A Place of Hiding (69 page)

Frank thought he saw the sudden realisation flash on Nobby's face: the fact that he himself—possessor of thousands of items of ostensibly beloved wartime memorabilia—did not want that material ever to see the light of day. And while that was indeed the truth of the matter, there was no way Nobby Debiere could have known it. The matter was too complicated for him to be able to suss out. As far as he knew, Frank Ouseley was just another disappointed member of the group who'd hung their hats on a scheme that had come to nothing.

Frank said, “I suppose I'm reeling from all this. I just can't believe . . . There has to be an explanation somewhere.”

“I've just given it to you. I only wish Guy were here so he could enjoy the result of his machinations. Look. Let me show you.” Nobby went to a corner of the work top, where it appeared that the family kept the day's post. Unlike the rest of the house, it was a messy area, with stacks of letters, magazines, catalogues, and telephone directories all piled together. From the bottom of this pile, Nobby brought out a single sheet and handed it over.

Frank saw that it was the copy and the artwork for an advertisement. In it, a cartoon Nobby Debiere stood at a draughtsman's table on which was spread out some sort of drawing. Around his cartoon feet lay partially unrolled scrolls on which other drawings appeared. The copy introduced his new enterprise as Bertrand Debiere's Repairs, Refurbishments, and Renovations and the address of the establishment was right there on Fort Road.

“I've had to let my secretary go, of course,” Nobby said with a forced cheer that was chilling to hear. “So she's out of work as well, which I'm sure would have delighted Guy no end had he only lived to see it happen.”

“Nobby . . .”

“And I'll be working from home, as you see, which is excellent, of course, since Caroline might be spending most of her time in town. I burned my bridges with the firm when I resigned, but no doubt in time I'll be able to get taken on by another if I haven't been blackballed altogether. Yes. It's wonderful, isn't it, to see how everything's turning out?” He took the advert from Frank's hand and shoved it, crumpled, beneath the telephone directory.

“I'm sorry,” Frank said. “The way it all turned out . . .”

“It's for the best, no doubt,” Nobby said. “For someone.”

Chapter 27

S
T.
J
AMES FOUND
R
UTH
Brouard in her conservatory. It was larger than it had appeared when he'd first seen it on the day of the funeral, and the air was humid and warm. As a result, the glass of the conservatory dripped condensation. Water from the windows and from an irrigation system made a constant pattern of splatters as drops fell upon the broad leaves of tropical plants and upon the brick path that wound among them.

Ruth Brouard was in the centre of the glass house, where the bricks widened out to form a circular seating area large enough to accommodate a chaise longue, one white wicker chair, a similar table, and a small pond in which lily pads floated. She was on the couch with her legs resting on a tapestry cushion. A tray of tea sat on the table next to her. A photograph album lay open upon her lap.

Ruth said to him, “Forgive the heat,” with a nod to the electric fire that was set up on the bricks, adding to the conservatory's warmth. “I find it a comfort. It actually doesn't do much to alter the course of things, but it feels like it does.” Her glance went to the painting he held loosely rolled, but she said nothing about it. Instead, she invited him to pull a chair near so that she could show him “who we were.”

The album, he saw, served as a document of the Brouards' years in care in England. In it, pictures depicted a boy and girl in wartime and in postwar London, always together, always staring seriously into the camera's lens. They grew older but their solemn expressions barely altered, posing in front of this door, or that gate, in this garden, before that fireplace.

“He never forgot me,” Ruth Brouard said as she turned the pages. “We weren't ever with the same family together and I was terrified every time he left: that he wouldn't return, that something might happen to him and I wouldn't be told. He'd just stop appearing one day. But he said that couldn't happen and even if it did, I would know. I would sense it, he said. I would feel a shift in the universe, so
unless
I felt that, I wasn't to worry.” She closed the album and set it to one side. “I didn't feel it, though, did I? When he went to the bay, Mr. St. James, I didn't sense it at all.”

St. James handed her the painting. “But what good fortune to have found this,” she said quietly as she took it. “In a small measure, it brings my family back.” She laid the painting on top of the album and looked at him. “What else?” she asked.

He smiled. “You're certain you're not a witch, Miss Brouard?”

“Perfectly,” she replied. “You do need something more from me, don't you?”

He admitted that he did. It was clear to him from her words and her actions that she had no idea of the value of the painting that her brother had managed to find for her. He didn't do anything to change that for the moment. Somehow, he knew its importance to her wouldn't be altered by learning it was the work of a master.

He said, “You may be right about your brother having spent most of his money to locate this. But I'd like to check through his accounts to be sure. You've records here, haven't you?”

She said she had, that Guy kept his accounts in his study. If Mr. St. James wanted to follow her, she'd be happy to show him where. They took the painting and the photo album with them, although it was fairly obvious that Ruth Brouard would have innocently left both in the conservatory till she returned to fetch them.

In her brother's study, she went round switching on lamps against the fading daylight. Surprisingly, from a cabinet next to his desk, she brought out a leather account book of the sort one would expect to find a Bob Cratchit using. She saw St. James's reaction to this, and she smiled.

“We ran the hotel business on computers,” she said. “But Guy was old-fashioned when it came to his personal finances.”

“It does seem . . .” St. James searched for a euphemism.

She supplied it. “Antiquated. Not like Guy at all. But he never caught on to computers. Push-button phones and microwave ovens were as far as he went before technology got away from him. But this is easy enough to follow, you'll see. Guy kept good records.”

As St. James sat at the desk and opened the ledger, Ruth brought out two more. Each of them, she explained, covered three years of her brother's expenses. These were not great, since the vast majority of the money was in her name, and it was from her own accounts that the estate had always been maintained.

In possession of the most recent ledger, St. James scanned it to see what the last three years had been like for Guy Brouard. It didn't take long to note a pattern in how he spent his money during that time, and that pattern was spelled A-n-a-ï-s A-b-b-o-t-t. Brouard had put out funds for his lover time and again, paying for everything from cosmetic surgery to property taxes to the mortgage on her house to holidays in Switzerland and Belize to her daughter's tuition at modeling school. Beyond that, he'd listed expenses for a Mercedes-Benz, for ten sculptures identified by artist and title, for a loan to Henry Moullin that he'd described as “furnace,” and for what appeared to be additional loans or gifts to his son. More recently, he'd apparently purchased a plot of land in St. Saviour, and he'd made payments to Bertrand Debiere as well as to De Carteret Cabinet Design, Tissier Electric, and Burton-Terry Plumbing.

From those, St. James concluded that Brouard had indeed intended to build the wartime museum initially, even to employ Debiere as its designer. But all of the payments that could have been even remotely related to producing a public building had ceased nine months ago. Then, in place of the careful accounting Brouard had been making, a list of numbers finished off the page and began another, ultimately being bracketed off together but without the single recipient being identified. Nonetheless, St. James had a fairly good idea of what that identification was: International Access. The figures corresponded to those the bank had provided Le Gallez. He noted that the final payment—the largest of all—had apparently been wired out of Guernsey on the very day that the River siblings had come to the island.

St. James asked Ruth Brouard for a calculator, which she handed over from a drawer in her brother's desk. He added up the list of those debits that had been applied to the unnamed recipient. They totaled over two million pounds.

“How much money did your brother begin with when you two settled here?” he asked Ruth. “You told me he put nearly everything into your name but he did hold something back for his own expenses, didn't he? Have you any idea how much?”

“Several million pounds,” she said. “He thought he could live quite well off the interest once the money was invested properly. Why? Is there something . . . ?”

She didn't add the word
wrong
since it was hardly necessary. From the very first, there had been little enough right about her brother's post-mortem finances.

The telephone ringing saved St. James from having to make an immediate reply. Ruth answered it from the extension on the desk and handed the receiver over to St. James.

“You've not endeared yourself to your hotel's receptionist,” Thomas Lynley said to him from London. “She's encouraging you to purchase a mobile. I'm passing along that message.”

“Received. Have you unearthed something?”

“I have indeed. It's an intriguing situation, although I don't expect you're going to be pleased to hear about it. It's going to throw a spanner.”

“Let me guess. There's no International Access in Bracknell.”

“Dead on. I rang an old mate of mine from Hendon. He works Vice in that area. He went round to the address that's listed as International Access and found a tanning salon. They'd been in that location for eight years—the tanning business being evidently quite good in Bracknell—”

“I'll note that for future reference.”

“—and they claimed to have not the slightest idea what my man was talking about. This prompted further discussion with the bank. I mentioned FSA to them and they became willing to part with some information about the International Access account. Apparently, money wired to that account from Guernsey was then wired onward some forty-eight hours later to a place called Jackson Heights in Queens, New York.”

“Jackson Heights? Is that—”

“The location, not the name on the account.”

“Did you get a name out of them?”

“Vallera and Son.”

“Some sort of business?”

“Apparently so. But we don't know what sort. Neither does the bank. Theirs is not to question why, et cetera. But it's looking like . . . well, you know what it's looking like: something to whet the American government's appetite for investigation.”

St. James studied the pattern on the rug beneath his feet. He became aware of Ruth Brouard next to him, and he looked up to see her watching him. Her expression was earnest but beyond that, he could read nothing from her face.

He rang off on Lynley's assurance that wheels were in motion to try to get someone from Vallera & Son on the telephone, although he cautioned St. James not to expect any cooperation from the other side of the Atlantic. “If this is what it appears to be, we may be at a dead end unless we involve a strong-arming agency over there. Internal Revenue. FBI. New York City Police.”

“
That
should do it,” St. James commented acerbically.

Lynley chuckled. “I'll be in touch.” Then he was gone.

When he'd replaced the receiver, St. James took a moment to consider everything that Lynley's information implied. He set it next to everything else he knew, and he didn't much like the result he came up with.

“What is it?” Ruth Brouard finally asked him.

He stirred himself. “I'm wondering if you still have the package that the museum plans came in, Miss Brouard.”

 

At first, Deborah St. James didn't see her husband when she came through the shrubbery. It was dusk and she was thinking about what she'd seen inside the prehistoric mound that Paul Fielder had taken her to. More than that, she was thinking what it meant that the boy had known the combination to the lock and had been so determined to keep that combination shielded from her view.

So she didn't see Simon until she was nearly upon him. He was engaged with a rake on the far side of the three outbuildings closest to the manor house. He was going through the estate's rubbish, having apparently upended four bins.

He stopped when she called his name. To her question, “Career change to Bennie the Binman?” he smiled and said, “It's a thought, although I'd confine myself to the rubbish of pop stars and politicians. What have you discovered?”

“All you need to know and more.”

“Paul spoke to you about the painting? Well done, my love.”

“I'm not sure Paul ever actually speaks,” she admitted. “But he took me to the place where he'd found it, although I thought he meant to lock me inside at first.” She went on to explain the location and nature of the mound Paul had taken her to, including the information about the combination lock and the contents of the two stone chambers. She concluded with “The condoms . . . the camp bed . . . It was obvious what Guy Brouard used it for, Simon. Although, to be honest, I don't quite understand why he just didn't have his flings in the house.”

“His sister was there most of the time,” St. James reminded her. “And as the flings involved a teenager . . .”

“In the plural, if Paul Fielder was one of them. I suppose that's it. It's all so unsavoury, isn't it?” She glanced back towards the shrubbery, the lawn, the trail through the woods. “Well, believe me, they were out of sight there. You'd have to know exactly where the dolmen is on the property to be able to find it.”

“Did he show you where in the dolmen?”

“Where he'd found the painting?” When Simon nodded, Deborah explained.

Her husband listened, his arm balancing his weight against the rake like a resting farmhand. When she'd completed her description of the altar stone and the crevice behind it and he'd clarified that the crevice was indeed in the floor itself, he shook his head. “That can't be right, Deborah. The painting's worth a fortune.” He told her everything he'd learned from Kevin Duffy. He ended by saying, “And Brouard would have known it.”

“He would have known it was a de Hooch? But how? If the painting was in his family for generations, if it had been handed down from father to son as a family heirloom . . . How would he have known? Would
you
have known?”

“Never. But if nothing else, he would have known what he spent to get the painting back, which was something in the vicinity of two million pounds. I can't believe after having gone to that expense and to whatever trouble it entailed to find the canvas that he would have deposited it even for five minutes inside a dolmen.”

“But if it was locked . . . ?”

“That's not the point, my love. We're talking about a seventeenth-century painting. He wasn't going to put it in a hiding place where either the cold or the damp could have harmed it.”

“So you think Paul's lying?”

“I'm not saying that. I'm just saying it's unlikely that Brouard put the painting in a prehistoric chamber. If he wanted to hide it—in anticipation of his sister's birthday, as she claims, or for any other reason—there are dozens of places inside his own house where he could have stowed it with far less danger of its being damaged.”

“Then someone else . . . ?” Deborah said.

“I'm afraid that's the only thing making any sense.” He went back to work with the rake.

“What are you looking for, then?” She heard the trepidation in her voice, and she knew he heard it as well, because when he looked at her, his eyes had grown darker, the way they always did when he was worried.

He said, “The way it came to Guernsey.”

He turned back to the rubbish and continued to spread it out till he'd found what he was apparently looking for. It was a tube some thirty-six inches in length with an eight-inch diameter. At both ends its circumference was ringed by a serious-looking metal washer whose sides lapped down to fasten snugly and immovably against the tube itself.