A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(89)

“It seems so,” St. James said.

“And their rooms were above my own,” she said. “The Rivers’ rooms. On the floor above. So you see—”

“Possibly,” St. James said. But he saw more than that. He saw how one could look at partial information and ignore the rest. So he said, “And where was Adrian staying?”

“He couldn’t have—”

“Did he know the situation with the wills? Yours and your brother’s?”

“Mr. St. James, I assure you. He couldn’t...Believe me, he wouldn’t...”

“Assuming he knew the laws of the island and assuming he didn’t know what his father had done to effectively cut him off from a fortune, he would believe he stood to inherit...what?”

“Either half of Guy’s entire estate divided into thirds with his sisters,”

Ruth said with clear reluctance.

“Or one-third of everything had his father simply left the lot only to his children?”

“Yes, but—”

“A considerable fortune,” St. James pointed out.

“Yes, yes. But you must believe me, Adrian wouldn’t have harmed a hair on his father’s head. Not for anything. And certainly not for an inheritance.”

“He has money of his own, then?”

She didn’t reply. A clock was ticking on a mantelpiece and the sound grew loud, like a waiting bomb. Her silence was answer enough for St. James.

He said, “What about your own will, Miss Brouard? What was the agreement you had with your brother? How did he want you to distribute the property that was held in your name?”

She licked her lower lip. Her tongue was nearly as pale as the rest of her. She said, “Adrian is a troubled boy, Mr. St. James. Most of his life, he’s been tugged between his parents like a rope in a game. Their marriage ended badly, and Margaret made Adrian the instrument of her revenge. It made no difference to her when she married again and married well— Margaret always marries well, you see—there was still the fact of Guy’s having betrayed her and of her not knowing soon enough, not being clever enough to catch him in the actual act, which I think is what she wanted more than anything: my brother and some woman in bed and Margaret coming upon them like one of the Furies. But it didn’t happen that way. Just some sort of squalid discovery...I don’t even know of what. And she couldn’t get past it, couldn’t live beyond it. Guy was made to suffer as much as possible for humiliating her. Adrian was the rack she used. And to be used like that...It doesn’t make the tree grow strong if you keep messing about with its roots. But Adrian’s not a killer.”

“You’ve left him everything in recompense, then?”

She’d been examining her hands, but, at that, she looked up. “No. I’ve done what my brother wanted.”

“Which was?”

Le Reposoir, she said, was being left to the people of Guernsey for their use and pleasure, with a trust fund set up to see to the maintenance of the grounds, the buildings, and the furnishings. The rest—the properties in Spain, France, and England—the stocks and the bonds, the bank accounts, and all personal belongings not used at the time of her death to furnish the manor house or to decorate the estate grounds—would be sold and the proceeds of such a sale would fund the trust itself into infinity.

“I agreed to this because it’s what he wanted,” Ruth Brouard said. “He promised me that his children would be remembered in his own will, and they have been. Not as generously as they would have been had things gone as normal, of course. But remembered nonetheless.”

“How?”

“He used the option he had to divide his estate in half. His three children got the first half, divided equally among them. The second half went to two other young people, teenagers here on Guernsey.”

“Leaving them effectively more than his own children will receive.”

“I...Yes,” she said. “I suppose that’s right.”

“Who are these teenagers?”

She told him they were called Paul Fielder and Cynthia Moullin. Her brother, she said, set himself up as their mentor. The boy came to his attention through a programme of sponsorship at the local secondary school. The girl came to his attention through her own father, Henry Moullin, a glazier who’d constructed the conservatory and replaced the windows at Le Reposoir.

“The families are quite poor, especially the Fielders,” Ruth concluded.

“Guy would have seen that and, liking the children, he would have wanted to do something for them, something their own parents would never be able to do.”

“But why keep this a secret from you, if that’s what he did?” St. James asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, “I don’t understand.”

“Would you have disapproved?”

“I might have told him how much trouble he could be causing.”

“In his own family?”

“In theirs as well. Both Paul and Cynthia have other siblings.”

“Who weren’t remembered in your brother’s will?”

“Who weren’t remembered in my brother’s will. So a legacy left to one and not the others...I would have told him it had the potential to rupture their families.”