A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(52)
he said. “And a witness is worth a hundred experts and their thousand pretty theories, if you know what I mean.”
At the prison where China was being held on remand, Deborah and Cherokee learned that events had moved forward swiftly in the twenty four hours since he’d left the island to find help in London. China’s advocate had managed to get her released on bail and had set her up elsewhere. Prison administration knew where, naturally, but they weren’t forthcoming with the information. Deborah and Cherokee thus retraced their route from the States Prison towards St. Peter Port, and when they found a phone box where Vale Road opened into the wide vista of Belle Greve Bay, Cherokee leaped out of the car to ring the advocate. Deborah watched through the phone box glass and could see that China’s brother was understandably agitated, rapping his fist against the glass as he spoke. Not adept at lip reading, Deborah could still discern the “Hey, man, you listen,” when Cherokee said it. Their conversation lasted three or four minutes, not enough time to reassure Cherokee about anything but just enough to discover where his sister had been delivered.
“He’s got her in some apartment back in St. Peter Port,” Cherokee reported as he climbed back into the car and jerked it into gear. “One of those places people rent out in the summer. ‘Only too happy to have her there’ was how he put it. Whatever that’s supposed to mean.”
“A holiday flat,” Deborah said. “It would just stand empty till spring, probably.”
“Whatever,” he said. “He might have gotten a message to me or something. I’m involved here, you know. I asked him why he didn’t let me know he was getting her out and he said...You know what he said? ‘Miss River didn’t mention telling anyone her whereabouts.’ Like she wants to be in hiding.”
They wound back to St. Peter Port where it was no easy feat to find the holiday flats where China had been installed, despite being in possession of the address. The town was a warren of one-way streets: narrow tracks that climbed the hillside from the harbour and swooped through a town that had existed long before cars had even been imagined. Deborah and Cherokee made several passes by Georgian town homes and through Victorian terraces before they finally stumbled upon the Queen Margaret Apartments on the corner of Saumarez and Clifton Streets, situated at the crest of the latter. It was a spot that would have afforded a holiday maker the sort of views one pays highly to enjoy during spring and summer: The port spread out below, Castle Cornet stood clearly visible on its spit of land where it once protected the town from invasion, and on a day without the lowering clouds of December, the coast of France would appear to hover on the far horizon.
On this day, however, in the early dusk, the Channel was an ashen mass of liquid landscape. Lights shone on a harbour that was empty of pleasure craft, and in the distance the castle appeared as a series of crosshatched children’s blocks, held haphazardly on a parent’s palm. Their challenge at the Queen Margaret Apartments was to find someone who could point them in the direction of China’s flat. They finally located an unshaven and odoriferous man in a bed-sitting room at the back of the otherwise deserted property. He appeared to act the part of concierge when he wasn’t doing what he was currently doing, which seemed to be taking both sides in a board game that involved depositing shiny black stones into cuplike depressions in a narrow wooden tray. He said, “Hang on,” when Cherokee and Deborah turned up in his single room. “I just need to...Damn. He’s got me again.”
He appeared to be his opponent which was himself, playing from the other side of the board. He cleared this side of its stones in one inexplicable move, whereupon he said, “What c’n I do for you?”
When they told him they’d come to see his tenant-in-the-singular— because it was certainly clear that no one else was occupying any of the Queen Margaret Apartments at this time of year—he feigned ignorance about the whole matter. Only when Cherokee told him to phone China’s advocate did he give the slightest hint that the woman charged with murder was staying somewhere in the building. And then all he did was lumber to the phone and punch in a few numbers. When the party answered at the other end, he said, “Someone saying he’s the brother...?” And with a glance at Deborah, “Got a red-head with him.” He listened for five seconds. He said, “Right, then,” and parted with the information. They would find the person they were looking for, he told them, in Flat B on the east side of the building.
It was no far distance. China met them at the door. She said only, “You came,” and she walked directly into Deborah’s embrace. Deborah held her firmly. “Of course I came,” she said. “I only wish I’d known from the first that you were in Europe at all. Why didn’t you let me know you were coming? Why didn’t you phone? Oh, it’s so good to see you.” She blinked against the sting behind her eyelids, surprised by the onslaught of feeling that told her how much she had missed her friend in the years during which they’d lost contact with each other.
“I’m sorry it has to be like this.” China gave Deborah a fleeting smile. She was far thinner than Deborah remembered her, and although her fine sandy hair was fashionably cut, it fell round a face that looked like a waif ’s. She was dressed in clothes that would have sent her vegan mother into a seizure. They were mostly black leather: trousers, waistcoat, and ankle boots. The colour heightened the pallor of her skin.