A Place of Hiding (4 page)

Yet the stone—fairy wheel or not—had not been nearly enough to protect him in the single way he'd thought he was protected. The unexpected still occurred in everyone's life, so he could not rightfully call himself surprised when the unexpected had occurred in his.

He wrapped the stone back in its linen and returned it to his pocket. Shrugging out of his jacket, he removed his knitted cap and stretched the goggles round his head. He picked his way across the narrow beach and without hesitation, he entered the water.

It came at him like a knife's blade. In the midst of summer the Channel was no tropical bath. In the tenebrous morning of fast-approaching winter, it felt glacial, dangerous, and forbidding.

But he didn't think of that. Instead, he moved resolutely forward and as soon as he had enough depth to make it safe to do so, he pushed off from the bottom and began to swim. He dodged patches of seaweed in the water, moving fast.

In this manner, he swam a hundred yards out, to the toad-shaped granite outcropping that marked the point where the bay met the English Channel. Here he stopped, right at the toad's eye, a creation of guano collected in a shallow recess of the stone. He turned back to the beach and began to tread water, the best way he knew to keep in shape for the coming ski season in Austria. As was his habit, he removed his goggles to clear his view for a few minutes. He idly inspected the cliffs in the distance and the heavy foliage that covered them. Through this means, his gaze traveled downward on an uneven, boulder-strewn journey to the beach.

He lost count of his kicks.

Someone was there. A figure, mostly in shadow but obviously watching him, stood on the beach. To one side of the granite slipway, it wore dark clothing with a flash of white at the neck, which was what must have caught his attention in the first place. As Guy squinted to bring the figure into better focus, it stepped away from the granite and moved across the beach.

There was no mistaking its destination. The figure glided over to his discarded clothes and knelt among them to pick up something: the jacket or the trousers, it was difficult to tell at this distance.

But Guy could guess what the figure was after, and he cursed. He realised that he should have emptied his pockets before setting out from the house. No ordinary thief, of course, would have been interested in the small pierced stone that Guy Brouard habitually carried. But no ordinary thief would ever have anticipated finding a swimmer's belongings in the first place, unguarded on the beach so early on a December morning. Whoever it was knew who was swimming in the bay. Whoever it was either sought the stone or fingered through his clothing as a feint devised to get Guy back to shore.

Well, damn it, he thought. This was
his
time in solitude. He didn't intend to get into it with anyone. What was important to him now was only his sister and how his sister would meet her end.

He resumed swimming. He traversed the width of the bay twice. When at last he looked to the beach another time, he was pleased to see that whoever had encroached on his peace was gone.

He swam to shore and arrived there breathless, having covered nearly twice the distance that he usually covered in the morning. He staggered out and hurried over to his towel, his body a mass of chicken flesh.

The tea promised quick relief from the cold, and he poured himself a cup from his Thermos. It was strong and bitter and most especially hot, and he gulped down all of it before whipping off his swim suit and pouring himself another. This he drank more slowly as he toweled himself off, rubbing his skin vigorously to restore some heat to his limbs. He put his trousers on and grabbed his jacket. He slung it round his shoulders as he sat on a rock to dry his feet. Only after he'd donned his trainers did he put his hand in his pocket. The stone was still there.

He thought about this. He thought about what he had seen from the water. He craned his neck and searched the cliffside behind him. Nothing stirred anywhere, that he could see.

He wondered then if he'd been mistaken about what he'd assumed was on the beach. Perhaps it had not been a real person at all but, rather, a manifestation of something going on in his conscience. Guilt given flesh, for example.

He brought out the stone. He unwrapped it once more and with his thumb traced the shallow initials carved into it.

Everyone needs protection, he thought. The tricky part was knowing from whom or what.

He tossed back the rest of his tea and poured himself another cup. Full sunrise was less than an hour off. He would wait for it right here this morning.

December 15

11:15
P.M.

LONDON

Chapter 1

T
HERE WAS THE WEATHER
to talk about. That was a blessing. A week of rain that had hardly ceased for more than an hour
was
something to remark upon, even by dreary December standards. Added to the previous month's precipitation, the fact that most of Somerset, Dorset, East Anglia, Kent, and Norfolk were under water—not to mention three-quarters of the cities of York, Shrewsbury, and Ipswich—made avoiding a post mortem of a Soho gallery's opening exhibit of black-and-white photography practically de rigueur. One couldn't entertain a discussion about the small handful of friends and relatives who had comprised the opening's meagre turnout when people outside of London were homeless, animals were displaced by the thousands, and property was destroyed. Not dwelling upon the natural disaster seemed nothing short of inhuman.

At least, that was what Simon St. James kept telling himself.

He recognised the inherent fallacy in this line of thinking. Nonetheless, he persisted in thinking it. He heard the wind rattle the window panes, and he grabbed on to the sound like a drowning swimmer finding salvation in a half-submerged log.

“Why don't you wait for a break in the storm?” he asked his guests. “It's going to be deadly driving home.” He could hear the earnestness in his voice. He hoped they put it down to his concern for their welfare and not to the rank cowardice it was. Never mind the fact that Thomas Lynley and his wife lived less than two miles northeast of Chelsea. No one should be out in this downpour.

Lynley and Helen already had their coats on, however. They were three steps short of St. James's front door. Lynley clasped their black umbrella in hand, and its condition—which was dry—told the tale of how long they'd already been gathered by the fire in the ground-floor study with St. James and his wife. At the same time, Helen's condition—plagued at eleven o'clock at night by what in her case could only euphemistically be called
morning
sickness this second month into her pregnancy—suggested a departure that was imminent, rain or not. Still, St. James thought, there was always hope.

“We've not even talked about the Fleming trial yet,” he told Lynley, who'd been the Scotland Yard officer investigating that murder. “CPS got it to court quick enough. You must be pleased.”

“Simon,
stop
this,” Helen Lynley said quietly. But she gentled her words with a fond smile. “You can't avoid things indefinitely. Talk to her about it. It's not like you to avoid.”

It was, unfortunately,
exactly
like him, and had St. James's wife heard Helen Lynley's comment, she would have been the first to make that declaration. The undercurrents of life with Deborah were treacherous. Like an inexperienced boatman in an unfamiliar river, St. James habitually steered clear of them.

He looked over his shoulder at the study. The firelight and the candles within provided the only illumination there. He should have thought to brighten the room, he realised. While the subdued lighting could have been construed as romantic in other circumstances, in these circumstances it seemed downright funereal.

But we have no corpse, he reminded himself. This isn't a death. Just a disappointment.

His wife had worked on her photographs for nearly twelve months leading up to this night. She'd accumulated a fine array of portraits taken across London: from fishmongers posing at five in the morning at Billingsgate to upmarket boozers stumbling into a Mayfair nightclub at midnight. She'd captured the cultural, ethnic, social, and economic diversity that was the capital city, and it had been her hope that her opening in a small but distinguished Little Newport Street gallery would be well enough attended to garner her a mention in one of the publications that fell into the hands of collectors looking for new artists whose work they might decide to buy. She just wanted to plant the seed of her name in people's minds, she'd said. She didn't expect to sell many pieces at first.

What she hadn't taken into account was the miserable late-autumn-verging-on-winter weather. The November rain hadn't concerned her much. The weather was generally bad that time of year. But as it had segued relentlessly into the ceaseless downpour of December, she'd begun to voice misgivings. Maybe she ought to cancel her show till spring? Until summer, even, when people were out and about well into the night?

St. James had advised her to hold firm to her plans. The bad weather, he told her, would never last until the middle of December. It had been raining for weeks, and statistically speaking if nothing else, it couldn't go on much longer.

But it had done exactly that. Day after day, night after night, until the city parks began to resemble swamps, and mould started growing in cracks in the pavement. Trees were toppling out of the saturated ground and basements in houses close to the river were fast becoming wading pools.

Had it not been for St. James's siblings—all of whom attended with their spouses, partners, and children in tow—as well as his mother, the only attendees at his wife's gala exhibit opening would have been Deborah's father, a handful of personal friends whose loyalty appeared to supersede their prudence, and five members of the public. Many hopeful glances were cast in the direction of this latter group until it became obvious that three of them were individuals seeking only to get out of the rain while two others were looking for relief from the queue that was waiting for a table at Mr. Kong's.

St. James had attempted to put a good face on all this for his wife, as had the gallery's owner, a bloke called Hobart, who spoke Estuary English as if the letter T did not exist in his alphabet. Deborah was “No' 'o worry, darling,” Hobart said. “Show will be up for a month and i'
is
quality, love. Look how many you've sold already!” To which Deborah had replied with her typical honesty, “And look how many of my husband's relatives are here, Mr. Hobart. If he'd only had more than three siblings, we'd be sold out.”

There was truth in that. St. James's family had been generous and supportive. But their purchase of her pictures couldn't mean to Deborah what a stranger's purchase would have meant. “I feel like they bought because they pity me,” she had confided in despair during the taxi ride home.

This was largely why the company of Thomas Lynley and his wife was so welcome to St. James at the moment. Ultimately, he was going to have to act the part of advocate to his wife's talent in the wake of the night's disaster, and he didn't yet feel equipped to do so. He knew she wasn't going to believe a word he said, no matter how much he believed his own assertions. Like so many artists, she wanted some form of outside approbation for her talent. He wasn't an outsider, so he wouldn't do. Nor would her father, who'd patted her on the shoulder and said philosophically, “Weather can't be helped, Deb,” on his way up to bed. But Lynley and Helen somewhat qualified. So when he finally got round to bringing up the topic of Little Newport Street with Deborah, St. James wanted to have them there.

It wasn't to be, however. He could see that Helen was drooping with fatigue and that Lynley was determined to get his wife home. “Mind how you go, then,” St. James told them now.

“‘Coragio, bully-monster,' ” Lynley said with a smile.

St. James watched them as they headed up Cheyne Row through the downpour to their car. When they reached it safely, he closed the door and girded himself for the conversation awaiting him in his study.

Aside from her brief remark in the gallery to Mr. Hobart, Deborah had put up an admirably brave front until that cab ride home. She'd chatted to their friends, greeted her in-laws with exclamations of delight, and taken her old photographic mentor Mel Doxson from picture to picture to listen to his praise and to receive his astute criticism of her work. Only someone who'd known her forever—like St. James himself—would have been able to see the dull glaze of dejection in her eyes, would have noted from her quick glances to the doorway how much she had foolishly pinned her hopes on an imprimatur that was given by strangers whose opinion she wouldn't have cared a half fig for in other circumstances.

He found Deborah where he'd left her when he'd accompanied the Lynleys to the door: She stood in front of the wall on which he always kept a selection of her photographs. She was studying those that hung there, her hands clasped tightly behind her back.

“I've thrown away a year of my life,” she announced. “I could have been working at a regular job, making money for once. I could have been taking wedding pictures or something. A debutante's ball. Christenings. Bar mitzvahs. Birthday parties. Ego portraits of middle-aged men and their trophy wives. What else?”

“Tourists standing with cardboard cutouts of the Royal Family?” he ventured. “That probably would've brought in a few quid had you set yourself up in front of Buckingham Palace.”

“I'm
serious,
Simon,” she said, and he could tell by her tone that levity on his part wasn't going to get them through the moment, nor was it going to make her see that the disappointment of one night's showing was in reality just a momentary setback.

St. James joined her at the wall and contemplated her pictures. She always let him choose his favourites from every suite she produced, and this particular grouping was among the best she'd done, in his unschooled opinion: seven black-and-white studies at dawn in Bermondsey, where dealers in everything from antiques to stolen goods were setting up their wares. He liked the timelessness of the scenes she'd captured, the sense of a London that never changed. He liked the faces and the way they were lit by street lamps and distorted by shadows. He liked the hope on one, the shrewdness on another, the wariness, the weariness, and the patience of the rest. He thought his wife was more than merely talented with her camera. He thought she was gifted in ways only very few are.

He said, “Everyone who wants to make a stab at this sort of career begins at the bottom. Name the photographer you admire most and you'll be naming someone who started out as someone's assistant, a bloke carrying floodlights and lenses for someone who'd once done the same. It would be a fine world if success were a matter of producing fine pictures and doing nothing more than gathering accolades for them afterwards, but that's not how it is.”

“I don't want accolades. That's not what this is about.”

“You think you've spun your wheels on ice. One year and how many
pictures later . . . ?”

“Ten thousand three hundred and twenty-two. Give or take.”

“And you've ended up where you started. Yes?”

“No closer to anything. Not one step further. Not knowing if any of this . . . this kind of life . . . is even worth my time.”

“So what you're saying is that the experience alone isn't good enough for you. You're telling yourself—and me, not that I believe it, mind you—that work counts only if it produces a result you've decided you want.”

“That isn't it.”

“Then what?”

“I need to believe, Simon.”

“In what?”

“I can't take another year to dabble at this. I want to be more than Simon St. James's arty wife in her dungarees and her combat boots, carting her cameras for a lark round London. I want to make a contribution to our life. And I can't do that if I don't
believe.
”

“Shouldn't you start with believing in the process, then? If you looked at every photographer whose career you've studied, wouldn't you see someone who began—”

“That's not what I mean!” She swung to face him. “I don't need to learn to believe that you start from the bottom and work your way upwards. I'm not such a fool that I think I'm supposed to have a show one night and the National Portrait Gallery demanding samples of my work the next morning. I'm not
stupid,
Simon.”

“I'm not suggesting you are. I'm just trying to point out that the failure of a single showing of your pictures
—which,
for all you know, will not be a failure at all, by the way—is a measurement of nothing. It's just an experience, Deborah. No more. No less. It's how you interpret the experience that gets you into trouble.”

“So we're not supposed to interpret our experiences? We're just supposed to have them and go on our way? Something ventured, nothing gained? Is that what you mean?”

“You know it isn't. You're getting upset. Which is hardly going to avail either of us—”

“
Getting
upset? I'm
already
upset. I've spent months on the street. Months in the darkroom. A fortune in supplies. I can't keep doing that without believing that there's a point to it all.”

“Defined by what? Sales? Success? An article in the
Sunday Times Magazine
?”

“No! Of course not. That's not what
any
of this is about, and you know it.” She pushed past him, crying, “Oh, why do I bother?” and she would have left the room, flying up the stairs and leaving him no closer to understanding the character of the demons she confronted periodically. It had always been this way between them: her passionate, unpredictable nature set against his phlegmatic constitution. The wild divergence in the way they each viewed the world was one of the qualities that made them so good together. It was also, unfortunately, one of the qualities that made them so bad as well.

“Then tell me,” he said. “Deborah.
Tell
me.”

She stopped in the doorway. She looked like Medea, all fury and intention, with her long hair rain-sprung round her shoulders and her eyes like metal in the firelight.

“I need to believe in myself,” she said simply. It sounded as if she despaired the very effort to speak, and he understood from this how much she loathed the fact that he had failed to understand her.

“But you've got to know your work is good,” he said. “How can you go to Bermondsey and capture it like this”—with a gesture towards the wall—“and not know that your work is good? Better than good. Good God, it's brilliant.”