A Place of Hiding

St. James pressed his fingers to his forehead and demanded of his brain that it sort out everything. But as appeared to be the case for everyone associated with the murder victim, Guy Brouard stayed one step ahead of him. It was a maddening feeling.

He’d placed the folded note from reception on the dressing table, and he caught a glimpse of it as he rose from the bed. It was, he saw, a message from Deborah and it appeared to have been written in a furious hurry. Cherokee’s been arrested! she’d scrawled. Please come as soon as you get this. The word please had been underlined twice, and she had added a hastily sketched map to the Queen Margaret Apartments on Clifton Street, which St. James took himself to at once.

His knuckles barely touched the door of Flat B before Deborah answered it. She said, “Thank God. I’m so glad you’re here. Come in, my love. Meet China at last.”

China River was sitting tailor-fashion on the sofa, round her shoulders a blanket that she held to her like a shawl. She said to St. James, “I never thought I’d actually meet you. I never thought...” Her face crumpled. She raised a fist to her mouth.

“What’s happened?” St. James asked Deborah.

“We don’t know,” she replied. “The police wouldn’t say when they took him. China’s solicitor...Chi na’s advocate...he set off to talk to them as soon as we phoned him, but we haven’t yet heard back from him. But, Simon”—and here she lowered her voice—“I think they’ve got something...something they’ve found. What else could it be?”

“His prints on that ring?”

“Cherokee didn’t know about the ring. He’d never seen it. He was as surprised as I when we took it to the antiques shop and were told—”

“Deborah,” China cut in from the sofa. They turned to her. She looked markedly hesitant. And then just as remarkedly regretful. “I...”

She seemed to reach inside herself for the resolve to continue. “Deborah, I showed that ring to Cherokee right when I bought it.”

St. James said to his wife, “Are you sure he didn’t—”

“Debs didn’t know. I didn’t say. I didn’t want to because when she showed me the ring—here in the apartment—Cherokee didn’t say a word. He didn’t act like he even recognised it. I couldn’t figure out...you know, why he...” Nervously, she bit at the cuticle of her thumbnail. “He didn’t say...And I didn’t thi nk...”

“They took his belongings as well,” Deborah said to St. James. “He had a duffel and a rucksack. They wanted them especially. There were two of them—two constables, I mean—and they said, ‘This is it? This is everything you’ve brought with you?’ After they took him, they came back and had a look through all the cupboards. Under the furniture as well. And through the rubbish.”

St. James nodded. He said to China, “I’ll have a word with DCI Le Gallez directly.”

China said, “Someone had it planned from the beginning. Find two dumb Americans, two who’ve never been out of the country, who’ll probably never have enough money to even get out of California unless they hitchhike. Offer them a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It’ll sound so good, too good to be true, and they’ll jump at the chance. And then we’ll have them.” Her voice quavered. “We’ve been set up. First me. Now him. They’re going to say we planned it together before we ever left home. And how can we prove that we didn’t? That we didn’t even know these people. Not one of them. How can we prove it?”

St. James was loath to say what needed to be said to Deborah’s friend. There was, indeed, a bizarre comfort for her in thinking that she and her brother were now in the quicksand together. But the truth of the matter lay in what two witnesses had seen on the morning of the murder and in what signs had been left at the crime scene. The additional truth lay in who had now been arrested and why.

He said, “I’m afraid it’s fairly clear there was only one killer, China. One person was seen following Brouard to the bay and one set of footprints was next to his body.”

The lights were dim in the room, but he saw China swallow. “Then it didn’t matter which one of us got accused. Me or him. But they definitely needed two of us here to double the chance that one of us would be fingered. It was all planned out, set up from the first. You see that, don’t you?”

St. James was silent. He did see that someone had thought everything through. He did see that the crime had not been the work of a single moment. But he also saw that, as far as he knew right now, only four people had possessed the information that two Americans—two potential fallguys for a murder—would be traveling to Guernsey to make a delivery to Guy Brouard: Brouard himself, the lawyer he’d employed in California, and the River siblings. With Brouard dead and the lawyer accounted for, that left only the Rivers to have planned out the murder. One of the Rivers.

He said carefully, “The difficulty is that apparently no one knew you were coming.”