A Place of Hiding (47 page)

“Which was why . . . ?” St. James repeated quietly.

“I've work to do,” she said. “But if you wouldn't mind a suggestion?” She didn't wait for him to welcome whatever thoughts she wished to share. “Our family matters have no bearing on Mr. Brouard's death, Mr. St. James. But I expect if you dig around a bit more, you'll find someone else's family matters do.”

Chapter 19

F
RANK HADN
'
T BEEN ABLE
to take the pie tin to Betty Petit and effect a return to
Moulin des Niaux
with anything close to the alacrity he'd been hoping for. The childless and widowed farmwife had few visitors and when one dropped by, coffee and fresh brioches were called for. The one factor that enabled Frank to make his escape in under an hour was his father.
Can't leave Dad alone for long
served him well when he needed it to do so.

When he made his turn into the mill yard, the first thing he saw was the Escort parked next to his Peugeot, a large Harlequin sticker plastered across its rear window identifying it as an island rental. He looked immediately to the cottage, where the front door hung open. He frowned at this and began to hurry towards it. At the threshold, he called out, “Dad?” and “Hullo?” but a moment sufficed to tell him no one was there.

Only one place, then, was the alternative. Frank beat a hasty path to the first of the cottages where their war memorabilia were stored. As he passed the small sitting room window what he saw within made his head fill with the sound of rushing water. The River woman's brother was standing at one side of the filing cabinet with a red-headed woman at his side. The top drawer gaped open and Frank's father stood before it. Graham Ouseley clutched onto the side of this drawer with one hand to keep himself upright. With the other hand he wrestled with a batch of documents that he was trying to prise out.

Frank moved without pause. Three strides took him to the cottage door, and he threw it open. Its swollen wood shrieked against the old floor. “What the hell,” he said sharply. “What the
hell
're you doing? Dad! Stop it! Those documents are fragile!” Which asked the question in the mind of anyone reasonable, of course, of what they were doing crammed into the filing cabinet higgledy-piggledy. But this was not the moment for worrying about that.

As Frank plunged across the room, Graham looked up. “It's time, boy,” he said. “I've said it and said it. You know what we've got to do.”

“Are you mad?” Frank demanded. “Get out of that stuff!” He took his father's arm and tried to ease him a step backwards.

His father jerked away. “No! Those men're owed. There're debts to be paid and I mean to pay them. I
survived,
Frank. Three of them dead and me still alive. All these years later when
they
could have been. Granddads, Frank. Great-granddads by now. But all of that come to nothing because of a God damn quisling who needs to face the music. You got that, son? Time for people to pay.”

He fought Frank like a teenager being disciplined, but without a teenager's youthful agility. His frailty made Frank reluctant to get rough with him. At the same time, however, it served the purpose of making the effort to control him so much more difficult.

The red-head said, “I think he believes we're journalists. We did try to tell him . . . We've actually come to talk to you.”

“Just get out,” Frank said over his shoulder to her, and he tempered the order with “For a minute. Please.”

River and the red-head left the cottage. Frank waited till they were safely outside. Then he pulled his father away from the filing cabinet and slammed the drawer home, saying, “You God damn fool,” between his teeth.

This curse got Graham's attention. Frank rarely swore, and never at his father. His devotion to the man, the passions they shared, the history that bound them, and the lifetime they'd spent together had always obviated any inclination he might have had towards either anger or impatience when it came to his father's stubborn will. But this circumstance constituted the absolute limit of what Frank was willing to endure. A dam burst inside him—despite having been so meticulously constructed in the last two months—and he let forth a stream of invective that he hadn't known was part of his vocabulary.

Graham shrank back from the sound of it. His shoulders fell, his arms dropped to his sides, and behind his thick spectacles, his vague eyes filled with frustrated and frightened tears.

“I meant . . .” His stubbled chin dimpled. “I meant to do good.”

Frank hardened his heart. “Listen to me, Dad,” he said. “Those two are not journalists. Do you understand me? They are not journalists. That
man . . . He's . . .” God. How to explain? And what would be the point of explaining? “And the woman . . .” He didn't even know who she was. He thought he'd seen her at Guy's funeral, but as to what she was doing at the water mill . . . and with the River woman's brother . . . He needed to have the answer to that question at once.

Graham was watching him in utter confusion. “They said . . . They've come
to . . .” And then dismissing this entire line of thinking, he grabbed Frank's shoulder and cried, “It's
time,
Frank. I could die any day, I could. I'm the only one left. You see that, don't you? Tell me you see. Tell me you know. An' if we're not to have our museum . . .” His grip was tighter than Frank would have thought possible. “Frankie, I can't let them die in vain.”

Frank felt pierced by this remark, as if it lanced his spirit as well as his flesh. He said, “Dad, for God's sake,” but he couldn't finish. He pulled his father to him and hugged the old man hard. Graham let a sob escape against his son's shoulder.

Frank wanted to cry with him but he didn't have the tears. And even if a well of them had been stored within him, he could not have let that well overflow.

“I got to do it, Frankie,” his father whimpered. “It's important, it is.”

“I know that,” Frank said.

“Then . . .” Graham stepped away from his son and wiped his cheeks on the sleeve of his tweed jacket.

Frank put his arm round his father's shoulders and said, “We'll talk about it later, Dad. We'll find a way.” He urged him towards the door and, the “journalists” being gone from his sight, Graham cooperated as if they were completely forgotten as, indeed, they probably were to him. Frank took him back to their own cottage where the door still stood open. He assisted his father inside and to his chair.

Graham leaned fully against him as Frank turned him towards the chair's comfortable seat. His head drooped as if it had grown too heavy, and his spectacles slid to the end of his nose. “Feeling a bit queer, lad,” he said in a murmur. “P'rhaps best to have a bit of a kip.”

“You've overdone it,” Frank told his father. “I mustn't leave you alone any more.”

“'M
not
a dirty-arsed infant, Frank.”

“But you get up to no good if I'm not here to watch you. You're as stubborn as gum on a shoe sole, Dad.”

Graham smiled at the image, and Frank handed him the remote for the television. “Can you keep yourself out of trouble for five minutes?” Frank asked his father kindly. “I want to see what's what out there.” He indicated the sitting room window, and hence the out-of-doors, with a tilt of his head.

When his father was absorbed once again by the television, Frank tracked down River and the red-head. They were standing near the tattered deck chairs on the overgrown lawn behind the cottages. They appeared to be in deep discussion. As Frank approached them, their conversation ceased.

River introduced his companion as a friend of his sister's. She was called Deborah St. James, he said, and she and her husband had come over from London to help China. “He deals with this kind of thing all the time,” River said.

Frank's main concern was his father and not leaving him alone to get up to further mischief, so he replied to the introduction with as much courtesy as he could muster. “How may I help you?”

They answered him in concert. Their visit apparently had to do with a ring that was associated with the Occupation. It was identified by an inscription in German, by a date, and by its unusual design of skull and crossed bones.

“D'you have anything like that in your collection?” River sounded eager.

Frank looked at him curiously, then at the woman, who was watching him with an earnestness that told him how important the information was to them both. He thought about this fact and about every possible implication of every possible answer he might give. He finally said, “I don't believe I've ever seen anything like that.”

To which River said, “But you can't be sure, can you?” When Frank didn't affirm this, he went on, gesturing to the two additional cottages that grew out from the water mill. “You've got a hell of a lot of stuff in there. I remember your saying not all of it's even catalogued yet. That's what you guys were doing, right? You and Guy were getting it ready to show, but first you had to have lists of what you have and where it is right now and where to put it in the museum, right?”

“That's what we were doing, yes.”

“And the kid helped out. Paul Fielder. Guy brought him along now and then.”

“As well as his son once and the Abbott boy as well,” Frank said. “But what's this got to do with—”

River turned to the red-head. “See? There're other ways to go. Paul. Adrian. The Abbott kid. The cops want to think every road leads to China, but it damn well doesn't, and here's our proof.”

The woman said gently, “Not necessarily. Not unless . . .” She looked pensive and directed her next remarks to Frank. “Is there a chance you've catalogued a ring like the one we've described and merely forgotten it? Or a chance that someone besides yourself catalogued it? Or even that you had one among your things and have forgotten you have it?”

Frank admitted that there was that possibility, but he allowed himself to sound doubtful because he knew the request she was likely to make and he didn't want to grant it. She made it straightaway, nonetheless. Could they have a look among his wartime artifacts, then? Oh, she knew there was no realistic way they were going to be able to go through everything, but there was always a slim chance that they could get lucky . . .

“Let's have a look through the catalogues at least,” Frank said. “If there was a ring, one of us would have documented it as long as we'd already come across it.”

He took them the way his father had taken them and pulled out the first of the notebooks. There were four of them and counting, each of them set up to log possession of a particular type of wartime article. So far he had a notebook for wearing apparel, one for medals and insignia, one for ammunition and arms, one for documents and papers. A perusal of the notebook for medals and insignia showed River and the St. James woman that no ring like the one they were describing had yet come to light. This did not, however, mean that no ring lay somewhere among the vast assortment of material still to be gone through. Within a minute it was quite clear that both of his visitors knew that.

Were the rest of the medals and the other insignia kept in one place, Deborah St. James wanted to know, or were they spread throughout the collection? She meant the medals and the insignia not catalogued already. Frank recognised that.

He told her that they weren't kept in one place. He explained that the only items that were stored with like items were those that had already been handled, sorted through, and catalogued. Those things, he explained, were in organised containers that had been carefully labeled for convenient access when the time came to set up exhibits in the wartime museum. Each article was logged into the designated notebook, where it was given an item number and a container number against the day it would be called for.

“Since there was no ring mentioned in the catalogue,” Frank said regretfully, and he let an eloquent silence fill in the rest of his remark: There was probably no ring at all, unless it was hidden somewhere among the Gordian knot of articles still to be dealt with.

“But there
were
rings catalogued,” River pointed out.

His companion added, “So during a sorting period, someone could even have pinched a skull-and-crossed-bones ring without your knowing, isn't that right?”

“And that person could have been anyone who came with Guy at one time or another,” River added. “Paul Fielder. Adrian Brouard. The Abbott kid.”

“Perhaps,” Frank said, “but I don't know why someone would.”

“Or the ring could have been stolen from you at another time, couldn't it?” Deborah St. James said. “Because if something got pinched from your uncatalogued material, would you even know it was missing?”

“I suppose that depends on what it is that was taken,” Frank answered. “Something large, something dangerous . . . I'd probably know. Something small—”

“Like a ring,” River persisted.

“—I might overlook.” Frank saw the glances of satisfaction they exchanged. He said, “But see here, why is this important?”

“Fielder, Brouard, and Abbott.” Cherokee River spoke to the red-head and not to Frank, and within a brief span of time, the two of them took their leave. They thanked Frank for his help and hurried to their car. He overheard River saying in reply to something the woman pointed out to him, “They all could have wanted it for different reasons. But China didn't. Not at all.”

At first Frank thought River was referring to the skull-and-crossed-bones ring. But he soon came to realise they were talking about the murder: wanting Guy dead and, perhaps, needing him dead. And beyond that, knowing that death might well be the only answer to imminent peril.

He shuddered and wished he had a religion that would give him the answers he needed and the route to walk. He closed the door of the cottage on the very thought of death—untimely, unnecessary, or otherwise—and he gave his gaze to the mishmash of wartime belongings that had defined his own life and the life of his father over the years.

It had long been
Look what I've got here, Frankie!

And
Happy Christmas, Dad. You'll never guess where I found that one.

Or
Think of whose hands fired this pistol, son. Think of the hate that pressed the trigger.