A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(71)

Still the boy didn’t speak. He looked fairly the worse for wear, with oleaginous hair clinging to his skull and his face streaked with dirt. The hands that held the dog were grimy and the black trousers he wore had grease crusted on one knee. He took several steps backwards.

“We haven’t startled you as well, have we?” Deborah asked. “We didn’t think anyone would be...”

Her voice faded as the boy turned on his heel and crashed back in the direction he’d come. He wore a tattered rucksack on his back, and it pounded against him like a bag of potatoes.

“Who on earth...?” Deborah murmured.

St. James wondered himself. “We’ll want to look into that.”

They reached the lane through a gate in the wall some distance from the drive. There they saw that the overflow of cars from the burial had departed, leaving the way unobstructed so that they easily found the descent to the bay, some one hundred yards from the entrance to the Brouard estate.

This descent was somewhere between a track and a lane—wider than one and too narrow to actually be considered the other—and it switched back on itself numerous times as it steeply dropped to the water. Rock walls and woodland sided it, along with a stream that chattered along the rough stones of the wall’s base. There were no houses or cottages here, just a single hotel that was closed for the season, surrounded by trees, tucked into a depression in the hillside, and shuttered at every window. In the distance below St. James and his wife, the English Channel appeared, speckled by what little sun was able to break through the heavy cover of clouds. With the sight of it came the sound of gulls. They soared among the granite outcroppings at the top of the cliffs, which formed the deep horseshoe that was the bay itself. Gorse and English stonecrop grew in undisturbed abundance here, and where the soil was deeper, tangled thickets of bony branches marked the spots where blackthorn and bramble would prosper in spring.

At the base of the lane a small car park made a thumbprint on the landscape. No cars stood in it, nor would any be likely to do so at this time of year. It was the perfect spot for a private swim or for anything that called for activity without witnesses.

A bulwark fashioned from stone protected the car park from tidal erosion, and to one side of this a slipway slanted down to the water. Dead and dying seaweed knotted thickly across this, just the sort of decaying vegetation that at another time of year would be infested with flies and gnats. Nothing moved or crawled within it in the middle of December, however, and St. James and Deborah were able to pick their way through it and thus gain access to the beach. The water lapped against this rhythmically, marking a gentle pulse against the coarse sand and the stones.

“No wind,” St. James noted as he observed the mouth of the bay some distance from where they stood. “That makes it very good for swimming.”

“But terribly cold,” Deborah said. “I can’t understand how he did it. In December? It’s extraordinary, don’t you think?”

“Some people like extremity,” St. James said. “Let’s have a look around.”

“What are we looking for, exactly?”

“Something the police may have missed.”

The actual spot of the murder was easy enough to find: The signs of a crime scene were still upon it in the form of a strip of yellow police tape, two discarded film canisters from the police photographer, and a globule of white plaster that had spilled when someone took a cast of a footprint.

St. James and Deborah started at this spot and began working side by side in an ever-widening circumference round it.

The going was slow. Eyes fixed to the ground, they wheeled round and round, turning over the larger stones that they came upon, gently moving aside seaweed, sifting through sand with their fingertips. In this manner, an hour passed as they examined the small beach, uncovering a top to a jar of baby food, a faded ribbon, an empty Evian bottle, and seventy-eight pence in loose change.

When they came to the bulwark, St. James suggested that they begin at opposite ends and work their way towards each other. At the point at which they would meet, he said, they would just continue onwards so each of them would have separately inspected the entire length of the wall. They had to go carefully, for there were heavier stones here and more crevices in which items could fall. But although each of them moved at earthworm pace, they met at the middle empty-handed.

“This isn’t looking very hopeful,” Deborah noted.

“It isn’t,” St. James agreed. “But it was always just a chance.” He rested for a moment against the wall, his arms crossed on his chest and his gaze on the Channel. He gave consideration to the idea of lies: those people tell and those people believe. Sometimes, he knew, the people in both cases were the same. Telling something long enough resulted in belief.

“You’re worried, aren’t you?” Deborah said. “If we don’t find something—”

He put his arm round her and kissed the side of her head. “Let’s keep going,” he told her but said nothing of what was obvious to him: Finding something could be even more damning than having the misfortune of finding nothing at all.

They continued like crabs along the wall, St. James slightly more inhibited by his leg brace, which made moving among the larger stones more difficult for him than it was for his wife. Perhaps this was the reason the cry of exultation—marking the discovery of something hitherto unnoticed—