A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(32)

He looked up to see if Valerie had the eyebrows-raised eyeswide face on her face. But she didn’t, which made his shoulders relax. He’d been holding them so tight since fleeing Moulin des Niaux that they’d begun to ache. But now it felt like the pincers gripping his collar bone had suddenly been loosed.

“We’re setting out at half past eleven tomorrow,” Valerie said, but she spoke to Paul himself this time. “You can ride with Kev and me, love. You’re not to mind about your clothes. I’ve brought you a shirt, see. And you’re to keep it, mind you. Kev says he’s got another two like it and he doesn’t need three. As for the trousers...” She studied him thoughtfully. Paul felt the heat at each spot that her eyes rested upon his body. “Kev’s won’t do. You’d be lost inside them. But I think a pair of Mr. Brouard’s...Now, you’re not to worry about wearing something of Mr. Brouard’s, love. He’d’ve wanted you to if you had the need. He was that fond of you, Paul. But you know that. No matter what he said or did, he was...He was that much fond...”

She stumbled on the words.

Paul felt her sorrow like a band that pulled, drawing out of him what he wanted to quell. He looked away from Valerie towards the three surviving ducks, and he wondered how everyone was going to cope without Mr. Guy to hold them together, to set them on a course, and to know what ought to be done from now on.

He heard Valerie blow her nose and he turned back to her. She gave him a shaky smile. “Anyway, we’d like you to go. But if you’d rather not, you’re not to feel guilty about it. Funerals aren’t for everyone and sometimes it’s best to remember the living by living ourselves. But the shirt’s yours anyway. You’re meant to have it.” She looked round, seeming to seek a clean spot to set it and saying, “Here we are, then” when she spied the rucksack where Paul had left it on the ground. She made a move to tuck the shirt inside.

Paul cried out and tore the shirt from her hands. He flung it away. Taboo barked sharply.

“Why, Paul,” Valerie said in surprise, “I didn’t mean to...It’s not an old shirt, love. It’s really quite—”

Paul snatched up the rucksack. He looked left and right. The only escape was the way he’d come, and escape was essential. He tore back along the path, Taboo at his heels, barking frantically. Paul felt a sob escape his lips as he emerged from the pond path out onto the lawn with the house beyond it. He was so tired of running, he realised. It seemed as if he’d been running all his life.





Chapter 4


Ruth Brouard watched the boy’s flight. She was in Guy’s study when Paul emerged from the bower that marked the entrance to the ponds. She was opening a stack of condolence cards from the previous day’s post, cards that she hadn’t had the heart to open until now and she heard the dog barking first and then saw the boy himself pounding across the lawn beneath her. A moment later Valerie Duffy emerged, in her hands the shirt she’d taken to Paul, a limp and rejected offering from a mother whose own boys had fledged and flown far before she had been prepared for them to do either.

She should have had more children, Ruth thought as Valerie trudged back towards the house. Some women were born with a thirst for maternity that nothing could slake, and Valerie Duffy had long seemed like one of them.

Ruth watched Valerie’s progress till she disappeared through the door to the kitchen, which was beneath Guy’s study, where Ruth had taken herself directly after breakfast. It was the one place she felt that she could be close to him now, surrounded by the evidence that told her, as if in defiance of the terrible manner in which he’d died, that Guy Brouard had lived a good life. That evidence was everywhere in her brother’s study: on the walls and the bookshelves and sitting on a fine old credence table in the centre of the room. Here were the certificates, the photographs, the awards, the plans, and the documents. Filed away were the correspondence and the recommendations for worthy recipients of the well-known Brouard largesse. And displayed prominently was what should have been the final jewel needed to complete the crown of her brother’s achievements: the carefully constructed model of a building that Guy had promised the island which had become his home. It would be a monument to the islanders’ suffering, Guy had called it. A monument built by one who had suffered as well.

Or such had been his intention, Ruth thought.

When Guy hadn’t come home from his morning swim, she’d not worried at first. True, he was always punctual and predictable in his habits, but when she descended the stairs and didn’t find him dressed and in the breakfast room, listening intently to Radio News as he waited for his meal, she merely assumed that he’d stopped at the Duffys’ cottage for coffee with Valerie and Kevin after his swim. He would do that occasionally. He was fond of them. That was why, after a moment’s consideration, Ruth had carried her coffee and her grapefruit to the telephone in the morning room, where she rang the stone cottage at the edge of the grounds.

Valerie answered. No, she told Ruth, Mr. Brouard wasn’t there. She hadn’t seen him since the early morning when she’d caught a glimpse of him as he went for his swim. Why? Hadn’t he returned? He was probably on the estate somewhere...perhaps among the sculptures? He’d mentioned to Kev that he wanted to shift them about. That large human head in the tropical garden? Perhaps he was trying to decide where to put it because Valerie knew for certain that the head was one of the pieces that Mr. Brouard wanted to move. No, Kev wasn’t with him, Miss Brouard. Kev was sitting right there in the kitchen.