A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(226)

His arms cradled his head and his face was turned away from her. But she knew that it was Simon because she would always know this one man anywhere on earth that she came upon him. She would know the shape and the size of him, the way his hair curled on the back of his neck, the way his shoulder blades flattened to smooth, strong planes when he lifted his arms to pillow his head.

What she noticed was that his shirt was soiled. Copper stains smeared its collar as if he’d badly cut himself shaving and hastily daubed away the blood by means of his shirt. Streaks of dirt ran down the sleeve closer to her and more copper smudges made seeping marks on the cuffs. She could see no more of him and she lacked the strength to awaken him. All she found she could do was to move her fingers an inch nearer to him. But that was enough.

Simon raised his head. He looked like a miracle to her. He spoke but she couldn’t hear him above the sound in her skull, so she shook her head, tried to talk, and found she couldn’t do that either because her throat was so parched and her lips and her tongue seemed to stick to her teeth. Simon reached for something on the table by the bed. He raised her slightly and brought a plastic glass to her lips. A straw bent from the glass and Simon gently eased it into her mouth. She drew in the water gratefully, finding it tepid but not caring. As she drank, she felt him come closer to her. She felt him trembling, and she thought the water would surely spill. She tried to steady his hand, but he stopped her. He brought her hand to his cheek and her fingers to his mouth. He bent to her and pressed his own cheek to the top of her head.

Deborah had survived, he’d been told, because she’d either never gone into the inner chamber where the explosion occurred or because she’d managed to get herself out of there and into the larger chamber seconds before the grenade went off. And it would have been a hand grenade, the police reported. There was evidence aplenty to verify that. As to the other woman...One did not deliberately detonate a handheld bomb packed with TNT and live to talk about it. And it had been a deliberate detonation, the police surmised. There was no other real explanation for the explosion.

“Lucky it happened in the mound,” St. James had been told first by the police and then by two of the doctors who had seen his wife at Princess Elizabeth Hospital. “That sort of explosion would have brought anything else down on top of them. She would’ve been crushed...i f not blown to Timbuktu. She got lucky. Everyone got lucky. A modern explosive would’ve taken out the mound and the paddock as well. How the hell’d that woman get her hands on a grenade, though? That’s the real question.”

But only one of the real questions, St. James thought. The others all began with why. That China River had returned to the dolmen to fetch the painting she’d placed there was not in doubt. That she’d somehow come to know the painting had been hidden for transport to Guernsey among the architectural drawings was also clear. That she’d planned and carried out the crime based on what she’d learned about Guy Brouard’s habits were two facts that they could piece together from the interviews they’d conducted with the principals involved in the case. But the why of it all remained a mystery at first. Why steal a painting she could not hope to sell on the open market, but only to a private collector for a great deal less than it was worth...and only if she could find a collector who was willing to operate outside the law? Why plant evidence against herself on the slim chance that the police would find a bottle with her brother’s fingerprints on it, a bottle containing traces of the opiate that had drugged the victim? And why plant that piece of evidence against her own brother?

That most of all.

And then there was how. How had she come to get her hands on that fairy wheel that she’d used to choke Brouard? Had he shown it to her? Had she known he carried it? Had she planned to use it? Or had that merely been a moment of inspiration during which she decided to muddy the waters by using, instead of the ring she’d brought with her to the bay, something she found that morning in the pocket of his discarded clothes?

Some of these questions St. James hoped that his wife would be able to answer in time. Others, he knew, they could never answer. Deborah’s hearing would return, he was told. It might or might not have been permanently damaged by her proximity to the explosion, but they would ascertain that over time. She’d sustained a severe concussion, the complete recovery from which would take a number of months. Doubtless she would experience some memory loss about the events immediately surrounding the detonation of the hand grenade. But he wasn’t to press her about those events. She would recall what she could when she could, if ever.

He phoned her father hourly with reports. When every chance of danger was passed, he spoke to Deborah about what had happened. He spoke directly into her ear, his voice low and his hand covering hers. The dressings were gone from the cuts on her face, but the stitches from a gash on her jaw were still to be removed. Her bruises were frightening to behold, but she was restless. She wanted to go home. Home to her dad, to her photography, to their dog and their cat, to Cheyne Row, to London and all that was most familiar to her.

She said, “China’s dead, isn’t she?” in a voice that was still uncertain of its own strength. “Tell me. I think I can hear if you get close enough.”

Which was where he wanted to be anyway. So he eased himself onto the hospital bed next to her and he told her what had happened as far as he knew it. He told her all that he’d withheld from her as well. And he admitted that he’d withheld that information in part to punish her for going her own way with the skull-and-crossed-bones ring and in part for the dressing-down he himself had received from Le Gallez about that ring. He told her that once he’d spoken to Guy Brouard’s American attorney and learned that the person who’d brought the architectural plans to him was not Cherokee River but a black Rastafarian, he’d managed to persuade Le Gallez to lay a trap to catch the killer. It had to be one of them, so release both of them, he’d suggested to the DCI. Let them both go free, with the proviso that they must leave the island by the first transport available to them in the morning. If this killing is about the painting that was found in the dolmen, the killer will have to fetch it before dawn...i f the killer is one of the Rivers.