A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(159)

“Damn,” St. James murmured, more to himself than to the DCI.

“We’ve got our man.” Le Gallez sounded completely confident of his facts, every bit as if he hadn’t been equally confident that they’d got their woman twenty-four hours earlier.

“How’ve you got it sorted, then?”

Le Gallez used a pencil to gesture to the pictures as he spoke. “How’d it get there, you mean? I figure it like this: He wouldn’t have put the opiate in the Thermos the night before or even earlier that morning. Always the chance that Brouard might rinse it out before he used it for his tea. So he followed him down to the bay. He put the oil in the Thermos while Brouard was swimming.”

“Taking the risk of being seen?”

“What sort of risk was it? It’s not even dawn, so he doesn’t expect anyone to be out and about. In case anyone is, he’s wearing his sister’s cloak. For his part, Brouard’s swimming out in the bay and he’s not paying attention to the beach. No big deal for River to wait till he’s swimming. Then he slips down to the Thermos—he was following Brouard, so he would’ve seen where he left it—and he pours the oil inside. Then he slips away wherever: into the trees, behind a rock, near the snack hut. He waits for Brouard to come out of the water and drink the tea like he does every morning and everyone knows it. Ginkgo and green tea. Puts hair on the chest and more important puts fire in the bollocks, which is what Brouard wants in order to keep the girlfriend happy. River waits for the opiate to do the trick. When it does, he’s on him.”

“And if it hadn’t done the trick on the beach?”

“No matter to him, was it?” Le Gallez shrugged eloquently. “It was still before dawn, and the opiate would take effect somewhere on Brouard’s route home. He’d be able to get to him no matter where it happened. When it happened on the beach, he shoved the stone down his throat and that was it. He reckoned the cause of death would be labeled as choking on a foreign object, and indeed it was. He got rid of the poppyoil bottle by tossing it into the bushes as he trotted home. Didn’t realise that toxicology tests would be run on the body no matter what the cause of death looked like.”

There was sense to this. Killers invariably made some sort of miscalculation somewhere along the line, which was largely how killers got themselves caught. With Cherokee River’s fingerprints on the bottle that had contained the opiate, it made sense that Le Gallez would turn his sights on him. But all the other details in the case remained to be explained. St. James chose one of them.

“How do you account for the ring? Are his prints on it as well?”

Le Gallez shook his head. “Couldn’t get a decent print from it. A partial of a partial, but that was it.”

“Then?”

“He would’ve taken it with him. He may even have intended to shove it down Brouard’s throat instead of the stone. The stone muddied the waters for us for a bit, and that would’ve been nice, to his way of thinking. How blatant would he want it to be that his sister was the killer after all?

He wouldn’t’ve wanted to hand it to us. He would’ve wanted us to work a little to reach the conclusion.”

St. James considered all this. It was reasonable enough—despite his wife’s loyalties to the River siblings—but there was something else that Le Gallez wasn’t talking about in his haste to close the case without pinning the crime on a fellow islander. He said, “You do see, I expect, that what applies to Cherokee River applies to others as well. And there are others who at least have motives for wanting Brouard dead.” He didn’t wait for Le Gallez to argue, hastening on to say, “Henry Moullin has a fairy wheel hanging among his keys and a dream to be a glass artist—at Brouard’s urging—that apparently came to nothing. Bertrand Debiere’s apparently in debt because he assumed he’d get the commission for Brouard’s museum. And as to the museum itself—”

Le Gallez cut in with a flick of his hand. “Moullin and Brouard were fast friends. Had been for years. Worked together to change the old Thibeault Manor to Le Reposoir. No doubt Henry gave him the stone at one time or another as a token of friendship. Way of saying, ‘You’re one of us now, my man.’ As for Debiere, I can’t see Nobby killing the very man whose mind he hoped to change, can you?”

“Nobby?”

“Bertrand.” Le Gallez had the grace to look embarrassed. “Nickname. We were at school together.”

Which likely made Debiere even less a potential candidate for murderer in the eye of the DCI than he would have been merely as a Guernseyman. St. James sought a way to prise open the inspector’s mind, if only a crack. “But why? What motive could Cherokee River have?

What motive could his sister have had when she was your principal suspect?”

“Brouard’s trip to California. Those months ago. River laid his plan then.”

“Why?”

Le Gallez lost patience. “Look, man, I don’t know,” he said hotly. “I don’t need to know. I just need to find Brouard’s killer and I’ve done it. Right, I fingered the sister first, but I fingered her on the evidence he planted. Just like I’m fingering him on the evidence now.”

“Yet someone else could have planted all of it.”

“Who? Why?” Le Gallez hopped off his desk and advanced on St. James rather more aggressively than the moment warranted, and St. James knew he was inches away from being tossed unceremoniously from the station.