A Place of Hiding

St. James studied the pattern on the rug beneath his feet. He became aware of Ruth Brouard next to him, and he looked up to see her watching him. Her expression was earnest but beyond that, he could read nothing from her face.

He rang off on Lynley’s assurance that wheels were in motion to try to get someone from Vallera & Son on the telephone, although he cautioned St. James not to expect any cooperation from the other side of the Atlantic. “If this is what it appears to be, we may be at a dead end unless we involve a strong-arming agency over there. Internal Revenue. FBI. New York City Police.”

“That should do it,” St. James commented acerbically. Lynley chuckled. “I’ll be in touch.” Then he was gone. When he’d replaced the receiver, St. James took a moment to consider everything that Lynley’s information implied. He set it next to everything else he knew, and he didn’t much like the result he came up with.

“What is it?” Ruth Brouard finally asked him.

He stirred himself. “I’m wondering if you still have the package that the museum plans came in, Miss Brouard.”

At first, Deborah St. James didn’t see her husband when she came through the shrubbery. It was dusk and she was thinking about what she’d seen inside the prehistoric mound that Paul Fielder had taken her to. More than that, she was thinking what it meant that the boy had known the combination to the lock and had been so determined to keep that combination shielded from her view.

So she didn’t see Simon until she was nearly upon him. He was engaged with a rake on the far side of the three outbuildings closest to the manor house. He was going through the estate’s rubbish, having apparently upended four bins. He stopped when she called his name. To her question, “Career change to Bennie the Binman?” he smiled and said, “It’s a thought, although I’d confine myself to the rubbish of pop stars and politicians. What have you discovered?”

“All you need to know and more.”

“Paul spoke to you about the painting? Well done, my love.”

“I’m not sure Paul ever actually speaks,” she admitted. “But he took me to the place where he’d found it, although I thought he meant to lock me inside at first.” She went on to explain the location and nature of the mound Paul had taken her to, including the information about the combination lock and the contents of the two stone chambers. She concluded with “The condoms...the camp bed...It was obvious what Guy Brouard used it for, Simon. Although, to be honest, I don’t quite understand why he just didn’t have his flings in the house.”

“His sister was there most of the time,” St. James reminded her. “And as the flings involved a teenager...”

“In the plural, if Paul Fielder was one of them. I suppose that’s it. It’s all so unsavoury, isn’t it?” She glanced back towards the shrubbery, the lawn, the trail through the woods. “Well, believe me, they were out of sight there. You’d have to know exactly where the dolmen is on the property to be able to find it.”

“Did he show you where in the dolmen?”

“Where he’d found the painting?” When Simon nodded, Deborah explained. Her husband listened, his arm balancing his weight against the rake like a resting farmhand. When she’d completed her description of the altar stone and the crevice behind it and he’d clarified that the crevice was indeed in the floor itself, he shook his head. “That can’t be right, Deborah. The painting’s worth a fortune.” He told her everything he’d learned from Kevin Duffy. He ended by saying, “And Brouard would have known it.”

“He would have known it was a de Hooch? But how? If the painting was in his family for generations, if it had been handed down from father to son as a family heirloom...How would he have known? Would you have known?”

“Never. But if nothing else, he would have known what he spent to get the painting back, which was something in the vicinity of two million pounds. I can’t believe after having gone to that expense and to whatever trouble it entailed to find the canvas that he would have deposited it even for five minutes inside a dolmen.”

“But if it was locked...?”

“That’s not the point, my love. We’re talking about a seventeenthcentury painting. He wasn’t going to put it in a hiding place where either the cold or the damp could have harmed it.”

“So you think Paul’s lying?”

“I’m not saying that. I’m just saying it’s unlikely that Brouard put the painting in a prehistoric chamber. If he wanted to hide it—in anticipation of his sister’s birthday, as she claims, or for any other reason—there are dozens of places inside his own house where he could have stowed it with far less danger of its being damaged.”

“Then someone else...?” Deborah said.

“I’m afraid that’s the only thing making any sense.” He went back to work with the rake.