A Place of Hiding

by Elizabeth George

  Past the Brouards a corridor extended to a door that gave onto the vegetable garden. Paul began to pull Taboo in this direction as the Viking woman said, “Don't even think of leaving without cleaning up the mess you've made, you little toad.”

  Taboo snarled. The Brouards backed away. Paul managed to get him down the passage without another outburst—despite Viking Woman's shriek of “Come back here at once!”—and he pushed the dog outside and into the fallow garden. He shut the door on him, steeling his heart when Taboo yelped in protest.

  Paul knew the dog was only trying to protect him. He also knew that anyone with a grain of common sense would have understood that. But the world was not a place where one could depend upon people having common sense, was it? This fact made them dangerous because it made them afraid and sly.

  So he had to get away from them. Because she hadn't come to see what the ruckus was all about, Paul knew that Miss Ruth couldn't possibly be home. He would have to return when it was safe to do so. But he couldn't leave the remains of this disastrous encounter with the other Brouards behind him. That, of all things, would not be right.

  He went back to the kitchen and paused in the doorway. He saw that despite the Viking woman's words, she and Adrian were already in the process of wiping up the floor and cleaning off the top of the cooker. The air in the room still hung with the odour of scalded milk, however.

  “. . . an end to this nonsense,” Adrian's mother was saying. “I'll have him sorted out straightaway and make no mistake about it. If he thinks he can just walk in here without a by-your-leave . . . as if he owns the place . . . as if he's not what he patently is, which is a useless little piece of common—”

  “Mother.” Adrian, Paul saw, had spied him by the door and with that single word, so did Viking Woman. She'd been wiping off the cook top but now she was standing with the dishcloth in her hand and she balled it up with her large, ringed fingers. She gave him such a scrutiny from head to toe with such a look of disgust on her face that Paul felt a shiver come over him and knew he had to be gone at once. But he wasn't about to leave without the rucksack and the message it contained about the plan and the dream.

  “You may inform your parents that we're hiring a solicitor about this business of the will,” Viking Woman told him. “If your imagination has led you to believe you're walking off with one penny of Adrian's money, you're very much mistaken. I intend to battle you in every court I can find, and by the time I'm finished, whatever money you schemed to have off Adrian's father will be gone. Do you understand? You will not win. Now, get out of here. I don't want to see your face again. If I do, I'll have the police after you. And that bloody mongrel of yours I'll have put down.”

  Paul didn't move. He wouldn't leave without his rucksack, but he wasn't sure how to get to it. It lay where he'd kicked it, by the leg of the table at the centre of the room. But between him and it stood both the Brouards. And nearness to them spelled certain danger to himself.

  “Did you hear me?” Viking Woman demanded. “I said get out. You've no friends here despite what you apparently think. You are not welcome in this house.”

  Paul saw that one way he could get to the rucksack was to scramble beneath the table for it, so that was what he did. Before Adrian's mother finished what she was saying, he was on his hands and knees and scuttling across the floor like a crab.

  “Where's he going?” she demanded. “What's he doing now?”

  Adrian seemed to realise Paul's intention. He snatched the rucksack at the same moment Paul's own fingers closed about it.

  “My God, the little beast's stolen something!” Viking Woman cried. “This is the limit. Stop him, Adrian.”

  Adrian attempted to do so. But all the images that the word stolen planted within Paul's brain—the rucksack gone through, the discovery, the questions, the police, a cell, the worry, the shame—gave him a strength he otherwise would not have possessed. He yanked so hard that he pulled Adrian Brouard off balance. The man crashed forward into the table, fell to his knees, and smacked his chin against the wood. His mother cried out, and that gave Paul the opening he needed. He jerked the rucksack away and leaped to his feet.

  He charged in the direction of the corridor. The vegetable garden was walled but its gate gave onto the estate grounds. There were places to hide at Le Reposoir that he wagered neither of the Brouards were aware of, so he knew that if he made it to the fallow garden, he'd be completely safe.

  He dashed down the corridor to the sound of Viking Woman crying out, “Darling, are you all right?” And then, “Chase him, for God's sake. Adrian! Get him.” But Paul was faster than both mother and son. The last thing he heard was “He's got something in that pack!” before the door closed behind him and he fled with Taboo towards the garden gate.

  Deborah was surprised by the Talbot Valley. It looked like a miniature dale transported from Yorkshire, where she and Simon had honeymooned. A river had carved it eons in the past, and one side consisted of rolling green slopes where the fawn-coloured cattle of the island grazed, sheltered from sunlight and the occasional harsh weather by stands of oaks. The road coursed along its other side, a steep hill held back by granite walls. Along them grew ashes and elms and beyond them, the land rose to hilltop pastures. The area was as different to the rest of the island as Yorkshire was to the South Downs.

  They were looking for a little lane called Les Niaux. Cherokee was relatively certain where it would be, having already paid a visit there. Nonetheless, he had a map spread out on his knees, and he acted as navigator for their journey. They nearly overshot the mark on their approach, but he said, “Here! Turn,” when they came upon an opening in a hedgerow. He added, “I swear. These streets look like our driveways at home.”

  Calling the stretch of paved trail a street was certainly giving it more than its due. It dipped off the main road like the entrance to another dimension, one that was defined by thick vegetation, damp air, and the sight of water passing through the cracks in boulders nearby. Not fifty yards along this lane, an old water mill appeared to their right. It stood less than five yards off the road, topped by an old sluice from which greenery draped.

  “This is it,” Cherokee said, folding the map and storing it in the glove compartment. “They live in the cottage at the end of the row. The rest . . .”—he gestured to the dwellings they passed as Deborah pulled the car into the wide yard in front of the water mill—“this is where he keeps all his war stuff.”

  “He must have a lot of it,” Deborah said, for there were two other cottages besides the one which Cherokee indicated that Frank Ouseley used as his home.

  “That's putting it mildly,” Cherokee replied. “That's Ouseley's car. We could be in luck.”

  Deborah knew they would need it. The presence of a ring on the beach where Guy Brouard had died—one identical to the ring China River had purchased, one that was also identical to the ring that was apparently now missing from her belongings—didn't help the cause of her proclaimed innocence. She and Cherokee needed Frank Ouseley to recognise a description of that ring. Moreover, they needed him to realise that one just like it had been nicked from his collection.

  A log fire burned somewhere nearby. Deborah and Cherokee took in its scent as they approached the front door of Ouseley's cottage. “Makes me think of the canyon,” Cherokee said. “Middle of winter there, you never even know you're in Orange County. All the cabins and the fires. Snow on Saddleback Mountain sometimes. It's the best.” He looked around. “I don't think I knew that till now.”

  “Second thoughts about living on a fishing boat, then?” Deborah said.

  “Hell,” he said ruefully, “I had second thoughts about that after fifteen minutes in St. Peter Port gaol.” He paused at the square of concrete that served as the cottage's front porch. “I know I'm to blame for all of this. I've put China where she is because it's always been the fast and easy buck for me, and I know it. So I need to get her out of this mess. If I can't do that . . .” He sighed,
and his breath was a puff of fog in the air. “She's scared, Debs. So am I. I guess that's why I wanted to call Mom. She wouldn't have helped much—she might even have made things worse—but still . . .”

  “She's still Mum,” Deborah finished for him. She squeezed his arm. “It's going to work out. It will. You'll see.”

  He covered her hand. “Thanks,” he said. “You're . . .” He smiled. “Never mind.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Were you thinking of making one of your moves on me, Cherokee?”

  He laughed. “You betcha.”

  They knocked on the door and then rang the bell. Despite the chatter of a television inside and the presence of a Peugeot outside, no one answered. Cherokee pointed out that Frank might be working among his immense collection, and he went to check the other two cottages as Deborah knocked on the door again. She heard a quavering voice call out, “Hold your damn horses,” and she said to Cherokee, “Someone's coming.” He rejoined her at the step and as he did so, keys and bolts operated on the other side of the door.

  An old man swung it open. A very old man. His thick eyeglasses glinted at them, and with one frail hand he held himself upright against the wall. He seemed to keep himself steady through a combination of that wall and willpower, but it looked as if it cost him a tremendous effort. He should have been using a Zimmer frame or at least a cane, but he had neither with him.

  “Well, here you be,” he said expansively. “Day early, aren't you? Well, no matter, that. All to the good. Come in. Come in.”

  Clearly, he was expecting someone else. Deborah herself had been expecting a much younger man. But Cherokee cleared that up for her when he said, “Is Frank here, Mr. Ouseley? We saw his car outside,” and made it evident that the old pensioner was Frank Ouseley's father.

  “It's not Frank you're wanting,” the man said. “It's me. Graham. Frank's gone to take that pie tin back to the Petit farm. 'F we're lucky, she'll do us another chicken and leek before the week's over. Got my fingers crossed on that one, I have.”

  “Will Frank return soon?” Deborah asked.

  “Oh, we've time enough for our business 'fore he gets here,” Graham Ouseley declared. “Don't you worry about that. Frankie doesn't like what I'm up to, I got to tell you. But I promised myself I'd do the right thing 'fore I died. And I mean to do it, with or without the boy's blessing.”

  He doddered into an overheated sitting room, where he scooped a remote from the arm of a chair, pointed it to the television where a chef was expertly slicing bananas, and doused the picture. He said, “Let's have at this in the kitchen. There's coffee.”

  “Actually, we've come—”

  “No trouble.” The old man interrupted what he clearly thought was going to be Deborah's protest. “Like to be hospitable.”

  There was nothing for it but to follow him to the kitchen. It was a small room made smaller by the clutter it held: Stacks of newspapers, letters, and documents shared space with cooking utensils, crockery, cutlery, and the occasional misplaced gardening tool. “Sit yourselfs down,” Graham Ouseley told them as he eased his way over to a coffee press that held four inches of some greasy-looking liquid that he unceremoniously dumped with its sodden grounds into the sink. From a bowing shelf he took down a canister, and with a shaking hand he spooned up fresh grounds: both into the cafetiere and onto the floor. He shuffled across this and captured the kettle from the cook top. At the tap he filled it with water, setting it to boil. When he'd managed all this, he beamed with pride. “That's that,” he announced, rubbing his hands together and then frowning, said, “Why the hell're you two still on your feet?”

  They were on their feet because, obviously, they were not the guests the old man meant to receive into his home. But as his son wasn't there—although due to return soon if his errand and the presence of his car were any indication—Deborah and Cherokee exchanged a glance that said “Well, why not?” They would enjoy a coffee with the old man and simply wait.

  Nonetheless, Deborah felt it only fair to say, “Frank's due back soon, Mr. Ouseley?”

  To which he replied rather peevishly, “Listen up. You're not to worry about Frank. Sit down. Gotcher notepad ready? No? Good God. You must have memories like elephants, the two of you.” He lowered himself to one of the chairs and loosened his tie. Deborah noticed for the first time that he was nattily dressed in tweeds and a waistcoat, and his shoes had been polished. “Frank,” Graham Ouseley informed them, “is born to worry. He doesn't like to think what might come of this business between you and me. But I'm not concerned. What c'n they do to me that they haven't done ten times over, eh? I owe it to the dead, I do, to hold the living accountable. We all have it as our duty, that, and I mean to do mine before I die. Ninety-two I am. Four score and more'n ten, it is. What d'you make of that?”

  Deborah and Cherokee murmured their amazement. On the stove the kettle whistled.

  “Let me,” Cherokee said, and before Graham Ouseley could voice a protest, he got to his feet. “You tell your story, Mr. Ouseley. I'll make the coffee.” He gave the old man an appealing smile.

  This appeared to be enough to mollify him, because Graham remained where he was as Cherokee saw to the coffee, moving round the kitchen to find cups, spoons, and sugar. As he brought things to the table, Graham Ouseley rested back in his chair. He said, “It's quite a tale, you two. Let me tell you about it,” and he proceeded to do so.

  His story took them back more than fifty years, to the German occupation of the Channel Islands. Five years living under the bleeding jackboot, he called it, five years of trying to outwit the damn Krauts and to live with dignity despite degradation. Vehicles confiscated right down to bicycles, wireless sets declared verboten, deportation of longtime residents, executions of those deemed “spies.” Slave camps where Russian and Ukrainian prisoners worked to build fortifications for the Nazis. Deaths in European labour camps, where those who defied German rule were sent. Documents studied into the time of one's grandparents to ascertain whether there was Jewish blood to be purged from the populace. And quislings aplenty among the honest people of Guernsey: those devils willing to sell their souls—and their fellow islanders—for whatever the Germans promised them.

  “Jealousy and spite,” Graham Ouseley declared. “They sold us out for that as well. Old scores settled by whispering a name to the devil Nazis.”

  He was glad to tell them that most of the time it was a foreigner betraying someone: a Dutchman living in St. Peter Port who became wise to someone's hidden wireless, an Irish fisherman from St. Sampson who witnessed a midnight landing of a British boat down near Petit Port Bay. While there was no excusing that and even less forgiving it, the fact that the quisling was foreign born made the betrayal less of an evil than when a native islander did it. But that happened as well: a Guernseyman betraying his fellows. That was what had happened to gift.

  “Gift?” Deborah asked. “What sort of gift?”

  Not gift, G.I.F.T., Graham Ouseley informed them, an acronym for Guernsey Independent From Terror. It was the island's underground news-sheet and the people's only source of truth about Allied activities during the war. This news was meticulously gleaned at night from contraband radio receivers that were tuned to pick up the BBC. The facts of the war were typed up on single sheets of paper in the wee hours by candlelight behind the shrouded windows of the vestry of St. Pierre-du-Bois, and then distributed by hand to trusted souls who were hungry enough for word of the outside world that they were willing to risk Nazi interrogation and the aftermath of Nazi interrogation in order to have it.

  “Quislings among them,” Graham Ouseley declared. “Should've known, the rest of us. Should've taken more care. Should never've trusted. But they were of us.” He thumped his chest with his fist. “You understand me? They were of us.”

  The four men responsible for G.I.F.T. were arrested upon the word of one of these quislings, he explained. Three of those men died as a result of that arrest—two in prison and the other attempting esc
ape. Only one of the men—Graham Ouseley himself—survived two hellish years incarcerated before being freed, one hundred pounds of skin, bones, lice, and tuberculosis.

  But they destroyed more than just the creators of G.I.F.T., those quislings who betrayed them, Ouseley said. They informed on those who sheltered British spies, on those who hid escaped Russian prisoners, on those whose only “crime” was to chalk a V for victory on the cycle-seats of Nazi soldiers as they drank at night in hotel bars. But the quislings were never forced to pay for their misdeeds, and that's what rankled with those who'd suffered at their hands. People died, people were executed, people went to prison and some never returned. For more than fifty years, no one spoke up publicly to name the names of those responsible.

  “Blood on their hands,” Graham Ouseley declared. “I mean to make them pay. Oh, they'll fight against it, won't they? They'll deny it hot and loud. But when we spread out the proof . . . And tha's how I want to do it, you two. Names first in the paper, and let 'em deny the whole thing and get themselves advocates to set things right. Then the proof comes, and we watch them squirm like they damn well should've squirmed when Jerry finally surrendered to the Allies. That's when all of this should've come out. The quislings, the bloody profiteers, the Jerrybags, and their bastard Kraut babies.”

  The old man was working himself into a lather, his lips wet with spittle. Deborah began to fear for his heart as his skin took on a bluish tinge. She knew it was time to make him understand that they were not who he thought they were, which was apparently reporters come to hear his story and to print it in the local newspaper.

  She said, “Mr. Ouseley, I'm terribly afraid—”

  “No!” He shoved his chair back from the table with a surprising strength that sloshed the coffee from their mugs and the milk from its jug. “You come with me if you don't believe the story. My boy Frank and I, we've got us the proof, you hear that?” He struggled to his feet, and Cherokee surged up to help him. Graham shook the assistance off, however, and trundled unsteadily towards the front door. Once again, there seemed nothing for it but to follow him, to mollify him, and to hope that his son arrived back at the water mill before the old man suffered from his exertions.