A Place of Hiding

After sound came sight: light and dark only, shadows posing in front of a curtain that seemed to comprise the sun. Its incandescence was so intense that she could expose herself to it for brief seconds at a time, and then she had to close her eyes again, which made the sound in her head seem louder.

Always the vibration remained. Her eyes opened or closed, herself awake or drifting in and out of consciousness, the noise was there. It became the one constant she could grasp on to, and she took it as an indication that she was alive. Perhaps children heard this as their first sensation of sound when they emerged from the womb, she thought. It was something to hold on to, so that’s what she did, swimming up towards it as one would swim for the far-off surface of a lake, its undulations heavy and shifting but always sparkling with the promise of sun and air.

When she could bear the light against her eyes longer than a few seconds, Deborah saw this was because constant day had finally become night. Wherever she was had altered from the brilliance of a stage illuminated for a watching audience to the dim interior of a single room in which one thin bar of fluorescence atop her bed cast a glowing shield downward onto the form of her body, indicated by those hills and valleys in the thin blanket that covered her. Next to the bed sat her husband, in a chair drawn up to her side so that his head could rest against the mattress on which she lay.

His arms cradled his head and his face was turned away from her. But she knew that it was Simon because she would always know this one man anywhere on earth that she came upon him. She would know the shape and the size of him, the way his hair curled on the back of his neck, the way his shoulder blades flattened to smooth, strong planes when he lifted his arms to pillow his head.

What she noticed was that his shirt was soiled. Copper stains smeared its collar as if he’d badly cut himself shaving and hastily daubed away the blood by means of his shirt. Streaks of dirt ran down the sleeve closer to her and more copper smudges made seeping marks on the cuffs. She could see no more of him and she lacked the strength to awaken him. All she found she could do was to move her fingers an inch nearer to him. But that was enough.

Simon raised his head. He looked like a miracle to her. He spoke but she couldn’t hear him above the sound in her skull, so she shook her head, tried to talk, and found she couldn’t do that either because her throat was so parched and her lips and her tongue seemed to stick to her teeth. Simon reached for something on the table by the bed. He raised her slightly and brought a plastic glass to her lips. A straw bent from the glass and Simon gently eased it into her mouth. She drew in the water gratefully, finding it tepid but not caring. As she drank, she felt him come closer to her. She felt him trembling, and she thought the water would surely spill. She tried to steady his hand, but he stopped her. He brought her hand to his cheek and her fingers to his mouth. He bent to her and pressed his own cheek to the top of her head.

Deborah had survived, he’d been told, because she’d either never gone into the inner chamber where the explosion occurred or because she’d managed to get herself out of there and into the larger chamber seconds before the grenade went off. And it would have been a hand grenade, the police reported. There was evidence aplenty to verify that. As to the other woman...One did not deliberately detonate a handheld bomb packed with TNT and live to talk about it. And it had been a deliberate detonation, the police surmised. There was no other real explanation for the explosion.

“Lucky it happened in the mound,” St. James had been told first by the police and then by two of the doctors who had seen his wife at Princess Elizabeth Hospital. “That sort of explosion would have brought anything else down on top of them. She would’ve been crushed...i f not blown to Timbuktu. She got lucky. Everyone got lucky. A modern explosive would’ve taken out the mound and the paddock as well. How the hell’d that woman get her hands on a grenade, though? That’s the real question.”

But only one of the real questions, St. James thought. The others all began with why. That China River had returned to the dolmen to fetch the painting she’d placed there was not in doubt. That she’d somehow come to know the painting had been hidden for transport to Guernsey among the architectural drawings was also clear. That she’d planned and carried out the crime based on what she’d learned about Guy Brouard’s habits were two facts that they could piece together from the interviews they’d conducted with the principals involved in the case. But the why of it all remained a mystery at first. Why steal a painting she could not hope to sell on the open market, but only to a private collector for a great deal less than it was worth...and only if she could find a collector who was willing to operate outside the law? Why plant evidence against herself on the slim chance that the police would find a bottle with her brother’s fingerprints on it, a bottle containing traces of the opiate that had drugged the victim? And why plant that piece of evidence against her own brother?