A Place of Hiding

by Elizabeth George

  Paul looked round. Where was Taboo?

  He put his lips together to whistle, but his mouth was too dry. He heard his father's tread on the stairs. At the same moment, his mum came from the kitchen. She wore an apron with a ketchup stain on it. She wiped her hands on a towel.

  “Paulie,” his dad said in a sombre voice.

  “Dear,” his mum said.

  Billy laughed. “He got hit. Stupid dog got hit. First a car then a lorry and he just kept on going. Ended up barking like a wild hyena on the side of the road and waiting for someone to come along an' shoot him.”

  Ol Fielder snapped, “That's enough, Bill. Get out to the pub or wherever you're going.”

  Billy said, “I don't aim to—”

  Mave Fielder cried, “You'll mind your dad this instant!” in a shriek that was so out of character in Paul's mild-mannered mother that her firstborn child gaped at her like a feeding fish before he shuffled to the door, where he picked up his denim jacket.

  “Dumb shit,” he said to Paul. “Can't even take care of nothing, can you? Not even a stupid dog.” He pushed out into the night and slammed the door behind him. Paul could hear him laugh foully and say, “Sod all of you losers.”

  But nothing Billy said or did could touch him. He stumbled into the lounge but saw nothing in front of him except the vision of Taboo. Taboo racing behind the police car. Taboo on the side of the road, fatally injured but barking and snarling frantically so that no one would come near for fear of his teeth. It was all his fault for not shouting out for the police to stop long enough for his dog to leap into the car. Or at least long enough for him to take the mongrel back home and tie him up.

  He felt his knees against the worn old sofa and he sank onto it with his vision gone blurry. Someone hurried across the room to join him there, and he felt an arm go round his shoulders. It was meant to be a comfort to him, but it felt like a band of hot metal. He cried out and tried to jerk away.

  “I know you're cut up about this, son,” his father's voice said, into his ear so he couldn't miss the words. “They got the poor thing down the vet's. They phoned right up. Got your mum at work because someone down there knew whose dog it was and—”

  It. His dad was calling Taboo it. Paul couldn't bear the sound of such a nothing word to refer to his friend, the only person who knew him through and through. Because he was a person, that mangy dog. He was no more an it than Paul was himself.

  “. . . so we'll go right over. They're waiting,” his father finished.

  Paul looked up at him, confused, frightened. What had he said?

  Mave Fielder seemed to know what Paul was thinking. She said, “They haven't put him down yet, love. I told them no. I said to wait. I said Our Paulie's got to be there to say goodbye so you do what you can to make that poor dog comfortable and you stop right there till Paul's by his side. Dad'll take you now. Kids and I . . .” She gestured back towards the kitchen, where doubtless Paul's brothers and sister were having tea, a special treat with their mother home to cook it for once. “We'll wait here for you, dear.” And as Paul and his father rose, she added, “I'm that sorry, Paul,” as he passed her.

  Outside, Paul's dad said nothing more. They shambled over to his old van with Fielder's Butchery, The Meat Market still visible in faded red on the side. They clambered inside in silence and Ol Fielder started up the engine.

  It took far too long to get there from the Bouet, for the twenty-four-hour surgery was all the way over on Route Isabelle and there was no direct way to it. So they had to negotiate the journey to and through St. Peter Port at the worst time of day, and all along Paul was in the clutch of an illness that turned his stomach liquid. His palms became wet and his face became icy. He could see the dog but he could see nothing else: just the image of him running along and barking barking behind that police car because the only person he loved in the world was being taken from him. They'd never been parted, Paul and Taboo. Even when Paul was at school, the dog was there, patient as a nun and never far away.

  “Here, lad. Come inside, all right?”

  His dad's voice was gentle, and Paul allowed himself to be led to the door of the surgery. Everything was a blur. He could smell the mix of animals and medicines. He could hear the voices of his dad and the veterinary assistant. But he couldn't really see and it wasn't until he'd been drawn to the back, to the quiet dim corner spot where an electric heater kept a shrouded form warm and a drip sent something soothing into that small form's veins.

  “He's got no pain,” Paul's father murmured into his ear just before Paul reached out to the dog. “We told 'em that, son. Keep him comfortable. Don't put him out 'cause we want him to know his Paulie's with him. That's just what they've done.”

  Another voice joined them. “This is the owner? You're Paul?”

  “This is him,” Ol Fielder said.

  They talked over Paul's head as he bent to the dog, easing back the blanket to see Taboo with his eyes half-closed, lightly panting, a needle inserted into a shaved strip along his leg. Paul lowered his face to the dog's. He breathed into Taboo's licorice nose. The dog whimpered, and his eyes fluttered wearily. His tongue came out—so weak the movement was—and he touched it to Paul's cheek in a faint hello.

  Who could know what they shared, what they were, and what they knew together? No one. Because what they had, were, and knew was between them alone. When people thought of a dog, they thought of an animal. But Paul had never thought of Taboo like that. Dog, he knew, was God spelled backwards. Being with a doG was being with love and hope.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid, his brother would have said.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid, the whole world would have said.

  But that made no difference to Paul and Taboo. They shared a soul together. They were part of one being.

  “. . . surgical procedures,” the vet was saying. Paul couldn't tell if he spoke to his dad or to someone else. “. . . spleen, but that doesn't have to be fatal . . . the biggest challenge . . . those back legs . . . could be a fruitless endeavour at the end of it all . . . difficult to know . . . it's a very tough call.”

  “Out of the question, 'm afraid,” Ol Fielder said regretfully. “The cost . . . Don't mean to put too fine a point on it.”

  “. . . understand . . . of course.”

  “I mean, this today . . . what you've done . . .” He sighed gustily. “This'll take some . . .”

  “Yes. I see . . . Of course . . . Long shot anyway, what with the hips crushed . . . extensive orthopoedic . . .”

  Paul looked up from Taboo as he realised what they were talking about, his father and the vet. From his position, bent to the dog, both of them looked like giants: the vet in his long white coat and Ol Fielder in his dusty work clothes. But they were giants of sudden promise to Paul. They held out hope, and that was all he needed.

  He straightened and took his father's arm. Ol Fielder looked at him, then shook his head. “It's more than we can pay, my boy, more than your mum and me can afford. And even if they did all of it to him, poor Taboo'd likely never be the same.”

  Paul turned his anxious gaze upon the vet. He wore a plastic tag that called him Alistair Knight, D.V.M., MRCVS. The vet said, “He'd be slower, that's the truth of it. Over time, he'd be arthritic as well. And as I said, there's a chance none of it would keep him alive in the first place. Even if it did, his convalescence would take months on end.”

  “Too much,” Ol Fielder said. “You see that, don't you, Paulie? Me and your mum . . . We can't manage it, lad . . . A fortune, we're talking about. We haven't got . . . I'm that sorry, Paul.”

  Mr. Knight squatted and ran his hand along Taboo's tousled fur. He said, “He's a good dog, though. Aren't you, boy?” And as if he understood, Taboo sent his pale tongue forth again. He shivered and wheezed. His front paws twitched. “We'll need to put him down, then,” Mr. Knight said, rising. “I'll fetch the jab.” And to Paul, “It'll be a comfort to both of you if you hold him.”

  Paul bent to th
e dog again, but he didn't lift Taboo in his arms as he otherwise might have done. Lifting him would do him more damage, and Paul meant no more damage to be done.

  Ol Fielder shuffled on his feet as they waited for the vet to return. Paul gently drew the cover up over his hurt Taboo. He reached out and moved the electric fire closer, and when the vet rejoined them with two hypodermics in his hand, Paul was finally ready.

  Ol Fielder squatted. So did the vet. Paul reached out and stayed the doctor's hand. “I got the money,” he said to Mr. Knight so clearly, he might have been speaking the first words ever spoken between two people. “I don't care what it costs me. Save my dog.”

  Deborah and her husband were just tucking into their first course at dinner when the maître d' approached them deferentially and spoke to Simon. There was a gentleman, he said—he seemed to be using the word loosely—who wanted to speak to Mr. St. James. He was waiting just outside the restaurant door. Did Mr. St. James wish to send him a message? To speak with him now?

  Simon turned in his chair to look in the direction the maître d' had come from. Deborah did the same and saw a lumpy man in a dark green anorak lurking beyond the doorway, watching them, watching her, it seemed. When her eyes met his, he shifted them to Simon.

  Simon said, “It's DCI Le Gallez. Excuse me, my love,” and he went to speak to the man.

  Both of them turned their backs to the doorway. They spoke for less than a minute and Deborah watched, trying to interpret the unexpected appearance of the police at their hotel as she also tried to gauge the intensity—or lack thereof—of their conversation. In short order, Simon returned to her, but he did not sit.

  “I've got to leave you.” His face looked grave. He picked up the napkin he'd left on the chair and folded it precisely, as was his habit.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “It seems I was right. Le Gallez has new evidence. He'd like me to have a look at it.”

  “That can't wait? Till after . . . ?”

  “He's champing at the bit. Apparently he wants to make an arrest tonight.”

  “Arrest? Of whom? With your approval or something? Simon, that doesn't—”

  “I must go, Deborah. Continue with your meal. I shouldn't be gone long. It's only the police station. I'll just pop round the corner and be back directly.” He bent and kissed her.

  She said, “Why did he come personally to get you? He could have . . . Simon!” But he was walking off.

  Deborah sat for a moment, staring at the single candle that flickered on their table. She had that uneasy sensation that tends to fall upon a listener when she hears a bald-faced lie. She didn't want to race after her husband and demand an explanation, but at the same time she knew that she couldn't just sit there docilely like a doe in the forest. So she found the middle ground, and she left the restaurant in favour of the bar, where a window overlooked the front of the hotel.

  There she saw Simon shrugging into his coat. Le Gallez was speaking to a uniformed constable. Out in the street, a police car stood idling with a driver behind the wheel. Behind that car waited a white police van through whose windows Deborah could see the silhouettes of other policemen.

  She gave a little cry. She could feel the pain of it and knew that pain for what it was. But she had no time to assess the damage. She hurried from the bar.

  She'd left her bag and her coat in their room. At Simon's suggestion, she realised now. He'd said, “You won't be needing any of that, will you, my love,” and she'd cooperated as she always cooperated . . . with him so wise, so concerned, so . . . what? So determined to keep her from following him. While he, of course, had his own coat somewhere quite close to the restaurant because he'd known all along that Le Gallez was going to come calling in the midst of their meal.

  But Deborah wasn't the fool her husband apparently thought she was. She had the advantage of intuition. She also had the greater advantage of having already been where she believed they were going. Where they had to be going, despite everything Simon had said to her earlier to make her think otherwise.

  With her coat and her bag, she flew back down the stairs and out into the night. The police vehicles were gone, leaving the pavement empty and the street free. She broke into a run and raced to the car park round the corner from the hotel and facing the police station. She wasn't surprised to see no panda cars or van standing in its courtyard: It had been highly unlikely from the first that Le Gallez had come with an escort to fetch Simon and to transport him less than one hundred yards to the offices of the States police.

  “We rang the manor house to let her know,” Le Gallez was saying to St. James as they sped through the darkness towards St. Martin, “but there was no answer.”

  “What do you take that to mean?”

  “I hope to God it means she's gone off somewhere for the night. A concert. Church service. Meal with a friend. She's a Samaritan, and they might have something on tonight. We can only hope.”

  They took the turns up Le Val des Terres, hugging the moss-grown wall that held back the hillside and the trees. With the van close behind them, they emerged into the precinct of Fort George, where street lights shone on the empty green that edged the east side of Fort Road. The houses on the west looked strangely uninhabited at this hour, save Bertrand Debiere's. There every light was on in the front of the building, as if the architect were beaming someone home.

  They coursed quickly in the direction of St. Martin, the only sound among them the periodic crackling of the police radio. Le Gallez snatched this up as they finally made the turn into one of the island's ubiquitous narrow lanes, whipping along beneath the trees until they came upon the wall that marked the boundary of Le Reposoir. He told the driver of the van that followed to take the turn that would direct him down to the bay. Leave the vehicle there and bring your officers back up along the footpath, he instructed. They would reconvene just on the inside of the gates to the estate.

  “And for God's sake, keep out of sight,” he ordered before he snapped the radio back where it belonged. To the driver of their own car he said, “Pull in at the Bayside. Go round the back.”

  The Bayside was a hotel, closed for the season like so many others outside of St. Peter Port. It hulked on the edge of the road in darkness, three-quarters of a mile from the gates to Le Reposoir. They pulled round to the back, where a rubbish bin stood next to a padlocked door. A bank of security lights blazed on immediately. Le Gallez made short work of unhooking his safety belt and throwing open the car door as soon as the vehicle stopped.

  As they hiked back along the road towards the Brouard property, St. James added to Le Gallez's knowledge of the estate's layout. Once inside the walls, they ducked into the thickest growth of chestnuts along the drive, and they waited for the officers from the van to climb the footpath from the bay and join them.

  “You're certain of all this?” was all Le Gallez muttered as they stood in the darkness and stamped their feet against the cold.

  “It's the only explanation that works,” St. James replied.

  “It had better be.”

  Nearly ten minutes passed before the other policemen—panting heavily from their quick ascent from the bay—passed through the gates and faded into the trees to join them. At that point, Le Gallez said to St. James, “Show us where it is,” and gave him the lead.

  The miracle of being married to a photographer was in her sense for detail: what Deborah noticed and what Deborah remembered. So there was little challenge involved in finding the dolmen. Their main concern was to keep out of sight: of the cottage that contained the Duffys at the edge of the property, of the manor house where Ruth Brouard had failed to answer the phone. To do this, they inched their way along the east side of the drive. They circled the house at a distance of some thirty yards, clinging to the protection of the trees and feeling their way without aid of torches.

  The night was extraordinarily dark; a heavy cover of clouds obscured the moon and stars. The men walked single file beneath the trees,
with St. James in the lead. In this manner, they approached the shrubbery behind the stables, seeking the break in the hedge that would take them ultimately to the woods and the path, beyond which was the walled paddock where the dolmen lay.

  Having no stile, the stone wall offered no easy access to the paddock which spread out beyond it. For someone unencumbered by a leg brace, mounting the wall presented very little problem. But for St. James, the situation was more complicated and made even more difficult by the darkness.

  Le Gallez seemed to realise this. He clicked on a small torch that he took from his pocket and, without comment, he moved along the edge of the wall till he found a spot where the stones at the top had crumbled, offering a narrow gap through which someone might more easily lift himself. He muttered, “This'll do, I think,” and he went first into the paddock.

  Once within, they found themselves surrounded by a nearly prehensile growth of briars, bracken, and brambles. Le Gallez's anorak got snagged immediately, and two of the constables that followed him were soon cursing quietly as thorns from the encroaching bushes tore at them.

  “Jesus,” Le Gallez muttered as he ripped his jacket from the branch on which it was snagged. “You're certain this is the spot?”

  “There has to be an easier access,” St. James said.

  “Damn right on that.” Le Gallez said to one of the other men, “Give us heavier light, Saumarez.”

  St. James said, “We don't want to warn—”

  “We're going to be good for sod all,” Le Gallez said, “if we end up like bugs in a web. Saumarez, hit it. Keep it low.”

  The constable in question carried a powerful torch that flooded the ground with light when he switched it on. St. James groaned when he saw it—surely, it seemed, the lights would be seen from the house—but at least luck was with them when it came to the spot they'd chosen to go over the wall. For less than ten yards to their right, they could see a path that led through the paddock.