A Place of Hiding (18 page)

“What sort of wrap?”

“Black blanket affair. One button at the neck, no sleeves.”

“A cloak?”

“And his hair was on it, just where you'd expect to find it if you had to lock your arm round him to hold him still. Silly cow hadn't thought to use a clothes brush on it.”

St. James said, “The means of the killing . . . It's a bit unusual, wouldn't you say? The stone? His choking? If he didn't swallow it himself by accident—”

Le Gallez said, “Not bloody likely.”

“—then someone would have had to thrust it down his throat. But how? When? In the midst of a struggle? Were there signs of a struggle? On the beach? On his body? On the River woman when you brought her in?”

He shook his head. “No struggle. But there wouldn't be the need for one. That's why we were looking for a woman from the first.” He went to one of the tables and fetched a plastic container whose contents he dumped into his palm. He fingered through them, said, “Ah. This'll do,” and produced a half-open roll of Polos. He thumbed one out, held it up for St. James to see, and said, “Stone in question's just a bit larger than this. Hole in the centre to go on a key ring. Some carving round the sides as well. Now watch.” He popped the Polo into his mouth, tongued it into his cheek, and said, “You c'n pass more than germs when you French it, mate.”

St. James understood but was nonetheless doubtful. There was vast improbability implied in the investigator's theory as far as he was concerned. He said, “But she would have had to do more than just pass the stone into his mouth. Yes. I do see it's possible she could have got it onto his tongue if she was kissing him, but surely not down his throat. How would she have managed that?”

“Surprise,” Le Gallez countered. “She catches him off guard when the stone goes into his mouth. One hand on the back of his neck while they're lip-locked and he's in the right position. The other on his cheek and in the moment he pulls away from her because she's passed him the stone, she's caught him in the crook of her arm, bent him back, and her hand's down his throat. So's the stone, for that matter. And he's done for.”

“You don't mind my saying, that's a bit unlikely,” St. James said. “Your prosecutors can't possibly hope to convince . . . D'you have juries here?”

“Doesn't matter. The stone's not intended to convince a soul,” Le Gallez said. “It's just a theory. May not even come up in court.”

“Why not?”

Le Gallez smiled thinly. “Because we've got a witness, Mr. St. James,” he said. “And a witness is worth a hundred experts and their thousand pretty theories, if you know what I mean.”

 

At the prison where China was being held on remand, Deborah and Cherokee learned that events had moved forward swiftly in the twenty-four hours since he'd left the island to find help in London. China's advocate had managed to get her released on bail and had set her up elsewhere. Prison administration knew where, naturally, but they weren't forthcoming with the information.

Deborah and Cherokee thus retraced their route from the States Prison towards St. Peter Port, and when they found a phone box where Vale Road opened into the wide vista of
Belle Greve
Bay, Cherokee leaped out of the car to ring the advocate. Deborah watched through the phone box glass and could see that China's brother was understandably agitated, rapping his fist against the glass as he spoke. Not adept at lip reading, Deborah could still discern the “Hey, man,
you
listen,” when Cherokee said it. Their conversation lasted three or four minutes, not enough time to reassure Cherokee about anything but just enough to discover where his sister had been delivered.

“He's got her in some apartment back in St. Peter Port,” Cherokee reported as he climbed back into the car and jerked it into gear. “One of those places people rent out in the summer. ‘Only too happy to have her there' was how he put it. Whatever that's supposed to mean.”

“A holiday flat,” Deborah said. “It would just stand empty till spring, probably.”

“Whatever,” he said. “He might have gotten a message to me or something. I'm involved here, you know. I asked him why he didn't let me know he was getting her out and he said . . . You know what he said? ‘Miss River didn't mention telling anyone her whereabouts.' Like she
wants
to be in hiding.”

They wound back to St. Peter Port where it was no easy feat to find the holiday flats where China had been installed, despite being in possession of the address. The town was a warren of one-way streets: narrow tracks that climbed the hillside from the harbour and swooped through a town that had existed long before cars had even been imagined. Deborah and Cherokee made several passes by Georgian town homes and through Victorian terraces before they finally stumbled upon the Queen Margaret Apartments on the corner of Saumarez and Clifton Streets, situated at the crest of the latter. It was a spot that would have afforded a holiday maker the sort of views one pays highly to enjoy during spring and summer: The port spread out below, Castle Cornet stood clearly visible on its spit of land where it once protected the town from invasion, and on a day without the lowering clouds of December, the coast of France would appear to hover on the far horizon.

On this day, however, in the early dusk, the Channel was an ashen mass of liquid landscape. Lights shone on a harbour that was empty of pleasure craft, and in the distance the castle appeared as a series of crosshatched children's blocks, held haphazardly on a parent's palm.

Their challenge at the Queen Margaret Apartments was to find someone who could point them in the direction of China's flat. They finally located an unshaven and odoriferous man in a bed-sitting room at the back of the otherwise deserted property. He appeared to act the part of concierge when he wasn't doing what he was currently doing, which seemed to be taking both sides in a board game that involved depositing shiny black stones into cuplike depressions in a narrow wooden tray.

He said, “Hang on,” when Cherokee and Deborah turned up in his single room. “I just need to . . . Damn. He's got me again.”

He
appeared to be his opponent which was himself, playing from the other side of the board. He cleared this side of its stones in one inexplicable move, whereupon he said, “What c'n I do for you?”

When they told him they'd come to see his tenant-in-the-singular—because it was certainly clear that no one else was occupying any of the Queen Margaret Apartments at this time of year—he feigned ignorance about the whole matter. Only when Cherokee told him to phone China's advocate did he give the slightest hint that the woman charged with murder was staying somewhere in the building. And then all he did was lumber to the phone and punch in a few numbers. When the party answered at the other end, he said, “Someone saying he's the brother . . . ?” And with a glance at Deborah, “Got a red-head with him.” He listened for five seconds. He said, “Right, then,” and parted with the information. They would find the person they were looking for, he told them, in Flat B on the east side of the building.

It was no far distance. China met them at the door. She said only, “You came,” and she walked directly into Deborah's embrace.

Deborah held her firmly. “Of course I came,” she said. “I only wish I'd known from the first that you were in Europe at all. Why didn't you let me know you were coming? Why didn't you phone? Oh, it's so
good
to see you.” She blinked against the sting behind her eyelids, surprised by the onslaught of feeling that told her how much she had missed her friend in the years during which they'd lost contact with each other.

“I'm sorry it has to be like this.” China gave Deborah a fleeting smile. She was far thinner than Deborah remembered her, and although her fine sandy hair was fashionably cut, it fell round a face that looked like a waif's. She was dressed in clothes that would have sent her vegan mother into a seizure. They were mostly black leather: trousers, waistcoat, and ankle boots. The colour heightened the pallor of her skin.

“Simon's come as well,” Deborah said. “We're going to sort this out. You're not to worry.”

China glanced at her brother, who'd shut the door behind them. He'd gone to the alcove that served as the flat's kitchen, where he stood shifting from foot to foot and looking like the sort of male who wishes to be in another universe when females are exhibiting emotion. She said to him, “I didn't intend you to bring them back with you. Just to get their advice if you needed it. But . . . I'm glad you did, Cherokee. Thanks.”

Cherokee nodded. He said, “You two need . . . ? I mean, I could go for a walk or something . . . ? You got food here? You know, here's what: I'll go find a store.” He took himself out of the flat without waiting for a response from his sister.

“Typical man,” China said when he was gone. “Can't deal with tears.”

“And we haven't even
got
to them yet.”

China chuckled, a sound which lightened Deborah's heart. She couldn't imagine what it would be like, trapped in a country that was not your own and charged with murder. So if she could help her friend not think about the jeopardy she faced, she wanted to do it. But she also wanted to reassure China: about the kinship she still felt for her.

So she said, “I've missed you. I should have written more.”

“You should have written period,” China replied. “I've missed you, too.” She took Deborah into the kitchen alcove. “I'm making us some tea. I can't believe how happy I am to see you.”

Deborah said, “No. Let me make it, China. You're not going to start us off by taking care of me. I'm reversing our roles and you're going to let me.” She marched the other woman over to a table that stood beneath an east-facing window. A legal pad and a pen lay upon this. The top sheet of the pad bore large block letters of dates and paragraphs beneath them rendered in China's familiar looped scrawl.

China said, “That was a bad time for you back then. It meant a lot to me to do what I could.”

“I was quite a pathetic blob,” Deborah said. “I don't know how you were able to cope with me.”

“You were nowhere near home and in big trouble and trying to figure out what to do. I was your friend. I didn't need to cope with you one way or another. I just needed to care. Which was pretty damn easy, to tell you the truth.”

Deborah felt a wash of warmth across her skin, a reaction that she knew had two distinct sources. It originated in part from the pleasure of female-to-female friendship. But it also had a root in a period of her past that was painful to contemplate. China River had been part of that period, nursing Deborah through it in the most literal sense.

Deborah said, “I am
so . . .
What word can I use? Happy to see you? But Lord, that sounds so egocentric, doesn't it? You're in trouble and I'm happy to be here? What a selfish little cod that makes me.”

“I don't know about that.” China sounded reflective before her contemplative remark segued into a smile. “I mean the real question is: Can a cod
be
selfish?”

“Oh, you know cod,” Deborah replied. “A hook in its mouth and all of a sudden it's me, me, me.”

They laughed together. Deborah went into the little kitchen. She filled the kettle and plugged it in. She found mugs, tea, sugar, and milk. One of the two cupboards even held a wrapped package of something identified as Guernsey Gâche. Deborah peeled back the covering to find a brick-shaped pastry that appeared to be a cross between raisin bread and fruit cake. It would do.

China said nothing more until Deborah had assembled everything on the table. Then it was only a murmured “I've missed you, too” that Deborah might not have heard had she not been listening earnestly for it.

She squeezed her friend's shoulder. She carried out the rituals of pouring and doctoring their tea. She knew the ceremony likely wouldn't have the power to comfort her friend for long, but there was something in the act of holding a mug of tea, of curving one's palm round the sides of the cup and allowing the heat to penetrate one's hand, that had always possessed a form of magic for Deborah, as if the waters of Lethe and not leaves from an Asian plant had created what steamed from within.

China seemed to know what Deborah intended because she took up her mug and said, “The English and their tea.”

“We drink coffee as well.”

“Not at a time like this, you don't.” China held the mug as Deborah intended her to hold it, palm curved comfortingly round its side. She looked out of the window, where the lights of the town had begun to form a winking palette of yellow on charcoal as the last of daylight deferred to night. “I can't get used to how early it gets dark over here.”

“It's the time of year.”

“I'm so used to the sun.” China sipped the tea and set the mug on the table. With a fork, she picked at a piece of the Guernsey Gâche loaf but she didn't eat. Instead, she said, “I guess I might have to get used to it, though. Lack of sunlight. Being permanently indoors.”

“That's not going to happen.”

“I didn't do it.” China raised her head and looked at Deborah directly. “I didn't kill that man, Deborah.”

Deborah felt her insides quiver at the thought that China might believe that she needed convincing of this fact. “My God, of course you didn't. I haven't come here to play see-for-myself. Neither has Simon.”

“But they have evidence, see?” China said. “My hair. My shoes. Footprints. I feel like I'm in one of those dreams where you try to shout but no one can hear you because you're not really shouting at all because you
can't
shout because you're in a dream. It's a round-and-round thing. D'you know what I mean?”

“I wish I could drag you out of this. I would if I could.”

“It was on his clothes,” China said. “The hair.
My
hair. On his clothes when they found him. And I don't know how it got there. I've thought back, but I can't explain it.” She gestured to the legal pad. “I've written down every day as best I can remember it. Did he hug me sometime? But why would he hug me, and if he did, why don't I remember? The lawyer wants me to say that there was something between us. Not sex, he says. Don't go that far. But the pursuit, he says. The hope in
his
mind of sex. Stuff between us that might have led to sex. Touching. That kind of thing. But there wasn't and I can't say there was. I mean, it's not like the lying bothers me or anything. Believe me, I'd lie my head off if it would do any good. But who the hell's going to support the story? People saw me with him and he never even put a finger on me. Oh, maybe on my arm or something but that was all. So if I go on the stand and say my hair was on him because he—what? hugged me? kissed me? petted me? what?—it's only my word against everyone else's who'll stand up and say he never looked at me at all. We could counter by putting Cherokee on the stand, but no way am I asking my brother to lie.”