A Place of Hiding (15 page)

The car in question that Paul went to see had met its end by the last method. There was little left of it but twisted metal and one blackened seat, something of a disappointment after the long bike ride in the wind. Had there been something more, Paul might have made the perilous descent to investigate. As there wasn't, he explored the area of the watch tower instead.

A rock fall had occurred, he saw, recent by the look of the stones and the ravaged nature of the ground from which they had become dislodged. The newly bared stones were devoid of thrift and sea campion that grew in tufts along the cliffs. And the boulders that had toppled towards the water below had no guano on them, although their older companion chunks of Icart gneiss were streaked with it.

This was a most dangerous place to be, and as an islander born and bred, Paul knew it. But he'd learned from Mr. Guy that whenever the land opened itself to man, there were secrets that often came into the daylight. For that reason, he scouted round.

He left Taboo on the cliff top and picked his way across the face of the gash left by the rock fall. He was careful to keep a firm hold on a fixed piece of granite whenever he moved his feet, and in this manner he slowly traversed the façade of the cliff, working his way downwards like a crab scouting for a crevice in which to hide.

It was at the midway point that he found it, so encrusted with half a century of soil, dried mud, and pebbles that at first he thought it was nothing more than an elliptical stone. But when his foot dislodged it, he saw the glint of what looked like metal marking a curve that emerged from within the object itself. So he picked it up.

He couldn't examine it there, midway down the cliff, so he carried it tucked between his chin and his chest back to the top. There, with Taboo snuffling at the object eagerly, he used a pocket knife and then his fingers to reveal what the earth had kept secret for so many years.

Who knew how it had come to be there? The Nazis hadn't bothered to clean up their mess once they realised the war was lost and the invasion of England was never going to happen. They merely surrendered, and like the defeated invaders who had occupied the island in times before them, they left behind whatever they found too inconvenient to carry.

So near to a watch tower once occupied by soldiers, it was no wonder that their detritus continued to be unearthed. While this would have been no personal possession of anyone, it certainly would have been something the Nazis might have found useful had the Allies, guerrillas, or Resistance fighters successfully made a landing beneath them.

Now, in the semi-dark of the special place he and Mr. Guy had shared, Paul reached for his rucksack. He'd intended to hand his find over to Mr. Ouseley at
Moulin des Niaux,
his first solo, pride-filled contribution. But he couldn't do that now—not after this morning—so he would keep it here where it would be safe.

Taboo raised his head and watched as Paul unfastened the rucksack's buckles. He reached inside and brought out the old towel in which he'd wrapped his treasure. In the way of all seekers of history's nuggets, he unfolded the towel from round his find to give it a final and rapt inspection before placing it for safekeeping within a place of security.

The hand grenade probably wasn't actually dangerous at all, Paul thought. The weather would have battered it for years before it became buried in the earth and the pin that might have once detonated the explosive within it was most likely rusted immovably in place. But still, it wasn't wise to carry it round in his rucksack. He didn't need Mr. Guy or anyone else to tell him that prudence suggested he put it somewhere that no one would come across it. Just till he decided what else he could do with it.

Within the secondary chamber of the dolmen, where he and Taboo now hid, was the cache. This, too, Mr. Guy had shown him: a natural fissure between two of the stones that comprised the wall of the dolmen. That wouldn't have been here originally, Mr. Guy had said. But time, weather, the movement of the earth . . . Nothing manmade withstands nature completely.

The cache was just to one side of the camp bed and to the uninitiated it appeared to be a simple gap in the stones and nothing more. But sliding a hand deep inside revealed a second, wider gap
behind
the stone that was nearest the camp bed, and this was the cache where secrets and treasures too precious for common view could be kept.

If I show you this, it says something, Paul. Something larger than words. Something bigger than thoughts.

Paul reckoned there was enough room for the grenade within the cache. He'd placed his hand in there before, guided by Mr. Guy's own hand with Mr. Guy's reassuring words spoken softly into his ear: There's nothing in there at the moment, I wouldn't play a nasty trick on you, Prince. Thus he knew there was space for one fist clasped over another, and that was more than enough space for a grenade to occupy. And the depth of the cache was more than sufficient. For Paul hadn't been able to feel the end of it no matter how far he'd managed to stretch his arm.

He moved the camp bed to one side and he set the wooden box with its candle in the middle of the alcove floor. Taboo whined at this alteration in his environment, but Paul patted his head and fondly touched the tip of his nose. Nothing to worry about, his gesture told the dog. We're safe in this place. No one knows about it now but you and me.

Carefully clutching the grenade, he lay on the cold stone floor. He squirreled his arm into the narrow fissure. It widened six or so inches from the opening, and even though he couldn't see far into the interior of the hiding spot, he knew where the second opening was by feel, so he anticipated no problem in depositing the hand grenade there.

But there
was
a problem. Not four inches inside the fissure was something else. He felt his knuckles press against it first, something firm and unmoving and entirely unexpected.

Paul gasped and withdrew his hand, but it was only a moment before he realised that
whatever
it was, it certainly wasn't alive, so there was no reason to be afraid of it. He set the grenade carefully on the camp bed, and he brought the candle closer to the opening of the fissure.

Problem was, he couldn't illuminate the fissure and see inside it at the same time. So he resumed his former position on his stomach and slid his hand, then his arm, back into the hiding place.

His fingers found it, something firm but giving. Not hard. Smooth. Shaped like a cylinder. He grasped it and began to pull it out.

This is a special place, a place of secrets, and it's our secret now. Yours and mine. Can you keep secrets, Paul?

He could. Oh, he could. He could
better
than could. Because as he pulled it towards him, Paul understood exactly what it was that Mr. Guy had hidden within the dolmen.

The island, after all, was a landscape of secrets and the dolmen itself was a secret place within that larger landscape of things buried, other things unspoken, and memories people wished to forget. It was no wonder to Paul that deep within the ages of an earth that could still yield medals, sabres, bullets, and other items more than half a century old lay buried somewhere something even more valuable, something from the time of the privateers or even further back, but something precious. And what he was pulling from the fissure was the key to finding that long-ago-buried something.

He'd found a final gift from Mr. Guy, who had already given him so very much.

 

“Énne rouelle dé faïtot,”
Ruth Brouard said in answer to Margaret Chamberlain's question. “It's used for barns, Margaret.”

Margaret thought this reply was deliberately obtuse, so typical of Ruth, whom she'd never particularly come to like despite having had to live with Guy's sister for the entirety of her marriage to the man. She'd clung too much to Guy, Ruth had, and too great a devotion between siblings was unseemly. It smacked of . . . Well, Margaret didn't even want to think of what it smacked of. Yes, she realised that these specific siblings—Jewish like herself but European Jewish during World War II, which gave them certain allowances for strange behaviour, she would grant them that—had lost every single relation to the unmitigated evil of the Nazis and thus had been forced to become everything to each other from early childhood. But the fact that Ruth had never developed a life of her own in all these years was not only questionable and pre-Victorian, it was something that made her an incomplete woman in Margaret's eyes, sort of a lesser creature who'd lived a half life, and that life in the shadows to boot.

Margaret decided patience would be in order. She said, “For barns? I don't quite understand, dear. The stone would have to be quite small, wouldn't it? To have gone into Guy's mouth?” She saw her sister-in-law flinch at the last question, as if talking about it awakened her darkest fantasies of how Guy had met his end: writhing on the beach, clawing uselessly at his throat. Well, it couldn't be helped. Margaret needed information and she meant to have it.

“What use would it have in a barn, Ruth?”

Ruth looked up from the needlework she'd been occupied with when Margaret had located her in the morning room. It was an enormous piece of canvas stretched on a wooden frame that was itself on a stand before which Ruth sat, an elfin figure in black trousers and an overlarge black cardigan that had probably once been Guy's. Her round-framed spectacles had slid down her nose, and she knuckled them back into place with one of her childlike hands.

“It's not used inside the barn,” she explained. “It's used on a ring with the keys to the barn. At least, that's what it once was used for. There are few enough barns on Guernsey now. It was for keeping the barn safe from witches' familiars. Protection, Margaret.”

“Ah. A charm, then.”

“Yes.”

“I see.” What Margaret thought was These ridiculous islanders. Charms for witches. Mumbo-jumbo for fairies. Ghosts on the cliff tops. Devils on the prowl. She'd never considered her former husband a man who'd fall for that sort of nonsense. “Did they show you the stone? Was it something you recognised? Did it belong to Guy? I ask only because it doesn't seem like him to carry round charms and that sort of thing. At least, it doesn't seem like the Guy I knew. Was he hoping for luck in some venture?”

With a woman
was what she didn't add, although both of them knew the phrase was there. Aside from business—at which Guy Brouard had excelled like Midas and needed no luck at all—the only other venture he had ever engaged in was the pursuit and conquest of the opposite sex, a fact that Margaret hadn't known until she'd found a pair of woman's knickers in her husband's briefcase, playfully tucked there by the Edinburgh flight attendant he'd been shagging on the side. Their marriage had ended the instant Margaret had found those knickers instead of the chequebook she'd been looking for. All that had remained for the next two years was her solicitor meeting with his solicitor to hammer out a deal that would finance the rest of her life.

“The only venture he was involved with recently was the wartime museum.” Ruth bent back over the frame that held her needlepoint and she expertly worked the needle in and out of the design she'd rendered there. “And he didn't carry a charm for that. He didn't really need to. It was going well enough, as far as I know.” She looked up again, her needle poised for another plunge. “Did he tell you about the museum, Margaret? Has Adrian told you?”

Margaret didn't want to get into Adrian with her sister-in-law or anyone else, so she said, “Yes. Yes. The museum. Of course. I knew about that.”

Ruth smiled, inwardly and fondly it seemed. “It made him terribly proud. To be able to do something like that for the island. Something lasting. Something fine and meaningful.”

Unlike his life, Margaret thought. She wasn't there to listen to encomia on the subject of Guy Brouard, Patron of Everything and Everyone. She was present only to ensure Guy Brouard had in death established himself additionally as Patron of His Only Son.

She said, “What will happen now? To his plans?”

“I suppose it all depends on the will,” Ruth replied. She sounded careful. Too careful, Margaret thought. “Guy's will, I mean. Well, of course, who else's? I haven't actually had a meeting with his advocate yet.”

“Why not, dearest?” Margaret asked.

“I suppose because talking about his will makes everything real. Permanent. I'm avoiding that.”

“Would you prefer I talk to his solicitor . . . his advocate, then? If there are arrangements to be made, I'm happy to make them for you, dear.”

“Thank you, Margaret. It's good of you to offer, but I must handle it myself. I must . . . and I will. Soon. When . . . when it feels right to do so.”

“Yes,” Margaret murmured. “Of course.” She watched her sister-in-law scoot her needle in and out of the canvas and fix it into place, indicating the conclusion of her work for the moment. She tried to sound like the incarnation of empathy, but inside she was champing at the bit to know exactly how her former husband had distributed his immense fortune. Specifically, she wanted to learn the manner in which he'd remembered Adrian. Because although while living he'd refused their son the money he needed for his new business, Guy's death surely had to benefit Adrian in ways that his life had not. And
that
would bring Carmel Fitzgerald and Adrian back together again, wouldn't it? Which would see Adrian married at last: a normal man leading a normal life with no more peculiar little incidents to worry about.

Ruth had gone to a small drop-front desk, where she'd picked up a delicate shadowbox frame. In this was encased one half of a locket, which she gazed at longingly. It was, Margaret saw, that tedious parting gift from
Maman,
handed over at the boat dock.
Je vais conserver l'autre moitié, mes chéris. Nous le reconstituerons lorsque nous nous retrouverons.

Yes, yes, Margaret wanted to say. I know you bloody miss her, but we've business to conduct.