A Place of Hiding

“I would.”


They were walking down the drive in the direction of the lane and St. James guided them through the trees towards the path that Ruth Brouard had told him would lead to the bay where her brother had taken his daily swim. Their way passed by the stone cottage he’d observed earlier, and he noted that two of the building’s windows looked directly onto the path. This was where the caretakers lived, he’d been told, and the Duffys, St. James concluded, might well have something to add to what Ruth Brouard had already told him.

The path grew cooler and more damp as it dipped into the trees. Either the land’s natural fecundity or a man’s determination had created an impressive array of foliage that screened the trail from the rest of the estate. Nearest to the path, rhododendrons flourished. Among them half a dozen varieties of ferns unfurled their fronds. The ground was spongy with the fall of autumn leaves left to decompose, and overhead the winter-bare branches of chestnuts spoke of the green tunnel they’d create in summer. It was silent here, save for the sound of their footsteps. That silence didn’t last, however. St. James was extending his hand to his wife to help her across a puddle, when a scruffy little dog bounded out of the bushes, yapping at both of them.

“Lord!” Deborah started and then laughed. “Oh, he’s awfully sweet, isn’t he? Here, little doggie. We won’t hurt you.”

She held her hand out to him. As she did so, a red-jacketed boy darted out the way the dog had come and scooped the animal up into his arms.

“Sorry,” St. James said with a smile. “We appear to have startled your dog.”

The boy said nothing. He looked from Deborah to St. James as his dog continued to bark protectively.

“Miss Brouard said this is the way to the bay,” St. James said. “Have we made a wrong turn somewhere?”

Still the boy didn’t speak. He looked fairly the worse for wear, with oleaginous hair clinging to his skull and his face streaked with dirt. The hands that held the dog were grimy and the black trousers he wore had grease crusted on one knee. He took several steps backwards.

“We haven’t startled you as well, have we?” Deborah asked. “We didn’t think anyone would be...”

Her voice faded as the boy turned on his heel and crashed back in the direction he’d come. He wore a tattered rucksack on his back, and it pounded against him like a bag of potatoes.

“Who on earth...?” Deborah murmured.

St. James wondered himself. “We’ll want to look into that.”

They reached the lane through a gate in the wall some distance from the drive. There they saw that the overflow of cars from the burial had departed, leaving the way unobstructed so that they easily found the descent to the bay, some one hundred yards from the entrance to the Brouard estate.

This descent was somewhere between a track and a lane—wider than one and too narrow to actually be considered the other—and it switched back on itself numerous times as it steeply dropped to the water. Rock walls and woodland sided it, along with a stream that chattered along the rough stones of the wall’s base. There were no houses or cottages here, just a single hotel that was closed for the season, surrounded by trees, tucked into a depression in the hillside, and shuttered at every window. In the distance below St. James and his wife, the English Channel appeared, speckled by what little sun was able to break through the heavy cover of clouds. With the sight of it came the sound of gulls. They soared among the granite outcroppings at the top of the cliffs, which formed the deep horseshoe that was the bay itself. Gorse and English stonecrop grew in undisturbed abundance here, and where the soil was deeper, tangled thickets of bony branches marked the spots where blackthorn and bramble would prosper in spring.

At the base of the lane a small car park made a thumbprint on the landscape. No cars stood in it, nor would any be likely to do so at this time of year. It was the perfect spot for a private swim or for anything that called for activity without witnesses.

A bulwark fashioned from stone protected the car park from tidal erosion, and to one side of this a slipway slanted down to the water. Dead and dying seaweed knotted thickly across this, just the sort of decaying vegetation that at another time of year would be infested with flies and gnats. Nothing moved or crawled within it in the middle of December, however, and St. James and Deborah were able to pick their way through it and thus gain access to the beach. The water lapped against this rhythmically, marking a gentle pulse against the coarse sand and the stones.

“No wind,” St. James noted as he observed the mouth of the bay some distance from where they stood. “That makes it very good for swimming.”