A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(82)
There was no way. There was only doing what she could to show him that the China River she knew was not a China River who would have easily given herself to seduction, who would ever have murdered anyone. She left the estate and drove back to St. Peter Port, winding into the town down the long wooded slope of Le Val des Terres and emerging just above Havelet Bay. Along the waterfront, few pedestrians walked. One street up the hillside, the banks for which the Channel Islands were famous would be bustling with business at any time of the year, but here there was virtually no sign of life: no tax exiles sunning themselves on their boats and no tourists snapping pictures of the castle or the town. Deborah parked near their hotel in Ann’s Place, less than a minute’s walk from the police station behind its high stone wall on Hospital Lane. She sat in the car for a moment once she’d turned off the engine. She had at least an hour—probably more—before Simon returned from LeReposoir. She decided to use it with a slight alteration in what he’d designed for her.
Nothing was very far from anything else in St. Peter Port. One was less than twenty minutes’ walk from everything, and in the central part of the town—which was roughly defined by a misshapen oval of streets that began with Vauvert and curved anticlockwise to end up on Grange Road—the time to get from point A to point B was cut in half. Nonetheless, since the town had existed long before motorised transportation, the streets were barely the width of a car and they curved round the side of the hill upon which St. Peter Port had developed, unrolling without any rhyme or reason, expanding the town upwards from the old port. Deborah crisscrossed through these streets to reach the Queen Margaret Apartments. But when she arrived and knocked on the door, it was to find China’s flat frustratingly empty. She traced her steps back to the front of the building and considered what to do.
China could be anywhere, she realised. She could be meeting with her advocate, reporting in to the police station, taking some exercise, or wandering the streets. Her brother was probably with her, though, so Deborah decided to see if she could find them. She would walk in the general direction of the police station. She’d descend towards the High Street and then follow it back along the route that would ultimately take her back up to the hotel.
Across the way from the Queen Margaret Apartments, stairs carved a path down the hill towards the harbour. Deborah made for these and dipped between tall walls and stone buildings, finally emerging into one of the older parts of the town, where a once-grand building of reddish stone stretched along one side of the street and the other side featured a series of arched entries into shops selling flowers, gifts, and fruit. The grand old building was high-windowed and dim inside, looking disused with no lights shining despite the gloom of the day. Part of it, however, was still active with what appeared to be stalls. They lay beyond a wide and worn blue door that stood open from Market Street into the cavernous interior of the building. Deborah crossed to this entrance. The unmistakable smell assailed her first: the blood and flesh of a butchery. Glass-fronted cases displayed chops and joints and minced meats, but there were very few of these stalls left in what had obviously once been a thriving meat market. Although the building with its ironwork and its decorative plaster would have interested China as a photographer, Deborah knew that the scent of dead animal would have quickly driven both the Rivers off, so she was unsurprised when she didn’t find them inside. Nonetheless, she checked round the rest of the building to make sure, tracing a route through what was a sadly abandoned warehouse of a place where once there had been dozens of thriving little businesses. In a central portion of the great hall, where the ceiling soared above her and caused her footsteps to echo eerily, a row of stalls stood shuttered and across one of them the words Sod you, Safeway had been rendered in marker pen, expressing the sentiments of at least one of the merchants who had lost his livelihood to the chain supermarket that had apparently come to the town. At the far end from the meat market, Deborah found a fruit and veg stall that was still in business, and beyond this once again was the street. She stopped to buy some hot-house lilies before leaving the building and pausing to examine the other shops outside.
Within the arches across the way, she could see not only the little businesses but also everyone making transactions within them, as there were few enough people doing so. Neither China nor Cherokee was among these customers, so Deborah pondered where else they might likely be. She saw her answer right next to the stairs she’d descended. A small grocery proclaimed itself as Channel Islands Cooperative Society Limited, which sounded like something that would appeal to the Rivers who, for all their joking about her, were still the children of their vegan mother. Deborah crossed to this shop and entered. She heard them at once because the grocery was small, albeit crowded with tall shelves that hid shoppers from the windows.
“I don’t want anything,” China was saying impatiently. “I can’t eat if I can’t eat. Could you eat if you were in my position?”
“There’s got to be something,” Cherokee replied. “Here. What about soup?”
“I hate canned soup.”
“But you used to make it for dinner.”
“My point. Would you want something that reminded you? Motel trash, Cherokee. Which is worse than trailer.”
Deborah went round the corner of the aisle and found them standing in front of a small display of Campbell’s. Cherokee was holding a tin of tomato and rice soup in one hand and a bag of lentils in the other. China had a wire basket over her arm. At the moment nothing was in it save a loaf of bread, a packet of spaghetti, and a jar of tomato sauce.