A Place of Hiding

“Can’t afford to make too many errors in your line of work,” St. James noted. “I suppose that could get expensive.”


“Well, you’re something of a distraction, aren’t you?” Moullin rejoined. “So if there’s nothing else, I’ve work to do and not a hell of a lot of time to do it.”

“I understand why Mr. Brouard left money to a boy called Paul Fielder,” St. James said. “Brouard was a mentor to him, through an established organisation on the island. GAYT. Have you heard of it? So they had a formal arrangement for their relationship. Is that how your daughter met him as well?”

“Cyn had no relationship with him,” Henry Moullin said, “GAYT or otherwise.” And despite his earlier words, he apparently decided to work no more. He began returning his cutting tools and measures to their appropriate storage places, and he grabbed up a whiskbroom and swept the workbench clear of minuscule fragments of glass. “He had his fancies, and that’s what it was with Cyn. One fancy today, another tomorrow. A bit of I can do this, I can do that, and I can do whatever I want because I’ve the funds to play Father Christmas Come to Guernsey if I decide to do it. Cyn just got lucky. Like musical chairs with her in the right spot when the tune dried up. Another day, it might’ve been one of her sisters. Another month and it probably would’ve been. That was it. He knew her better than the other girls because she’d be on the grounds when I was working. Or she’d stop by to visit her aunt.”

“Her aunt?”

“Val Duffy. My sister. She helps out with the girls.”

“How?”

“What do you mean, how?” Moullin demanded, and it was clear that the man was reaching his limit. “Girls need a woman in their lives. Do you want the ABC’s on why, or can you figure it out for yourself? Cyn’d go over there and the two of them would talk. Girl business this was, all right?”

“Changes in her body? Problems with boys?”

“I don’t know. I kept my nose where it’s meant to be, which is on my face and not in their affairs. I just blessed my stars that Cyn had a woman she could talk to and that woman was my sister.”

“A sister who’d let you know if there was something amiss?”

“There was nothing amiss.”

“But he had his fancies.”

“What?”

“Brouard. You said he had his fancies. Was Cynthia one of them?”

Moullin’s face purpled. He took a step towards St. James. “God damn. I ought to—” He stopped himself. It looked like an effort. “We’re speaking of a girl, ” he said. “Not a full-grown woman. A girl.”

“Old men have fancied young girls before.”

“You’re twisting my words.”

“Then untwist them for me.”

Moullin took a moment. He stepped away. He looked across the room to his creative glass pieces. “Like I said. He had fancies. Something caught his eye, he shook fairy dust on it. He made it feel special. Then something else caught his eye and he moved the fairy dust over to that. It’s the way he was.”

“Fairy dust being money?”

Moullin shook his head. “Not always.”

“Then what?”

“Belief,” he said.

“What sort of belief?”

“Belief in yourself. He was good that way. Problem was, you started thinking there might be something to his belief if you got lucky.”

“Like money.”

“A promise. Like someone was saying, Here’s how I can help you if you work hard enough but you’ve got to do that first—the hard work itself—and then we’ll see what we will see. Only no one ever said it, did they, not exactly. But somehow the thought got planted in your mind.”

“In yours as well?”

On a sigh, Moullin said, “In mine as well.”

St. James considered what he’d learned about Guy Brouard, about the secrets he kept, about his plans for the future, about what each individual had apparently believed about the man himself and about those plans. Perhaps, St. James thought, these aspects of the dead man—which might otherwise have been merely reflections of a wealthy entrepreneur’s caprice—were instead symptoms of larger and more injurious behaviour: a bizarre power game. In this game, an influential man no longer at the helm of a successful business retained a form of control over individuals, with the exercise of that control being the ultimate objective of the game. People became chess pieces and the board was their lives. And the principal player was Guy Brouard.

Would that be enough to drive someone to kill?

St. James supposed that the answer to that question lay in what each person actually did as a result of Brouard’s professed belief in him. He glanced round the barn once more and saw some of the answer in the glass pieces that were diligently cared for and the furnace and blowing pipes that were not. “I expect he made you believe in yourself as an artist,” he noted.