A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(65)

“It’s when a cloud comes down. Or the fog. Or whatever. But it’s really bad and you can’t tell which way the hill is going and you can’t see the ski runs so you don’t know how to get out. All you see is white everywhere: the snow and the air. So you get lost. And sometimes—” He turned his face away. “Sometimes you die.”

“Your dad?” she said. “I’m sorry, Stephen. What a horrible way to lose someone you love.”

“She said he’d find his way down. He’s an expert, she said. He knows what to do. Expert skiers always find their way. But it lasted too long and then the snow started, a real blizzard, and he was miles from where he ought to have been. When they finally found him it’d been two days and he’d been trying to hike out and he’d broken his leg. And then they said...they said if they’d only got there six hours sooner—” He drove his fist into what remained of the pellets. They sprayed out of the container and onto the rock. “He might’ve lived. But she wouldn’t’ve liked that much.”

“Why not?”

“It would’ve kept her from collecting her boyfriends.”

“Ah.” Deborah saw how it fitted together. A child loses his beloved father and then watches his mother move from one man to the next, perhaps out of a grief she cannot bear to face, perhaps in a frantic effort to replace what she’s lost. But Deborah also saw how it might appear to that child: as if the mother hadn’t loved the father in the first place. She said, “Mr. Brouard was one of those boyfriends, then? Is that why your mother was with the family this morning? That was your mother, wasn’t it, then? The woman who wanted you to have the shovel?”

“Yeah,” he said. “That was her, all right.” He brushed at the pellets that he’d spilled round them. They flipped into the water one by one, like the discarded beliefs of a disillusioned child. “Stupid cow,” he muttered.

“Bloody stupid cow.”

“To want you to be part of the—”

“She thinks she’s so clever,” he cut in. “She thinks she’s such a bloody good lay...Just spread ’em, Mum, and they’ll be your puppets. Hasn’t worked so far, but if you do it long enough, it bloody well might.” Stephen surged to his feet, grabbing up the container. He strode back to the teahouse and went inside. Again, Deborah followed him. From the doorway she said, “Sometimes people do things when they miss someone terribly, Stephen. On the surface what they do looks irrational. Unfeeling, you know. Or even sly. But if we can get past what it looks like to us, if we can try to understand the reason behind it—”

“She started right after he died, all right?” Stephen shoved the bag of fish food back into the cupboard. He slammed its door. “One of the ski patrol instructors, only I didn’t know what was going on right then. I didn’t figure it out till we were in Palm Beach and by then we’d lived in Milan already and Paris and there was always a man, do you see, there was always... That’s why we’re here now, d’you get it? Because the last was in London and she couldn’t get him to marry her and she’s getting desperate because if she runs out of money and there’s no one, then what the hell is she going to do?”

The poor boy cried at that, wrenching, humiliating sobs. Deborah’s heart went out to him and she crossed the teahouse to his side. She said,

“Sit here. Please sit down, Stephen.”

He said, “I hate her. I really hate her. Sodding bitch. She’s so bloody stupid she can’t even see...” He couldn’t go on, so hard was he weeping. Deborah urged him down to one of the pillows. He dropped onto it on his knees, his head lowered to his chest and his body heaving. Deborah didn’t touch him although she wanted to. Seventeen years old, abject despair. She knew what it felt like: The sunlight was gone, the night never ended, and the feeling of hopelessness descended like a shroud.

“It feels like hate because it’s so strong,” she said. “But it isn’t hate. It’s something quite different. The flip side of love, I suppose. Hate destroys. But this...? This, what you’re feeling...? It wouldn’t harm anyone. So it isn’t hate. Really.”

“But you saw her,” he cried. “You saw what she’s like.”

“Just a woman, Stephen.”

“No! More than that. You saw what she’s done.”

At this, Deborah’s intellect went on the alert. “What she’s done?” she repeated.

“She’s too old now. She can’t cope with that. And she won’t see...And I can’t tell her. How can I tell her?”

“Tell her what?”

“It’s too late. For any of it. He doesn’t love her. He doesn’t even want her. She can do anything she wants to make it different. But nothing’s going to work. Not sex. Not going under the knife. Nothing. She’d lost him, and she was too bloody stupid to see it. But she ought to have seen. Why didn’t she see? Why’d she just keep on doing things to make herself seem better? To try to make him want her when he didn’t any longer?”

Deborah absorbed this carefully. With it, she pondered all the boy had previously said. The implication behind his words was clear: Guy Brouard had moved on from this boy’s mother. The logical conclusion was that he’d gone on to someone else. But the truth of the matter could also be that the man had gone on to some thing else. If he hadn’t wanted Mrs. Abbott any longer, they needed to discover what it was he had wanted.