A Place of Hiding

These last remarks seemed to get his attention, for he looked up from his shoveling and inspected Margaret head to toe, after which he silently crossed the lawn to the porch, where he took up a bucket. This was filled with some sort of pellets which he carried to the tree and poured liberally into the trench he’d dug round its trunk. He set down the bucket and moved to the next tree, where he began more digging.

“See here,” Margaret said, “I’m looking for Cynthia Moullin. I’d like to speak to her at once, so if you know where I can find her...She does live here, doesn’t she? This is the Shell House?” Which was, Margaret thought, the most ridiculous question she could have asked. If this wasn’t the Shell House, there was a bigger nightmare waiting for her somewhere, and she found that difficult to get her mind round.

“So you’re th’ first,” the man said with a nod. “Always wondered wha’ th’ first ’as like. Says a lot ’bout a man, his first. Y’know? Tells you why he went the way he went in the afters.”

Margaret strained to decipher his words through his accent. She caught every fourth or fifth utterance, and from that she was able to reach the conclusion that the creature was referring in some way that was less than flattering to her sexual partnership with Guy. This wasn’t about to do. She was meant to have control over the conversation. Men always reduced things to poke-and-thrust if they could. They thought it was an efficacious manoeuvre guaranteed to fluster any woman with whom they spoke. But Margaret Chamberlain was not any woman. And she was gathering her wits to make this clear to the man when a mobile rang and he was forced to fish it out of his pocket, flip it open, and reveal himself as a fraud. He said, “Henry Moullin,” into the phone and listened for nearly a minute. And then in a voice perfectly different from that with which he’d been entertaining Margaret, he said, “I’d first have to do the measurements on the site, Madam. There’s no real way I can tell you how long that sort of project would take until I see what I’d be working with.” He listened again and in short order dug a black diary out of another pocket. Into this, he scheduled some sort of appointment with someone he called, “Certainly. Happy to do it, Mrs. Felix.” He returned the phone to his pocket and looked at Margaret quite as if he hadn’t been trying to bamboozle her into believing he was someone shearing sheep outside of Casterbridge.

“Ah,” Margaret said with grim pleasantry, “now that we have that out of the way, perhaps you’ll answer the question and tell me where I can find Cynthia Moullin. I take it you must be her father?”

He was as unrepentant as he was unembarrassed. He said, “Cyn’s not here, Mrs. Brouard.”

“Chamberlain,” Margaret corrected him. “Where is she? It’s essential I speak to her at once.”

“Not possible,” he said. “She’s gone to Alderney. Helping out her gran.”

“And this gran has no phone?”

“When it’s working, she has one.”

“I see. Well, perhaps that’s just as well, Mr. Moullin. You and I can sort things out ourselves and she won’t have to know a thing about it. Nor will she have to be disappointed.”

Moullin removed from his pocket a tube of some sort of ointment, which he squeezed into his palm. He eyed her as he rubbed the mixture into the many cuts on his hands, as if he had not the slightest care that he was also rubbing garden soil into them. “You’d best tell me what it is,” he said, and there was a masculine directness to his manner that was simultaneously disconcerting and somewhat arousing. Margaret had an instant’s bizarre vision of herself as woman-to-his-man, sheer animal stuff that she wouldn’t have thought possible to entertain. He took a step in her direction and she took a step backwards in reflex. His lips moved in what might have been amusement. A frisson shot through her. She felt like a character in a bad romance novel, one moment away from ravishment. Which was just enough to infuriate her, enabling her to wrest the upper hand back. “This is something that you and I can probably resolve ourselves, Mr. Moullin. I can’t think you wish to be drawn into a protracted legal battle. Am I right?”

“Legal battle over what?”

“The terms of my former husband’s will.”

A glint in his eye indicated heightened interest. Margaret saw this and realised compromise was something that might work: settling on a lesser sum to avoid having to spend it all on solicitors—or whatever they called them over here—who would hash things out in court for years as if members of the Jarndyce clan had come calling. She said, “I’m not going to lie to you, Mr. Moullin. Your daughter’s been left a considerable fortune in my former husband’s will. My son—