A Place of Hiding

“Now? You were taking it there now? Where’s it been in the meantime? It’s hours since we found it.”


“You never said...Si mon, why’re you acting like this? Stop it. Let me go. You’re hurting me.” She wrenched away and stood before him, her cheeks burning colour. There was a path in the garden along its perimeter and she set off down this, although it actually went nowhere but along the wall. Rainwater pooled here blackly, reflecting a sky that was fast growing dark. Deborah strode right through it without hesitation, uncaring of the soaking she was giving her legs.

St. James followed her. It maddened him that she’d walk away from him in this manner. She seemed like another Deborah entirely, and he wasn’t about to have that. If it was to come to a chase between them, she would win, naturally. If it was to come to anything other than words and intellect between them, she would also win. That was the curse of his handicap, which left him weaker and slower than his own wife. This, too, angered him as he pictured what the two of them must look like to any watcher from the street above the sunken park: her sure stride carrying her ever farther from him, his pathetic mendicant’s plea of a hobble in pursuit. She reached the far end of the little park, the deepest end. She stood in the corner, where a pyracantha, heavy with red berries, leaned its burdened branches forward to touch the back of a wooden bench. She didn’t sit. Instead, she remained at the arm of the bench and she ripped a handful of berries from the bush and began to fling them mindlessly back into the greenery.

This angered him further, the childishness of it. He felt swept back in time to being twenty-three to her twelve, confronted with a fit of incomprehensible pre-adolescent hysteria about a hair cut she’d hated, wrestling scissors from her before she had a chance to do what she wanted to do, which was to make the hair worse, make herself look worse, punish herself for thinking a hair cut might make a difference in how she was feeling about the spots on her chin that had appeared overnight and marked her as forever changing. “Ah, she’s a handful, she is, our Deb,” her father had said. “Needs a woman’s touch,” which he never gave her. How convenient it would be, St. James thought, to blame Joseph Cotter for all of it, to decide that he and Deborah had come to this moment in their marriage because her father had remained a widower. That would make things easier, wouldn’t it. He’d have to look no further for an explanation of why Deborah had acted in such an inconceivable manner. He reached her. Foolishly, he said the first thing that came into his head. “Don’t ever run from me again, Deborah.”

She swung round with a handful of berries in her fist. “Don’t you dare... Don’t you ever talk to me like that!”

He tried to steady himself. He knew that an escalating argument would be the only outcome of this encounter unless one of them did something to calm down. He also knew how unlikely it was that Deborah would be the one to rein in. He said as mildly as he could which, admittedly, was only marginally less combative than before, “I want an explanation.”

“Oh, you want that, do you? Well, pardon me if I don’t feel like giving you one.” She slung the berries onto the path.

Just like a gauntlet, he thought. If he picked it up, he knew quite well there would be an all-out war between them. He was angry, but he didn’t want that war. He was still sane enough to see that any sort of battle would be useless. He said, “That ring constitutes evidence. Evidence is meant to go to the police. If it doesn’t go directly to them—”

“As if every piece of evidence goes directly,” she retorted. “You know that it doesn’t. You know that half the time police dig up evidence that no one even knew was evidence in the first place. So it’s been through half a dozen way stations before it comes to them. You know that, Simon.”

“That doesn’t give anyone the right to create way stations,” he countered. “Where have you been with that ring?”

“Are you interrogating me? Have you any idea what that sounds like?

Do you care?”

“What I care about at the moment is the fact that a piece of evidence that I assumed was in the hands of Le Gallez was not in his hands when I mentioned it to him. Do you care what that means?”

“Oh, I see.” She raised her chin. She sounded triumphant, the way a woman tends to sound when a man walks into a mine field she’s laid.

“This is all about you. You looked bad. Egg on your face without a napkin to be had.”