A Place of Hiding

“Reduced. Yes. I hadn’t thought of that.”


“Start thinking of it, then,” Mr. Forrest told her. “As things stand now, Guy’s children are inheriting less than sixty thousand pounds apiece, the other two have been left round eighty-seven thousand pounds, and you are sitting on property and belongings worth millions. When all this becomes clear, there’s going to be enormous pressure on you to make things right in the eyes of other people. Till we get everything sorted out, I suggest you hold firm to what we know of Guy’s wishes about the estate.”

“There may be more to know,” Ruth murmured.

Forrest dropped his notes from the forensic accountant onto his desk.

“Believe me, there’s definitely more to know,” he agreed.





Chapter 16


At her end of the line, Valerie Duffy listened to the phone ring on and on. She whispered, “Answer it, answer it, answer it,” but the ringing continued. Although she didn’t want to break the connection, she finally forced herself to do so. A moment later, she had herself convinced she’d misdialed the number, so she began again. The call went through; the ringing commenced. The result was the same.

Outside, she could see the police carrying on with their search. They’d been dogged but thorough in the manor house and they’d moved on to the outbuildings and the gardens. Soon, Valerie reckoned, they would decide to search the cottage as well. It was part of Le Reposoir and their orders had been—according to the sergeant in charge—to conduct a thorough and painstaking search of the premises, Madam.

She didn’t want to consider what they were looking for, but she had a fairly good idea. An officer had descended the stairs with Ruth’s medicines in an evidence bag and it was only through stressing how essential the medicines were to Ruth’s well-being that Valerie had been able to persuade the constable not to remove every single one of the pills from the house. They didn’t need all of them, surely, she’d argued. Miss Brouard had terrible pain and without her medicine—

Pain? the constable had interrupted. So we’ve got painkillers here? and he shook the bag for emphasis, as if any were needed. Well, certainly. All they had to do was to read the labels and take note of the words for pain, which surely they had seen when they picked the drugs out of her medicine cabinet.

We’ve had our instructions, Madam, were the words the constable used in reply. By which declaration Valerie assumed they were to remove all drugs that they found, no matter their purpose. She asked if they would leave the majority of the pills behind. Take a sample from each bottle and leave the rest, she suggested. Surely you can do that for Miss Brouard’s sake. She’ll do very badly without them.

The constable agreed to do so, but he wasn’t pleased. As Valerie left him to return to her work in the kitchen, she felt his eyes boring into her back and knew she’d made herself the object of his suspicion. For this reason, she didn’t want to make her phone call from the manor house. So she’d crossed to the cottage and rather than place the call from the kitchen where she wouldn’t be able to see what was going on in the grounds of LeReposoir, she made it instead from the upstairs bedroom. She sat on Kevin’s side of the bed, closer to the window, and because of this, as she watched the police separate and head into the gardens and the individual buildings on the estate, she was able to breathe in the scent of Kev from a work shirt he’d left over the arm of a chair.

Answer, she thought. Answer. Answer. The ringing went on. She turned from the window and hunched over the phone, concentrating on sending the force of her will through the receiver. If she let the connection go on long enough, surely the irritating noise alone would force an answer.