A Place of Hiding

“And why is that?” she asked him pointedly.

“There hasn’t been time.”

“Oh, really?”

He could tell from her tone—and what was, to him, the very scent of emotion beneath her words—that he’d misjudged the impact it would have upon her for him to forge ahead without her knowledge. Yet he hadn’t had the right to bring her into the picture as fully as she apparently wanted. Things had moved too swiftly for that.

She said to him in a low voice, “We came here together. To help them together.”

He knew the rest that Deborah did not say: So we were meant to finishthis together. But that was not the case and at the moment he couldn’t explain why. They weren’t some latter-day Tommy and Tuppence come to Guernsey, larking their way through mischief, mayhem, and murder. A real man had died, not a fairy-tale villain conveniently done in because he richly deserved it. The only form of justice that existed for that man now was to trap his killer in a single moment of self-revelation that would itself be jeopardised to hell and back if St. James could not resolve this situation with the woman standing before him.

He said, “I’m sorry. There is no time. Later, I’ll explain.”

She said, “Fine. I’ll be waiting. You can visit me in gaol.”

“Deborah, for God’s sake...”

Le Gallez interrupted. “Jesus, man.” And then to Deborah, “I’ll deal with you later, Madam.”

He turned on his heel and strode back to the blind. From this, St. James took it that Deborah was meant to stay with them. He didn’t much like that, but he knew better than to argue with his wife any further. He, too, would have to deal with the situation at another time.





Chapter 30


They’d created a hidey-hole for themselves. Deborah saw that it comprised a rectangle of roughly beaten down vegetation in which two other police officers were already lying in wait. There had apparently been a third, but he’d set himself up along the far perimeter of the paddock for some reason. She could see no sense in that, for there was only one way in and one way out: on the single path through the bushes. Otherwise, she had no idea how many policemen were in the area, and she didn’t much care. She was still attempting to cope with the realisation that her husband had deliberately and with plenty of forethought lied to her for the first time in their marriage. At least she believed it was the first time in their marriage, although she was perfectly willing to admit that anything else was possible at this point. So she alternated among seething, plotting revenge, and planning what she intended to say to him once the police had made whatever arrest they thought they were going to make that night.

The cold descended upon them like a Biblical scourge, easing in from the bay first and then stretching across the paddock. It reached them somewhere close to midnight, or so it seemed to Deborah. No one was willing to risk the light it would take to look at the face of a watch. They all held to silence. Minutes passed and then hours with nothing happening. Occasionally, a rustle in the bushes would strike tension throughout their little group. But when nothing followed the rustling save more rustling, the noise was put down to some creature into whose habitat they had intruded. A rat possibly. Or a feral cat, curious to investigate the interlopers.

It seemed to Deborah that they’d waited till nearly dawn, when Le Gallez finally murmured a single word, “Coming,” which she might have missed altogether had not a collective rigidity seem to tighten the limbs of the men in their hiding place.

Then she heard it: the crunch of stones on the paddock wall, followed by the snap of a twig on the ground as someone approached the dolmen in the darkness. No torch lit a way that was obviously known to the person who had joined them. It was only a moment before a figure—shrouded in black like a banshee—slipped onto the path that encircled the mound. At the door to the dolmen, the banshee risked a torch, shining it on the combination lock. From the brambles, however, all Deborah could see was the edge of a small pool of light which gave enough illumination to highlight the black silhouette of a back bent to the doorway, which gave access to the mound.

She waited for the police to make their move. No one did. No one, it seemed, even breathed as the figure at the dolmen unfastened the lock on the door and crouched, entering the prehistoric chamber. The door remained halfway open in the banshee’s wake, and in a moment a soft gleam from what Deborah knew to be a candle flickered. Then it grew brighter from a second flame. Beyond the doorway, though, they could see nothing, and whatever movement occurred within was stifled by the thickness of the stone walls of the chamber and of the earth that had covered them for generations.