A Place of Hiding

by Elizabeth George

  “So it might seem at first. But he apparently had secrets, Miss Brouard. We know that much from his trip to America when you thought he was elsewhere, don't we?”

  “He had no secret to call for this. There's a simple explanation for what Guy did with the money, one that's completely aboveboard. We just don't know what it is yet.” Even as she spoke, she didn't believe herself, and she could see by the sceptical expression on his face that St. James didn't believe her either.

  He said—and she could tell he was trying to be gentle with her—“I expect you know at heart that the way he was moving money about probably wasn't legitimate.”

  “No, I don't know—”

  “And if you want to find his killer—which I think you do—you know we have to consider possibilities.”

  She made no reply. But the misery she felt was compounded by the compassion in his face. She hated that: people's sympathy. She always had done. Poor dear child having lost her family to the maw of the Nazis. We must be charitable. We must allow her her little moments of terror and grief.

  “We have his killer.” Ruth made the declaration stonily. “I saw her that morning. We know who she is.”

  St. James went his own direction, as if she'd said nothing. “He might have been making a payoff of some kind. Or an enormous purchase. Perhaps even an illegal purchase. Weapons? Drugs? Explosives?”

  “Preposterous,” she said.

  “If he sympathised with a cause—”

  “Arabs? Algerians? Palestinians? The Irish?” she scoffed. “My brother was as politically inclined as a garden gnome, Mr. St. James.”

  “Then the only conclusion is that he willingly gave the money to someone over time. And if that's the case, we need to look at the potential recipients of a glut of cash.” He looked towards the doorway, as if considering what lay beyond it. “Where's your nephew this morning, Miss Brouard?”

  “This has nothing to do with Adrian.”

  “Nonetheless . . .”

  “I expect he's driving his mother somewhere. She's not familiar with the island. The roads are poorly marked. She'd need his help.”

  “He's been a frequent visitor to his father, then? Throughout the years? Familiar with—”

  “This is not about Adrian!” She sounded shrill even to her own ears. Her bones felt pierced by a hundred spikes. She needed to be rid of this man, no matter his intentions towards her and her family. She needed to get to her medicine and to douse herself with enough to render her body unconscious, if that was even possible. She said, “Mr. St. James, you've come for some reason, I expect. I know this isn't a social call.”

  “I've been to see Henry Moullin,” he told her.

  Caution swept over her. “Yes?”

  “I didn't know Mrs. Duffy is his sister.”

  “There wouldn't be a reason for anyone to tell you.”

  He smiled briefly in acknowledgement of this point. He went on to tell her that he'd seen Henry's drawings of the museum windows. He said they put him in mind of the architectural plans in Mr. Brouard's possession. He wondered if he might have a look at them.

  Ruth was so relieved that the request was simple that she granted it at once without considering all the directions her doing so might actually take them. The plans were upstairs in Guy's study, she told him. She would fetch them at once.

  St. James told her he'd accompany her if she didn't mind. He wanted to have another look at the model Bertrand Debiere had constructed for Mr. Brouard. He wouldn't take long, he assured her.

  There was nothing for it but to agree. They were on the stairs before the Londoner spoke again.

  “Henry Moullin,” he said, “appears to have his daughter Cynthia locked up inside the house. Have you any idea how long that's been going on, Miss Brouard?”

  Ruth continued climbing, pretending she hadn't heard the question.

  St. James was unrelenting, however. He said, “Miss Brouard . . . ?”

  She answered quickly as she headed down the corridor towards her brother's study, grateful for the muted day outside and the darkness of the passage, which would hide her expression. “I have no idea whatsoever,” she replied. “I make it a habit to stay out of the business of my fellow islanders, Mr. St. James.”

  “So there wasn't a ring logged in with the rest of his collection,” Cherokee River said to his sister. “But that doesn't mean someone didn't snatch it sometime without him knowing. He says Adrian, Steve Abbott, and the Fielder kid all have been there at one time or another.”

  China shook her head. “The ring from the beach's mine. I know it. I can feel it. Can't you?”

  “Don't say that,” Cherokee said. “There's going to be another explanation.”

  They were in the flat at the Queen Margaret Apartments, gathered in the bedroom where Deborah and Cherokee had found China sitting at the window in a ladderback chair she'd brought from the kitchen. The room was extraordinarily cold, made so by the fact that the window was open, framing a view of Castle Cornet in the distance.

  “Thought I'd better get used to looking at the world from a small square room with a single window,” China had explained wryly when they came upon her.

  She hadn't donned a coat or even a sweater. The goose-pimples on her skin had their own goose-pimples, but she didn't seem to be aware of this.

  Deborah took off her own coat. She wanted to reassure her friend with a fervency identical to Cherokee's, but she also didn't want to give her false hope. The open window provided an excuse to avoid a discussion of the growing blackness of China's situation. She said, “You're freezing. Put this on,” and she draped her coat round China's shoulders.

  Cherokee leaned past them and shut the window. He said to Deborah, “Let's get her out of here,” and he nodded in the direction of the sitting room, where the temperature was marginally higher.

  When they had China seated and Deborah had found a blanket to wrap round her legs, Cherokee said to his sister, “You know, you need to take better care of yourself. We can do some things for you, but we can't do that.”

  China said to Deborah, “He thinks I've done it, doesn't he? He hasn't come because he thinks I've done it.”

  Cherokee said, “What're you—”

  Understanding, Deborah cut him off. “Simon doesn't work that way. He examines evidence all the time. He's got to have an open mind to do it. That's how it is just now for him. His mind is open.”

  “Why hasn't he come over here, then? I wish that he would. If he did—if we could meet and I could talk to him . . . I'd be able to explain if things need explaining.”

  “Nothing,” Cherokee said, “needs explaining because you didn't do anything to anyone.”

  “That ring . . .”

  “It got there. On the beach. It just got there somehow. If it's yours and you can't remember having it in your pocket when you went down to check out the bay sometime, then you're being framed. End of story.”

  “I wish I'd never bought it.”

  “Hell, yes. Damn right. Jesus. I thought you'd closed the book on Matt. You said you made it over between you.”

  China looked at her brother evenly and for so long a time that he looked away. “I'm not like you,” she finally said.

  Deborah saw that a secondary communication had passed between brother and sister with this. Cherokee grew restless and shifted on his feet. He shoved his fingers through his hair and said, “Hell. China. Come on.”

  China said to Deborah, “Cherokee still surfs. Did you know that, Debs?”

  Deborah said, “He mentioned surfing but I don't think he actually said . . .” She let her voice drift off. Surfing was so patently not what her old friend was talking about.

  “Matt taught him. That's how they first became friends. Cherokee didn't have a surfboard but Matt was willing to teach him on his own. How old were you then?” China asked her brother. “Fourteen?”

  “Fifteen.” He mumbled his answer.

  “Fifteen. Right. But you didn't have a b
oard.” She said to Deborah, “To get good, you need a board of your own. You can't keep borrowing someone else's because you need to practise all the time.”

  Cherokee went to the television and picked up the remote. He examined it, pointed it at the set. He turned the set on and just as quickly turned it off. He said, “Chine, come on.”

  “Matt was Cherokee's friend first, but they grew apart when he and I got together. I thought this was sad, and I asked Matt once why it happened that way. He said things change between people sometimes and he never said anything else. I thought it was because their interests were different. Matt went into film making, and Cherokee just did his Cherokee thing: played music, brewed beer, did his swap-meet number with the phony Indian stuff. Matt was a grown-up, I decided, while Cherokee wanted to be nineteen forever. But friendships are never that simple, are they?”

  “You want me to leave?” Cherokee asked his sister. “I can go, you know. Back to California. Mom can come over. She can be with you instead.”

  “Mom?” China gave a strangled laugh. “That would be perfect. I can see her now, going through this apartment—not to mention through my clothes—removing anything vaguely related to animals. Making sure I have my daily allotment of vitamins and tofu. Checking to be certain the rice is brown and the bread whole grain. That would be sweet. A great distraction, if nothing else.”

  “Then what?” Cherokee asked. He sounded despairing. “Tell me. What?”

  They faced each other, Cherokee still standing and his sister still sitting, but he seemed much smaller in comparison with her. Perhaps, Deborah thought, it was a reflection of their personalities that made China seem so relatively large a figure. “You'll do what you have to do,” China told him.

  He was the one to break the gaze they each held steadily on the other. During their silence, Deborah thought fleetingly of the entire nature of sibling relationships. She was in water without gills when it came to understanding what went on between brothers and sisters.

  With her gaze still on her brother, China said, “D'you ever wish you could turn back time, Debs?”

  “I think everyone wishes that now and then.”

  “What time would you choose?”

  Deborah pondered this. “There was an Easter before my mum died . . . A fête on one of the village greens. There were pony rides available for fifty p and I had just that much money. I knew if I spent it, it would be all gone, up in smoke for three minutes in the pony ring and I'd have nothing to spend on anything else. I couldn't decide what to do. I got all hot and bothered because I was afraid that whatever I did decide would be the wrong decision and I'd regret it and be miserable. So we talked about it, Mum and I. There's no wrong decision, she told me. There's just what we decide and what we learn from deciding.” Deborah smiled at the memory. “I'd go back to that moment and live onward from there all over again if I could. Except she wouldn't die this time.”

  “So what did you do?” Cherokee asked her. “Ride the pony? Or not?”

  Deborah considered the question. “Isn't that odd? I can't remember. I suppose the pony wasn't all that important to me, even then. It was what she said to me that made a difference. It was how she was.”

  “Lucky,” China said.

  “Yes,” Deborah replied.

  A knock sounded on the door at that, followed by a ringing of the buzzer that seemed insistent. Cherokee went to see who'd come calling.

  He opened the door to reveal two uniformed constables standing on the front step, one of them looking round anxiously as if checking the potential for ambush and the other having removed a baton which he was slapping lightly against his palm.

  “Mr. Cherokee River?” Baton Constable said. He didn't wait for a reply, as he clearly knew to whom he was speaking. “You'll need to come with us, sir.”

  Cherokee said, “What? Where?”

  China rose. “Cherokee? What . . . ?” but she didn't apparently need to finish her question.

  Deborah went to her. She slid her arm round her old friend's waist.

  Deborah said, “Please. What's going on?”

  Whereupon Cherokee River was given the formal caution by the States of Guernsey Police.

  They'd brought handcuffs with them, but they didn't use them. One of them said, “If you'll come with us, sir.”

  The other took Cherokee by the arm and led him briskly away.

  Chapter 20

  THE SECONDARY COTTAGES AT the water mill were poorly provided with light because generally Frank didn't work inside either of them in the late afternoons or evenings. But he didn't need a lot of light to find what he was looking for among the papers in the filing cabinet. He knew where the single document was, and his personal hell comprised the fact that he also knew what the document said.

  He drew it forth. A crisp manila folder held it like a layer of smooth skin. Its skeleton, however, was a tattered envelope with crumpled corners, long missing its little metal clasp.

  During the final days of the war, the occupying forces on the island had suffered from a degree of hubris that was most surprising, considering the defeats piling upon the German military everywhere else. On Guernsey, they had even refused to surrender at first, so determined were they to disbelieve that their plan for European domination and eugenic perfection would come to nothing. When Major-General Heine finally climbed aboard HMS Bulldog to negotiate the terms of his surrender of the island, it was a full day after victory had been declared and was being celebrated in the rest of Europe.

  Holding on to what little they had left in those final days, and perhaps wanting to leave their mark on the island as every successive presence on Guernsey had done throughout time, the Germans had not destroyed all that they had produced. Some creations—like gun emplacements—were impervious to easy demolition. Others—like that which Frank held in his hands—acted as an unspoken message that there were islanders whose self-interest had superseded their feelings of brotherhood and whose actions as a result wore the guise of espousing the German cause. That this guise was inaccurate wouldn't have meant anything to the Occupiers. What counted was the shock value attached to having betrayal writ large and bold: in spiky handwriting, in black and white.

  Frank's curse was the respect for history that had sent him first to read it at university, then to teach it to largely indifferent adolescents for nearly thirty years. It was the same respect that had been inculcated in him by his father. It was the same respect that had encouraged him to amass a collection which, he had hoped, would serve the purpose of remembrance long after he was gone.

  He'd always believed the truth in the aphorism about remembering the past or being doomed to repeat it. He'd long seen in the armed struggles round the world man's failure to acknowledge the futility of aggression. Invasion and domination resulted in oppression and rancour. What grew from that was violence in all of its forms. What didn't grow from that was inherent good. Frank knew this, and he believed it fervently. He was a missionary attempting to win his small world to the knowledge he had been taught to hold dear, and his pulpit was constructed from the wartime properties that he'd collected over the years. Let these objects speak for themselves, he'd decided. Let people see them. Let them never forget.

  So like the Germans before him, he'd destroyed nothing. He'd compiled so vast an array of goods that he'd long ago lost track of all that he had. If it was related to the war or the Occupation, he had wanted it.

  He hadn't really even known what he had among his collection. For the longest time, he merely thought of everything only in the most generic terms. Guns. Uniforms. Daggers. Documents. Bullets. Tools. Hats. Only the advent of Guy Brouard made him start thinking differently.

  It could actually be a monument of sorts, Frank. Something that will serve to distinguish the island and the people who suffered. Not to mention those who died.

  That was the irony. That was the cause.

  Frank carried the flimsy old envelope over to a rotting cane-bottomed chair. A floo
r lamp stood next to this, its shade discoloured and its tassel disengaged, and he switched it on and sat. It poured yellow light on his lap, which was where he placed the envelope, and he studied it for a minute before he opened it, drawing out a batch of fourteen fragile pieces of paper.

  From halfway down the stack, he slid one out. He smoothed it against his thighs; he set the others onto the floor. He examined the remaining one with an intensity that would have suggested to an uninformed onlooker that he had never pondered it before. And why would he have done so, really? It was such an innocuous piece of paper.

  6 Würstchen, he read. 1 Dutzend Eier, 2 kg. Mehl, 6 kg. Kartoffeln, 1 kg. Bohnen, 200 gr. Tabak.

  It was a simple list, really, shoved in among the records of purchases of everything from petrol to paint. It was an unimportant document in the overall scheme of things, the sort of slip that might have gone misplaced without anyone ever being the wiser. Yet it spoke to Frank of many things, not the least of which was the arrogance of the Occupiers, who documented every move they made and then saved those documents against the time of a victory whose advocates they would want to identify.

  Had Frank not spent every one of his formative years right on into his solitary adulthood being taught the inestimable value of everything remotely related to Guernsey's time of trial, he might have deliberately misplaced this single piece of paper, and no one would have been the wiser. But he would still have known that it had once existed, and nothing would ever obliterate that knowledge.

  Indeed, had the museum remained unconsidered by the Ouseleys, this paper probably would have remained undiscovered, even by Frank himself. But once he and his father had grasped on to Guy Brouard's offer to build the Graham Ouseley Wartime Museum for the education and betterment of the present and future citizens of Guernsey, the sorting, sifting, and organising essential to such an enterprise had begun. In the process, this list had come to light. 6 Würstchen, in 1943. 1 Dutzend Eier, 2 kg. Mehl, 6 kg. Kartoffeln, 1 kg. Bohnen, 200 gr. Tabak.

  Guy had been the one to find it, the one to say, “Frank, what d'you make of this?” as he spoke no German.