A Place of Hiding

by Elizabeth George

  “Friend,” she said. “Oh yes, Debs. Aren't you ever my friend.” She flicked on the torch that she'd used to illuminate the lock on the dolmen's door. The resulting light struck Deborah squarely in the face. It came low from the camp bed, where China was sitting. Behind its bright glow, her face was as white as a marble death mask hovering above the light. “You,” China said to her simply, “don't know shit about friendship. You never have. So don't talk to me about what you can do to help me out.”

  “I didn't bring the police here. I didn't know . . .” Except Deborah couldn't quite lie, not in this final moment. For she'd been on Smith Street earlier, hadn't she? She'd returned there, and she'd seen no shop to buy the sweets that China had claimed to have secured for her brother. Cherokee himself had opened her shoulder bag in a search for money and had brought forth nothing, especially not the chocolate bars he supposedly loved. Deborah said more to herself than to China, “Was it that travel agent? Is that where you'd gone? Yes, that had to be it. You were laying your plans, where you'd go first when you got off the island because you knew they'd release you. After all, they had him. That must have been what you wanted from the first, what you planned, even. But why?”

  “You'd want to know that, wouldn't you.” China played the light up and down Deborah's body. She said, “Perfect in every way. Good at everything you set out to do. Always the apple of some man's eye. I can see you'd want to understand how it feels to be good for nothing and have someone oh-too-happy to prove it for you.”

  “You can't say you killed him because of . . . China, what did you do? Why did you do it?”

  “Fifty dollars,” she said flatly. “That and a surfboard. Think about it, Deborah. Fifty dollars and a banged-up surfboard.”

  “What're you talking about?”

  “I'm talking about what he paid. The price tag. He thought it would be only once. They both thought that. But I was good—a whole lot better than he expected and a whole lot better than I expected—so he came back for more. The original plan was just to get his cherry taken care of, and my brother assured him that I'd go for it if he treated me right and acted like a real nice guy, if he pretended he wasn't interested in that. So that's what he did and that's what I did. Only it went on for thirteen years. Which, when you think of it, is pretty much a bargain since he shelled out only fifty dollars and a surfboard to my own brother. To my own brother.” The torchlight trembled, but she steadied it and forced out a laugh. “Imagine. One person thinking it's love eternal and the other showing up for the best fuck he's ever going to have while all the time—all the time, Deborah—there's an attorney in LA and a gallery owner in New York and a surgeon in Chicago and God knows who else in the rest of the country but none of them—are you getting this, Deborah—can fuck him like I do, which is why he keeps coming back for more. And I'm so stupid as to think that in a matter of time, we'll finally be together because it's so good, my God it's so good and he's got to see that, right? And he does, he does, but there're others and there have always been others which is what he finally tells me when I confront him after my God damn brother admits he sold me to his best friend for fifty dollars and a surfboard when I was seventeen years old.”

  Deborah didn't move and hardly dared to breathe, knowing that to do either might be the one false move that encouraged her friend to leap over the edge she was balanced on. She said the only thing she believed. “That can't be true.”

  “Which part?” China asked. “The part about you, or the part about me? Because I can tell you, the part about me is fact-o amaze-o. So you must be talking about the part about you. You must be saying your life hasn't just clicked along, day one to day one hundred fucking thousand, and all of it going according to plan.”

  “Of course it hasn't. It doesn't. No one's does.”

  “Dad who adores you. Rich boyfriend willing to do anything for you. Follow up with equally well-heeled husband. Everything you ever want. Not a worry in the world. Oh you go through a bad time when you come to Santa Barbara but it all works out and isn't that always the case with you. Everything always works out.”

  “China, nothing's that easy for anyone. You know that.”

  It was as if Deborah hadn't spoken. “And you just fade away. Like everyone else. As if I haven't put my heart and soul into being your friend when you needed a friend. You end up like Matt, don't you. You end up just like everyone. You take what you want and you forget what you owe.”

  “Are you saying . . . You can't mean you've done all this—what you've done . . . This can't be about—”

  “You? Don't flatter yourself. It's time for my brother to pay the piper.”

  Deborah considered this. She recalled what Cherokee had told her that very first night he'd come to them in London. She said, “You didn't want to come with him to Guernsey, not at first.”

  “Not till I decided I could use the trip to make him pay,” China acknowledged. “I wasn't sure when and I wasn't sure how, but I knew that something would come up sometime. I figured it would be dope in his suitcase when we were going through customs. We planned on Amsterdam, so I'd pick the stuff up there. That would've been nice. Not foolproof, but a definite possibility. Or maybe a weapon. Or explosives in the carry-on. Or something. The point is I didn't care what it was. I only knew I'd find it if I kept my eyes open. And when we got here to Le Reposoir and he showed me . . . well, what he showed me . . .” Behind the torch, she offered a ghostlike smile. “There it was,” she said. “Too good to pass up.”

  “Cherokee showed you the painting?”

  “Ah,” China said. “So you're the one. You and Simon the wonderhusband, I bet. Hell, no, Debs. Cherokee didn't have a clue he was carrying that painting. Neither did I. Not till Guy showed it to me. Come into the study for a nightcap, my lovely. Let me show you something that's bound to impress you more than everything else I've shown you so far or talked about so far or done so far to try to work my way into your panties because that's what I do and that's what you want and I can tell that much by looking at you. And even if you don't, there's no loss in trying, is there, because I'm rich and you're not and rich guys don't have to be anything other than rich to get what they want from women and you know that, Debs, more than anyone, don't you. Only this time it wasn't for fifty dollars and a surfboard and the payment didn't go to my brother. It was like killing a dozen birds, not just two. So I fucked him right here when he showed me this place because that's what he wanted, that's why he brought me, that's why he called me special—the asshole—that's why he lit the candle and patted this cot and said What d'you think of my hideaway? Whisper what you think. Come close. Let me touch you. I can make you feel and you can make me feel and the light is gentle against our skin, isn't it, and it glows to gold where we need to be touched. Like on this place and that place and God I do think you may be the one at last, my dear. So I did it with him, Deborah, and believe me, he liked it, just like Matt liked it, and this is where I put the painting when I took it the night before I killed him.”

  “Oh God,” Deborah said.

  “God had nothing to do with it. Not then. Not now. Not ever. Not in my life. Maybe in yours, but not in mine. And you know, that's not fair. It's never been fair. I'm as good as you and as good as anyone and I deserve better than what I've been handed.”

  “So you took the painting? Do you know what it is?”

  “I do read the papers,” China said. “They're not much in So-Cal and they're worse in Santa Barbara. But the big stories . . . ? Yeah. They cover the big ones.”

  “But what were you going to do with it?”

  “I didn't know. It was an afterthought, really. Not part of the cake, just the frosting. I knew where it was in the study. He wasn't doing much to hide it away. So I took it. I put it in Guy's special place. I'd come back later for it. I knew it'd be safe.”

  “But anyone could have stumbled in here and found it,” Deborah said. “Once they got inside the dolmen, which was only a matter of cutting off the loc
k if they didn't know the combination. They'd come in with a light, they'd see it, they'd—”

  “How?”

  “Because it was in plain sight if you went beyond the altar. You couldn't miss it.”

  “That's where you found it?”

  “Not me . . . Paul . . . Guy Brouard's friend . . . The boy . . .”

  “Ah,” China said. “So he's who I have to thank.”

  “For what?”

  “For replacing it with this.” China moved into the light the hand that wasn't holding the torch. Deborah saw it was curled round an object shaped like a small pineapple. She formed the question what is it even as her mind made the leap to assimilate what her eyes were seeing.

  Outside the dolmen, Le Gallez said to St. James, “I'll give her another two minutes. That's it.”

  St. James was still attempting to digest the fact that China River and not her brother had appeared at the dolmen. While he'd said to Deborah that he'd known it would have to be one of the siblings—for that was the only reasonable explanation for all that had happened, from the ring on the beach to the bottle in the field—he'd concluded from the first that it would be the brother. And this despite not having had the moral fortitude to admit to that conclusion openly, even to himself. It wasn't so much that murder was a crime he attributed to men more than to women. It was because at an atavistic level he didn't want to lay claim to, he wanted Cherokee River out of the way and had wanted him thus from the moment the American had appeared on their doorstep in London, whole and affable and calling his wife Debs.

  So he wasn't quick to answer Le Gallez. He was too caught up in attempting to effect a mental elusion of his fallibility and his contemptible personal weakness.

  “Saumarez,” Le Gallez was saying next to him. “Get ready to move. You others—”

  “She'll bring her out,” St. James said. “They're friends. She's going to listen to Deborah. She'll bring her out. There's no other alternative.”

  “I'm not willing to take that risk,” Le Gallez said.

  The hand grenade looked ancient. Even across the chamber from it, Deborah could see that the thing was crusty with earth and discoloured with rust. It appeared to be an artifact from the Second World War and as such she couldn't believe it was dangerous. How could something so old explode?

  China seemed to read her mind, because she said, “But you don't know for sure, do you? Neither do I. Tell me how they worked it all out, Debs.”

  “Worked what out?”

  “Me. This. Here. And with you. They wouldn't have you here if they hadn't known. It doesn't make sense.”

  “I don't know. I told you. I followed Simon. We were at dinner and the police showed up. Simon told me—”

  “Don't lie to me, all right? They had to have found the poppy-oil bottle or they wouldn't have come for Cherokee. They figured he could have planted the other evidence to make it look like me because why would I risk planting evidence against myself on the strength of just believing they'd find that bottle? So they found it. But from there, what?”

  “I don't know about a bottle,” Deborah said. “I don't know about poppy oil.”

  “Oh, please. You know. Papa's little girl? Simon's not going to keep something important from you. So tell me, Debs.”

  “I have done. I don't know what they know. Simon didn't tell me. He wouldn't.”

  “Didn't trust you, then?”

  “Apparently not.” The admission struck Deborah like the unexpected slap from a parent's hand. A poppy-oil bottle. He couldn't trust her. She said, “We need to go. They're waiting. They'll be coming in if we don't—”

  “I'm not,” China said.

  “Not what?”

  “Serving time. Standing trial. Whatever they do here. I'm getting out.”

  “You can't . . . China, there's no place to go. There's no way you can get off the island. They've probably already given the word to . . . You can't.”

  “You misconstrue,” China said. “Out isn't off. Out is out. You and me. Friends—in a manner of speaking—till the end.” Carefully, she placed her torch to one side and she began to work at the pin on the old grenade. She murmured, “Can't remember how long it takes for these things to blow, can you?”

  Deborah said, “China! No! It won't work. But if it does—”

  “That's what I'm hoping,” China said.

  To Deborah's horror, China managed to work the pin loose. Old and rusty and exposed to God only knew what elements in the last sixty years, it should have been frozen into place, but it wasn't. Like the unexploded bombs that periodically came to light in South London, it lay like a memory in China's hand, with Deborah trying and failing to remember how much time they had—how much time she had—to avoid obliteration.

  China murmured, “Five, four, three, two . . .”

  Deborah flung herself backwards, falling mindlessly, heedlessly into the darkness. For a moment that stretched into infinity, nothing happened. Then an explosion rocked the dolmen with the roar of an Armageddon.

  After that came nothing.

  The door blew off. It shot like a missile into the dense vegetation, and a gust came with it, foul like a sirocco from hell. Time froze for an instant. In its suspension, all sound disappeared, sucked up by the horror of realisation.

  Then after an hour a minute a second all reaction in the universe fixed itself on the head of the pin that was this spot on the island of Guernsey. Sound and movement rose round St. James like the effluence of a bursting dam which discharges water and mud as well as leaves and branches and uprooted trees and the broken corpses of animals that it finds in its path. He was aware of pushing and shoving going on within his protected vantage point of cleared-out vegetation. He felt bodies moving by him and he heard as if from a far-off planet the cursing of one man and the hoarse shouting of another. At a greater distance someone's shrieking seemed to float high above them while all round them lights swung like the limbs of hanged men, trying to pierce through the dust.

  Through it all, he stared at the dolmen, knowing the blown-out door, the noise, the gust, and the aftermath all for what they were: manifestations of something that no one had even considered a possibility. When he had accepted this, he began to stumble forward. He made directly for the door without knowing he was in the brambles and caught among them. He tore at the spikes and thorns that held him fast, and if they pierced his flesh, he did not know it. He knew only the door, the interior of that place, and the unspeakable fear of what he would not name but understood all the same because no one had to spell out for him what had just occurred with his wife and a killer trapped together.

  Someone grabbed him and he became aware of shouting. The words this time, not only the noise. “Jesus. Here. This way, man. Saumarez. For Christ's sake, get him. Saumarez, give us some bloody light over here. Hawthorne, they'll be coming from the house. Keep them back, for the love of God.”

  He was pulled and jerked and then shoved forward. Then he was free of the wild growth that filled the paddock and he was blundering in the wake of Le Gallez, their object the dolmen.

  For it still stood as it had stood for one hundred thousand years already: granite hewn out of the very stuff that was this island, fitted into more granite, walled by it, floored by it, ceilinged by it. And then hidden within the earth itself which gave forth man who would attempt again and again to destroy it.

  But not succeed. Even now.

  Le Gallez was giving orders. He'd taken out his torch and he was shining it into the interior of the dolmen, where it lit the dust which floated out and up like liberated souls on the Day of Judgement. He spoke over his shoulder to one of his men who asked him something, and it was this question—whatever it was, because St. James could take account of nothing but what lay before him, inside that place—that made the DCI pause in the doorway to reply. That pause gave St. James access where he otherwise might not have had it, and so he took it. He took it in prayer, in a bargain with God: If she survives I'll do anything,
be anything, try anything You want, accept anything. Just not this please God not this.

  He didn't have a torch, but it didn't matter because he didn't need light when he had his hands. He felt his way inside, slapping his palms against the rough surface of the stones, banging his knees, in his haste smashing his head against a low lintel of some sort. He reeled from this. He felt the warmth of his blood as it seeped from the wound he'd made on his brow. He continued to bargain. Be anything, do anything, accept anything You ask of me without question, live only for others, live only for her, be faithful and loyal, listen better, attempt to understand because that's where I fail where I've always failed and You know that don't you which is why You've taken her from me haven't you haven't you haven't you.

  He would have crawled but he couldn't, trapped in the brace that held him upright. But he needed to crawl, needed to kneel to make his supplication in the dark and the dust where he could not find her. So he tore at the leg of his trousers and tried to reach the hated plastic and the Velcro and he could not reach it so he cursed as much as he prayed and begged. Which was what he was doing when Le Gallez's light reached him.

  “Jesus, man. Jesus,” the DCI said, and he shouted behind him, “Saumarez, we need a better light.”

  But St. James did not. For he saw the colour first, copper it was. Then the mass and the glory of it—how he had always loved her hair.

  Deborah lay sprawled just before the slightly raised stone that she had described to him as an altar, in the place where Paul Fielder told her that he had found the painting of the pretty lady with the book and the quill.

  St. James stumbled to her. He was dimly aware of other movement round him and of greater light sweeping into this place. He heard voices and the sound of feet scraping against stone. He smelled the dust and the acrid stink of dead explosive. He tasted the salt and the copper of his blood and he felt first the cold hard rough stone of the altar as he reached it and then beyond it the pliant warm flesh that was the body of his wife.