A Place of Hiding

As they hiked back along the road towards the Brouard property, St. James added to Le Gallez’s knowledge of the estate’s layout. Once inside the walls, they ducked into the thickest growth of chestnuts along the drive, and they waited for the officers from the van to climb the footpath from the bay and join them.

“You’re certain of all this?” was all Le Gallez muttered as they stood in the darkness and stamped their feet against the cold.

“It’s the only explanation that works,” St. James replied.

“It had better be.”

Nearly ten minutes passed before the other policemen—panting heavily from their quick ascent from the bay—passed through the gates and faded into the trees to join them. At that point, Le Gallez said to St. James, “Show us where it is,” and gave him the lead. The miracle of being married to a photographer was in her sense for detail: what Deborah noticed and what Deborah remembered. So there was little challenge involved in finding the dolmen. Their main concern was to keep out of sight: of the cottage that contained the Duffys at the edge of the property, of the manor house where Ruth Brouard had failed to answer the phone. To do this, they inched their way along the east side of the drive. They circled the house at a distance of some thirty yards, clinging to the protection of the trees and feeling their way without aid of torches.

The night was extraordinarily dark; a heavy cover of clouds obscured the moon and stars. The men walked single file beneath the trees, with St. James in the lead. In this manner, they approached the shrubbery behind the stables, seeking the break in the hedge that would take them ultimately to the woods and the path, beyond which was the walled paddock where the dolmen lay.

Having no stile, the stone wall offered no easy access to the paddock which spread out beyond it. For someone unencumbered by a leg brace, mounting the wall presented very little problem. But for St. James, the situation was more complicated and made even more difficult by the darkness. Le Gallez seemed to realise this. He clicked on a small torch that he took from his pocket and, without comment, he moved along the edge of the wall till he found a spot where the stones at the top had crumbled, offering a narrow gap through which someone might more easily lift himself. He muttered, “This’ll do, I think,” and he went first into the paddock. Once within, they found themselves surrounded by a nearly prehensile growth of briars, bracken, and brambles. Le Gallez’s anorak got snagged immediately, and two of the constables that followed him were soon cursing quietly as thorns from the encroaching bushes tore at them.

“Jesus,” Le Gallez muttered as he ripped his jacket from the branch on which it was snagged. “You’re certain this is the spot?”

“There has to be an easier access,” St. James said.

“Damn right on that.” Le Gallez said to one of the other men, “Give us heavier light, Saumarez.”

St. James said, “We don’t want to warn—”

“We’re going to be good for sod all,” Le Gallez said, “if we end up like bugs in a web. Saumarez, hit it. Keep it low.”

The constable in question carried a powerful torch that flooded the ground with light when he switched it on. St. James groaned when he saw it—surely, it seemed, the lights would be seen from the house—but at least luck was with them when it came to the spot they’d chosen to go over the wall. For less than ten yards to their right, they could see a path that led through the paddock.

“Cut it,” Le Gallez ordered, seeing this himself. The light went out. The DCI forged off through the brambles, beating them down for the men that followed. The darkness was thus both a gift and a curse. It had prevented them from easily finding the path to the middle of the paddock, leaving them instead in the middle of a botanic mire. But it also hid their passage through the overgrowth to the main path, which would have otherwise shown up only too well had the moon and the stars been visible.

The dolmen was much as Deborah had described it to St. James. It rose in the paddock’s centre, as if several acres of land had been walled off generations in the past with the express intention of protecting it. To the unschooled, it might have appeared to be an inexplicable knoll plopped down without reason in the middle of a field long gone to seed. But to someone with an eye for indications of prehistory, it would have marked a spot worthy of excavation.

Access round it was by means of a narrow course hacked away from the surrounding growth. It skirted its circumference at a width of something less than two feet, and the men followed this path till they came to the thick wooden door with its combination lock hanging from a hasp. Here Le Gallez stopped, shining his pocket torch again, this time on the lock. From there he shone it upon the bracken and the brambles. “No easy cover,” he said quietly.