A Place of Hiding

by Elizabeth George

  She went to him where he stood near the fireplace with his father's friend. She linked her arm through his. “Sit with me, darling,” she said to her son. “May I steal him from you, Mr. Ouseley?”

  There was no need for Frank Ouseley to respond because Ruth had closed the drawing room door, indicating that all relevant parties were present. Margaret led Adrian to a sofa that formed part of a seating group near the table on which Guy's solicitor—a reedy-looking man called Dominic Forrest—had set out his papers.

  Margaret didn't fail to notice that everyone was attempting to look as unanticipatory as possible. This included her own son upon whom she'd had to prevail to attend this meeting at all. He sat slumped, his face expressionless and his body a declaration of how little he cared to hear what his father had intended with his money.

  This made no difference to Margaret because she cared. So when Dominic Forrest put on his half-moon spectacles and cleared his throat, she was all attention. He'd made sure that Margaret knew this formal reading-of-the-will situation was extremely irregular. Far better for beneficiaries to be made aware of inheritances in a setting that allowed them the privacy to absorb the information and to ask any questions they might have without the delicacy of their situation being revealed to parties who might have no vested interest in their individual welfare.

  Which, Margaret knew, was legalese for how much Mr. Forrest would have preferred to be able to make arrangements to see each beneficiary separately in order to bill each one individually later. Nasty little man.

  Ruth perched birdlike on the edge of a Queen Anne chair not far from Valerie. Kevin Duffy remained at the window, Frank at the fireplace. Anaïs Abbott and her daughter came to sit on a love seat where the one wrung her hands and the other tried to tuck her giraffe legs somewhere where they wouldn't seem so obtrusive.

  Mr. Forrest took a seat and shook his papers with a flick of his wrist. The last will and testament of Mr. Brouard, he began, was written, signed, and witnessed on the second of October in this current year. It was a simple document.

  Margaret didn't much like the way things were developing. She steeled herself to hear news that was potentially less than good. This was wise on her part, as things turned out, because in extremely short order Mr. Forrest revealed that Guy's entire fortune consisted of a single bank account and an investment portfolio. The account and portfolio, in accordance with the laws of inheritance in the States of Guernsey—whatever that meant—were to be divided equally into two parts. The first part, once again in accordance with the laws of inheritance in the States of Guernsey, was to be distributed evenly among Guy's three children. The second part was to be given half to one Paul Fielder and half to one Cynthia Moullin.

  Of Ruth, beloved sister and lifelong companion of the deceased, there was no mention made at all. But considering the properties Guy owned in England, in France, in Spain, in the Seychelles, considering his international holdings, considering his stocks, his bonds, his works of art—not to mention Le Reposoir itself—none of which had even been mentioned in his will, it was no difficult feat to work out how Guy Brouard had made his feelings about his children crystal clear while simultaneously taking care of his sister. God in heaven, Margaret thought weakly. He must have given Ruth everything while he was still alive.

  Silence, which was stunned at first and which only slowly turned to outrage on Margaret's part, greeted the conclusion of Mr. Forrest's recitation. The first thing she thought was that Ruth had orchestrated this entire event to humiliate her. Ruth had never liked her. Never, never, never, never once had she liked her. And during the years in which Margaret had kept Guy from his son, Ruth had no doubt brewed a real hatred of her. So what true pleasure she would be getting from this moment when she was able to witness Margaret Chamberlain get her deserved comeuppance: not only being sandbagged by learning that Guy's estate was not as it had seemed but also having to witness her son receiving even less of that estate than two complete strangers called Fielder and Moullin.

  Margaret swung on her sister-in-law, ready to do battle. But she saw on Ruth's face a truth she didn't want to believe. Ruth had gone so pale that her lips were rendered in chalk, and her expression illustrated better than anything could that her brother's will was not what she had expected it to be. But there was more information than that contained in the combination of Ruth's expression and her invitation to the others to hear the will's reading. Indeed, those two facts led Margaret to an ineluctable conclusion: Not only had Ruth known about the existence of an earlier will, but she had also been privy to that will's contents.

  Why else invite Guy's most recent lover to be present? Why else Frank Ouseley? Why else the Duffys? There could be only one reason for this: Ruth had invited them all in good faith to be present because Guy had at one time left each of them a legacy.

  A legacy, Margaret thought. Adrian's legacy. Her own son's legacy. Her vision seemed occluded by a thin red veil at the realisation of what had actually occurred. That her son Adrian should be denied what was rightfully his . . . That he should be in effect cut out of his own father's will, despite the fancy dancing Guy may have done to make it seem otherwise . . . That he should be placed in the humiliating position of actually receiving less than two people—Fielder and Moullin, whoever the hell they were—who were no apparent relation of Guy's . . . That the vast majority of his father's possessions had obviously already been disposed of . . . That he should thus be literally set adrift with nothing by the very man who had given him life and then abandoned him without a fight and then apparently felt nothing in that abandonment and then sealed whatever rejection was implied in the abandonment by having his way with his only son's lover when that lover was on the verge—yes the verge—of the kind of commitment that could have changed his life forever and made him whole at last . . . It was inconceivable. The act itself was unconscionable. And someone was going to pay for it.

  Margaret didn't know how and she didn't know who. But she was determined to set matters right.

  Setting them right meant first wresting away the money her former husband had left to two utter strangers. Who were they, anyway? Where were they? More important, what had they to do with Guy?

  Two people clearly knew the answer to these questions. Dominic Forrest was one of them, he who was returning his paperwork to his briefcase and making some sort of noises about forensic accountants and banking statements and investment brokers and the like. And Ruth was the other, she who was hustling over to Anaïs Abbott—of all bloody people—and murmuring something into her ear. Forrest, Margaret knew, was unlikely to part with any more information than he'd given them during the reading of the will. But Ruth as her own sister-in-law and—crucially—as Adrian's aunt, Adrian who'd been so badly used by his father . . . Yes, Ruth would be forthcoming with facts when approached correctly.

  Next to her, Margaret became aware of Adrian trembling and she brought herself round abruptly. She'd been so caught up in thoughts of what-to-do-now that she'd not even considered the impact this moment was probably having on her son. God knew that Adrian's relationship with his father had been a difficult one, with Guy vastly preferring a long line of sexual liaisons to a close connection with his eldest child. But to be dealt with in this fashion was cruel, far more cruel than a life cut off from paternal influence ever could have been. And he was suffering for it now.

  So she turned to him, ready to tell him that they hadn't reached the end of anything in this moment, ready to point out that there were legal channels, modes of recourse, ways of settling or manipulating or threatening but in any case ways of getting what one wanted so he wasn't to worry and more than that he wasn't ever to believe that the terms of his father's will meant anything other than his father's momentary lunacy inspired by God only knew what . . . She was ready to say this, ready to put her arm round his shoulders, ready to buck him up and send her steel through his body. But she saw that none of that would be necessary.

  Adrian wasn't weeping.
He wasn't even withdrawing into himself.

  Margaret's son was silently laughing.

  Valerie Duffy had gone into the reading of the will worried for more than one reason, and only one of her worries was assuaged by the conclusion of the event. This was the worry pertaining to losing her home and her livelihood, which she'd feared might happen once Guy Brouard died. But the fact that Le Reposoir hadn't been mentioned in the will suggested that the estate had already been disposed of elsewhere, and Valerie was fairly certain in whose care and possession it now resided. That meant she and Kevin wouldn't be immediately forced out onto the street without employment, which was a vast relief.

  The rest of Valerie's worries remained, however. These pertained to Kevin's natural taciturnity, which she generally found untroubling but which she now found unnerving.

  She and her husband walked across the grounds of Le Reposoir, leaving the manor house behind them, heading for their cottage. Valerie had seen the variety of reactions on the faces of those who'd been gathered in the drawing room, and she'd read in each of them the hopes they'd had dashed. Anaïs Abbott had been relying upon financial exhumation from the grave she'd dug herself attempting to hold on to her man. Frank Ouseley had been anticipating a bequest enormous enough to build a monument to his father. Margaret Chamberlain had expected more than enough money to move her adult son permanently out from under her roof. And Kevin . . . ? Well, it was clear enough that Kevin had a lot on his mind, most of it having nothing to do with wills and bequests, so Kevin had walked into the drawing room without the handicap of a crowded canvas on which he'd painted his aspirations.

  She looked at him now, just a quick glance as he walked beside her. She knew he would think it unnatural if she made no comment, but she wanted to be careful with how much she said. Some things didn't bear talking about.

  “D'you think we ought to ring Henry, then?” she finally asked her husband.

  Kevin loosened his tie and undid the top button of his shirt, unused to the type of clothes most other men wore with ease. He said, “I expect he'll know soon enough. Doubtless, half the island will know by supper.”

  Valerie waited for him to say more, but he didn't. She wanted to be relieved at this, but the fact that he didn't look at her told her his thoughts were on the run.

  “Makes me wonder how he'll react, though,” Valerie said.

  “Does it, love?” Kevin asked her.

  He said it low so that Valerie nearly couldn't hear him at all, but his tone alone would have conveyed enough to make her shiver. She said, “Why do you ask that, Kev?” in the hope that she could force his hand.

  He said, “What people say they'll do and what they actually do are different sometimes, aren't they?” He moved his gaze to her.

  Valerie's shiver altered to a permanent chill. She felt it sweep up her legs and shoot into her stomach, where it curled round like a hairless cat and just lay there, asking her to do something about it. She waited for her husband to introduce the obvious topic that everyone who'd been sitting in the drawing room was at that moment probably either thinking of or speaking of to someone else. When he didn't, she said, “Henry was at the funeral, Kev. Did you speak to him? He came to the burial as well. And to the reception. Did you see him there? I expect that means he and Mr. Brouard were friendly right to the end. Which is good, I think. Because it would be dreadful if Mr. Brouard died at odds with anyone, and especially with Henry. Henry wouldn't want a crack in their friendship to be troubling his conscience, would he?”

  “No,” Kevin said. “A troubled conscience is a nasty thing. Keeps you up at night. Makes it hard to think of anything else but what you did to get it in the first place.” He stopped walking and Valerie did the same. They stood on the lawn. A sudden gust of wind from the Channel brought the salt air with it and with it as well the reminder of what had happened by the bay.

  “Do you think, Val,” Kevin said when a good thirty seconds had crawled by between them with Valerie making no reply to his comment, “that Henry's going to wonder about that will?”

  She glanced away, knowing his gaze was still on her and still attempting to draw her out. He usually could cajole her into speaking, this husband of hers, because no matter the twenty-seven years of their marriage, she loved him the way she'd done from the first, when he'd stripped the clothes from her willing body and loved that body with his own. She knew the true value of having that kind of celebration with a man in your life and the fear of losing it pulled at her to speak and ask Kevin's pardon for what she'd done despite the promise she'd made never to do it because of the hell it might cause if she did.

  But the pull of Kevin's look upon her wasn't enough. It drew her to the brink, but it couldn't shoot her over into certain destruction. She remained silent, which forced him to continue.

  He said, “I can't see how he won't wonder, can you? The whole oddity of it begs for questions to be asked and answered. And if he doesn't ask them . . .” Kevin looked over in the direction of the duck ponds, where the little duck graveyard held the broken bodies of those innocent birds. He said, “Too many things mean power to a man, and when his power's taken from him he doesn't deal with that lightly. Because there's no laughing it off, you see, no saying ‘Ah, it didn't mean all that much in the first place, did it.' Not if a man's identified his power. And not if he's lost it.”

  Valerie started them walking again, determined not to be caught another time by the pin of her husband's stare, fixed onto a display board like a captured butterfly, with the label female forsworn beneath her. “Do you think that's what's happened, Kev? Someone's lost his power? Is that what you think this is all about?”

  “I don't know,” he replied. “Do you?”

  A coy woman might have said “Why would I . . . ?” but the last attribute Valerie possessed was the one of being coy. She knew exactly why her husband was asking her that question and she knew where it would lead them if she answered him directly: to an examination of promises given and a discussion of rationalisations made.

  But beyond those things that Valerie didn't want to have present in any conversation with her husband, there was the fact of her own feelings that she had to consider now as well. For it was no easy matter to live with the knowledge that you were probably responsible for a good man's death. Going through the motions of day-after-day with that on your mind was trying enough. Having to cope with someone other than yourself knowing about your responsibility would make the burden of it intolerable. So there was nothing to be done save to sidestep and obfuscate. Any move she might make appeared to Valerie to be a losing one, a short journey on the long path of covenants broken and responsibilities not faced.

  She wanted more than anything to reverse the wheel of time. But she could not do it. So she kept walking steadily towards the cottage, where at least there was employment for both of them, something to take their minds off the chasm that fast was developing between them.

  “Did you see that man talking to Miss Brouard?” Valerie asked her husband. “The man with the bad leg? She took him off upstairs. Just near the end of the reception this was. He's no one I've seen round here before, so I was wondering . . . Could he have been her doctor? She isn't well. You know that, Kev, don't you? She's tried to hide it, but now it's getting worse. I wish she'd say something about it, though. So I could help her more. I can understand why she wouldn't say a word while he was alive—she wouldn't want to worry him, would she?—but now that he's gone . . . We could do a lot for her, you and I, Kev. If she'd let us.”

  They left the lawn and crossed a section of the drive that swung by the front of their cottage. They approached the front door, Valerie in the lead. She would have strode straight through it and hung up her coat and got on with her day, but Kevin's next words stopped her.

  “When're you going to stop lying to me, Val?”

  The words comprised just the sort of question that she would have had to answer at some other time. They implied so much about the changing natu
re of their relationship that in any other circumstances the only way to refute that implication would have been to give her husband what he was asking for. But in the current situation, Valerie didn't have to do that because as Kevin spoke, the very man she'd been talking about the moment before came through the bushes that marked the path to the bay.

  He was accompanied by a red-haired woman. The two of them saw the Duffys and, after exchanging a quick word, they walked immediately over. The man said he was called Simon St. James and he introduced the woman, who was his wife, Deborah. They had come from London for the funeral, he explained, and he asked the Duffys if he could have a word with them both.

  The most recent of the analgesics—that which her oncologist had called the “one last thing” they were going to try—no longer possessed the strength to kill the brutal pain in Ruth's bones. The time had obviously come to bring on morphine in a very big way, but that was the physical time. The mental time, defined by the moment when she admitted defeat over her attempt to govern the way her life would end, still had not arrived. Until it had, Ruth was determined to carry on as if the disease were not running amok in her body like invading Vikings who'd lost their leader.

  She'd awakened that morning in an exquisite agony that hadn't diminished as the day continued. In the early hours, she'd maintained such a fine focus on carrying out her duties to her brother, his family, his friends, and the community that she'd been able to ignore the stranglehold which the fire had on most of her body. But as people said their final goodbyes, it became more and more difficult to ignore what was so earnestly trying to claim her. The reading of the will had provided Ruth a momentary diversion from the disease. What followed the reading of the will was continuing to do so.