A Place of Hiding

by Elizabeth George

  “Be finished, then.”

  Margaret advanced on her son, grateful for the fact that he'd inherited his father's height and not her own. She had two inches over him, nearly three. She used them now. “You're impossible. You defeat yourself. Do you have any idea how unappealing that is? How it makes a woman feel?”

  He went to the chest of drawers, where he'd laid a packet of Benson and Hedges. He shook one out and lit it. He drew in on it deeply and said nothing for a moment. The indolence of his movements was aggravation incarnate.

  “Adrian!” Margaret heard herself shriek and knew the horror of sounding like her mother: that charwoman's voice tinctured with the tones of hopelessness and fear, both of which had to be hidden by calling them rage. “Answer me, damn you. I won't accept this. I've come to Guernsey to ensure your future and I have no intention of standing here and allowing you to treat me like—”

  “What?” He swung round to her. “Like what? Like a piece of furniture? Moved this way and that. Like you treat me?”

  “I do not—”

  “D'you think I don't know what this is all about? What it's always been about? What you want. What you have planned.”

  “How can you say that? I've worked. I've slaved. I've organised. I've arranged. More than half my life, I've lived to make yours into something you can be proud of. To make you the equal of your brothers and your sisters. To make you a man.”

  “Don't make me laugh. You've worked to make me good for nothing, and now that I am, you're working to get me out of your hair. You think I can't see it? You think I don't know it? That's what this is all about. Has been since you stepped off the plane.”

  “That's not true. Worse, it's vicious, ungrateful, and designed to—”

  “No. Let's make sure we're on the same page in all of this if you want me to be part of acquiring what I'm intended to acquire. You want me to have that money so you can be rid of me. ‘No more excuses, Adrian. You're on your own.' ”

  “That isn't true.”

  “Don't you think I know what a loser I am? What an embarrassment to have around?”

  “Don't you say that about yourself. Don't you ever say it!”

  “With a fortune in my hands, the excuses are gone. I'm out of your house and out of your life. I even have enough money to put myself away in the mad house if it comes down to that.”

  “I want you to have what you deserve. God in heaven, can't you see that?”

  “I see it,” he replied. “Believe me. I see. But what makes you think I don't have what I deserve? Already, Mother. Now. Already.”

  “You're his son.”

  “Yes. That's the point. His son.”

  Adrian stared at her long and hard. It came to Margaret that he was sending her a message, and she could feel its intensity in the gaze if not in the words. It seemed to her all at once as if they'd become strangers to each other, two people having pasts that were unrelated to this present moment in which their lives had intersected by chance.

  But there was safety in feeling that strangeness and distance. Anything else ran the risk of encouraging the unthinkable to invade her thoughts.

  Margaret said calmly, “Get dressed, Adrian. We're going to town. We've a solicitor to hire and little time to waste.”

  “I sleepwalk,” he said, and at last he sounded at least marginally broken. “I do all sorts of things.”

  “That's certainly not something we need discuss now.”

  St. James and Deborah separated after their conversation in the hotel room. She would seek out the possible existence of another German ring like the one they'd found on the beach. He would seek out the beneficiaries of Guy Brouard's will. Their objectives were essentially the same—an attempt to uncover a motive behind the murder—but their approaches would be different.

  Having admitted to himself that the clear signs of premeditation strongly pointed to anyone but the River siblings as complicit in the murder, St. James offered his blessing on Cherokee's accompanying Deborah to talk to Frank Ouseley about his collection of wartime memorabilia. When it came down to it, she was safer with a man if she found herself interviewing a murderer. For his part, he would go alone, seeking out the individuals most affected by Guy Brouard's will.

  He began with a trip to La Corbière, where he found the Moullin household on a bend in one of the narrow lanes that snaked across the island between skeletal hedgerows and tall earthen banks knotted with ivy and thick sea grasses. He knew only the general area that the Moullins lived in—La Corbière itself—but it was no difficult matter to locate them exactly. He stopped at a large yellow farmhouse just outside the tiny hamlet and made an enquiry of a woman optimistically hanging laundry in the misty air. She said, “Oh, it's the Shell House you're wanting, dearie,” and she pointed vaguely towards the east. Follow the road past the turn to the sea, she informed him. He couldn't miss it.

  That proved to be the case.

  St. James stood on the drive and surveyed the grounds of the Moullin residence for a moment before proceeding farther. He frowned at the curious sight of it: a wreckage of shells and wire and concrete where apparently had once existed a fanciful garden. A few objects remained to illustrate what the place had been like. A shell-formed wishing well stood untouched beneath an enormous sweet chestnut, and a whimsical shell-and-concrete chaise longue held a shell pillow on which the words Daddy Says . . . had been fashioned in bits of broken indigo glass. Everything else had been reduced to rubble. It looked as if a hurricane of sledgehammers had slammed into the grounds surrounding the small, squat house.

  To one side of this building stood a barn, and music issued from inside: Frank Sinatra by the sound of it, crooning a pop tune in Italian. St. James headed in this direction. The barn door hung partially open, and he could see that its interior was whitewashed and lit by rows of fluorescent tubes that dangled from the ceiling.

  He called out a hello that went unacknowledged. He stepped inside and found himself in a glassmaker's workshop. It appeared to be the manufacturing place for two entirely different kinds of objects. One half of it was given to the precise fashioning of greenhouse and conservatory glass. The other half appeared devoted to glass as art. In this section large sacks of chemicals had been piled not far from an unlit furnace. Against this leaned long pipelike tubes for blowing, and on shelves what had been blown was arranged, decorative pieces that were richly coloured: huge plates on stands, stylised vases, modern sculptures. The objects were all more suited to a Conran restaurant in London than to a barn on Guernsey. St. James took them in with some surprise. Their condition—lovingly dustless and pristine—was a contrast to the condition of the furnace, the pipes, and the chemical sacks, all of which wore a thick coating of grime.

  The glassmaker himself was oblivious of the presence of anyone. He was working at a wide bench on the greenhouse-and-conservatory side of the barn. Above him hung the plans for a complicated conservatory. To either side of these and beneath them hung drawings of other projects even more elaborate. As he made a swift cut in the transparent sheet that lay across his bench, the man didn't refer to any of these plans or drawings but rather to a simple paper napkin on which some dimensions looked to be scrawled.

  This had to be Moullin, St. James thought, the father of one of Brouard's beneficiaries. He called the man's name, speaking louder this time. Moullin looked up. He removed wax earplugs from his ears, which explained why he hadn't heard St. James's approach but did little to explain why Sinatra had been serenading him.

  He next went to the source of the music—a CD player—where Frank had gone on to Luck Be a Lady Tonight. Moullin cut him off mid-phrase. He reached for a large towel with whales spouting water upon it and covered the CD player, saying, “I use it so people know where to find me out here. But he gets on my nerves, so I use the plugs as well.”

  “Instead of a different kind of music?”

  “I hate it all, so it doesn't matter. What can I do for you?”

  St. James in
troduced himself and handed over his card. Moullin read it and flipped it onto the workbench, where it landed next to his napkin calculations. His face became immediately wary. He'd noted St. James's occupation, obviously, and would have little inclination to believe that a forensic scientist from London had come calling with building a conservatory in mind.

  St. James said, “You appear to have had some damage to your garden. I wouldn't think vandalism is a common problem here.”

  “You come to inspect it?” Moullin asked. “Is that a job for the likes of you?”

  “Have you phoned the police?”

  “Didn't need to.” Moullin took a metal tape measure from his pocket and used it against the sheet of glass he'd cut. He made a tick next to one of his calculations and carefully leaned the pane against a stack of a dozen or more others that he'd already seen to. “I did it myself,” he said. “It was time.”

  “I see. Home improvement.”

  “Life improvement. My girls started it when the wife left us.”

  “You've more than one daughter?” St. James asked.

  Moullin seemed to weigh the question before answering. “I've three.” He turned and took up another sheet of glass. He put it on the bench and bent over it: a man not to be disturbed from his work. St. James took the opportunity to approach. He glanced at the plans and the drawings above the bench. The words Yates, Dobree Lodge, Le Vallon identified the site of the complicated conservatory. The other drawings, he saw, were for stylised windows. They belonged to G. O. Wartime Museum.

  St. James examined Henry Moullin at work before he said anything else. He was a thick-boned man who looked strong and fit. His hands were muscled, which was evident even beneath the plasters that at the moment were crosshatching them haphazardly.

  “You've cut yourself, I see,” St. James said. “That must be an occupational hazard.”

  “True enough.” Moullin sliced through the glass and then repeated the action, with an expertise that gave the lie to his remark.

  “You make windows as well as conservatories?”

  “The plans would indicate that.” He raised his head and tilted it towards the wall of drawings. “If it's glass, I do it, Mr. St. James.”

  “Would that be how you came to the attention of Guy Brouard?”

  “It would.”

  “You were intended to do the museum windows?” St. James gestured towards the drawings posted on the wall. “Or were these just on spec?”

  “I did all the glasswork for the Brouards,” Moullin answered. “Took down the original greenhouses on the property, built the conservatory, replaced windows in the house. Like I said, if it's glass, I do it. So that would be the case for the museum as well.”

  “But you can't be the only glazier on the island. Not with all the greenhouses I've seen. It wouldn't be possible.”

  “Not the only one,” Moullin acknowledged. “Just the best. Brouards knew that.”

  “Which made you the logical one to employ for the wartime museum?”

  “You might say that.”

  “As I understand it, though, no one knew what the exact architecture was going to be on the building. Until the night of the party. So for you to make drawings in advance . . . Did you fit them to the local man's plans? I've seen his model, by the way. Your drawings look suitable for his design.”

  Moullin ticked off another item on his paper-napkin list and said, “Did you come here to talk about windows?”

  “Why only one?” St. James asked.

  “One what?”

  “Daughter. You've three but Brouard remembered only one in his will. Cynthia Moullin. Your . . . what? Is she your oldest?”

  Moullin got another sheet of glass and made two more cuts. He used the tape measure to confirm his result and said, “Cyn's my oldest.”

  “Any thoughts why he singled her out? How old is she, by the way?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Finished school yet?”

  “She's doing Further Education in St. Peter Port. University's what he suggested for her. She's clever enough, but there's nothing like that here. She'd need England for it. England costs money.”

  “Which you didn't have, I take it. Nor did she.”

  Till he died hung between them like smoke from an unseen cigarette.

  “Right. It was all about money. Yeah. Lucky us.” Moullin turned from the workbench to face St. James. “'S that all you want to know, or is there more?”

  “Any thoughts about why only one of your daughters was remembered in the will?”

  “None.”

  “Surely the other two girls would benefit from higher education as well.”

  “True.”

  “Then . . . ?”

  “They weren't the right age. Not set to go to university yet. All in good time.”

  This remark pointed the way to an overall illogic in what Moullin was suggesting, and St. James seized upon it.

  “But Mr. Brouard couldn't have expected to die, could he? At sixty-nine, he wasn't a young man, but to all reports, he was fit. Isn't that the case?” He didn't wait for Moullin to answer. “So if Brouard meant your oldest daughter to be educated with the money he left her . . . When was she supposed to be educated, by his account? He might not have died for twenty years. Or more.”

  “Unless we killed him, of course,” Moullin said. “Or isn't that where you're heading?”

  “Where is your daughter, Mr. Moullin?”

  “Oh, come on, man. She's seventeen years old.”

  “She's here, then? May I speak with—”

  “She's on Alderney.”

  “Doing what?”

  “She's caring for her gran. Or hiding out from the coppers. Have it which way you will. It's no matter to me.” He went back to his work, but St. James saw that the vein in his temple throbbed, and when he made his next cut on the sheet of glass, it went off the mark. He muttered a curse and flung the resulting ruined pieces in a rubbish bin.

  “Can't afford to make too many errors in your line of work,” St. James noted. “I suppose that could get expensive.”

  “Well, you're something of a distraction, aren't you?” Moullin rejoined. “So if there's nothing else, I've work to do and not a hell of a lot of time to do it.”

  “I understand why Mr. Brouard left money to a boy called Paul Fielder,” St. James said. “Brouard was a mentor to him, through an established organisation on the island. GAYT. Have you heard of it? So they had a formal arrangement for their relationship. Is that how your daughter met him as well?”

  “Cyn had no relationship with him,” Henry Moullin said, “GAYT or otherwise.” And despite his earlier words, he apparently decided to work no more. He began returning his cutting tools and measures to their appropriate storage places, and he grabbed up a whiskbroom and swept the workbench clear of minuscule fragments of glass. “He had his fancies, and that's what it was with Cyn. One fancy today, another tomorrow. A bit of I can do this, I can do that, and I can do whatever I want because I've the funds to play Father Christmas Come to Guernsey if I decide to do it. Cyn just got lucky. Like musical chairs with her in the right spot when the tune dried up. Another day, it might've been one of her sisters. Another month and it probably would've been. That was it. He knew her better than the other girls because she'd be on the grounds when I was working. Or she'd stop by to visit her aunt.”

  “Her aunt?”

  “Val Duffy. My sister. She helps out with the girls.”

  “How?”

  “What do you mean, how?” Moullin demanded, and it was clear that the man was reaching his limit. “Girls need a woman in their lives. Do you want the ABC's on why, or can you figure it out for yourself? Cyn'd go over there and the two of them would talk. Girl business this was, all right?”

  “Changes in her body? Problems with boys?”

  “I don't know. I kept my nose where it's meant to be, which is on my face and not in their affairs. I just blessed my stars that Cyn had a woman she could
talk to and that woman was my sister.”

  “A sister who'd let you know if there was something amiss?”

  “There was nothing amiss.”

  “But he had his fancies.”

  “What?”

  “Brouard. You said he had his fancies. Was Cynthia one of them?”

  Moullin's face purpled. He took a step towards St. James. “God damn. I ought to—” He stopped himself. It looked like an effort. “We're speaking of a girl,” he said. “Not a full-grown woman. A girl.”

  “Old men have fancied young girls before.”

  “You're twisting my words.”

  “Then untwist them for me.”

  Moullin took a moment. He stepped away. He looked across the room to his creative glass pieces. “Like I said. He had fancies. Something caught his eye, he shook fairy dust on it. He made it feel special. Then something else caught his eye and he moved the fairy dust over to that. It's the way he was.”

  “Fairy dust being money?”

  Moullin shook his head. “Not always.”

  “Then what?”

  “Belief,” he said.

  “What sort of belief?”

  “Belief in yourself. He was good that way. Problem was, you started thinking there might be something to his belief if you got lucky.”

  “Like money.”

  “A promise. Like someone was saying, Here's how I can help you if you work hard enough but you've got to do that first—the hard work itself—and then we'll see what we will see. Only no one ever said it, did they, not exactly. But somehow the thought got planted in your mind.”

  “In yours as well?”

  On a sigh, Moullin said, “In mine as well.”

  St. James considered what he'd learned about Guy Brouard, about the secrets he kept, about his plans for the future, about what each individual had apparently believed about the man himself and about those plans. Perhaps, St. James thought, these aspects of the dead man—which might otherwise have been merely reflections of a wealthy entrepreneur's caprice—were instead symptoms of larger and more injurious behaviour: a bizarre power game. In this game, an influential man no longer at the helm of a successful business retained a form of control over individuals, with the exercise of that control being the ultimate objective of the game. People became chess pieces and the board was their lives. And the principal player was Guy Brouard.