A Place of Hiding

“Nobby...”


“And I’ll be working from home, as you see, which is excellent, of course, since Caroline might be spending most of her time in town. I burned my bridges with the firm when I resigned, but no doubt in time I’ll be able to get taken on by another if I haven’t been blackballed altogether. Yes. It’s wonderful, isn’t it, to see how everything’s turning out?”

He took the advert from Frank’s hand and shoved it, crumpled, beneath the telephone directory.

“I’m sorry,” Frank said. “The way it all turned out...”

“It’s for the best, no doubt,” Nobby said. “For someone.”





Chapter 27


St. James found Ruth Brouard in her conservatory. It was larger than it had appeared when he’d first seen it on the day of the funeral, and the air was humid and warm. As a result, the glass of the conservatory dripped condensation. Water from the windows and from an irrigation system made a constant pattern of splatters as drops fell upon the broad leaves of tropical plants and upon the brick path that wound among them. Ruth Brouard was in the centre of the glass house, where the bricks widened out to form a circular seating area large enough to accommodate a chaise longue, one white wicker chair, a similar table, and a small pond in which lily pads floated. She was on the couch with her legs resting on a tapestry cushion. A tray of tea sat on the table next to her. A photograph album lay open upon her lap.

Ruth said to him, “Forgive the heat,” with a nod to the electric fire that was set up on the bricks, adding to the conservatory’s warmth. “I find it a comfort. It actually doesn’t do much to alter the course of things, but it feels like it does.” Her glance went to the painting he held loosely rolled, but she said nothing about it. Instead, she invited him to pull a chair near so that she could show him “who we were.”

The album, he saw, served as a document of the Brouards’ years in care in England. In it, pictures depicted a boy and girl in wartime and in postwar London, always together, always staring seriously into the camera’s lens. They grew older but their solemn expressions barely altered, posing in front of this door, or that gate, in this garden, before that fireplace.

“He never forgot me,” Ruth Brouard said as she turned the pages.

“We weren’t ever with the same family together and I was terrified every time he left: that he wouldn’t return, that something might happen to him and I wouldn’t be told. He’d just stop appearing one day. But he said that couldn’t happen and even if it did, I would know. I would sense it, he said. I would feel a shift in the universe, so unless I felt that, I wasn’t to worry.”

She closed the album and set it to one side. “I didn’t feel it, though, did I?

When he went to the bay, Mr. St. James, I didn’t sense it at all.”

St. James handed her the painting. “But what good fortune to have found this,” she said quietly as she took it. “In a small measure, it brings my family back.” She laid the painting on top of the album and looked at him.

“What else?” she asked.

He smiled. “You’re certain you’re not a witch, Miss Brouard?”

“Perfectly,” she replied. “You do need something more from me, don’t you?”

He admitted that he did. It was clear to him from her words and her actions that she had no idea of the value of the painting that her brother had managed to find for her. He didn’t do anything to change that for the moment. Somehow, he knew its importance to her wouldn’t be altered by learning it was the work of a master.

He said, “You may be right about your brother having spent most of his money to locate this. But I’d like to check through his accounts to be sure. You’ve records here, haven’t you?”

She said she had, that Guy kept his accounts in his study. If Mr. St. James wanted to follow her, she’d be happy to show him where. They took the painting and the photo album with them, although it was fairly obvious that Ruth Brouard would have innocently left both in the conservatory till she returned to fetch them. In her brother’s study, she went round switching on lamps against the fading daylight. Surprisingly, from a cabinet next to his desk, she brought out a leather account book of the sort one would expect to find a Bob Cratchit using. She saw St. James’s reaction to this, and she smiled.

“We ran the hotel business on computers,” she said. “But Guy was old-fashioned when it came to his personal finances.”