A Place of Hiding

by Elizabeth George

  But not to tell her . . . Ruth felt as if she'd been set adrift into space, but it was a storm-tossed space in which she had nothing to grasp on to any longer. For Guy had kept her in the dark, her brother and her rock. In less than twenty-four hours she had uncovered a trip to California that had gone unmentioned and now a deliberate ruse to mete out punishment and reward to the young people who had disappointed him and the young people who had not.

  “He was quite intent upon this final will,” Mr. Forrest said, as if to reassure her. “And the manner in which it was written would have left his children a substantial amount of money no matter what the other beneficiaries received. He started with two million pounds nearly ten years ago, as you recall. Invested wisely, this could have developed into enough of a fortune to make anyone happy even if they were left only part of it.”

  Past the wrenching knowledge of what her brother had done to hurt so many people, Ruth heard the would have and could have of Mr. Forrest's remarks. He seemed suddenly at a great distance from her, the space into which she'd been thrust whipping her ever farther away from the rest of humanity. She said, “Is there something more I need to know, Mr. Forrest?”

  Dominic Forrest appeared to consider this question. “Need to know? I wouldn't say you need to. But on the other hand, considering Guy's children and how they're going to react . . . I think it's wise to be prepared.”

  “For what?”

  The advocate took up a piece of paper that lay next to the telephone on his desk. “I had a message from the forensic accountant. The phone calls I needed to make? Returning his was one of them.”

  “And?” Ruth could see his hesitation in the way Forrest looked at the paper, the same sort of hesitation her doctor employed when marshaling his forces to relay bad news. So she knew enough to prepare herself, although that didn't go far towards keeping her from wanting to run from the room.

  “Ruth, there's very little money left. Just under two hundred and fifty thousand pounds. A considerable amount in the normal scheme of things, yes. But when you consider he began with two million . . . He was a shrewd businessman, no one shrewder. He knew when, where, and how to invest. There should be far more than what there is right now in his accounts.”

  “What happened . . . ?”

  “To the rest of that money?” Forrest finished. “I don't know. When the forensic accountant gave his report, I told him there had to be some kind of mistake. He's looking into things, but he's said it was a straightforward affair as far as he could tell.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Evidently ten months ago, Guy sold off a significant portion of his holdings. Over three and a half million pounds at the time.”

  “To put in the bank? In his savings, perhaps?”

  “It's not there.”

  “To make a purchase?”

  “There's no record of that.”

  “Then what?”

  “I don't know. I've only just found out ten minutes ago that the money is missing, and all I can tell you is what's left: a quarter of a million pounds.”

  “But as his advocate, you must have known—”

  “Ruth, I just spent part of the morning letting his beneficiaries know they were each to inherit something in the vicinity of seven hundred thousand pounds, perhaps more. Believe me, I didn't know the money was gone.”

  “Could someone have stolen it?”

  “I don't see how.”

  “Embezzled it at the bank or the stockbroker's?”

  “Again, how?”

  “Could he have given it away?”

  “He could have. Yes. Right now the accountant is looking for paper trails. The logical person to have been slipped a fortune on the side is his son. But at the moment?” He shrugged. “We don't know.”

  “If Guy did give Adrian money,” Ruth said, more to herself than to the advocate, “he kept quiet about it. They both kept quiet. And his mother doesn't know. Margaret, his mother?”—this to the advocate—“she doesn't know.”

  “Until we find out more, we can only assume everyone has a legacy much reduced from what it might otherwise be,” Mr. Forrest said. “And you should prepare yourself for a fair amount of animosity.”

  “Reduced. Yes. I hadn't thought of that.”

  “Start thinking of it, then,” Mr. Forrest told her. “As things stand now, Guy's children are inheriting less than sixty thousand pounds apiece, the other two have been left round eighty-seven thousand pounds, and you are sitting on property and belongings worth millions. When all this becomes clear, there's going to be enormous pressure on you to make things right in the eyes of other people. Till we get everything sorted out, I suggest you hold firm to what we know of Guy's wishes about the estate.”

  “There may be more to know,” Ruth murmured.

  Forrest dropped his notes from the forensic accountant onto his desk. “Believe me, there's definitely more to know,” he agreed.

  Chapter 16

  AT HER END OF the line, Valerie Duffy listened to the phone ring on and on. She whispered, “Answer it, answer it, answer it,” but the ringing continued. Although she didn't want to break the connection, she finally forced herself to do so. A moment later, she had herself convinced she'd misdialed the number, so she began again. The call went through; the ringing commenced. The result was the same.

  Outside, she could see the police carrying on with their search. They'd been dogged but thorough in the manor house and they'd moved on to the outbuildings and the gardens. Soon, Valerie reckoned, they would decide to search the cottage as well. It was part of Le Reposoir and their orders had been—according to the sergeant in charge—to conduct a thorough and painstaking search of the premises, Madam.

  She didn't want to consider what they were looking for, but she had a fairly good idea. An officer had descended the stairs with Ruth's medicines in an evidence bag and it was only through stressing how essential the medicines were to Ruth's well-being that Valerie had been able to persuade the constable not to remove every single one of the pills from the house. They didn't need all of them, surely, she'd argued. Miss Brouard had terrible pain and without her medicine—

  Pain? the constable had interrupted. So we've got painkillers here? and he shook the bag for emphasis, as if any were needed.

  Well, certainly. All they had to do was to read the labels and take note of the words for pain, which surely they had seen when they picked the drugs out of her medicine cabinet.

  We've had our instructions, Madam, were the words the constable used in reply. By which declaration Valerie assumed they were to remove all drugs that they found, no matter their purpose.

  She asked if they would leave the majority of the pills behind. Take a sample from each bottle and leave the rest, she suggested. Surely you can do that for Miss Brouard's sake. She'll do very badly without them.

  The constable agreed to do so, but he wasn't pleased. As Valerie left him to return to her work in the kitchen, she felt his eyes boring into her back and knew she'd made herself the object of his suspicion. For this reason, she didn't want to make her phone call from the manor house. So she'd crossed to the cottage and rather than place the call from the kitchen where she wouldn't be able to see what was going on in the grounds of Le Reposoir, she made it instead from the upstairs bedroom. She sat on Kevin's side of the bed, closer to the window, and because of this, as she watched the police separate and head into the gardens and the individual buildings on the estate, she was able to breathe in the scent of Kev from a work shirt he'd left over the arm of a chair.

  Answer, she thought. Answer. Answer. The ringing went on.

  She turned from the window and hunched over the phone, concentrating on sending the force of her will through the receiver. If she let the connection go on long enough, surely the irritating noise alone would force an answer.

  Kevin wouldn't like this. He'd say, “Why're you doing this, Val?” And she wouldn't be able to make a reply that was direct and honest, because for
too long there had simply been too much at stake to be direct and honest about anything.

  Answer, answer, answer, she thought.

  He'd left quite early. The weather was getting rougher every day, he'd said, and he needed to see to that leak in the front windows of Mary Beth's house. With the exposure she had—looking directly west onto Portelet Bay—when the rains came, she was going to have a real problem on her hands. The lower windows affected the sitting room and the water would destroy her carpet, not to mention encourage mould to grow, and Val knew how Mary Beth's girls both had allergies to damp. Upstairs, even worse, the windows belonged to the two girls' bedrooms. He couldn't have his nieces sleeping in their beds while the rain seeped in and ran down the wallpaper, now, could he? He had responsibilities as a brother-in-law, and he didn't like to disregard them.

  So off he'd gone to see to his sister-in-law's windows. Helpless, helpless Mary Beth Duffy, Valerie thought, thrust into an untimely widowhood by a defect of heart that had killed her husband, walking from a taxi to the door of a hotel in Kuwait. All over for Corey in less than one minute. Kev shared that defect of heart with his twin, but none of them had known that till Corey died on that street, in that endless sunshine, in that heat of Kuwait. Thus Kevin owed his life to Corey's death. A congenital defect in one twin suggested the possibility of such a defect in the other. Kevin had magic planted in his chest now, a device that would have saved Corey had anyone ever suspected that there was something wrong with his heart.

  Valerie knew her husband felt doubly responsible for his brother's wife and his brother's children as a result. While she tried to remind herself that he was only living up to a sense of obligation that wouldn't have even existed had Corey not died, she couldn't help looking at the bedside clock and asking herself how long it really did take to seal four or five windows.

  The girls would be at school—Kev's two nieces—and Mary Beth would be grateful. Her gratitude in conjunction with her grief could combine to make an intoxicating brew.

  Make me forget, Kev. Help me forget.

  The phone kept ringing, ringing, ringing. Valerie listened, head bent to the task. She pressed her fingers against her eyes.

  She knew quite well how seduction worked. She'd seen it happen before her eyes. A world history between a man and a woman grew from sidelong glances and knowing looks. It gained definition from those moments of casual contact for which existed an easy explanation: Fingers touch when a plate is passed; a hand on the arm merely emphasises an amusing remark. After that, a flush on the skin presaged a hunger within the eyes. In the end came the reasons to hang about, to see the beloved, to be seen and desired.

  How had all of them come to this? she wondered. Where would everything lead if no one spoke?

  She'd never been able to lie convincingly. Put to the question, she either had to ignore it, walk away from it, pretend to misunderstand it, or tell the truth. Looking someone in the eye and deliberately misleading them was beyond her meagre acting abilities. When asked “What do you know about this, Val?” her only options were to run or to speak.

  She'd been absolutely certain of what she'd seen from the window on the morning of Guy Brouard's death. She was certain still, even now. She'd been certain then because it had all seemed so much in keeping with how Guy Brouard lived: the early-morning passage on his way to the bay where every day he reenacted a swim that was less exercise to him than it was reassurance of a prowess and virility that time was finally draining away, and then moments later, the figure who followed him. Valerie was certain now about who that figure had been because she'd seen the way Guy Brouard had been with the American woman—charming and charmed in that manner he had, part old world courtesy, part new world familiarity—and she knew how his ways could make a woman feel and what his ways could cause a woman to do.

  But to kill? That was the problem. She could believe China River had followed him to the bay, probably for a tryst that had been prearranged. She could believe that a great deal—if not everything and then some—had passed between them before that morning as well. But she could not bring herself to think the American woman had killed Guy Brouard. Killing a man—and especially killing a man as this man had been killed—was not the work of a woman. Women killed their rivals for a man's affections; they didn't kill the man.

  With this in mind, it stood to reason that China River herself had been the one in danger. Anaïs Abbott couldn't have been pleased to witness her lover giving his attention to someone besides herself. And were there others, Valerie wondered, who'd watched the two of them—China River and Guy Brouard—and put down the quick understanding that had developed between them as the budding of a relationship? Not just a stranger come to stay a few days at Le Reposoir and then to move on but a threat to someone's plans for the future, plans that had, until China River's advent upon Guernsey, seemed breathlessly close to fruition. But if that was the case, why kill Guy Brouard?

  Answer, answer, Valerie told the phone.

  And then, “Val, what're the police doing here?”

  Valerie dropped the receiver into her lap. She whirled round to find Kevin standing in the doorway of their bedroom, his half-unbuttoned shirt suggesting he'd planned to change his clothes. She gave a fleeting moment to wonder why—her scent upon them, Kev?—but then saw that he was choosing from the wardrobe something heavier against the cold: a thick wool fisherman's sweater that he'd be able to work in outside.

  Kevin looked at the phone in her lap, then at her. Faintly, the ear piece emitted the sound of continued ringing at the other end of the line. Valerie grabbed it up and replaced it in the cradle. She became aware of what she hadn't noticed before: sharp pain in the joints of her hands. She moved her fingers but winced with the shock of dull soreness. She wondered she hadn't noticed it before.

  Kevin said, “Bad, is it?”

  “Comes and goes.”

  “Ringing the doctor, were you?”

  “As if that would change things. There's nothing wrong is what he keeps saying. You don't have arthritis, Mrs. Duffy. And those pills of his . . . I expect they're nothing but sugar, Kev. Humouring me. But the pain is real. Days I can't even make my fingers work.”

  “Another doctor, then?”

  “It's so hard for me to find someone I trust.” How true, she thought. At whose knee had she learned such suspicion and doubt?

  “I meant the phone,” Kevin said as he pulled the grey wool sweater over his head. “Are you trying another doctor? If the pain's got worse, you need to do something.”

  “Oh.” Valerie looked at the phone on the bedside table so as to avert her eyes from her husband's. “Yes. Yes. I was trying . . . I couldn't get through.” She produced a quick smile. “Don't know what the world's coming to when doctors' phones don't get answered, not even in their surgeries.” She slapped her hands on her thighs in a gesture of finality, and she rose from the bed. “I'll fetch those pills, then. If it's all in my head like the doctor thinks, p'rhaps the pills'll fool my body into believing.”

  Taking her pills gave her time to collect herself. She fetched them from the bathroom and carried them down to the kitchen so that she could take them as she always took medicine: with orange juice. There was nothing out of the ordinary in that for Kevin to notice.

  When he descended the stairs and joined her, she was ready for him. She said brightly, “All's well with Mary Beth? Get her windows done up?”

  “She's worried about Christmas coming. This first one without Corey.”

  “Rough, that is. She's going to miss him for a long long time. Like I'd miss you, Kev.” Valerie dug a fresh dishcloth out of the linen drawer and set to wiping down the work tops with it. They didn't need it, but she wanted to be doing something to stop the truth spilling out. Keeping occupied went hand in glove with making sure her voice, her body, and her expressions did nothing to betray her, and she wanted that: the comfort of knowing that she was safe, with her feelings guarded. “It's trying as well, I expect, when she s
ees you. She looks at you, sees Corey.”

  Kevin didn't reply. She was forced to look at him. He said, “It's the girls she's worried over. They're asking Father Christmas to bring their daddy back. Mary Beth's worried what'll happen with them when he doesn't.”

  Valerie rubbed at the work top, where a too-hot pot had burnt a black smudge into its old surface. Rubbing wouldn't alleviate the problem, though. It had been created too long ago and should have been seen to then.

  Kevin said again, “What're the police doing here, Val?”

  “Searching.”

  “For?”

  “They're not saying.”

  “It's to do with . . . ?”

  “Yes. What else? They've taken Ruth's pills—”

  “They're not thinking Ruth—”

  “No. I don't know. I don't think so.” Valerie stopped her rubbing and folded the dishcloth. The spot remained, unchanged.

  “Not like you to be here this time of day,” Kevin said. “Work to be done in the big house? Meals to prepare?”

  “Had to stay out of the way of that lot,” she said, meaning the police.

  “They ask that of you?”

  “Just the way it seemed.”

  “They'll search here if they've searched there.” He gazed towards the window as if he could see the manor house from the kitchen, which he could not. “I wonder what they're looking for.”

  “I don't know,” she told him again, but her throat felt tight.

  From the front of the cottage, a dog began to bark. The barking changed to yelping. Someone shouted. Valerie and her husband went to the sitting room, where the windows looked out onto a lawn and beyond it the drive, at the point where it circled round the bronze sculpture of the swimmers and the dolphins. There, they saw, Paul Fielder and Taboo were having a run-in with the local police in the person of a single constable, backed against a tree as the dog snapped at his trousers. Paul dropped his bicycle and began to pull the dog away. The constable advanced, red of face and loud of voice.