A Place of Hiding

He watched his wife and her friend drive off, their route established. They dipped down Hospital Lane and followed the road in the direction of the harbour. He could see the curve of Deborah’s cheek as the car made its turn towards St. Julian’s Avenue. She was smiling at something her friend had just said.

He stood for a moment and thought about the myriad ways he might caution his wife had she been willing and able to hear him. It’s not what I think, he would have told her in explanation. It’s everything that I do not yet know.

Le Gallez, he hoped, would fill in the gaps in his knowledge. St. James sought him out.

The DCI had just arrived at the police station. He still had on his overcoat when he came to fetch St. James. He shed this on a chair in the incident room and directed St. James to a china board, at the top of which a uniformed constable was attaching a line of colour photographs.

“Check them,” Le Gallez said with a nod. He looked quite pleased with himself.

The pictures, St. James saw, featured a medium-size brown bottle, the sort that often contained prescription cough syrup. It lay cradled in what looked like dead grass and weeds, with a burrow rising on either side of it. One of the pictures showed its size in comparison with a plastic ruler. Others showed its location with respect to the nearest live flora, to the apparent field in which it lay, to the hedgerow shielding the field from the road, and to wood-shrouded road itself which St. James recognised since he’d walked it himself.

“The lane that leads to the bay,” he said.

“That’s the spot, all right,” Le Gallez acknowledged.

“What is it, then?”

“The bottle?” The DCI went to a desk and picked up a piece of paper that he read from, saying, “Eschscholzia californica.”

“Which is?”

“Oil of poppy.”

“You’ve got your opiate, then.”

Le Gallez grinned. “That we do.”

“And californica means...”

“Just what you’d expect. His prints are on the bottle. Big as life. Clear and lovely. A sight for work-sore eyes, let me tell you.”

“Damn,” St. James murmured, more to himself than to the DCI.

“We’ve got our man.” Le Gallez sounded completely confident of his facts, every bit as if he hadn’t been equally confident that they’d got their woman twenty-four hours earlier.

“How’ve you got it sorted, then?”

Le Gallez used a pencil to gesture to the pictures as he spoke. “How’d it get there, you mean? I figure it like this: He wouldn’t have put the opiate in the Thermos the night before or even earlier that morning. Always the chance that Brouard might rinse it out before he used it for his tea. So he followed him down to the bay. He put the oil in the Thermos while Brouard was swimming.”

“Taking the risk of being seen?”

“What sort of risk was it? It’s not even dawn, so he doesn’t expect anyone to be out and about. In case anyone is, he’s wearing his sister’s cloak. For his part, Brouard’s swimming out in the bay and he’s not paying attention to the beach. No big deal for River to wait till he’s swimming. Then he slips down to the Thermos—he was following Brouard, so he would’ve seen where he left it—and he pours the oil inside. Then he slips away wherever: into the trees, behind a rock, near the snack hut. He waits for Brouard to come out of the water and drink the tea like he does every morning and everyone knows it. Ginkgo and green tea. Puts hair on the chest and more important puts fire in the bollocks, which is what Brouard wants in order to keep the girlfriend happy. River waits for the opiate to do the trick. When it does, he’s on him.”

“And if it hadn’t done the trick on the beach?”

“No matter to him, was it?” Le Gallez shrugged eloquently. “It was still before dawn, and the opiate would take effect somewhere on Brouard’s route home. He’d be able to get to him no matter where it happened. When it happened on the beach, he shoved the stone down his throat and that was it. He reckoned the cause of death would be labeled as choking on a foreign object, and indeed it was. He got rid of the poppyoil bottle by tossing it into the bushes as he trotted home. Didn’t realise that toxicology tests would be run on the body no matter what the cause of death looked like.”

There was sense to this. Killers invariably made some sort of miscalculation somewhere along the line, which was largely how killers got themselves caught. With Cherokee River’s fingerprints on the bottle that had contained the opiate, it made sense that Le Gallez would turn his sights on him. But all the other details in the case remained to be explained. St. James chose one of them.

“How do you account for the ring? Are his prints on it as well?”

Le Gallez shook his head. “Couldn’t get a decent print from it. A partial of a partial, but that was it.”

“Then?”

“He would’ve taken it with him. He may even have intended to shove it down Brouard’s throat instead of the stone. The stone muddied the waters for us for a bit, and that would’ve been nice, to his way of thinking. How blatant would he want it to be that his sister was the killer after all?