A Place of Hiding

“You’re certain she was American?”


“California lady. I heard her accent and asked. Mum did as well.”

Jeanne Potter nodded. “We talked about movie stars,” she said. “I’ve never been myself, but I always thought if you lived in California you saw them walking about the streets. She said no, that wasn’t the case.”

“Harrison Ford,” Mark Potter said. “Don’t tell fibs, Mum.”

She laughed and looked flustered. “Go on with you, then.” And then to Deborah, “I quite like Harrison. That little scar on his chin? Something so manly about him.”

“You’re very naughty,” Mark told her. “What would Dad’ve thought?”

Cherokee interposed, saying hopefully, “What did she look like? The American lady? Do you remember?”

They didn’t see much of her, as things turned out. She had a head wrap on—Mark thought it was a scarf; his mother thought it was a hood—and it covered her hair and dropped over the top part of her face. As the light wasn’t all that bright inside the shop, and as it was likely raining that day...They couldn’t add much about what she looked like. She was all in black, though, if that was any help. And she was wearing leather trousers, Jeanne Potter recalled. She remembered them especially, those leather trousers. Just the sort of thing she would’ve liked to wear at that age had they existed then and had she ever had the figure for them, which she had not.

Deborah didn’t look at Cherokee, but she didn’t have to. She’d told him where she and Simon had found the ring, so she knew he was despairing at this new bit of information. He did try to make the best of it, though, because he asked the Potters if there was any place else on the island where a ring like this —another ring like this, he emphasised—might have come from.

Both of the Potters considered the question, and ultimately Mark was the one to answer. There was only one place, he informed them, that another ring like this might have come from. He named the place, and when he did so, his mother seconded the notion at once.

Out in the Talbot Valley, Mark said, lived a serious collector of wartime lumber. He had more items than the rest of the island put together. He was called Frank Ouseley, Jeanne Potter added, and he lived with his father in a place called Moulin des Niaux.

Speaking to Nobby Debiere about the potential demise of the plans to build a museum hadn’t been easy for Frank. He’d done it, though, out of a sense of obligation to the man whom he’d failed in so many ways as a youth. Next he was going to have to speak to his father. He owed Graham Ouseley much as well, but it was lunacy to think that he could forever pretend their dreams were being incarnated just down the lane from St. Saviour’s Church, as his father expected.

He could, of course, still approach Ruth about the project. Or, for that matter, he could speak with Adrian Brouard, his sisters—providing he could find them—and Paul Fielder and Cynthia Moullin as well. The advocate hadn’t named any actual sum of money these individuals stood to inherit since that would be in the hands of bankers, brokers, and forensic accountants. But there had to be a huge amount involved because it was impossible to believe that Guy might have disposed of Le Reposoir, its contents, and his other properties in whatever way he’d disposed of them, without assuring his own future with an enormous bank account and a portfolio of investments with which to replenish that account if necessary. He was far too clever for that.