A Place of Hiding

by Elizabeth George

  She didn't reply. A clock was ticking on a mantelpiece and the sound grew loud, like a waiting bomb. Her silence was answer enough for St. James.

  He said, “What about your own will, Miss Brouard? What was the agreement you had with your brother? How did he want you to distribute the property that was held in your name?”

  She licked her lower lip. Her tongue was nearly as pale as the rest of her. She said, “Adrian is a troubled boy, Mr. St. James. Most of his life, he's been tugged between his parents like a rope in a game. Their marriage ended badly, and Margaret made Adrian the instrument of her revenge. It made no difference to her when she married again and married well—Margaret always marries well, you see—there was still the fact of Guy's having betrayed her and of her not knowing soon enough, not being clever enough to catch him in the actual act, which I think is what she wanted more than anything: my brother and some woman in bed and Margaret coming upon them like one of the Furies. But it didn't happen that way. Just some sort of squalid discovery . . . I don't even know of what. And she couldn't get past it, couldn't live beyond it. Guy was made to suffer as much as possible for humiliating her. Adrian was the rack she used. And to be used like that . . . It doesn't make the tree grow strong if you keep messing about with its roots. But Adrian's not a killer.”

  “You've left him everything in recompense, then?”

  She'd been examining her hands, but, at that, she looked up. “No. I've done what my brother wanted.”

  “Which was?”

  Le Reposoir, she said, was being left to the people of Guernsey for their use and pleasure, with a trust fund set up to see to the maintenance of the grounds, the buildings, and the furnishings. The rest—the properties in Spain, France, and England—the stocks and the bonds, the bank accounts, and all personal belongings not used at the time of her death to furnish the manor house or to decorate the estate grounds—would be sold and the proceeds of such a sale would fund the trust itself into infinity.

  “I agreed to this because it's what he wanted,” Ruth Brouard said. “He promised me that his children would be remembered in his own will, and they have been. Not as generously as they would have been had things gone as normal, of course. But remembered nonetheless.”

  “How?”

  “He used the option he had to divide his estate in half. His three children got the first half, divided equally among them. The second half went to two other young people, teenagers here on Guernsey.”

  “Leaving them effectively more than his own children will receive.”

  “I . . . Yes,” she said. “I suppose that's right.”

  “Who are these teenagers?”

  She told him they were called Paul Fielder and Cynthia Moullin. Her brother, she said, set himself up as their mentor. The boy came to his attention through a programme of sponsorship at the local secondary school. The girl came to his attention through her own father, Henry Moullin, a glazier who'd constructed the conservatory and replaced the windows at Le Reposoir.

  “The families are quite poor, especially the Fielders,” Ruth concluded. “Guy would have seen that and, liking the children, he would have wanted to do something for them, something their own parents would never be able to do.”

  “But why keep this a secret from you, if that's what he did?” St. James asked.

  “I don't know,” she said, “I don't understand.”

  “Would you have disapproved?”

  “I might have told him how much trouble he could be causing.”

  “In his own family?”

  “In theirs as well. Both Paul and Cynthia have other siblings.”

  “Who weren't remembered in your brother's will?”

  “Who weren't remembered in my brother's will. So a legacy left to one and not the others . . . I would have told him it had the potential to rupture their families.”

  “Would he have listened to you, Miss Brouard?”

  She shook her head. She looked infinitely sad. “That was my brother's weakness,” she told him. “Guy never listened to anyone.”

  Margaret Chamberlain was hard pressed to recall a time when she'd been as furious or as driven to do something about her fury. She thought she may have been so caught up in rage the day her suspicions about Guy's philandering had ceased to be suspicions at all and had become instead a full-blown reality that had felt like a fist driven into her stomach. But that day had been long ago and so much had happened in the intervening years—three more marriages and three more children, to be specific—that that time had faded into a tarnished memory which she generally didn't run a silver cloth over because, just like a piece of old and unfashionable silver, she had no use for it any longer. Nonetheless, she reckoned that what was consuming her was akin to that earlier provocation. And how ironic was it that both then and now the seed for what consumed her came from the same source?

  When she felt like this, she generally had a difficult time deciding in what area she wished to strike out first. She knew that Ruth had to be dealt with, the provisions of Guy's will being so utterly bizarre that there could be only one explanation for them and Margaret was willing to bet her life that that explanation was spelled R-u-t-h. Beyond Ruth, however, there were the two beneficiaries of half of what was pretending to be Guy's entire estate. There was no way on heaven, on earth, or in hell that Margaret Chamberlain intended to stand by and watch two nobodies—unrelated to Guy by even the tiniest speck of blood—walk away with more money than the bastard's own son.

  Adrian was less than helpful with information. He'd retreated to his room and when she'd cornered him there, demanding to know more who, where, and why than Ruth had been willing to impart, he'd said only, “They're kids. Someone to look at Dad the way he thought the fruit of his loins were supposed to look at him. We wouldn't cooperate. They were happy to. That's Dad for you, isn't it? Always rewarding devotion.”

  “Where are they? Where can I find them?”

  “He's in the Bouet,” he replied. “I don't know where. It's like council housing. He could be anywhere.”

  “What about the other?”

  That was easier by far. The Moullins lived in La Corbière, southwest of the airport, in a parish called Forest. They lived in the looniest house on the island. People called it the Shell House and once you were in the vicinity of La Corbière, you couldn't miss it.

  “Fine. Let's go,” Margaret told her son.

  At which point Adrian made it perfectly clear that he wasn't going anywhere. “What d'you think you're going to achieve?”

  “I'm going to let them know who they're dealing with. I'm going to make it clear that if they expect to rob you of what is rightfully yours—”

  “Don't bother.” He was smoking incessantly, pacing the room, back and forth across the Persian carpet as if determined to create a trough in it. “It's what Dad wanted. It's his final . . . you know . . . The big slap goodbye.”

  “Stop wallowing in all this, Adrian.” She couldn't help herself. It was too much to have to consider the fact that her son might be perfectly willing to accept a humiliating defeat just because his father had decided he was to do so. “There's more involved in this than your father's wishes. There're your rights as his flesh and blood. If it comes down to it, there're your sisters' rights as well, and you can't tell me JoAnna Brouard will sit by and do nothing once she learns how your father dealt with her girls. This is something that has the potential to mire itself in court for years if we don't do something. So we tackle these two beneficiaries first. And then we tackle Ruth.”

  He walked to the chest of drawers, varying his route for once and thank God. He crushed out his cigarette in an ashtray that was providing the bedroom with ninety percent of its malodorous air. He immediately lit another. “I'm not going anywhere,” he said to her. “I'm out of it, Mother.”

  Margaret refused to believe that, at least not as a permanent condition. She told herself he was just depressed. He was humiliated. He was mourning. Not Guy, of course. B
ut Carmel whom he'd lost to Guy, God curse his soul for betraying his own and only son in that inimitable fashion of his, the consummate Judas. But this was the very same Carmel who would come scampering back begging to be forgiven once Adrian took his proper place at the head of his father's fortune. Margaret had little doubt about that.

  Adrian made no enquiry as Margaret said, “Very well,” and searched through his things. He made no protest as she rooted his car keys out from the jacket he'd left lying on the seat of a chair. She added, “All right. Be out of it for now,” and she left him.

  In the glove compartment of the Range Rover, she found a map of the island, the sort of map that car hire firms pass out, on which their locations are predominantly displayed and everything else fades into illegibility. But since the car hire firm was at the airport and since La Corbière wasn't far from either, she was able to pinpoint the hamlet near the south shore of the island, on a lane that looked to be the approximate width of a feline's whisker.

  She gunned the engine as an expression of her feelings and set off. How difficult could it be, she told herself, to trace a route back to the airport and then venture left at La Rue de la Villiaze? She wasn't an idiot. She could read the street signs. She wouldn't get lost.

  Those beliefs, naturally, presupposed that there would actually be street signs. Margaret soon discovered that part of the whimsical nature of the island lay in the manner in which street markings were hidden: generally waist-high and behind a growth of ivy. She also quickly found that one needed to know towards which parish one wished to be headed in order not to end up in the middle of St. Peter Port which, like Rome, appeared to be where all roads led.

  Four false starts had her damp with anxious perspiration, and when she finally found the airport, she drove right past La Rue de la Villiaze without noticing it, so tiny was the street when it appeared. Margaret was used to England, where main routes bore some resemblance to main routes. On the map, the street was coloured red, so in her mind it possessed at least two nicely marked lanes, not to mention a large sign indicating she'd found what she was looking for. She was, unfortunately, all the way to a triangular intersection in the middle of the island, one marked by a church half-hidden in a depression in the land, before she thought she may have gone too far. At which point, she pulled onto what went for the verge, studied the map, and saw—with her irritation intensifying—that she'd overshot her mark and would have to try it all again.

  This was when she finally cursed her son. Had he not been such a gormless and pathetic excuse of a . . . But no, no. True, it would have been more convenient to have had him with her, to have had the ability to drive directly to her destination without half a dozen false starts. But Adrian needed to recover from the blow of his father's will—his bloody bloody bloody father's will—and if he wanted an hour or so to do that, so be it, Margaret thought. She could cope on her own.

  This made her wonder, though, if that was in part what had happened to Carmel Fitzgerald: just one too many moments when she realised there would be times when she would have to cope on her own, times when Adrian took to his room, or worse. God knew Guy could drive anyone with a sensitive nature into the ground, not to mention into self-loathing, and if that had happened to Adrian while he and Carmel had been guests at Le Reposoir, what might have the young woman thought, how vulnerable might she have actually been to the advances of a man so clearly in his element, so virile, and so bloody capable. Vulnerable as hell, Margaret thought. Which Guy had no doubt seen and acted upon with absolutely no conscience.

  But, by God, he would pay for what he'd done. He couldn't pay in life. But he would pay now.

  So caught up was she in this resolution that Margaret very nearly missed La Rue de la Villiaze a second time. But at the last moment, she saw a narrow lane veering to the right in the vicinity of the airport. She took it blindly and found herself zipping past a pub and then a hotel and then out into the countryside, coursing between tall banks and hedges beyond which lay farmhouses and fallow fields. Secondary lanes that looked more like tractor tracks began to pop up round her, and just when she was deciding to try any one of them in the hope it might lead her somewhere identifiable, she came to a junction in the road she was traveling and found the miracle of a sign post, pointing to the right and La Corbière.

  Margaret muttered her thanks to the driving deity that had seen her to this point and turned into a lane that was indistinguishable from any of the others. Had she encountered another car, one of them would have had to reverse back to the lane's starting point, but her luck held and along the route that passed a whitewashed farmhouse and two flesh-coloured stone cottages, she saw no other vehicle.

  What she did see at a dogleg was the Shell House. As Adrian had suggested, only a blind man could have missed it. The building itself was of stucco painted yellow. The shells from which it took its name served as decoration along the drive, topping the boundary wall, and within the large front garden.

  It was the most tasteless display Margaret could ever recall seeing, something that looked assembled by a madman. Conch shells, ormer shells, scallop shells, and the occasional abalone shell formed borders, first. They stood alongside flowerbeds in which more shells—glued onto twigs and branches and flexible metal—comprised the flowers. In the middle of the lawn a shallow shell-embedded pond raised its shell-embedded sides and provided an environment for—mercifully—non-shelled goldfish. But all round this pond stood shell-encrusted pedestals on which shell-formed idols posed for purposes of adoration. Two full-sized shell lawn tables and their appropriate shell chairs each held tea services of shell and shell food on their sandwich plates. And along the front wall ran a miniature firestation, a school, a barn, and a church, all of them glinting white from the molluscs that had given their lives to fashion them. It was, Margaret thought as she climbed out of the Range Rover, enough to put one off bouillabaisse forever.

  She shuddered at such a monument to vulgarity. It brought back too many unpleasant memories: childhood summer holidays on the coast of Essex, all those aitches dropped, all those greasy chips consumed, all that doughy flesh so hideously reddened in order to proclaim to one and all that enough money had been saved for a holiday at the sea.

  Margaret shoved aside the thought of it, the remembered sight of her parents on the steps of a hired beach hut, arms slung round each other, bottled beer in their hands. Their sloppy kisses and then her mother's giggles and what followed the giggles.

  Enough, Margaret thought. She advanced determinedly up the drive. She called out a confident hello, then a second and a third. No one came out of the house. There were gardening tools arrayed on the front walk, however, although God only knew to what purpose anyone intended to put them in this environment. Nonetheless, they suggested someone was at home and at work in the garden, so she approached the front door. As she did so, a man came round the side of the house, carrying a shovel. He was grubbily clad in blue jeans so dirty that they might have stood up on their own had he not been wearing them. Despite the cold, no jacket protected him, just a faded blue work shirt on which someone had embroidered Moullin Glass in red. The theme of climatic indifference was one that the man carried down to his feet, on which he wore sandals only, although he also had on socks. These, however, displayed more than one hole and his right big toe protruded from one of them.

  He saw Margaret and stopped, saying nothing. She was surprised to realise that she recognised him: the overnourished Heathcliff she'd seen at Guy's funeral reception. Close up, she saw that the darkness of his skin was due to his face being weathered to the condition of unsoaped leather. His eyes were hostile observing her, and his hands were covered with myriad healed and unhealed cuts. Margaret might have been intimidated by the level of animosity coming from him, but she already felt her own animosity, and even if that had not been the case, she was not a woman who was easily alarmed.

  “I'm looking for Cynthia Moullin,” she told the man as pleasantly as she could. “Can yo
u tell me where I might find her, please?”

  “Why?” He carried the shovel onto the lawn, where he began digging round the base of one of the trees.

  Margaret bristled. She was used to people hearing her voice—God knew she'd spent years enough developing it—and jumping to at once. She said, “I believe it's either yes or no. You can or you can't help me find her. Have you a problem understanding me?”

  “I've a problem caring one way or t'other.” His accent was so thick with what Margaret assumed was island patois that he sounded like someone from a costume drama.

  She said, “I need to speak to her. It's essential I speak to her. I've been told by my son that she lives in this place”—she tried to make this place not sound like this rubbish tip, but she decided she could be forgiven if she failed—“but if he's wrong, I'd appreciate your telling me. And then I'll be happy to get out of your hair.” Not, Margaret thought, that she wanted to be in his hair which, albeit thick, looked unwashed and lousy.

  He said, “Your son? Who mightee be?”

  “Adrian Brouard. Guy Brouard was his father. I expect you know who he is, don't you? Guy Brouard? I saw you at his funeral reception.”

  These last remarks seemed to get his attention, for he looked up from his shoveling and inspected Margaret head to toe, after which he silently crossed the lawn to the porch, where he took up a bucket. This was filled with some sort of pellets which he carried to the tree and poured liberally into the trench he'd dug round its trunk. He set down the bucket and moved to the next tree, where he began more digging.

  “See here,” Margaret said, “I'm looking for Cynthia Moullin. I'd like to speak to her at once, so if you know where I can find her . . . She does live here, doesn't she? This is the Shell House?” Which was, Margaret thought, the most ridiculous question she could have asked. If this wasn't the Shell House, there was a bigger nightmare waiting for her somewhere, and she found that difficult to get her mind round.