A Place of Hiding (36 page)

So he was unprepared for the disquiet he began to feel the moment he learned that his wife had not delivered the ring to DCI Le Gallez. And he was ultimately undone by the level that disquiet reached when the minutes passed without Deborah's return to the hotel.

He paced at first: across their room and along the small balcony outside their room. Then he flung himself into a chair for five minutes and contemplated what Deborah's actions might mean. This only heightened his anxiety, however, so he grabbed up his coat and finally left the building altogether. He would set out after her, he decided. He crossed the street without a clear idea of what direction he needed to take, thankful only that the rain had eased, which made the going easier.

Downhill seemed good, so he started off, skirting the rock wall that ran along a bear-pit sort of garden sunk into the landscape across from the hotel. At its far end stood the island's war memorial, and St. James had reached this when he saw his wife coming round the corner where the dignified grey façade of the Royal Court House stretched the length of
Rue du Manoir.

Deborah raised her hand in greeting. As she approached him, he did what he could to calm himself.

“You made it back,” she said with a smile as she came up to him.

“That's fairly obvious,” he replied.

Her smile faded. She heard it all in his voice. She would. She'd known him for most of her life, and he'd thought he knew her. But he was fast discovering that the gap between what he thought and what was was beginning to develop the dimensions of a chasm.

“What is it?” she asked. “Simon, what's wrong?”

He took her arm in a grip that he knew was far too tight, but he couldn't seem to loosen it. He led her to the bear-pit garden and forcibly guided her down the steps.

“What've you done with that ring?” he demanded.

“Done with it? Nothing. I've got it right—”

“You were to take it straight to Le Gallez.”

“That's what I'm doing. I was going there now. Simon, what on
earth . . . ?”

“Now? You were taking it there now? Where's it been in the meantime? It's hours since we found it.”

“You never said . . . Simon, why're you acting like this? Stop it. Let me go. You're hurting me.” She wrenched away and stood before him, her cheeks burning colour. There was a path in the garden along its perimeter and she set off down this, although it actually went nowhere but along the wall. Rainwater pooled here blackly, reflecting a sky that was fast growing dark. Deborah strode right through it without hesitation, uncaring of the soaking she was giving her legs.

St. James followed her. It maddened him that she'd walk away from him in this manner. She seemed like another Deborah entirely, and he wasn't about to have that. If it was to come to a chase between them, she would win, naturally. If it was to come to anything other than words and intellect between them, she would also win. That was the curse of his handicap, which left him weaker and slower than his own wife. This, too, angered him as he pictured what the two of them must look like to any watcher from the street above the sunken park: her sure stride carrying her ever farther from him, his pathetic mendicant's plea of a hobble in pursuit.

She reached the far end of the little park, the deepest end. She stood in the corner, where a pyracantha, heavy with red berries, leaned its burdened branches forward to touch the back of a wooden bench. She didn't sit. Instead, she remained at the arm of the bench and she ripped a handful of berries from the bush and began to fling them mindlessly back into the greenery.

This angered him further, the childishness of it. He felt swept back in time to being twenty-three to her twelve, confronted with a fit of incomprehensible pre-adolescent hysteria about a hair cut she'd hated, wrestling scissors from her before she had a chance to do what she wanted to do, which was to make the hair worse, make herself look worse, punish herself for thinking a hair cut might make a difference in how she was feeling about the spots on her chin that had appeared overnight and marked her as forever changing. “Ah, she's a handful, she is, our Deb,” her father had said. “Needs a woman's touch,” which he never gave her.

How convenient it would be, St. James thought, to blame Joseph Cotter for all of it, to decide that he and Deborah had come to this moment in their marriage because her father had remained a widower. That would make things easier, wouldn't it. He'd have to look no further for an explanation of why Deborah had acted in such an inconceivable manner.

He reached her. Foolishly, he said the first thing that came into his head. “Don't ever run from me again, Deborah.”

She swung round with a handful of berries in her fist. “Don't you
dare . . .
Don't you
ever
talk to me like that!”

He tried to steady himself. He knew that an escalating argument would be the only outcome of this encounter unless one of them did something to calm down. He also knew how unlikely it was that Deborah would be the one to rein in. He said as mildly as he could which, admittedly, was only marginally less combative than before, “I want an explanation.”

“Oh, you
want
that, do you? Well, pardon me if I don't feel like giving you one.” She slung the berries onto the path.

Just like a gauntlet, he thought. If he picked it up, he knew quite well there would be an all-out war between them. He was angry, but he didn't want that war. He was still sane enough to see that any sort of battle would be useless. He said, “That ring constitutes evidence. Evidence is meant to go to the police. If it doesn't go directly to them—”

“As if
every
piece of evidence goes directly,” she retorted. “You know that it doesn't. You know that half the time police dig up evidence that no one even
knew
was evidence in the first place. So it's been through half a dozen way stations before it comes to them. You know that, Simon.”

“That doesn't give anyone the right to create way stations,” he countered. “Where have you been with that ring?”

“Are you interrogating me? Have you any idea what that
sounds
like? Do you care?”

“What I care about at the moment is the fact that a piece of evidence that I assumed was in the hands of Le Gallez was not in his hands when I mentioned it to him. Do
you
care what that means?”

“Oh, I see.” She raised her chin. She sounded triumphant, the way a woman tends to sound when a man walks into a mine field she's laid. “This is all about you.
You
looked bad. Egg on your face without a napkin to be had.”

“Obstructing a police investigation isn't egg on anyone's face,” he said tersely. “It's a crime.”

“I
wasn't
obstructing. I've
got
the damn ring.” She thrust her hand into her shoulder bag, brought out the ring wrapped in his handkerchief, grabbed his arm in a grip that was as tight as his own had been on hers, and slammed the shrouded ring into his palm. “There. Happy? Take it to your precious DCI Le Gallez. God knows what he might think of you if you don't run it over there straightaway, Simon.”

“Why are you acting like this?”

“Me? Why are you?”

“Because I told you what to do. Because we have evidence. Because we know it's evidence. Because we knew it then and—”

“No,” she said. “Wrong. We did
not
know that. We suspected. And based upon that suspicion, you asked me to take the ring. But if it was so crucial that the police get their hands on it in the next breath—if the ring was so
obviously
critical—you damn well might've brought it into town yourself instead of swanning round wherever you decided to swan, which was obviously more important to you than the ring in the first place.”

St. James heard all this with rising irritation. “And
you
know damn well I was talking to Ruth Brouard. Considering she's the sister of the murder victim, considering that she
asked
to see me, as you well know, I'd say we have something that was marginally important for me to attend to at
Le Reposoir.
”

“Right. Of course. While what
I
was attending to has the value of dust motes.”

“What you were
supposed
to be attending to—”

“Don't harp on about that!” Her voice rose to a screech. She seemed to hear it herself, for when she went on, she spoke more quietly although with no less anger. “What I was
attending
to”—she gave the verb the auditory equivalent of a sneer—“was this. China wrote it. She thought you might find it useful.” She rooted through her shoulder bag a second time and brought forth a legal pad folded in half. “I also found out about the ring,” she went on with a studied courtesy that was as meaningful as the sneer. “Which I'll tell you about if you think the information might be important enough, Simon.”

St. James took the legal pad from her. He ran his gaze over it to see the dates, the times, the places, and the descriptions, all written in what he presumed was China River's hand.

Deborah said, “She wanted you to have it. As a matter of fact, she asked that you have it. She also bought the ring.”

He looked up from the document. “What?”

“I think you heard me. The ring or one like it . . . China bought it in a shop in Mill Street. Cherokee and I tracked it down. Then we asked her about it. She admitted she bought it to send to her boyfriend. Her ex. Matt.”

Deborah told him the rest. She delivered the information formally: the antiques shops, the Potters, what China had done with the ring, the possibility of another like it having come from the Talbot Valley. She concluded with “Cherokee says he saw the collection himself. And a boy called Paul Fielder was with him.”

“Cherokee?” St. James asked sharply. “He was there when you tracked down the ring?”

“I believe I said that.”

“So he knows everything about it?”

“I think he has the right.”

St. James cursed in silence: himself, her, the whole situation, the fact that he'd involved himself in it for reasons he didn't want to consider. Deborah wasn't stupid, but she was clearly in over her head. To tell her this would escalate the difficulty between them. Not to tell her—in some way, diplomatically or otherwise—ran the risk of jeopardising the entire investigation. He had no choice.

“That wasn't wise, Deborah.”

She heard his tone. Her reply was sharp. “Why?”

“I wish you'd told me in advance.”

“Told you what?”

“That you intended to reveal—”

“I
didn't
reveal—”

“You said he was there when you tracked the source of the ring, didn't you?”

“He wanted to help. He's worried. He feels responsible because he was the one who wanted to make this trip and now his sister's likely to stand trial for murder. When I left China, he looked like . . . He's
suffering
with her.
For
her. He wanted to help, and I didn't see the harm in letting him.”

“He's a suspect, Deborah, as well as his sister. If she didn't kill Brouard, someone else did. He's one of the people who were on the property.”

“You
can't
be thinking . . . He
didn't . . .
Oh, for God's sake! He came to London. He came to see us. He went to the embassy. He agreed to see Tommy. He's desperate for someone to prove China innocent. Do you honestly think he'd do all that—do
any
of that—if he was the killer? Why?”

“I have no answer for that.”

“Ah. Yes. But you still insist—”

“I do have this, though,” he interrupted. He hated himself even as he allowed the bitter rush of pleasure to wash through him: He'd cornered her and now he had the blow to defeat her, to establish exactly who was in the right and who in the wrong. He told her about the paperwork he'd delivered to Le Gallez and what that paperwork revealed about where Guy Brouard had been on a trip to America that his own sister hadn't known he'd taken. It didn't matter to St. James that, during his discussion with Le Gallez, he'd argued the very opposite of what he was now telling his wife about the potential connection between Brouard's trip to California and Cherokee River. What did matter was that he impress upon her his own supremacy in matters that touched upon murder. Hers was the world of photography, his words suggested: celluloid images manipulated in a darkroom. His, on the other hand, was the world of science, the world of fact. Photography, however, was another word for fiction. She needed to keep all that in mind the next time she decided to forge a path he knew nothing about.

At the conclusion of his remarks, she said, “I see,” and her posture was stiff. “Then I'm sorry about the ring.”

“I'm sure you did what you thought was right,” St. James told her, feeling all the magnanimity of a husband who's reestablished his rightful place in his marriage. “I'll take it over to Le Gallez right now and explain what happened.”

“Fine,” she said. “I'll go with you if you like. I'm happy to make the explanation, Simon.”

He was gratified by the offer and what it revealed about her realisation of wrongdoing. “That's really not necessary,” he told her kindly. “I'll handle it, my love.”

“Are you sure you want to?” The question was arch.

He should have known what her tone meant, but he failed miserably, saying, instead, like the fool who thinks he can ever better a woman at anything, “I'm happy to do it, Deborah.”

“Funny, that. I wouldn't have thought.”

“What?”

“That you'd forgo the opportunity to see Le Gallez put the thumbscrews on me. Such a fun sight. I'm surprised you want to miss it.”

She gave a bitter smile and pushed past him abruptly. She hurried back up the path in the direction of the street.

 

DCI Le Gallez was climbing into his car in the police station's courtyard when St. James came through the gates. The rain had begun to fall once again as Deborah left him in the sunken garden, and although in his haste he'd departed the hotel without an umbrella, he didn't follow Deborah in order to pick one up from reception. Following Deborah at that point seemed like an act of importuning her. As he had nothing to importune her for, he didn't want to give the appearance of doing so.