“So you're th' first,” the man said with a nod. “Always wondered wha' th' first 'as like. Says a lot 'bout a man, his first. Y'know? Tells you why he went the way he went in the afters.”
Margaret strained to decipher his words through his accent. She caught every fourth or fifth utterance, and from that she was able to reach the conclusion that the creature was referring in some way that was less than flattering to her sexual partnership with Guy. This wasn't about to do. She was meant to have control over the conversation. Men always reduced things to poke-and-thrust if they could. They thought it was an efficacious manoeuvre guaranteed to fluster any woman with whom they spoke. But Margaret Chamberlain was not any woman. And she was gathering her wits to make this clear to the man when a mobile rang and he was forced to fish it out of his pocket, flip it open, and reveal himself as a fraud.
He said, “Henry Moullin,” into the phone and listened for nearly a minute. And then in a voice perfectly different from that with which he'd been entertaining Margaret, he said, “I'd first have to do the measurements on the site, Madam. There's no real way I can tell you how long that sort of project would take until I see what I'd be working with.” He listened again and in short order dug a black diary out of another pocket. Into this, he scheduled some sort of appointment with someone he called, “Certainly. Happy to do it, Mrs. Felix.” He returned the phone to his pocket and looked at Margaret quite as if he hadn't been trying to bamboozle her into believing he was someone shearing sheep outside of Casterbridge.
“Ah,” Margaret said with grim pleasantry, “now that we have that out of the way, perhaps you'll answer the question and tell me where I can find Cynthia Moullin. I take it you must be her father?”
He was as unrepentant as he was unembarrassed. He said, “Cyn's not here, Mrs. Brouard.”
“Chamberlain,” Margaret corrected him. “Where is she? It's essential I speak to her at once.”
“Not possible,” he said. “She's gone to Alderney. Helping out her gran.”
“And this gran has no phone?”
“When it's working, she has one.”
“I see. Well, perhaps that's just as well, Mr. Moullin. You and I can sort things out ourselves and she won't have to know a thing about it. Nor will she have to be disappointed.”
Moullin removed from his pocket a tube of some sort of ointment, which he squeezed into his palm. He eyed her as he rubbed the mixture into the many cuts on his hands, as if he had not the slightest care that he was also rubbing garden soil into them. “You'd best tell me what it is,” he said, and there was a masculine directness to his manner that was simultaneously disconcerting and somewhat arousing. Margaret had an instant's bizarre vision of herself as woman-to-his-man, sheer animal stuff that she wouldn't have thought possible to entertain. He took a step in her direction and she took a step backwards in reflex. His lips moved in what might have been amusement. A frisson shot through her. She felt like a character in a bad romance novel, one moment away from ravishment.
Which was just enough to infuriate her, enabling her to wrest the upper hand back. “This is something that you and I can probably resolve ourselves, Mr. Moullin. I can't think you wish to be drawn into a protracted legal battle. Am I right?”
“Legal battle over what?”
“The terms of my former husband's will.”
A glint in his eye indicated heightened interest. Margaret saw this and realised compromise was something that might work: settling on a lesser sum to avoid having to spend it all on solicitors—or whatever they called them over here—who would hash things out in court for years as if members of the Jarndyce clan had come calling.
She said, “I'm not going to lie to you, Mr. Moullin. Your daughter's been left a considerable fortune in my former husband's will. My son—Guy's oldest child and his only male heir, as you may know—has been left far less. I'm sure you'll agree there's a gross inequity here. So I'd like to set it right without legal recourse.”
Margaret hadn't thought in advance about what the man's reaction might be to learning about his daughter's inheritance. In fact, she hadn't much cared what his reaction would be. All she'd thought of was sorting this situation out to Adrian's benefit in any way she could. A person of reason, she'd decided, would see things her way when she laid them out in terms that were tinged with allusions to future litigation.
Henry Moullin said nothing at first. He turned from her. He went back to his digging, but his breathing had altered. It was harsh and his pace was faster than it had been before. He jumped on the shovel and drove it into the ground. Once, twice, three times. As he did so, the back of his neck changed from unsoaped leather to so deep a red that Margaret feared he might have a seizure on the spot. Then he said, “My daughter, God damn it,” and stopped his digging. He seized the bucket of pellets. He hurled them into the second trench with no regard for how they spilled up and over its sides. He said, “Does he think he can . . . Not for a single God damn moment . . .” And before Margaret could say another word, before she could sympathise, however factitiously, with his obvious distress over Guy's intrusion into his ability to support his own child, Henry Moullin grabbed up the shovel again. This time, though, he swung round on her. He raised it and advanced.
Margaret cried out, cringing, hating herself for cringing, hating him for making her cringe, and looking for a quick escape. But her only option for flight was to leap over the shell firestation, the shell chaise longue, the shell tea table, or—like a long-jumper—the shell-crusted pond. As she started to head for the chaise longue, however, Henry Moullin shoved past her and went after the shell firestation. He struck at it blindly, “God damn.” Fragments flew everywhere. He reduced it to rubble in three brutal blows. He went on to the barn and then to the school while Margaret watched, awestruck by the power of his rage.
He said nothing more. He flung himself from one fanciful shell creation to the next: the schoolhouse, the tea table, the chairs, the pond, the garden of artificial shell flowers. Nothing seemed to spend him. He didn't stop till he'd worked all the way back to the path that led from the drive to the front door. And there he finally threw his shovel at the yellow house itself. It narrowly missed one of the grated front windows. It fell with a clatter onto the walk.
The man himself stood panting. Some of the cuts on his hands had reopened. Fresh cuts had been made by fragments of the shells and the concrete that had held the shells together. His filthy jeans were white with dust, and when he wiped the backs of his hands along them, blood stained that white in feathery streaks.
Margaret said, “Don't!” without even thinking. “Don't let him do this to you, Henry Moullin.”
He stared at her, breathing hard, blinking as if this would somehow clear his head. All aggression seeped out of him. He looked round at the devastation he'd wrought in the front of his house and he said, “Bastard had two already.”
JoAnna's girls, Margaret thought. Guy had his daughters. He'd had and lost the opportunity for fatherhood given to him. But he hadn't been a man to take such a loss lightly, so he'd replaced all of his abandoned children with others, others much more likely to turn a blind eye to the faults so apparent to his own flesh and blood. For they were poor, and he was rich. Money bought love and devotion where it could.
Margaret said, “You need to see to your hands. You've cut them. They're bleeding. No, don't wipe them—”
But he did so anyway, adding more streaks onto the dust and grime on his jeans and, when that didn't suffice, wiping them on his dust-caked work shirt as well. He said, “We don't want his damn money. We don't need it. You can set fire to it in Trinity Square for all it means to us.”
Margaret thought he might have said that at first and saved them both from a frightening scene, not to mention saved the front garden as well. She said, “I'm very happy to hear that, Mr. Moullin. It's only fair to Adrian—”
“But it's Cyn's money, isn't it,” Henry Moullin went on, dashing her hopes as effectively as he'd dashed to pieces th
e creations of shell and cement that surrounded them. “If Cyn wants the payoff . . .” He trudged to the shovel where it lay on the path to the door. He picked it up. He did the same to a rake and a dustpan. Once he had them, however, he gazed round, as if unsure what he'd been doing with them in the first place.
He looked at Margaret and she saw that his eyes were bloodlined with grief. He said, “He comes here. I go there. We work side by side for years. And it's: You're a real artist, Henry. You aren't meant to do greenhouse work all your life. It's: Break out and break away from it, man. I believe in you. I'll help you a bit. Let me take you on. Nothing ventured, nothing ever God damn gained. And I believed him, see. I wanted it. More than this life here. For my girls, I wanted it, yes, for my girls. But for me as well. Where's the sin in that?”
“No sin,” Margaret said. “We all want the best for our children, don't we? I do, too. That's why I'm here, because of Adrian. My son and Guy's. Because of what was done to him. He was cheated out of his due, Mr. Moullin. You do see how wrong that is, don't you?”
“We were all cheated,” Henry Moullin said. “Your ex-husband was good at that. He spent years setting every one of us up, biding his time with us all. Not a man to take, our Mr. Brouard, not a man to operate wrong side of the law. Wrong side of what was moral, see. Wrong side of what was dutiful and right. He had us lapping milk from his hands without our knowing he'd put poison in it.”
“Don't you want to be part of making that right?” Margaret said. “You can, you know. You can talk to your daughter, you can explain. We wouldn't ask Cynthia to give up all the money he's left her. We'd only want to make things even, a reflection of who is Guy's blood and who isn't.”
“That's what you want?” Henry Moullin said. “That's what you think will balance the scales? You're just like him, then, aren't you, Missus? Think money makes up for every sin. But it doesn't, and it never will.”
“You won't talk to her, then? You won't explain? We're going to have to take this to another level?”
“You don't get it, do you?” Henry Moullin asked. “There is no talking to my girl any longer. There is no explaining left to be done.”
He turned and carried his tools the way he'd come with the shovel just a few minutes earlier. He disappeared round the side of the house.
Margaret stood for a moment, unmoving on the path, and found herself for the first time in her life at a loss for words. She felt nearly overwhelmed by the strength of the hate that Henry Moullin left behind him. It was like a current that pulled her into a tide from which there was only the barest hope of escape.
Where she least expected to find it, she felt a kinship with this disheveled man. She understood what he was going through. One's children were one's own, belonging to no one else in quite the same way they belonged to you. They were not the same as one's spouse, one's parents, one's siblings, one's partners, or one's mates. One's children were of one's body and soul. No intruder easily broke the bond that was created from that kind of substance.
But if an intruder attempted or, God forbid, succeeded . . . ?
No one knew better than Margaret Chamberlain the extent someone might go to in order to preserve a relationship one had with his child.
Chapter 13
ST. JAMES STOPPED AT the hotel first when he returned to St. Peter Port, but he found their room empty and no message at reception from his wife. So he went on to the police station, where he interrupted DCI Le Gallez in the midst of wolfing down a baguette crammed with prawn salad. The DCI took him to his office, offering a portion of his sandwich (which St. James refused) and a cup of coffee (which St. James accepted). He put chocolate digestives on offer as well, but since they looked as if their coating had melted and reconstituted itself one time too many, St. James declined and made do with the coffee alone.
He brought Le Gallez into the picture with regard to the wills of the Brouards, brother and sister. Le Gallez listened as he chewed, and he jotted notes on a legal pad that he snared from a plastic in-and-out box on his desk. As St. James spoke, he watched the DCI underline Fielder and Moullin, adding a question mark next to the second name. Le Gallez interrupted the flow of information to explain that he knew about the dead man's relationship with Paul Fielder, but Cynthia Moullin's was a new name to come up. He also jotted down the facts of the Brouard wills and listened politely as St. James posited a theory he'd considered on the way back to town.
The earlier will that Ruth Brouard knew about remembered individuals deleted from the more recent document: Anaïs Abbott, Frank Ouseley, Kevin and Valerie Duffy, along with Guy Brouard's children as required by law. This being the case, she had asked those individuals to be present when the will was read. If, St. James pointed out to Le Gallez, any of those beneficiaries had known about the earlier will, they had a clear motive to do away with Guy Brouard, hoping to collect sooner rather than later what was coming to them.
“Fielder and Moullin weren't in the earlier will?” Le Gallez enquired.
“She didn't mention them,” St. James replied, “and as neither was present when the will was read this afternoon, I think it's safe to conclude that the legacies they were left came as a surprise to Miss Brouard.”
“But to them?” Le Gallez asked. “They might have been told by Brouard himself. Which puts them in the frame with motives as well. Wouldn't you say?”
“I suppose it's possible.” He didn't think it likely, considering the two were teenagers, but he welcomed any indication that Le Gallez's thinking was, at least for the moment, encompassing something more than China River's putative guilt.
Seeing the inspector's thoughts ranging wider than they had been earlier, St. James hated to do anything that might remind Le Gallez of his previous mindset, but he knew that his conscience would never rest unless he was completely honest with the other man. “On the other hand . . .” St. James felt reluctant to do so—his loyalty to his wife seemed to call for a similar loyalty to her friends—and despite knowing how the inspector was likely to react to the information, he next handed over the material that Ruth Brouard had passed to him during their last conversation. The DCI flipped through Guy Brouard's passport first, then went on to the credit card bills and the receipts. He spent a moment studying the receipt from the Citrus Grille, tapping his pencil against it as he took another bite of his sandwich. After some thought, he swung his chair round and reached for a manila folder. He opened this to reveal a set of typed notes, which he fingered through till he found what he apparently wanted.
“Postal codes,” he said to St. James. “They both begin with nine two. Nine two eight and nine two six.”
“One of them is Cherokee River's, I take it?”
“You knew already?”
“I know he lives somewhere in the area Brouard visited.”
“The second code's his,” Le Gallez said. “The nine two six. The other is this restaurant's: the Citrus Grille. What does that suggest to you?”
“That Guy Brouard and Cherokee River passed some time in the same county.”
“Nothing more, then?”
“How can it suggest more? California's a large state. Its counties are probably large as well. I'm not sure anyone can extrapolate from postal codes that Brouard and River met prior to River's coming to the island with his sister.”
“You find nothing coincidental in this? Nothing suspiciously coincidental?”
“I would do, yes, if we had only the facts right in front of us at this moment: the passport, the receipts, and Cherokee River's home address. But a lawyer—no doubt with a similar postal code—hired River to deliver architectural plans to Guernsey. So it seems reasonable to assume that Guy Brouard was in California, meeting that lawyer—as well as the architect, who probably also has a similar postal code—and not with Cherokee River. I don't expect they knew each other till the moment River and his sister arrived at Le Reposoir.”
“But you'll agree that we can't discount it?”
“I'd say we can't d
iscount anything.”
Which, St. James knew, included the ring that he and Deborah had found at the bay. He asked DCI Le Gallez about this, about the possibility of there being fingerprints upon it, or at least a partial print that might be useful to the police. The ring's appearance suggested it hadn't been lying on the beach for any length of time, he pointed out. But no doubt the DCI had himself already reached that conclusion when he'd examined it.
Le Gallez set his sandwich aside and wiped his fingers on a paper napkin. He took up a cup of coffee that he'd been ignoring as he ate, and he cradled it in his palm before he spoke. The two words he said made St. James's heart sink.
“What ring?”
Bronze, brass, some baser metal, St. James told him. It was fashioned into a skull and crossed bones with the numbers thirty-nine-stroke-forty on the skull's forehead along with an inscription in German. He'd sent it into the station earlier with instructions that it be handed over to DCI Le Gallez personally.
He didn't add that his own wife had been the courier because he was in the process of steadying himself to hear the inevitable from the DCI. He was already asking himself what that inevitable meant, although he thought he knew the answer.
“Haven't seen it,” Le Gallez told him, and he picked up the phone and rang reception to make sure the ring wasn't waiting for him below. He spoke to the duty officer in charge, describing the ring as St. James had done. He grunted when the officer made a reply and he eyed St. James as he listened at some length to a recitation on one subject or another. He finally said, “Well, bring it up here, man,” which allowed St. James to breathe easily again. He went on with “For God's sake, Jerry, I'm not the person to grouse to about the bloody fax machine. Just sort it out and have done with it, will you?” and he slammed down the phone with a curse and dashed St. James's peace of mind a second time in three minutes when he next spoke.
“No ring in sight. Want to tell me more about it, then?”