A Place of Hiding

“Sit here. Please sit down, Stephen.”


He said, “I hate her. I really hate her. Sodding bitch. She’s so bloody stupid she can’t even see...” He couldn’t go on, so hard was he weeping. Deborah urged him down to one of the pillows. He dropped onto it on his knees, his head lowered to his chest and his body heaving. Deborah didn’t touch him although she wanted to. Seventeen years old, abject despair. She knew what it felt like: The sunlight was gone, the night never ended, and the feeling of hopelessness descended like a shroud.

“It feels like hate because it’s so strong,” she said. “But it isn’t hate. It’s something quite different. The flip side of love, I suppose. Hate destroys. But this...? This, what you’re feeling...? It wouldn’t harm anyone. So it isn’t hate. Really.”

“But you saw her,” he cried. “You saw what she’s like.”

“Just a woman, Stephen.”

“No! More than that. You saw what she’s done.”

At this, Deborah’s intellect went on the alert. “What she’s done?” she repeated.

“She’s too old now. She can’t cope with that. And she won’t see...And I can’t tell her. How can I tell her?”

“Tell her what?”

“It’s too late. For any of it. He doesn’t love her. He doesn’t even want her. She can do anything she wants to make it different. But nothing’s going to work. Not sex. Not going under the knife. Nothing. She’d lost him, and she was too bloody stupid to see it. But she ought to have seen. Why didn’t she see? Why’d she just keep on doing things to make herself seem better? To try to make him want her when he didn’t any longer?”

Deborah absorbed this carefully. With it, she pondered all the boy had previously said. The implication behind his words was clear: Guy Brouard had moved on from this boy’s mother. The logical conclusion was that he’d gone on to someone else. But the truth of the matter could also be that the man had gone on to some thing else. If he hadn’t wanted Mrs. Abbott any longer, they needed to discover what it was he had wanted.



Paul Fielder arrived at Le Reposoir sweating, dirty, and breathless, with his rucksack askew on his back. Although he’d reckoned that it was far too late, he’d pedaled his bicycle from the Bouet to the Town Church first, hurtling along the waterfront as if all four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were in hot pursuit. There was a chance, he’d thought, that Mr. Guy’s funeral had been delayed for one reason or another. If that had occurred, he would have still been able to be present for at least part of it. But the fact of no cars sitting along North Esplanade and none in the car parks on the pier told him that Billy’s scheme had paid off. His older brother had managed to keep Paul from attending the funeral of his only friend.

Paul knew it was Billy who’d done the damage to his bike. As soon as he got outside and saw it—the back tyre knifed and the chain removed and slung into the mud—he recognised his brother’s nasty fingerprints all over the prank. He’d given a strangled cry and charged back into the house, where his brother was eating fried bread at the kitchen table and drinking a mug of tea. He had a fag burning in an ashtray next to him and another forgotten and smoking from the draining board over the sink. He was pretending to watch a chat show on the telly while their toddler sister played with a bag of flour on the floor, but the truth was that he was waiting for Paul to storm into the house and confront him in some way so that the two of them could get into a brawl.