A Place of Hiding

by Elizabeth George

  All he saw was Deborah as he turned her over. The blood on her face and in her hair, her clothing torn, her eyelids closed.

  Fiercely he pulled her into his arms. Fiercely he pressed her face to his neck. He found himself beyond either prayer or curse, the centre of his life—what made himself just that, himself—torn from him in an instant that he had not and could not have anticipated. Without an instant more to prepare.

  He said her name. He shut his eyes against seeing anything more, and he heard nothing.

  But still he could feel, not only the body that he held and swore he would not release and would never release, but after a moment the sensation of breath. Shallow, quick, and against his neck. Mercifully, dear God. Against his neck.

  “My God,” St. James said. “My God. Deborah.”

  He lowered his wife to the floor and shouted hoarsely for help.

  Awareness returned to her in two forms. First was the sound: a high-pitched vibration that never varied in level, tone, or intensity. It filled her ear canal, pulsating against the thin and protective membrane at its core. Then it seemed to seep past the eardrum itself to permeate her skull, and there it stayed. No room remained for ordinary sounds, cast from the world as she knew it.

  After sound came sight: light and dark only, shadows posing in front of a curtain that seemed to comprise the sun. Its incandescence was so intense that she could expose herself to it for brief seconds at a time, and then she had to close her eyes again, which made the sound in her head seem louder.

  Always the vibration remained. Her eyes opened or closed, herself awake or drifting in and out of consciousness, the noise was there. It became the one constant she could grasp on to, and she took it as an indication that she was alive. Perhaps children heard this as their first sensation of sound when they emerged from the womb, she thought. It was something to hold on to, so that's what she did, swimming up towards it as one would swim for the far-off surface of a lake, its undulations heavy and shifting but always sparkling with the promise of sun and air.

  When she could bear the light against her eyes longer than a few seconds, Deborah saw this was because constant day had finally become night. Wherever she was had altered from the brilliance of a stage illuminated for a watching audience to the dim interior of a single room in which one thin bar of fluorescence atop her bed cast a glowing shield downward onto the form of her body, indicated by those hills and valleys in the thin blanket that covered her. Next to the bed sat her husband, in a chair drawn up to her side so that his head could rest against the mattress on which she lay. His arms cradled his head and his face was turned away from her. But she knew that it was Simon because she would always know this one man anywhere on earth that she came upon him. She would know the shape and the size of him, the way his hair curled on the back of his neck, the way his shoulder blades flattened to smooth, strong planes when he lifted his arms to pillow his head.

  What she noticed was that his shirt was soiled. Copper stains smeared its collar as if he'd badly cut himself shaving and hastily daubed away the blood by means of his shirt. Streaks of dirt ran down the sleeve closer to her and more copper smudges made seeping marks on the cuffs. She could see no more of him and she lacked the strength to awaken him. All she found she could do was to move her fingers an inch nearer to him. But that was enough.

  Simon raised his head. He looked like a miracle to her. He spoke but she couldn't hear him above the sound in her skull, so she shook her head, tried to talk, and found she couldn't do that either because her throat was so parched and her lips and her tongue seemed to stick to her teeth.

  Simon reached for something on the table by the bed. He raised her slightly and brought a plastic glass to her lips. A straw bent from the glass and Simon gently eased it into her mouth. She drew in the water gratefully, finding it tepid but not caring. As she drank, she felt him come closer to her. She felt him trembling, and she thought the water would surely spill. She tried to steady his hand, but he stopped her. He brought her hand to his cheek and her fingers to his mouth. He bent to her and pressed his own cheek to the top of her head.

  Deborah had survived, he'd been told, because she'd either never gone into the inner chamber where the explosion occurred or because she'd managed to get herself out of there and into the larger chamber seconds before the grenade went off. And it would have been a hand grenade, the police reported. There was evidence aplenty to verify that.

  As to the other woman . . . One did not deliberately detonate a hand-held bomb packed with TNT and live to talk about it. And it had been a deliberate detonation, the police surmised. There was no other real explanation for the explosion.

  “Lucky it happened in the mound,” St. James had been told first by the police and then by two of the doctors who had seen his wife at Princess Elizabeth Hospital. “That sort of explosion would have brought anything else down on top of them. She would've been crushed . . . if not blown to Timbuktu. She got lucky. Everyone got lucky. A modern explosive would've taken out the mound and the paddock as well. How the hell'd that woman get her hands on a grenade, though? That's the real question.”

  But only one of the real questions, St. James thought. The others all began with why. That China River had returned to the dolmen to fetch the painting she'd placed there was not in doubt. That she'd somehow come to know the painting had been hidden for transport to Guernsey among the architectural drawings was also clear. That she'd planned and carried out the crime based on what she'd learned about Guy Brouard's habits were two facts that they could piece together from the interviews they'd conducted with the principals involved in the case. But the why of it all remained a mystery at first. Why steal a painting she could not hope to sell on the open market, but only to a private collector for a great deal less than it was worth . . . and only if she could find a collector who was willing to operate outside the law? Why plant evidence against herself on the slim chance that the police would find a bottle with her brother's fingerprints on it, a bottle containing traces of the opiate that had drugged the victim? And why plant that piece of evidence against her own brother? That most of all.

  And then there was how. How had she come to get her hands on that fairy wheel that she'd used to choke Brouard? Had he shown it to her? Had she known he carried it? Had she planned to use it? Or had that merely been a moment of inspiration during which she decided to muddy the waters by using, instead of the ring she'd brought with her to the bay, something she found that morning in the pocket of his discarded clothes?

  Some of these questions St. James hoped that his wife would be able to answer in time. Others, he knew, they could never answer.

  Deborah's hearing would return, he was told. It might or might not have been permanently damaged by her proximity to the explosion, but they would ascertain that over time. She'd sustained a severe concussion, the complete recovery from which would take a number of months. Doubtless she would experience some memory loss about the events immediately surrounding the detonation of the hand grenade. But he wasn't to press her about those events. She would recall what she could when she could, if ever.

  He phoned her father hourly with reports. When every chance of danger was passed, he spoke to Deborah about what had happened. He spoke directly into her ear, his voice low and his hand covering hers. The dressings were gone from the cuts on her face, but the stitches from a gash on her jaw were still to be removed. Her bruises were frightening to behold, but she was restless. She wanted to go home. Home to her dad, to her photography, to their dog and their cat, to Cheyne Row, to London and all that was most familiar to her.

  She said, “China's dead, isn't she?” in a voice that was still uncertain of its own strength. “Tell me. I think I can hear if you get close enough.”

  Which was where he wanted to be anyway. So he eased himself onto the hospital bed next to her and he told her what had happened as far as he knew it. He told her all that he'd withheld from her as well. And he admitted that he'd withheld tha
t information in part to punish her for going her own way with the skull-and-crossed-bones ring and in part for the dressing-down he himself had received from Le Gallez about that ring. He told her that once he'd spoken to Guy Brouard's American attorney and learned that the person who'd brought the architectural plans to him was not Cherokee River but a black Rastafarian, he'd managed to persuade Le Gallez to lay a trap to catch the killer. It had to be one of them, so release both of them, he'd suggested to the DCI. Let them both go free, with the proviso that they must leave the island by the first transport available to them in the morning. If this killing is about the painting that was found in the dolmen, the killer will have to fetch it before dawn . . . if the killer is one of the Rivers.

  “I expected it to be Cherokee,” St. James said into his wife's ear. He hesitated before admitting the rest. “I wanted it to be Cherokee.”

  Deborah turned her head to look at him. He didn't know if she could hear him without his lips at her ear and he didn't know if she could read his lips, but he spoke anyway while her eyes were on him. He owed her that much: that precise degree of intimate confession.

  “I've asked myself over and over if it's ever not going to come down to that,” he said.

  She heard him or read him. It didn't matter which. She said, “Down to what?”

  “Myself against them. As I am. As they are. What you chose as opposed to what you could have had in someone else.”

  Her eyes widened. “Cherokee?”

  “Anyone. There he is on our doorstep, some bloke I don't even know and can't honestly remember your even mentioning in the years you've been back from America, and he's familiar to you. He's familiar with you. He's undeniably part of that time. Which I am not, you see. I never will be. So there's that in my head and then there's the rest: this decent-looking, able-bodied bloke coming to fetch my wife to Guernsey. Because it's going to come down to that, and I can see it, no matter what he says about the American embassy. And I know anything can come of that. But that's the last thing I want to admit.”

  She searched his face. “How could you ever think I would leave you, Simon? For anyone. That's not what loving someone is.”

  “It's not you,” he said. “It's me. The person that you are . . . You've never walked away from anything, and you wouldn't because you couldn't and still be the person you are. But I see the world through the eyes of someone who did walk away, Deborah. More than once. More than just from you. So for me, the world's a place where people devastate each other all the time. Through selfishness, greed, guilt, stupidity. Or in my case, fear. Pure palm-sweating fear. Which is what comes back to haunt me when someone like Cherokee River shows up on my doorstep. Fear gains hold of me and everything I do is coloured by everything else I fear. I wanted him to be the killer because only then could I be certain of you.”

  “Do you really think it's that important, Simon?”

  “What?”

  “You know.”

  He lowered his head to look at his hand covering hers so that if she was reading his lips, perhaps she wouldn't read it all. He said, “I couldn't even get to you easily, my love. Inside the dolmen. As I am. So yes. I think it's that important.”

  “But only if you feel I need to be protected. Which I don't. Simon, I stopped being seven years old so long ago. What you did for me then . . . I don't need that now. I don't even want that now. I want only you.”

  He took this in and tried to make it his own. He'd been damaged goods since her fourteenth year, a time long past since the day he'd sorted out the group of schoolkids who'd been bullying her. He knew that he and Deborah had arrived at a point where he was meant to trust in the strength they had together as a single unit of husband-and-wife. He was just not sure that he could do it.

  This moment was like crossing a frontier for him. He could see the crossing itself but he could not make out what was on the other side. It took a leap of faith to be a pioneer. He didn't know where such faith came from.

  “I'm going to have to muddle my way into your adulthood, Deborah,” he said at last. “That's the best I can do at the moment and even at that, I'll probably muff things up continually. Can you bear with that? Will you bear with that?”

  She turned her hand in his and grasped his fingers. “It's a start,” she replied. “And I'm happy with a start.”

  Chapter 31

  ST. JAMES WENT TO Le Reposoir on the third day after the explosion and found Ruth Brouard with her nephew. They were coming past the stables, returning from the distant paddock, where Ruth had insisted upon seeing the dolmen. She'd known it was there on the grounds, of course, but she'd known it only as “the old burial mound.” That her brother had excavated it, that he'd found its entrance, that he'd both equipped it and used it as a hideaway . . . These things she didn't know. Nor did Adrian, as St. James discovered.

  They'd heard the explosion in the dead of night but had not known its source or location. Awakened by it, they'd each dashed from their rooms and met in the corridor. Ruth admitted to St. James—with an embarrassed laugh—that in the first confusion she'd thought Adrian's return to Le Reposoir was directly related to the terrible noise. She'd intuitively known that someone had detonated a bomb somewhere, and she'd connected this to Adrian's solicitous desire that she eat a dinner which she'd found him stirring in the kitchen earlier that evening. She'd thought that he intended her to sleep and that he'd added a little something to her meal to assist her in her slumber. So when the reverberations from the explosion rattled her bedroom windows and slammed against the house, she didn't expect to find her nephew stumbling round the upstairs corridor in his pyjamas, shouting about a plane crash, a gas leak, Arab terrorists, and the IRA.

  She'd thought he meant to do damage to the estate, she admitted. If he couldn't inherit it, then he would destroy it. But she changed her mind when he took charge of the events that followed: the police, the ambulances, the fire brigade. She didn't know how she would have managed without him.

  “I would have trusted it all to Kevin Duffy,” Ruth Brouard said. “But Adrian said no. He said, ‘He's not family. We don't know what's going on and until we do, we're handling everything that needs to be handled ourselves.' So that's what we did.”

  “Why did she kill my father?” Adrian Brouard asked St. James.

  That brought them to the painting, for as far as St. James had been able to ascertain, the painting was China River's objective. But there by the stables was not the place to discuss a stolen seventeenth-century canvas, so he asked if they might return to the house and have their conversation in the vicinity of the pretty lady with the book and the quill. There were things to be decided about that painting.

  The picture was up in the gallery, a room that extended most of the length of the east side of the house. It was paneled in walnut and hung with Guy Brouard's collection of modern oils. The pretty lady seemed out of place among them, lying frameless on a table that held a display case of miniatures.

  “What's this?” Adrian said, crossing to the table. He switched on a lamp and its glow struck the veil of hair that fell copiously round St. Barbara's shoulders. “Not exactly a piece that Dad would collect.”

  “It's the lady we ate our meals with,” Ruth replied. “She always hung in the dining room in Paris when we were children.”

  Adrian looked at her. “Paris?” His voice was sombre. “But after Paris . . . Where has it come from, then?”

  “Your father found it. I think he wanted to surprise me with it.”

  “Found it where? How?”

  “I don't expect I'll ever know. Mr. St. James and I . . . We've thought he must have hired someone. It went missing after the war, but he never forgot about it. Or about any of them: the family. We just had that one picture of them—the Seder picture? the one in your father's study?—and this painting was in that picture as well. So he couldn't forget it, I suppose. And if he couldn't bring them back to us, which of course he couldn't, at least he could find our picture. So that's wh
at he did. Paul Fielder had it. He gave it to me. I think Guy must have told him to do that if . . . Well, if anything happened to him before it happened to me.”

  Adrian Brouard wasn't obtuse. He looked at St. James. “Does this have to do with why he died?”

  Ruth said, “I don't see how, my dear.” She came to stand at her nephew's side and considered the painting. “Paul had it, so I don't see how China River could have known about it. Even if she did—if your father had told her for some reason—well, it's a sentimental thing, really, the last vestige of our family. It would have represented a promise he'd made to me in childhood, when we left France. A way of recapturing what we both knew we couldn't ever really replace. Beyond that, it's a nice enough picture, isn't it, but that's all it is at the end of the day. Just an old painting. What could it mean to anyone else?”

  Of course, St. James thought, she would learn the answer to her question soon enough and if for no other reason than Kevin Duffy would tell her. If not today, then someday, he'd walk into the house and there it would be in the great stone hall or the morning room, in this gallery or in Guy Brouard's study. He'd see it and he'd have to speak . . . unless he learned from Ruth that this fragile canvas was just a memento of a time and a people that a war had destroyed.

  St. James realised that the painting would be safe with her, as safe as it had been for generations when all it was was merely the pretty lady with the book and the quill, handed down from father to son and then stolen by an occupying army. It was Ruth's now. Coming to her as it had done in the aftermath of her brother's murder, it wasn't governed by the terms of his will or by any agreement between the two of them that had preceded his death. Thus, she could do with it what she liked, when she liked. Just so long as St. James held his tongue.

  Le Gallez knew about the painting, but what did he know? Merely that China River had wanted to steal a work of art from Brouard's collection. Nothing more. What the painting was, who the artist was, where the canvas had come from, how the robbery had been carried out . . . St. James himself was the only person who knew it all. The power was his to do with as he liked.