Smile and be a Villain (17 page)

‘I
thought he'd be interested, at least.' I was feeling put out.

‘My dear woman, he put his thoughts quite succinctly. What difference does it make now? All the damage is done, and the one who did it has been placed past all human retribution. The only matter that now concerns Robin is whether his friend Harold had a hand in putting him there.'

‘Oh. I hadn't thought of it that way.' I hit myself on the forehead. ‘Stupid, stupid.'

We'd gone back to our B & B, had our naps and were back to our problem.

‘We need to talk to the chap,' said Alan. ‘More sherry?'

‘No, I've had quite enough, thank you. I wouldn't mind another couple of biscuits, though. How are we going to find him, to talk to him?'

‘Robin suggested Mr Lewison.'

‘He doesn't know him. He told me so, just before you came back this morning.'

‘He'll be on the parish rolls.'

‘They'll be kept in the church somewhere, probably under lock and key. I suppose there's always the phone book. There must be one downstairs somewhere.'

‘I'll look.' He put down his empty glass and left the room, to return after only a couple of minutes. ‘No listing for Guillot. He may use a mobile only; so many people do these days.'

‘Drat. I don't want to disturb Mr Lewison today. He has enough to deal with. That poor man didn't know what he was getting into when he took this temporary job!'

Alan ran a hand down the back of his head. He was thinking. ‘I wonder,' he said. ‘I don't want this to drag on too long. I have an uneasy feeling … Do you suppose we could find Martha Duckett? She would know where Guillot lives, and she'd be indignant about his attitudes, so she might tell us.'

‘That's a great idea, Alan. And I'll bet she's the old-fashioned type who still has a landline. I'll go down with you to look her up.'

Martha was in the phone book. She was at home. Yes, she said disapprovingly, she knew where Mr Guillot lived. (She pronounced his name ‘ghillet', to rhyme with skillet, another sign of her dislike, I thought.) No, she didn't have his phone number. Why would she want to call him? No, she didn't have the address, but she could tell us where his house was.

‘Here, I'll let you speak to Alan. He's much better at directions than I am.'

He repeated them after her, and I began to write them down. They sounded complicated enough that I wished we had a better map, ours being sketchy in the extreme.

‘White with blue shutters and a red door. Right. Thank you so much.'

‘Sounds like we'll need to leave a trail of breadcrumbs,' I said when he'd rung off. ‘We should have bought an OS map.'

‘They're not always of much help in town. You jotted it all down?'

‘As soon as she had you turning off the High Street into something I couldn't spell. I suppose it must be French, like so much around here.'

‘And not even pronounced like proper French, but in the local patois.'

‘I wrote it down phonetically, as best I could.'

‘Ah, well. We can but try. How lost can we get on an island this size?'

‘We keep saying that, but I have my doubts. If it had sounded easy, I'd have been willing to start out right away, but it isn't easy and I'm not up to a hunt at this point. I'm hungry. Do you suppose the Thai place is open on Sundays? The food was really good.'

‘If not, we could always fall back on the takeaway we stashed in the fridge last night.'

‘It would be pretty awful cold, and I've never asked if we could use the microwave.'

‘Then let's go to Nellie Gray's. I know it's open on Sunday; the sign says so. And it's in the right direction; we can go from there on our search for Harold.'

‘You know what I'd really like to do? I'd like to sit down in our own kitchen in my bathrobe for leftover meatloaf and some brownies.'

Alan gave me a look.

‘All right, that's my grumble for the evening. Let me put on some decent pants and shoes, and we'll go do Indian.'

We had a light meal, which was very good, as I'd come to expect. I really do like Indian food; I was just being contrary, and besides, we'd had some last night. No matter. Onward and upward.

Literally. We toiled on up Victoria Street, turned left into the High Street, and then tried to follow Martha's directions.

Most of my transcriptions were wildly off, but we persevered with the help of the landmarks she had mentioned, finding ourselves eventually in something called La Brecque Philippe. ‘What do you suppose it means?' I asked.

‘Haven't the faintest. This would be old Norman French evolved into Alderney French, and I learned only the standard modern language. Look for a white house with blue shutters and a red door. Martha didn't know the number, but said it was quite a long way up the street.'

Like almost all Alderney streets, this one was on a slope. The grade wasn't too bad, but I was tired, and not looking forward to the conversation we hoped to have.

There were plenty of white houses, several with blue shutters, several with red doors. We finally came to one with both.

Evening was beginning, as the poets like to say, to lower. ‘Getting home is going to be fun,' I said. ‘We should have brought a flashlight.'

‘I remember the way,' said Alan. ‘Most of it,' he amended, which didn't make me feel a bit better. He went to the door, picked up the brass knocker and let it fall, once, twice, three times.

Somewhere in a neighbour's garden a dog barked. A blackbird trilled in a tree several yards away.

He knocked again, hammering hard.

Nothing.

‘He's obviously not home,' I said, perhaps more relieved than disappointed. ‘We'll have to try again tomorrow.'

‘I wish we had his phone number.'

‘Me, too. Maybe if we see Robin again we can ask him for it. We can tell him we already know where he lives.'

‘If this is indeed the right house.'

‘Oh, dear. Yes, there's that. Well, tomorrow we can maybe get at the parish rolls and find out his phone number and his proper address, and make sure.' I couldn't help sighing, and Alan took my hand.

‘I'm sorry, love. This is turning out to be a wretched holiday for you.'

‘A bit like the curate's egg, perhaps. “Parts of it are excellent, m'lord”,' I quoted, and we both laughed. ‘Anyway, it's not your fault. We just seem to fall into these things. I sometimes remind myself of a cartoon character from my childhood. There was a strip with a guy named Joe something – a name with no vowels in it at all. If you tried to pronounce it, it sounded like a sneeze. Anyway, he walked around with a little black cloud over his head all the time, spreading disaster wherever he went. I look up now and then to see if there's a little black cloud there.'

Alan peered, and shook his head. ‘All I see is a rainbow, my dear.'

After which delightful comment he took my arm, and we walked contentedly back to our room.

We woke early Monday to a truly disgusting day. A weather front had moved in overnight, with cold winds and fitful rain. I was sorely tempted not to get up at all, but I could smell breakfast being prepared, and my stomach decided it needed sustenance. So I dragged myself out, dressed in clothes that would dry quickly if I was forced to go outside, and we got to the breakfast room just as they opened up.

‘I think I want porridge, please. And coffee.' It was that kind of a day. At home I would have called it oatmeal and made it with raisins and possibly apples, but this wasn't home. I was deeply suspicious of other people's porridge, but it was worth a try. Alan opted for the same, and shook his head when I spooned coffee sugar in liberally. Defiantly, I asked the waitress for some butter, and put quite a lot of that in, too.

It actually wasn't bad. Not like home, but smooth, hot, tasty. ‘All right, I don't care if you think the way I like oatmeal is weird. It's the way I grew up with, so there. And I feel much better about the weather with some comfort food inside me. Now what on earth are we going to do today? It's the kind of rain that penetrates any defences. And darn it, I was going to go down to the harbour and do a little laundry.'

The waitress, who was clearing away our dishes, stopped and said, ‘You can give me your laundry if you like, madam. I can do it here when we've finished with the linens.'

I had dimly realized that she was not only waitress, but cook – and now it appeared that she was laundress, as well. And a real sweetheart. ‘Why, bless your heart! It'll just be one load – underwear and one outfit that I got really muddy the first day we were here. Are you sure it won't be too much trouble?'

‘No trouble at all. You don't want to be walking all the way down to the harbour on a day like this!'

A gust of wind flung rain against the front window. It hit like a handful of pebbles. No, indeed, I didn't want to step foot outside my cosy den.

‘Oh, and I meant to ask, we put some leftover takeaway in the fridge. Would anyone mind if I popped it into the microwave? I promise I'll clean up any mess I might make.'

‘There's one in the lounge that's meant for guests, for just that sort of thing. Have you not seen it? Here, I'll show you.'

So that settled lunch. We had no table wine left, but tea would do in a pinch.

I went up to get my laundry, gave it to the girl with my profound thanks, and settled down in the lounge with Alan and the morning papers.

After we'd worked our way through
The
Times
and the
Telegraph
, I went upstairs and brought down a selection of the books we'd bought at Annie's. The wind blew. The rain continued.

At about ten I could stand it no longer. I was reading the same page of my book over and over, and absorbing none of it. I tossed it aside and stood up. ‘This is ridiculous! We ought to be doing something.'

Alan laid his book down. ‘I agree. I've thought about hiring a car. I wonder if they'd deliver one here.'

‘You can ask.' My lethargy was gone. The thought of being able to go anywhere we liked, quickly, was intoxicating. I had never realized how much a car meant until we didn't have one. ‘Honestly, I love to walk, but it's very limiting, isn't it?'

‘Especially on a day that makes one think about building an ark. I know I saw some advertisements for car hire somewhere.'

‘There should be phone numbers in here.' I picked up the glossy Alderney guide book from the coffee table, and leafed through. ‘Here you are. You do have brilliant ideas occasionally, my dear!'

We were given a street map of Alderney with the car, much more detailed than the one in the tourist guide. It also, thank heaven, had the one-way streets clearly marked. We hadn't paid a lot of attention while we were walking; now we realized that in a car we'd need to make a round-about approach to Harold Guillot's house. ‘If,' Alan reminded me, ‘that is his house. I think our first stop needs to be the church, to look him up.'

‘And if that fails, I've had a thought. Surely the police would have contact information for everyone on the island.'

‘Mmm. Probably. But my dear, do we really want to go to the police and tell them we're looking for Harold Guillot, who had an excellent reason for hating Abercrombie?'

‘Oh. I suppose not. St Anne's first, then.'

But there was no one at St Anne's, and no indication of where the parish directory might be. ‘It was really stupid of us not to get Mr Lewison's phone number,' I said. ‘And I have no idea where the vicarage is. Now what?'

Alan had been thinking while I'd been fulminating. ‘I'd say there's a good chance he's visiting Alice. We need to do that, in any case, and if he's not there, the hospital will almost certainly have his phone number.'

‘Alan, something about foul weather seems to set your synapses synapsing. That's the second brilliant idea you've had today. My brain, on the other hand, seems to be about the same consistency as that oatmeal I had for breakfast.'

‘You're a fair-weather sort of person,' he said. ‘All that hot Indiana sunshine when you were young, perhaps. You blossom on a fine day.'

‘I certainly droop on a miserable one. However. Yes, let's head to the hospital, if you think you can find it.'

I
had not noticed on our previous visits to the hospital how small it was. The building was modern, the staff pleasant and efficient, but there seemed to be very few rooms. We stopped at the nurses' station to ask a few questions.

‘No, Mr Lewison was here earlier, but he's left. Yes, certainly I have the number of his mobile.' She gave it to us. ‘And I'm sorry, but visitors aren't allowed before eleven. Clergy, of course, can visit at any time.'

‘I wonder,' I said, ‘where the rest of the rooms might be.'

She laughed. ‘You're American, aren't you? I imagine you're accustomed to huge hospitals with hundreds of beds. We have twenty-two, fourteen of them in the continuing care wing.'

‘So – um – eight beds for the ill or injured?'

‘That's right.'

‘You must be a healthy bunch here in Alderney!'

She laughed again. ‘Anyone with a complicated problem goes to Guernsey. We deal mostly with emergencies, post-op patients and the occasional baby that comes too soon to make it to Guernsey. But yes, on the whole we are a healthy lot. Some would say too strong-willed and independent to get sick.'

‘Well, then, good luck to you! And would you tell Alice that Mr Nesbitt and Mrs Martin came to visit, and we'll try to get back later today?'

‘I will.' She went briskly on her way as a call bell sounded.

I phoned Mr Lewison, who looked up Guillot's address and phone number in the parish directory, which was in fact kept at the vicarage. He didn't ask why we wanted them, and I, for one, was thankful. As it was, I felt we were betraying Robin's confidence – but he hadn't said we weren't to visit the man, or even talk about him to anyone.