A Place of Hiding (23 page)

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.

Paul saw this directly he entered. Billy's smirk gave him away.

There'd been a time when he might have appealed to their parents. There was even a time when he might have flung himself mindlessly at his brother without considering the differences in their size and their strength. But those times had passed. The longtime meat market—a fixture of the proud old complex of colonnaded buildings that comprised Market Square in St. Peter Port—had closed forever, destroying his family's means of support. His mother was now behind a Boots till on the High Street, ringing up purchases, while his father had joined a road-works crew where the days were long and the labour was brutal. Neither of them was in the house at the moment to help and even if one of them had been, Paul wasn't about to burden them further. As for taking on Billy himself, he knew he was slow at times, but he wasn't stupid. Taking Billy on was what Billy wanted. He'd wanted it for months and had done much to make it happen. He was itching to assault someone, and he didn't care who that someone was.

Paul barely cast him a look. Instead, he leaped to the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink and brought out their father's tool box.

Billy followed him outside, ignoring their sister who remained on the kitchen floor with her hands thrust into the flour bag. Two more of their siblings were squabbling upstairs. Billy was supposed to be getting them off to school. But Billy never did much of anything he was supposed to do. Instead, he spent his days in the weed-filled back garden, pitching pennies into the beer cans that he emptied from dawn to dusk.

“Ohhh,” Billy said with mock concern when his eyes lit on the ruin of Paul's bike. “Wha' the hell happened here, Paulie? Someone do something to your bike, di' they?”

Paul ignored him and flung himself to the ground. He began by removing the tyre first. Taboo, who'd been standing guard at the bike, sniffed round it suspiciously, a whine deep in his throat. Paul stopped and took Taboo over to a nearby lamppost. He tied the dog to it and pointed to the ground where he wanted him to lie. Taboo obeyed but it was clear he didn't like it. He didn't trust Paul's brother one iota and Paul knew the dog would have vastly preferred to stick close to his side.

“Need to go somewheres, do you?” Billy asked. “And your bike got wrecked. Wicked, that. What people will do.”

Paul didn't want to cry because he knew that tears would give his brother more roads to take in tormenting him. It was true that tears would give him less satisfaction than defeating Paul in a brutal dust-up, but they still would serve as a better-than-nothing and Paul vastly preferred to give Billy nothing. He'd long ago learned that his brother had no heart and even less conscience. He lived to make the lives of others a torment. It was the only contribution he could make to the family.

So Paul ignored him, which Billy didn't like. He took up a station leaning against the house, and he lit yet another cigarette.

Rot your lungs, Paul thought. But he didn't say it. He just set about patching the worn old tyre, taking up the bits of rubber and the glue and stretching them across the ragged incision.

“Now lemme see where lit'le bruvver might've been going this morning,” Billy said reflectively, dragging in on his fag. “Going to pay a call on Mummy down 't Boots? Take Dad his lunch somewheres out on the road-works crew? Hmm. Don't think so. Clobber's too posh. Matter of fac', where'd he get that shirt? Outta
my
cupboard? Better hope not. 'Cause pinching from me would require some discipline. But p'rhaps I oughter have a closer look. Just to make sure.”

Paul didn't react. Billy, he knew, was a coward's bully. The only time he had the bottle to attack was when he believed his victims were cowed. Like their parents were cowed, Paul thought dismally. Keeping him in the house like a nonpaying lodger month after month because they were afraid what he'd do if they chucked him out.

Paul had once been like them, watching his brother cart off family belongings to flog in car-boot sales to keep himself in beer and fags. But that had been before Mr. Guy had come along. Mr. Guy, who always seemed to know what was going on in Paul's heart and who always seemed able to talk about it without preaching or making demands or expecting anything at all in return but companionship.

You just keep your eyes focused on what's important, my Prince. As to the rest of it? Let it go if it's not in the way of your dreams.

This was why he could repair his bike while his brother mocked him, challenging him either to fight or to cry. Paul closed his ears and concentrated. One tyre to patch, one chain to clean.

He could have caught the bus into town, but he didn't think of that until he had the bike back together and was halfway to the church. At that point, though, he was beyond berating himself for dimwittedness. He'd wanted so fiercely to be there for Mr. Guy's farewell that the sole thought he was even capable of producing when a bus trundled by him on the northern Number Five route and reminded him of what might have been was how easy it would be to ride out in front of the vehicle and put an end to everything.

That was when he finally cried, in sheer frustration and in desperation. He cried for the present in which his every aim appeared to be thwarted, and he cried for the future, which looked bleak and empty.

Despite seeing that not a single car remained near the Town Church, he hiked his rucksack higher on his shoulders and went inside anyway. First, though, he scooped up Taboo. He took the dog with him inside although he knew he was out of order in a very big way for this. But he didn't care. Mr. Guy had been Taboo's friend as well and anyway, he wasn't about to leave the animal out on the square not understanding what was going on. So he carried him inside where the scent of flowers and burnt candles was still in the air and a banner saying
Requiescat in Pace
still stood to the right of the pulpit. But those were the only signs that a funeral had taken place in St. Peter Port Church. After wandering the length of the centre aisle and trying to pretend he'd been one of the mourners, Paul left the building and returned to his bike. He headed south towards
Le Reposoir.

He'd put on what went for his best clothes that morning, wishing he'd not run off from Valerie Duffy on the previous day when she'd made the offer of one of Kevin's old shirts. As a result, all he had was a pair of black trousers with bleach spots on them, his single pair of broken-down shoes, and a flannel shirt that his father used to wear on the colder days inside the meat market. Around the neck of this shirt, he'd looped a knitted tie that also belonged to his dad. And over it all he'd worn his mother's red anorak. He looked a wretched sight, and he knew it, but it was the best he could do.

Everything he had on was either grimy or sweated through when he got to the Brouard estate. For this reason, he pushed his bike behind an enormous camellia bush just inside the wall, and he ducked off the drive and walked up to the house beneath the trees instead of in the open, with Taboo trotting along beside him.

Ahead of him, Paul saw that people were coming out of the house in dribs and drabs, and as he paused to try to suss out what was happening, the hearse that had held Mr. Guy's coffin came his way, slowly passed by him where he stood half-hidden to the east of the drive, and turned out of the gates to make the journey back to town. Paul followed its route with his gaze before turning back to the house and understanding that he'd missed the burial as well. He'd missed everything.

He felt his whole body tightening and surging at once, as something tried to escape him as fiercely as he tried to keep it imprisoned. He took off his rucksack and clutched it to his chest, and he tried to believe that what he had shared with Mr. Guy had not been obliterated in the work of one moment but instead had been sanctified, blessed forever through the means of a message Mr. Guy left behind.

This, my Prince, is a special place, a you-and-I place. How good are you at keeping secrets, Paul?

Better than good, Paul Fielder vowed. Better than being able to hear his brother's taunts without listening to them. Better than being able to bear the searing fires of this loss without disintegrating completely. Better, in fact, than anything.

 

Ruth Brouard took St. James upstairs to her brother's study. This, he found, was in the northwest corner, and it overlooked an oval lawn and the conservatory in one direction and a semicircle of outbuildings that appeared to be old stables in the other direction. Beyond each of these, the estate spread out: more gardens, distant paddocks, fields, and woodland. St. James saw that the theme of sculpture beginning in the walled garden in which the murdered man had been buried extended to the rest of his estate as well. Here and there, a geometric form done in marble or bronze or granite or wood appeared among the trees and the plants that grew unrestrained across the land.

“Your brother was a patron of the arts.” St. James turned from the window as Ruth Brouard quietly shut the door behind them.

“My brother,” she replied, “was a patron of everything.”

She didn't appear well, St. James decided. Her movements were studied and her voice sounded drained. She walked to an armchair and lowered herself into it. Behind her glasses, her eyes narrowed in what might have developed into a wince had she not been so careful to keep her face like a mask.

In the centre of the room, a walnut table stood, upon it the detailed model of a building set into a landscape that comprised the passing roadway in front of it, the garden behind it, even the miniature trees and shrubbery that the gardens would grow. The model was so detailed that it included both doors and windows and along the front of it what would eventually be carved into the facing stonework had been neatly applied by a skilled hand.
Graham Ouseley Wartime Museum
was incised into the frieze.

“Graham Ouseley.” St. James stepped back from the model. It was low to the ground in the manner of a bunker, save for its entrance, which swept up dramatically like something designed by Le Corbusier.

“Yes,” Ruth murmured. “He's a Guernseyman. Quite old. In his nineties. A local hero from the Occupation.” She offered nothing more, but it was clear she was waiting. She'd read St. James's name and profession on the card he'd handed her and she'd immediately agreed to talk to him. But she obviously was going to wait to see what he wanted before volunteering any more information.

“Is this the local architect's version?” St. James asked. “I understand he built a model for your brother.”

“Yes,” Ruth told him. “This was done by a man from St. Peter Port, but his plan wasn't the one Guy finally chose.”