A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(139)

“I suppose that depends on what it is that was taken,” Frank answered.

“Something large, something dangerous...I’d probably know. Something small—”

“Like a ring,” River persisted.

“—I might overlook.” Frank saw the glances of satisfaction they exchanged. He said, “But see here, why is this important?”

“Fielder, Brouard, and Abbott.” Cherokee River spoke to the redhead and not to Frank, and within a brief span of time, the two of them took their leave. They thanked Frank for his help and hurried to their car.

He overheard River saying in reply to something the woman pointed out to him, “They all could have wanted it for different reasons. But China didn’t. Not at all.”

At first Frank thought River was referring to the skull-and-crossedbones ring. But he soon came to realise they were talking about the murder: wanting Guy dead and, perhaps, needing him dead. And beyond that, knowing that death might well be the only answer to imminent peril. He shuddered and wished he had a religion that would give him the answers he needed and the route to walk. He closed the door of the cottage on the very thought of death—untimely, unnecessary, or otherwise—

and he gave his gaze to the mishmash of wartime belongings that had defined his own life and the life of his father over the years. It had long been Look what I’ve got here, Frankie!

And Happy Christmas, Dad. You’ll never guess where I found that one. Or Think of whose hands fired this pistol, son. Think of the hate that pressedthe trigger.

Everything he now had had been amassed as a way to have an unbreakable bond with a giant of a man, a colossus of spirit, dignity, courage, and strength. One couldn’t be like him—couldn’t even hope to be like him, to have lived as he lived, to have survived all that he had survived—

so one shared what he loved and in that way, one made a tiny mark on the ledger on which one’s own father’s mark was and would always be larger than life, bold and proud.

That had begun it, that need to be like, so basic and ingrained that Frank often wondered if sons were somehow programmed from conception to strive for perfect paternal emulation. If that wasn’t possible—Dad too much a Herculean figure, never diminished by infirmity or age—then something else needed to be created, to serve as a son’s irrefutable proof of a worthiness that matched his father’s.

Inside the cottage, Frank observed the concrete testimony of his personal worth. The idea of the wartime collection and the years of searching out everything from bullets to bandages had grown like the abundant vegetation that surrounded the water mill: undisciplined, exuberant, and unrestrained. The seed had been planted in the form of a trunk of goods preserved by Graham’s own mother: ration books, air raid precautions, licences to purchase candles. Seen and fingered through, those belongings had served as inspiration for the great project that had circumscribed Frank Ouseley’s life and exemplified his love for his father. He’d used the amassment of goods as a means of speaking all the words of devotion, admiration, and sheer delight that he had long found impossible to say. The past is always with us, Frankie. It behooves those of us who were part ofit to pass the experience on to them that follows. Else how d’we keep the bad fromextending itself ? Else how d’we tip our hats to the good?

And what better way to preserve that past and to acknowledge it fully

than to educate others not only in the classroom, as he’d done for years, but also through exposure to the relics that defined a time long gone? His father had sheets of G.I.F.T., the occasional pronouncement from the Nazis, a Luftwaffe cap, a party membership pin, a rusty pistol, a gas mask, and a carbide lamp. Frank the boy had held these artifacts in his hands and had pledged himself to the cause of amassment at the age of seven. Let’s start a collection, Dad. D’you want to? It’d be such fun, wouldn’t it?

There’s got to be lots of stuff on the island.

It wasn’t a game, boy. You’re not meant to think it was ever a game. You understand me?

And he did. He did. That was his torment. He understood. It had never been a game.

Frank drove from his head the sound of his father’s voice, but in its place came another sound, an explanation of both the past and the future that arose from nowhere, comprising words whose source he felt he knew well but could not have named: It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul. He whimpered like a child caught in a bad dream, and he forced himself to move into the nightmare.

The filing cabinet, he saw, hadn’t shut completely when he’d shoved it home. He approached it tentatively, like an untried soldier crossing a mine field. When he reached it unscathed, he curled his fingers round the handle of the drawer, half-expecting it to singe his flesh as he pulled. He was finally part of the war he’d longed to serve in with distinguished valour. He finally knew what it was to want to run wildly away from the enemy, to a small safe place he could hide, a place that did not actually exist. By the time she returned to Le Reposoir, Ruth Brouard saw that a batch of police constables had moved from the estate grounds to the lane and were progressing along towards the cut-off that would take them down to the bay. Their work, it seemed, was finished at Le Reposoir itself. Now they would be searching the earthen bank and the hedgerows—and perhaps, even, both the wooded areas and the fields beyond—to locate whatever it was that would prove whatever needed proving about whatever they knew or thought they knew or fancied about the death of her brother. She ignored them. Her time in St. Peter Port had drained her of nearly every ounce of her strength and was threatening to rob her of that which had long sustained her in a life marked by flight and fear and loss. Throughout everything that might have demolished the core of another child—that foundation carefully laid by two loving parents, by grandparents and doting aunts and uncles—she had been able to hold on to who she was. The reason had been Guy and what Guy represented: family and a sense of having come from some place even if that place was gone forever. But now it seemed to Ruth as if the fact of Guy himself as a living, breathing human whom she had known and loved was inches away from being obliterated. If that happened, she didn’t know how or if she could recover. More, she didn’t think she would want to.