A Place of Hiding

by Elizabeth George

  Within the secondary chamber of the dolmen, where he and Taboo now hid, was the cache. This, too, Mr. Guy had shown him: a natural fissure between two of the stones that comprised the wall of the dolmen. That wouldn't have been here originally, Mr. Guy had said. But time, weather, the movement of the earth . . . Nothing manmade withstands nature completely.

  The cache was just to one side of the camp bed and to the uninitiated it appeared to be a simple gap in the stones and nothing more. But sliding a hand deep inside revealed a second, wider gap behind the stone that was nearest the camp bed, and this was the cache where secrets and treasures too precious for common view could be kept.

  If I show you this, it says something, Paul. Something larger than words. Something bigger than thoughts.

  Paul reckoned there was enough room for the grenade within the cache. He'd placed his hand in there before, guided by Mr. Guy's own hand with Mr. Guy's reassuring words spoken softly into his ear: There's nothing in there at the moment, I wouldn't play a nasty trick on you, Prince. Thus he knew there was space for one fist clasped over another, and that was more than enough space for a grenade to occupy. And the depth of the cache was more than sufficient. For Paul hadn't been able to feel the end of it no matter how far he'd managed to stretch his arm.

  He moved the camp bed to one side and he set the wooden box with its candle in the middle of the alcove floor. Taboo whined at this alteration in his environment, but Paul patted his head and fondly touched the tip of his nose. Nothing to worry about, his gesture told the dog. We're safe in this place. No one knows about it now but you and me.

  Carefully clutching the grenade, he lay on the cold stone floor. He squirreled his arm into the narrow fissure. It widened six or so inches from the opening, and even though he couldn't see far into the interior of the hiding spot, he knew where the second opening was by feel, so he anticipated no problem in depositing the hand grenade there.

  But there was a problem. Not four inches inside the fissure was something else. He felt his knuckles press against it first, something firm and unmoving and entirely unexpected.

  Paul gasped and withdrew his hand, but it was only a moment before he realised that whatever it was, it certainly wasn't alive, so there was no reason to be afraid of it. He set the grenade carefully on the camp bed, and he brought the candle closer to the opening of the fissure.

  Problem was, he couldn't illuminate the fissure and see inside it at the same time. So he resumed his former position on his stomach and slid his hand, then his arm, back into the hiding place.

  His fingers found it, something firm but giving. Not hard. Smooth. Shaped like a cylinder. He grasped it and began to pull it out.

  This is a special place, a place of secrets, and it's our secret now. Yours and mine. Can you keep secrets, Paul?

  He could. Oh, he could. He could better than could. Because as he pulled it towards him, Paul understood exactly what it was that Mr. Guy had hidden within the dolmen.

  The island, after all, was a landscape of secrets and the dolmen itself was a secret place within that larger landscape of things buried, other things unspoken, and memories people wished to forget. It was no wonder to Paul that deep within the ages of an earth that could still yield medals, sabres, bullets, and other items more than half a century old lay buried somewhere something even more valuable, something from the time of the privateers or even further back, but something precious. And what he was pulling from the fissure was the key to finding that long-ago-buried something.

  He'd found a final gift from Mr. Guy, who had already given him so very much.

  “Énne rouelle dé faïtot,” Ruth Brouard said in answer to Margaret Chamberlain's question. “It's used for barns, Margaret.”

  Margaret thought this reply was deliberately obtuse, so typical of Ruth, whom she'd never particularly come to like despite having had to live with Guy's sister for the entirety of her marriage to the man. She'd clung too much to Guy, Ruth had, and too great a devotion between siblings was unseemly. It smacked of . . . Well, Margaret didn't even want to think of what it smacked of. Yes, she realised that these specific siblings—Jewish like herself but European Jewish during World War II, which gave them certain allowances for strange behaviour, she would grant them that—had lost every single relation to the unmitigated evil of the Nazis and thus had been forced to become everything to each other from early childhood. But the fact that Ruth had never developed a life of her own in all these years was not only questionable and pre-Victorian, it was something that made her an incomplete woman in Margaret's eyes, sort of a lesser creature who'd lived a half life, and that life in the shadows to boot.

  Margaret decided patience would be in order. She said, “For barns? I don't quite understand, dear. The stone would have to be quite small, wouldn't it? To have gone into Guy's mouth?” She saw her sister-in-law flinch at the last question, as if talking about it awakened her darkest fantasies of how Guy had met his end: writhing on the beach, clawing uselessly at his throat. Well, it couldn't be helped. Margaret needed information and she meant to have it.

  “What use would it have in a barn, Ruth?”

  Ruth looked up from the needlework she'd been occupied with when Margaret had located her in the morning room. It was an enormous piece of canvas stretched on a wooden frame that was itself on a stand before which Ruth sat, an elfin figure in black trousers and an overlarge black cardigan that had probably once been Guy's. Her round-framed spectacles had slid down her nose, and she knuckled them back into place with one of her childlike hands.

  “It's not used inside the barn,” she explained. “It's used on a ring with the keys to the barn. At least, that's what it once was used for. There are few enough barns on Guernsey now. It was for keeping the barn safe from witches' familiars. Protection, Margaret.”

  “Ah. A charm, then.”

  “Yes.”

  “I see.” What Margaret thought was These ridiculous islanders. Charms for witches. Mumbo-jumbo for fairies. Ghosts on the cliff tops. Devils on the prowl. She'd never considered her former husband a man who'd fall for that sort of nonsense. “Did they show you the stone? Was it something you recognised? Did it belong to Guy? I ask only because it doesn't seem like him to carry round charms and that sort of thing. At least, it doesn't seem like the Guy I knew. Was he hoping for luck in some venture?”

  With a woman was what she didn't add, although both of them knew the phrase was there. Aside from business—at which Guy Brouard had excelled like Midas and needed no luck at all—the only other venture he had ever engaged in was the pursuit and conquest of the opposite sex, a fact that Margaret hadn't known until she'd found a pair of woman's knickers in her husband's briefcase, playfully tucked there by the Edinburgh flight attendant he'd been shagging on the side. Their marriage had ended the instant Margaret had found those knickers instead of the chequebook she'd been looking for. All that had remained for the next two years was her solicitor meeting with his solicitor to hammer out a deal that would finance the rest of her life.

  “The only venture he was involved with recently was the wartime museum.” Ruth bent back over the frame that held her needlepoint and she expertly worked the needle in and out of the design she'd rendered there. “And he didn't carry a charm for that. He didn't really need to. It was going well enough, as far as I know.” She looked up again, her needle poised for another plunge. “Did he tell you about the museum, Margaret? Has Adrian told you?”

  Margaret didn't want to get into Adrian with her sister-in-law or anyone else, so she said, “Yes. Yes. The museum. Of course. I knew about that.”

  Ruth smiled, inwardly and fondly it seemed. “It made him terribly proud. To be able to do something like that for the island. Something lasting. Something fine and meaningful.”

  Unlike his life, Margaret thought. She wasn't there to listen to encomia on the subject of Guy Brouard, Patron of Everything and Everyone. She was present only to ensure Guy Brouard had in death established himself
additionally as Patron of His Only Son.

  She said, “What will happen now? To his plans?”

  “I suppose it all depends on the will,” Ruth replied. She sounded careful. Too careful, Margaret thought. “Guy's will, I mean. Well, of course, who else's? I haven't actually had a meeting with his advocate yet.”

  “Why not, dearest?” Margaret asked.

  “I suppose because talking about his will makes everything real. Permanent. I'm avoiding that.”

  “Would you prefer I talk to his solicitor . . . his advocate, then? If there are arrangements to be made, I'm happy to make them for you, dear.”

  “Thank you, Margaret. It's good of you to offer, but I must handle it myself. I must . . . and I will. Soon. When . . . when it feels right to do so.”

  “Yes,” Margaret murmured. “Of course.” She watched her sister-in-law scoot her needle in and out of the canvas and fix it into place, indicating the conclusion of her work for the moment. She tried to sound like the incarnation of empathy, but inside she was champing at the bit to know exactly how her former husband had distributed his immense fortune. Specifically, she wanted to learn the manner in which he'd remembered Adrian. Because although while living he'd refused their son the money he needed for his new business, Guy's death surely had to benefit Adrian in ways that his life had not. And that would bring Carmel Fitzgerald and Adrian back together again, wouldn't it? Which would see Adrian married at last: a normal man leading a normal life with no more peculiar little incidents to worry about.

  Ruth had gone to a small drop-front desk, where she'd picked up a delicate shadowbox frame. In this was encased one half of a locket, which she gazed at longingly. It was, Margaret saw, that tedious parting gift from Maman, handed over at the boat dock. Je vais conserver l'autre moitié, mes chéris. Nous le reconstituerons lorsque nous nous retrouverons.

  Yes, yes, Margaret wanted to say. I know you bloody miss her, but we've business to conduct.

  “Sooner is better than later, though, dearest,” Margaret said gently. “You ought to speak to him. It's rather important.”

  Ruth set the frame down but continued to look at it. “It won't change things, speaking to anyone,” she said.

  “But it will clarify them.”

  “If clarity's needed.”

  “You do need to know how he wanted . . . well, what his wishes were. You do need to know that. With an estate as large as his is going to be, forewarned is forearmed, Ruth. I've no doubt his advocate would agree with me. Has he contacted you, by the way? The advocate? After all, he must know . . .”

  “Oh yes. He knows.”

  Well, then? Margaret thought. But she said soothingly, “I see. Yes. Well, all in good time, my dear. When you feel you're ready.”

  Which would be soon, Margaret hoped. She didn't want to have to stay on this infernal island any longer than was absolutely necessary.

  Ruth Brouard knew this about her sister-in-law. Margaret's presence at Le Reposoir had nothing to do with her failed marriage to Guy, with any sorrow or regret she might feel about the manner in which she and Guy had parted, or even with respect she might have thought appropriate to show at his terrible passing. Indeed, the fact that she'd so far not shown the least bit of curiosity about who had murdered Ruth's brother indicated where her true passion lay. In her mind, Guy had pots of money and she meant to have her ladle-full. If not for herself, then for Adrian.

  Vengeful bitch was what Guy had called her. She's got a collection of doctors willing to testify that he's too unstable to be anywhere but with his bloody mother, Ruth. But she's the one ruining the pathetic boy. The last time I saw him, he was covered with hives. Hives. At his age. God, she's quite mad.

  So it had gone year after year, with holiday visits cut short or canceled till the only opportunity Guy had to meet his son was in his ex-wife's watchful presence. She bloody stands guard, Guy had seethed. Probably because she knows if she didn't, I'd tell him to cut the apron strings . . . with a hatchet if necessary. There's nothing wrong with that boy that a few years in a decent school wouldn't sort out. And I'm not talking one of those cold-baths-in-the-morning and straps-on-the-backsides places, either. I'm talking about a modern school where he'd learn self-sufficiency which he isn't about to learn as long as she keeps him attached to her side like a barnacle.

  But Guy had never won the day over that. The result was poor Adrian as he was now, thirty-seven years old with no single talent or quality upon which he could draw to define himself. Unless an uninterrupted line of failures at everything from team sports to male-female relationships could be deemed a talent. Those failures could be laid directly at the feet of Adrian's relationship with his mother. One didn't need a degree in psychology to arrive at that conclusion. But Margaret would never see it that way, lest she have to take some form of responsibility for her son's enduring problems. And that, by God, she would never do.

  That was Margaret to the core. She was a don't-blame-me, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps sort of woman. If you couldn't pull yourself up by the bootstraps you were given, then you damn well ought to cut the bootstraps off.

  Poor, dear Adrian, to have had such a mother. That she meant well came to nothing at the end of the day, considering the ill she managed to do along the way.

  Ruth watched her now, as Margaret pretended to inspect the single memento she had of her mother, that little half-locket forever broken. She was a big woman, blonde with fiercely upswept hair and sunglasses—in grey December? How extraordinary, really!—perched on the top of her head. Ruth couldn't imagine that her brother had once been married to this woman, but she'd never been able to imagine that. She'd never quite managed to reconcile herself to the image of Margaret and Guy together as husband and wife, not the sex business which of course was part of human nature and could, as a result of that fact, accommodate itself to any sort of strange pairing, but to the emotional part, the sustaining part, the part that she imagined—having never been privileged to experience it herself—to be the fertile earth into which one planted family and future.

  As things turned out between her brother and Margaret, Ruth had been quite correct in her assumption that they were wildly unsuited. Had they not produced poor Adrian in a rare moment of sanguinity, they probably would have gone their separate ways at the end of their marriage, one of them grateful for the money she'd managed to excavate from the ruins of their relationship and the other delighted to part with that money as long as it meant he'd be free of one of his worst mistakes. But with Adrian as part of the equation, Margaret had not faded into obscurity. For Guy had loved his son—even if he'd been frustrated by him—and the fact of Adrian made the fact of Margaret an immutable given. Till one of them died: Guy or Margaret herself.

  But that was what Ruth didn't want to think of and couldn't bear to speak of, even though she knew she couldn't avoid the topic indefinitely.

  As if reading her thoughts, Margaret replaced the locket on the desk and said, “Ruth, dearest, I can't get ten words from Adrian about what happened. I don't want to be ghoulish about it, but I would like to understand. The Guy I knew never had an enemy in his life. Well, there were his women, of course, and women don't much like being discarded. But even if he'd done his usual—”

  Ruth said, “Margaret. Please.”

  “Wait.” Margaret hurried on. “We simply can't pretend, dear. This is not the time. We both know how he was. But what I'm saying is that even if a woman's been discarded, a woman rarely . . . as revenge . . . You know what I mean. So who . . . ? Unless it was a married woman this time, and the husband found out . . . ? Although Guy did normally avoid those types.” Margaret played with one of the three heavy gold chains she wore round her neck, the one with the pendant. This was a pearl, misshapen and enormous, a milky excrescence that lay between her breasts like a glob of petrified mashed potato.

  “He hadn't . . .” Ruth wondered why it hurt so to say it. She'd known her brother. She'd known what he was: the sum of so many p
arts that were good and only one that was dark, that was hurtful, that was dangerous. “There was no affair. No one had been discarded.”

  “But hasn't a woman been arrested, dear?”

  “Yes.”

  “And weren't she and Guy . . . ?”

  “Of course not. She'd been here only a few days. It had nothing to do with . . . nothing.”

  Margaret cocked her head, and Ruth could see what she was thinking. A few hours had long been more than enough for Guy Brouard to work his way when it came to sex. Margaret was about to begin probing on this subject. The shrewd expression on her face was enough to communicate that she was seeking a way into it that would look less like morbid curiosity and a belief that her once-philandering husband had finally got what he deserved and more like compassion for Ruth's loss of a brother more beloved to her than her own life. But Ruth was saved from having to enter into that conversation. A hesitant tap sounded against the open morning room door, and a tremulous voice said, “Ruthie? I'm . . . I'm not disturbing . . . ?”

  Ruth and Margaret turned to see a third woman standing in the doorway and behind her a gawky teenage girl, tall and not yet used to her height. “Anaïs,” Ruth said. “I didn't hear you come in.”

  “We used our key.” Anaïs held it up, a single brass statement of her place in Guy's life lying desolately in the palm of her hand. “I hope that was . . . Oh Ruth, I can't believe . . . still . . . I can't . . .” She began to weep.

  The girl behind her looked away uneasily, wiping her hands down the sides of her trousers. Ruth crossed the room and took Anaïs Abbott into her arms. “You're welcome to use the key as long as you like. That's what Guy would have wanted.”