A Place of Hiding

Margaret frowned. “ ‘She was there.’ Where? When? What situation?”


Adrian stepped away from the building. He turned up the collar of his jacket against the chill, moving off in the direction of the Royal Court House. Margaret saw all this as a way to avoid replying to her questions, and her antennae went up. As did a pernicious sense of dread. She stopped her son at the foot of the war memorial and she accosted him beneath the sombre gaze of that melancholy soldier.

“Don’t walk away from me like that. We’re not finished here. What situation? What haven’t you told me?”

Adrian tossed his cigarette towards a score of motor scooters that stood in disorganised ranks not far from the memorial. “Dad didn’t intend me to have money,” he said. “Not now. Not ever. Aunt Ruth knew that. So even if we appeal to her—to her sense of loyalty or fair play or whatever else you want to call it—she’s going to remember what he wanted and that’s what she’s going to do.”

“How could she possibly know what Guy intended at the time of his death?” Margaret scoffed. “Oh, I see how she could have known what he intended when this mess was set up. She would have had to know then in order to cooperate with him then. But that’s just it. Then. It’s what he wanted then. People change. Their wishes change. Believe me, your aunt Ruth will see that when it’s put to her.”

“No. It was more than just then,” Adrian said, and he began to push past her, to move towards the car park where they’d left the Range Rover. Margaret said, “Damn it. Stay where you are, Adrian,” and she heard the trepidation in her voice, which annoyed her, which in turn directed her annoyance onto him. “We’ve plans to lay and an approach to map out. We’re not about to accept this situation as your father created it: like good little Christians with our cheeks averted. For all we know, he made his arrangements with Ruth in a fit of pique one day and he regretted it afterwards but never expected to die before he had a chance to put it all right.”

Margaret drew a breath and considered the implication behind what she was saying. “Someone knew that,” she said. “That has to be it. Someone knew that he intended to change everything, to favour you the way you were meant to be favoured. Because of that, Guy had to be eliminated.”

“He wasn’t going to change a thing,” Adrian said.

“Stop it! How can you know—”

“Because I asked him, all right?” Adrian shoved his hands into his pockets and looked generally miserable. “I asked him,” he repeated. “And she was there. Aunt Ruth. In the room. She heard us talking. She heard me ask him.”

“To change his will?”

“To give me money. She heard the whole thing. I asked. He said he didn’t have it. Not what I needed. Not that much. I didn’t believe him. We rowed. I left him in a rage and she stayed behind.” He looked back at her then, his expression resigned. “You can’t think they didn’t talk everything through afterwards. She’d’ve said, What should we do about Adrian?

And he would’ve said, We let things be.”

Margaret heard all this like a cold wind calling. She said, “You asked your father again...? After September? You’d asked him for money again since September?”

“I asked. He turned me down.”

“When?”

“The evening before the party.”

“But you told me you hadn’t...since last September...” Margaret saw him turn away from her again, his head lowered as it had lowered so many times in childhood over a legion of disappointments and defeats. She wanted to rage against them all, but particularly against whatever fate it was that made Adrian’s life so difficult for him. Beyond that maternal reaction, however, Margaret felt something else that she didn’t want to feel. Nor could she risk identifying it. She said, “Adrian, you told me...” Mentally, she went back through the chronology of events. What had he said? that Guy had died before his son had had the opportunity to ask him a second time for the money he needed to bankroll his business. Internet access, it was, the wave of the future. A wave he could ride to make his father proud to have produced such a visionary son. “You said you’d had no chance to ask him for money on this visit.”

“I lied,” Adrian replied flatly. He lit another cigarette and he didn’t look her way.

Margaret felt her throat go dry. “Why?”

He made no reply.

She wanted to shake him. She needed to force an answer from him because only with an answer could she possibly discover the rest of the truth so that she would know what she was dealing with so that she could move quickly and plan for whatever might come next. But beneath that need to scheme, to excuse, to do anything it took to keep her son safe, Margaret was aware of a deeper feeling.