A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(122)

Brouard, Kiefer said, was eccentric enough to offer five thousand dollars for the job. He was tight enough to offer only tourist-level travel. Because the couple in question had to be able to leave whenever the plans were ready, it seemed the best source of potential couriers might be the local University of California. So Kiefer posted the job there and waited to see what would happen.

In the meantime, Brouard paid him his fee and added the five thousand dollars which would be promised to the courier. Neither cheque bounced, and while Kiefer thought the scenario was bizarre, he made certain it wasn’t illegal by checking out the architect to make sure he was an architect and not some arms manufacturer, a plutonium source, a drug dealer, or a supplier of substances for biological warfare. Because obviously, Kiefer said, none of those types were about to send anything by a legitimate courier service.

But the architect turned out to be a man called Jim Ward, who’d even attended high school with Kiefer. He confirmed every part of the story: He was assembling a set of architectural plans and elevation drawings for Mr. Guy Brouard, Le Reposoir, St. Martin, Island of Guernsey. Brouard wanted those plans and those drawings ASAP.

So Kiefer set about making everything happen on his end of things. A slew of applicants lined up to do the job, and from them he chose a man called Cherokee River. He was older than the others, Kiefer explained, and he was married.

“Essentially,” Simon concluded, “William Kiefer confirmed the Rivers’ story down to the last comma, question mark, and full stop. It was a strange way of doing things, but I’m getting the impression that Brouard liked doing things strangely. Keeping people off balance kept him in control. That’s important to rich men. It’s generally how they got rich to begin with.”

“Do the police know all this?”

He shook his head. “Le Gallez’s got all the paperwork, though. I expect he’s one step from finding out.”

“Will he release her, then?”

“Because the basic story she told checks out?” Simon reached for the case that was the source of the electrodes. He switched the unit off and began detaching himself from the wires. “I don’t think so, Deborah. Not unless he comes up with something that points definitively to someone else.”

He grabbed his crutches from the floor and swung himself off the bed.

“And is there something else? Pointing to someone else?”

He didn’t reply. Instead, he took his time with his leg brace, which lay next to the armchair beneath the window. To Deborah, there seemed to be countless adjustments he made to it this morning and an endless procedure to be gone through before he was dressed, standing on his feet, and willing to continue their conversation.

Then he said, “You sound worried.”

“China wondered why you...Well, you haven’t seemed to want to meet her. It looks to her as if you’ve got a reason to keep your distance. Do you?”

“Superficially, she’s the logical person for someone to frame for this crime: She and Brouard evidently spent some time together alone, her cloak appears to have been fairly easy for someone to get their hands on, and anyone with access to her bedroom would also have access to her hair and her shoes. But premeditation in murder demands a motive. And any way you look at it, motive is something she didn’t have.”

“Still, the police may think—”

“No. They know they’ve got no motive. That clears the way for us.”

“To find one for someone else?”

“Yes. Why do people premeditate murder? Revenge, jealousy, blackmail, or material gain. That’s where we need to direct our energies now, I dare say.”

“But that ring...Si mon, i f i t’s definitely China’s?”

“We’d better be damn quick about our work.”





Chapter 17


Margaret Chamberlain maintained a death grip on the steering wheel as she drove back to Le Reposoir. The death grip kept her in focus, aware only of the effort required to keep the appropriate degree of pressure in her grasp. This, in turn, allowed her to stay present in the Range Rover so that she could course south along Belle Greve Bay without thinking about her encounter with what went for the Fielder family. Finding them had been a simple matter: There were only two Fielder listings in the telephone directory and one of them lived on Alderney. The other was domiciled in Rue des Lierres in an area between St. Peter Port and St. Sampson. Finding this on the map had presented little difficulty. Finding it in reality had, however, been another matter, as this part of town—called the Bouet—was as ill-marked as it was ill-featured. The Bouet turned out to be an area that reminded Margaret a little too much of her distant past as one of six children in a family where ends not only didn’t meet, they didn’t even acknowledge the existence of each other. In the Bouet lived the fringe dwellers of the island’s society, and their homes looked like the homes of such people in every town in England. Here were hideous terraced houses with narrow front doors, aluminium windows, and siding stained by rust. Overfilled rubbish bags took the place of shrubbery, and instead of flowerbeds, what few lawns there were had their patchy expanses broken up by debris. As Margaret got out of her car along the street, two cats hissed at each other over possession of a half-eaten pork pie that lay in the gutter. A dog rooted in an overturned dustbin. Gulls fed upon the remains of a loaf of bread on a lawn. She shuddered at the sight of all this even as she knew it suggested she would have a distinct advantage in the coming conversation. The Fielders were clearly not in a position to hire a solicitor to explain their rights to them. It should not, she thought, prove a difficult matter to wrest from them Adrian’s rightful due.