A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(105)

She swung round with a handful of berries in her fist. “Don’t you dare... Don’t you ever talk to me like that!”

He tried to steady himself. He knew that an escalating argument would be the only outcome of this encounter unless one of them did something to calm down. He also knew how unlikely it was that Deborah would be the one to rein in. He said as mildly as he could which, admittedly, was only marginally less combative than before, “I want an explanation.”

“Oh, you want that, do you? Well, pardon me if I don’t feel like giving you one.” She slung the berries onto the path.

Just like a gauntlet, he thought. If he picked it up, he knew quite well there would be an all-out war between them. He was angry, but he didn’t want that war. He was still sane enough to see that any sort of battle would be useless. He said, “That ring constitutes evidence. Evidence is meant to go to the police. If it doesn’t go directly to them—”

“As if every piece of evidence goes directly,” she retorted. “You know that it doesn’t. You know that half the time police dig up evidence that no one even knew was evidence in the first place. So it’s been through half a dozen way stations before it comes to them. You know that, Simon.”

“That doesn’t give anyone the right to create way stations,” he countered. “Where have you been with that ring?”

“Are you interrogating me? Have you any idea what that sounds like?

Do you care?”

“What I care about at the moment is the fact that a piece of evidence that I assumed was in the hands of Le Gallez was not in his hands when I mentioned it to him. Do you care what that means?”

“Oh, I see.” She raised her chin. She sounded triumphant, the way a woman tends to sound when a man walks into a mine field she’s laid.

“This is all about you. You looked bad. Egg on your face without a napkin to be had.”

“Obstructing a police investigation isn’t egg on anyone’s face,” he said tersely. “It’s a crime.”

“I wasn’t obstructing. I’ve got the damn ring.” She thrust her hand into her shoulder bag, brought out the ring wrapped in his handkerchief, grabbed his arm in a grip that was as tight as his own had been on hers, and slammed the shrouded ring into his palm. “There. Happy? Take it to your precious DCI Le Gallez. God knows what he might think of you if you don’t run it over there straightaway, Simon.”

“Why are you acting like this?”

“Me? Why are you?”

“Because I told you what to do. Because we have evidence. Because we know it’s evidence. Because we knew it then and—”

“No,” she said. “Wrong. We did not know that. We suspected. And based upon that suspicion, you asked me to take the ring. But if it was so crucial that the police get their hands on it in the next breath—if the ring was so obviously critical—you damn well might’ve brought it into town yourself instead of swanning round wherever you decided to swan, which was obviously more important to you than the ring in the first place.”

St. James heard all this with rising irritation. “And you know damn well I was talking to Ruth Brouard. Considering she’s the sister of the murder victim, considering that she asked to see me, as you well know, I’d say we have something that was marginally important for me to attend to at Le Reposoir. ”

“Right. Of course. While what I was attending to has the value of dust motes.”

“What you were supposed to be attending to—”

“Don’t harp on about that!” Her voice rose to a screech. She seemed to hear it herself, for when she went on, she spoke more quietly although with no less anger. “What I was attending to”—she gave the verb the auditory equivalent of a sneer—“was this. China wrote it. She thought you might find it useful.” She rooted through her shoulder bag a second time and brought forth a legal pad folded in half. “I also found out about the ring,” she went on with a studied courtesy that was as meaningful as the sneer. “Which I’ll tell you about if you think the information might be important enough, Simon.”

St. James took the legal pad from her. He ran his gaze over it to see the dates, the times, the places, and the descriptions, all written in what he presumed was China River’s hand.

Deborah said, “She wanted you to have it. As a matter of fact, she asked that you have it. She also bought the ring.”

He looked up from the document. “What?”

“I think you heard me. The ring or one like it...Chi na bought it in a shop in Mill Street. Cherokee and I tracked it down. Then we asked her about it. She admitted she bought it to send to her boyfriend. Her ex. Matt.”

Deborah told him the rest. She delivered the information formally: the antiques shops, the Potters, what China had done with the ring, the possibility of another like it having come from the Talbot Valley. She concluded with “Cherokee says he saw the collection himself. And a boy called Paul Fielder was with him.”

“Cherokee?” St. James asked sharply. “He was there when you tracked down the ring?”

“I believe I said that.”

“So he knows everything about it?”

“I think he has the right.”

St. James cursed in silence: himself, her, the whole situation, the fact that he’d involved himself in it for reasons he didn’t want to consider. Deborah wasn’t stupid, but she was clearly in over her head. To tell her this would escalate the difficulty between them. Not to tell her—in some way, diplomatically or otherwise—ran the risk of jeopardising the entire investigation. He had no choice.