A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(29)
Frank’s spirits sank. It was as he thought: The boy was here to bond with him and carry on with the work as a sign of that bond. This wouldn’t do. Paul pulled the top box from the stack and gingerly set it down on the floor as Taboo joined him. He squatted next to it. With Taboo sinking into his usual posture of blowsy head on paws and devoted eyes fixed on his silent master, Paul carefully opened the box as he’d seen Guy and Frank do a hundred times. The contents constituted a jumble of wartime medals, old belt buckles, boots, Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht caps, and other items of apparel worn by those enemy troops in the distant past. He did as Guy and Frank had themselves done: He spread a polythene sheet on the stone floor, and he began to set the items out upon it, preparatory to cataloguing each of them in the three-ring notebook that they had been using. He rose to get the notebook from its storage place, which was at the back of the filing drawer from which Frank had only moments before pulled the copies of G.I.F.T. Frank saw his opportunity. He cried out, “Hey! See here, young man!” and he shot across the room to slam the filing drawer shut as the boy pulled it open. He moved so quickly and spoke at such a volume that Taboo leaped up and began to bark.
Frank seized the moment. “Just what the hell are you doing?” he demanded. “I’m working in here. You can’t barge in and take over like this. These are priceless items. They’re fragile, and once they’re destroyed, they’re gone. D’you understand?”
Paul’s eyes widened. He opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out. Taboo continued to bark.
“And get that mongrel out of here, damn it,” Frank continued. “You don’t have the sense of a monkey, boy. Bringing him in here where he mi ght...Just look at him. Destructive little beast.”
Taboo, for his part, had hackles raised at the source of the commotion, so Frank used this as well. He raised his voice another degree to shout,
“Get him out of here, boy. Before I throw him out myself.” When Paul shrank back further but made no other move to depart, Frank looked round frantically for something to spur him into action. His eyes lit on the boy’s rucksack and he picked it up, swinging it menacingly at Taboo, who backed off, yelping.
The threat to the dog was what did it. Paul gave a strangled, inarticulate cry and raced for the door with Taboo at his heels. He paused only long enough to grab the rucksack from Frank. He threw it over his shoulder as he ran. Through the window, his heart hammering, Frank watched them go. The boy’s bike was a relic that at best would probably only have squeaked along at little above a walking pace. But he managed to pedal it furiously, so that in record time he and dog had vanished round the side of the water mill, teetering beneath the overhead weed-clogged sluice in the direction of the road. When they were safely gone, Frank found that he could breathe again. His heart had been pounding in his ears and this had prevented him from hearing a second pounding, from the wall that joined this cottage to the one in which Frank and Graham lived.
He dashed back to see why his father was calling for him. He found Graham tottering back to the armchair from which he’d struggled, a wooden mallet in his hand. He said, “Dad? You all right? What is it?”
“Man can’t get any peace in his own home?” Graham demanded.
“Wha’s the matter with you this a.m., lad? Can’t even hear the bloomin’ telly over all your racket.”
“Sorry,” Frank said to his father. “That boy came round alone. Without Guy. You know the one I mean. Paul Fielder? Well, we can’t have that, Dad. I don’t want him prowling round here by himself. Not that I don’t trust him, but some of what we’ve got is valuable and as he’s from...well, rather deprived circumstances...” He knew he was talking too fast, but he couldn’t help himself. “I don’t like to take the chance he might nick something and sell it. He opened one of the boxes, you see. He just dived right in without a how-do-you-do and I—”
Graham took up the remote for the television and raised the volume to a level that assaulted Frank’s eardrums. “You go about your damn business,” he ordered his son. “I trust you c’n bloody well see for yourself I got my own here.”
Paul pedaled like a madman, Taboo running along at his side. He made no stop to breathe, to rest, or even to think. Instead, he shot along the road out of the Talbot Valley, skirting too close for safety to the ivy-grown wall that held back the hillside into which the road was carved. Had he been able to think clearly, he might have stopped where a lay-by gave access to a path up the hill. He could have parked his bike there and followed that path upwards and along the fields where the tawny dairy cows grazed. No one would walk there at this time of year, so he would have been safe, and the solitude would have given him a chance to ponder what to do next. But all he had in his mind was escape. Bellowing was the precursor to violence, in his experience. Flight had long been his only option. So he coursed up the valley and ages later, when he finally came round to wondering where he was, he saw that his legs had taken him to the single place he’d ever found safety and bliss. He was at the iron gates of LeReposoir. They stood open as if in expectation of his arrival, as they had done so many times in the past.
He braked. At his knee, Taboo was panting. Paul felt a sudden excruciating bolt of guilt as he recognised the little dog’s unwavering devotion to him. Taboo had barked to protect Paul from Mr. Ouseley’s anger. He’d exposed himself to a stranger’s wrath. Having done that, he’d then run half way across the island without hesitation. Paul dropped his bike with an indifferent crash and fell to his knees to hug the dog. Taboo responded by licking Paul’s ear, as if he hadn’t been ignored and forgotten in his master’s flight. Paul choked back a cry at the thought of this. In his entire life’s experience, no one but a dog could have offered Paul more love. Not even Guy Brouard.