A Place of Hiding

He walked back towards the house.

Deborah watched him, the way the brace on his leg hampered what would have otherwise been a natural grace and beauty. She wanted to call him back and explain to him that she knew China River in ways that were born of a trouble he couldn’t understand, ways in which a friendship is forged that makes the understanding between two women perfect. There are bits of history between women, she wanted to tell her husband, that establish a form of truth that can never be destroyed and never be denied, which never need a lengthy explanation. The truth just is and how each woman operates within that truth is fixed if the friendship is real. But how to explain this to a man? And not just to any man but to her husband who’d lived for more than a decade in an effort to move beyond the truth of his own disability—if not denying it altogether—treating it like a mere bagatelle when, she knew, it had wreaked havoc over the greater part of his youth.

There was no way. There was only doing what she could to show him that the China River she knew was not a China River who would have easily given herself to seduction, who would ever have murdered anyone. She left the estate and drove back to St. Peter Port, winding into the town down the long wooded slope of Le Val des Terres and emerging just above Havelet Bay. Along the waterfront, few pedestrians walked. One street up the hillside, the banks for which the Channel Islands were famous would be bustling with business at any time of the year, but here there was virtually no sign of life: no tax exiles sunning themselves on their boats and no tourists snapping pictures of the castle or the town. Deborah parked near their hotel in Ann’s Place, less than a minute’s walk from the police station behind its high stone wall on Hospital Lane. She sat in the car for a moment once she’d turned off the engine. She had at least an hour—probably more—before Simon returned from LeReposoir. She decided to use it with a slight alteration in what he’d designed for her.

Nothing was very far from anything else in St. Peter Port. One was less than twenty minutes’ walk from everything, and in the central part of the town—which was roughly defined by a misshapen oval of streets that began with Vauvert and curved anticlockwise to end up on Grange Road—the time to get from point A to point B was cut in half. Nonetheless, since the town had existed long before motorised transportation, the streets were barely the width of a car and they curved round the side of the hill upon which St. Peter Port had developed, unrolling without any rhyme or reason, expanding the town upwards from the old port. Deborah crisscrossed through these streets to reach the Queen Margaret Apartments. But when she arrived and knocked on the door, it was to find China’s flat frustratingly empty. She traced her steps back to the front of the building and considered what to do.