A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(219)

The dolmen was much as Deborah had described it to St. James. It rose in the paddock’s centre, as if several acres of land had been walled off generations in the past with the express intention of protecting it. To the unschooled, it might have appeared to be an inexplicable knoll plopped down without reason in the middle of a field long gone to seed. But to someone with an eye for indications of prehistory, it would have marked a spot worthy of excavation.

Access round it was by means of a narrow course hacked away from the surrounding growth. It skirted its circumference at a width of something less than two feet, and the men followed this path till they came to the thick wooden door with its combination lock hanging from a hasp. Here Le Gallez stopped, shining his pocket torch again, this time on the lock. From there he shone it upon the bracken and the brambles. “No easy cover,” he said quietly.

There was truth to that. If they were to lie in wait for their killer, it wasn’t going to be easy. On the other hand, they wouldn’t need to be any great distance from the dolmen since the growth of plants was so thick that it supplied plenty of cover.

“Hughes, Sebastian, Hazell,” Le Gallez said with a nod towards the vegetation. “See to it. You’ve got five minutes. I want access without visibility. And quiet, for the love of God. You break a leg, you keep it to yourself. Hawthorne, you’re by the wall. Anyone comes over, I’ve got my pager on vibrate. The rest of you, mobiles off, pagers off, radios off. No one talks, no one sneezes, no one burps, no one farts. We cock this up, we’re back to square one and I’m not a happy man. Got it? Go.”

Their advantage, St. James knew, was the hour itself. For although it seemed to be darkest night, it was not yet late. There was little chance that their killer would venture to the dolmen prior to midnight. There was too great a risk of coming upon someone else on the estate any earlier than that and too few excuses one could make for stumbling round the grounds of Le Reposoir without aid of torchlight after dark.



So it was with surprise that St. James heard Le Gallez stifle a curse and say tersely not fifteen minutes later, “Hawthorne’s got someone on the perimeter. Shite. Damn it all to hell, ” and to the constables who were still hacking at the brambles some fifteen feet from the wooden door, “I said five minutes, you lot. We’re coming through.”

He led the way and St. James followed. Le Gallez’s men had managed to establish a rough blind the size of a dog crate in the undergrowth. It was suitable for two watchers. Five squeezed into it.

Whoever was coming did so quickly, no hesitation marking a passage over the wall and along the path. In very short order a dark figure moved against the additional darkness. Only an elongating shadow against the bracken that grew on the mound marked a progress that was defined by the certainty of someone’s having been at this spot before. Then a voice spoke quietly, firmly, and unmistakably. “Simon. Where are you?”

“What the living hell...” Le Gallez muttered.

“I know you’re here and I’m not going away,” Deborah said clearly. St. James breathed out, half curse and half sigh. He should have considered this. He said to Le Gallez, “She’s worked it out.”

“Tell me something to surprise me,” the DCI commented. “Get her the hell out of here.”

“That,” St. James said, “is not going to be easy.” He edged past Le Gallez and the constables. He worked his way back to the dolmen, saying,

“Here, Deborah.”

She swung round in his direction. She said simply, “You lied to me.”

He didn’t reply till he reached her. He could see her face, ghostlike in the darkness. Her eyes were large and dark, and he was reminded at the worst possible time of those same eyes of the child she had been at her mother’s funeral nearly two decades earlier, confused but seeking someone to trust. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t see the alternative.”

“I want to know—”

“This isn’t the place. You’ve got to go. Le Gallez’s stretched a point letting me be here. He isn’t about to stretch it further for you.”

“No,” she said. “I know what you think. I’m going to stay to see you proved wrong.”

“This isn’t about right or wrong,” he told her.

“Of course,” she said. “It never is for you. It’s just about the facts and how you interpret them. To hell with anyone who interprets them differently. But I know these people. You don’t. You never have. You see them only through—”

“You’re jumping to conclusions, Deborah. We haven’t the time to argue. There’s too much risk. You’ve got to leave.”

“You’re going to have to carry me out of here, then.” He could hear the maddening tone of finality in her voice. “You should have thought of that in advance. ‘What do I do if darling Deb discovers I’m not toddling off to the police station after all?’ ”

“Deborah, for the love of God—”

“What in Christ’s sake is going on?”

Le Gallez made the demand from just behind St. James. He advanced on Deborah with the best intention of intimidating her. St. James hated to have to admit openly to someone he barely knew that he was not—and had never been, God help him—the master of this willful red-head. In another world at another time, a man might have had some sort of power over a woman like Deborah. But they, unfortunately, did not live in that long-ago world where women became the property of their men by virtue of having married them. He said,