A Place of Hiding

by Elizabeth George

  His voice was determined, but what the determination was all about was a question that Deborah didn't want to ask. She knew there was no real way round the confrontation that they needed to have with China. No matter what either one of them believed, there was still the matter of the ring to be dealt with.

  She said, “Let's get to the flat. I think it's going to pour in another minute or two.”

  They found China watching a boxing match on the television. One of the boxers was taking a particularly nasty beating, and it was obvious that the match needed to be ended. But the howling crowd clearly was not about to allow that. Blood, their screams declared, would definitely have blood. China seemed oblivious to all this. Her face was a blank.

  Cherokee went to the television and changed the channel. He found a cycle race being covered in a sun-drenched land that looked like Greece but could have been anywhere that was not this wintry place. He muted the sound and left the picture. He went to his sister, saying, “You okay? Need anything?” He touched China's shoulder tentatively.

  She stirred then. “I'm okay,” she told her brother. She offered him a small half-smile. “Just thinking.”

  He returned her smile. “Got to stay away from that. Look where it's got me. I'm always thinking. If I hadn't been, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in now.”

  She shrugged. “Yeah. Well.”

  “You eat anything?”

  “Cherokee . . .”

  “Okay. All right. Forget I asked.”

  China seemed to realise that Deborah was also there. She turned her head and said, “I thought you'd gone to Simon, to give him that list of what I've done on the island.”

  Here was a simple way to address the issue of the ring, so Deborah took it. She said, “It's not quite complete, though. That list doesn't actually have everything on it.”

  “What d'you mean?”

  Deborah set her umbrella in a stand near the door and came to the sofa, where she sat by her friend. Cherokee pulled a chair over and joined them.

  “You didn't mention Potter and Potter Antiques,” Deborah pointed out. “In Mill Street. You were there and you bought a ring from the son. Did you forget?”

  China cast a look at her brother as if for a further explanation, but Cherokee said nothing. She turned back to Deborah. “I didn't list any of the stores I've been in. I didn't think . . . Why would I? I was in Boots several times, I was in a couple of shoe stores. I bought a newspaper once or twice, and I got some breath mints. The battery went out in my camera, so I replaced it with one I got down in the arcade . . . the one off the High Street? But I didn't write down any of that and there're probably more stores I've forgotten. Why?” Then to her brother, “What's this all about?”

  Deborah answered her by bringing out the ring. She unfolded the handkerchief that enclosed it and extended her hand so that China could see it in its linen nest. “This was on the beach,” she said, “at the bay where Guy Brouard died.”

  China didn't attempt to touch the ring, as if she knew what it meant that Deborah had it wrapped in a handkerchief and that it had been found in the vicinity of a homicide. She looked at it, though. She looked long and hard. She was so pale already that Deborah couldn't tell if any colour left her cheeks. But her teeth caught her lips within her closed mouth, and when she next looked at Deborah, her eyes were unmistakably frightened.

  “What're you asking me?” she said. “Did I kill him? D'you want to ask that straight out?”

  Deborah said, “The man at the shop—Mr. Potter?—he said an American woman bought a ring like this from him. An American woman from California. A woman wearing leather trousers and perhaps a cloak, I suppose, because a hood was over her head. She and this man's mother—Mrs. Potter?—talked about movie stars. They remembered that she—this woman from America?—told them that one generally doesn't see movie stars in—”

  “All right,” China said. “You've made your point. I bought the ring. A ring. That ring. I don't know. I bought a ring from them, okay?”

  “Like this one?”

  “Well, obviously,” China snapped.

  “Look, Chine, we've got to find out—”

  “I'm cooperating!” China shrieked at her brother. “All right? I'm cooperating like a good little girl. I came into town and I saw that ring and I thought it was perfect so I bought it.”

  “Perfect?” Deborah asked. “For what?”

  “For Matt. Okay? I got it for Matt.” China looked embarrassed at her own admission, a gift for a man she'd declared herself done with. As if she knew how this appeared to the others, she went on. “It was nasty, and I liked that about it. It was like sending him a voodoo doll. Skull and crossed bones. Poison. Death. It felt like a good way to tell him how I feel.”

  Cherokee got up at this and walked over to the television, where riders were spinning along the edge of a cliff. The sea lay beyond them and the sun glittered off it. He killed the picture and returned to his seat. He didn't look at his sister. He didn't look at Deborah.

  As if his actions made the comment his silence implied, China responded, saying, “Okay, so it's a stupid thing to do. So it makes things go on between us when they shouldn't. So it asks for a reply of some sort from him. I know that, okay? I know it's stupid. I wanted to do it anyway. That's just how it is. How it was when I saw it. I bought it and that's it.”

  “What did you do with it?” Deborah said. “The day that you bought it?”

  “What d'you mean?”

  “Did they put it in a bag for you? Did you put the bag inside another? Did you put it in your pocket? What happened next?”

  China considered these questions; Cherokee looked up from examining his shoes. He appeared to realise where Deborah was heading, because he said, “Try to remember, Chine.”

  “I don't know. I probably shoved it in my purse,” she said. “That's what I usually do when I buy something small.”

  “And afterwards? When you got it back to Le Reposoir? What would you have done with it then?”

  “Probably . . . I don't know. If it was in my purse, I would've left it there and forgotten about it. Otherwise, I might've put it in my suitcase. Or on the dressing table till we packed to leave.”

  “Where someone could have seen it,” Deborah murmured.

  “If that's even the same ring,” Cherokee said.

  There was that, Deborah thought. For if the ring she held was merely a duplicate of the ring that China had purchased from the Potters, they had a startling coincidence on their hands. However unlikely that coincidence was, the slate needed to be cleared of it before they went any further. She said, “Did you pack the ring when you left? Is it among your things now? Perhaps tucked away where you've forgotten about it?”

  China smiled, as if aware of an irony she was about to disclose. “I wouldn't know, Debs. Right now the cops have everything I own. At least everything I brought with me. If I packed the ring or put it in my suitcase when I got it back to Le Reposoir, it'll be with all the rest of my stuff.”

  “So that will need to be checked into,” Deborah said.

  Cherokee nodded at the ring in Deborah's palm. “What happens with that?”

  “It goes to the police.”

  “What'll they do with it?”

  “I expect they'll try to get latent fingerprints off it. They might manage a partial.”

  “If they do, what then? I mean, if the print's Chine's . . . if the ring's the same . . . Won't they know it's been planted? The ring, I mean.”

  “They might suspect that,” Deborah said. She didn't add what she also knew to be the situation: The interest of the police always lay in assessing guilt and closing the case. The rest they put into other hands. If China had no ring in her possession identical to this one and if her prints were upon the one that Deborah had found at the bay, the police weren't required to do anything more than document those two facts and pass them along to the prosecutors. It would be up to China's own advocate to argue another interpretation o
f the ring in court during her trial for murder.

  Certainly, Deborah thought, both China and Cherokee had to know this. They weren't babes in the woods. The troubles China's father had had with the law in California must have given them both an education in what went on when a crime occurred.

  Cherokee said, “Debs” in a thoughtful tone that elongated the nickname, making it sound like an appeal. “Is there any way . . .” He looked at his sister as if gauging a reaction to something he hadn't yet said. “This is a tough one to ask. Is there any way you could lose that ring?”

  “Lose . . . ?”

  China said, “Cherokee, don't.”

  “I have to,” he said to her. “Debs, if that ring is the one China bought . . . And we know there's a chance it is, right? . . . I mean, why do the cops have to know you found it? Can't you just toss it down a storm drain or something?” He seemed to comprehend the magnitude of what he was asking Deborah to do, because he rushed on, saying, “Look. The cops already think she did it. Her prints on this, they'll just use it as another way to nail her. But if you lose it . . . it falls out of your pocket on the way to your hotel, let's say . . . ?” He watched her hopefully, one hand extended, as if he wished her to deposit the offending ring on his palm.

  Deborah felt held by his gaze, its frankness and hope. She felt held by what his gaze implied about the history she shared with China River.

  “Sometimes,” Cherokee said to her quietly, “right and wrong get twisted. What looks right turns out to be wrong and what looks wrong—”

  “Forget it,” China interrupted. “Cherokee, forget it.”

  “But it would be no big deal.”

  “Forget it, I said.” China reached for Deborah's hand and curved her fingers closed round the linen-covered ring. “You do what you have to do, Deborah.” And to her brother, “She's not like you. It's not as easy as that for her.”

  “They're fighting dirty. We've got to do the same.”

  “No,” China said, and then to Deborah, “You've come to help me out. I'm grateful for that. You just do what you have to do.”

  Deborah nodded but felt the difficulty of saying “I'm sorry.”

  She couldn't escape the sensation of having let them down.

  St. James wouldn't have thought himself the kind of man who let agitation get the better of him. Since the day he'd awakened in a hospital bed—remembering nothing but a final shot of tequila that he shouldn't have drunk—and gazed up into the face of his mother and had seen there the news he himself had confirmed not an hour later by a neurologist, he'd governed himself and his reactions with a discipline that would have done a military man proud. He'd considered himself an unshakeable survivor: The worst had happened and he had not broken on the wheel of personal disaster. He'd been maimed, left crippled, and abandoned by the woman he loved, and he'd emerged from it all with his core intact. If I can cope with that, I can cope with anything.

  So he was unprepared for the disquiet he began to feel the moment he learned that his wife had not delivered the ring to DCI Le Gallez. And he was ultimately undone by the level that disquiet reached when the minutes passed without Deborah's return to the hotel.

  He paced at first: across their room and along the small balcony outside their room. Then he flung himself into a chair for five minutes and contemplated what Deborah's actions might mean. This only heightened his anxiety, however, so he grabbed up his coat and finally left the building altogether. He would set out after her, he decided. He crossed the street without a clear idea of what direction he needed to take, thankful only that the rain had eased, which made the going easier.

  Downhill seemed good, so he started off, skirting the rock wall that ran along a bear-pit sort of garden sunk into the landscape across from the hotel. At its far end stood the island's war memorial, and St. James had reached this when he saw his wife coming round the corner where the dignified grey façade of the Royal Court House stretched the length of Rue du Manoir.

  Deborah raised her hand in greeting. As she approached him, he did what he could to calm himself.

  “You made it back,” she said with a smile as she came up to him.

  “That's fairly obvious,” he replied.

  Her smile faded. She heard it all in his voice. She would. She'd known him for most of her life, and he'd thought he knew her. But he was fast discovering that the gap between what he thought and what was was beginning to develop the dimensions of a chasm.

  “What is it?” she asked. “Simon, what's wrong?”

  He took her arm in a grip that he knew was far too tight, but he couldn't seem to loosen it. He led her to the bear-pit garden and forcibly guided her down the steps.

  “What've you done with that ring?” he demanded.

  “Done with it? Nothing. I've got it right—”

  “You were to take it straight to Le Gallez.”

  “That's what I'm doing. I was going there now. Simon, what on earth . . . ?”

  “Now? You were taking it there now? Where's it been in the meantime? It's hours since we found it.”

  “You never said . . . Simon, why're you acting like this? Stop it. Let me go. You're hurting me.” She wrenched away and stood before him, her cheeks burning colour. There was a path in the garden along its perimeter and she set off down this, although it actually went nowhere but along the wall. Rainwater pooled here blackly, reflecting a sky that was fast growing dark. Deborah strode right through it without hesitation, uncaring of the soaking she was giving her legs.

  St. James followed her. It maddened him that she'd walk away from him in this manner. She seemed like another Deborah entirely, and he wasn't about to have that. If it was to come to a chase between them, she would win, naturally. If it was to come to anything other than words and intellect between them, she would also win. That was the curse of his handicap, which left him weaker and slower than his own wife. This, too, angered him as he pictured what the two of them must look like to any watcher from the street above the sunken park: her sure stride carrying her ever farther from him, his pathetic mendicant's plea of a hobble in pursuit.

  She reached the far end of the little park, the deepest end. She stood in the corner, where a pyracantha, heavy with red berries, leaned its burdened branches forward to touch the back of a wooden bench. She didn't sit. Instead, she remained at the arm of the bench and she ripped a handful of berries from the bush and began to fling them mindlessly back into the greenery.

  This angered him further, the childishness of it. He felt swept back in time to being twenty-three to her twelve, confronted with a fit of incomprehensible pre-adolescent hysteria about a hair cut she'd hated, wrestling scissors from her before she had a chance to do what she wanted to do, which was to make the hair worse, make herself look worse, punish herself for thinking a hair cut might make a difference in how she was feeling about the spots on her chin that had appeared overnight and marked her as forever changing. “Ah, she's a handful, she is, our Deb,” her father had said. “Needs a woman's touch,” which he never gave her.

  How convenient it would be, St. James thought, to blame Joseph Cotter for all of it, to decide that he and Deborah had come to this moment in their marriage because her father had remained a widower. That would make things easier, wouldn't it. He'd have to look no further for an explanation of why Deborah had acted in such an inconceivable manner.

  He reached her. Foolishly, he said the first thing that came into his head. “Don't ever run from me again, Deborah.”

  She swung round with a handful of berries in her fist. “Don't you dare . . . Don't you ever talk to me like that!”

  He tried to steady himself. He knew that an escalating argument would be the only outcome of this encounter unless one of them did something to calm down. He also knew how unlikely it was that Deborah would be the one to rein in. He said as mildly as he could which, admittedly, was only marginally less combative than before, “I want an explanation.”

  “Oh, you want that, do you?
Well, pardon me if I don't feel like giving you one.” She slung the berries onto the path.

  Just like a gauntlet, he thought. If he picked it up, he knew quite well there would be an all-out war between them. He was angry, but he didn't want that war. He was still sane enough to see that any sort of battle would be useless. He said, “That ring constitutes evidence. Evidence is meant to go to the police. If it doesn't go directly to them—”

  “As if every piece of evidence goes directly,” she retorted. “You know that it doesn't. You know that half the time police dig up evidence that no one even knew was evidence in the first place. So it's been through half a dozen way stations before it comes to them. You know that, Simon.”

  “That doesn't give anyone the right to create way stations,” he countered. “Where have you been with that ring?”

  “Are you interrogating me? Have you any idea what that sounds like? Do you care?”

  “What I care about at the moment is the fact that a piece of evidence that I assumed was in the hands of Le Gallez was not in his hands when I mentioned it to him. Do you care what that means?”

  “Oh, I see.” She raised her chin. She sounded triumphant, the way a woman tends to sound when a man walks into a mine field she's laid. “This is all about you. You looked bad. Egg on your face without a napkin to be had.”

  “Obstructing a police investigation isn't egg on anyone's face,” he said tersely. “It's a crime.”

  “I wasn't obstructing. I've got the damn ring.” She thrust her hand into her shoulder bag, brought out the ring wrapped in his handkerchief, grabbed his arm in a grip that was as tight as his own had been on hers, and slammed the shrouded ring into his palm. “There. Happy? Take it to your precious DCI Le Gallez. God knows what he might think of you if you don't run it over there straightaway, Simon.”

  “Why are you acting like this?”

  “Me? Why are you?”

  “Because I told you what to do. Because we have evidence. Because we know it's evidence. Because we knew it then and—”