A Place of Hiding

He followed the curve of Ann’s Place as it gave onto Hospital Lane and the police station beyond. He pondered the entire idea of connection. Perhaps, he thought, that inability of his which created a chasm between himself and other people—always and ever the cool damn scientist, always and ever looking inward and thinking, always considering, weighing, and observing when other people occupied themselves with just being... Perhaps that was the source of his discomfort with Cherokee River as well.

“I do remember the surfing!” Deborah had said, her face altering in an instant when the shared experience came to her mind. “All three of us went that one ti me...D’you remember? Where were we?”

Cherokee had looked reflective before he’d said, “Sure. It was Seal Beach, Debs. Easier than Huntington. More protected there.”

“Yes, yes. Seal Beach. You made me go out and flail round on the board and I kept shrieking about hitting the pier.”

“Which,” he said, “you weren’t anywhere close to. No way were you going to stay on the board long enough to hit anything unless you decided to sleep on it.”

They laughed together, another link forged, an effortless instant between two people when they acknowledged that a common chain existed that connected the present to the past.

And that was how it was between everyone who shared any kind of history, St. James thought. That was just how it was. He crossed the street to the Guernsey police headquarters. It stood behind an imposing wall hewn from a stone that was veined with feldspar, an L-shaped building with four banks of windows climbing its two wings and the flag of Guernsey flying above it. Inside the reception room, St. James gave his name and his card to the special constable. Would it be possible, he asked, to speak with the chief investigating officer on the Guy Brouard murder enquiry? Or, failing that, with the department’s Press Officer?

The special constable studied the card, his face a declaration that indicated a few select telephone calls were going to be made across the Channel to ascertain exactly who this forensic scientist on their doorstep was. This was all to the good, because if phone calls were made, they would be made to the Met, to the CPS, or to the university where St. James lectured, and if that were the case, his way would be paved. It took twenty minutes while St. James cooled his heels in reception and read the notice board half a dozen times. But they were twenty minutes well spent, because at the end of them, Detective Chief Inspector Louis Le Gallez came out personally to lead St. James to the incident room, a vast hammer-beamed former chapel in which departmental exercise equipment vied with filing cabinets, computer tables, bulletin boards, and china boards.

DCI Le Gallez wanted to know, naturally, what interest a forensic scientist from London had in a murder enquiry on Guernsey, especially in an enquiry that was closed. “We’ve got our killer,” he said, arms across his chest and one leg slung over the corner of a table. He rested his weight—

which was considerable for a man so short—on the table’s edge and he flipped St. James’s card back and forth against the side of his hand. He looked curious rather than guarded.

St. James opted for complete honesty. The brother of the accused, understandably shaken by what had happened to his sister, had asked St. James for help after failing to stimulate the American embassy into acting on his sister’s behalf.

“The Americans have done their bit,” Le Gallez countered. “Don’t know what else this bloke’s expecting. He was one of the suspects as well, by the way. But then, they all were. Everyone at that party Brouard had. Night before he bought it. Half the island was there. And if that didn’t complicate the hell out of matters, nothing did, believe me.”

Le Gallez took the lead as if fully aware of where St. James intended to direct the conversation upon that remark about the party. He went on to say that interviews had been conducted with everyone who’d been at the Brouard house on the night before the murder, and nothing had come to light in the days since Guy Brouard’s death to alter the investigators’ initial suspicion: Anyone who’d ducked out of Le Reposoir as the Rivers had done on the morning of the killing was someone who bore looking into.

“All the other guests had alibis for the time of the killing?” St. James asked.

That wasn’t what he was implying, Le Gallez responded. But once the evidence was stacked up, what everyone else had been doing on the morning Guy Brouard met his death was germane to nothing related to the case. What they had against China River was damning, and Le Gallez seemed only too happy to list it. Their four scenes-of-crime officers had worked the location and their forensic pathologist had worked the body. The River woman had left a partial print at the scene—this was a footprint, half of it obscured by a broad blade of seaweed, admittedly, but grains that were the exact match of the coarse sand upon the beach had been imbedded in the soles of her shoes and those same shoes matched the partial print as well.