A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(202)

“Ah,” Simon murmured. He looked at Deborah.

She knew what he was thinking because she was thinking it herself and she didn’t want to think it. She said, “May I have a look...?” and she took it from him gratefully when he handed the tube over without comment. Inspected, the tube revealed what Deborah thought was a most important detail: The only way into the inner compartment was clearly through the outer shell. For the rings on each end of the tube had been fixed so immovably in place that prising them off would have damaged the entire structure irreversibly. It would also have told anyone else who looked at the tube—namely, the recipient of it if not customs officials—that someone had tampered with it. Yet there was not a single mark round the metal rings on either end. Deborah pointed this out to her husband.

“I see that,” he said. “But you understand what that means, don’t you?”

Deborah felt flustered by the intensity of his scrutiny and the intensity of his question. She said, “What? That whoever brought this to Guernsey didn’t know—”

“Didn’t open it in advance,” he interrupted. “But that doesn’t mean that person didn’t know what was in it, Deborah.”

“How can you say that?” She felt wretched. Her inner voice and all of her instincts were shouting no.

“Because of the dolmen. Its presence in the dolmen. Guy Brouard was killed for that painting, Deborah. It’s the only motive that explains everything else.”

“That’s too convenient,” she countered. “It’s also what we’re meant to believe. No”—as he started to speak—“do listen, Simon. You’re saying they knew in advance what was in it.”

“I’m saying one of them knew, not both.”

“All right. One. But if that’s the case—if they wanted—”

“He. I’m saying he wanted,” her husband put in quietly.

“Yes. Fine. But you’re being single-minded in this. If he—”

“Cherokee River, Deborah.”

“Yes. Cherokee. If he wanted the painting, if he knew it was in the tube, why on earth bring it here to Guernsey? Why not just disappear with it? It doesn’t make sense that he’d bring it all this way and then steal it. There’s another explanation altogether.”

“Which is?”

“I think you know. Guy Brouard opened this package and showed that painting to someone else. And that was the person who killed him.”

Adrian was driving too fast and far too close to the centre of the road. He was passing other cars indiscriminately and slowing for nothing. In short, he was driving with the deliberate intent to unnerve her, but Margaret was determined not to be provoked. Her son was so lacking in subtlety. He wanted her to demand that he drive differently so that he could continue to drive exactly as he pleased and thus prove to her once and for all that she had no suzerainty over him. It was just the sort of thing one would expect of a ten-year-old engaged in a game of I’ll-show-you. Adrian had infuriated her enough already. It took every ounce of selfcontrol Margaret had not to lash out at him. She knew him well enough to understand that he wasn’t about to part with any information which he’d decided to withhold because at this point he would believe that parting with anything was an indication that she had won. Won what, she didn’t know and could not have said. All she had ever wanted for her eldest son was a normal life with a successful career, a wife, and children.



Was that too much to hope and plan for? Margaret certainly didn’t think so. But the last few days had shown her that her every attempt to smooth the way for Adrian, her every intercession on his behalf, the excuses she’d made for everything from sleepwalking to inadequate bowel control were just so many pearls in a food trough frequented by swine. Very well, she thought. So be it. But she would not leave Guernsey till she’d sorted him out about one thing. Evasions were fine. Looked at one way, they could even be construed as a pleasing sign of a long-delayed adulthood. But outright lies were unacceptable, now and always. For lies were the stuff of the terminally weak-minded.

She saw now that Adrian had probably been lying to her most of his life, both by action and by implication. But she’d been so caught up in her efforts to keep him away from the malign influence of his father that she’d accepted his version of every event in which he’d got caught up: from the supposedly accidental drowning of his puppy the night before her second marriage to the recent reason for his engagement’s termination. That he was still lying to her was something about which Margaret had little doubt. And this International Access business spoke of the greatest untruth he’d yet delivered.

So she said, “He sent you that money, didn’t he? Months ago. What I’m wondering is what you spent it on.”

Unsurprisingly, Adrian replied with “What are you talking about?”

He sounded indifferent. No. He actually sounded bored.

“Betting, was it? Card playing? Idiotic stock market gambles? I know there’s no International Access because you haven’t left the house in more than a year for anything other than visiting your father or seeing Carmel. But perhaps that’s it. Did you spend it on Carmel? Did you buy her a car?

Jewellery? A house?”

He rolled his eyes. “Of course. That’s exactly what I did. She agreed to marry me, and it must have been because I laid on the dosh like jelly on toast.”