This Body of Death

Chapter Seven

MEREDITH FINALLY TRACKED GORDON JOSSIE TO FRITHAM. She’d assumed he’d still be working on the building in Boldre Gardens where Gina Dickens had met him, but when she got there it was obvious from the state of the roof that he was long gone to another job. The thatch had been dressed and Gordon’s signature piece was in place on the ridge: an elegant peacock whose tail protected the vulnerable corner of the ridge and trailed in sculpted straw several feet down the roof.

Meredith muttered a disappointed expletive-low so that Cammie couldn’t hear it-and said to her daughter, “Let’s wander over to the duck pond, shall we, ’cause there’s supposed to be a pretty green bridge over it that we can walk on.”

The duck pond and the bridge ate up an hour, but it turned out to be well spent as things happened. They stopped at the refreshment kiosk afterwards and while purchasing a Cornetto for Cammie and a bottle of water for herself, Meredith learned where she could find Gordon Jossie without having to ring him and thus allow him time to ready himself to see her.

He was working on the pub near Eyeworth Pond. She gathered this from the girl at the till who apparently possessed the information because she’d had her eye on Gordon’s apprentice for the entire time the two men had worked at Boldre Gardens. She’d managed to make inroads into this person’s affections, apparently, and despite-or perhaps because of-having legs so bowed she was shaped like a turkey wishbone. That’s where Meredith could find the thatchers, she said, near Eyeworth Pond. She narrowed her eyes and asked which one of the men Meredith was looking for. Meredith wanted to tell her to save her anxiety for something worthwhile. A man in any condition, of any age, and in any form was the last thing she wished to add to her life. But she said she was trying to find Gordon Jossie, at which point the girl helpfully indicated the exact location of Eyeworth Pond, just east of Fritham. And the pub was nearer to Fritham than it was to the pond anyway, she added.

The idea of another pond and more ducks made it easy to get Cammie from the lawns and flowers of Boldre Gardens into the car, never her favourite place to be because she positively loathed the restrictions of her car seat and the vehicle’s lack of air-conditioning, and she had long been very happy to make her displeasure known. As luck would have it, though, Fritham was some quarter hour only from the gardens, just on the other side of the A31. Meredith drove there with all the windows rolled down and instead of her affirmation tape, she popped in a cassette that was a favourite of Cammie’s. Cammie was partial-of all things-to tenors, and she could actually warble “Nessuno Dorma” with astonishing operatic flair.

It was easy enough to find the pub in question. Called the Royal Oak, it was a mishmash of styles that reflected different periods when extensions had been built upon it. So the place blended cob, half-timber, and brick, and its roof was part thatch and another part slate tiles. Gordon had removed the old thatch right down to the rafters. When Meredith arrived he was in the midst of climbing down from the scaffolding where, beneath the pub’s eponymous oak, his apprentice was organising bundles of reeds. Cammie was happy to play upon a swing at the far side of the pub’s beer garden, so Meredith knew she’d be well occupied while her mum had a chat with the master thatcher.

Gordon didn’t look surprised to see her. Meredith reckoned Gina Dickens had likely reported her visit, and who could blame her? She wondered if, after making her report, Gina had also grilled Gordon on the matter of a car that was not his and on the matter of clothing stored in his attic. She thought the younger woman might have done. She’d seemed unnerved enough when Meredith had brought her more fully into the picture of the place Jemima Hastings had occupied in Gordon Jossie’s life.

Meredith wasted no time with preambles once she saw Cammie climb safely onto the swing. She strode up to Gordon Jossie and she said, “What I’d like to know is how she was supposed to get up to London without her car, Gordon,” and she waited to hear how he’d answer the question and what his face would look like as he did so.

Gordon glanced at his apprentice. He said, “Let’s have a break, Cliff,” and added nothing more till the younger man had nodded and disappeared into the pub. Then he removed the baseball cap he’d been wearing and wiped down his face and his balding pate with a handkerchief that he removed from his jeans. He had his sunglasses on and he didn’t remove them, which, Meredith knew, was going to make it more difficult to read him. She’d always thought he wore dark glasses so often because he didn’t want people to see his shifty eyes, but Jemima had said, “Oh, that’s nonsense,” and apparently thought there was nothing odd about a man in dark glasses rain or shine, sometimes even indoors as well. But that had been the problem from the first: Meredith had thought there were scores of things about Gordon Jossie that just weren’t right, while Jemima had wanted to see none of them. He was, after all, m-a-n, one of a subspecies among whom Jemima had been careening for years like someone controlled by the Pinball Wizard.

Now Gordon removed those dark glasses, but he kept them off only long enough to wipe them down with his handkerchief, whereupon he replaced them, shoved the handkerchief back into his pocket, and said calmly, “What d’you have against me, Meredith?”

“The fact that you separated Jemima from her friends.”

He nodded slowly, as if taking this in. He finally said, “From you, you mean.”

“From everyone, Gordon. You don’t deny it, do you?”

“No point to denying what’s dead wrong, eh? Stupid as well, if you don’t mind me saying. You stopped coming round, didn’t you, so if any separating was being done, you’re the one who did it. D’you want to talk about why?”

“What I want to talk about is why her car’s in your barn. I want to know why you told that…that…that blonde at your house that the car belongs to you. I also want to know why her clothes’re packed up and nothing even vaguely Jemima is on display anywhere.”

“Why am I supposed to tell you all that?”

“Because if you don’t or if you do and I’m not satisfied with what you tell me…” She let the threat hang there. He wasn’t a fool. He knew what the rest of the sentence would be.

Still he said, “What?” He was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and from its breast pocket he took a packet of cigarettes. He shook one out and lit it with a plastic lighter. And then he waited for her reply. He turned his head briefly to look beyond her where, across the street from the pub, a redbrick farmhouse stood at the edge of the heath. The heath itself rolled into the distance, purple with heather. A wood lay beyond it. The treetops seemed to shimmer in the summer heat.

“Oh, just answer me,” Meredith said. “Where is she and why’d she not take her car?”

His head turned towards her once again. “What was she to do with a car up in London? She didn’t take it because she didn’t need it.”

“Then how did she get there?”

“No idea.”

“That’s absurd. You can’t expect me to believe-”

“Train, bus, helicopter, hang glider, roller skates,” he cut in. “I don’t know, Meredith. One day she said she was going and the next day she went. She was gone when I got home from work. I expect she took a taxi into Sway and the train from there. So what?”

“You did something to her.” Meredith hadn’t intended to accuse him, not like this and not so quickly. But the thought of that car and the lies about it and Gina Dickens taking up residence while Jemima’s belongings languished in boxes up in the attic…“Didn’t you?” she demanded. “Rob’s tried to phone her and she’s not answering and she’s not returning his messages and-”

“Interested there, are you? Well, he’s always been available and, all things considered, I suppose it’s a wise move.”

She wanted to strike him. Not so much for the remark, which was totally ridiculous, but for the fact that that’s what he would think, that like Jemima she was always looking for a man, that she was somehow incomplete and unfulfilled and otherwise so…so…so desperate without one that she’d have her female antennae up just in case a free bloke floated by in her vicinity. Which-as it applied to Rob Hastings-was completely absurd as he was fifteen years her senior and she’d known him since she was eight years old.

“So where did this Gina person come from?” she demanded. “How long have you known her? You met her prior to Jemima leaving, didn’t you, Gordon. She’s at the root of all this.”

He shook his head, eloquently communicating both disbelief and disgust. He drew in deeply on his cigarette, in a breath that looked angry to Meredith.

She said, “You met this Gina person-”

“Her name is Gina. Gina Dickens, full stop. Don’t call her ‘this Gina person.’ I don’t much like it.”

“I’m supposed to care about what you don’t like? You met this person and you decided you’d rather have her than Jemima, didn’t you?”

“That’s bloody rubbish. I’m getting back to work.” He turned to do so.

Meredith raised her voice. “You drove her off. She might be in London now but there was never a reason to go there except for you. She had her own business. She’d hired Lexie Streener. She was making a go of the Cupcake Queen, but you didn’t like that, did you? You made it rough for her. And somehow you used that or her interest in it or the hours she was gone or something to make her feel she had to leave. And then you brought in Gina…” It all seemed so reasonable to Meredith, so much the way men behave.

He said again, “I’m getting back to work,” and he walked to the ladder that gave him access to the scaffolding that stretched the length of the building. Before he climbed, though, he turned to her. He said, “For the record, Meredith, Gina didn’t live here-in the New Forest-till June. She came down from Winchester and-”

“That’s where you’re from! You went to school in Winchester. You met her then.” She knew she sounded shrill, but she couldn’t help it. For some reason that she couldn’t identify, she’d begun to feel desperate to know what was going on and had been going on for the months that she and Jemima had been estranged.

Gordon waved her off. “Believe what you want. But what I want is to know why you’ve hated me from the first.”

“This isn’t about me.”

“It’s all about you, and so’s the reason you hated me on sight. Think about that before you come round again. And leave Gina alone while you’re at it.”

“Jemima’s the reason-”

“Jemima,” he said evenly, “has easily found someone else by now. You know that as well as I do. And I expect it drives you mad.”

GORDON JOSSIE’S PICKUP wasn’t visible when Robbie Hastings pulled beyond the tall hedges and onto the driveway of the man’s holding. But that didn’t deter him. If Gordon wasn’t there, there was still a chance that his new woman might be, and Robbie wanted to see her as much as he wanted to have a conversation with Gordon. He also wanted to have a look round. And he wanted to see Jemima’s car with his own eyes although Meredith could not have mistaken it for someone else’s. It was a Figaro, and one didn’t see a vehicle like that on the road every day.

He had no idea what all of this would or would not prove. But two more phone calls to Jemima’s mobile had produced no response and he was beginning to panic. Jemima was flighty, but she wasn’t one to ignore her own brother.

Robbie walked over to the paddock where he saw that two ponies were grazing. It was an odd time of year for the animals to be brought in off the forest, and he wondered what was wrong with them. They appeared perfectly fit.

He looked over his shoulder at the cottage. All of its windows were open, as if in hope of a breeze, but there seemed to be no one about. This was all to the good. Meredith had said that Jemima’s car was in the barn, so he made for this. He’d got the door wide open when he heard a woman’s pleasant voice call out, “Hullo there. C’n I help you with something?”

The voice came from a second paddock, this one on the barn’s east side, across a narrow, rutted farm lane that led off towards the heath. Robbie saw a young woman brushing fragments of weeds from the knees of her blue jeans. She looked like a designer from one of those telly programmes had dressed her: white shirt starched and with the collar turned up, cowboy neckerchief bibbing against her throat, straw hat shading her face from the sun. She wore dark glasses, but he could tell she was pretty. Prettier than Jemima by several yards, tall and possessing curves in places other girls her age usually didn’t want to have them. She said, “Are you looking for someone?”

“My sister,” he said.

She said, “Oh.” No surprise, he thought. Well, she wouldn’t be surprised at this point, would she? Meredith had been there ahead of him and what woman wouldn’t ask questions of her man if another woman’s name came up unexpectedly, as Jemima’s name no doubt had done?

He said, “I’ve been told her motor’s in the barn.”

“Evidently,” she said. “So is mine. Hang on.”

She ducked through the wire fencing. It was barbed, but she was wearing gloves to hold the barbs away. She was also carrying a map of some sort, ordnance survey by the look of it. “I’m finished here anyway,” she told him. “The car’s just inside.”

So it was. Not covered by a tarpaulin as it had been before, according to Meredith, but standing there big as life: battleship grey with a cream coloured roof. It was an ancient thing, and it was pulled far into the barn. Another car sat behind it, a late-model Mini Cooper, apparently the other woman’s.

She introduced herself although he knew she’d be Gina Dickens, Jemima’s replacement. She said frankly that she’d been rather put out, learning that the car wasn’t Gordon’s but his former partner’s. She’d had a few words with him about it, she said. About Jemima’s clothing boxed up in the attic as well.

She said, “He told me she’s been gone for months, that he’s not heard a single word from her in all that time, that she likely isn’t coming back again, that they’d…well, he didn’t say they’d had a row, just that they’d parted. He said it was something coming on for ages and it had been her idea, and as he was hoping to move on with his life, he’d boxed up everything, but not thrown it away. He reckons she’ll want her things eventually and ask to have them sent when she gets…settled, I suppose.” She removed her sunglasses and looked at him frankly. “I’m babbling,” she said. “Sorry. I’m nervous about all this. I mean about how it looks and everything. Her car here, her things boxed up.”

“You believed Gordon?” Robbie ran his hand along Jemima’s car. It was dust free and it shone with a glossy patina. She’d always taken good care of it. So Meredith was right in this: Why’d she not taken it with her? True, it would be difficult to have a car in London. But Jemima wouldn’t have considered that. When an impulse came upon her, she’d never stopped to consider a thing.

Gina said in a somewhat altered voice, “Well, I actually had no reason not to, Mr. Hastings. To believe him, that is. Do you think otherwise?”

“Robbie,” he said. “Name’s Robbie. You can call me that.”

“I’m Gina.”

“Yes. I know.” He looked at her. “Where’s Gordon, then?”

“Working near Fritham.” She rubbed her arms as if a chill had come over her. She said, “Would you like to come inside? The house, I mean.”

He didn’t particularly want to, but he followed her, hoping he might learn something that could settle his concern. They went in through the laundry area and from there to the kitchen. She set her map on the table and he saw that it was indeed an ordnance survey map, as he’d thought. She’d marked the property on it, and she’d attached to it a second sheet of paper with a penciled drawing. This, too, was of the property, but enlarged. Gina apparently saw him looking it over because she said, “We’re…,” and she sounded hesitant, as if leery of parting with the information. “Well, we’re thinking of making some changes round here.”

That certainly said a great deal about Jemima’s absence from the scene. Robbie looked at Gina Dickens. She’d removed her hat. Her hair was pure gold. It was shaped to her head like a close-fitting cap, in a style that brought to mind the Roaring Twenties. She removed her gloves and tossed them on the table. “Amazing weather,” she said. “Would you like water? Cider? A Coke?” And when he shook his head, she came to the table to stand beside him. She cleared her throat. He could tell she felt uncomfortable. Here she was with the brother of her lover’s former lover. It was bloody awkward. He felt it as well. She said, “I was thinking how lovely it would be to have a proper garden, but I wasn’t quite sure where. I was trying to determine where the property actually ends, and I thought the survey map would help, but it doesn’t, actually. So I’d decided that perhaps in the second paddock…as we’re not…as he’s not using it. I thought it would make a lovely garden, a place where I could bring my girls.”

“You’ve children?”

“Oh no. I work with adolescent girls. The sort who might get themselves into trouble if they don’t have someone to take an interest. Girls at risk? I hoped to have a place besides an office somewhere…” Her voice drifted. She used her teeth to pull on the inside of her lip.

He wanted to dislike her, but he couldn’t. It wasn’t her fault Gordon Jossie had chosen to move on once Jemima had left him. If indeed that was what had happened. Robbie looked at the map and then at Gina’s drawing. She’d created a grid from the paddock, he saw, and she’d numbered the squares within it. She said as if in explanation, “I was trying to get an idea of the exact size. So I’d know what we…what I was working with. I’m not sure the paddock itself will do for what I have in mind, so if it doesn’t, then perhaps part of the heath…? That’s why I’m trying to sort out where the property ends, in case I have to have the garden…we have to have the garden somewhere else.”

“You do,” Robbie said.

“What?”

“You can’t have it in the paddock.”

She seemed surprised. “Whyever not?”

“Gordon and Jemima”-Robbie wouldn’t allow his sister not to be part of the conversation-“have common rights here, and the paddocks are meant for the ponies, if they’re out of condition.”

Her face fell. She said, “I had no idea…”

“That he has common rights?”

“I don’t even know what the expression means, to tell you the truth.”

Rob explained briefly, how some of the land within the Perambulation had certain rights attached to it-the right of pasture, the right of mast, the right of estovers or marl or turbary-and this particular property had the right of common pasture. It meant that Gordon and Jemima had been allowed ponies which could graze freely upon the New Forest but the proviso was that land near the house had to be kept free for the ponies should they need to be removed from the forest for any reason. “Gordon didn’t tell you this?” he said. “Odd that he’d be thinking of putting a garden in the paddock when he knows he can’t.”

She fingered the edge of the map. “I haven’t actually told him about the garden. He knows I’d like to bring my girls out here. So they can see the horses, walk on the forest or in the inclosures, picnic by one pond or another…But I hadn’t really gone further than that. I thought I’d make a plan of it first. You know…sketch it out?”

Robbie nodded. “It’s not a bad idea. Are these city girls, then? From Winchester or Southampton or the like?”

“No, no. They’d be from Brockenhurst. I mean they’d go to school in Brockenhurst-the college or the comprehensive?-but they could be from anywhere in the New Forest, I expect.”

“Hmmm. Except they’d be from properties just like this, some of them,” he noted. “So it wouldn’t be that much of a diversion for them, would it?”

She frowned. “I hadn’t thought of that.” She walked to the kitchen window. It overlooked the driveway into the property and the west paddock beyond the driveway. She said with a sigh, “All this land…It seemed such a shame not to put it to good use.”

“Depends on how you define ‘good use,’” Robbie said. As he spoke he looked round the kitchen. It was bare of those items that had belonged to Jemima: her set of cookbooks, her colourful wall hangings, and on a shelf above the table, her model horses-some of that collection which she’d kept at her family home, his own home-were gone. In their place were propped a dozen antique postcards of the sort that predated greeting cards: one for Easter, one for Valentine’s Day, two for Christmas, etc. They were not Jemima’s.

Seeing these, it came to Robbie that Meredith Powell was correct in her surmise. Gordon Jossie had wiped Robbie’s sister completely from his life. That wasn’t unreasonable. But having her car and her clothing was. Jossie wanted talking to. There was no doubt of that.