She said, “I jumped to conclusions. Your father always . . . Well, you know how he was round women. I assumed . . . I must have misunderstood . . . You did say she took it as a lark, though, didn't you? Perhaps you were talking about someone else and I merely thought you meant Carmel . . . ?”
He smiled sardonically, actually enjoying the spectacle of his mother back-pedaling from what she'd only just claimed. He let her dangle in the wind of her declarations for a moment longer before he interceded.
He said to the others, “I don't know about anyone in England, but Dad was having it off with someone on the island. I don't know who it was, but my aunt knows.”
“She told you?”
“I heard them arguing about it. All I can tell you is it's someone young, because Ruth threatened to tell her father. She said if that's the only way she could stop Dad from carrying on with a girl, she'd do it.” He smiled without humour and added, “He was a piece of work, my dad. I'm not surprised someone finally killed him.”
Margaret closed her eyes, fervently wished something would transport her from the room, and cursed her son.
Chapter 25
ST. JAMES AND HIS wife didn't have to go in search of Ruth Brouard. She found them herself. She came to the drawing room, fairly glowing excitement. She said, “Mr. St. James, what very good fortune. I phoned your hotel, and they said you'd come here.” She ignored her sister-in-law and her nephew, asking St. James to come with her, please, because everything was suddenly crystal clear and she meant him to know all about it straightaway.
“Shall I . . . ?” Deborah asked with a nod towards the outside of the house.
She was to come as well, Ruth told her when she learned her identity.
Margaret Chamberlain protested, saying, “What's this all about, Ruth? If it's to do with Adrian's inheritance—”
But Ruth continued to ignore her, going so far as to shut the door as she was speaking and then saying to St. James, “You'll have to forgive Margaret. She's rather . . .” She shrugged meaningfully, going on to add, “Do come with me. I'm in Guy's study.”
Once there, she wasted no time with preambles. “I know what he did with the money,” she told them. “Here. Look. See for yourself.”
Across her brother's desk, St. James saw, an oil painting lay. It was some twenty-four inches high and eighteen inches wide, and it was weighted on its ends by volumes from the bookshelves. Ruth touched it tentatively, as if it were a devotional object. She said, “Guy finally brought it home.”
“What is it?” Deborah asked, standing near to Ruth and gazing down at the picture.
“The pretty lady with the book and the quill,” Ruth said. “She belonged to my grandfather. To his father before him, to his father as well, and to every father before that as far as I know. She was meant to be Guy's eventually. And I expect he spent all that money to find her. There's nothing else . . .” Her voice altered, and St. James raised his head from the painting to see that behind her round-framed spectacles Ruth Brouard's eyes were full. “It's all there's left now, of them. You see.”
She removed her glasses and, wiping her eyes on the sleeve of her heavy sweater, she went to a table that stood between two armchairs at one end of the room. There, she picked up a photograph and returned to them with it. “Here it is,” she said. “You can see it in the picture. Maman gave this to us the night we left because everyone was in it. You can see them there. Grandpère, Grandmère, Tante Esther, Tante Becca, their brand-new husbands, our parents, us. She said, ‘Gardez-la . . .' ” Ruth seemed to realise she'd gone to another place and time. She switched back to English. “I beg your pardon. She said, ‘Keep this till we meet again, so you'll know us when you see us.' We didn't know that would never happen. And look. In the photo. There she is above the sideboard. The pretty lady with the book and the quill, where she always was. See the little figures behind her in the distance . . . all of them busy building that church. Some huge gothic thing that took one hundred years to complete and there she is, sitting there so . . . well, so serenely. As if she knows something about that church that the rest of us will never be privy to.” Ruth smiled down at the painting fondly although her eyes glistened. “Très cher frère,” she murmured. “Tu n'as jamais oublié.”
St. James had joined Deborah in looking at the photograph as Ruth Brouard spoke. He saw that, indeed, the painting before them on the desk was the same painting that was in the picture, and the photograph itself was the one he'd noticed the last time he was in this room. In it, an extended family gathered round a table for Passover dinner. They all smiled happily at the camera, at peace with a world that would soon destroy them.
“What happened to the painting?”
“We never knew,” Ruth said. “We could only surmise. When the war ended, we waited. We thought for a time that they'd come for us, our parents. We didn't know, you see. Not at first. Not for quite some time because we kept hoping . . . Well, children do that, don't they? It was only later that we found out.”
“That they'd died,” Deborah murmured.
“That they'd died,” Ruth said. “They'd remained in Paris too long. They fled to the south thinking they'd be safe there, and that was the last we heard from them. They'd gone to Lavaurette. But there was no protection from the Vichy, was there? They betrayed the Jews when it was asked of them. They were worse than the Nazis, actually, because after all the Jews were French, the Vichy's own people.” She reached for the photograph that St. James still held, and she gazed at it as she continued to talk. “At the end of the war, Guy was twelve, I was nine. It was years before he could go to France and find out what had happened to our family. We knew from the last letter we had that they'd left everything behind but the clothing they could fit into one suitcase each. So the pretty lady with the book and the quill remained, along with the rest of their belongings, in the safekeeping of a neighbour, Didier Bombard. He told Guy that the Nazis came for it all, as property of Jews. But of course he might have been lying. We knew that.”
“How on earth would your brother have found it, then?” Deborah asked. “After all these years?”
“He was a very determined man, my brother. He would have hired as many people as he needed: first to search for it and then to acquire it.”
“International Access,” St. James noted.
Ruth said, “What's that?”
“It's where his money went, the money he had transferred out of his account here on Guernsey. It's a company in England.”
“Ah. So that's it.” She reached for a small lamp that lit the top of her brother's desk, and she moved it over, the better to shine more brightly upon the painting. “I expect that's who found it. It makes sense, doesn't it, when you think about the enormous collections of art that are bought and sold every day in England. When you talk to them, I imagine they'll tell you how they tracked this down and who was involved in getting it back for us. Private investigators, most likely. Perhaps a gallery as well. He would have had to buy it back, of course. They wouldn't have just handed it over to him.”
“But if it's yours . . .” Deborah said.
“How could we prove it? We had only that one family photo as proof, and who would look at a photo of a family dinner and decide the picture hanging on the wall in the background is the same as this one?” She gestured to the painting before them on the desk. “We had no other documents. There were no other documents. This had always been in the family—the pretty lady with the book and the quill—and other than this one photo, there was no way to prove it.”
“Testimony of people who'd seen it in your grandfather's house?”
“They're all dead now, I presume,” Ruth said. “And besides Monsieur Bombard, I wouldn't have known who they were anyway. So Guy had no other way to retrieve this but to buy it from whoever had it, and that's what he did, depend upon it. I expect it was his birthday gift to me: to bring back to the family the only thing left of the family. Before I died.”
In silence,
they looked down upon the canvas stretched across the desk. That the painting was old there could be no doubt. It looked Dutch or Flemish to St. James, and it was a mesmerising work, a thing of timeless beauty that had no doubt at one time been an allegory both for the artist and for the artist's patron.
“I wonder who she is,” Deborah said. “A gentlewoman of some sort, because look at her robes. They're very fine, aren't they? And the book. It's so large. To have had a book like that . . . even to have been able to read at that time . . . She must have been quite rich. Perhaps she's a queen.”
“She's just the lady with the book and the quill,” Ruth said. “That's enough for me.”
St. James stirred himself from his contemplation of the picture, saying to Ruth Brouard, “How did you happen upon this this morning? Was it here in the house? Among your brother's things?”
“Paul Fielder had it.”
“The boy your brother mentored?”
“He gave it to me. Margaret thought he'd stolen something from the house because he wouldn't let anyone near his rucksack. But this is what he had in it, and he handed it over to me straightaway.”
“When was this?”
“This morning. The police brought him over from the Bouet.”
“Is he still here?”
“I expect he's on the grounds somewhere. Why?” Ruth's face grew grave. “You're not thinking he stole this, are you? Because really, he wouldn't have. It's not in his nature.”
“May I take this with me, Miss Brouard?” St. James touched the edge of the painting. “For a while. I'll keep it quite safe.”
“Why?”
He said only, “If you wouldn't mind,” by way of answer. “You needn't worry. I'll get it back to you quickly.”
She looked at the painting as if loath to part with it, as she no doubt was. After a moment, though, she nodded and then removed the books from either end of the canvas. She said, “It needs to go into a frame. It needs to be properly hung.”
She handed the canvas over to St. James. He took it from her and said, “I expect you knew your brother was involved with Cynthia Moullin, didn't you, Miss Brouard?”
Ruth switched off the light that was on the desk and moved it back to its original position. For a moment, he thought she might not answer, but she finally said, “I discovered them together. He said he would have told me eventually. He said he meant to marry her.”
“You didn't believe him?”
“Too many times, Mr. St. James, my brother claimed he'd finally found her. ‘She's the one,' he would say. ‘This woman, Ruth, is definitely the one.' He always believed it at the moment . . . because he always mistook that frisson of sexual attraction for love, the way many people do. Guy's trouble was that he couldn't seem ever to rise above that. And when the feeling faded—as these things do—he always assumed it was the death of love and not merely a chance to begin to love.”
“Did you tell the girl's father?” St. James asked.
Ruth walked from the desk to the model of the wartime museum on its central table. She brushed nonexistent dust from its roof. “He left me no choice. He wouldn't end it. And it was wrong.”
“Because?”
“She's a girl, scarcely more than a child. She's had no experience. I was willing to turn a blind eye when he played round with older women because they were older. They knew what they were doing, no matter what they thought he was doing. But Cynthia . . . This was too much. He took things too far. He left me no choice but to go to Henry. It was the only way I could think of to save them both. Her from heartbreak and him from censure.”
“That didn't work, did it?”
She turned from the museum model. “Henry didn't kill my brother, Mr. St. James. He didn't lay a hand on him. When he had the chance to, he couldn't bring himself to do it. Believe me. He's not that sort of man.”
St. James saw how necessary it was for Ruth Brouard to believe in this fact. If she allowed her thoughts to go in any other direction, the responsibility she'd face would be excruciating. And what she had to bear already was excruciating enough.
He said, “Are you certain of what you saw from your window the morning your brother died, Miss Brouard?”
“I saw her,” she said. “Following him. I saw her.”
“You saw someone,” Deborah corrected her gently. “Someone in black. From a distance.”
“She wasn't in the house. She followed him. I know this.”
“Her brother's been arrested,” St. James said. “The police seem to think they made a mistake earlier. Is there a chance you could have seen her brother instead of China River? He would have had access to her cloak, and if someone who'd earlier seen her wearing it and then saw him in it . . . It would be logical to assume you were looking at China.” St. James avoided Deborah's gaze as he spoke, knowing how she would react to the intimation that either of the Rivers was involved in this case. But there were still issues that had to be dealt with, no matter Deborah's feelings. “Did you search the house for Cherokee River as well?” he asked her. “Did you check his bedroom as you said you checked China's?”
“I did check hers,” Ruth Brouard protested.
“Adrian's room? Did you check there? What about your brother's room? Did you look for China there?”
“Adrian didn't . . . Guy and that woman never . . . Guy didn't . . .” Ruth's words died off.
Which was all the answer that St. James needed.
When the drawing room door closed upon their visitors, Margaret wasted no time in getting to the bottom of matters with her son. He'd started to follow their lead and leave the room himself, but she got to the door ahead of him and blocked his way. She said, “Sit down, Adrian. We have things to talk about.” She heard the menace in her voice and she wished she could remove it, but she was too damn tired of having to draw upon her decidedly finite reserves of maternal devotion, and there was nothing for it now but to face the facts: Adrian had been a difficult child from the day of his birth, and difficult children often turned into difficult adolescents who in their turn became difficult adults.
She'd long seen her son as a victim of circumstances, and she'd used those circumstances to explain away his every oddity. Insecurity brought about by the presence of men in his life who clearly didn't understand him was how she had rationalised years of sleepwalking and fugue states from which only a tornado could have roused her son. Fear of being abandoned by a mother who'd remarried not once but three times was how she excused his failure to make a life on his own. Early childhood trauma clarified that single terrible incident of public defecation that had resulted in his expulsion from university. There had always been a reason for everything in Margaret's eyes. But she could not come up with a reason for his lying to the very woman who'd given her life to make his more livable. She wanted something in exchange for that. If she couldn't have the revenge she yearned for, an explanation would do.
She said again, “Sit down. You're not going anywhere. We have something to discuss.”
He said, “What?” and Margaret was infuriated that he sounded not wary but actually irritated, as if she were presuming on his valuable time.
“Carmel Fitzgerald,” she said. “I intend to get to the bottom of this.”
He met her eyes with his own, and she saw he had the temerity actually to look insolent, like an adolescent blatantly caught in an act that has been forbidden him, an act he very much wanted to be caught in as a mark of a defiance he refused to verbalise. Margaret felt her palms itch with the desire to slap that expression from Adrian's face: that slightly raised upper lip and those flaring nostrils. She contained herself and walked to a chair.
He remained by the door but he didn't leave the room. He said, “Carmel. All right. What about her?”
“You told me that she and your father—”
“You assumed. I told you sod all.”
“Don't you dare use that sort of—”
“Sod all,” he repeated. “Jack shit, Mother. Bum-fucking
nothing.”
“Adrian!”
“You assumed. You've spent your whole life comparing me with him. And that being the case, why would anyone prefer the son to the father?”
“That isn't true!”
“Funnily enough, though, she did prefer me. Even with him there. You could say it was because she wasn't his type and she knew it—not blonde, not submissive the way he liked them, not appropriately awed by his money and his power. But the fact is she wasn't impressed by him, no matter the charm he poured on. She knew it was just a game, and it was, wasn't it: the clever talk, the anecdotes, the probing questions while giving a woman all of his attention. He didn't want her, not really, but if she'd been willing, he would've gone for it because that's what he always did. Second nature. You know. Who better than you? Only she wasn't willing.”
“Then why on earth did you tell me . . . did you imply . . . And you can't deny it. You did imply. Why?”
“You'd already worked it out in your head. Carmel and I ended things after we came here to see him, and what other reason could there possibly have been? I'd caught him with his hands down her knickers—”
“Stop that!”
“And I'd been forced to end it. Or she'd ended it, liking him better than me. That was the only thing you could work out, wasn't it? Because if it wasn't that, if I hadn't lost her to Dad, then it would have to be something else, and you didn't want to think what that was because you'd been hoping all of it was finally passed.”
“You're talking nonsense.”
“So here's what it was, Mother. Carmel was willing to take just about anything. She wasn't a looker and she didn't have much spark to her either. She wasn't likely to hook up with more than one bloke in her life, so she was willing to settle. And having settled, she wasn't likely to go after other men. In short, she was perfect. You saw it. I saw it. Everybody saw it. Carmel saw it, too. We were made for each other. But there was only one problem: a compromise she wasn't able to make.”
A Place of Hiding Page 57
