A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(9)
She heard his bedroom door closing. She knew exactly what would come next: Through the darkness, he’d feel his way to the airing cupboard and pull out a towel to take with him. That procedure would take ten seconds, after which he’d use up five minutes to locate his swimming goggles, which he’d have placed yesterday morning in the knife box or draped over the canterbury in his study or shoved without thought into that corner dresser that listed against the wall in the breakfast room. With the goggles in his possession, he’d be off to the kitchen to brew his tea, and when he had it in hand—because he always took it with him for afterwards, his steaming ginkgo-and-green reward for another successful dip into water too cold for ordinary mortals—he’d be out of the house and striding across the lawn towards the chestnuts, beyond them the drive and beyond that the wall that defined the edge of the property.
Ruth smiled at her brother’s predictability. It was not only what she loved best about him; it was also what had long given her life a sense of security that by rights it shouldn’t have had.
She watched the numbers on her digital clock change as the minutes passed and her brother made his preparations. Now he would be at the airing cupboard, now descending the stairs, now rustling round for those goggles and cursing the lapses of memory that were becoming more frequent as he approached seventy. Now he would be in the kitchen, she thought, perhaps even sneaking a pre-swim snack.
At the point at which Guy’s morning ritual would be taking him out of the house, Ruth rose from bed and wrapped her dressing gown round her shoulders. She padded to the window on bare feet and pulled aside the heavy curtains. She counted down from twenty, and when she hit five, there he was below her, coming out of the house, dependable as the hours of the day, as the December wind and the salt it blew off the English Channel.
He was wearing what he always wore: a red knitted cap pulled low on his forehead to cover his ears and his thick greying hair; the navy running suit stained at the elbows, the cuffs, and the thighs with the white paint he’d used on the conservatory last summer; trainers without socks—although she couldn’t see that, merely knew her brother and how he dressed. He carried his tea. He had a towel slung round his neck. The goggles, she guessed, would be in a pocket.
“Have a good swim,” she said into the icy window pane. And she added what he’d always said to her, what their mother had cried out long ago as the fishing boat pulled away from the dock, taking them from home in the pitch-black night, “Au revoir et adieu, mes chéris.”
Below her, he did what he always did. He crossed the lawn and headed for the trees and the drive beyond them.
But this morning, Ruth saw something else as well. Once Guy reached the elms, a shadowy figure melted out from beneath them and began to follow her brother. Ahead of him, Guy Brouard saw that the lights were already on in the Duffys’ cottage, a snug stone structure that was, in part, built into the boundary wall of the estate. Once the collection point for rent from tenants of the privateer who’d first built Le Reposoir in the early eighteenth century, the steep-roofed cottage now served to house the couple who helped Guy and his sister maintain the property: Kevin Duffy on the grounds and his wife, Valerie, inside the manor house. The cottage lights indicated that Valerie was up seeing to Kevin’s breakfast. That would be exactly like her: Valerie Duffy was a wife beyond compare.
Guy had long thought that the mould had been broken after Valerie Duffy’s creation. She was the last of a breed, a wife from the past who saw it as her job and her privilege to take care of her man. If Guy himself had had that sort of wife from the first, he knew he wouldn’t have had to spend a lifetime sampling the possibilities out there in the hope of finally finding her. His own two wives had been true to tedious type. One child with the first, two children with the second, good homes, nice cars, fine holidays in the sun, nannies, and boarding schools...It hadn’t mattered: You work too much. You’re never at home. You love your miserable job more than me. It was an endless variation on a deadly theme. No wonder he’d not been able to keep himself from straying.
Out from beneath the bare-branched elms, Guy followed the drive in the direction of the lane. It was quiet still, but as he reached the iron gates and swung one of them open, the first warblers stirred from within the bramble, the blackthorn, and the ivy that grew along the narrow road and clung to the lichened stone wall that edged it.
It was cold. December. What could one expect? But as it was early, there was still no wind, although a rare southeast promised for later that day would make swimming impossible after noon. Not that anyone other than he would likely be swimming in December. That was one of the advantages of having a high tolerance for cold: One had the water all to oneself. That was how Guy Brouard preferred it. For swimming time was thinking time, and he generally had much to think about. Today was no different. The wall of the estate to his right, the tall hedgerows of the surrounding farmland to his left, he strode along the lane in the dim morning light, heading for the turn that would take him down the steep hillside to the bay.
He considered what he had wrought in his life in the past few months, some of it deliberately and with plenty of forethought, some of it as a consequence of events no one could have anticipated. He’d engendered disappointment, confusion, and betrayal among his closest associates. And because he’d long been a man who kept his own counsel in matters closest to his heart, none of them had been able to comprehend—let alone to digest—the fact that their expectations of him had been so wildly off the mark. For nearly a decade he’d encouraged them to think of Guy Brouard as a permanent benefactor, paternal in his concern for their futures, profligate in the manner in which he assured those futures were secure. He hadn’t meant to mislead any of them with this. To the contrary, he’d all along fully intended to make everyone’s secret dream come true.