A Place of Hiding

by Elizabeth George

  “Why?”

  He held out his hands. His face told her that what he was about to say was the most reasonable part of the fantasy he'd been living with. “Who wouldn't have made a move on you if he stood the slightest chance of success?”

  She felt her whole body soften towards him: at the question he'd asked, the expression on his face, the movement of his arms. She felt the softness come into her eyes and upon her features. She went to him. She said, “There's been only one in my life, Kevin. Few enough women can say that. Fewer still can be proud to say it. I can say it and I'm proud to be able to. There's always and only been you.”

  She felt his arms come round her. He pulled her to him without gentleness. He held on to her without desire. It was reassurance that he was seeking, and she knew it since she sought reassurance herself.

  Blessedly, he asked nothing further of her.

  So she said nothing more at all.

  Margaret opened her second suitcase on the bed and began to remove more of her clothing from the chest of drawers. She'd folded it all carefully when she'd arrived, but now she had no concern about how it got itself repacked. She was finished with this place and finished with the Brouards. God only knew when the next flight to England was, but she meant to be on it.

  She'd done what she could: for her son, for her former sister-in-law, for bloody everyone. But Ruth's dismissal of her was the final straw, more final than had been the straw of her last conversation with Adrian.

  “Here's what she thinks,” she'd announced. She'd gone to his bedroom looking for him and not finding him there. She'd finally unearthed him on the top floor of the house, in the gallery where Guy had kept some of the antiques he'd collected over the years along with most of the artworks. The fact that all of this could have been Adrian's—should have been Adrian's . . . No matter that the canvases were all of that modern nonsense stuff—smears of paint and figures looking like something sliced up by a food processor—they were probably valuable, they should have been her son's, and the thought that Guy had structured his final years to deliberately deny his son what he was owed . . . Margaret burned. She vowed she would be avenged.

  Adrian wasn't doing anything in the gallery. He was merely in the act of being Adrian, slumped in an armchair. The room was cold and against its chill, Adrian had donned his leather jacket. His legs were stretched out in front of him and his hands were in his pockets. His might have been the posture of someone watching a favourite football team get thoroughly humiliated on the pitch, but Adrian's eyes were not fixed on a television. Instead, they were fastened onto the mantel. Half a dozen family pictures stood there, among them Adrian with his father. Adrian with his half-sisters. Adrian with his aunt.

  Margaret said his name and “Did you hear me? She thinks you've no right to his money. He thought that as well, according to her. She says he didn't believe in entitlements. That's the way she put it. As if we're supposed to actually believe that story. If your father had had the great good fortune of having someone leave him an inheritance, d'you think he would have turned up his nose at it? Would he have said ‘Oh dear. No thanks. It's not good for me. Better leave it to someone whose purity wouldn't be spoiled by unexpected money.' Not very likely. They're hypocrites, both of them. What he did, he did to punish me through you, and she's happy as a slug on a lettuce leaf just to carry on with his plan. Adrian! Are you listening? Have you heard a single word I've said?”

  She'd wondered if he'd escaped to one of his twilight states, which would be so bloody typical of him. Just sink into the self for an extended period of faux catatonia, my fine young man. Leave Mummy to handle the difficult details in your life.

  Finally, it was all too much for Margaret: the history of phone calls from the schools that Adrian couldn't succeed in, with the San sisters telling her confidentially that there was “really nothing wrong with the boy, Madam”; the psychologists with their sympathetic expressions informing her that those apron strings simply had to be cut if her son was to improve; the husbands who'd found their protective wings not large enough to shelter a stepson with so many problems; the siblings punished for tormenting him; the teachers lectured for misunderstanding him; the doctors disagreed with for failing to help him; the pets dispensed with for failing to please him; the employers begged for third and fourth chances; the landlords interceded with; the potential girlfriends importuned and manipulated . . . And all of it done to bring her to this moment when he was meant to listen at least, to murmur a single word of acknowledgement, to say to her, “You did your best, Mum,” or perhaps even to grunt but, no, that asked too much of him, didn't it, that asked him to put out a little effort, that asked him to have some gumption, to care about having a life that was a life and not just an extension of hers because God God a mother was guaranteed something, wasn't she? Wasn't she at least guaranteed the knowledge that her children had the will to survive if left on their own?

  But motherhood had guaranteed her absolutely nothing from her oldest son. Seeing this, Margaret felt her resolve finally crack.

  She said “Adrian!” and when he didn't reply, she smacked him hard across the cheek. She shrieked, “I'm not a piece of furniture! Answer me at once! Adrian, if you don't—” She raised her hand again.

  He caught it as she began to bring it down on his face. He held it hard and kept it in his grasp as he stood. Then he tossed it to one side like so much rubbish and said, “You always make things worse. I don't want you here. Go home.”

  She said, “My God. How dare you . . .” But that was all she managed to utter.

  He said, “Enough,” and left her in the gallery.

  So she'd come to her room, where she'd taken her suitcases from beneath the bed. She'd packed the first and she was on the second. She would go home now. She would leave him to his fate. She would give him the opportunity he apparently wanted to see how he liked coping with life on his own.

  Two car doors slammed in quick succession on the drive, and Margaret went to her window. She'd heard the police leave not five minutes earlier, and she'd seen they hadn't taken the Fielder boy with them. She hoped they'd returned for him, having come up with a reason to lock the little beast away. But she saw below her a navy Ford Escort, its driver and passenger engaged in conversation over its bonnet.

  The passenger she recognised from the reception that had followed Guy's funeral: the disabled, ascetic-looking man she'd seen lurking near the fireplace. His companion, the driver, was a red-headed woman. Margaret wondered what they wanted, who they'd come to see.

  She was answered soon enough. For along the drive from the direction of the bay, Adrian came walking. The fact that the newcomers were turned his way told Margaret they'd probably seen him on the lane as they'd driven in and were in fact waiting for him to join them.

  All her antennae went up. No matter her previous resolve to leave her son to his fate, Adrian talking to strangers while his father's murder went unsolved was Adrian in jeopardy.

  Margaret was holding a nightdress preparatory to placing it in her suitcase. She tossed it on the bed and hurried from the room.

  She heard the murmur of Ruth's voice from Guy's study as she headed for the stairs. She made a mental note to deal later with her sister-in-law's refusal to let her confront that little yobbo-in-training while the police were in attendance. Now there was a more pressing situation to handle.

  Once outside, she saw that the man and his red-headed companion were walking to join her son. She called out, “Hello? Hello, there. May I help you with something? I'm Margaret Chamberlain.”

  She saw the brief flicker on Adrian's face and registered it as mild contempt. She almost left him to them—God knew he deserved to have to thrash round on his own—but she found she couldn't do it without knowing exactly what they wanted.

  She caught up with the visitors and introduced herself again. The man said that he was called Simon Allcourt-St. James, that his companion was his wife, Deborah, and that the two of them had come to s
ee Adrian Brouard. He nodded at Margaret's son as he imparted this bit, one of those I-know-that's-you nods that precluded Adrian's escape should he think about effecting one.

  “What's this about?” Margaret said pleasantly. “I'm Adrian's mother, by the way.”

  “Do you have a few minutes?” Allcourt-St. James asked Adrian as if Margaret hadn't made her meaning clear.

  She felt a bristling inside her but she tried to keep her voice as pleasant as before. “I'm sorry. We haven't time for a chat. I'm due to leave for England and as Adrian's going to need to drive me to—”

  “Come inside,” Adrian said. “We can talk in there.”

  “Adrian, darling,” Margaret said. She looked at him long and hard, telegraphing her message: Stop being a fool. We have no idea who these people are.

  He ignored her and led the way to the door. She had little choice but to follow, saying, “Well, yes. I suppose we do have a few minutes, don't we?” in an effort to portray a unified front.

  Margaret would have forced them to conduct their chat on their feet in the stone hall where the air was cold and there were only hard chairs against the walls to sit on: the better to make their visit brief. Adrian, however, took them up to the drawing room. There, he had the good sense not to ask her to leave, and she ensconced herself in the middle of one of the sofas to make sure they felt her presence.

  St. James—for so he asked to be called when she used his double-barreled surname—didn't seem to mind that she was going to witness whatever he had to say to her son. Neither did his wife, who joined Margaret on the sofa unbidden, and maintained a watchful presence as if she'd been told to make a study of the participants in their discussion. For his part, Adrian seemed unconcerned that two strangers had come to call upon him. His concern didn't alter when St. James began to talk about money—large sums of it—that was missing from his father's estate.

  It took Margaret a moment to digest the implications behind what St. James was revealing and to realise the extent to which Adrian's inheritance had just been decimated. As paltry as it had been, considering what it should have been had Guy not cleverly prevented his son from benefiting from his fortune, it now appeared that the sum was far less than she had even supposed it would be.

  Margaret cried out, “Are you actually telling us—”

  “Mother,” Adrian interrupted her. “Go on,” he then said to St. James.

  Apparently, the Londoner had come for more than just revealing the change in Adrian's expectations. Guy had been wiring his money out of Guernsey for the last eight or nine months, he told them, and St. James had come to see if Adrian knew anything about why his father had been sending large sums to an account in London with an address in Bracknell. He had someone working on this information in England, he informed Adrian, but if Mr. Brouard could make their job easier by giving them any details he himself might have . . . ?

  That meaning was as clear as Swiss air, and before Adrian could speak, Margaret said, “Precisely what is your job, Mr. St. James? Frankly—and please do understand that I don't intend to be rude—I don't see why my son should answer any of your questions, whatever they might be.” This should have been enough to warn Adrian to keep his mouth shut, but naturally, it wasn't.

  Adrian said, “I don't know why my father would have been wiring money anywhere.”

  “He wasn't sending it to you? For personal reasons? A business venture? Or any other reason? Debt of some kind?”

  Adrian brought a crumpled packet of cigarettes from the pocket of his jeans. He dug one out and lit it. “My father didn't support my business ventures,” he said. “Or anything else I did. I wanted him to. He didn't. That's it.”

  Margaret winced inwardly. He couldn't hear how he sounded. He didn't know what he looked like. And he would offer them more than they were asking. Whyever not when he had such a wonderful chance to spite her? They'd had words, and here was an opportunity to even the score, which he would take without bothering to think of the ramifications of what he said. He was maddening, her son.

  St. James said to him, “So you've no connection with International Access, Mr. Brouard?”

  “What's that?” Margaret asked cautiously.

  “The recipient of all the wire transfers from Mr. Brouard's father. Over two million pounds in wire transfers, as it turns out.”

  Margaret tried to look interested rather than aghast, but she felt as if a steel band were closing over her intestines. She forced herself to keep her gaze off her son. If Guy had actually sent him money, she thought, if Adrian had lied to her about this as well . . . Because hadn't International Access been the name Adrian had been contemplating for the company he'd wished to start? So typical of him to title the scheme before he had it up and running. But wasn't that it? His brainchild and the brilliant idea that would make him millions if only his father would act the part of venture capitalist? Yet Adrian had claimed his father had invested nothing in his idea, not so much as fifty pence. If that wasn't the case, if Guy had given him the money all along . . .

  Anything that made Adrian look guilty of anything had to be dealt with at once. Margaret said, “Mr. St. James, I can assure you that if Guy sent money to England, he didn't send it to Adrian.”

  “No?” St. James sounded as pleasant as she herself was attempting to sound, but she didn't miss the look he exchanged with his wife, nor did she misinterpret what it meant. At the least, they thought it curious that she was speaking for an adult son who appeared perfectly capable of speaking for himself. At worst, they thought her an interfering bitch. Well, let them think what they would. She had more important concerns than how she appeared to two strangers.

  “I expect my son would have told me about it. He tells me everything,” she said. “Since he didn't tell me about his father sending him money, Guy didn't send him money. There you have it.”

  St. James said, “Indeed,” and looked at Adrian. “Mr. Brouard? Perhaps for reasons other than business?”

  “You've already asked that,” Margaret pointed out.

  “I don't think he's actually answered,” St. James's wife said politely. “Not completely, that is.”

  And she was exactly the sort of woman Margaret particularly loathed: sitting there so placidly, all tumbling hair and perfect skin. She was probably delighted to be seen and not heard, like a Victorian wife who'd learned to lie back and contemplate England.

  Margaret said, “See here,” and Adrian interrupted. “I didn't have money off my dad,” he said. “For any reason.”

  Margaret said, “There. Now, if there's nothing else, we have a great deal to do before I leave.” She started to rise.

  St. James's next question stopped her. “Is there anyone else, then, Mr. Brouard? Anyone else you know of in England whom he might have wanted to help out in some way? Someone who might be associated with a group called International Access?”

  This was the limit. They'd given the bloody man what he wanted. Now what they wanted was his departure. “If Guy was sending his money anywhere,” Margaret said archly, “there was probably a woman involved. I, for one, suggest you look into that. Adrian? Darling? Will you help me with my suitcases? Surely it's time we left.”

  “Any woman in particular?” St. James asked. “I'm aware of his relationship with Mrs. Abbott, but as she's here on Guernsey . . . Is there someone in England we should be talking to?”

  They would, Margaret saw, have to give him the name if they were to be rid of him. And far better that the name should come from them than that this man should dig it up for himself and use it later to tar her son. From them it could still sound innocent. From anyone else it would sound as if they had something to hide. She said to Adrian, attempting to make her tone casual if not slightly impatient in order to let the interlopers know they were imposing upon her time, “Oh . . . There was that young woman who came with you to visit your father last year. Your little chess-playing friend. What was her name? Carol? Carmen? No. Carmel. That was it. Carmel Fitzgeral
d. Guy was quite taken with her, wasn't he? They even had something of a fling together, as I recall. Once your father knew you and she weren't . . . well, you know. Wasn't that her name, Adrian?”

  “Dad and Carmel—”

  Margaret kept going, to make certain the St. Jameses understood. “Guy liked the ladies, and as Carmel and Adrian weren't a couple . . . Darling, perhaps he was even more taken with Carmel than you thought. You were amused by it; I remember that. ‘Dad's picked Carmel as his Flavour of the Month' you called it. I remember we laughed at the pun. But is there a chance that your father might have been fonder of her than you thought? You did tell me she spoke of it as something of a lark, but perhaps to Guy there was something more significant . . . ? It wouldn't have been exactly like him to buy someone's affection, but that's because he'd never had to. And in her case . . . Darling, what do you think?”

  Margaret held her breath. She knew she'd spoken at too great a length, but there was no help for it. He had to be given the clues to how he was to portray the relationship between his father and the woman he himself had been meant to marry. All he had to do now was pick up the thread, say “Oh yes, Dad and Carmel. What a laugh that was. You need to talk to her if you're looking for where his money went,” but he said none of it.

  Instead, he said to the man from London, “It wouldn't be Carmel. They hardly knew each other. Dad wasn't interested. She wasn't his type.”

  In spite of herself, Margaret said, “But you told me . . .”

  He glanced at her. “I don't think I did. You assumed. And why not? It was so logical, wasn't it?”

  Margaret could see that the other two had no idea what Mother and son were talking about, but they were definitely interested in finding out. She was so flummoxed by the news her son was giving her, however, that she couldn't sift through it quickly enough to decide how much damage would come from having in front of them the conversation she needed to have with Adrian. God. How much more had he lied about? And if she so much as breathed the word lie in the presence of these Londoners, what on earth would they do with it? Where would they take it?