A Place of Hiding

Having admitted to himself that the clear signs of premeditation strongly pointed to anyone but the River siblings as complicit in the murder, St. James offered his blessing on Cherokee’s accompanying Deborah to talk to Frank Ouseley about his collection of wartime memorabilia. When it came down to it, she was safer with a man if she found herself interviewing a murderer. For his part, he would go alone, seeking out the individuals most affected by Guy Brouard’s will.

He began with a trip to La Corbière, where he found the Moullin household on a bend in one of the narrow lanes that snaked across the island between skeletal hedgerows and tall earthen banks knotted with ivy and thick sea grasses. He knew only the general area that the Moullins lived in —La Corbière itself—but it was no difficult matter to locate them exactly. He stopped at a large yellow farmhouse just outside the tiny hamlet and made an enquiry of a woman optimistically hanging laundry in the misty air. She said, “Oh, it’s the Shell House you’re wanting, dearie,” and she pointed vaguely towards the east. Follow the road past the turn to the sea, she informed him. He couldn’t miss it.

That proved to be the case.

St. James stood on the drive and surveyed the grounds of the Moullin residence for a moment before proceeding farther. He frowned at the curious sight of it: a wreckage of shells and wire and concrete where apparently had once existed a fanciful garden. A few objects remained to illustrate what the place had been like. A shell-formed wishing well stood untouched beneath an enormous sweet chestnut, and a whimsical shelland-concrete chaise longue held a shell pillow on which the words DaddySays... had been fashioned in bits of broken indigo glass. Everything else had been reduced to rubble. It looked as if a hurricane of sledgehammers had slammed into the grounds surrounding the small, squat house. To one side of this building stood a barn, and music issued from inside: Frank Sinatra by the sound of it, crooning a pop tune in Italian. St. James headed in this direction. The barn door hung partially open, and he could see that its interior was whitewashed and lit by rows of fluorescent tubes that dangled from the ceiling.

He called out a hello that went unacknowledged. He stepped inside and found himself in a glassmaker’s workshop. It appeared to be the manufacturing place for two entirely different kinds of objects. One half of it was given to the precise fashioning of greenhouse and conservatory glass. The other half appeared devoted to glass as art. In this section large sacks of chemicals had been piled not far from an unlit furnace. Against this leaned long pipelike tubes for blowing, and on shelves what had been blown was arranged, decorative pieces that were richly coloured: huge plates on stands, stylised vases, modern sculptures. The objects were all more suited to a Conran restaurant in London than to a barn on Guernsey. St. James took them in with some surprise. Their condition—lovingly dustless and pristine—was a contrast to the condition of the furnace, the pipes, and the chemical sacks, all of which wore a thick coating of grime. The glassmaker himself was oblivious of the presence of anyone. He was working at a wide bench on the greenhouse-and-conservatory side of the barn. Above him hung the plans for a complicated conservatory. To either side of these and beneath them hung drawings of other projects even more elaborate. As he made a swift cut in the transparent sheet that lay across his bench, the man didn’t refer to any of these plans or drawings but rather to a simple paper napkin on which some dimensions looked to be scrawled.

This had to be Moullin, St. James thought, the father of one of Brouard’s beneficiaries. He called the man’s name, speaking louder this time. Moullin looked up. He removed wax earplugs from his ears, which explained why he hadn’t heard St. James’s approach but did little to explain why Sinatra had been serenading him.

He next went to the source of the music—a CD player—where Frank had gone on to Luck Be a Lady Tonight. Moullin cut him off mid-phrase. He reached for a large towel with whales spouting water upon it and covered the CD player, saying, “I use it so people know where to find me out here. But he gets on my nerves, so I use the plugs as well.”

“Instead of a different kind of music?”

“I hate it all, so it doesn’t matter. What can I do for you?”

St. James introduced himself and handed over his card. Moullin read it and flipped it onto the workbench, where it landed next to his napkin calculations. His face became immediately wary. He’d noted St. James’s occupation, obviously, and would have little inclination to believe that a forensic scientist from London had come calling with building a conservatory in mind. St. James said, “You appear to have had some damage to your garden. I wouldn’t think vandalism is a common problem here.”

“You come to inspect it?” Moullin asked. “Is that a job for the likes of you?”

“Have you phoned the police?”

“Didn’t need to.” Moullin took a metal tape measure from his pocket and used it against the sheet of glass he’d cut. He made a tick next to one of his calculations and carefully leaned the pane against a stack of a dozen or more others that he’d already seen to. “I did it myself,” he said. “It was time.”

“I see. Home improvement.”