A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(223)

“Are you saying...You can’t mean you’ve done all this—what you’ve done...This can’t be about—”

“You? Don’t flatter yourself. It’s time for my brother to pay the piper.”

Deborah considered this. She recalled what Cherokee had told her that very first night he’d come to them in London. She said, “You didn’t want to come with him to Guernsey, not at first.”

“Not till I decided I could use the trip to make him pay,” China acknowledged. “I wasn’t sure when and I wasn’t sure how, but I knew that something would come up sometime. I figured it would be dope in his suitcase when we were going through customs. We planned on Amsterdam, so I’d pick the stuff up there. That would’ve been nice. Not foolproof, but a definite possibility. Or maybe a weapon. Or explosives in the carry-on. Or something. The point is I didn’t care what it was. I only knew I’d find it if I kept my eyes open. And when we got here to LeReposoir and he showed me...well, what he showed me...” Behind the torch, she offered a ghostlike smile. “There it was,” she said. “Too good to pass up.”

“Cherokee showed you the painting?”

“Ah,” China said. “So you’re the one. You and Simon the wonderhusband, I bet. Hell, no, Debs. Cherokee didn’t have a clue he was carrying that painting. Neither did I. Not till Guy showed it to me. Come into the study for a nightcap, my lovely. Let me show you something that’s bound to impress you more than everything else I’ve shown you so far or talked about so far or done so far to try to work my way into your panties because that’s what I do and that’s what you want and I can tell that much by looking at you. And even if you don’t, there’s no loss in trying, is there, because I’m rich and you’re not and rich guys don’t have to be anything other than rich to get what they want from women and you know that, Debs, more than anyone, don’t you. Only this time it wasn’t for fifty dollars and a surfboard and the payment didn’t go to my brother. It was like killing a dozen birds, not just two. So I f*cked him right here when he showed me this place because that’s what he wanted, that’s why he brought me, that’s why he called me special — the * — that’s why he lit the candle and patted this cot and said What d’you think of my hideaway?

Whisper what you think. Come close. Let me touch you. I can make you feel and you can make me feel and the light is gentle against our skin, isn’t it, and it glows to gold where we need to be touched. Like on this place and that place and God I do think you may be the one at last, my dear. So I did it with him, Deborah, and believe me, he liked it, just like Matt liked it, and this is where I put the painting when I took it the night before I killed him.”

“Oh God,” Deborah said.

“God had nothing to do with it. Not then. Not now. Not ever. Not in my life. Maybe in yours, but not in mine. And you know, that’s not fair. It’s never been fair. I’m as good as you and as good as anyone and I deserve better than what I’ve been handed.”

“So you took the painting? Do you know what it is?”

“I do read the papers,” China said. “They’re not much in So-Cal and they’re worse in Santa Barbara. But the big stories...? Yeah. They cover the big ones.”

“But what were you going to do with it?”

“I didn’t know. It was an afterthought, really. Not part of the cake, just the frosting. I knew where it was in the study. He wasn’t doing much to hide it away. So I took it. I put it in Guy’s special place. I’d come back later for it. I knew it’d be safe.”

“But anyone could have stumbled in here and found it,” Deborah said.

“Once they got inside the dolmen, which was only a matter of cutting off the lock if they didn’t know the combination. They’d come in with a light, they’d see it, they’d—”

“How?”

“Because it was in plain sight if you went beyond the altar. You couldn’t miss it.”

“That’s where you found it?”

“Not me...Paul...Guy Brouard’s friend...The boy...”

“Ah,” China said. “So he’s who I have to thank.”

“For what?”

“For replacing it with this.” China moved into the light the hand that wasn’t holding the torch. Deborah saw it was curled round an object shaped like a small pineapple. She formed the question what is it even as her mind made the leap to assimilate what her eyes were seeing. Outside the dolmen, Le Gallez said to St. James, “I’ll give her another two minutes. That’s it.”

St. James was still attempting to digest the fact that China River and not her brother had appeared at the dolmen. While he’d said to Deborah that he’d known it would have to be one of the siblings—for that was the only reasonable explanation for all that had happened, from the ring on the beach to the bottle in the field—he’d concluded from the first that it would be the brother. And this despite not having had the moral fortitude to admit to that conclusion openly, even to himself. It wasn’t so much that murder was a crime he attributed to men more than to women. It was because at an atavistic level he didn’t want to lay claim to, he wanted Cherokee River out of the way and had wanted him thus from the moment the American had appeared on their doorstep in London, whole and affable and calling his wife Debs.