A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(128)

“Old men have fancied young girls before.”

“You’re twisting my words.”

“Then untwist them for me.”

Moullin took a moment. He stepped away. He looked across the room to his creative glass pieces. “Like I said. He had fancies. Something caught his eye, he shook fairy dust on it. He made it feel special. Then something else caught his eye and he moved the fairy dust over to that. It’s the way he was.”

“Fairy dust being money?”

Moullin shook his head. “Not always.”

“Then what?”

“Belief,” he said.

“What sort of belief?”

“Belief in yourself. He was good that way. Problem was, you started thinking there might be something to his belief if you got lucky.”

“Like money.”

“A promise. Like someone was saying, Here’s how I can help you if you work hard enough but you’ve got to do that first—the hard work itself—and then we’ll see what we will see. Only no one ever said it, did they, not exactly. But somehow the thought got planted in your mind.”

“In yours as well?”

On a sigh, Moullin said, “In mine as well.”

St. James considered what he’d learned about Guy Brouard, about the secrets he kept, about his plans for the future, about what each individual had apparently believed about the man himself and about those plans. Perhaps, St. James thought, these aspects of the dead man—which might otherwise have been merely reflections of a wealthy entrepreneur’s caprice—were instead symptoms of larger and more injurious behaviour: a bizarre power game. In this game, an influential man no longer at the helm of a successful business retained a form of control over individuals, with the exercise of that control being the ultimate objective of the game. People became chess pieces and the board was their lives. And the principal player was Guy Brouard.

Would that be enough to drive someone to kill?

St. James supposed that the answer to that question lay in what each person actually did as a result of Brouard’s professed belief in him. He glanced round the barn once more and saw some of the answer in the glass pieces that were diligently cared for and the furnace and blowing pipes that were not. “I expect he made you believe in yourself as an artist,” he noted.

“Is that what happened? Did he encourage you to live your dream?”

Moullin abruptly began walking towards the door of the barn, where he snapped off the lights and stood silhouetted by the day outside. He was a hulking figure there, described not only by the bulky clothes he wore but also by his bull-like strength. St. James reckoned that he’d had little trouble destroying his daughters’ handiwork in the garden.

He followed him. Outside, Moullin shoved the barn door closed and padlocked it through a thick metal hasp. He said, “Making people think larger than what they were was what he did. If they chose to take steps they might’ve not taken without him coaxing them...Well, I s’pose that’s just their own affair. No skin off anyone else’s arse, is it, if someone extends himself and takes a risk.”

“People generally don’t extend themselves without some idea of the venture’s success,” St. James said.

Henry Moullin looked over to the garden where the smashed shells dusted the lawn like snow. “He was good at ideas. Having them and giving them. The rest of us...we were good at belief.”

“Did you know about the terms of Mr. Brouard’s will?” St. James asked. “Did your daughter know?”

“Did we kill him, you mean? Quick to douse his lights before he changed his mind?” Moullin dug his hand into his pocket. He brought out a heavy-looking set of keys. He began to walk along the drive towards the house, crunching through the gravel and the shells. James walked at his side, not because he expected Moullin to expatiate on the topic he himself had brought up but because he’d caught a glimpse of something among the man’s keys and he wanted to make sure it was what he thought it was.

“The will,” he said. “Did you know about its terms?”

Moullin didn’t reply till he’d reached the front porch and had inserted his key in the door’s deadbolt lock. He turned to reply.

“We didn’t know a thing about anyone’s will,” Moullin said. “Good day to you.”

He turned back to the door and let himself inside, and the lock on the door snapped smartly behind him. But St. James had seen what he wanted to see. A small pierced stone hung from the ring holding Henry Moullin’s keys.

St. James stepped away from the house. He wasn’t such a fool as to think he’d heard all there was to hear from Henry Moullin, but he knew he’d taken matters as far as he could just then. Still, he stood for a moment on his way back down the drive and considered the Shell House: its curtains drawn against the daylight, its door locked, its garden ruined. He pondered what it meant to have fancies. He dwelled on the influence it gave one person to be privy to another person’s dreams. As he stood there, not particularly focused on anything, movement from the house caught his eye. He sought it out and saw it at a small window.

Inside the house, a figure at the glass flicked the curtains into place. But not before St. James caught a glimpse of fair hair and saw a gauzy shape fade from view. In other circumstances he might have thought he was looking at a ghost. But the unmistakable body of a female very much corporeal was backlit briefly by a light within the room.