A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(116)

“If Guy did give Adrian money,” Ruth said, more to herself than to the advocate, “he kept quiet about it. They both kept quiet. And his mother doesn’t know. Margaret, his mother?”—this to the advocate—“she doesn’t know.”

“Until we find out more, we can only assume everyone has a legacy much reduced from what it might otherwise be,” Mr. Forrest said. “And you should prepare yourself for a fair amount of animosity.”

“Reduced. Yes. I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Start thinking of it, then,” Mr. Forrest told her. “As things stand now, Guy’s children are inheriting less than sixty thousand pounds apiece, the other two have been left round eighty-seven thousand pounds, and you are sitting on property and belongings worth millions. When all this becomes clear, there’s going to be enormous pressure on you to make things right in the eyes of other people. Till we get everything sorted out, I suggest you hold firm to what we know of Guy’s wishes about the estate.”

“There may be more to know,” Ruth murmured.

Forrest dropped his notes from the forensic accountant onto his desk.

“Believe me, there’s definitely more to know,” he agreed.





Chapter 16


At her end of the line, Valerie Duffy listened to the phone ring on and on. She whispered, “Answer it, answer it, answer it,” but the ringing continued. Although she didn’t want to break the connection, she finally forced herself to do so. A moment later, she had herself convinced she’d misdialed the number, so she began again. The call went through; the ringing commenced. The result was the same.

Outside, she could see the police carrying on with their search. They’d been dogged but thorough in the manor house and they’d moved on to the outbuildings and the gardens. Soon, Valerie reckoned, they would decide to search the cottage as well. It was part of Le Reposoir and their orders had been—according to the sergeant in charge—to conduct a thorough and painstaking search of the premises, Madam.

She didn’t want to consider what they were looking for, but she had a fairly good idea. An officer had descended the stairs with Ruth’s medicines in an evidence bag and it was only through stressing how essential the medicines were to Ruth’s well-being that Valerie had been able to persuade the constable not to remove every single one of the pills from the house. They didn’t need all of them, surely, she’d argued. Miss Brouard had terrible pain and without her medicine—

Pain? the constable had interrupted. So we’ve got painkillers here? and he shook the bag for emphasis, as if any were needed. Well, certainly. All they had to do was to read the labels and take note of the words for pain, which surely they had seen when they picked the drugs out of her medicine cabinet.

We’ve had our instructions, Madam, were the words the constable used in reply. By which declaration Valerie assumed they were to remove all drugs that they found, no matter their purpose. She asked if they would leave the majority of the pills behind. Take a sample from each bottle and leave the rest, she suggested. Surely you can do that for Miss Brouard’s sake. She’ll do very badly without them.

The constable agreed to do so, but he wasn’t pleased. As Valerie left him to return to her work in the kitchen, she felt his eyes boring into her back and knew she’d made herself the object of his suspicion. For this reason, she didn’t want to make her phone call from the manor house. So she’d crossed to the cottage and rather than place the call from the kitchen where she wouldn’t be able to see what was going on in the grounds of LeReposoir, she made it instead from the upstairs bedroom. She sat on Kevin’s side of the bed, closer to the window, and because of this, as she watched the police separate and head into the gardens and the individual buildings on the estate, she was able to breathe in the scent of Kev from a work shirt he’d left over the arm of a chair.

Answer, she thought. Answer. Answer. The ringing went on. She turned from the window and hunched over the phone, concentrating on sending the force of her will through the receiver. If she let the connection go on long enough, surely the irritating noise alone would force an answer.

Kevin wouldn’t like this. He’d say, “Why’re you doing this, Val?” And she wouldn’t be able to make a reply that was direct and honest, because for too long there had simply been too much at stake to be direct and honest about anything. Answer, answer, answer, she thought.

He’d left quite early. The weather was getting rougher every day, he’d said, and he needed to see to that leak in the front windows of Mary Beth’s house. With the exposure she had—looking directly west onto Portelet Bay—when the rains came, she was going to have a real problem on her hands. The lower windows affected the sitting room and the water would destroy her carpet, not to mention encourage mould to grow, and Val knew how Mary Beth’s girls both had allergies to damp. Upstairs, even worse, the windows belonged to the two girls’ bedrooms. He couldn’t have his nieces sleeping in their beds while the rain seeped in and ran down the wallpaper, now, could he? He had responsibilities as a brotherin-law, and he didn’t like to disregard them. So off he’d gone to see to his sister-in-law’s windows. Helpless, helpless Mary Beth Duffy, Valerie thought, thrust into an untimely widowhood by a defect of heart that had killed her husband, walking from a taxi to the door of a hotel in Kuwait. All over for Corey in less than one minute. Kev shared that defect of heart with his twin, but none of them had known that till Corey died on that street, in that endless sunshine, in that heat of Kuwait. Thus Kevin owed his life to Corey’s death. A congenital defect in one twin suggested the possibility of such a defect in the other. Kevin had magic planted in his chest now, a device that would have saved Corey had anyone ever suspected that there was something wrong with his heart. Valerie knew her husband felt doubly responsible for his brother’s wife and his brother’s children as a result. While she tried to remind herself that he was only living up to a sense of obligation that wouldn’t have even existed had Corey not died, she couldn’t help looking at the bedside clock and asking herself how long it really did take to seal four or five windows. The girls would be at school—Kev’s two nieces—and Mary Beth would be grateful. Her gratitude in conjunction with her grief could combine to make an intoxicating brew. Make me forget, Kev. Help me forget.