A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(44)

His fingers found it, something firm but giving. Not hard. Smooth. Shaped like a cylinder. He grasped it and began to pull it out. This is a special place, a place of secrets, and it’s our secret now. Yours and mine. Can you keep secrets, Paul?

He could. Oh, he could. He could better than could. Because as he pulled it towards him, Paul understood exactly what it was that Mr. Guy had hidden within the dolmen.

The island, after all, was a landscape of secrets and the dolmen itself was a secret place within that larger landscape of things buried, other things unspoken, and memories people wished to forget. It was no wonder to Paul that deep within the ages of an earth that could still yield medals, sabres, bullets, and other items more than half a century old lay buried somewhere something even more valuable, something from the time of the privateers or even further back, but something precious. And what he was pulling from the fissure was the key to finding that long-ago-buried something.

He’d found a final gift from Mr. Guy, who had already given him so very much.

“énne rouelle dé fa?tot,” Ruth Brouard said in answer to Margaret Chamberlain’s question. “It’s used for barns, Margaret.”

Margaret thought this reply was deliberately obtuse, so typical of Ruth, whom she’d never particularly come to like despite having had to live with Guy’s sister for the entirety of her marriage to the man. She’d clung too much to Guy, Ruth had, and too great a devotion between siblings was unseemly. It smacked of...Well, Margaret didn’t even want to think of what it smacked of. Yes, she realised that these specific siblings—

Jewish like herself but European Jewish during World War II, which gave them certain allowances for strange behaviour, she would grant them that—had lost every single relation to the unmitigated evil of the Nazis and thus had been forced to become everything to each other from early childhood. But the fact that Ruth had never developed a life of her own in all these years was not only questionable and pre-Victorian, it was something that made her an incomplete woman in Margaret’s eyes, sort of a lesser creature who’d lived a half life, and that life in the shadows to boot. Margaret decided patience would be in order. She said, “For barns? I don’t quite understand, dear. The stone would have to be quite small, wouldn’t it? To have gone into Guy’s mouth?” She saw her sisterin-law flinch at the last question, as if talking about it awakened her darkest fantasies of how Guy had met his end: writhing on the beach, clawing uselessly at his throat. Well, it couldn’t be helped. Margaret needed information and she meant to have it.

“What use would it have in a barn, Ruth?”

Ruth looked up from the needlework she’d been occupied with when Margaret had located her in the morning room. It was an enormous piece of canvas stretched on a wooden frame that was itself on a stand before which Ruth sat, an elfin figure in black trousers and an overlarge black cardigan that had probably once been Guy’s. Her round-framed spectacles had slid down her nose, and she knuckled them back into place with one of her childlike hands.

“It’s not used inside the barn,” she explained. “It’s used on a ring with the keys to the barn. At least, that’s what it once was used for. There are few enough barns on Guernsey now. It was for keeping the barn safe from witches’ familiars. Protection, Margaret.”

“Ah. A charm, then.”

“Yes.”

“I see.” What Margaret thought was These ridiculous islanders. Charms for witches. Mumbo-jumbo for fairies. Ghosts on the cliff tops. Devils on the prowl. She’d never considered her former husband a man who’d fall for that sort of nonsense. “Did they show you the stone? Was it something you recognised? Did it belong to Guy? I ask only because it doesn’t seem like him to carry round charms and that sort of thing. At least, it doesn’t seem like the Guy I knew. Was he hoping for luck in some venture?”

With a woman was what she didn’t add, although both of them knew the phrase was there. Aside from business—at which Guy Brouard had excelled like Midas and needed no luck at all—the only other venture he had ever engaged in was the pursuit and conquest of the opposite sex, a fact that Margaret hadn’t known until she’d found a pair of woman’s knickers in her husband’s briefcase, playfully tucked there by the Edinburgh flight attendant he’d been shagging on the side. Their marriage had ended the instant Margaret had found those knickers instead of the chequebook she’d been looking for. All that had remained for the next two years was her solicitor meeting with his solicitor to hammer out a deal that would finance the rest of her life.

“The only venture he was involved with recently was the wartime museum.” Ruth bent back over the frame that held her needlepoint and she expertly worked the needle in and out of the design she’d rendered there. “And he didn’t carry a charm for that. He didn’t really need to. It was going well enough, as far as I know.” She looked up again, her needle poised for another plunge. “Did he tell you about the museum, Margaret?

Has Adrian told you?”

Margaret didn’t want to get into Adrian with her sisterin-law or anyone else, so she said, “Yes. Yes. The museum. Of course. I knew about that.”

Ruth smiled, inwardly and fondly it seemed. “It made him terribly proud. To be able to do something like that for the island. Something lasting. Something fine and meaningful.”