A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(26)

Dressing his dad was something he did by rote, always easing his father into his clothing in the exact same order. It was a ritual that he had once found reassuring, giving a sameness to his days with Graham that made the promise, however false, that those days would continue indefinitely. But now he watched his father warily, and he wondered if the catch in his breath and the waxy nature of his skin presaged an end to their time together, a time that had now exceeded fifty years. Two months ago he would have quailed at that thought. Two months ago all he wanted was enough time to establish the Graham Ouseley Wartime Museum so his father could proudly cut the ribbon on its doors on the morning it finally opened. The passage of sixty days had changed everything unrecognisably, though, and that was a pity because gathering every memento that represented the years of German occupation on the island had been the mortar of Frank’s relationship with his father for as long as he could remember. It was their shared life’s work and their mutual passion, done for a love of history and a belief that the present and future populations of Guernsey should be educated about what their forebears had endured. That their plans would likely come to nothing now was something which Frank didn’t want his father to know just yet. Since Graham’s days were numbered, there seemed no sense in dashing a dream that he would not even have had in the first place had Guy Brouard not walked into their lives.

“Wha’s up for today?” Graham asked his son as Frank pulled the tracksuit trousers up round his shriveled bum. “ ’Bout time to walk the construction site, i’n’t it? Breaking earth any day now, a’n’t they, Frankie?

You’ll be there for that, won’t you, lad? Turning over the ceremonial shovelful? Or’s that something Guy’s wanting for himself?”

Frank avoided the entire set of questions, indeed the entire subject of Guy Brouard. He’d so far managed to keep from his father the news of their friend and benefactor’s gruesome death, as he hadn’t yet decided whether the information would be too burdensome for his health. Besides, they were playing a waiting game at the moment whether his father knew it or not: There was no news about how Guy’s estate was being settled. Frank said to his father, “I thought to check through the uniforms this morning. It looked to me like the damp’s getting to them.” This was a lie, of course. The ten uniforms they had—from the dark-collared overcoats worn by the Wehrmacht to the threadbare coveralls used by Luftwaffe antiaircraft crews—were all preserved in airtight containers and acid-free tissue against the day that they would be placed in glass cases designed to keep them forever. “I can’t think how it happened, but if it has, we need to get on to it before they start to rot.”

“Damn rights, that,” his father agreed. “You take care, Frankie. All that clobber. Got to keep it mint, we do.”

“That we do, Dad,” Frank replied mechanically.

His father seemed satisfied with this. He allowed his sparse hair to be combed and himself to be helped to the lounge. There Frank tucked him into his favourite armchair and handed him the television remote. He had no worries that his father might tune in to the island station and hear the very news about Guy Brouard which he was attempting to keep from him. The only programmes Graham Ouseley ever watched were cooking shows and the soaps. The former he took notes from, for reasons that never were clear to his son. The latter he studied completely enthralled and spent his daily dinner hour discussing the troubled individuals on them as if they were his next-door neighbours.

There were none of those where the Ouseleys lived. Years ago there had been: two other families living in the line of cottages that grew like an appendage, out from the old water mill called Moulin des Niaux. But over time, Frank and his father had managed to purchase these dwellings when they came up for sale. Now they held the vast collection that was supposed to fill the wartime museum.

Frank took his keys and, after checking the radiator in the lounge and setting up the electric fire when he didn’t like the modest warmth coming from the old pipes, he walked over to the cottage next to the one in which he and his father had lived forever. They were all in a terrace and the Ouseleys lived in the farthest one from the water mill itself, whose ancient wheel was known to creak and groan at night if the wind whistled up the stream-carved glen that was the Talbot Valley.

The cottage door stuck when Frank pushed upon it because the old stone floor had been laid uneven and neither Frank nor his father had thought to correct the problem in the years they’d owned the place. They were using it for storage primarily, and a sticking door had always seemed a small matter compared to the other challenges that an ageing building presented to someone who wanted to use it as a storage facility. It was more important to keep the roof weatherproof and the windows free of draughts. If the heating system worked and a balance could be maintained between dryness and humidity, the fact that a door was a bother to open was something one could easily overlook.

Guy Brouard hadn’t done that, though. The door was the first thing he mentioned when he paid his initial call upon the Ouseleys. He’d said,

“The wood’s got swollen. That means damp, Frank. Are you guarding against it?”

“It’s the floor, actually,” Frank had pointed out to him. “Not the damp. Although we’ve got that as well, I’m afraid. We try to keep the heat in here constant, but in the winter...I expect it’s the proximity to the stream.”