This Body of Death

Chapter Thirteen

“BLOODY INCREDIBLE. I’VE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE IT.” This was Barbara Havers’ reaction to the New Forest and the herds of ponies running wild upon it. There were hundreds of them-thousands perhaps-and they grazed freely wherever they had a mind to graze. On the vast swatches of the grassland, they munched on greenery with their foals nearby. Beneath primeval oaks and beeches and wandering among both rowan and birch, they fed on the scrub growth and left in their wake a woodland floor dappled with sunlight; spongy with decomposing leaves; and devoid of weeds, bushes, and brambles.

It was nearly impossible not to be enchanted by a place where ponies lapped water in splashes and ponds and thatched cottages of whitewashed cob looked like buildings scrubbed on a daily basis. Grand vistas of hillsides displayed a patchwork in which the green of the bracken had begun to brown and the yellow of gorse was giving way to the increasing purple of heather.

“Almost makes me want to pack in London,” Barbara declared. She had the big A-Z road atlas open upon her lap, having acted as navigator for Winston Nkata during their drive. They’d stopped once for lunch and another time for coffee and now they were wending their way from the A31 over to Lyndhurst where they would make their presence known to the local coppers whose patch they were invading.

“Nice, yeah,” was Nkata’s assessment of the New Forest. “Expect it’d be a bit quiet for me, though. Not to mention…” He glanced at her. “There’s the raisin in the rice pud aspect of things.”

“Oh. Right. Well,” Barbara said, and she reckoned he was correct on that score. The country wasn’t a place where they’d be finding a minority population and certainly not a population with Nkata’s background of Brixton via West Africa and the Caribbean, with a bit of a sidetrack into gang warfare on the housing estate. “Good place for a holiday, though. Mind how you go through town. We’ve got a one-way system coming up.”

They negotiated this with little trouble and found the Lyndhurst police station just beyond town in the Romsey Road. An undistinguished brick building in the tedious architectural style that fairly shouted 1960s, it squatted on the top of a small knoll, with a crown of concertina wire and a necklace of CCTV cameras marking it as an area of out-of-bounds to anyone not wishing his every movement to be monitored. A few trees and a flower garden in front of the building attempted to soften the overall dismal air of the place, but there was no disguising its institutional nature.

They showed their identification to the special constable apparently in charge of reception, a young bloke who emerged from an internal room once they rang a buzzer placed on the counter for this purpose. He looked interested but not overwhelmed by the idea that New Scotland Yard had come calling. They told him they needed to speak to his chief super and he made much of going from their ID pictures to their faces as if suspecting them of ill intentions. He said, “Hang on, then,” and disappeared with their IDs into the bowels of the station. It was nearly ten minutes before he reappeared, handed back their warrant cards, and told them to follow him.

Chief Super, he said, was a bloke called Zachary Whiting. He’d been in a meeting but he’d cut it short.

“We won’t keep him long,” Barbara said. “Just a courtesy call, this, if you know what I mean. Bring him into the picture so there’s no misunderstanding later.”

Lyndhurst was the operational command headquarters for all the police stations in the New Forest. It was under the authority of a chief superintendent who himself reported to the constabulary in Winchester. One cop didn’t wander onto another cop’s patch without making nice and all the et ceteras, and that was what Barbara and Winston were there to do. If anything currently going on in the area happened to apply to their investigation, all the better. Barbara didn’t expect this to be the case, but one never knew where a professional obligation like this one could lead.

Chief Superintendent Zachary Whiting stood waiting for them at his desk. Behind spectacles, his eyes watched them with some speculation, hardly a surprising response to a call from New Scotland Yard. When the Met arrived, it often meant trouble of the internal investigation sort.

Winston gave Barbara the nod, so she did the honours, making the introductions and then sketching out the details of the death in London. She named Jemima Hastings as the victim. She concluded with the reason for their incursion into his patch.

“There was a mobile number on a postcard related to the victim,” Barbara told Whiting. “We’ve traced that number to a Gordon Jossie here in Hampshire. So…” She didn’t add the rest. The chief inspector would know the drill.

Whiting said, “Gordon Jossie?” and he sounded thoughtful.

“Know him?” Nkata asked.

Whiting went to his desk and leafed through some paperwork. Barbara and Winston exchanged glances.

“Has he been in trouble round here?” Barbara asked.

Whiting didn’t reply directly at first. He repeated the surname, and then he said, “No, not in trouble,” putting a hesitation before the final word as if Gordon Jossie had been in something else.

“But you know the bloke?” Nkata said again.

“It’s just the name.” The chief superintendent apparently found what he was searching for in his stack of paperwork, and this turned out to be a phone message. “We’ve had a phone call about him. Crank call, if you ask me, but evidently she was insistent, so the message got passed along.”

“Is that normal procedure?” Barbara asked. Why would a chief superintendent want to be informed about phone calls, crank or otherwise?

He said that it wasn’t normal procedure at all, but in this case the young lady wasn’t taking no for an answer. She wanted something done about a bloke called Gordon Jossie. She’d been asked did she want to make a formal complaint against the man, but she was having none of that. “Said she finds him a suspicious character,” Whiting said.

“Bit odd that you’d be informed, sir,” Barbara noted.

“I wouldn’t have been in the normal course of things. But then a second young lady phoned, saying much the same thing, and that’s when I learned about it. Seems odd to you, no doubt, but this isn’t London. It’s a small, close place and I find it wise to know what’s going on in it.”

“Anticipating this bloke Jossie might be up to something?” Nkata asked.

“Nothing suggests that. But this”-Whiting indicated the phone message-“puts him onto the radar.”

He went on to tell the Scotland Yard officers they were welcome to go about their business on his patch, and when they gave him Jossie’s address, he told them how to find the man’s property, near the village of Sway. If they needed his help or the help of one of his officers…There was something about the way he made the offer. Barbara had the feeling he was doing more than just making nice with them.

Sway was located off the regularly traveled routes in the New Forest, the apex of a triangle created by itself, Lymington, and New Milton. They drove there on lanes that became progressively narrower, and they ended up in a stretch of road called Paul’s Lane, where houses had names but no numbers and tall hedges blocked most of them from view.

There were a number of cottages strung along the lane, but only two substantial properties. Jossie’s turned out to be one of them.

They parked on the verge next to a tall hawthorn hedge. They walked up the lumpy driveway, and they found him within a paddock to the west of a neat cob cottage. He was inspecting the rear hooves of two restless ponies. Under the baking sun, he wore dark glasses as well as a baseball cap, and he was protected further by long sleeves, gloves, trousers, and boots.

This was not the case for the young woman watching him from outside the paddock. She was calling out, “D’you think they’re ready for release yet?” and she was wearing a striped sundress that left her arms and legs bare. Despite the heat, she looked fresh and cool, and her head was covered by a straw hat banded by material that matched the dress. Hadiyyah, Barbara thought, would have approved.

“Dead silly to be afraid of ponies,” Gordon Jossie replied.

“I’m trying to make friends with them. Honestly.” She turned her head and caught sight of Barbara and Winston, her gaze taking them both in but then going back to linger on Winston. She was very attractive, Barbara thought. Even with her own limited experience, she could tell that the young woman wore her makeup like a pro. Again, Hadiyyah would have approved. “Hullo,” the woman said to them. “Are you lost?”

At this, Gordon Jossie looked up. He watched their progress up the driveway and over to the fence. This was barbed wire strung between wooden posts, and his companion had been standing with her hands clasped on top of one of the latter.

Jossie had the wiry sort of body that reminded Barbara of a footballer. When he took off his cap and wiped his brow with his arm, she saw his hair was thinning, but its ginger colour suited him well.

Barbara and Winston fished out their IDs. Winston did the honours this time. When he’d finished the introductions, he said to the man in the paddock, “You’re Gordon Jossie?”

Jossie nodded. He walked towards the fence. Nothing much showed upon his face. His eyes, of course, they could not read. The glass in his lenses was virtually black.

The young woman identified herself as Gina Dickens. “Scotland Yard?” she said, with a smile. “Like Inspector Lestrade?” And then to tease Jossie, “Gordon, have you been naughty?”

There was a wooden gate nearby, but Jossie didn’t come through it. Rather, he went to a hosepipe that was looped round a newish-looking fence post and attached to a freestanding water tap outside the paddock. He removed the hosepipe and unspooled it in the direction of a stone trough. Absolutely pristine, this was, Barbara saw. It was either new like the fence post or the man was more than a bit compulsive about keeping things tidy. The latter didn’t seem likely since part of the paddock was overgrown and in disrepair, as if he’d given up in the midst of repairing the area. He began adding water to the trough. Over his shoulder, he said, “What’s the trouble, then?”

Interesting question, Barbara thought. Directly to trouble. But then who could blame him? A personal visit from the Metropolitan police wasn’t one’s garden experience.

She said, “Could we have a word, Mr. Jossie?”

“Seems like we’re having it.”

“Gordon, I think they might mean…” Gina hesitated, then she said to Winston, “We’ve a table and chairs beneath the tree in the garden,” and indicated the front of the cottage. “Shall we meet you there?”

“Works for me,” Nkata said and went on with, “Hot today, innit?” giving Gina Dickens the benefit of his high-wattage smile.

“I’ll fetch something cool for us to drink,” she said, and she went off towards the cottage, but not before she cast a puzzled glance in Jossie’s direction.

Barbara and Nkata waited for Jossie, the better to make sure he took a direct route from the paddock to the front garden with no sidetracking. When he’d finished topping off the trough for the ponies, he returned the hosepipe to the post and came through the wooden paddock gate, removing his gloves.

“It’s this way,” he said to them, as if they couldn’t find the front garden without his help. He led them to it, a patch of parched lawn at this time of year, but containing flower beds that were thriving. He saw Barbara looking at these and said, “Gina uses the dishwater. We do the washing up with special detergent,” as if to explain why the flowers weren’t dead in the middle of hose pipebans and a very dry summer.

“Nice,” Barbara noted. “I kill most everything and it doesn’t take special washing-up soap for me to do it.” She got down to business as they sat at the table. This looked to be part of a little outdoor dining area featuring candles, a floral tablecloth, and complementary cushions on the chairs. Someone, it seemed, had a flair for decorating. Barbara pulled the postcard photo of Jemima Hastings from her bag. She laid it on the table in front of Gordon Jossie. She said, “C’n you tell us anything about this woman, Mr. Jossie?”

“Why?”

“Because your mobile number”-she flipped the card over-“is on the back here. And what with ‘Have you seen this woman?’ on the front, it seems like you probably know her.” Barbara turned the postcard faceup again, sliding it within inches of Jossie’s hand. He did not touch it.

Gina came round the side of the cottage carrying a tray on which sat a pink concoction in a squat glass jug. Sprigs of mint and a few pieces of ice floated in it. She placed the tray on the table and her gaze took in the postcard. She looked from it to Jossie. She said, “Gordon? Is something…?”

Abruptly Jossie said, “This is Jemima,” and indicated the picture on the card by flicking his fingers towards it.

Gina sat slowly. She looked perplexed. “On the card?”

Jossie didn’t reply. Barbara didn’t want to hasten to any conclusions about his reticence. She reckoned, among other things, his lack of response might well be due to embarrassment. Clearly this woman Gina Dickens was something to Jossie, and she’d likely be wondering why he was being faced with a postcard featuring another woman whom he clearly knew.

Barbara waited for Jossie’s answer to Gina’s question. She and Nkata exchanged a look. They were of one mind in the matter and that mind was of the let him swing for a moment variety.

Gina said, “May I?” and when Barbara nodded, she picked up the postcard. She made no comment about the photo itself, but her gaze took in the query at the bottom of the card and she flipped it over and saw the phone number printed across the back. She said nothing. Instead, she placed the card gently on the table and poured each of them a glass of whatever it was she’d concocted.

The heat seemed to grow more oppressive in the silence. Gina herself was the one to break it. She said, “I’d no idea…” Her fingers touched her throat. Barbara could see her pulse beating there. It put her in mind of the manner in which Jemima Hastings had died. “How long have you been looking for her, Gordon?” Gina asked.

Jossie fixed his eyes on the postcard. He finally said, “This is months old, this is. I got a stack of them…I dunno…round April, it was. I didn’t know you then.”

“Want to explain?” Barbara asked him. Nkata opened his neat leather notebook.

Gina said, “Is something going on?”

Barbara wasn’t about to give any more information than was necessary at this point, so she said nothing. Nor did Winston, except to murmur, “So…Mr. Jossie?”

Gordon Jossie made a restless movement in his chair. The story he told was brief but direct. Jemima Hastings was his former lover; she’d left him after more than two years together; he’d wanted to find her. He’d seen an advertisement for the photographic portrait show in the Mail on Sunday by purest chance and this-with a nod at the postcard-was the photo that had been used in the advert for that show. So he’d gone to London. No one at the gallery would tell him where the model was, and he hadn’t a clue how to contact the photographer. So he bought up the postcards-forty, fifty, or sixty because he couldn’t recall but they’d had to fetch more from their storage room-and he’d stuck them in phone boxes, in shop windows, in any spot where he thought they’d get noticed. He’d worked in widening rings round the gallery itself till he ran out of cards. And then he waited.

“Any luck?” Barbara asked him.

“I never heard from anyone about her.” He said again to Gina, “This was before I’d met you. It’s nothing to do with you and me. Far as I knew, far as I know, wasn’t anyone who ever saw them, saw her, and put two and two together. Waste of time and money, it was. But I felt like I had to try.”

“To find her, you mean,” Gina said in a quiet voice.

He said to her, “It was the time we’d put in together. Over two years. I just wanted to know. It doesn’t mean anything.” Jossie turned to Barbara. “Where’d you get this, anyway? What’s going on?”

She answered his question with one of her own. “Care to tell us why Jemima left you?”

“I’ve no bloody idea. One day she decided it was over, and off she went. She made the announcement and the next day she was gone.”

“Just like that?”

“I reckoned she’d been planning it for weeks. I phoned her at first once she’d gone. I wanted to know what the hell was going on. Who wouldn’t, after two years together when someone says it’s over and just disappears and you’ve not seen it coming? But she never took the calls and she never returned them and then the mobile number got changed altogether or she got a new mobile or whatever, because the phone calls stopped going through. I asked her brother about it-”

“Her brother?” Nkata looked up from his notebook, and when Gordon Jossie identified the brother as Robbie Hastings, Nkata jotted this down.

“But he said he didn’t know anything about what she was up to. I didn’t believe him-he never liked me and I expect he was dead chuffed when Jemima ended things-but I couldn’t get a single detail out of him. I finally gave up. And then”-with a look at Gina Dickens that had to be called grateful-“I met Gina last month.”

“When did you last see Jemima Hastings, then?” Barbara asked.

“The morning of the day she left me.”

“Which was?”

“Day after Guy Fawkes. Last year.” He took a swig of his drink and then wiped his mouth on his arm. He said, “Now are you going to tell me what this is all about?”

“I’m going to ask you if you’ve made any journeys out of Hampshire in the last week or so.”

“Why?”

“Will you answer the question, please?”

Jossie’s face suffused with colour. “I don’t think I will. What the hell is going on? Where’d you get that postcard? I didn’t break any laws. You see postcards in phone boxes all over London and they’re a damn sight more suggestive than that one.”

“This was among Jemima’s belongings in her lodgings,” Barbara told him. “I’m sorry to tell you that she’s dead. She was murdered in London about six days ago. So again, I’ll ask you if you’ve made any journeys out of Hampshire.”

Barbara had heard the expression pale to the lips but she’d never seen it occur so rapidly. She reckoned it had to do with Gordon Jossie’s natural colouring: His face gained colour quickly, and it seemed to lose it in much the same manner.

“Oh my God,” Gina Dickens murmured. She reached for his hand.

Her movement made him flinch away. “What d’you mean, murdered?” he asked Barbara.

“Is there more than one meaning to murdered?” she inquired. “Have you been out of Hampshire, Mr. Jossie?”

“Where did she die?” he asked as a response, and when Barbara didn’t answer he said to Nkata, “Where did this happen? How? Who?”

“She was murdered in a place called Abney Park Cemetery,” Barbara told him. “So again, Mr. Jossie, I’ll have to ask you-”

“Here,” he said numbly. “I’ve not left. I’ve been here. I was here.”

“Here at home?”

“No. ’Course not. I’ve been working. I was…” He seemed dazed. Either that, Barbara reckoned, or he was trying to do a mental two-step to come up with an alibi that he hadn’t expected to have to give. He explained that he was a thatcher and that he’d been working on a job, which was what he did every day except weekends and some Friday afternoons. When asked if someone could confirm that fact, he said yes, of course, for God’s sake, he had an apprentice. He gave the name-Cliff Coward-and the phone number as well. Then he said, “How…?” and licked his lips. “How did she…die?”

“She was stabbed, Mr. Jossie,” Barbara said. “She bled out before anyone found her.”

Gina did clasp Jossie’s hand at that point, but she didn’t say anything. What, really, could she say, given her position?

Barbara considered this last: her position, its security, or its lack thereof. She said, “And you, Ms. Dickens? Have you been out of Hampshire?”

“No, of course not.”

“And six days ago?”

“I’m not sure. Six days? I’ve been only to Lymington. The shopping…in Lymington.”

“Who can confirm that?”

She was silent. It was the moment when someone was supposed to say, “You aren’t bloody well suggesting that I had something to do with this?” but neither of them did. Instead they glanced at each other and then Gina said, “I don’t expect anyone can confirm it except Gordon. But why should someone be able to confirm it?”

“Keep the receipts from your shopping, did you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I mean, one doesn’t, ordinarily. I can look, but I certainly didn’t think…” She looked frightened. “I’ll try to find them,” she said. “But if I can’t…”

“Don’t be stupid.” Jossie directed this remark not to Gina but to Barbara and Winston. “What’s she supposed to have done? Obliterated the competition? There isn’t any. We were finished, Jemima and me.”

“Right,” Barbara said. She gave a nod to Winston and he made much of flipping his notebook closed. “Well, you are now, aren’t you, you and Jemima? Finished is definitely the word for it.”

HE WENT INTO the barn. He thought to brush Tess-as he usually did in this kind of moment-but the dog wouldn’t come despite his whistling and his calls. He stood stupidly at her brushing table, fruitlessly and with a very dry mouth shouting, “Tess! Tess! Get in here, dog!” with absolutely no result because, of course, animals were intuitive and Tess damn well knew something wasn’t right.

Gina did come, however. She said quietly, “Gordon, why didn’t you tell them the truth?” She sounded fearful and he cursed himself for that fear in her voice.

She would ask, of course. It was, after all, the question of the hour. He wanted to thank her for having said nothing to the Scotland Yard cops because he knew what it must look like that he’d lied to them.

She said, “You did go to Holland, didn’t you? You were there, weren’t you? That new source for reeds? That site where they’re growing them? Because the reeds from Turkey are becoming rubbish…? That’s where you were, isn’t it? Why didn’t you tell them?”

He didn’t want to look at her. He heard it all in her voice, so he bloody well didn’t want to see it in her face. But he had to look her in the eye for the simple reason that she was Gina, and not just anyone.

So he looked. He saw not fear but rather concern. It was for him and he knew it and knowing it made him weak and desperate. He said, “Yes.”

“You went to Holland?”

“Yes.”

“Then why didn’t you just tell them? Why did you say…? You weren’t at work, Gordon.”

“Cliff’ll say I was.”

“He’ll lie for you?”

“If I ask him, yes. He doesn’t like coppers.”

“But why would you ask him? Why not just tell them the truth? Gordon, has something…Is something…?”

He wanted her to approach him as she’d done before, early in the morning, in bed and then in the shower because although it was sex and only sex, it meant more than sex, and that was what he needed. How odd that he’d understand in that moment what Jemima had wanted from him and from the act. A lifting up and a carrying off and an end to that which could never be ended because it was imprisoned within and no simple conjoining of bodies could free it.

He set down the brush. Obviously, the dog was not going to obey-even for a brushing-and he felt like a fool for waiting for her. He said, “Geen,” and Gina said in return, “Tell me the truth.”

He said, “If I told them I was in Holland, they’d take it further.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’d want me to prove it.”

“Can’t you? Why would you not be able to prove…? Did you not go to Holland, Gordon?”

“Of course I went. But I tossed the ticket.”

“But there’re records. All sorts of records. And there’s the hotel. And whoever you saw…the farmer…whoever…Who grows the reeds? He’ll be able to say…You can phone the police and just tell them the truth and that’ll be the end…”

“It’s easier like this.”

“How on earth can it be easier to ask Cliff to lie? Because if he lies and if they find out that he lied…?”

Now she did look frightened, but frightened was something that he could deal with. Frightened was something he understood. He approached her the way he approached the ponies in the paddock, one hand out and the other visible: No surprises here, Gina, nothing to fear.

He said, “Can you trust me on this? Do you trust me?”

“Of course I trust you. Why shouldn’t I trust you? But I don’t understand…”

He touched her bare shoulder. “You’re here with me. You’ve been with me…what? A month? Longer? Are you thinking I would’ve hurt Jemima? Gone up to London? Found her wherever she was and stabbed her to death? Is that how I seem to you? That sort of bloke? He goes to London, murders a woman for no real reason since she’s already long gone out of his life, then comes home and makes love to this woman, this woman right here, the centre of his whole flaming world? Why? Why?”

“Let me look at your eyes.” She reached up and took off his dark glasses, which he hadn’t removed on coming into the barn. She set them on the brushing table and then she put her hand on his cheek. He met her gaze. She looked at him and he didn’t flinch and finally her expression softened. She kissed his cheek and then his closed eyelids. Then she kissed his mouth. Then her own mouth opened, and her hands went down to his arse and she pulled him close.

After a moment, breathless, she said, “Take me right here,” and he did so.

THEY FOUND ROBBIE Hastings between Vinney Ridge and Anderwood, which were two stopping-off spots on the Lyndhurst Road between Burley and the A35. They had reached him on his mobile, from a number that Gordon Jossie had given them. “He’ll doubtless tell you the worst about me,” Jossie said abruptly.

It was no easy matter to locate Jemima Hastings’ brother since so many roads in the New Forest had convenient names but no signs. They finally discovered exactly where he was by chance, having stopped at a cottage where the road they were taking made a dogleg, only to discover it was called Anderwood Cottage. By heading farther along the route, they were led to believe by the cottage owner, they would locate Rob Hastings on a track leading to Dames Slough Inclosure. He was an agister, they were told, and he’d been called to do “the usual bit of sad business.”

This business turned out to be the shooting of one of the New Forest ponies that had been hit by a car on A35. The poor animal had apparently managed to stagger across acres of heath before collapsing. When Barbara and Nkata found the agister, he’d put the horse to death with one merciful shot from a.32 pistol, and he’d brought the animal’s body to the edge of the lane. He was talking on his mobile, and sitting attentively next to him was a majestic-looking Weimaraner, so well trained as to ignore not only the interlopers but also the dead pony lying a short distance from the Land Rover in which Robbie Hastings had apparently come to this lonely spot.

Nkata pulled off the lane as far as he was able. Hastings nodded as they approached him. They’d told him only that they wanted to speak with him at once, and he looked grave. It was hardly likely that he had many calls from the Metropolitan police in this part of the world.

He said, “Stay, Frank,” to the dog and came towards them. “You might want to keep back from the pony. It’s not a happy sight.” He said he was waiting for the New Forest Hounds and then added, “Ah. Here he is,” in reference to an open-bed lorry that rumbled towards them. It was pulling a low trailer with shallow sides, and into this the dead animal was going to be loaded. It would be used for meat to feed the dogs, Robbie Hastings informed them as the lorry got into position. At least some good would come of the reckless stupidity of drivers who thought the Perambulation was their personal playground, he added.

Barbara and Nkata had already decided there was no way that they were going to inform Robbie Hastings of his sister’s death on the side of a country road. But they had also reckoned that their very presence was likely to set the man on edge, and it did so. Once the pony was loaded and the lorry from New Forest Hounds had negotiated a difficult turn to get back to the main road, Hastings swung round to them and said, “What’s happened? It’s bad. You wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

Barbara said, “Is there somewhere we could have a conversation with you, Mr. Hastings?”

Hastings touched the top of his dog’s smooth head. “Might tell me here,” he said. “There’s no place nearby for private talk ’less you want to go into Burley, and you don’t want that, not at this time of year.”

“Do you live nearby?”

“Beyond Burley.” He took off the baseball cap he was wearing, revealing a head of close-cropped hair. This was graying and would have been thick otherwise, and he used a kerchief he had round his neck to scrub over his face. His face was singularly unattractive, with large buckteeth and virtually no chin. His eyes, however, were deeply human and they filled with tears as he looked at them. He said, “So she’s dead, eh?” and when Barbara’s expression told him this was so, he gave a terrible cry and turned from them.

Barbara exchanged a look with Nkata. Neither of them moved at first. Then Nkata was the one to put his hand on Hastings’ shoulder and the one to say, “We’re that sorry, mon. ’S bad when someone goes like this.”

He himself was upset. Barbara knew this from the way Nkata’s accent altered, becoming less South London and more Caribbean, with the th’s morphing into d’s. He said, “I’m drivin’ you home. Sergeant here, she follow in my car. You tell me how to go, we get you there. No way you need to be out here now. You good to tell me how to get t’your place?”

“I can drive,” Hastings said.

“No way you’re doing that, mon.” Nkata jerked his head at Barbara and she hastened to open the Land Rover’s passenger door. On its seat were a shotgun and the pistol the man had used to shoot the pony. She moved these beneath the seat and together she and Nkata got Hastings inside. His dog followed: one graceful leap and Frank was leaning against his master in the silent way all dogs have of comforting.

They made a sad little procession out of the area, proceeding not back the way they had come but rather farther along the lane through a woodland of oaks and chestnuts. These afforded a canopy that arced over the lane in a verdant tunnel of leaves. Back out on the Lyndhurst Road, though, there was broad lawn on one side giving way to tangled heath on the other. Herds of ponies grazed freely here, and where they wished to cross the road, they simply did so.

Once in Burley, it became quickly clear why Hastings had said they would not want to have a private conversation there. Tourists were massing everywhere, and they seemed to be taking their cues from the ponies and the cows wandering through the village at will: They walked where their fancy took them, bright sunlight falling upon their shoulders.

Hastings lived through and beyond the village. He had a holding at the top of a strip of road called Honey Lane-actually marked with a sign, Barbara noted-and when they finally pulled onto the property, she saw it was similar to a farm, with several outbuildings and paddocks, one of which held two horses.

The door they used led directly into the kitchen of the house, where Barbara went to an electric kettle upended on a draining board. She filled it, set it to work, and sorted out mugs and bags of PG Tips. Sometimes a shot of the bloody national beverage was the only way in which fellow feeling could be expressed.

Nkata sat Hastings at an old Formica-topped table, where the agister took off his hat and blew his nose on his kerchief, which he then balled up and shoved to one side. He said, “Sorry,” and his eyes filled. “I should have known when she didn’t answer my calls on her birthday. And not ringing back at once th’ day afterwards. She always rang back. Within the hour, generally. When she didn’t, it was easier to think she was just busy. Caught up in things. You know.”

“Are you married, Mr. Hastings?” Barbara brought mugs to the table, along with a battered tin canister of sugar that she’d found on a shelf with matching old canisters of flour and coffee as well. It was an old-fashioned kitchen with old-fashioned contents, from the appliances to the objects on the shelves and in the cupboards. As such, it looked like a room that had been lovingly preserved, rather than one that had been artfully restored to wear the guise of an earlier period.

“Not very likely, that,” was how he answered the question. It seemed to be a resigned and bleak reference to his unfortunate looks. That was sad, Barbara thought, a self-prophecy fulfilled.

“Ah,” she said. “Well, we’re going to want to speak to everyone in Hampshire who knew Jemima. We hope you’ll be able to help us with that.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Because of how she died, Mr. Hastings.”

At this point Hastings seemed to realise something he hadn’t yet considered despite the fact that he was being spoken to by representatives of the Metropolitan police. He said, “Her death…Jemima’s death…”

“I’m very sorry to tell you that she was murdered six days ago.” Barbara added the rest: not the means of death but the place in which it had occurred. And even then she kept it general, by mentioning the cemetery but not its location and not the location of the body within it. She finished with, “So everyone who knew her will have to be interviewed.”

“Jossie.” Hastings sounded numb. “She left him. He didn’t like that. She said he couldn’t come to terms with it. He rang her and rang her and he wouldn’t stop ringing her.” That said, he raised his fists to his eyes, and he wept like a child.

The electric kettle clicked off, and Barbara went to fetch it. She poured water into the mugs, and she found milk in the fridge. A shot or two of whisky would have been better for the poor man, but she wasn’t up to rustling through his cupboards, so the tea was going to have to do, despite the heat of the day. At least the interior of the cottage was cool and kept that way by its construction of thick cob walls, which were rough and whitewashed outside and painted pale yellow within the kitchen.

It was the presence of the Weimaraner that seemed to soothe Robbie Hastings at last. The dog had placed his head on Hastings’ thigh, and the low, long whine that issued from the animal roused the master. Robbie Hastings wiped his eyes and blew his nose again. He said, “Aye, Frank,” and he cupped his hand over the dog’s smooth head. He lowered his own head and pressed his lips to the animal. He didn’t look at either Barbara or Nkata when he raised his head again. Instead he stared at the mug of tea.

Perhaps knowing what their questions were going to be, he began to talk, slowly at first, then with more reassurance. Next to him, Nkata took out his notebook.

At Longslade Bottom, Hastings began, there was a wide expanse of lawn where people went regularly to exercise their dogs off lead. He took his own dog there one day several years back and Jemima went along. That’s where she met Gordon Jossie. This would have been round three years ago.

“Somewhat new to the area, he was,” Hastings said. “Broken away from a master thatcher round Itchen Abbas-a bloke called Heath-and come down the New Forest to start his own business. Never had much to say, but Jemima fancied him at once. Well, she would do, wouldn’t she, ’cause she was tweenem at that point.”

Barbara frowned, wondering at the expression. She reckoned it was some strange Hampshirean term. “‘Tweenem?’”

“’Tween men,” he clarified. “Jemima always liked to have a partner. From the time she was…I don’t know…twelve or thirteen?…She wanted boyfriends. I always reckoned it was our dad’s dying like he did, mum ’s well. Killed in a car crash, both of them at once. Made her think she had to have someone that was truly and permanently hers, I think.”

“More ’n yourself,” Nkata clarified.

“I reckon it seemed to Jemima that she needed someone more special. I was her brother, see. Didn’t mean anything if her brother loved her since he was meant to love her.” Hastings pulled the mug towards him. A bit of tea sloshed onto the table. He smeared this with the palm of his hand.

“Was she promiscuous?” Barbara asked, adding when the agister looked at her sharply, “Sorry, but I have to ask. And it doesn’t matter, Mr. Hastings. Only as it might relate to her death.”

He shook his head. “To her, it was all about being in love with some bloke. Given, she partnered up with one or two eventually-if you know what I mean-but only if she thought they were in love. ‘Madly in love’ was what she always called it. ‘We’re madly in love with each other, Rob.’ Typical young girl, you ask me. Well…nearly.”

“Nearly?” Barbara and Nkata spoke simultaneously.

Hastings looked thoughtful, as if examining his sister in a new light. He said slowly, “She did cling, I s’pose. And could be that made it hard for her to hold on to a boy. Same with men. She wanted a bit too much from them, I think, and that would…well, it would eventually end things. I wasn’t much good at it, but I’d try to explain things to her: how blokes don’t like someone holding on to them so. But I reckon she felt alone in the world ’cause of our parents, though she wasn’t alone, not ever, not the way you’d think. But feeling that way, she had to stop the…the aloneness. She wanted to-” He frowned and seemed to consider how to put his next remarks. “It was a bit like she wanted to climb into their skin, get that close to them, be them in a manner of speaking.”

“A stranglehold?” Barbara said.

“She didn’t intend it, never. But, aye, I s’pose that’s what happened. And when a bloke wanted his bit of space, Jemima couldn’t cope. She clung all the tighter. I expect they felt like they had no air, so they sloughed her off. She’d cry a bit, then she’d blame them for not being what she really wanted, and she’d go on to another.”

“But this didn’t happen with Gordon Jossie?”

“The strangling part?” He shook his head. “With him, she got as close as she wanted. He seemed to like it.”

“How did you feel about him?” Barbara asked. “And about her being involved with him?”

“I wanted to like him ’cause he made her happy, ’s well as one person can make another happy, you know. But there was something about him didn’t ever strike me right. He wasn’t much like blokes round here. I wanted her to find someone, settle down, make a family for herself as that’s what she wanted, and I didn’t see it as something could happen with him. Mind, I didn’t tell her so. Wouldn’t have made a difference if I had.”

“Why not?” Nkata asked. He had not, Barbara noted, touched his tea. But then Winston had never been much of a tea man. Lager was more his thing, but not a lot of it. Winston was nearly as abstemious as a monk: little drinking, no smoking, his body a temple.

“Oh, when she was ‘madly in love,’ the deal was sealed. There’d have been no point. Anyway I reckoned it was nothing to worry over ’cause Jemima’d likely run through him like she’d done the others. A few months and things would be over and she’d be searching for a man again. That didn’t happen, though. Soon enough she was spending whole nights with him in his lodgings. Then they found that property over Paul’s Lane, and they snapped it up and set up house and that was that. Well, I wasn’t ’bout to say anything then. I just hoped for the best. It looked like that’s what happened for a time. Jemima seemed quite happy. Starting her business with them cupcakes and all, over Ringwood. And he was building his thatching business. They seemed good with each other.”

“Cupcake business?” Nkata asked the question. “What’d that be?”

“The Cupcake Queen. Sounds daft, eh? But thing is, she was that good in the kitchen, quite a hand with baking, Jemima. She had a score of customers buying cupcakes off her, fancy decorated and the like, special occasions, holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, gatherings. Worked herself up to being able to open a business of it in Ringwood-that would be the Cupcake Queen-and it was doing good, but then it all came to naught ’cause she left Jossie and she left the area.”

As Nkata noted this, Barbara said, “Gordon Jossie tells us he has no idea why Jemima left him.”

Hastings snorted. “He told me he reckoned she had someone on the side and left him for that one.”

“What did she tell you?”

“That she was going off to think.”

“That’s all, is it?”

“That’s the limit. That’s what she said. She needed time to think.” Hastings rubbed his hands on his face. “Thing is, I didn’t see that as bad, you know? That she wanted to go off? I reckoned that finally she didn’t want to rush things with some bloke, that she wanted to get herself sorted before she settled it permanently with someone. I thought it was a good idea.”

“But she didn’t indicate anything more than that?”

“Nothing more than she was going off to think. She stayed in touch with me regular. Got herself a new mobile and let me know she’d done it ’cause Gordon kept ringing her, but I didn’t consider what that could mean, see. Just that he wanted her back. Well, so did I.”

“Did you?”

“I bloody well did. She’s…She’s all I had in the way of family. I wanted her home.”

“Here, you mean?” Barbara asked.

“Just home. However she wanted that to mean. Long as it was Hampshire.”

Barbara nodded and asked for a list of Jemima’s friends and acquaintances in the area, as best he could give it them. She also told him they would need-regretfully-to know his own whereabouts on the day his sister died. Last, they asked him what he knew of Jemima’s activities in London and he said that he knew little enough except that she had “someone up there, some new bloke that she was ‘madly in love with.’ As usual.”

“Did she give you his name?”

“Wouldn’t even whisper it. It was all brand new, she said, this relationship, and she didn’t want to throw a spanner in it. All she’d say was that she was over the moon. That and ‘this is the one.’ Well, she’d said that before, hadn’t she? She always said it. So I didn’t take much notice.”

“That’s all you know? Nothing at all about him?”

Hastings appeared to consider this. Next to him, Frank gave a gusty sigh. He’d lowered himself to the floor, but when Hastings moved restlessly in his chair, the dog was up at once, attending to him. Hastings smiled at the animal and pulled gently on one of his ears. He said, “She’d started taking ice-skating instruction. God knows why, but that was Jemima. There’s a rink named after the Queen or some other Royal, maybe the Prince of Wales, and…” He shook his head. “I expect it was her skating instructor. That’d be just like Jemima. Someone skating her round the rink with his arm round her waist? She’d fall for that. She’d think it meant something when all it meant was that he was keeping her on her feet.”

“Like that, was she?” Nkata asked. “Taking things wrong?”

“Always taking things to mean love when they meant nothing of the sort,” Hastings said.

ONCE THE POLICE had left him, Robbie Hastings went above stairs. He wanted to remove the smell of dead pony with a shower. He also wanted a place to weep.

He realised how little the police had told him: death in a cemetery somewhere in London and that was all. He also realised how little he had asked them. Not how she had died, not where she had died within the cemetery, and not even when, exactly. Not who had found her. Not what did they know so far. And recognising this, he felt deep shame. He wept for that as much as he wept for the incalculable loss of his little sister. It came to him that as long as he’d had Jemima, no matter where she was, he hadn’t ever been completely alone. But now his life seemed finished. He couldn’t imagine how he would cope.

But that was the absolute end of what he would allow himself. There were things to be done. He got out of the shower, put on fresh clothes, and went out to the Land Rover. Frank hopped in beside him and together he and the dog traveled west, towards Ringwood. It was slow country driving, which gave him time to think. What he thought of was Jemima and what she had told him in their many conversations after she’d gone to London. What he tried to recall was anything that might have indicated she was on a path to her death.

It could have been a random killing, but he didn’t think it was. Not only could he not begin to face the possibility that his sister had merely been the victim of someone who had seen her and decided that she was perfect for one of those sick thrill killings so commonplace these days, but also there was the matter of where she had been. The Jemima he knew didn’t go into cemeteries. The last thing she wanted was to be reminded of death. She never read obituaries, she didn’t go to films if she knew a leading character was going to die, she avoided books with unhappy endings, and she turned newspapers facedown if death was on the front page as it so often was. So if she’d entered a cemetery on her own, she had a reason for doing so. And a reflection on Jemima’s life led him to the one reason he didn’t really want to consider.

A rendezvous. The latest bloke she’d been mad about was likely married. That wouldn’t have mattered to Jemima. Married or single, partnered or partnerless…These were fine distinctions she wouldn’t have made. Where love-as she considered it-was concerned, she would have seen the greater good as making a connection with a man. She would have defined as love whatever it was between them. She would have called it love, and she would have expected it would run the course of love as she saw it: two people fulfilling each other as soul mates-another daft term of hers-and then having miraculously found each other, walking hand in hand into happily ever after. When that did not happen, she would cling and demand. And then what? he asked himself. Then what, Jemima?

He wanted to blame Gordon Jossie for what had happened to his sister. He knew that Jossie had been looking for her. Jemima had told him as much although not how she knew this, so at the time he’d thought it could well be just another one of her fancies. But if Gordon Jossie had been looking and if he had found her, he could have gone up to London…

Why was the problem. Jossie had another lover now. So had Jemima if she was to be believed. So what was the point? Dog in the manger? It had been known to happen. A bloke is rejected, finds another woman, but still cannot rid his mind of the first one. He decides the only way to scour his brain of the memories associated with her is to eliminate her so he can move on with her replacement. Jemima had been, upon Jossie’s own admission and despite his age, his first lover. And that first rejection is always the worst, isn’t it?

Those eyes of his behind the dark glasses, Robbie thought. The fact that he had so little to say. Hard worker, Jossie, but what did that mean? Strong focus on one thing-building his business-could just as easily turn into strong focus on something else.

Robbie thought all this as he made his way to Ringwood. He would face off with Jossie, he decided, but now wasn’t the time. He wanted to see him without Jemima’s replacement at his side.

Ringwood was tricky to negotiate. Robbie came at it from Hightown Hill. This forced him to drive past the abandoned Cupcake Queen, which he couldn’t bear to look at. He parked the Land Rover not far from the parish church of St. Peter and Paul, overlooking the market square from a hillock where it rose among ancient graves. From the car park, Robbie could hear the constant rumble and even smell the exhaust of the lorries chugging along the Ringwood Bypass. From the market square he could see the bright flowers in the church’s graveyard and the hand-washed fronts of the Georgian buildings along the high street. It was in the high street that Gerber & Hudson Graphic Design had its small suite of offices, above a shop called Food for Thought. He told Frank to stay in the doorway there, and he went up the stairs.

Robbie found Meredith Powell at her computer, in the process of creating a poster for a children’s dance studio there in the town. It wasn’t, he knew, the job that she wanted. But unlike Jemima, Meredith had long been a realist, and as a single parent forced to live with her own parents in order to save money, she would know that her dream of designing fabrics was not something immediately attainable for her.

When she saw Robbie, Meredith rose. He saw that she wore a caftan of bright summer hues: bold lime shot through with violet. Even he could see the colours were all wrong on her. She was gawky and out of place, like him. The thought made him feel a sudden, awkward tenderness for her.

He said, “A word, Merry?” and Meredith seemed to read something on his face. She went to an interior office, where she popped her head in the doorway to speak briefly to someone. Then she came across to him. He led her down the stairs and, once out on Ringwood High Street again, reckoned that the church or the churchyard was the best place to tell her.

She greeted Frank with a “Hello, doggie-Frank,” and the Weimaraner wagged his tail and followed them along the street. She peered at Robbie and said, “You look…Has something happened, Rob? Have you heard from her?” and he said that he had. For indeed he had, after a fashion. If not from her, then of her. The result was the same.

They went up the steps and into the graveyard but it was too hot there, he reckoned, with the sun beating down and not a breeze stirring. So he found Frank a shady spot under a bench on the porch and took Meredith inside the church and by then she was saying, “What is it? It’s bad. I can see that. What’s happened?”

She didn’t weep when he told her. Instead, she went to one of the battered pews. She didn’t take a red leather cushion off its holder in order to kneel, though. Rather, she sat. She folded her hands in her lap, and when he joined her in the pew, she looked at him.

She murmured, “I’m most horribly sorry, Rob. This must be so awful for you. I know what she means to you. I know she was…She’s everything.”

He shook his head because he couldn’t reply. The church was cool inside, but he was still hot. He marveled when, next to him, Meredith shivered.

“Why did she leave?” Meredith’s voice was anguished. He could tell, however, that she asked the question as a form of one of those universal whys: Why do terrible things happen at all? Why do people make incomprehensible decisions? Why does evil exist? “God, Rob. Why did she leave? She loved the New Forest. She wasn’t a city girl. She could barely cope with college in Winchester.”

“She said-”

“I know what she said. You told me what she said. So did he.” She was silent for a moment, thinking. Then she said, “And this is down to him, isn’t it? This is down to Gordon. Oh, maybe not the killing itself, but part of it. Some small part. Something we can’t see or understand just yet. Somehow. Some part of it.”

And then she did begin to cry, which was when she took one of the kneelers from its holder and dropped to her knees upon it. He thought she intended to pray, but she talked instead: to him but with her face towards the altar and its reredos of carved angels holding up their quatrefoil shields. These depicted the instruments of the passion. Interesting, he thought helplessly, they had nothing to do with instruments of defence.

Meredith told him about looking into Gordon’s new partner, Gina Dickens, about looking into the claims she had made about what she was doing in this part of Hampshire. There was no programme for girls at risk that anyone knew of, Meredith told him and she sounded bitter as she gave him the news, no programme at the college in Brockenhurst, no programme through the district council, not one anywhere at all. “She’s lying,” Meredith concluded. “She met Gordon somewhere a long time ago, believe me, and she wanted him and he wanted her. It wasn’t enough that they just do it in a hotel or something”-She said this last with the bitterness of a woman who’d done exactly that-“with no one the wiser. She wanted more. She wanted it all. But she couldn’t get it with Jemima round, could she, so she got him to drive Jemima off. Rob, she isn’t who she pretends to be.”

Robbie didn’t know how to respond to this, so far-fetched seemed the notion. Truth was, he wondered about Meredith’s real purpose in looking into Gina Dickens and into what Gina Dickens claimed to be doing in Hampshire. Meredith had something of a history of disapproving of people whom she herself could not understand, and more than once over the years of their friendship Jemima had found herself at odds with Meredith because of this, because of Meredith’s inability to see why Jemima could simply not be without a man, as Meredith herself was fully and perfectly capable of being. Meredith was not a serial manhunter; ergo, in her mind, neither should Jemima be.

But there was more to it than that in this particular matter, and Robbie reckoned he knew what it was: If Gina had wanted Gordon and had wanted him to remove Jemima from his life in order to have him, then Gordon had done for Gina what Meredith’s long-ago London lover had not done for her, despite what had been a greater need in the form of her pregnancy. Gordon had driven Jemima off, opening the door to Gina’s complete entry into his life, no secret lover but rather overt life partner. This would rankle with Meredith. She wasn’t made of stone.

“Police have been to talk to Gordon,” Robbie told her. “I expect they talked to her as well. To Gina. They asked me where I was when Jemima…when it happened and-”

Meredith whirled to him. “They didn’t!”

“’Course. They have to. So they also asked him. Her, too, probably. And if they didn’t, they will. They’ll come to talk to you as well.”

“Me? Why?”

“Because you were her friend. I was meant to give them names of anyone who might tell them something, anything. That’s what they’re here for.”

“What? To accuse us? You? Me?”

“No. No. Just to make sure they know everything there is to know about her. Which means…” He hesitated.

She cocked her head. Her hair touched her shoulder. He saw in places where her skin was bare that it was also freckled, as her face was freckled. He recalled her and his sister in a state about the spots on their young adolescent faces, trying this and that product and using makeup and just being growing girls together. The acuteness of the memory struck him.

He said, “Ah, Merry,” and could go no further. He didn’t want to weep in front of her. It felt weak and useless. He was suddenly, stupidly, selfishly aware of how bloody ugly he was, of how weeping would make him seem all the uglier to Jemima’s friend, and where that had never mattered before, it mattered now, because he wanted comfort. And he thought how there was no comfort and never had been and never would be for ugly men such as he.

She said, “I should have stayed in contact with her, this last year, Rob. If I had done, she might’ve not gone off.”

“You mustn’t think that,” he said. “It’s not your doing. You were her friend and the two of you were just going through a bad patch. That happens, sometimes.”

“It was more than a bad patch. It was…I wanted her to listen, Rob, to hear, just for once. But there were things she never would change her mind about and Gordon was one of them. Because they were sexual by that time and whenever she was sexual with a bloke-”

He gripped her arm to stop her. He felt a cry building in him, but he wouldn’t and he couldn’t let it escape. He couldn’t look at her, so he looked at the stained-glass windows round the altar and he thought how they had to be Victorian because the church had been rebuilt, hadn’t it, and there was Jesus saying, “It is I, be not afraid,” and there was St. Peter, and there the Good Shepherd, and there oh there was Jesus with the children and he was suffering the little children to come unto him and that was the problem, wasn’t it, that the little children with all their troubles had not been suffered? Wasn’t that the real problem when everything else was stripped away?

Meredith was silent. His hand was still on her arm and he became aware of how hard he was gripping her and how he must be hurting her, actually. He felt her fingers move against his where they were like claws on her bare skin and it came to him that she wasn’t trying to loosen his grip but rather she was caressing his fingers and then his hand, making small, slow circles to tell him that she understood his grief, although the truth of the matter was that she could not understand, nor could anyone else, what it was like to be robbed of everyone, and to have no hope of filling the void.