A Place of Hiding (32 page)

Margaret muttered her thanks to the driving deity that had seen her to this point and turned into a lane that was indistinguishable from any of the others. Had she encountered another car, one of them would have had to reverse back to the lane's starting point, but her luck held and along the route that passed a whitewashed farmhouse and two flesh-coloured stone cottages, she saw no other vehicle.

What she did see at a dogleg was the Shell House. As Adrian had suggested, only a blind man could have missed it. The building itself was of stucco painted yellow. The shells from which it took its name served as decoration along the drive, topping the boundary wall, and within the large front garden.

It was the most tasteless display Margaret could ever recall seeing, something that looked assembled by a madman. Conch shells, ormer shells, scallop shells, and the occasional abalone shell formed borders, first. They stood alongside flowerbeds in which more shells—glued onto twigs and branches and flexible metal—comprised the flowers. In the middle of the lawn a shallow shell-embedded pond raised its shell-embedded sides and provided an environment for—mercifully—non-shelled goldfish. But all round this pond stood shell-encrusted pedestals on which shell-formed idols posed for purposes of adoration. Two full-sized shell lawn tables and their appropriate shell chairs each held tea services of shell and shell food on their sandwich plates. And along the front wall ran a miniature firestation, a school, a barn, and a church, all of them glinting white from the molluscs that had given their lives to fashion them. It was, Margaret thought as she climbed out of the Range Rover, enough to put one off bouillabaisse forever.

She shuddered at such a monument to vulgarity. It brought back too many unpleasant memories: childhood summer holidays on the coast of Essex, all those aitches dropped, all those greasy chips consumed, all that doughy flesh so hideously reddened in order to proclaim to one and all that enough money had been saved for a holiday at the sea.

Margaret shoved aside the thought of it, the remembered sight of her parents on the steps of a hired beach hut, arms slung round each other, bottled beer in their hands. Their sloppy kisses and then her mother's giggles and what followed the giggles.

Enough, Margaret thought. She advanced determinedly up the drive. She called out a confident hello, then a second and a third. No one came out of the house. There were gardening tools arrayed on the front walk, however, although God only knew to what purpose anyone intended to put them in this environment. Nonetheless, they suggested someone was at home and at work in the garden, so she approached the front door. As she did so, a man came round the side of the house, carrying a shovel. He was grubbily clad in blue jeans so dirty that they might have stood up on their own had he not been wearing them. Despite the cold, no jacket protected him, just a faded blue work shirt on which someone had embroidered
Moullin Glass
in red. The theme of climatic indifference was one that the man carried down to his feet, on which he wore sandals only, although he also had on socks. These, however, displayed more than one hole and his right big toe protruded from one of them.

He saw Margaret and stopped, saying nothing. She was surprised to realise that she recognised him: the overnourished Heathcliff she'd seen at Guy's funeral reception. Close up, she saw that the darkness of his skin was due to his face being weathered to the condition of unsoaped leather. His eyes were hostile observing her, and his hands were covered with myriad healed and unhealed cuts. Margaret might have been intimidated by the level of animosity coming from him, but she already felt her own animosity, and even if that had not been the case, she was not a woman who was easily alarmed.

“I'm looking for Cynthia Moullin,” she told the man as pleasantly as she could. “Can you tell me where I might find her, please?”

“Why?” He carried the shovel onto the lawn, where he began digging round the base of one of the trees.

Margaret bristled. She was used to people hearing her voice—God knew she'd spent years enough developing it—and jumping to at once. She said, “I believe it's either yes or no. You can or you can't help me find her. Have you a problem understanding me?”

“I've a problem caring one way or t'other.” His accent was so thick with what Margaret assumed was island patois that he sounded like someone from a costume drama.

She said, “I need to speak to her. It's essential I speak to her. I've been told by my son that she lives in this place”—she tried to make
this place
not sound like
this rubbish tip,
but she decided she could be forgiven if she failed—“but if he's wrong, I'd appreciate your telling me. And then I'll be happy to get out of your hair.” Not, Margaret thought, that she wanted to be
in
his hair which, albeit thick, looked unwashed and lousy.

He said, “Your son? Who mightee be?”

“Adrian Brouard. Guy Brouard was his father. I expect you know who he is, don't you? Guy Brouard? I saw you at his funeral reception.”

These last remarks seemed to get his attention, for he looked up from his shoveling and inspected Margaret head to toe, after which he silently crossed the lawn to the porch, where he took up a bucket. This was filled with some sort of pellets which he carried to the tree and poured liberally into the trench he'd dug round its trunk. He set down the bucket and moved to the next tree, where he began more digging.

“See here,” Margaret said, “I'm looking for Cynthia Moullin. I'd like to speak to her at once, so if you know where I can find her . . . She does live here, doesn't she? This is the Shell House?” Which was, Margaret thought, the most ridiculous question she could have asked. If this wasn't the Shell House, there was a bigger nightmare waiting for her somewhere, and she found that difficult to get her mind round.

“So you're th' first,” the man said with a nod. “Always wondered wha' th' first 'as like. Says a lot 'bout a man, his first. Y'know? Tells you why he went the way he went in the afters.”

Margaret strained to decipher his words through his accent. She caught every fourth or fifth utterance, and from that she was able to reach the conclusion that the creature was referring in some way that was less than flattering to her sexual partnership with Guy. This wasn't
about
to do. She was meant to have control over the conversation. Men always reduced things to poke-and-thrust if they could. They thought it was an efficacious manoeuvre guaranteed to fluster any woman with whom they spoke. But Margaret Chamberlain was not any woman. And she was gathering her wits to make this clear to the man when a mobile rang and he was forced to fish it out of his pocket, flip it open, and reveal himself as a fraud.

He said, “Henry Moullin,” into the phone and listened for nearly a minute. And then in a voice perfectly different from that with which he'd been entertaining Margaret, he said, “I'd first have to do the measurements on the site, Madam. There's no real way I can tell you how long that sort of project would take until I see what I'd be working with.” He listened again and in short order dug a black diary out of another pocket. Into this, he scheduled some sort of appointment with someone he called, “Certainly. Happy to do it, Mrs. Felix.” He returned the phone to his pocket and looked at Margaret quite as if he hadn't been trying to bamboozle her into believing he was someone shearing sheep outside of Casterbridge.

“Ah,” Margaret said with grim pleasantry, “now that we have that out of the way, perhaps you'll answer the question and tell me where I can find Cynthia Moullin. I take it you must be her father?”

He was as unrepentant as he was unembarrassed. He said, “Cyn's not here, Mrs. Brouard.”

“Chamberlain,” Margaret corrected him. “Where is she? It's essential I speak to her at once.”

“Not possible,” he said. “She's gone to Alderney. Helping out her gran.”

“And this gran has no phone?”

“When it's working, she has one.”

“I see. Well, perhaps that's just as well, Mr. Moullin. You and I can sort things out ourselves and she won't have to know a thing about it. Nor will she have to be disappointed.”

Moullin removed from his pocket a tube of some sort of ointment, which he squeezed into his palm. He eyed her as he rubbed the mixture into the many cuts on his hands, as if he had not the slightest care that he was also rubbing garden soil into them. “You'd best tell me what it is,” he said, and there was a masculine directness to his manner that was simultaneously disconcerting and somewhat arousing. Margaret had an instant's bizarre vision of herself as woman-to-his-man, sheer animal stuff that she wouldn't have thought possible to entertain. He took a step in her direction and she took a step backwards in reflex. His lips moved in what might have been amusement. A frisson shot through her. She felt like a character in a bad romance novel, one moment away from ravishment.

Which was just enough to infuriate her, enabling her to wrest the upper hand back. “This is something that you and I can probably resolve ourselves, Mr. Moullin. I can't think you wish to be drawn into a protracted legal battle. Am I right?”

“Legal battle over what?”

“The terms of my former husband's will.”

A glint in his eye indicated heightened interest. Margaret saw this and realised compromise was something that might work: settling on a lesser sum to avoid having to spend it all on solicitors—or whatever they called them over here—who would hash things out in court for years as if members of the Jarndyce clan had come calling.

She said, “I'm not going to lie to you, Mr. Moullin. Your daughter's been left a considerable fortune in my former husband's will. My son—Guy's oldest child and his only male heir, as you may know—has been left far less. I'm sure you'll agree there's a gross inequity here. So I'd like to set it right without legal recourse.”

Margaret hadn't thought in advance about what the man's reaction might be to learning about his daughter's inheritance. In fact, she hadn't much cared what his reaction would be. All she'd thought of was sorting this situation out to Adrian's benefit in any way she could. A person of reason, she'd decided, would see things her way when she laid them out in terms that were tinged with allusions to future litigation.

Henry Moullin said nothing at first. He turned from her. He went back to his digging, but his breathing had altered. It was harsh and his pace was faster than it had been before. He jumped on the shovel and drove it into the ground. Once, twice, three times. As he did so, the back of his neck changed from unsoaped leather to so deep a red that Margaret feared he might have a seizure on the spot. Then he said, “My daughter, God
damn
it,” and stopped his digging. He seized the bucket of pellets. He hurled them into the second trench with no regard for how they spilled up and over its sides. He said, “Does he think he can . . . Not for a single God damn
moment
. . .” And before Margaret could say another word, before she could sympathise, however factitiously, with his obvious distress over Guy's intrusion into his ability to support his own child, Henry Moullin grabbed up the shovel again. This time, though, he swung round on her. He raised it and advanced.

Margaret cried out, cringing, hating herself for cringing, hating him for making her cringe, and looking for a quick escape. But her only option for flight was to leap over the shell firestation, the shell chaise longue, the shell tea table, or—like a long-jumper—the shell-crusted pond. As she started to head for the chaise longue, however, Henry Moullin shoved past her and went after the shell firestation. He struck at it blindly, “God
damn.
” Fragments flew everywhere. He reduced it to rubble in three brutal blows. He went on to the barn and then to the school while Margaret watched, awestruck by the power of his rage.

He said nothing more. He flung himself from one fanciful shell creation to the next: the schoolhouse, the tea table, the chairs, the pond, the garden of artificial shell flowers. Nothing seemed to spend him. He didn't stop till he'd worked all the way back to the path that led from the drive to the front door. And there he finally threw his shovel at the yellow house itself. It narrowly missed one of the grated front windows. It fell with a clatter onto the walk.

The man himself stood panting. Some of the cuts on his hands had reopened. Fresh cuts had been made by fragments of the shells and the concrete that had held the shells together. His filthy jeans were white with dust, and when he wiped the backs of his hands along them, blood stained that white in feathery streaks.

Margaret said, “Don't!” without even thinking. “Don't let him do this to you, Henry Moullin.”

He stared at her, breathing hard, blinking as if this would somehow clear his head. All aggression seeped out of him. He looked round at the devastation he'd wrought in the front of his house and he said, “Bastard had two already.”

JoAnna's girls, Margaret thought. Guy had his daughters. He'd had and lost the opportunity for fatherhood given to him. But he hadn't been a man to take such a loss lightly, so he'd replaced all of his abandoned children with others, others much more likely to turn a blind eye to the faults so apparent to his own flesh and blood. For they were poor, and he was rich. Money bought love and devotion where it could.

Margaret said, “You need to see to your hands. You've cut them. They're bleeding. No, don't wipe them—”

But he did so anyway, adding more streaks onto the dust and grime on his jeans and, when that didn't suffice, wiping them on his dust-caked work shirt as well. He said, “We don't want his damn money. We don't need it. You can set fire to it in Trinity Square for all it means to us.”

Margaret thought he might have said that at first and saved them both from a frightening scene, not to mention saved the front garden as well. She said, “I'm very happy to hear that, Mr. Moullin. It's only fair to Adrian—”