A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(186)

He smiled sardonically, actually enjoying the spectacle of his mother back-pedaling from what she’d only just claimed. He let her dangle in the wind of her declarations for a moment longer before he interceded. He said to the others, “I don’t know about anyone in England, but Dad was having it off with someone on the island. I don’t know who it was, but my aunt knows.”

“She told you?”

“I heard them arguing about it. All I can tell you is it’s someone young, because Ruth threatened to tell her father. She said if that’s the only way she could stop Dad from carrying on with a girl, she’d do it.” He smiled without humour and added, “He was a piece of work, my dad. I’m not surprised someone finally killed him.”

Margaret closed her eyes, fervently wished something would transport her from the room, and cursed her son.





Chapter 25


St. James and his wife didn’t have to go in search of Ruth Brouard. She found them herself. She came to the drawing room, fairly glowing excitement. She said, “Mr. St. James, what very good fortune. I phoned your hotel, and they said you’d come here.” She ignored her sister-in-law and her nephew, asking St. James to come with her, please, because everything was suddenly crystal clear and she meant him to know all about it straightaway.

“Shall I...?” Deborah asked with a nod towards the outside of the house.

She was to come as well, Ruth told her when she learned her identity. Margaret Chamberlain protested, saying, “What’s this all about, Ruth?

If it’s to do with Adrian’s inheritance—”

But Ruth continued to ignore her, going so far as to shut the door as she was speaking and then saying to St. James, “You’ll have to forgive Margaret. She’s rather...” She shrugged meaningfully, going on to add,

“Do come with me. I’m in Guy’s study.”

Once there, she wasted no time with preambles. “I know what he did with the money,” she told them. “Here. Look. See for yourself.”

Across her brother’s desk, St. James saw, an oil painting lay. It was some twenty-four inches high and eighteen inches wide, and it was weighted on its ends by volumes from the bookshelves. Ruth touched it tentatively, as if it were a devotional object. She said, “Guy finally brought it home.”

“What is it?” Deborah asked, standing near to Ruth and gazing down at the picture.

“The pretty lady with the book and the quill,” Ruth said. “She belonged to my grandfather. To his father before him, to his father as well, and to every father before that as far as I know. She was meant to be Guy’s eventually. And I expect he spent all that money to find her. There’s nothi ng else...” Her voi ce altered, and St. James raised his head from the painting to see that behind her round-framed spectacles Ruth Brouard’s eyes were full. “It’s all there’s left now, of them. You see.”

She removed her glasses and, wiping her eyes on the sleeve of her heavy sweater, she went to a table that stood between two armchairs at one end of the room. There, she picked up a photograph and returned to them with it. “Here it is,” she said. “You can see it in the picture. Maman gave this to us the night we left because everyone was in it. You can see them there. Grandpère, Grandmère, Tante Esther, Tante Becca, their brandnew husbands, our parents, us. She said, ‘Gardez-la . . .’ ” Ruth seemed to realise she’d gone to another place and time. She switched back to English.

“I beg your pardon. She said, ‘Keep this till we meet again, so you’ll know us when you see us.’ We didn’t know that would never happen. And look. In the photo. There she is above the sideboard. The pretty lady with the book and the quill, where she always was. See the little figures behind her in the distance...all of them busy building that church. Some huge gothic thing that took one hundred years to complete and there she is, sitting there so...well, so serenely. As if she knows something about that church that the rest of us will never be privy to.” Ruth smiled down at the painting fondly although her eyes glistened. “Très cher frère,” she murmured. “Tu n’as jamais oublié.”

St. James had joined Deborah in looking at the photograph as Ruth Brouard spoke. He saw that, indeed, the painting before them on the desk was the same painting that was in the picture, and the photograph itself was the one he’d noticed the last time he was in this room. In it, an extended family gathered round a table for Passover dinner. They all smiled happily at the camera, at peace with a world that would soon destroy them.

“What happened to the painting?”

“We never knew,” Ruth said. “We could only surmise. When the war ended, we waited. We thought for a time that they’d come for us, our parents. We didn’t know, you see. Not at first. Not for quite some time because we kept hoping...Well, children do that, don’t they? It was only later that we found out.”

“That they’d died,” Deborah murmured.

“That they’d died,” Ruth said. “They’d remained in Paris too long. They fled to the south thinking they’d be safe there, and that was the last we heard from them. They’d gone to Lavaurette. But there was no protection from the Vichy, was there? They betrayed the Jews when it was asked of them. They were worse than the Nazis, actually, because after all the Jews were French, the Vichy’s own people.” She reached for the photograph that St. James still held, and she gazed at it as she continued to talk.