A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(108)
“You must have ignored something at the scene, something innocent looking.”
“We didn’t ignore it,” Le Gallez said. “It got tested along with everything else.”
“What?”
“Brouard’s Thermos. His daily dose of ginkgo and green tea. He drank it every morning after his swim.”
“On the beach, you mean?”
“On the bloody effing beach. Quite the fanatic about his daily dose of ginkgo and green, matter of fact. The drug has to’ve been mixed with it.”
“But there was no trace when you tested it?”
“Salt water. We reckoned Brouard rinsed it out.”
“Someone certainly did. Who found the body?”
“Duffy. He goes down to the bay because Brouard’s not returned to the house and the sister’s phoned to see if he’s stopped at the cottage for a cuppa. He finds him laid out cold as a fish and he comes back on the run to phone emergency because it looks like a heart attack to him and why wouldn’t it? Brouard’s nearly seventy years old.”
“So in the coming and going, Duffy could have rinsed the Thermos.”
“Could have done, yes. But if he killed Brouard, he either did it with his wife as an accomplice or with her knowledge, and in either case that makes her the best liar I’ve come across. She says he was upstairs and she was in the kitchen when Brouard went for his swim. He—Duffy—never left the house, she says, till he went searching for Brouard down the bay. I believe her.”
St. James glanced at the phone then, and considered the call Le Gallez had made with its allusions of an ongoing search. “So if you’re not looking for how he was drugged that morning—if you’ve decided the drug came from the Thermos—you must be looking for what held the opiate till it was used, something it might have been put in to convey it onto the estate.”
“If it was in the tea,” Le Gallez said, “and I can’t think where else it could have been, that suggests a liquid form. Or a soluble powder.”
“Which in turn suggests a bottle, a vial, a container of some sort...with fingerprints on it, one would hope.”
“Which could be anywhere,” Le Gallez acknowledged.
St. James saw the difficulty that the DCI was in: not only an enormous estate to search but also a cast of hundreds to suspect now, since the night before Guy Brouard’s death Le Reposoir had been peopled by partygoers, any one of whom might have come to the celebration with murder in mind. For despite the presence of China River’s hair on Guy Brouard’s body, despite the image of an early-morning stalker in China River’s cape, and despite the misplaced skull-and-crossed-bones ring on the beach—a ring purchased by China River herself—the opiate ingested by Guy Brouard shouted a tale that Le Gallez would now be forced to hear. He wouldn’t much like the predicament he was in, though: Until this moment, his evidence suggested China River was the killer, but the presence of the narcotic in Brouard’s blood showed a premeditation that was in direct conflict with the fact that she’d met Brouard only upon coming to the island.
“If the River woman did it,” St. James said, “she would have had to bring the narcotic with her from the States, wouldn’t she? She couldn’t have hoped to find it here on Guernsey. She wouldn’t have known what the place was like: how big the town, where to make the score. And even if it was her hope to get a drug here and she brought it off by asking round St. Peter Port till she found it, the question still remains, doesn’t it? Why did she do it?”
“There’s nothing among her belongings that she could have used to transport it in,” Le Gallez said as if St. James had not just brought up an extremely cogent point. “No bottle, jar, vial. Nothing. That suggests she tossed it out. If we find it—when we find it—there’ll be residue. Or fingerprints. Even one. No one allows for every possibility when they kill. They think they will. But killing doesn’t come naturally to people if they’re not psychopaths, so they get unhinged when they bring it off and they forget. One detail. Somewhere.”
“But you’re back to the why of it,” St. James argued. “China River has no motive. She gains nothing by his death.”
“I find the container with her prints on it, and that’s not my problem,”
Le Gallez returned.
That remark reflected police work at its worst: that damnable predisposition of investigators to assign guilt first and interpret the facts to fit it second. True, the Guernsey police had a cloak, hair on the body, and eyewitness reports of someone following Guy Brouard in the direction of the bay. And now they had a ring purchased by their principal suspect and found at the scene. But they also had an element that should have thrown a spanner directly into their case. The fact that the toxicology report wasn’t doing that explained why innocent people ended up serving prison terms and why the public’s faith in due process had long ago altered to cynicism.
“Inspector Le Gallez,” St. James began carefully, “on one hand we have a multimillionaire who dies and a suspect who gained nothing from his death. On the other hand, we have people in his life who might well have had expectations of an inheritance. We have a disenfranchised son, a small fortune left to two adolescents unrelated to the deceased, and a number of individuals with disappointed dreams that appear to be related to plans Brouard made to build a museum. It seems to me that motives for murder are falling out of the trees. To ignore them in favour of—”