A Place of Hiding

by Elizabeth George

  “Cut it,” Le Gallez ordered, seeing this himself. The light went out. The DCI forged off through the brambles, beating them down for the men that followed. The darkness was thus both a gift and a curse. It had prevented them from easily finding the path to the middle of the paddock, leaving them instead in the middle of a botanic mire. But it also hid their passage through the overgrowth to the main path, which would have otherwise shown up only too well had the moon and the stars been visible.

  The dolmen was much as Deborah had described it to St. James. It rose in the paddock's centre, as if several acres of land had been walled off generations in the past with the express intention of protecting it. To the unschooled, it might have appeared to be an inexplicable knoll plopped down without reason in the middle of a field long gone to seed. But to someone with an eye for indications of prehistory, it would have marked a spot worthy of excavation.

  Access round it was by means of a narrow course hacked away from the surrounding growth. It skirted its circumference at a width of something less than two feet, and the men followed this path till they came to the thick wooden door with its combination lock hanging from a hasp.

  Here Le Gallez stopped, shining his pocket torch again, this time on the lock. From there he shone it upon the bracken and the brambles. “No easy cover,” he said quietly.

  There was truth to that. If they were to lie in wait for their killer, it wasn't going to be easy. On the other hand, they wouldn't need to be any great distance from the dolmen since the growth of plants was so thick that it supplied plenty of cover.

  “Hughes, Sebastian, Hazell,” Le Gallez said with a nod towards the vegetation. “See to it. You've got five minutes. I want access without visibility. And quiet, for the love of God. You break a leg, you keep it to yourself. Hawthorne, you're by the wall. Anyone comes over, I've got my pager on vibrate. The rest of you, mobiles off, pagers off, radios off. No one talks, no one sneezes, no one burps, no one farts. We cock this up, we're back to square one and I'm not a happy man. Got it? Go.”

  Their advantage, St. James knew, was the hour itself. For although it seemed to be darkest night, it was not yet late. There was little chance that their killer would venture to the dolmen prior to midnight. There was too great a risk of coming upon someone else on the estate any earlier than that and too few excuses one could make for stumbling round the grounds of Le Reposoir without aid of torchlight after dark.

  So it was with surprise that St. James heard Le Gallez stifle a curse and say tersely not fifteen minutes later, “Hawthorne's got someone on the perimeter. Shite. Damn it all to hell,” and to the constables who were still hacking at the brambles some fifteen feet from the wooden door, “I said five minutes, you lot. We're coming through.”

  He led the way and St. James followed. Le Gallez's men had managed to establish a rough blind the size of a dog crate in the undergrowth. It was suitable for two watchers. Five squeezed into it.

  Whoever was coming did so quickly, no hesitation marking a passage over the wall and along the path. In very short order a dark figure moved against the additional darkness. Only an elongating shadow against the bracken that grew on the mound marked a progress that was defined by the certainty of someone's having been at this spot before.

  Then a voice spoke quietly, firmly, and unmistakably. “Simon. Where are you?”

  “What the living hell . . .” Le Gallez muttered.

  “I know you're here and I'm not going away,” Deborah said clearly.

  St. James breathed out, half curse and half sigh. He should have considered this. He said to Le Gallez, “She's worked it out.”

  “Tell me something to surprise me,” the DCI commented. “Get her the hell out of here.”

  “That,” St. James said, “is not going to be easy.” He edged past Le Gallez and the constables. He worked his way back to the dolmen, saying, “Here, Deborah.”

  She swung round in his direction. She said simply, “You lied to me.”

  He didn't reply till he reached her. He could see her face, ghostlike in the darkness. Her eyes were large and dark, and he was reminded at the worst possible time of those same eyes of the child she had been at her mother's funeral nearly two decades earlier, confused but seeking someone to trust. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I couldn't see the alternative.”

  “I want to know—”

  “This isn't the place. You've got to go. Le Gallez's stretched a point letting me be here. He isn't about to stretch it further for you.”

  “No,” she said. “I know what you think. I'm going to stay to see you proved wrong.”

  “This isn't about right or wrong,” he told her.

  “Of course,” she said. “It never is for you. It's just about the facts and how you interpret them. To hell with anyone who interprets them differently. But I know these people. You don't. You never have. You see them only through—”

  “You're jumping to conclusions, Deborah. We haven't the time to argue. There's too much risk. You've got to leave.”

  “You're going to have to carry me out of here, then.” He could hear the maddening tone of finality in her voice. “You should have thought of that in advance. ‘What do I do if darling Deb discovers I'm not toddling off to the police station after all?' ”

  “Deborah, for the love of God—”

  “What in Christ's sake is going on?”

  Le Gallez made the demand from just behind St. James. He advanced on Deborah with the best intention of intimidating her.

  St. James hated to have to admit openly to someone he barely knew that he was not—and had never been, God help him—the master of this willful red-head. In another world at another time, a man might have had some sort of power over a woman like Deborah. But they, unfortunately, did not live in that long-ago world where women became the property of their men by virtue of having married them. He said, “She isn't going to—”

  “I'm not leaving.” Deborah spoke directly to Le Gallez.

  “You'll do as you're bloody well told, Madam, or I'll have you locked up,” the DCI replied.

  “That's fine,” she replied. “You're good at that, as I understand. You've locked up both of my friends so far with limited cause. Why not me as well?”

  “Deborah . . .” St. James knew it was futile to reason with her, but he made the attempt. “You're not in possession of all the facts.”

  “And why is that?” she asked him pointedly.

  “There hasn't been time.”

  “Oh, really?”

  He could tell from her tone—and what was, to him, the very scent of emotion beneath her words—that he'd misjudged the impact it would have upon her for him to forge ahead without her knowledge. Yet he hadn't had the right to bring her into the picture as fully as she apparently wanted. Things had moved too swiftly for that.

  She said to him in a low voice, “We came here together. To help them together.”

  He knew the rest that Deborah did not say: So we were meant to finish this together. But that was not the case and at the moment he couldn't explain why. They weren't some latter-day Tommy and Tuppence come to Guernsey, larking their way through mischief, mayhem, and murder. A real man had died, not a fairy-tale villain conveniently done in because he richly deserved it. The only form of justice that existed for that man now was to trap his killer in a single moment of self-revelation that would itself be jeopardised to hell and back if St. James could not resolve this situation with the woman standing before him.

  He said, “I'm sorry. There is no time. Later, I'll explain.”

  She said, “Fine. I'll be waiting. You can visit me in gaol.”

  “Deborah, for God's sake . . .”

  Le Gallez interrupted. “Jesus, man.” And then to Deborah, “I'll deal with you later, Madam.”

  He turned on his heel and strode back to the blind. From this, St. James took it that Deborah was meant to stay with them. He didn't much like that, but he knew better than to argue with his wife any further. He, too
, would have to deal with the situation at another time.

  Chapter 30

  THEY'D CREATED A HIDEY-HOLE for themselves. Deborah saw that it comprised a rectangle of roughly beaten down vegetation in which two other police officers were already lying in wait. There had apparently been a third, but he'd set himself up along the far perimeter of the paddock for some reason. She could see no sense in that, for there was only one way in and one way out: on the single path through the bushes.

  Otherwise, she had no idea how many policemen were in the area, and she didn't much care. She was still attempting to cope with the realisation that her husband had deliberately and with plenty of forethought lied to her for the first time in their marriage. At least she believed it was the first time in their marriage, although she was perfectly willing to admit that anything else was possible at this point. So she alternated among seething, plotting revenge, and planning what she intended to say to him once the police had made whatever arrest they thought they were going to make that night.

  The cold descended upon them like a Biblical scourge, easing in from the bay first and then stretching across the paddock. It reached them somewhere close to midnight, or so it seemed to Deborah. No one was willing to risk the light it would take to look at the face of a watch.

  They all held to silence. Minutes passed and then hours with nothing happening. Occasionally, a rustle in the bushes would strike tension throughout their little group. But when nothing followed the rustling save more rustling, the noise was put down to some creature into whose habitat they had intruded. A rat possibly. Or a feral cat, curious to investigate the interlopers.

  It seemed to Deborah that they'd waited till nearly dawn, when Le Gallez finally murmured a single word, “Coming,” which she might have missed altogether had not a collective rigidity seem to tighten the limbs of the men in their hiding place.

  Then she heard it: the crunch of stones on the paddock wall, followed by the snap of a twig on the ground as someone approached the dolmen in the darkness. No torch lit a way that was obviously known to the person who had joined them. It was only a moment before a figure—shrouded in black like a banshee—slipped onto the path that encircled the mound.

  At the door to the dolmen, the banshee risked a torch, shining it on the combination lock. From the brambles, however, all Deborah could see was the edge of a small pool of light which gave enough illumination to highlight the black silhouette of a back bent to the doorway, which gave access to the mound.

  She waited for the police to make their move. No one did. No one, it seemed, even breathed as the figure at the dolmen unfastened the lock on the door and crouched, entering the prehistoric chamber.

  The door remained halfway open in the banshee's wake, and in a moment a soft gleam from what Deborah knew to be a candle flickered. Then it grew brighter from a second flame. Beyond the doorway, though, they could see nothing, and whatever movement occurred within was stifled by the thickness of the stone walls of the chamber and of the earth that had covered them for generations.

  Deborah couldn't understand why the police did nothing. She murmured to Simon, “What . . . ?”

  His hand closed on her arm. She couldn't see his face, but she had the distinct sense that he was intent upon the dolmen's door.

  Three minutes passed, no more, when the candles within were suddenly extinguished. The steady and small pool of light from the torch took their place, and it approached the door of the dolmen from within just as DCI Le Gallez whispered, “Steady now, Saumarez. Wait. Easy. Easy, man.”

  As the figure emerged and then stood upright, Le Gallez said, “Now.” Nearby in their cramped little space, the officer in question rose and in the same movement switched on a torch so powerful that it blinded Deborah for a moment and did much the same to China River, caught both in its beam and in Le Gallez's trap.

  “Stay where you are, Miss River,” the DCI ordered. “The painting's not there.”

  “No,” Deborah whispered. She heard Simon murmur, “I'm sorry, my love,” but she didn't quite take it in, for things happened too quickly after that.

  At the door to the dolmen, China spun as a second light from the wall behind them picked her out like a hunter's quarry. She said nothing. Instead, she ducked back inside the earthen mound and shoved the door closed behind her.

  Deborah rose without thinking. She cried out, “China!” and then in a panic to her husband and to the police, “It's not what it seems.”

  As if she hadn't spoken, Simon said in answer to something to Le Gallez asked him, “Just the camp bed, some candles, a wooden box holding condoms . . .” and she knew that every word she'd spoken to her husband about the dolmen was something he had relayed to the Guernsey police.

  This somehow—illogically, ridiculously, stupidly, but she could not help it, she could not help it—seemed like an even greater betrayal to Deborah. She couldn't think through it; she couldn't think past it. She could only charge out of their hiding spot to go to her friend.

  Simon grabbed her before she got five feet.

  She cried, “Let me go!” and wrested away from him. She heard Le Gallez say, “God damn it. Get her away!” and she cried, “I'll get her for you. Let me go. Let me go!”

  She twisted from Simon's grasp but she didn't leave him. They confronted each other, breathing hard. Deborah said, “She has nowhere to go. You know that. So do they. I'm going to fetch her. You must let me fetch her.”

  “I don't have that power.”

  “Tell them.”

  Le Gallez said, “You're certain?” to Simon. “No other way out?”

  Deborah said, “What difference does it make if there is? How's she going to get off the island? She knows you'll phone the airport and the harbour. Is she supposed to swim to France? She'll come out when I . . . Let me tell her who's out here . . .” She heard her voice quaver and hated the fact that here and now she would have to battle not only with the police, not only with Simon, but also with her blasted emotions, which would never for an instant allow her to be what he was: cool, dispassionate, able to adjust his thinking in a moment on the edge of a coin, if it came down to it. Which it had.

  She said brokenly to Simon, “What made you decide . . . ?” But she couldn't finish the question.

  He said, “I didn't know. Not as a certainty. Just that it had to be one of them.”

  “What haven't you told me? No. I don't care. Let me go to her. I'll tell her what she's facing. I'll bring her out.”

  Simon studied her in silence, and Deborah could see the extent of the indecision that played on his intelligent, angular features. But she could also see the worry there of how much damage he'd done to her ability to trust him.

  He said over her shoulder to Le Gallez, “Will you allow—”

  “Bloody hell, no I will not. This is a killer we're talking about. We've got one corpse. I won't have another.” Then to his men, “Bring the sodding bitch out.”

  Which was enough to spur Deborah on her way to the dolmen. She shot back through the bushes and reached the door into the mound before Le Gallez could even shout “Grab her.”

  Once she was there, they had little choice but to wait for what would happen next. They could storm the dolmen and risk her life if China was armed, which Deborah knew she was not, or they could wait till Deborah brought her friend out. What would happen after that—her own arrest, most likely—was something about which she did not care at the moment.

  She shoved open the thick wooden door and entered the ancient chamber.

  With the door shut behind her, black enveloped her, thick and silent like a tomb. The last noise she heard was a shout from Le Gallez, which the heavy door cut off when she closed it. The last sight she had was the spearpoint of light that fast extinguished at the same moment.

  She said into the stillness, “China,” and she listened. She tried to picture what she'd seen of the dolmen's interior when she'd been inside with Paul Fielder. The main inner chamber was straight ahead
of her. The secondary chamber was to her right. There might be, she realised, further chambers within, perhaps to her left, but she hadn't seen them earlier and she couldn't recall if there were any additional fissures that might lead into one.

  She put herself in the place of her friend, in the place of anyone caught in this position. Safety, she thought. The feeling of being returned to the womb. The inner side chamber, which was small and secure.

  She reached for the wall. It was useless waiting for her eyes to adjust, for there was nothing to which her eyes could adjust. No light pierced the gloom, not a flicker, not a gleam.

  She said, “China. The police are out there. They're in the paddock. There're three of them about thirty feet from the door and one on the wall and I don't know how many more in the trees. I didn't come with them. I didn't know. I followed. Simon . . .” Even at this last, she couldn't tell her friend that her own husband had apparently been the instrument of China's downfall. She said, “There's no way out of here. I don't want you to get hurt. I don't know why . . .” But her voice couldn't get through that sentence with the calm that she wanted, so she took another route. “There's an explanation for everything. I know that. There is. Isn't there. China.”

  She listened hard as she felt for the fissure that gave way to the small side chamber. She told herself there was nothing to fear, for this was her friend, the woman who'd seen her through a bad time that was the worst time ever, one of love and loss, of indecision, action, and action's aftermath. She'd held her and promised, “Debs, it'll pass. It will pass, believe me.”

  In the darkness, Deborah said China's name again. She added, “Let me walk you out of here. I want to help you. I want to see you through this. I'm your friend.”

  She gained the inner chamber, her jacket brushing against the stone wall. She heard the rustle of its material and so, apparently, did China River. She finally spoke.