A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(231)
Deborah knew he was right in at least that one respect: China had put a price tag on things, always feeling herself owed far more than was actually on offer. Deborah had finally seen that in her last conversation with the other woman: She’d expected too much of people, of life. In those expectations she had sown the seeds of her own destruction.
“And the worst of it is that she didn’t need to do it, Debs,” Cherokee said. “No one was holding a gun to her head. He made the moves. I put them together in the first place, yeah. But she let it happen. She went on letting it. So how the hell could that’ve been my fault?”
Deborah didn’t have the answer to that question. Too much fault, she thought, had been assessed upon or rejected by members of the River family through the years. A quick knock on the door brought Simon into the room to join them. He carried what she hoped was the paperwork that would release her from Princess Elizabeth Hospital. He nodded at Cherokee but directed his question to Deborah.
“Ready to go home?” he asked her.
“More than anything else,” she said.
Chapter 32
Frank Ouseley waited till the twenty-first of December, the shortest day and longest night of the year. Sunset would come early, and he wanted sunset. The long shadows it provided felt comfortable to him, giving him protection from any prying eyes who might inadvertently witness the final act in his personal drama.
At half past three he took up the parcel. A cardboard box, it had sat on top of the television set since he’d brought it home from St. Sampson. A band of tape kept its flaps closed, but Frank had earlier lifted this tape to check on the contents. A plastic bag now held what remained of his father. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust. The colour of the substance was somewhere between the two, lighter and darker simultaneously, ridged by the occasional fragment of bone.
Somewhere in the Orient, he knew, they picked through the ashes of the dead. The family gathered and with chopsticks in hand, they lifted out what remained of the bones. He didn’t know what they did with those bones—they likely used them for family reliquaries much as the bones of martyrs had once been used to sanctify early Christian churches. But that was something he didn’t intend to do with his father’s ashes. What bones there were would become part of the place to which Frank had determined to deposit the rest of his father. He’d thought first of the reservoir. The spot where his mother had drowned could have received his father with little trouble, even if he didn’t scatter the remains into the water itself. Then he considered the tract of land near St. Saviour’s Church, where the wartime museum had been meant to stand. But he concluded that a sacrilege existed in disposing of his father at a site where men utterly unlike him were meant to be honoured. Carefully, he carried his father out to the Peugeot and rested him snugly on the passenger seat, cushioned all the way round by an old beach towel that he’d used as a boy. Just as carefully, he drove out of the Talbot Valley. The trees were completely bare now, with only the stands of oaks still leafy on the gentle slope of the valley’s south side. And even here, many of the leaves lay on the ground, colouring the comforting, large trunks of the trees with a cape of saffron and umber. Daylight left the Talbot Valley sooner than it did the rest of the island. Folded into a landscape of undulating hillsides eroded by centuries of stream, the occasional cottage along the road already showed bright lights in its windows. But as Frank emerged from the valley into St. Andrew, the land itself changed and so did the light. Hillside grazing for the island cows gave over to agriculture and hamlets, where cottages with a score of greenhouses behind them all drank in and reflected the last of the sun. He headed east and came at St. Peter Port on the far side of Princess Elizabeth Hospital. From there, it was no difficult feat to get to Fort George. Although daylight was fading, it was too early for the traffic to be a problem. Besides, at this time of year, there was little enough of it. Come Easter, the roads would begin to fill.
He waited only for a tractor to lumber through the intersection at the end of Prince Albert Road. After that, he made good time to Fort George, skimming through its thick stone archway just as the sun struck the picture windows of the sprawling houses inside the fort. This place had long since been used for any military purpose, despite its name, but unlike other of the fortresses on the island—from Doyle to le Crocq— this was also no ruin of granite and brick. Its proximity to St. Peter Port as well as its views of Soldiers’ Bay had made it a prime location for exiles from Her Majesty’s revenue collectors to build their sumptuous homes. So they had done so: behind tall hedges of box and yew, behind wrought iron fences with electric gates, set back on lawns next to which stood Mercedes-Benzes and Jaguars.
A car like Frank’s would have been looked upon with suspicion had he chosen to drive it anywhere within the fort other than directly to the cemetery, which was situated, as luck and irony would have it, on the most scenically advantageous part of the entire area. It occupied an east-facing slope at the southern end of the old military grounds. Its entrance was marked by a war memorial in the shape of an enormous granite cross in which a sword—embedded in the stone—duplicated the grey cruciform into which it had been placed. The irony might have been intentional. It probably was. The cemetery thrived on irony.
Frank parked in the gravel just beneath the memorial and crossed the lane to the cemetery’s entrance. From there he could see the smaller islands of both Herm and Jethou rising in the mist across a placid stretch of water. From there, also, a concrete ramp—ridged against the possibility of a mourner falling in inclement weather—sloped down to the graveyard which comprised a set of terraces that had been carved out of the hillside. Set at a right angle to these terraces, a retaining wall of Rocquaine Blue held a bronze bas relief of people in profile, perhaps citizens or soldiers or victims of war. Frank could not tell. But an inscription in the relief —Lifelives beyond the grave— suggested that those bronze figures represented the souls of the departed laid to rest in this place, and the carving itself had been fashioned into a door that, when opened, revealed the actual names of the interred.