A Place of Hiding

“Arrest? Of whom? With your approval or something? Simon, that doesn’t—”

“I must go, Deborah. Continue with your meal. I shouldn’t be gone long. It’s only the police station. I’ll just pop round the corner and be back directly.” He bent and kissed her.

She said, “Why did he come personally to get you? He could have...Simon!” But he was walking off.

Deborah sat for a moment, staring at the single candle that flickered on their table. She had that uneasy sensation that tends to fall upon a listener when she hears a bald-faced lie. She didn’t want to race after her husband and demand an explanation, but at the same time she knew that she couldn’t just sit there docilely like a doe in the forest. So she found the middle ground, and she left the restaurant in favour of the bar, where a window overlooked the front of the hotel.

There she saw Simon shrugging into his coat. Le Gallez was speaking to a uniformed constable. Out in the street, a police car stood idling with a driver behind the wheel. Behind that car waited a white police van through whose windows Deborah could see the silhouettes of other policemen. She gave a little cry. She could feel the pain of it and knew that pain for what it was. But she had no time to assess the damage. She hurried from the bar.

She’d left her bag and her coat in their room. At Simon’s suggestion, she realised now. He’d said, “You won’t be needing any of that, will you, my love,” and she’d cooperated as she always cooperated...wi th hi m so wise, so concerned, so...what? So determined to keep her from following him. While he, of course, had his own coat somewhere quite close to the restaurant because he’d known all along that Le Gallez was going to come calling in the midst of their meal.

But Deborah wasn’t the fool her husband apparently thought she was. She had the advantage of intuition. She also had the greater advantage of having already been where she believed they were going. Where they had to be going, despite everything Simon had said to her earlier to make her think otherwise.

With her coat and her bag, she flew back down the stairs and out into the night. The police vehicles were gone, leaving the pavement empty and the street free. She broke into a run and raced to the car park round the corner from the hotel and facing the police station. She wasn’t surprised to see no panda cars or van standing in its courtyard: It had been highly unlikely from the first that Le Gallez had come with an escort to fetch Simon and to transport him less than one hundred yards to the offices of the States police.

“We rang the manor house to let her know,” Le Gallez was saying to St. James as they sped through the darkness towards St. Martin, “but there was no answer.”

“What do you take that to mean?”

“I hope to God it means she’s gone off somewhere for the night. A concert. Church service. Meal with a friend. She’s a Samaritan, and they might have something on tonight. We can only hope.”

They took the turns up Le Val des Terres, hugging the moss-grown wall that held back the hillside and the trees. With the van close behind them, they emerged into the precinct of Fort George, where street lights shone on the empty green that edged the east side of Fort Road. The houses on the west looked strangely uninhabited at this hour, save Bertrand Debiere’s. There every light was on in the front of the building, as if the architect were beaming someone home.

They coursed quickly in the direction of St. Martin, the only sound among them the periodic crackling of the police radio. Le Gallez snatched this up as they finally made the turn into one of the island’s ubiquitous narrow lanes, whipping along beneath the trees until they came upon the wall that marked the boundary of Le Reposoir. He told the driver of the van that followed to take the turn that would direct him down to the bay. Leave the vehicle there and bring your officers back up along the footpath, he instructed. They would reconvene just on the inside of the gates to the estate.

“And for God’s sake, keep out of sight,” he ordered before he snapped the radio back where it belonged. To the driver of their own car he said,

“Pull in at the Bayside. Go round the back.”

The Bayside was a hotel, closed for the season like so many others outside of St. Peter Port. It hulked on the edge of the road in darkness, threequarters of a mile from the gates to Le Reposoir. They pulled round to the back, where a rubbish bin stood next to a padlocked door. A bank of security lights blazed on immediately. Le Gallez made short work of unhooking his safety belt and throwing open the car door as soon as the vehicle stopped.