A Place of Hiding

Margaret Chamberlain maintained a death grip on the steering wheel as she drove back to Le Reposoir. The death grip kept her in focus, aware only of the effort required to keep the appropriate degree of pressure in her grasp. This, in turn, allowed her to stay present in the Range Rover so that she could course south along Belle Greve Bay without thinking about her encounter with what went for the Fielder family. Finding them had been a simple matter: There were only two Fielder listings in the telephone directory and one of them lived on Alderney. The other was domiciled in Rue des Lierres in an area between St. Peter Port and St. Sampson. Finding this on the map had presented little difficulty. Finding it in reality had, however, been another matter, as this part of town—called the Bouet—was as ill-marked as it was ill-featured. The Bouet turned out to be an area that reminded Margaret a little too much of her distant past as one of six children in a family where ends not only didn’t meet, they didn’t even acknowledge the existence of each other. In the Bouet lived the fringe dwellers of the island’s society, and their homes looked like the homes of such people in every town in England. Here were hideous terraced houses with narrow front doors, aluminium windows, and siding stained by rust. Overfilled rubbish bags took the place of shrubbery, and instead of flowerbeds, what few lawns there were had their patchy expanses broken up by debris. As Margaret got out of her car along the street, two cats hissed at each other over possession of a half-eaten pork pie that lay in the gutter. A dog rooted in an overturned dustbin. Gulls fed upon the remains of a loaf of bread on a lawn. She shuddered at the sight of all this even as she knew it suggested she would have a distinct advantage in the coming conversation. The Fielders were clearly not in a position to hire a solicitor to explain their rights to them. It should not, she thought, prove a difficult matter to wrest from them Adrian’s rightful due.

She hadn’t counted on the creature who answered her knock on the door. He was a hulking mass of unkempt unwashed unseemly male antagonism. To her pleasant enquiry of “Good morning. Do the parents of Paul Fielder live here?” he replied, “Could be they do, could be they don’t,”

and he fastened his eyes upon her breasts with the deliberate intention of unnerving her.

She said, “You aren’t Mr. Fielder, are you? Not the father...” But, of course, he couldn’t have been. For all his deliberate sexual precocity, he looked no more than twenty years old. “You must be a brother? I’d like to speak to your parents, if they’re here. You might tell them this is about your brother. Paul Fielder is your brother, I take it?”

He lifted his eyes from her chest momentarily. “Little git,” he said, and stepped away from the door.

Margaret took this as invitation to enter, and when the lout disappeared to the rear of the house, she took this as further invitation to follow. She found herself in a cramped kitchen smelling of rancid bacon, alone with him, where he lit a cigarette on the gas burner of the hob and turned to face her as he inhaled.

“Wha’s he done now?” Brother Fielder asked.

“He’s inherited a fair sum of money from my husband, from my former husband, to be exact. He’s inherited it away from my son, to whom it is owed. I’d like to avoid a lengthy court battle over this matter, and I thought it best to see if your parents felt likewise.”

“Did you?” Brother Fielder asked. He adjusted his filthy blue jeans round his hips, shifted his legs, and broke wind loudly. “Pardon,” he said.

“Must mind my manners with a lady. I forget.”

“Your parents aren’t here, I take it?” Margaret settled her bag on her arm in an indication that their encounter was quickly drawing to a close.

“If you’ll tell them—”

“Could be they’re just ’bove stairs. They like to go at it in the morning, they do. What ’bout you? When d’you like it?”

Margaret decided her conversation with this yob had gone on long enough. She said, “If you’ll tell them Margaret Chamberlain—formerly Brouard—stopped by...I’ll phone them later.” She turned to go the way she’d come.

“Margaret Chamberlain Formerly Brouard,” Brother Fielder repeated.

“Don’t know if I c’n remember that much. I’ll need some help with all that. Real mouthful, it is.”

Margaret stopped in her progress to the front door. “If you have a piece of paper, I’ll write it down.”