A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(91)

She gunned the engine as an expression of her feelings and set off. How difficult could it be, she told herself, to trace a route back to the airport and then venture left at La Rue de la Villiaze? She wasn’t an idiot. She could read the street signs. She wouldn’t get lost. Those beliefs, naturally, presupposed that there would actually be street signs. Margaret soon discovered that part of the whimsical nature of the island lay in the manner in which street markings were hidden: generally waist-high and behind a growth of ivy. She also quickly found that one needed to know towards which parish one wished to be headed in order not to end up in the middle of St. Peter Port which, like Rome, appeared to be where all roads led.

Four false starts had her damp with anxious perspiration, and when she finally found the airport, she drove right past La Rue de la Villiaze without noticing it, so tiny was the street when it appeared. Margaret was used to England, where main routes bore some resemblance to main routes. On the map, the street was coloured red, so in her mind it possessed at least two nicely marked lanes, not to mention a large sign indicating she’d found what she was looking for. She was, unfortunately, all the way to a triangular intersection in the middle of the island, one marked by a church halfhidden in a depression in the land, before she thought she may have gone too far. At which point, she pulled onto what went for the verge, studied the map, and saw—with her irritation intensifying—that she’d overshot her mark and would have to try it all again.

This was when she finally cursed her son. Had he not been such a gormless and pathetic excuse of a...But no, no. True, it would have been more convenient to have had him with her, to have had the ability to drive directly to her destination without half a dozen false starts. But Adrian needed to recover from the blow of his father’s will—his bloody bloody bloody father’s will—and if he wanted an hour or so to do that, so be it, Margaret thought. She could cope on her own.

This made her wonder, though, if that was in part what had happened to Carmel Fitzgerald: just one too many moments when she realised there would be times when she would have to cope on her own, times when Adrian took to his room, or worse. God knew Guy could drive anyone with a sensitive nature into the ground, not to mention into self-loathing, and if that had happened to Adrian while he and Carmel had been guests at Le Reposoir, what might have the young woman thought, how vulnerable might she have actually been to the advances of a man so clearly in his element, so virile, and so bloody capable. Vulnerable as hell, Margaret thought. Which Guy had no doubt seen and acted upon with absolutely no conscience.

But, by God, he would pay for what he’d done. He couldn’t pay in life. But he would pay now.

So caught up was she in this resolution that Margaret very nearly missed La Rue de la Villiaze a second time. But at the last moment, she saw a narrow lane veering to the right in the vicinity of the airport. She took it blindly and found herself zipping past a pub and then a hotel and then out into the countryside, coursing between tall banks and hedges beyond which lay farmhouses and fallow fields. Secondary lanes that looked more like tractor tracks began to pop up round her, and just when she was deciding to try any one of them in the hope it might lead her somewhere identifiable, she came to a junction in the road she was traveling and found the miracle of a sign post, pointing to the right and La Corbière. Margaret muttered her thanks to the driving deity that had seen her to this point and turned into a lane that was indistinguishable from any of the others. Had she encountered another car, one of them would have had to reverse back to the lane’s starting point, but her luck held and along the route that passed a whitewashed farmhouse and two flesh-coloured stone cottages, she saw no other vehicle.

What she did see at a dogleg was the Shell House. As Adrian had suggested, only a blind man could have missed it. The building itself was of stucco painted yellow. The shells from which it took its name served as decoration along the drive, topping the boundary wall, and within the large front garden.

It was the most tasteless display Margaret could ever recall seeing, something that looked assembled by a madman. Conch shells, ormer shells, scallop shells, and the occasional abalone shell formed borders, first. They stood alongside flowerbeds in which more shells—glued onto twigs and branches and flexible metal—comprised the flowers. In the middle of the lawn a shallow shell-embedded pond raised its shell-embedded sides and provided an environment for—mercifully—non-shelled goldfish. But all round this pond stood shell-encrusted pedestals on which shell-formed idols posed for purposes of adoration. Two full-sized shell lawn tables and their appropriate shell chairs each held tea services of shell and shell food on their sandwich plates. And along the front wall ran a miniature firestation, a school, a barn, and a church, all of them glinting white from the molluscs that had given their lives to fashion them. It was, Margaret thought as she climbed out of the Range Rover, enough to put one off bouillabaisse forever.

She shuddered at such a monument to vulgarity. It brought back too many unpleasant memories: childhood summer holidays on the coast of Essex, all those aitches dropped, all those greasy chips consumed, all that doughy flesh so hideously reddened in order to proclaim to one and all that enough money had been saved for a holiday at the sea. Margaret shoved aside the thought of it, the remembered sight of her parents on the steps of a hired beach hut, arms slung round each other, bottled beer in their hands. Their sloppy kisses and then her mother’s giggles and what followed the giggles. Enough, Margaret thought. She advanced determinedly up the drive. She called out a confident hello, then a second and a third. No one came out of the house. There were gardening tools arrayed on the front walk, however, although God only knew to what purpose anyone intended to put them in this environment. Nonetheless, they suggested someone was at home and at work in the garden, so she approached the front door. As she did so, a man came round the side of the house, carrying a shovel. He was grubbily clad in blue jeans so dirty that they might have stood up on their own had he not been wearing them. Despite the cold, no jacket protected him, just a faded blue work shirt on which someone had embroidered Moullin Glass in red. The theme of climatic indifference was one that the man carried down to his feet, on which he wore sandals only, although he also had on socks. These, however, displayed more than one hole and his right big toe protruded from one of them. He saw Margaret and stopped, saying nothing. She was surprised to realise that she recognised him: the overnourished Heathcliff she’d seen at Guy’s funeral reception. Close up, she saw that the darkness of his skin was due to his face being weathered to the condition of unsoaped leather. His eyes were hostile observing her, and his hands were covered with myriad healed and unhealed cuts. Margaret might have been intimidated by the level of animosity coming from him, but she already felt her own animosity, and even if that had not been the case, she was not a woman who was easily alarmed.