A Place of Hiding

by Elizabeth George

  Frank admitted that there was that possibility, but he allowed himself to sound doubtful because he knew the request she was likely to make and he didn't want to grant it. She made it straightaway, nonetheless. Could they have a look among his wartime artifacts, then? Oh, she knew there was no realistic way they were going to be able to go through everything, but there was always a slim chance that they could get lucky . . .

  “Let's have a look through the catalogues at least,” Frank said. “If there was a ring, one of us would have documented it as long as we'd already come across it.”

  He took them the way his father had taken them and pulled out the first of the notebooks. There were four of them and counting, each of them set up to log possession of a particular type of wartime article. So far he had a notebook for wearing apparel, one for medals and insignia, one for ammunition and arms, one for documents and papers. A perusal of the notebook for medals and insignia showed River and the St. James woman that no ring like the one they were describing had yet come to light. This did not, however, mean that no ring lay somewhere among the vast assortment of material still to be gone through. Within a minute it was quite clear that both of his visitors knew that.

  Were the rest of the medals and the other insignia kept in one place, Deborah St. James wanted to know, or were they spread throughout the collection? She meant the medals and the insignia not catalogued already. Frank recognised that.

  He told her that they weren't kept in one place. He explained that the only items that were stored with like items were those that had already been handled, sorted through, and catalogued. Those things, he explained, were in organised containers that had been carefully labeled for convenient access when the time came to set up exhibits in the wartime museum. Each article was logged into the designated notebook, where it was given an item number and a container number against the day it would be called for.

  “Since there was no ring mentioned in the catalogue,” Frank said regretfully, and he let an eloquent silence fill in the rest of his remark: There was probably no ring at all, unless it was hidden somewhere among the Gordian knot of articles still to be dealt with.

  “But there were rings catalogued,” River pointed out.

  His companion added, “So during a sorting period, someone could even have pinched a skull-and-crossed-bones ring without your knowing, isn't that right?”

  “And that person could have been anyone who came with Guy at one time or another,” River added. “Paul Fielder. Adrian Brouard. The Abbott kid.”

  “Perhaps,” Frank said, “but I don't know why someone would.”

  “Or the ring could have been stolen from you at another time, couldn't it?” Deborah St. James said. “Because if something got pinched from your uncatalogued material, would you even know it was missing?”

  “I suppose that depends on what it is that was taken,” Frank answered. “Something large, something dangerous . . . I'd probably know. Something small—”

  “Like a ring,” River persisted.

  “—I might overlook.” Frank saw the glances of satisfaction they exchanged. He said, “But see here, why is this important?”

  “Fielder, Brouard, and Abbott.” Cherokee River spoke to the red-head and not to Frank, and within a brief span of time, the two of them took their leave. They thanked Frank for his help and hurried to their car. He overheard River saying in reply to something the woman pointed out to him, “They all could have wanted it for different reasons. But China didn't. Not at all.”

  At first Frank thought River was referring to the skull-and-crossed-bones ring. But he soon came to realise they were talking about the murder: wanting Guy dead and, perhaps, needing him dead. And beyond that, knowing that death might well be the only answer to imminent peril.

  He shuddered and wished he had a religion that would give him the answers he needed and the route to walk. He closed the door of the cottage on the very thought of death—untimely, unnecessary, or otherwise—and he gave his gaze to the mishmash of wartime belongings that had defined his own life and the life of his father over the years.

  It had long been Look what I've got here, Frankie!

  And Happy Christmas, Dad. You'll never guess where I found that one.

  Or Think of whose hands fired this pistol, son. Think of the hate that pressed the trigger.

  Everything he now had had been amassed as a way to have an unbreakable bond with a giant of a man, a colossus of spirit, dignity, courage, and strength. One couldn't be like him—couldn't even hope to be like him, to have lived as he lived, to have survived all that he had survived—so one shared what he loved and in that way, one made a tiny mark on the ledger on which one's own father's mark was and would always be larger than life, bold and proud.

  That had begun it, that need to be like, so basic and ingrained that Frank often wondered if sons were somehow programmed from conception to strive for perfect paternal emulation. If that wasn't possible—Dad too much a Herculean figure, never diminished by infirmity or age—then something else needed to be created, to serve as a son's irrefutable proof of a worthiness that matched his father's.

  Inside the cottage, Frank observed the concrete testimony of his personal worth. The idea of the wartime collection and the years of searching out everything from bullets to bandages had grown like the abundant vegetation that surrounded the water mill: undisciplined, exuberant, and unrestrained. The seed had been planted in the form of a trunk of goods preserved by Graham's own mother: ration books, air raid precautions, licences to purchase candles. Seen and fingered through, those belongings had served as inspiration for the great project that had circumscribed Frank Ouseley's life and exemplified his love for his father. He'd used the amassment of goods as a means of speaking all the words of devotion, admiration, and sheer delight that he had long found impossible to say.

  The past is always with us, Frankie. It behooves those of us who were part of it to pass the experience on to them that follows. Else how d'we keep the bad from extending itself? Else how d'we tip our hats to the good?

  And what better way to preserve that past and to acknowledge it fully than to educate others not only in the classroom, as he'd done for years, but also through exposure to the relics that defined a time long gone? His father had sheets of G.I.F.T., the occasional pronouncement from the Nazis, a Luftwaffe cap, a party membership pin, a rusty pistol, a gas mask, and a carbide lamp. Frank the boy had held these artifacts in his hands and had pledged himself to the cause of amassment at the age of seven.

  Let's start a collection, Dad. D'you want to? It'd be such fun, wouldn't it? There's got to be lots of stuff on the island.

  It wasn't a game, boy. You're not meant to think it was ever a game. You understand me?

  And he did. He did. That was his torment. He understood. It had never been a game.

  Frank drove from his head the sound of his father's voice, but in its place came another sound, an explanation of both the past and the future that arose from nowhere, comprising words whose source he felt he knew well but could not have named: It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul. He whimpered like a child caught in a bad dream, and he forced himself to move into the nightmare.

  The filing cabinet, he saw, hadn't shut completely when he'd shoved it home. He approached it tentatively, like an untried soldier crossing a mine field. When he reached it unscathed, he curled his fingers round the handle of the drawer, half-expecting it to singe his flesh as he pulled.

  He was finally part of the war he'd longed to serve in with distinguished valour. He finally knew what it was to want to run wildly away from the enemy, to a small safe place he could hide, a place that did not actually exist.

  By the time she returned to Le Reposoir, Ruth Brouard saw that a batch of police constables had moved from the estate grounds to the lane and were progressing along towards the cut-off that would take them down to the bay. Their work, it seemed, was finished at Le Reposoir itself. Now they would be searching the earth
en bank and the hedgerows—and perhaps, even, both the wooded areas and the fields beyond—to locate whatever it was that would prove whatever needed proving about whatever they knew or thought they knew or fancied about the death of her brother.

  She ignored them. Her time in St. Peter Port had drained her of nearly every ounce of her strength and was threatening to rob her of that which had long sustained her in a life marked by flight and fear and loss. Throughout everything that might have demolished the core of another child—that foundation carefully laid by two loving parents, by grandparents and doting aunts and uncles—she had been able to hold on to who she was. The reason had been Guy and what Guy represented: family and a sense of having come from some place even if that place was gone forever. But now it seemed to Ruth as if the fact of Guy himself as a living, breathing human whom she had known and loved was inches away from being obliterated. If that happened, she didn't know how or if she could recover. More, she didn't think she would want to.

  She eased along the drive beneath the line of chestnuts and thought how good it would be to sleep. Every movement was an effort and had been so for weeks, and she knew that the immediate future held no palliative for what she suffered. Morphine carefully administered might mitigate the misery that ceaselessly occupied her bones, but only complete oblivion would remove from her mind the suspicions that were beginning to plague her.

  She told herself that what she'd learned had a thousand and one explanations. But knowing that didn't alter the fact that some of those explanations might well have cost her brother his life. It didn't matter that what she'd uncovered about Guy's final months could have actually alleviated the guilt she felt for her part in the heretofore unexplained circumstances that surrounded his murder. What possessed importance was the fact that she hadn't known what her brother had been doing, and the existence of that very simple not knowing was enough to begin the process of emptying her of her long-held beliefs. To allow that would bring horror upon horror into Ruth's life, however. Thus, she knew she had to build bulwarks against the possibility of losing what had given her world its definition. But she didn't know how to do it.

  From Dominic Forrest's office she'd gone to Guy's broker and then to his banker. From them, she'd seen the journey that her brother had been on in the ten months that preceded his death. Selling enormous lumps of securities, he'd moved cash into and out of his bank account in such a way that the fingerprints of illegality seemed to be smudged across everything he'd done. The impassive faces of Guy's monetary advisors had suggested much, but all they would present her with was facts so bare as to beg to be clothed with the garments of her darkest suspicions.

  Fifty thousand pounds here, seventy-five thousand pounds there, building ever building to an immense two hundred and fifty thousand pounds in early November. There would be some sort of paper trail, of course, but she didn't want to try to follow it just yet. All she wanted to do was to confirm what Dominic Forrest had told her were the results of the forensic accountant's exploration into Guy's monetary situation. He'd invested and reinvested carefully and wisely, as was his wont throughout the nine years since they had come to the island, but suddenly in his final months, money had slipped through his fingers like sand . . . or had been drawn from him like blood . . . or had been required . . . or had been donated . . . or . . . what?

  She didn't know. For a risible moment, she told herself that she didn't care. It wasn't important—the money itself—and that was true enough. But what the money represented, what the absence of money suggested in a situation in which Guy's will had seemed to indicate there was plenty to be spread among his children and his two other beneficiaries . . . This Ruth could not so easily dismiss. Because the thought of all this led her ineluctably to her brother's murder and how and if it was connected to that money.

  Her head ached. There were too many pieces of information swimming round up there, and they seemed to press against her skull, each one of them jockeying for a position in which it would receive the most attention. But she didn't want to attend to any of them. She wanted only to sleep.

  She pulled her car round the side of the house, past the rose garden where the leafless bushes had already been pruned for winter. Just beyond this garden, the drive curved again and led the way to the old stable where she kept her car. When she braked in front of it, she knew she didn't have the strength to draw the doors open. So she merely turned the key, stilled the engine, and rested her head on the steering wheel.

  She felt the cold seep into the Rover, but she remained where she was, her eyes closed as she listened to the comforting silence. It soothed her as nothing else could have done. In silence there was nothing else to be learned.

  But she knew she couldn't stay there long. She needed her medicine. And rest. God, how she needed rest.

  She had to use her shoulder to open the car door. When she was on her feet, she was surprised to find herself feeling unequal to the task of walking across the gravel in the direction of the conservatory, where she would be able to let herself into the house. So instead, she leaned against the car, which was how she came to notice movement in the area of the duck pond.

  She thought at once of Paul Fielder and that thought led her in the direction of someone's having to break the news to him that his inheritance wasn't going to be as immense as Dominic Forrest had earlier led him to believe. Not that it would matter greatly. His family was impoverished, his father's business ruined by the relentless pressures of modernisation and convenience on the island. Anything that came into his hands was going to be a vast amount more than he could ever have hoped to have . . . if he'd known about Guy's will in the first place. But that was another speculation that Ruth didn't wish to entertain.

  The walk to the duck pond took an effort of will. But when Ruth got there, emerging between two rhododendrons so that the pond spread out in front of her like a pewter platter that took its colour from the sky, she found that she hadn't seen Paul Fielder at all, busy building duck shelters to replace those that had been destroyed. Instead, it was the man from London who stood at the pond's edge. He'd taken a position a yard from some discarded tools. But the focus of his attention appeared to be the duck graveyard across the water.

  Ruth would have turned to go back to the house in the hope of escaping his notice. But he glanced her way and then back at the graves. He said, “What happened?”

  “Someone didn't like ducks,” she replied.

  “Who wouldn't like ducks? They're harmless enough.”

  “One would think so.” She didn't say more, but when he looked at her, she felt as if he read the truth on her face.

  He said, “The shelters were destroyed as well? Who was rebuilding them?”

  “Guy and Paul. They'd built the originals. The whole pond was one of their projects.”

  “Perhaps someone didn't like that.” He directed his gaze at the house.

  “I can't think who,” she said, although she herself could hear how artificial her words sounded, and she knew—and feared—that he didn't believe her for a moment. “As you said, who could dislike ducks?”

  “Someone who disliked Paul? Or the relationship Paul had with your brother?”

  “You're thinking of Adrian.”

  “Is he likely to have been jealous?”

  Adrian was likely, Ruth thought, to be anything. But she didn't intend to talk about her nephew to this man or to anyone else. So she said, “It's damp here. I'll leave you to your contemplation, Mr. St. James. I'm going inside.”

  He accompanied her, unbidden. He limped next to her in silence and there was nothing for it but to allow him to follow her back through the shrubbery and into the conservatory whose door, as ever, remained unlocked.

  He took note of this. Was it always so? he asked her.

  Yes. It was. Living in Guernsey was not like living in London. People felt more secure here. Locks were unnecessary.

  She felt him gazing at her as she spoke, felt his grey-blue eyes boring
into the back of her head as she moved before him along the brick path in the humid air beneath the glass. She knew what he was thinking about an unlocked door: access and egress for anyone wishing to harm her brother.

  At least this was a better direction for his thoughts to be taking than where they'd been heading when he spoke about the deaths of the innocent ducks. She didn't believe for a moment that an unknown intruder had anything to do with her brother's death. But she would allow this speculation if it kept the Londoner from considering Adrian.

  He said, “I spoke to Mrs. Duffy earlier. You've been to town?”

  Ruth said, “I saw Guy's advocate. His bankers and his brokers as well.” She took them into the morning room. Valerie, she saw, had already been there. The windows were uncovered to let in the milky December daylight and the gas fire burned to cut the chill. A carafe of coffee stood on a table next to the sofa, with a single cup and saucer at its side. Her needlepoint box was open in anticipation of her working upon the new tapestry, and the post lay stacked upon her drop-front desk.

  Everything about the room declared this a normal day. But it wasn't. Nor would any day be normal again.

  This thought spurred Ruth to speak. She told St. James exactly what she had learned in St. Peter Port. She lowered herself to the sofa as she spoke and gestured him to one of the chairs. He listened in silence and when she was done, he offered her an array of explanations. She'd considered most of them on the drive from town. How could she not when murder sprawled at the end of the trail they appeared to lay?

  “It suggests blackmail, of course,” St. James said. “That sort of depletion of funds, with the amounts increasing over time—”

  “There was nothing in his life he could have been blackmailed over.”