A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(125)

“Be finished, then.”

Margaret advanced on her son, grateful for the fact that he’d inherited his father’s height and not her own. She had two inches over him, nearly three. She used them now. “You’re impossible. You defeat yourself. Do you have any idea how unappealing that is? How it makes a woman feel?”

He went to the chest of drawers, where he’d laid a packet of Benson and Hedges. He shook one out and lit it. He drew in on it deeply and said nothing for a moment. The indolence of his movements was aggravation incarnate.

“Adrian!” Margaret heard herself shriek and knew the horror of sounding like her mother: that charwoman’s voice tinctured with the tones of hopelessness and fear, both of which had to be hidden by calling them rage. “Answer me, damn you. I won’t accept this. I’ve come to Guernsey to ensure your future and I have no intention of standing here and allowing you to treat me like—”

“What?” He swung round to her. “Like what? Like a piece of furniture? Moved this way and that. Like you treat me?”

“I do not—”

“D’you think I don’t know what this is all about? What it’s always been about? What you want. What you have planned.”

“How can you say that? I’ve worked. I’ve slaved. I’ve organised. I’ve arranged. More than half my life, I’ve lived to make yours into something you can be proud of. To make you the equal of your brothers and your sisters. To make you a man. ”

“Don’t make me laugh. You’ve worked to make me good for nothing, and now that I am, you’re working to get me out of your hair. You think I can’t see it? You think I don’t know it? That’s what this is all about. Has been since you stepped off the plane.”

“That’s not true. Worse, it’s vicious, ungrateful, and designed to—”

“No. Let’s make sure we’re on the same page in all of this if you want me to be part of acquiring what I’m intended to acquire. You want me to have that money so you can be rid of me. ‘No more excuses, Adrian. You’re on your own.’ ”

“That isn’t true.”

“Don’t you think I know what a loser I am? What an embarrassment to have around?”

“Don’t you say that about yourself. Don’t you ever say it!”

“With a fortune in my hands, the excuses are gone. I’m out of your house and out of your life. I even have enough money to put myself away in the mad house if it comes down to that.”

“I want you to have what you deserve. God in heaven, can’t you see that?”

“I see it,” he replied. “Believe me. I see. But what makes you think I don’t have what I deserve? Already, Mother. Now. Already.”

“You’re his son.”

“Yes. That’s the point. His son.”

Adrian stared at her long and hard. It came to Margaret that he was sending her a message, and she could feel its intensity in the gaze if not in the words. It seemed to her all at once as if they’d become strangers to each other, two people having pasts that were unrelated to this present moment in which their lives had intersected by chance.

But there was safety in feeling that strangeness and distance. Anything else ran the risk of encouraging the unthinkable to invade her thoughts. Margaret said calmly, “Get dressed, Adrian. We’re going to town. We’ve a solicitor to hire and little time to waste.”

“I sleepwalk,” he said, and at last he sounded at least marginally broken. “I do all sorts of things.”

“That’s certainly not something we need discuss now.”

St. James and Deborah separated after their conversation in the hotel room. She would seek out the possible existence of another German ring like the one they’d found on the beach. He would seek out the beneficiaries of Guy Brouard’s will. Their objectives were essentially the same—an attempt to uncover a motive behind the murder—but their approaches would be different.

Having admitted to himself that the clear signs of premeditation strongly pointed to anyone but the River siblings as complicit in the murder, St. James offered his blessing on Cherokee’s accompanying Deborah to talk to Frank Ouseley about his collection of wartime memorabilia. When it came down to it, she was safer with a man if she found herself interviewing a murderer. For his part, he would go alone, seeking out the individuals most affected by Guy Brouard’s will.

He began with a trip to La Corbière, where he found the Moullin household on a bend in one of the narrow lanes that snaked across the island between skeletal hedgerows and tall earthen banks knotted with ivy and thick sea grasses. He knew only the general area that the Moullins lived in —La Corbière itself—but it was no difficult matter to locate them exactly. He stopped at a large yellow farmhouse just outside the tiny hamlet and made an enquiry of a woman optimistically hanging laundry in the misty air. She said, “Oh, it’s the Shell House you’re wanting, dearie,” and she pointed vaguely towards the east. Follow the road past the turn to the sea, she informed him. He couldn’t miss it.

That proved to be the case.

St. James stood on the drive and surveyed the grounds of the Moullin residence for a moment before proceeding farther. He frowned at the curious sight of it: a wreckage of shells and wire and concrete where apparently had once existed a fanciful garden. A few objects remained to illustrate what the place had been like. A shell-formed wishing well stood untouched beneath an enormous sweet chestnut, and a whimsical shelland-concrete chaise longue held a shell pillow on which the words DaddySays... had been fashioned in bits of broken indigo glass. Everything else had been reduced to rubble. It looked as if a hurricane of sledgehammers had slammed into the grounds surrounding the small, squat house. To one side of this building stood a barn, and music issued from inside: Frank Sinatra by the sound of it, crooning a pop tune in Italian. St. James headed in this direction. The barn door hung partially open, and he could see that its interior was whitewashed and lit by rows of fluorescent tubes that dangled from the ceiling.