A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(103)

“All right,” China said. “You’ve made your point. I bought the ring. A ring. That ring. I don’t know. I bought a ring from them, okay?”

“Like this one?”

“Well, obviously,” China snapped.

“Look, Chine, we’ve got to find out—”

“I’m cooperating!” China shrieked at her brother. “All right? I’m cooperating like a good little girl. I came into town and I saw that ring and I thought it was perfect so I bought it.”

“Perfect?” Deborah asked. “For what?”

“For Matt. Okay? I got it for Matt.” China looked embarrassed at her own admission, a gift for a man she’d declared herself done with. As if she knew how this appeared to the others, she went on. “It was nasty, and I liked that about it. It was like sending him a voodoo doll. Skull and crossed bones. Poison. Death. It felt like a good way to tell him how I feel.”

Cherokee got up at this and walked over to the television, where riders were spinning along the edge of a cliff. The sea lay beyond them and the sun glittered off it. He killed the picture and returned to his seat. He didn’t look at his sister. He didn’t look at Deborah. As if his actions made the comment his silence implied, China responded, saying, “Okay, so it’s a stupid thing to do. So it makes things go on between us when they shouldn’t. So it asks for a reply of some sort from him. I know that, okay? I know it’s stupid. I wanted to do it anyway. That’s just how it is. How it was when I saw it. I bought it and that’s it.”

“What did you do with it?” Deborah said. “The day that you bought it?”

“What d’you mean?”

“Did they put it in a bag for you? Did you put the bag inside another?

Did you put it in your pocket? What happened next?”

China considered these questions; Cherokee looked up from examining his shoes. He appeared to realise where Deborah was heading, because he said, “Try to remember, Chine.”

“I don’t know. I probably shoved it in my purse,” she said. “That’s what I usually do when I buy something small.”

“And afterwards? When you got it back to Le Reposoir? What would you have done with it then?”

“Probably...I don’t know. If it was in my purse, I would’ve left it there and forgotten about it. Otherwise, I might’ve put it in my suitcase. Or on the dressing table till we packed to leave.”

“Where someone could have seen it,” Deborah murmured.

“If that’s even the same ring,” Cherokee said.

There was that, Deborah thought. For if the ring she held was merely a duplicate of the ring that China had purchased from the Potters, they had a startling coincidence on their hands. However unlikely that coincidence was, the slate needed to be cleared of it before they went any further. She said, “Did you pack the ring when you left? Is it among your things now?

Perhaps tucked away where you’ve forgotten about it?”

China smiled, as if aware of an irony she was about to disclose. “I wouldn’t know, Debs. Right now the cops have everything I own. At least everything I brought with me. If I packed the ring or put it in my suitcase when I got it back to Le Reposoir, it’ll be with all the rest of my stuff.”

“So that will need to be checked into,” Deborah said. Cherokee nodded at the ring in Deborah’s palm. “What happens with that?”

“It goes to the police.”

“What’ll they do with it?”

“I expect they’ll try to get latent fingerprints off it. They might manage a partial.”

“If they do, what then? I mean, if the print’s Chine’s...i f the ring’s the same...Won’t they know i t’s been planted? The ring, I mean.”

“They might suspect that,” Deborah said. She didn’t add what she also knew to be the situation: The interest of the police always lay in assessing guilt and closing the case. The rest they put into other hands. If China had no ring in her possession identical to this one and if her prints were upon the one that Deborah had found at the bay, the police weren’t required to do anything more than document those two facts and pass them along to the prosecutors. It would be up to China’s own advocate to argue another interpretation of the ring in court during her trial for murder. Certainly, Deborah thought, both China and Cherokee had to know this. They weren’t babes in the woods. The troubles China’s father had had with the law in California must have given them both an education in what went on when a crime occurred.

Cherokee said, “Debs” in a thoughtful tone that elongated the nickname, making it sound like an appeal. “Is there any way...” He looked at his sister as if gauging a reaction to something he hadn’t yet said. “This is a tough one to ask. Is there any way you could lose that ring?”

“Lose...?”

China said, “Cherokee, don’t.”

“I have to,” he said to her. “Debs, if that ring is the one China bought...And we know there’s a chance it is, right?...I mean, why do the cops have to know you found it? Can’t you just toss it down a storm drain or something?” He seemed to comprehend the magnitude of what he was asking Deborah to do, because he rushed on, saying, “Look. The cops already think she did it. Her prints on this, they’ll just use it as another way to nail her. But if you lose it...i t falls out of your pocket on the way to your hotel, let’s say...?” He watched her hopefully, one hand extended, as if he wished her to deposit the offending ring on his palm. Deborah felt held by his gaze, its frankness and hope. She felt held by what his gaze implied about the history she shared with China River.