A Place of Hiding

“It’s not you,” he said. “It’s me. The person that you are...You’ve never walked away from anything, and you wouldn’t because you couldn’t and still be the person you are. But I see the world through the eyes of someone who did walk away, Deborah. More than once. More than just from you. So for me, the world’s a place where people devastate each other all the time. Through selfishness, greed, guilt, stupidity. Or in my case, fear. Pure palm-sweating fear. Which is what comes back to haunt me when someone like Cherokee River shows up on my doorstep. Fear gains hold of me and everything I do is coloured by everything else I fear. I wanted him to be the killer because only then could I be certain of you.”


“Do you really think it’s that important, Simon?”

“What?”

“You know.”

He lowered his head to look at his hand covering hers so that if she was reading his lips, perhaps she wouldn’t read it all. He said, “I couldn’t even get to you easily, my love. Inside the dolmen. As I am. So yes. I think it’s that important.”

“But only if you feel I need to be protected. Which I don’t. Simon, I stopped being seven years old so long ago. What you did for me then...I don’t need that now. I don’t even want that now. I want only you.”

He took this in and tried to make it his own. He’d been damaged goods since her fourteenth year, a time long past since the day he’d sorted out the group of schoolkids who’d been bullying her. He knew that he and Deborah had arrived at a point where he was meant to trust in the strength they had together as a single unit of husband-and-wife. He was just not sure that he could do it.

This moment was like crossing a frontier for him. He could see the crossing itself but he could not make out what was on the other side. It took a leap of faith to be a pioneer. He didn’t know where such faith came from.

“I’m going to have to muddle my way into your adulthood, Deborah,” he said at last. “That’s the best I can do at the moment and even at that, I’ll probably muff things up continually. Can you bear with that? Will you bear with that?”

She turned her hand in his and grasped his fingers. “It’s a start,” she replied. “And I’m happy with a start.”





Chapter 31


St. James went to Le Reposoir on the third day after the explosion and found Ruth Brouard with her nephew. They were coming past the stables, returning from the distant paddock, where Ruth had insisted upon seeing the dolmen. She’d known it was there on the grounds, of course, but she’d known it only as “the old burial mound.” That her brother had excavated it, that he’d found its entrance, that he’d both equipped it and used it as a hideaway...These things she didn’t know. Nor did Adrian, as St. James discovered.

They’d heard the explosion in the dead of night but had not known its source or location. Awakened by it, they’d each dashed from their rooms and met in the corridor. Ruth admitted to St. James—with an embarrassed laugh—that in the first confusion she’d thought Adrian’s return to LeReposoir was directly related to the terrible noise. She’d intuitively known that someone had detonated a bomb somewhere, and she’d connected this to Adrian’s solicitous desire that she eat a dinner which she’d found him stirring in the kitchen earlier that evening. She’d thought that he intended her to sleep and that he’d added a little something to her meal to assist her in her slumber. So when the reverberations from the explosion rattled her bedroom windows and slammed against the house, she didn’t expect to find her nephew stumbling round the upstairs corridor in his pyjamas, shouting about a plane crash, a gas leak, Arab terrorists, and the IRA. She’d thought he meant to do damage to the estate, she admitted. If he couldn’t inherit it, then he would destroy it. But she changed her mind when he took charge of the events that followed: the police, the ambulances, the fire brigade. She didn’t know how she would have managed without him.

“I would have trusted it all to Kevin Duffy,” Ruth Brouard said. “But Adrian said no. He said, ‘He’s not family. We don’t know what’s going on and until we do, we’re handling everything that needs to be handled ourselves.’ So that’s what we did.”

“Why did she kill my father?” Adrian Brouard asked St. James. That brought them to the painting, for as far as St. James had been able to ascertain, the painting was China River’s objective. But there by the stables was not the place to discuss a stolen seventeenth-century canvas, so he asked if they might return to the house and have their conversation in the vicinity of the pretty lady with the book and the quill. There were things to be decided about that painting.

The picture was up in the gallery, a room that extended most of the length of the east side of the house. It was paneled in walnut and hung with Guy Brouard’s collection of modern oils. The pretty lady seemed out of place among them, lying frameless on a table that held a display case of miniatures.

“What’s this?” Adrian said, crossing to the table. He switched on a lamp and its glow struck the veil of hair that fell copiously round St. Barbara’s shoulders. “Not exactly a piece that Dad would collect.”

“It’s the lady we ate our meals with,” Ruth replied. “She always hung in the dining room in Paris when we were children.”

Adrian looked at her. “Paris?” His voice was sombre. “But after Pari s...Where has it come from, then?”

“Your father found it. I think he wanted to surprise me with it.”