A Place of Hiding

“She wasn’t in the house. She followed him. I know this.”


“Her brother’s been arrested,” St. James said. “The police seem to think they made a mistake earlier. Is there a chance you could have seen her brother instead of China River? He would have had access to her cloak, and if someone who’d earlier seen her wearing it and then saw him i n i t...It would be logical to assume you were looking at China.” St. James avoided Deborah’s gaze as he spoke, knowing how she would react to the intimation that either of the Rivers was involved in this case. But there were still issues that had to be dealt with, no matter Deborah’s feelings. “Did you search the house for Cherokee River as well?” he asked her. “Did you check his bedroom as you said you checked China’s?”

“I did check hers,” Ruth Brouard protested.

“Adrian’s room? Did you check there? What about your brother’s room? Did you look for China there?”

“Adrian didn’t...Guy and that woman never...Guy didn’t...”

Ruth’s words died off.

Which was all the answer that St. James needed.

When the drawing room door closed upon their visitors, Margaret wasted no time in getting to the bottom of matters with her son. He’d started to follow their lead and leave the room himself, but she got to the door ahead of him and blocked his way. She said, “Sit down, Adrian. We have things to talk about.” She heard the menace in her voice and she wished she could remove it, but she was too damn tired of having to draw upon her decidedly finite reserves of maternal devotion, and there was nothing for it now but to face the facts: Adrian had been a difficult child from the day of his birth, and difficult children often turned into difficult adolescents who in their turn became difficult adults.

She’d long seen her son as a victim of circumstances, and she’d used those circumstances to explain away his every oddity. Insecurity brought about by the presence of men in his life who clearly didn’t understand him was how she had rationalised years of sleepwalking and fugue states from which only a tornado could have roused her son. Fear of being abandoned by a mother who’d remarried not once but three times was how she excused his failure to make a life on his own. Early childhood trauma clarified that single terrible incident of public defecation that had resulted in his expulsion from university. There had always been a reason for everything in Margaret’s eyes. But she could not come up with a reason for his lying to the very woman who’d given her life to make his more livable. She wanted something in exchange for that. If she couldn’t have the revenge she yearned for, an explanation would do.

She said again, “Sit down. You’re not going anywhere. We have something to discuss.”

He said, “What?” and Margaret was infuriated that he sounded not wary but actually irritated, as if she were presuming on his valuable time.

“Carmel Fitzgerald,” she said. “I intend to get to the bottom of this.”

He met her eyes with his own, and she saw he had the temerity actually to look insolent, like an adolescent blatantly caught in an act that has been forbidden him, an act he very much wanted to be caught in as a mark of a defiance he refused to verbalise. Margaret felt her palms itch with the desire to slap that expression from Adrian’s face: that slightly raised upper lip and those flaring nostrils. She contained herself and walked to a chair. He remained by the door but he didn’t leave the room. He said,

“Carmel. All right. What about her?”

“You told me that she and your father—”

“You assumed. I told you sod all.”

“Don’t you dare use that sort of—”

“Sod all,” he repeated. “Jack shit, Mother. Bum-fucking nothing.”

“Adrian!”

“You assumed. You’ve spent your whole life comparing me with him. And that being the case, why would anyone prefer the son to the father?”

“That isn’t true!”

“Funnily enough, though, she did prefer me. Even with him there. You could say it was because she wasn’t his type and she knew it—not blonde, not submissive the way he liked them, not appropriately awed by his money and his power. But the fact is she wasn’t impressed by him, no matter the charm he poured on. She knew it was just a game, and it was, wasn’t it: the clever talk, the anecdotes, the probing questions while giving a woman all of his attention. He didn’t want her, not really, but if she’d been willing, he would’ve gone for it because that’s what he always did. Second nature. You know. Who better than you? Only she wasn’t willing.”

“Then why on earth did you tell me...did you imply...And you can’t deny it. You did imply. Why?”

“You’d already worked it out in your head. Carmel and I ended things after we came here to see him, and what other reason could there possibly have been? I’d caught him with his hands down her knickers—”