Read Online A Place of Hiding by Elizabeth George - Free Book Online

clothes,” Deborah said. “I expect a bath'll do the trick. I'm going to run one for you and while you're soaking, we'll throw your things in the dryer. All right?”
    â€œHey, no. I can't. It's . . . hell, what time is it?”
    â€œDon't worry about the time. Simon, will you take him to the spare room and help him with his clothes? And no arguments, Cherokee. It isn't any trouble.”
    Deborah led the way upstairs. While her husband went in search of something dry for the man to wear when he was finished bathing, she turned the taps on in the tub. She laid out towels, and when Cherokee joined her—clothed in an old dressing gown of Simon's with a pair of Simon's pyjamas draped over his arm—she cleaned the cut on his head. He winced at the alcohol she dabbed on his skin. She held his head more firmly and said, “Grit your teeth.”
    â€œYou don't provide bullets to bite?”
    â€œOnly when I'm doing surgery. This doesn't count.” She tossed the cotton wool away and took up a plaster. “Cherokee, where've you come from tonight? Not Los Angeles, surely. Because you've no . . . Have you any luggage?”
    â€œGuernsey,” he said. “I came over from Guernsey. I set off this morning. I thought I'd get everything taken care of and get back there by tonight, so I didn't bring anything with me from the hotel. But I ended up spending most of the day at the airport, waiting for the weather to clear.”
    Deborah homed in on a single word. “Everything?” She fitted a plaster over his cut.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œGetting everything taken care of today. What's everything?”
    Cherokee's gaze flicked away from her. It was just for a moment but long enough for Deborah to feel trepidation. He'd said his sister had given him their Cheyne Row address, and from this Deborah had first assumed she'd provided it to her brother before he left the States, as one of those gestures one person makes to another when an upcoming journey is mentioned in passing.
Going to London as part of your holiday? Oh,
do
call on my good friends there.
Except when she really thought it out, Deborah had to admit how unlikely this scenario was in a situation in which she hadn't had contact with Cherokee's sister in the last five years. That made her think that if Cherokee himself wasn't in trouble but if he'd come in a rush from Guernsey to London with their address in his possession and the express purpose of going to the American embassy . . .
    She said, “Cherokee, has something happened to China? Is that why you're here?”
    He looked back at her. His face was bleak. “She's been arrested,” he said.
    Â 
    â€œI didn't ask him anything more.” Deborah had found her husband in the basement kitchen, where, prescient as always, Simon had already gone to put soup on the cooker. Bread was toasting as well, and the scarred kitchen table where Deborah's father had prepared a hundred thousand meals over the years was set with one place. “I thought after his
bath . . . It seemed better to let him recover a bit. That is, before he tells us . . . If he
wants
to tell us . . .” She frowned, running her thumbnail along the edge of the work top where a splinter in the wood felt like a pinprick in her conscience. She tried to tell herself that she had no reason to feel it, that friendships came and went in life and that's just how it was. But she was the one who'd stopped replying to letters from the other side of the Atlantic. For China River had been a part of Deborah's life that Deborah had wanted very much to forget.
    Simon shot her a look from the cooker, where he was stirring tomato soup with a wooden spoon. He appeared to read worry into her reluctance to speak, because he said, “It could be something relatively simple.”
    â€œHow on earth can an arrest be simple?”
    â€œNot earth-shattering, I mean. A traffic accident. A misunderstanding in Boots that