A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(153)

“Cherokee didn’t know about the ring. He’d never seen it. He was as surprised as I when we took it to the antiques shop and were told—”

“Deborah,” China cut in from the sofa. They turned to her. She looked markedly hesitant. And then just as remarkedly regretful. “I...”

She seemed to reach inside herself for the resolve to continue. “Deborah, I showed that ring to Cherokee right when I bought it.”

St. James said to his wife, “Are you sure he didn’t—”

“Debs didn’t know. I didn’t say. I didn’t want to because when she showed me the ring—here in the apartment—Cherokee didn’t say a word. He didn’t act like he even recognised it. I couldn’t figure out...you know, why he...” Nervously, she bit at the cuticle of her thumbnail. “He didn’t say...And I didn’t thi nk...”

“They took his belongings as well,” Deborah said to St. James. “He had a duffel and a rucksack. They wanted them especially. There were two of them—two constables, I mean—and they said, ‘This is it? This is everything you’ve brought with you?’ After they took him, they came back and had a look through all the cupboards. Under the furniture as well. And through the rubbish.”

St. James nodded. He said to China, “I’ll have a word with DCI Le Gallez directly.”

China said, “Someone had it planned from the beginning. Find two dumb Americans, two who’ve never been out of the country, who’ll probably never have enough money to even get out of California unless they hitchhike. Offer them a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It’ll sound so good, too good to be true, and they’ll jump at the chance. And then we’ll have them.” Her voice quavered. “We’ve been set up. First me. Now him. They’re going to say we planned it together before we ever left home. And how can we prove that we didn’t? That we didn’t even know these people. Not one of them. How can we prove it?”

St. James was loath to say what needed to be said to Deborah’s friend. There was, indeed, a bizarre comfort for her in thinking that she and her brother were now in the quicksand together. But the truth of the matter lay in what two witnesses had seen on the morning of the murder and in what signs had been left at the crime scene. The additional truth lay in who had now been arrested and why.

He said, “I’m afraid it’s fairly clear there was only one killer, China. One person was seen following Brouard to the bay and one set of footprints was next to his body.”

The lights were dim in the room, but he saw China swallow. “Then it didn’t matter which one of us got accused. Me or him. But they definitely needed two of us here to double the chance that one of us would be fingered. It was all planned out, set up from the first. You see that, don’t you?”

St. James was silent. He did see that someone had thought everything through. He did see that the crime had not been the work of a single moment. But he also saw that, as far as he knew right now, only four people had possessed the information that two Americans—two potential fallguys for a murder—would be traveling to Guernsey to make a delivery to Guy Brouard: Brouard himself, the lawyer he’d employed in California, and the River siblings. With Brouard dead and the lawyer accounted for, that left only the Rivers to have planned out the murder. One of the Rivers.

He said carefully, “The difficulty is that apparently no one knew you were coming.”

“Someone must have. Because the party was arranged...the museum party...”

“Yes. I see that. But Brouard appears to have led a number of people to believe that the design he’d chosen was going to be Bertrand Debiere’s. That tells us that your arrival—your presence at Le Reposoir— was something of a surprise to everyone but Brouard himself.”

“He must have told someone. Everyone confides in someone else. What about Frank Ouseley? They were good friends. Or Ruth? Wouldn’t he have told his own sister?”

“It doesn’t appear that way. And even if he had done, she had no reason to—”

“Like we did ?” China’s voice raised. “Come on. He told someone we were coming. If not Frank or Ruth...Someone knew. I’m telling you. Someone knew.”

Deborah said to St. James, “He might have told Mrs. Abbott. Ana?s. The woman he was involved with.”

“And she could have passed the word along,” China said. “Anyone could have known from that point.”

St. James had to admit that this was possible. He had to admit it was even likely. The problem was, of course, that Brouard’s having told anyone about the eventual arrival of the Rivers begged the question of a crucial detail that still needed sorting out: the apocryphal nature of the architectural plans. Brouard had presented the elevation water colour as the genuine article, the future wartime museum, when he’d known all along that it was nothing of the sort. So if he’d told someone else that the Rivers were bringing plans from California, had he also told that person the plans were phony?

“We do need to speak with Ana?s, my love,” Deborah urged. “Her son as well. He was...He was definitely in a state, Simon.”

“You see?” China said. “There’re others, and one of them knew we were coming. One of them planned things from there. And we’ve got to find that person, Simon. Because no way are the cops about to do it.”