A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(174)

Deborah and China had a bit of trouble finding Cynthia Moullin’s home in La Corbière. They’d been told that it was commonly called the Shell House and that they wouldn’t be able to miss it despite its being on a lane the approximate width of a bicycle tyre, which was itself the offshoot of another lane that wound between banks and hedges. It was on their third try when they finally saw a post box done up in oyster shells that they decided they might well have found the spot they were looking for. So Deborah pulled their car into the drive, which allowed them to note a vast wreckage of more shells in the garden.

“The house formerly known as Shell,” Deborah murmured. “No wonder we didn’t see it at first.”

The place looked deserted: no other car in the drive, a closed-up barn, curtains drawn tight against diamond-paned windows. But as they climbed out of the car onto the shell-strewn driveway, they noted a young woman crouched at the far side of what was left of a fanciful garden. She embraced the top of a small shell-crusted concrete wishing well, with her blonde head resting upon its rim. She looked rather like a statue of Viola after the shipwreck, and she didn’t move as Deborah and China approached her.

She did speak, however, saying, “Go away. I don’t want to see you.

I’ve phoned Gran and she says I can come to Alderney. She wants me there, and I mean to go.”

“Are you Cynthia Moullin?” Deborah asked the girl.

She raised her head, startled. She looked from China to Deborah as if attempting to make out who they were. Then she looked beyond them, perhaps to see if they were accompanied by anyone else. There being no one with them, her body slumped. Her face settled back to its expression of despair.

“I thought you were Dad,” she said dully, and lowered her head to the rim of the wishing well again. “I want to be dead.” She went back to clutching the sides of the well as if she could force her will upon her body.

“I know the feeling,” China said.

“No one knows the feeling,” Cynthia rejoined. “No one knows because it’s mine. He’s glad. He says, ‘You can go about your business now. The milk’s been spilt and what’s over is over.’ But that’s not how it is. He just thinks it’s over. But it never will be. Not for me. I will never forget.”

“D’you mean you and Mr. Brouard being over?” Deborah asked her.

“Because he’s dead?”

The girl looked up again at the mention of Brouard. “Who are you?”

Deborah explained. On their drive from Le Grand Havre China had told her that she’d not heard a whisper about Guy Brouard and anyone called Cynthia Moullin while she herself had been at Le Reposoir. As far as she’d known, Ana?s Abbott was Guy Brouard’s only lover. “They both sure acted like it,” China had said. So it was clear that this girl had been out of the picture prior to the Rivers’ arrival on Guernsey. It remained to be seen why she was out of the picture and at whose instigation. Cynthia’s lips began trembling, curving downwards as Deborah introduced China and herself and laid out the reasons for their visit to the Shell House. By the time everything had been explained to her, the first tears were snaking down her cheeks. She did nothing to stop them. They dripped onto the grey sweatshirt she was wearing, marking it with miniature ovals of her grief.

“I wanted it,” she wept. “He wanted it, too. He never said and I never said but we both knew. He just looked at me this one time before we did it and I knew everything had changed between us. I could see it all in his face—what it would mean to him and everything—and I said to him,

‘Don’t use anything.’ And he smiled that smile which meant he knew what I was thinking and it was okay. It would’ve made everything easier in the end. It would’ve made it logical for us to get married.”

Deborah looked at China. China mouthed her reaction: wow. Deborah said to Cynthia, “You were engaged to Guy Brouard?”

“Would’ve been,” she said. “And now...Guy. Oh Guy.” She wept without embarrassment, like a little girl. “There’s nothing left. If there’d been a baby, I’d’ve had something. But now he’s truly, really dead and I can’t bear it and I hate him. I hate him. I hate him. He says, ‘Go on, now. Get on with your life. You’re free to go about like before,’ and he acts like he didn’t pray for this to happen, like he didn’t think I’d run off if I could and hide till I’d had the baby and it was too late for him to do anything to stop it. He talks about how it would’ve ruined my life, when my life’s ruined now. And he’s glad about that. He’s glad. He’s glad. ” She threw her arms round the wishing well, weeping against its granular rim. They definitely had their question answered, Deborah thought. There could hardly be a cloud in the sky of certainty about Cynthia Moullin’s relationship with Guy Brouard. And the he that she hated had to be her father. Deborah couldn’t imagine who else would have had the concerns she was attributing to the he she so despised. She said, “Cynthia, may we help you into the house? It’s cold out here and as you’ve only that sweatshirt...”

“No! I will never go back in there! I’ll stay out here till I die. I want to.”

“I don’t expect your dad’s going to let that happen.”

“He wants it as much as I do,” she said. “ ‘Hand over the wheel,’ he says to me. ‘You’re not deserving of its protection, girl.’ Like I was supposed to be hurt by that. Like I was supposed to get his meaning. He’s saying ‘You’re no daughter of mine,’ and I’m supposed to hear that without his saying it. But I don’t care a bloody whit, see. I do not care.”