A Place of Hiding

St. James stopped at the Duffys’ cottage first. He was unsurprised when no one was there. In the middle of the day, both Valerie and Kevin would doubtless be at work: he somewhere in the grounds of Le Reposoir and she in the manor house itself. She was the person he wanted to talk to. The undercurrent that he’d felt during his previous conversation with her needed clarifying now that he knew she was the sister of Henry Moullin. He found her, as he expected, in the big house, which he was allowed to approach once he identified himself to the police who were still searching the grounds. She answered the door with a bundle of sheets crumpled under her arm.

St. James didn’t waste time with social niceties. They would rob him of the advantage of surprise and allow her to marshal her thoughts. Instead, he said, “Why didn’t you mention when we spoke earlier that there’s another fair-haired woman involved?”

Valerie Duffy made no reply, but he could see the confusion in her eyes, followed by the calculation going on inside her head. She shifted her gaze from him as if she wished to seek out her husband. She would have liked his support, St. James surmised, and he was determined that she should not have it.

She said faintly, “I don’t understand.” She set the sheets on the floor inside the doorway and retreated to the interior of the house. He followed her into the stone hall, where the air was icy and tinctured with the smell of dead fires. She stopped by the enormous refectory table in the room’s centre, and began to gather up dried leaves and fallen berries from an autumnal floral arrangement that was offset with tall white candles.

St. James said, “You claimed that you saw a fair-haired woman following Guy Brouard to the bay on the morning of his death.”

“The American—”

“As you’d like us to believe.”

She looked up from the flowers. “I saw her.”

“You saw someone. But there are other possibilities, aren’t there? You merely failed to mention them.”

“Mrs. Abbott’s fair.”

“And so, I suspect, is your niece. Cynthia.”

To her credit, Valerie didn’t move her gaze from his face. Also to her credit, she said nothing till she made certain she knew how much he himself knew. She was nobody’s fool.

“I’ve spoken to Henry Moullin,” St. James said. “I believe I’ve seen your niece. He’d like me to think she’s on Alderney with her grandmother, but something tells me that if there’s a grandmother living, Alderney isn’t where I’d find her. Why does your brother have Cynthia hidden away in the house, Mrs. Duffy? Does he have her locked in her room as well?”

“She’s going through a difficult stage,” Valerie Duffy finally said, and she went back to the flowers, the leaves, and the berries as she spoke.

“Girls her age go through them all the time.”

“What sort of stage requires imprisonment?”

“The sort where there’s no talking to them. No talking sense, that is. They don’t want to hear it.”

“Talking sense about what?”

“Whatever their current fancy is.”

“And hers is...?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Not according to your brother,” St. James pointed out. “He says she confided in you. He gave me the impression the two of you are close.”

“Not close enough.” She took a handful of the leaves over to the fireplace and tossed them in. From a pocket in the apron she wore, she drew out a rag and used it to dust off the top of the table.

“So you approve of his locking her in the house? While she’s in this stage of hers?”

“I didn’t say that. I wish Henry wouldn’t...” She paused, stopped her dusting, and seemed to be trying to gather her thoughts once again. St. James said, “Why did Mr. Brouard leave her money? Her and not the other girls? A seventeen-year-old being left a small fortune at the expense of her benefactor’s children and her own siblings? What was the purpose of that?”

“She wasn’t the only one. If you know about Cyn, you’ve been told about Paul. They both have siblings. He has even more than Cyn. None of them were remembered. I don’t know why Mr. Brouard did it like that. Perhaps he fancied the thought of the disruption a load of money could cause among young people in a family.”

“That’s not what Cynthia’s father claims. He says the money was meant for her education.”

Valerie dusted a spotless area on the table.

“He also says Guy Brouard had other fancies. I’m wondering if one of them led to his death. Do you know what a fairy wheel is, Mrs. Duffy?”

Her dusting hand slowed. “Folklore.”

“Island folklore, I expect,” St. James said. “You were born here, weren’t you? Both you and your brother?”

She raised her head. “Henry isn’t the one, Mr. St. James.” She said it quite calmly. A pulse fluttered in her throat, but she gave no other indication of being bothered by the direction St. James’s words were taking.

“I wasn’t actually thinking of Henry,” St. James said. “Has he a reason to want Guy Brouard dead?”

She flushed completely at that and bent back to her needless task of dusting.