A Place of Hiding

She saw the brief flicker on Adrian’s face and registered it as mild contempt. She almost left him to them—God knew he deserved to have to thrash round on his own—but she found she couldn’t do it without knowing exactly what they wanted. She caught up with the visitors and introduced herself again. The man said that he was called Simon Allcourt-St. James, that his companion was his wife, Deborah, and that the two of them had come to see Adrian Brouard. He nodded at Margaret’s son as he imparted this bit, one of those I-know-that’s-you nods that precluded Adrian’s escape should he think about effecting one.

“What’s this about?” Margaret said pleasantly. “I’m Adrian’s mother, by the way.”

“Do you have a few minutes?” Allcourt-St. James asked Adrian as if Margaret hadn’t made her meaning clear.

She felt a bristling inside her but she tried to keep her voice as pleasant as before. “I’m sorry. We haven’t time for a chat. I’m due to leave for England and as Adrian’s going to need to drive me to—”

“Come inside,” Adrian said. “We can talk in there.”

“Adrian, darling,” Margaret said. She looked at him long and hard, telegraphing her message: Stop being a fool. We have no idea who these people are.

He ignored her and led the way to the door. She had little choice but to follow, saying, “Well, yes. I suppose we do have a few minutes, don’t we?” in an effort to portray a unified front.

Margaret would have forced them to conduct their chat on their feet in the stone hall where the air was cold and there were only hard chairs against the walls to sit on: the better to make their visit brief. Adrian, however, took them up to the drawing room. There, he had the good sense not to ask her to leave, and she ensconced herself in the middle of one of the sofas to make sure they felt her presence.

St. James—for so he asked to be called when she used his doublebarreled surname—didn’t seem to mind that she was going to witness whatever he had to say to her son. Neither did his wife, who joined Margaret on the sofa unbidden, and maintained a watchful presence as if she’d been told to make a study of the participants in their discussion. For his part, Adrian seemed unconcerned that two strangers had come to call upon him. His concern didn’t alter when St. James began to talk about money—large sums of it—that was missing from his father’s estate. It took Margaret a moment to digest the implications behind what St. James was revealing and to realise the extent to which Adrian’s inheritance had just been decimated. As paltry as it had been, considering what it should have been had Guy not cleverly prevented his son from benefiting from his fortune, it now appeared that the sum was far less than she had even supposed it would be.

Margaret cried out, “Are you actually telling us—”

“Mother,” Adrian interrupted her. “Go on,” he then said to St. James. Apparently, the Londoner had come for more than just revealing the change in Adrian’s expectations. Guy had been wiring his money out of Guernsey for the last eight or nine months, he told them, and St. James had come to see if Adrian knew anything about why his father had been sending large sums to an account in London with an address in Bracknell. He had someone working on this information in England, he informed Adrian, but if Mr. Brouard could make their job easier by giving them any details he himself might have...?

That meaning was as clear as Swiss air, and before Adrian could speak, Margaret said, “Precisely what is your job, Mr. St. James? Frankly—and please do understand that I don’t intend to be rude—I don’t see why my son should answer any of your questions, whatever they might be.” This should have been enough to warn Adrian to keep his mouth shut, but naturally, it wasn’t. Adrian said, “I don’t know why my father would have been wiring money anywhere.”

“He wasn’t sending it to you? For personal reasons? A business venture? Or any other reason? Debt of some kind?”

Adrian brought a crumpled packet of cigarettes from the pocket of his jeans. He dug one out and lit it. “My father didn’t support my business ventures,” he said. “Or anything else I did. I wanted him to. He didn’t. That’s it.”

Margaret winced inwardly. He couldn’t hear how he sounded. He didn’t know what he looked like. And he would offer them more than they were asking. Whyever not when he had such a wonderful chance to spite her? They’d had words, and here was an opportunity to even the score, which he would take without bothering to think of the ramifications of what he said. He was maddening, her son.

St. James said to him, “So you’ve no connection with International Access, Mr. Brouard?”

“What’s that?” Margaret asked cautiously.