A Place of Hiding

  Frank himself had supplied the translation, doing it mindlessly and automatically, without pausing to read every line of it, without pausing to consider the ramifications. The meaning sank in as the last word—Tabak—drifted between his lips. As he'd become conscious of the implications, he'd lifted his gaze to the top of the paper and then shifted it to Guy, who'd already read it. Guy, who had lost both parents to the Germans, lost an entire family, lost a heritage.

  Guy said, “How will you deal with this?”

  Frank made no reply.

  Guy said, “You're going to have to. You can't let it go. Holy God, Frank. You don't intend to let it go, do you?”

  That had been the colour and the flavour of their days ever after. Have you dealt with it, Frank? Have you brought it up?

  Frank had thought he wouldn't need to now, with Guy dead and buried and the only one who knew. Indeed, he'd thought he would never need to. But the past day had taught him otherwise.

  Who forgets the past repeats it.

  He got to his feet. He replaced the other papers in their envelope and returned the envelope to its folder. He shut the filing cabinet on it, and he turned out the light. He pulled the cottage door closed behind him.

  Inside his own cottage, he found his father asleep in his armchair. An American detective show was playing on the television, two policemen with NYPD on the back of their windbreakers poised—handguns at the ready—to burst through a closed door and do violence behind it. At another time, Frank would have roused his father and taken him upstairs. But now he passed him and climbed upwards himself, seeking the solitude of his room.

  On the top of his chest of drawers stood two framed photographs. One depicted his parents on their wedding day after the war. In the other, Frank and his father posed at the base of the German observation tower not far from the end of Rue de la Prevote. Frank couldn't remember who had taken the picture, but he did remember the day itself. They'd been pelted by rain but had hiked along the cliff path anyway, and when they'd arrived, the sun had burst upon them. God's approval for their pilgrimage, Graham had said.

  Frank leaned the list from the filing cabinet against this second picture. He backed away from it like a priest unwilling to turn his back on the consecrated bread. He felt behind him for the end of his bed, and he lowered himself to it. He gazed on the insubstantial document and tried not to hear the challenge of that voice.

  You can't let this go.

  And he knew he couldn't. Because It is the cause, my soul.

  Frank had limited experience in the world, but he wasn't an ignorant man. He knew that the human mind is a curious creature that can frequently act like a funhouse mirror when it comes to details too painful to recall. The mind can deny, refashion, or forget. It can create a parallel universe if necessary. It can devise a separate reality for any situation it finds too difficult to bear. In doing this, Frank knew, the mind did not lie. It simply came up with the strategy to cope.

  The trouble arose when the coping strategy obliterated the truth instead of merely shielding one from it temporarily. When that occurred, desperation resulted. Confusion reigned. Chaos followed.

  Frank knew they were on the cusp of chaos. The time had come to act, but he felt immobilised. He'd given his life to the service of a chimera, and despite knowing this fact for two months, he found that he was still reeling from it.

  Exposure now would render meaningless more than half a century of devotion, admiration, and belief. It would make a miscreant out of a hero. It would end a life in public disgrace.

  Frank knew that he could prevent all this. Only a single piece of paper, after all, stood between an old man's fantasy and the truth.

  On Fort Road, an attractive albeit heavily pregnant woman answered the door of the Bertrand Debiere household. She was the architect's wife, Caroline, she informed St. James. Bertrand was working in the back garden with the boys. He was taking them off her hands for a few hours while she got some writing done. He was good that way, a model husband. She didn't know how or why she'd managed to be so lucky as to end up his wife.

  Caroline Debiere noted the collection of large sheets of paper that St. James carried rolled up under his arm. Was this about business? she inquired. Her voice gave a fair indication of how eager she was for that to be the case. He was a fine architect, her husband, she told St. James. Anyone wanting a new building, a renovation of an old one, or an extension of an existing structure would not go wrong hiring Bertrand Debiere to design it.

  St. James told her that he was interested in having Mr. Debiere examine some pre-existing plans. He'd called in at his office, but a secretary had told him Mr. Debiere had left for the day. He'd looked in the phone directory and taken the liberty of tracking the architect down at home. He hoped this wasn't an inconvenient time . . . ?

  Not at all. Caroline would fetch Bertrand from the garden if Mr. St. James wouldn't mind waiting in the sitting room.

  A happy shout rose from outside, at the back of the house. Pounding followed it: the sound of hammer striking nail and wood. Hearing this, St. James said he didn't want to take Mr. Debiere from what he was doing, so if the architect's wife didn't mind, he'd join him and his children in the garden.

  Caroline Debiere looked relieved at this, doubtless happy that she would be able to continue her work without having her sons handed over to her. She showed St. James the way to the back door and left him to his meeting with her husband.

  Bertrand Debiere turned out to be one of the two men St. James had seen duck out of the procession to Guy Brouard's grave site and engage in intense conversation in the grounds of Le Reposoir on the previous day. He was a crane of a man, so tall and gangly that he looked like a character from a Dickens novel, and at the moment he was in the lowest branches of a sycamore tree, pounding together the foundation of what was clearly going to be a tree house for his sons. There were two of them, and they were helping in the way of small children: The elder was passing nails to his father from a leather waist pouch that he wore round his shoulders while the younger was employing a plastic hammer against a piece of wood at the base of the tree, on his haunches and chanting, “I am pounding, I am nailing,” and being no use to his father whatsoever.

  Debiere saw St. James crossing the lawn, but he finished pounding his nail before he acknowledged him. St. James noticed that the architect's gaze took in his limp and fixed on its cause—the leg brace whose cross piece ran through the heel of his shoe—but then it traveled upwards and fixed, like his wife's, on the roll of papers beneath St. James's arm.

  Debiere lowered himself from the tree limbs and said to the older boy, “Bert, take your brother inside please. Mum'll have those biscuits for you now. Mind you have only one each, though. You don't want to ruin your tea.”

  “The lemony ones?” the elder boy asked. “Has she done the lemony ones, Dad?”

  “I expect so. Those are what you asked for, aren't they?”

  “The lemony ones!” Bert breathed the words to his little brother.

  The promise of those biscuits prompted both boys to drop what they were doing and scamper to the house, shouting, “Mummy! Mum! We want our biscuits!” and bringing an end to their mother's solitude. Debiere watched them fondly, then scooped up the nail pouch that Bert had haphazardly discarded, spilling half of its contents onto the grass.

  As the other man collected the nails, St. James introduced himself and explained his connection to China River. He was on Guernsey at the request of the accused woman's brother, he told Debiere, and the police were aware that he was making independent enquiries.

  “What sort of enquiries?” Debiere asked. “The police already have their killer.”

  St. James didn't want to go in the direction of China River's guilt or innocence. Instead, he indicated the roll of plans beneath his arm and asked the architect if he wouldn't mind having a look at them.

  “What are they?”

  “The plans for the design Mr. Brouard selected for the warti
me museum. You've not seen them yet, have you?”

  He'd seen only what the rest of the islanders at Brouard's party had seen, Debiere informed him: the detailed, three-dimensional drawing that was the American architect's rendering of the building.

  “A total piece of crap,” Debiere said. “I don't know what Guy was thinking about when he decided on it. It's about as suitable as the space shuttle for a museum on Guernsey. Huge windows in the front. Cathedral ceilings. The place would be impossible to heat for less than a fortune, not to mention the fact that the entire structure looks like something designed to sit on a cliff and take in the view.”

  “Whereas the museum's actual location . . . ?”

  “Down the lane from St. Saviour's Church, right next door to the underground tunnels. Which is about as far inland and away from any cliff as you can get on an island this size.”

  “The view?”

  “Sod all. Unless you consider the car park for the tunnels a worthy view.”

  “You shared your concerns with Mr. Brouard?”

  Debiere's expression became cautious. “I talked to him.” He weighed the nail pouch in his hand as if considering whether he would put it on and resume his work on the tree house. A quick glance at the sky, taking in what little remained of daylight, apparently prompted him to forgo further building. He began to gather the pieces of timber he'd assembled on the lawn at the base of the tree. He carried them to a large blue polythene tarpaulin at one side of the garden, where he neatly stacked them.

  “I was told that things between you went a bit further than talking,” St. James said. “You argued with him, apparently. Directly after the fireworks.”

  Debiere didn't reply. He merely continued carrying timber to the pile, a patient log man like Ferdinand doing the magician's bidding. When he had this task completed, he said quietly, “I was m-m-meant to get the bloody commission. Everyone knew it. So when it w-w-w-went to someone else . . .” He returned to the sycamore where St. James waited and he put one hand on its mottled trunk. He took a minute during which it seemed that he worked to be the master of his sudden stammer. “A tree house,” he finally said in derision of his own efforts. “Here I am. A bloody tree house.”

  “Had Mr. Brouard told you you'd have the commission?” St. James asked.

  “Told me directly? No. That w-w-” He looked pained. When he was ready, he tried again. “That wasn't Guy's way. He never promised. He merely suggested. He made you think of possibilities. Do this, my man, and the next thing you know, that will happen.”

  “In your case, what did that mean?”

  “Independence. My own firm. Not a minion or a drone, working for someone else's glory, but my own ideas in my own space. He knew that's what I wanted and he encouraged it. He was an entrepreneur, after all. Why shouldn't the rest of us be?” Debiere examined the bark of the sycamore tree and gave a bitter laugh. “So I left my job and forged out on my own, started my own firm. He'd taken risks in his life. I would, too. Of course, it was easier for me, thinking I was secure with an enormous commission.”

  “You said you wouldn't let him ruin you,” St. James reminded him.

  “Words overheard at a party?” Debiere said. “I don't remember what I said. I just remember having a look at that drawing instead of drooling over it like everyone else. I could see how wrong it was and I couldn't understand why he'd chosen it when he'd said . . . when he'd . . . he'd as much as promised. And I remember f-f-feeling—” He stopped. His hand was white at the knuckles from the grip he had upon the tree.

  “What happens with his death?” St. James asked. “Does the museum get built anyway?”

  “I don't know,” he said. “Frank Ouseley told me the will didn't allow for the museum. I can't imagine Adrian would care enough to fund it, so I expect it's going to be up to Ruth, if she wants to go forward.”

  “I dare say she might be amenable to suggestions at this point.”

  “Guy made it clear that the museum was important to him. She's going to know that without anyone telling her, believe me.”

  “I didn't mean amenable to building the museum,” St. James said. “I meant amenable to changes in the design. Amenable in ways her brother wasn't, perhaps. Have you spoken to her? Do you intend to?”

  “I intend to,” Debiere said. “I've not much choice.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Look around, Mr. St. James. I've two boys and a baby on the way. A wife I talked into leaving her job to write her novel. A mortgage here and a new office in Trinity Square, where my secretary expects to be paid now and then. I need the commission and if I don't get it . . . So I'll talk to Ruth. Yes. I'll argue my case. I'll do anything it takes.”

  He apparently recognised the wealth of meaning in his final statement because he moved away from the tree abruptly and returned to the pile of timber at the edge of the lawn. He pulled the sides of the blue tarpaulin up round the neat stack of boards, revealing rope precisely coiled on the ground. This he took up and used to tie the polythene sheet protectively over the wood, whereupon he began to gather up his tools.

  St. James followed him when he took his hammer, nails, level, tape measure, and saw into a handsome shed at the bottom of the garden. Debiere replaced these items above a workbench, and it was on this bench that St. James set the plans he'd taken from Le Reposoir. His main intention had been to learn whether Henry Moullin's elaborate windows could be used on the building design that Guy Brouard had chosen, but now he saw that Moullin wasn't the only person whose participation in the construction of the wartime museum might have been crucial to him.

  He said, “These are what the American architect sent over to Mr. Brouard. I'm afraid I know nothing about architectural drawings. Will you look at them and tell me what you think? There appear to be several different kinds.”

  “I've already told you.”

  “You might want to add more when you see them.”

  The papers were large, well over a yard long and nearly as wide. Debiere sighed his agreement to inspect them and reached for a hammer to weigh the edges down.

  They were not blueprints. Debiere informed him that blueprints had gone the way of carbon paper and manual typewriters. These were black-and-white documents that looked as if they'd come off an elephantine copying machine, and as he sorted through them, Debiere identified each for what it was: the schematic of every floor of the building; the construction documents with labels indicating the ceiling plan, the electrical plan, the plumbing plan, the building sections; the site plan showing where the building would sit at its chosen location; the elevation drawings.

  Debiere shook his head as he fingered through them. He murmured, “Ridiculous” and “What's the idiot thinking?” and he pointed out the ludicrous size of the individual rooms that the structure would contain. “How,” he demanded, indicating one of the rooms with a screwdriver, “is this supposed to be set up as a gallery? Or a viewing room? Or whatever the hell it's designed to be? Look at it. You could comfortably fit three people into a room that size, but that's the limit. It's no bigger than a cell. And they're all like that.”

  St. James examined the schematic that the architect was indicating. He noted that nothing on the drawing was identified and he asked Debiere if this was normal. “Wouldn't you generally label what each room is meant to be?” he asked. “Why's that missing from these drawings?”

  “Who the hell knows,” Debiere said dismissively. “Shoddy work's my guess. Not surprising considering he submitted his design without even bothering to walk the site. And look at this—” He'd pulled one of the sheets out and placed it on top of the stack. He tapped his screwdriver against it. “Is this a courtyard with a pool, for God's sake? I'd love to have a talk with this idiot. Probably designs homes in Hollywood and thinks no place's complete unless twenty-year-olds in bikinis have a spot to lie in the sun. What a waste of space. The whole thing's a disaster. I can't believe that Guy—” He frowned. Suddenly, he bent over the drawing and looked at
it more closely. He appeared to be searching for something but whatever it was, it wasn't part of the building itself because Debiere looked at all four corners of the paper and then directed his gaze along the edges. He said, “This is damn odd,” and shifted the first paper to one side so that he could see the one under it. Then he went to the next, then the one after that. He finally looked up.

  “What?” St. James asked.

  “These should be wet-signed,” Debiere said. “Every one of them. But not one is.”

  “What d'you mean?”

  Debiere pointed to the plans. “When these're complete, the architect stamps them. Then he signs his name over that stamp.”

  “Is that a formality?”

  “No. It's essential. It's how you tell the plans are legitimate. You can't get them approved by planning or building commissions if they're not stamped, and you sure as hell can't find a contractor willing to take on the job, either.”

  “So if they aren't legitimate, what else might they be?” St. James asked the architect.

  Debiere looked from St. James to the plans. And then back to St. James once again. “Stolen,” he replied.

  They were silent, each of them contemplating the documents, the schematics, and the drawings that lay across the workbench. Outside the shed, a door slammed and a voice cried out, “Daddy! Mum's made you short bread as well.”

  Debiere roused himself at this. His forehead creased as he apparently tried to comprehend what seemed so patently incomprehensible: a large gathering of islanders and others at Le Reposoir, a gala event, a surprising announcement, a mass of fireworks to mark the occasion, the presence of everyone important on Guernsey, the coverage in the paper and on island television.

  His sons were shouting “Daddy! Daddy! Come in for tea!” but Debiere didn't seem to hear them. He murmured, “What did he intend to do, then?”

  The answer to that question, St. James thought, might go far to shedding more light on the murder.