This Body of Death

Chapter Thirty-Two

SHE WAS IN BIG TROUBLE, NO DOUBT ABOUT IT. SHE WAS already so late for work that Meredith knew she was going to have to come up with an excuse for her absence that was akin to an alien abduction. Anything less was unlikely to result in her continued employment.

And it was going to be absence at this point, not mere tardiness. That was certain. For once she saw Zachary Whiting in conversation with Gina Dickens, Meredith felt afire to take action, and the action she felt afire to take had nothing to do with driving over to Ringwood and sitting obediently within her cubicle at Gerber & Hudson Graphic Design.

Still, she didn’t ring Mr. Hudson. She knew she ought, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. He was going to be livid, and she reckoned if she could somehow sort out Gina Dickens, Zachary Whiting, Gordon Jossie, and Jemima’s death by the end of the day, emerging as a heroine who wrestles villains into submission would bring her enough glory to translate into a chance that she wouldn’t lose her job.

She felt a bit like a headless chicken at first, seeing the chief superintendent chatting with Gina Dickens. She hadn’t known what to do, what to think, or where to go. She crept back to her car and started off in the direction of Lyndhurst because that was where the police station was and one was meant to rely on the police. Only what was the point in going there, she realised, when the head of the Lyndhurst police was here, and he was obviously thick as thieves with Gina Dickens?

Meredith pulled to the side of the road, and she tried to sort through what she’d heard from Gina Dickens, what she’d discovered about her during her own investigation, and what she’d learned about her from Michele Daugherty. She tried to remember every statement made to her and from these statements she tried to sort out who Gina Dickens really was. What she ended up with was the decision that there had to be something somewhere about Gina, a piece of truth about her that Gina herself had not realised she was revealing. Meredith needed to find that truth because when she found it, it would tell her exactly what to do.

The problem, of course, was the where of it. Where was she supposed to find this piece of truth? If Gina Dickens did not actually exist, then what was she-Meredith Powell-supposed to do to sort out who she really was and why she was in cahoots with Chief Superintendent Whiting in the matter of…what? What, exactly, was the reason for their partnership?

It seemed to Meredith that any information about Gina, her purpose in Hampshire, and her true identity was information that Gina herself would keep quite close. She would keep it secreted on her person, or in her bag, or in her car, perhaps.

Except, Meredith thought, that didn’t make sense. Gina Dickens couldn’t risk it. For Gordon Jossie might well stumble upon it if she kept it nearby, and Gina would know that, so she’d want some place far more secure to keep the key to who she really was and what she was up to.

Meredith grasped the steering wheel tightly as she realised the obvious answer. There was one spot where Gina could be freely who she really was: within the four walls of her own bed-sitting room. For while Meredith had searched that room from top to bottom, she hadn’t looked everywhere, had she? She hadn’t looked between the mattress and the box springs on the bed, for instance. Nor had she removed drawers to look for anything that might be taped beneath them. Or behind pictures for that matter.

That damn bed-sitting room had to hold all the answers, Meredith reckoned, because when it came down to it, it had never made sense that Gina would be living with Gordon while maintaining her own digs, did it? Why go to the expense of doing that unless there was a reason? So the answers to every riddle about Gina Dickens were in Lyndhurst, where they had always been. For not only was Lyndhurst the site of Gina’s room, but it was also the location of Whiting’s police station. And how bloody convenient was that?

Despite all of this delicate thinking and supposing, Meredith knew she was perilously close to being completely out of her depth in the situation. Murder, police malfeasance, false identities…None of this was exactly up her alley. Still, she knew she had to get to the bottom of everything because there seemed to be no one else who was interested in doing so.

Although…Of course, Meredith thought. She took out her mobile and punched in Rob Hastings’ number.

He was-as wonderful luck would have it-actually in Lyndhurst! He was-as less than wonderful luck would have it-just stepping into a meeting of all the agisters, which was likely to go on for more than ninety minutes and closer to two hours.

She said to him in a rush, “Rob, it’s Gina Dickens and that chief superintendent. It’s them together. And there’s no Gina Dickens at all anyway. And Chief Superintendent Whiting told Michele Daugherty that she had to stop looking into Gordon Jossie, but she hadn’t even started the process of looking into him yet and-”

“Hang on. What’re you banging on about?” Rob asked. “Merry, what the hell…? Who’s Michele Daugherty?”

She said, “I’m going to her room in Lyndhurst.”

“Michele Daugherty’s room?”

“Gina’s room. She’s got a bed-sit over the Mad Hatter, Rob. On the high street. You know where it is? The tea rooms over the road from-”

“’Course I know,” he said. “But-”

“There’s got to be something there, something I overlooked the last time. Will you meet me there? It’s important because I saw them together. On Gordon’s property. Rob, he drove right up and got out and went into the paddock and they stood there talking-”

“Whiting?”

“Yes, yes. Who else? That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

He said, “Scotland Yard’s back, Merry. It’s a woman called Havers. You need to ring her about this. I’ve got her number.”

“Scotland Yard? Rob, how c’n we trust them if we can’t trust Whiting? They’re all cops. And what do we tell them? That Whiting’s talking to Gina Dickens who isn’t really Gina Dickens anyway except we don’t know who she is? No, no. We’ve got to-”

“Merry! For God’s sake, listen. I told this woman-this Havers-everything. What you told me about Whiting. How you gave him the information. How he said it was all in hand. She’ll want to hear whatever else you know. I expect she’ll want to see that bed-sit as well. Listen to me.”

That was when he told her he was heading into the agisters’ meeting. He couldn’t skip it because among other things, he had to…Oh, never mind, he said, he just had to be there. And she had to ring the detective from Scotland Yard.

“Oh no,” she cried. “Oh no, oh no. If I do that, there’s no way she’ll agree to break into Gina’s room. You know that.”

“Break in?” he said. “Break in? Merry, what’ve you got planned?” He went on to ask could she wait for him. He would meet her at the Mad Hatter immediately after his meeting. He would be there as soon as he could. “Don’t do anything mad,” he told her. “Promise me, Merry. If something happens to you…” He stopped.

At first she said nothing. Then she promised and quickly rang off. She intended to keep her promise and to wait for Rob Hastings, but when she got to Lyndhurst, she knew that waiting was out of the question. She couldn’t wait. Whatever was up there in Gina’s room was something she intended to put her hands on now.

She parked by the New Forest Museum and hoofed up Lyndhurst High Street to the Mad Hatter Tea Rooms. At that time of morning, the tea rooms were open and doing a brisk business, so no one took notice of Meredith as she went through the doorway set at an angle to the tea rooms themselves.

She dashed quickly up the stairs. At the top, she was stealthy about her movements. She listened at the doorway of the room opposite Gina’s. No sound from within. She tapped upon it just to make sure. No one answered. Good. Once again there would be no witness to what she was about to do.

She fished in her bag for her bank card. Her hands felt slick, but she reckoned it was nerves. There was more menace about breaking into Gina’s room than there had been the last time she’d done so. Then her suspicions had driven her. Now she had certain knowledge.

She fumbled with the card and dropped it twice before she finally managed to get the door open. A final time, she looked round the corridor. She stepped inside the room.

There was sudden movement to her left. A rush of air and a blur of darkness. The door shut behind her and she heard an inner bolt driven home. She swung round and found herself face-to-face with an utter stranger. A man. For a moment, and it was just a single moment, her mind said ridiculously and in rapid succession that she’d got the wrong room, that the room had been let out to someone else, that Gina’s room had never been here above the Mad Hatter in the first place. And then her mind said she was in real danger, for the man grabbed her arm, swung her round, clamped his hand brutally over her mouth. She felt something press into her neck. It was wickedly sharp.

“Now what have we here?” he whispered in her ear. “And what are we going to do about it?”

ONCE HE RECEIVED the phone call from the Scotland Yard sergeant, Gordon Jossie knew he’d reached the absolute endgame with Gina. There had been a moment in the kitchen that morning when Gina’s denials about Jemima had nearly convinced him she was speaking the truth, but after DS Havers phoned him wondering why Gina had not shown up at her hotel in Sway, he understood that being convinced by Gina had more to do with how he wanted things to be than how things actually were. That, indeed, served as a good description of his entire adult life, he thought morosely. There had been at least two years of that life-those years after he’d first met Jemima and become enmeshed with her-when he’d developed a fantasy future. It had seemed as if the fantasy could be turned into reality because of Jemima herself and because she’d seemed to need him so. She’d appeared to need him the way a plant needs decent soil and adequate water, and he’d reckoned that that kind of need would make the mere fact of having a man in her life more important than who the man was. She’d seemed exactly what he’d been looking for, although he hadn’t been looking at all. There had been no sense to looking, he’d decided. Not when the world he had constructed for himself-or perhaps, better said, the world that had been constructed for him-could come crashing down round his ears at any time. And then, suddenly, there she had been on Longslade Bottom with her brother and his dog. And there he had been with Tess. And she had been the one to make “the first move,” as it was called. An invitation to her brother’s house, which was her own house, an invitation for drinks on a Sunday afternoon although he didn’t drink, couldn’t and wouldn’t ever risk a drink.

He’d gone because of her eyes. Ridiculous now to think that’s why he’d driven to Burley to see her again but that was it. He’d never seen anyone with two entirely different-coloured eyes, and he’d liked studying them, or at least that was what he’d told himself. So he’d gone. And the rest of it…? What did it matter? The rest had brought him to where he was now.

Her hair was longer those months later when he saw her in London after she’d left him. It seemed a bit lighter as well, but that could have been a trick of memory. As to the remainder of the package that was Jemima: She was all the same.

He hadn’t understood at first why she’d chosen the cemetery in Stoke Newington for their meeting, but when he saw the place with its winding paths, ruined monuments, and unrestrained growth of vegetation he realised her choice had had to do with not being seen in his company. This should have reassured him about her intentions, but still he’d wanted to hear it from her lips. He’d also wanted both the coin and the stone returned to him. Those he was determined to have. He had to have them because if she kept them in her possession, there was no telling what she’d do with them.

She’d said, “So how did you find me? I know about the postcards. But how…? Who…?”

He said he didn’t know who’d phoned him, just that it was a bloke’s voice, telling him about the cigar shop in Covent Garden.

She’d said, “A man,” to herself, not to him. She seemed to be going over in her mind the various possibilities. There would, he knew, likely be many. Jemima had never gone in for friendship with other women in a big way, but men she had sought, men who somehow completed her in ways that friendship with women never could. He wondered if that was why Jemima had died. Perhaps a man had misunderstood the nature of her need, wanting something from her that far exceeded what she wanted from him. It explained in some ways the phone call he’d received, which itself could be described as a betrayal, a tit for tat as it were, you don’t do what I want and I turn you over to…well, to whoever seems to be looking for you because I don’t care who it is, I only want to balance the scales in which you and I do harm to each other.

He’d said, “Have you told anyone?”

“That’s why you’ve been looking for me?”

“Jemima, have you told anyone?”

“Do you actually think I’d want anyone to know?”

He could see her point although he felt it like a wound she was inflicting upon him instead of merely an answer to his question. Still, there was something in the way she said it that made him doubt her. He knew her too well.

“D’you have a new bloke?” he asked her abruptly, not because he really wanted to know but because of what it could mean if she had.

“I don’t see that’s any business of yours.”

“Do you?”

“Why?”

“You know.”

“I most certainly do not know.”

He said, “If you’ve told…Jemima, just tell me if you’ve told someone.”

“Why? Worried, are you? Yes, I suppose you would be. I’d be worried as well. So let me ask you this, Gordon: Have you thought how I’d feel if other people knew? Have you considered the wreck my life could become? ‘Just please give us an interview, Miss Hastings. Just a word about what it’s been like for you. Did you never suspect? Did you not recognise…? What sort of woman wouldn’t know there was something terribly wrong here…?’ D’you actually think I’d want that, Gordon? My picture smeared on the front of some tabloid along with yours?”

“They’d pay,” he said. “Like you said, it’d be a tabloid. They’d pay you a lot for an interview. They’d pay you a fortune.”

She’d backed off, white faced. “You’re mad,” she said. “If it’s even possible, you’re actually madder than you were-”

“All right,” he’d said fiercely. Then, “What’ve you done with the coin? Where is it? Where’s the stone?”

“Why?” she asked. “How’s that your business?”

“I mean to take them back to Hampshire, obviously.”

“Do you indeed?”

“You know I do. They must go back, Jemima. It’s the only way.”

“No. There’s another way entirely.”

“What way is that?”

“I think you might already know. Especially as you’ve been looking for me.”

That was the moment when he knew she did indeed have someone else. That was when he understood, despite her declarations to the contrary, how likely it was that the darkest part of his soul was going to be revealed to someone, if it had not already been revealed. His only hope-his guarantee of her silence and the silence of whoever else knew the truth-lay in complying with whatever she was about to ask of him.

He knew she was about to ask something because he knew Jemima. And his curse for the rest of his life was going to be the knowledge that once again he and no one else had put himself into a place of complete destruction. He’d wanted to return the coin and the stone to the earth in which they’d laid buried for more than a thousand years. More than that, he’d wanted to know that Jemima would keep his secret safe. So he’d put up those cards and in doing so he’d forced her hand. And now she was going to play it.

She’d said, “We need the money.”

“What money? Who’s we?”

“You know what money. We have plans, Gordon, and that money-”

“That’s what this is about, then? That’s why you left? Not because of me, but because you want to sell whatever’s dug up from the ground and then…what?”

But no, that hadn’t been it at all, not at first. Money was fine but money had not driven Jemima. Money bought things, but what it didn’t buy, could never buy, had never bought was what she needed most.

He said, understanding things further, “It’s the bloke. He’s the one, isn’t he? He wants it. For whatever your plans are.”

He’d known he’d hit upon the truth. He’d seen as much in the high colour that swept across her cheeks. Indeed, she had left him to get away from the truth of who he was, but she’d met another man in her inimitable fashion and it was to this other man that she’d told his secrets.

He said, “Why did it take you so long, then? All these months? Why’d you not tell him at once?”

After a moment in which she’d looked away from him, she said, “Those postcards,” and he’d seen how his own fear of discovery, his own need for reassurance, which was unlike her need and yet ironically identical to it, had brought about this very meeting between them. Any new lover of hers would have asked why someone was trying to find her. Where she could have lied, she had told the truth.

He said to her, “What do you want then, Jemima?”

“I’ve already told you.”

To which he’d said, “I’ll need to think.”

“About what?”

“How to make it happen.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s obvious, isn’t it? If you mean to dig the lot of it up, I have to disappear. If I don’t…Or is it that you want me found out as well? Perhaps you want me dead? I mean, we were something to each other for a while, weren’t we?”

She was silent at this. The day around them was bright and hot and clear, and the sounds of the birds intensified suddenly. She finally said, “I don’t want you dead. I don’t even want you harmed, Gordon. I just want to forget about it. About us. I want a new life. We’re going to emigrate and open a business and to do that…And it’s your own fault. If you hadn’t put up those cards. If you hadn’t. I was in a state, and he wanted to know, so I told him. He asked-well, anyone would-how I’d come to find out because he reckoned it’d be the last thing you’d tell anyone. So I told him that part as well.”

“About the paddock.”

“Not the paddock itself but what you’d found there. How I expected we’d use it or sell it or whatever one does, how you hadn’t wanted to, and then…well, yes. Why. I had to tell him why.”

“Had to?”

“Of course. Don’t you see? There aren’t supposed to be secrets between people who love each other.”

“And he loves you.”

“He does.”

Yet Gordon could see her doubts, and he understood how the existence of her doubts had also served a role in what was happening. She wanted to secure him, whoever he was. He wanted money. These desires combined to produce betrayal.

“When?” he asked her.

“What?”

“When did you decide to do this, Jemima?”

“I’m not doing anything. You asked to see me. I didn’t ask to see you. You looked for me, I didn’t look for you. If you hadn’t done any of that, there’d have been no need to tell anyone about you.”

“And when money had come up between you? What then?”

“It never did come up, till I told him why…” Her voice drifted off at that point, and he could tell that she was reasoning something out on her own, determining the possibility of something that he himself was only too able to see.

He said, “It’s the money. He wants the money. Not you. You see that, don’t you?”

She said, “No. That’s not the truth.”

He said, “And I expect you’ve had your doubts all along.”

“He loves me.”

“If that’s how you see it.”

“You’re a rotten person.”

“I suppose I am.”

He’d said that he would cooperate with her plan to return to the holding and stake her claim. He would be gone, but it would take time to effect the sort of disappearance that was required. She asked how long and he said he wasn’t sure. He would have to speak to certain people and then he would let her know. She could, naturally, ring up the media in the meantime and make some additional cash that way. He said this last bitterly before he’d walked off. What a mess he’d made of everything, he thought.

And now Gina. Or whoever the hell she was. He told himself that if he hadn’t decided to replace the bloody fence of the bloody paddock, none of this would have happened. But the truth of the matter was that the first event that had brought him ultimately to this moment had occurred in a crowded McDonald’s when let’s jus’ take him had led to let’s make him cry had led to shut him up! how do we shut him up?

When Zachary Whiting showed up at the Royal Oak pub a few hours after his arrival at the work site, Gordon was up on the roof’s ridge. He saw the familiar vehicle pull into the car park, but he felt neither nervous nor afraid. He’d prepared himself for Whiting’s eventual appearance. Since they’d been interrupted during their last encounter, Gordon knew the chief superintendent was probably unwilling to let that moment between them go uncompleted.

The cop signaled him down from the roof. Cliff was handing a bundle of straw up to him, so Gordon told him to take a break. The day was as hot as every day that had preceded it, so he said, “Have a cider,” and he said the cider would be on him. “Enjoy,” he told him. “I’ll be along directly.”

Cliff was happy to comply although he muttered, “Anything wrong, mate?” as Whiting approached. He likely didn’t know who Whiting was, but he could sense the man’s menace. Whiting wore it like skin.

“Not a bit,” was Gordon’s reply. “Take your time in there,” he added, with a nod to the doorway. And he repeated, “I’ll be along.”

With Cliff out of the way, he waited for Whiting. The chief superintendent stopped in front of him. He did his usual, getting in too close, but Gordon didn’t pull away from the man.

“You’re out of here,” Whiting said.

“What?”

“You heard. You’re being moved. Home Office orders. You’ve an hour. Let’s go. Leave the pickup. You won’t be needing it.”

“My dog’s in-”

“Fuck the dog. The dog stays. The pickup stays. This-” with a jerk of his head towards the pub, by which Gordon reckoned he meant the thatching, the job he was doing, his source of employment. “This’s done for. Get in the car.”

“Where are they sending me?”

“No bloody idea and even less interest. Get in the fucking car. We don’t want a scene. You don’t want a scene.”

Gordon wasn’t about to cooperate without more information. He wasn’t about to get into that car unprepared. There were any number of isolated lanes between this spot and his holding near Sway, and the unfinished business between him and this man suggested that he wouldn’t be driven home directly, no matter what Whiting was claiming. He had no way to be sure the cop was even telling the truth, although Jemima’s death and the presence of New Scotland Yard in Hampshire suggested that it was likely.

Still, he said, “I’m not leaving that dog here. I go, she goes.”

Whiting took off the clip-on sunglasses and polished them on the front of his shirt. It was clinging to him where he was sweating. Heat of day or anticipation. Gordon reckoned it could be either. Whiting said, “Do you think you can negotiate with me?”

“I’m not negotiating. I’m stating a fact.”

“Are you now, laddie.”

“I expect your brief is to take me somewhere and hand me over. I expect you’ve got a time line involved. I expect you’ve been told not to cock it up, not to cause a scene, not to make it look like anything other than two blokes having a chat right here, with me climbing into your car at the end of it. Anything else and it’s likely to attract notice, eh? Like the notice of those people in the beer garden over there. You and I have a dustup and someone’s going to ring the cops, and if it’s a proper dustup-a head-banging sort of dustup-then it gets even more attention and someone wonders how you managed to make such a mess out of something so simple as-”

“Fetch the sodding dog,” Whiting said. “I want you out of Hampshire. You pollute the air.”

Gordon smiled thinly. The truth of the matter was that sweat was dripping down his sides and pouring like a waterfall along his spine. His words were hard but there was nothing behind them except the only means he had to protect himself. He went to the pickup.

Tess was within, thank God, dozing across the length of the seat. Her lead was looped through the steering wheel, and he took it up swiftly and dropped it on the floor where it was safe to fumble round. Tess awakened, blinked, and yawned widely, exhaling a cloud of dog breath. She began to rise. He told her to stay and climbed inside. With one hand he attached the lead to her collar while with the other, he made himself ready. He had a wind-breaker, so he donned it. He flipped down the sun visors. He opened and closed the glove box. He heard Whiting approaching across the gravel car park, and he said, “I expect you don’t want me to go into the pub. Cliff’ll need a note,” and he was thankful he had the presence of mind to say that much.

Whiting said, “Hurry it up then,” and returned to his car. He didn’t get inside but rather lit a cigarette and watched and waited.

His note was brief, This is yours till I need it, mate. Cliff didn’t need to know anything else. If Gordon had a chance later to get the vehicle back, he’d do so. If not, at least it wouldn’t fall into Whiting’s hands.

He’d left the keys in the ignition, which was his habit. He removed the cottage key from the ring, told Tess to come, and climbed out of the truck. The whole procedure had taken less than two minutes. Less than two minutes to alter the course of his life once again.

“I’m ready,” he said to Whiting as he and the dog-wagging her tail as always, as if the wanker in front of them was just another someone who might pat her damn head-approached the man.

“Oh, I expect you are,” was Whiting’s reply.