Margaret sighed. She said, “Adrian.” And then, “Adrian,” when he failed to respond.
He heard her the second time and looked up from his scrutiny. He slunk over to the car hire counter and replaced the map. The red-head asked if she could help him, sir, but he didn't reply. Or even look at her. She asked again. He pulled up the collar of his jacket and gave her his shoulder instead of a reply. “Car's outside,” he said to his mother by way of hello as he hoisted her suitcases from the trolley.
“How about ‘Nice flight, darling Mum?' ” Margaret suggested. “Why don't we just wheel the trolley to the car, dear? It would be easier, wouldn't it?”
He strode off, her cases in hand. There was nothing for it but to follow. Margaret cast an apologetic smile in the direction of the car hire counter in case the red-head was monitoring the welcome she'd received from her son. Then she went after him.
The airport comprised a single building sitting to one side of a single runway just off a series of unploughed fields. It had a car park smaller than her own local railway station's in England, so it was an easy matter to follow Adrian through it. By the time Margaret caught him up, he was shoving her two suitcases into the back of a Range Rover which was, she discovered in very short order, just the wrong sort of car in which to be riding round the threadlike roads of Guernsey.
She'd never been to the island herself. She and Adrian's father had long been divorced by the time he retired from Chateaux Brouard and set up house here. But Adrian had been to visit his father numerous times since Guy's removal to Guernsey, so why he was driving round in something nearly the size of a pantechnicon when what was clearly called for was a Mini was beyond her comprehension. As was the case with a number of things that her son did, the most recent being his termination of the only relationship he'd managed to have with a woman in his thirty-seven years. What was that all about? Margaret still wondered. All he'd said to her was “We wanted different things,” which she didn't believe for a moment, since she knew—from a private and very confidential conversation with the young woman herself—that Carmel Fitzgerald had wanted marriage, and she also knew—from a private and very confidential conversation with her son—that Adrian had considered himself lucky to find someone youthful, moderately attractive, and willing to unquestioningly hook up with a nearly middle-aged man who'd never lived anywhere but in his mother's house. Save, of course, for that dreadful three months on his own while he tried to go to university . . . but the less that was thought of the better. So, what had happened?
Margaret knew she couldn't ask that question. At least, not now with Guy's funeral coming fast upon them. But she intended to ask it soon.
She said, “How's your poor aunt Ruth coping, darling?”
Adrian braked for a light at an ageing hotel. “Haven't seen her.”
“Whyever not? Is she keeping to her room?”
He looked ahead to the traffic light, all his attention locked on to the moment the amber would show. “I mean I've seen her but I haven't seen her. I don't know how she's coping. She doesn't say.”
He wouldn't think to ask her, of course. Any more than he would think to talk to his own mother in something more direct than riddles. Margaret said, “She wasn't the one who found him, was she?”
“That would be Kevin Duffy. The groundsman.”
“She must be devastated. They've been together for . . . Well, they've always been together, haven't they.”
“I don't know why you wanted to be here, Mother.”
“Guy was my husband, darling.”
“Number one of four,” Adrian pointed out. It was tiresome of him, really. Margaret knew very well how many times she'd been married. “I thought you went to their funerals only if they died while you were still married to them.”
“That's an incredibly vulgar remark, Adrian.”
“Is it? Good God, we can't have vulgarity.”
Margaret turned in her seat to face him. “Why are you behaving like this?”
“Like what?”
“Guy was my husband. I loved him once. I owe him the fact that I have you as a son. So if I want to honour all that by attending his funeral, I intend to do it.”
Adrian smiled in a way that indicated his disbelief and Margaret wanted to slap him. Her son knew her only too well.
“You always thought you were a better liar than you actually are,” he said. “Did Aunt Ruth think I'd do something . . . hmm . . . what would it be? unhealthy? illegal? just plain mad without you here? Or does she think I've already done that?”
“Adrian! How can you suggest . . . even as a joke . . .”
“I'm not joking, Mother.”
Margaret turned to the window, unwilling to listen to any more examples of her son's skewed thinking. The light changed and Adrian powered through the intersection.
The route they were following was strung with structures. Beneath the sombre sky, postwar stucco cottages sat cheek by jowl with run-down Victorian terraces which themselves occasionally butted up against a tourist hotel that was shut for the season. The populated areas gave way to bare fields on the south side of the road, and here the original stone farmhouses stood, with white wooden boxes at the edge of their properties marking the sites where their owners would deposit homegrown new potatoes or hot-house flowers for sale at other times of the year.
“Your aunt phoned me because she phoned everyone,” Margaret finally said. “Frankly, I'm surprised you didn't ring me yourself.”
“No one else is coming,” Adrian said in that maddening way he had of altering the course of a conversation. “Not even JoAnna or the girls. Well, I can understand JoAnna . . . how many mistresses did Dad go through while he was married to her? But I thought the girls might come. They hated his guts, of course, but I reckoned sheer greed would light a fire beneath their bums in the end. The will, you know. They'd want to know what they're getting. Big money, no doubt, if he ever got round to feeling guilty about what he did to their mum.”
“Please don't talk about your father like that, Adrian. As his only son and the man who will one day marry and have sons to carry on Guy's name, I think you might—”
“But they're not coming.” Adrian spoke doggedly and louder now, as if with the wish to drown his mother out. “Still, I thought JoAnna might show up, if only to drive a stake through the old man's heart.” Adrian grinned, but it was more to himself than to her. Nonetheless, that grin caused a chill to shoot through Margaret's body. It reminded her too much of her son's bad times, when he pretended all was well while within him a civil war was brewing.
She was reluctant to ask but she was more reluctant to remain in ignorance. So she picked her handbag off the floor and opened it, making a pretence of searching for a breath mint as she said in an offhand manner, “I expect the salt air does one a lot of good. How have your nights gone since you've been here, darling? Any uncomfortable ones?”
He flicked her a look. “You shouldn't have insisted I come to his bloody party, Mother.”
“I insisted?” Margaret touched her fingers to her chest.
“‘You must go, darling.' ” He did an uncanny imitation of her voice. “‘It's been ages since you've seen him. Have you even spoken to him on the phone since last September? No? So there you are. Your father will be extremely disappointed if you stay away.' And we couldn't have that,” Adrian said. “Guy Brouard mustn't ever be disappointed when there's something he wants. Except he didn't want it. He didn't want me here. You were the one who wanted that. He told me as much.”
“Adrian, no. That's not . . . I hope . . . You . . . you didn't quarrel with him, did you?”
“You thought he'd change his mind about the money if I showed up to see him in his moment of glory, didn't you?” Adrian asked. “I'd parade my mug at his stupid party and he'd be so damned happy to see me that he'd finally change his mind and fund the business. Isn't that what this was all about?”
“I have no idea what you're talking about.”
“You aren't
suggesting he didn't tell you about refusing to fund the business, are you? Last September? Our little . . . discussion? ‘You don't show enough potential for success, Adrian. Sorry, my boy, but I don't like throwing my money away.' Despite how many buckets of cash he distributed elsewhere, of course.”
“Your father said that? ‘So little potential'?”
“Among other things. The idea's good, he told me. Internet access can always be improved and this does look like the way to do it. But with your track record, Adrian . . . not that you actually have a track record, which means we'll now need to examine all the reasons why you don't.”
Margaret felt the outrage slowly spill its acid into her stomach. “Did he actually . . . ? How dare he.”
“So pull up a chair, son. Yes, do. Ah. You have had your difficulties, haven't you? That incident in the headmaster's garden when you were twelve? And what about the hash you made out of university when you were nineteen? Not exactly what one looks for in an individual in whom one plans to make an investment, my boy.”
“He said that to you? He brought those things up? Darling, I'm so sorry,” Margaret said. “I could just weep. And you came over anyway after that? You agreed to see him? Why?”
“Obviously, because I'm a stupid lout.”
“Don't say that.”
“I thought I'd give it another try. I thought if I could just get this thing going, Carmel and I might . . . I don't know . . . give it another go. Seeing him—having to put up with whatever he dished out to me—I decided it would be worth it if I could save things with Carmel.”
He'd kept his attention determinedly on the road as he admitted all this, and Margaret felt her heart go out to her son despite all the characteristics about him that frequently maddened her. His life had been so much rougher than the lives of his half-brothers, she thought. And she herself was to blame for so much of what had been rough about it. If she'd allowed him to have more time with his father, the time that Guy had wanted, had demanded, had attempted to get . . . That had been impossible, of course. But if she'd allowed it, had taken the risk, perhaps Adrian's way would have been easier. Perhaps she would have less to feel guilty about.
“Did you speak to him again about the money, then? On this visit, dear?” she asked. “Did you ask him to help you with the new business?”
“Didn't have the chance. I couldn't get him alone, what with Miss Melontits hanging all over him, making sure I didn't get a moment to score any of the cash she wanted for herself.”
“Miss . . . Who?”
“His latest. You'll meet her.”
“That can't be her real—”
Adrian snorted. “It should be. She was always hanging round, thrusting them into his face just in case he started thinking of something that didn't immediately relate to her. Quite the distraction, she provided. So we never talked. And then it was too late.”
Margaret hadn't asked before because she hadn't wanted to elicit the information from Ruth, who had sounded on the phone as if she was already suffering enough. And she hadn't wanted to ask her son as soon as she saw him because she'd needed to assess his state of mind first. But now he'd given her an opening, and she took it.
“How exactly did your father die?”
They were entering a wooded area of the island, where a high stone wall richly covered in ivy ran along the west side of the road while the east side grew thick groves of sycamores, chestnuts, and elms. Between these in places the distant Channel showed through, a sheen of steel in the winter light. Margaret couldn't imagine why anyone would have wanted to swim there.
Adrian didn't reply to her question at first. He waited till they'd passed some farmland, and he slowed as they came to a break in the wall where two iron gates stood open. Tiles inset into the wall identified the property as Le Reposoir, and here he turned in to a drive. It led in the direction of an impressive house: four storeys of grey stone surmounted by what looked like a widow's walk, the inspiration, perhaps, of a former owner who'd undergone some form of enchantment in New England. Dormer windows rose beneath this balustraded balcony, while beneath these windows the façade of the house itself was perfectly balanced. Guy, Margaret saw, had done quite well for himself in retirement. But that was hardly surprising.
Towards the house, the drive emerged from the trees that tunneled it and circled a lawn at the centre of which stood an impressive bronze sculpture of a young man and woman swimming with dolphins. Adrian followed this circle and stopped the Range Rover at steps that swept up to a white front door. It was closed and it remained closed as he finally replied to Margaret's question.
“He choked to death,” Adrian said. “Down at the bay.”
Margaret was puzzled by this. Ruth had said that her brother had not returned from his morning swim, that he had been waylaid on the beach and murdered. But choking to death didn't imply murder at all. Being choked did, of course, but being choked had not been Adrian's words.
“Choked?” Margaret said. “But Ruth told me your father was murdered.” And for a wild moment she considered the fact that her former sister-in-law may have lied to her in order to get her to the island for some reason.
“It was murder, all right,” Adrian said. “No one chokes accidentally—or even normally—on what was lodged in Dad's throat.”
Chapter 5
“THIS IS JUST ABOUT the last place I thought I'd ever be showing up at.” Cherokee River paused for a moment to observe the revolving sign in front of New Scotland Yard. He ran his gaze from the silver metallic letters to the building itself with its protective bunkers, its uniformed guards, and its air of sombre authority.
“I'm not sure if it's going to do us any good,” Deborah admitted. “But I think it's worth a try.”
It was closing in on half past ten, and the rain had finally begun to abate. What had been a downpour when they'd set off earlier for the American embassy was now a persistent drizzle, from which they sheltered beneath one of Simon's large black umbrellas.
Their sojourn had begun hopefully enough. Despite the desperate quality of his sister's situation, Cherokee possessed that can-do attitude that Deborah recalled being second nature to most Americans she'd met in California. He was a citizen of the United States on a mission to his nation's embassy. As a taxpayer he had assumed that when he entered the embassy and laid out the facts, phone calls would be made and China's release would be effected at once.
At first it had seemed that Cherokee's belief in the embassy's power was perfectly well founded. Once they had established where they were supposed to go—to the Special Consular Services Section, whose entrance was not through the impressive doors and beneath the impressive flag on Grosvenor Square but, rather, round the corner on the much more subdued Brook Street—they gave Cherokee's name at the reception desk, and a phone call into the reaches of the embassy brought an amazingly and gratifyingly quick response. Even Cherokee hadn't expected to be greeted by the chief of Special Consular Services. Perhaps ushered into her presence by an underling, but not greeted personally right there in reception. But that was what had happened. Special Consul Rachel Freistat—“It's Ms.,” she'd said and her handshake was of the two-fisted sort, designed to reassure—strode into the enormous waiting room and shepherded both Deborah and Cherokee into her office where she offered them coffee and biscuits and insisted they sit near the electric fire to dry out.
It turned out that Rachel Freistat knew everything. Within twenty-four hours of China's arrest, she'd been phoned by the Guernsey police. This, she explained, was regulation, something agreed upon by the nations who'd signed the Hague Treaty. She had, in fact, spoken to China herself by phone, and she'd asked her if she required someone from the embassy to fly over and attend to her on the island.
“She said she didn't need that,” the special consul had informed Deborah and Cherokee. “Otherwise we would have sent someone at once.”
“But she does need that,” Cherokee protested. “She's being railroaded. She knows i
t. Why would she have said . . . ?” He shoved his hand through his hair and muttered, “I don't get that one at all.”
Rachel Freistat had nodded sympathetically, but her expression telegraphed the message that she'd heard the “being railroaded” declaration before. She said, “We're limited as to what we can do, Mr. River. Your sister knows that. We've been in touch with her attorney—her advocate, it's called over there—and he's assured us that he's been present for each one of her interviews with the police. We're ready to make any phone calls to the States that your sister wants made, although she specifically said she wants none right now. And should the American press pursue the story, we'll handle all queries from them as well. The local press on Guernsey is already covering the story, but they're hobbled by their relative isolation and their lack of funds, so they can't do more than just print what few details they're given by the police.”
“But that's just it,” Cherokee protested. “The police're doing their best to frame her.”
Ms. Freistat had taken a sip of her coffee then. She'd looked at Cherokee over the rim of her cup. Deborah could see that she was weighing the available alternatives when it came to delivering bad news to someone, and she took her time before she reached her decision. “The American embassy can't help you with that, I'm afraid,” she finally told him. “While it may be true, we can't interfere. If you believe wheels are turning that will steamroll your sister into prison, then you need to get help at once. But it needs to come from within their own system, not from ours.”
“What's that supposed to mean?” Cherokee demanded.
“Perhaps some sort of private investigator . . . ?” Ms. Freistat replied.
So they'd left the embassy without attaining the joy they'd hoped for. They'd spent the next hour discovering that finding a private investigator on Guernsey was akin to finding ice cream in the Sahara. That being ascertained, they'd trekked across town to Victoria Street where now they stood with New Scotland Yard rising up before them, grey concrete and glass springing out of the heart of Westminster.