A Place of Hiding

“I’m not willing to take that risk,” Le Gallez said. The hand grenade looked ancient. Even across the chamber from it, Deborah could see that the thing was crusty with earth and discoloured with rust. It appeared to be an artifact from the Second World War and as such she couldn’t believe it was dangerous. How could something so old explode?

China seemed to read her mind, because she said, “But you don’t know for sure, do you? Neither do I. Tell me how they worked it all out, Debs.”

“Worked what out?”

“Me. This. Here. And with you. They wouldn’t have you here if they hadn’t known. It doesn’t make sense.”

“I don’t know. I told you. I followed Simon. We were at dinner and the police showed up. Simon told me—”

“Don’t lie to me, all right? They had to have found the poppy-oil bottle or they wouldn’t have come for Cherokee. They figured he could have planted the other evidence to make it look like me because why would I risk planting evidence against myself on the strength of just believing they’d find that bottle? So they found it. But from there, what?”

“I don’t know about a bottle,” Deborah said. “I don’t know about poppy oil.”

“Oh, please. You know. Papa’s little girl? Simon’s not going to keep something important from you. So tell me, Debs.”

“I have done. I don’t know what they know. Simon didn’t tell me. He wouldn’t.”

“Didn’t trust you, then?”

“Apparently not.” The admission struck Deborah like the unexpected slap from a parent’s hand. A poppy-oil bottle. He couldn’t trust her. She said, “We need to go. They’re waiting. They’ll be coming in if we don’t—”

“I’m not,” China said.

“Not what?”

“Serving time. Standing trial. Whatever they do here. I’m getting out.”

“You can’t...Chi na, there’s no place to go. There’s no way you can get off the island. They’ve probably already given the word to...You can’t.”

“You misconstrue,” China said. “Out isn’t off. Out is out. You and me. Friends—in a manner of speaking—till the end.” Carefully, she placed her torch to one side and she began to work at the pin on the old grenade. She murmured, “Can’t remember how long it takes for these things to blow, can you?”

Deborah said, “China! No! It won’t work. But if it does—”

“That’s what I’m hoping,” China said.

To Deborah’s horror, China managed to work the pin loose. Old and rusty and exposed to God only knew what elements in the last sixty years, it should have been frozen into place, but it wasn’t. Like the unexploded bombs that periodically came to light in South London, it lay like a memory in China’s hand, with Deborah trying and failing to remember how much time they had—how much time she had—to avoid obliteration. China murmured, “Five, four, three, two...”

Deborah flung herself backwards, falling mindlessly, heedlessly into the darkness. For a moment that stretched into infinity, nothing happened. Then an explosion rocked the dolmen with the roar of an Armageddon. After that came nothing.

The door blew off. It shot like a missile into the dense vegetation, and a gust came with it, foul like a sirocco from hell. Time froze for an instant. In its suspension, all sound disappeared, sucked up by the horror of realisation. Then after an hour a minute a second all reaction in the universe fixed itself on the head of the pin that was this spot on the island of Guernsey. Sound and movement rose round St. James like the effluence of a bursting dam which discharges water and mud as well as leaves and branches and uprooted trees and the broken corpses of animals that it finds in its path. He was aware of pushing and shoving going on within his protected vantage point of cleared-out vegetation. He felt bodies moving by him and he heard as if from a far-off planet the cursing of one man and the hoarse shouting of another. At a greater distance someone’s shrieking seemed to float high above them while all round them lights swung like the limbs of hanged men, trying to pierce through the dust.

Through it all, he stared at the dolmen, knowing the blown-out door, the noise, the gust, and the aftermath all for what they were: manifestations of something that no one had even considered a possibility. When he had accepted this, he began to stumble forward. He made directly for the door without knowing he was in the brambles and caught among them. He tore at the spikes and thorns that held him fast, and if they pierced his flesh, he did not know it. He knew only the door, the interior of that place, and the unspeakable fear of what he would not name but understood all the same because no one had to spell out for him what had just occurred with his wife and a killer trapped together.

Someone grabbed him and he became aware of shouting. The words this time, not only the noise. “Jesus. Here. This way, man. Saumarez. For Christ’s sake, get him. Saumarez, give us some bloody light over here. Hawthorne, they’ll be coming from the house. Keep them back, for the love of God.”