he could remember. It was their shared life's work and their mutual passion, done for a love of history and a belief that the present and future populations of Guernsey should be educated about what their forebears had endured.
That their plans would likely come to nothing now was something which Frank didn't want his father to know just yet. Since Graham's days were numbered, there seemed no sense in dashing a dream that he would not even have had in the first place had Guy Brouard not walked into their lives.
“Wha's up for today?” Graham asked his son as Frank pulled the track-suit trousers up round his shriveled bum. “'Bout time to walk the construction site, i'n't it? Breaking earth any day now, a'n't they, Frankie? You'll be there for that, won't you, lad? Turning over the ceremonial shovelful? Or's that something Guy's wanting for himself?”
Frank avoided the entire set of questions, indeed the entire subject of Guy Brouard. He'd so far managed to keep from his father the news of their friend and benefactor's gruesome death, as he hadn't yet decided whether the information would be too burdensome for his health. Besides, they were playing a waiting game at the moment whether his father knew it or not: There was no news about how Guy's estate was being settled.
Frank said to his father, “I thought to check through the uniforms this morning. It looked to me like the damp's getting to them.” This was a lie, of course. The ten uniforms they had—from the dark-collared overcoats worn by the Wehrmacht to the threadbare coveralls used by Luftwaffe anti-aircraft crews—were all preserved in airtight containers and acid-free tissue against the day that they would be placed in glass cases designed to keep them forever. “I can't think how it happened, but if it has, we need to get on to it before they start to rot.”
“Damn rights, that,” his father agreed. “You take care, Frankie. All that clobber. Got to keep it mint, we do.”
“That we do, Dad,” Frank replied mechanically.
His father seemed satisfied with this. He allowed his sparse hair to be combed and himself to be helped to the lounge. There Frank tucked him into his favourite armchair and handed him the television remote. He had no worries that his father might tune in to the island station and hear the very news about Guy Brouard which he was attempting to keep from him. The only programmes Graham Ouseley ever watched were cooking shows and the soaps. The former he took notes from, for reasons that never were clear to his son. The latter he studied completely enthralled and spent his daily dinner hour discussing the troubled individuals on them as if they were his next-door neighbours.
There were none of those where the Ouseleys lived. Years ago there had been: two other families living in the line of cottages that grew like an appendage, out from the old water mill called Moulin des Niaux. But over time, Frank and his father had managed to purchase these dwellings when they came up for sale. Now they held the vast collection that was supposed to fill the wartime museum.
Frank took his keys and, after checking the radiator in the lounge and setting up the electric fire when he didn't like the modest warmth coming from the old pipes, he walked over to the cottage next to the one in which he and his father had lived forever. They were all in a terrace and the Ouseleys lived in the farthest one from the water mill itself, whose ancient wheel was known to creak and groan at night if the wind whistled up the stream-carved glen that was the Talbot Valley.
The cottage door stuck when Frank pushed upon it because the old stone floor had been laid uneven and neither Frank nor his father had thought to correct the problem in the years they'd owned the place. They were using it for storage primarily, and a sticking door had always seemed a small matter compared to the other challenges that an ageing building presented to someone who wanted to use it as a storage facility. It was more important to keep the roof weatherproof and the windows free of draughts. If the heating system worked and a balance could be maintained between dryness and humidity, the fact that a door was a bother to open was something one could easily overlook.
Guy Brouard hadn't done that, though. The door was the first thing he mentioned when he paid his initial call upon the Ouseleys. He'd said, “The wood's got swollen. That means damp, Frank. Are you guarding against it?”
“It's the floor, actually,” Frank had pointed out to him. “Not the damp. Although we've got that as well, I'm afraid. We try to keep the heat in here constant, but in the winter . . . I expect it's the proximity to the stream.”
“You need higher ground.”
“Not easy to come by on the island.”
Guy hadn't disagreed. There were no extreme
elevations on Guernsey save perhaps for the cliffs on the south end of the island, which dropped precipitously down to the Channel. But the presence of the Channel itself with its salt-laden air made the cliffs unsuitable as a place to which the collection could be moved . . . if they even could find a building in which to house it, an unlikely prospect.
Guy hadn't suggested the museum at once. He hadn't at first comprehended the breadth of the Ouseleys' collection. He'd come to the Talbot Valley as the result of an invitation extended by Frank at the coffee-and-biscuits conclusion of a presentation at the historical society. They'd assembled above the market square of St. Peter Port, in the old assembly room that had long since been usurped by an extension to the Guille-Alles Library. There they gathered to listen to a lecture about the 1945 Allied investigation of Hermann Göring, which had turned out to be a dry recitation of the facts gleaned from something called The Consolidated Interrogation Report. Most of the members were nodding off a mere ten minutes into the talk, but Guy Brouard had appeared to hang upon the speaker's every word. This told Frank that he might be a worthwhile confederate. So few people really cared any longer about events that happened in another century. Thus, he'd approached him at the lecture's conclusion, not knowing who he was at first and learning to his surprise that he was the gentleman who'd taken the derelict Thibeault Manor between St. Martin and St. Peter Port and engineered its renaissance as Le Reposoir.
Had Guy Brouard not been an easy man to know, Frank might have exchanged a few pleasantries with him that night and gone on his way. But the truth was that Guy had displayed an interest in Frank's avocation that Frank had found flattering. So he'd extended the invitation for a call upon Moulin des Niaux.
Guy had doubtless come thinking that the invitation was the sort of polite gesture which a dilettante makes to someone evidencing a suitable degree of curiosity about his area of dabbling. But when he'd seen the first room of boxes and crates, of shoeboxes filled with bullets and medals, of armaments half a century old, of bayonets and knives and gas masks and signaling equipment, he'd given a low, appreciative whistle and he'd settled in for a lengthy browse.
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