A Place of Hiding

Le Gallez looked uncomfortable. He thrust the paperwork back onto his desk. He said, “The man choked on that stone. No matter what was in his blood, he died the same bloody way. He choked on that stone. Let’s not forget it.”


“But at least we can see how the stone came to be lodged in his throat. If he’d been drugged, if he’d lost consciousness, how difficult would it be to shove a stone down his throat and allow him to suffocate? The only question would be how he came to be drugged. He wouldn’t have sat by and allowed an injection. Was he diabetic? A substitution made for his insulin? No? Then he had to have...what? Drunk it in a solution?” St. James saw Le Gallez’s eyes tighten marginally. He said to the DCI, “You think he did drink it, then,” and he realised why the detective was suddenly being so amenable to St. James’s having new information despite the difficulty caused by Deborah’s failure to bring the ring immediately to the station. It was a form of quid pro quo: an unspoken apology for insult and loss of temper given in exchange for St. James’s willingness to refrain from dragging Le Gallez’s investigation over the metaphorical coals. Considering this, St. James said slowly as he reflected on what he knew of the case,

“You must have ignored something at the scene, something innocent looking.”

“We didn’t ignore it,” Le Gallez said. “It got tested along with everything else.”

“What?”

“Brouard’s Thermos. His daily dose of ginkgo and green tea. He drank it every morning after his swim.”

“On the beach, you mean?”

“On the bloody effing beach. Quite the fanatic about his daily dose of ginkgo and green, matter of fact. The drug has to’ve been mixed with it.”

“But there was no trace when you tested it?”

“Salt water. We reckoned Brouard rinsed it out.”

“Someone certainly did. Who found the body?”

“Duffy. He goes down to the bay because Brouard’s not returned to the house and the sister’s phoned to see if he’s stopped at the cottage for a cuppa. He finds him laid out cold as a fish and he comes back on the run to phone emergency because it looks like a heart attack to him and why wouldn’t it? Brouard’s nearly seventy years old.”

“So in the coming and going, Duffy could have rinsed the Thermos.”

“Could have done, yes. But if he killed Brouard, he either did it with his wife as an accomplice or with her knowledge, and in either case that makes her the best liar I’ve come across. She says he was upstairs and she was in the kitchen when Brouard went for his swim. He—Duffy—never left the house, she says, till he went searching for Brouard down the bay. I believe her.”

St. James glanced at the phone then, and considered the call Le Gallez had made with its allusions of an ongoing search. “So if you’re not looking for how he was drugged that morning—if you’ve decided the drug came from the Thermos—you must be looking for what held the opiate till it was used, something it might have been put in to convey it onto the estate.”

“If it was in the tea,” Le Gallez said, “and I can’t think where else it could have been, that suggests a liquid form. Or a soluble powder.”

“Which in turn suggests a bottle, a vial, a container of some sort...with fingerprints on it, one would hope.”

“Which could be anywhere,” Le Gallez acknowledged.

St. James saw the difficulty that the DCI was in: not only an enormous estate to search but also a cast of hundreds to suspect now, since the night before Guy Brouard’s death Le Reposoir had been peopled by partygoers, any one of whom might have come to the celebration with murder in mind. For despite the presence of China River’s hair on Guy Brouard’s body, despite the image of an early-morning stalker in China River’s cape, and despite the misplaced skull-and-crossed-bones ring on the beach—a ring purchased by China River herself—the opiate ingested by Guy Brouard shouted a tale that Le Gallez would now be forced to hear. He wouldn’t much like the predicament he was in, though: Until this moment, his evidence suggested China River was the killer, but the presence of the narcotic in Brouard’s blood showed a premeditation that was in direct conflict with the fact that she’d met Brouard only upon coming to the island.