This Body of Death

Chapter Three

HER NAME WAS GINA DICKENS, MEREDITH LEARNED, AND it seemed that she was Gordon Jossie’s new partner, although she didn’t actually refer to herself as that. She didn’t use new because, as things turned out, she had no idea there was an old partner or a former partner or whatever one wanted to call Jemima Hastings. She also didn’t use partner as such, as she didn’t quite live there in the cottage although she “had hopes,” she said with a smile. She was there on the holding more than she was at her own place, she confided, which was a tiny bed-sit above the Mad Hatter Tea Rooms. They were in Lyndhurst High Street, she said, where, frankly, the noise from dawn to dusk was appalling. And, come to think of it, the noise went on far beyond dusk because it was summer and there were several hotels, a pub, restaurants…and with all the tourists at this time of year…she was lucky to average four hours of sleep a night when she was there. Which, to be honest, she tried not to be.

They’d gone inside the cottage. It had, Meredith quickly saw, been stripped of all things Jemima, at least as far as the kitchen went, which was as far as Meredith herself went and was also as far as she wanted to go. Alarm bells were ringing in her head, her palms were wet, and her underarms were dripping straight down her sides. Part of this was due to the day’s ever-increasing heat, but the rest was due to everything being absolutely wrong.

Outside the cottage, Meredith’s throat had instantly dried to a desert. As if knowing this, Gina Dickens had ushered her within, sat her down at the old oak table, and brought from the fridge designer water in a frosty bottle, just the sort of thing Jemima would have scoffed at. She poured them both a glass and said, “You look as if you’ve…I don’t know what to call it.”

Meredith said stupidly, “It’s our birthday.”

“Yours and Jemima’s? Who is she?”

Meredith couldn’t believe at first that Gina Dickens didn’t know a thing about Jemima. How could one live with a woman for as long as Gordon had lived with Jemima and somehow manage to keep the knowledge of her existence from his…Was Gina his next lover? Or was she one in a line of his lovers? And where were the rest of them? Where was Jemima? Oh, Meredith had known from the first that Gordon Jossie was bad news on legs.

“…at Boldre Gardens,” Gina was saying. “Near Minstead? D’you know it? He was thatching a building there and I’d got myself lost. I had a map, but I’m completely useless even with a map. Spacially hopeless. North, west, whatever. None of them mean a thing to me.”

Meredith roused herself. Gina was telling her how she and Gordon Jossie had met, but she didn’t care about that. She cared about Jemima Hastings. She said, “He never mentioned Jemima? Or the Cupcake Queen? The shop she opened in Ringwood?”

“Cupcakes?”

“It’s what she does. She had a business she ran from this cottage and it’d grown so much and…bakeries and hotels and catering for parties like children’s birthdays and…he never mentioned…?”

“I’m afraid he didn’t. He hasn’t.”

“What about her brother? Robbie Hastings? He’s an agister. This-” She waved her arm to indicate the entire holding. “This is part of his area. It was part of his father’s area as well. And his grandfather’s. And his great-grandfather’s. There’ve been agisters in their family so long that all this part of the New Forest is actually called the Hastings. You didn’t know that?”

Gina shook her head. She looked mystified and, now, a little bit frightened. She moved her chair a few inches away from the table and she glanced from Meredith to the cake she’d brought, which, ridiculously, she’d carried into the cottage. Seeing this, it came to Meredith that Gina wasn’t afraid of Gordon Jossie-as she damn well should have been-but of Meredith herself who was talking rather like a madwoman.

“You must think I’m barking,” Meredith said.

“No, no. I don’t. It’s just…” Gina’s words were quick, marginally breathless, and she seemed to stop herself from going on.

They were silent together. A whinnying came from outside. “The ponies!” Meredith said. “If you’ve got ponies here, Robbie Hastings would likely have brought them in off the Forest. Or he would have arranged with Gordon to fetch them. But in either case, he would have come by at some point to check on them. Why d’you have ponies here anyway?”

If anything, Gina looked more concerned than before at this ping-ponging of Meredith’s conversation. She clasped both hands round her water glass and said to it rather than to Meredith, “Something about…I don’t exactly know.”

“Are they hurt? Lame? Off their feed?”

“Yes. That’s it, isn’t it. Gordon said they were lame. He brought them in off the Forest…three weeks ago? Something like that. I’m not sure, actually. I don’t care for horses.”

“Ponies,” Meredith corrected her. “They’re ponies.”

“Oh, yes. I suppose. I’ve never quite seen the difference.” She hesitated, as if considering something. “He did say…” She took a sip of the water, lifting the glass with both hands as if she’d not have been able to get it to her mouth otherwise.

“What? What did he say? Did he tell you-”

“Of course one asks eventually, doesn’t one?” Gina said. “I mean, here’s a lovely man living on his own, good-hearted, gentle, passionate when passion’s called for if you know what I mean.”

Meredith blinked. She didn’t want to know.

“So I did ask how he happened to be alone, no girlfriend, no partner, no wife. No one’s snapped you up? That sort of thing. Over dinner.”

Yes, Meredith thought. Outside in the garden, sitting at the wrought-iron table with the candles lit and the torchères blazing. She said stiffly, “And what did he say?”

“That he’d been involved once and he’d been quite badly hurt and he didn’t like to talk about it. So I didn’t want to intrude. I assumed he’d tell me when he was ready.”

“That’s Jemima,” Meredith said. “Jemima Hastings. And she’s…” She didn’t want to put it into words. Putting it into words might make it true and for all she knew it wasn’t true at all. She assessed her facts, for they were few enough. The Cupcake Queen was closed up. Lexie Streener had made phone calls that had gone unreturned. This cottage was semioccupied by another woman. She said, “How long have you and Gordon known each other? Been involved? Whatever?”

“We met early last month. At Boldre-”

“Yes. At Boldre Gardens. What were you doing there?”

Gina looked startled. Clearly, she hadn’t expected the question and even more clearly, she didn’t much like it. She said, “I was having a walk, actually. I’ve not lived in the New Forest long and I like to explore.” She offered a smile as if to take the sting out of what she said next. “You know, I’m not sure why you’re asking me this. D’you think something’s happened to Jemima Hastings? That Gordon did something to her? Or that I did something? Or that Gordon and I together did something? Because I do want you to know that when I got here, to this cottage, there wasn’t a sign that anyone-”

She’d stopped abruptly. Meredith saw that Gina’s eyes were still fixed on hers, but they’d lost their focus, as if she was seeing something else entirely. Meredith said, “What? What is it?”

Gina dropped her gaze. A moment passed. The ponies whinnied outside once again and the excited warbling of pied wagtails broke into the air, as if warning one another that a predator was approaching. “Perhaps,” Gina finally said, “you ought to come with me.”

WHEN MEREDITH FINALLY found Robbie Hastings, he was standing in the car park behind the Queen’s Head in Burley. This was a village at the junction of three roads, arranged in a line of buildings undecided between cob, half-timber, and redbrick, all of them possessing roofs that were equally undecided between thatch and slate. Midsummer, there were vehicles everywhere, including six tour coaches that had brought visitors to this place for what would likely be their only New Forest experience outside of riding through the lanes and seeing it in air-conditioned comfort from well-padded coach seats. This experience would consist of snapping photos of the ponies that wandered freely through the area, of having an expensive bar meal in the pub or in one of the picturesque cafés, and of making purchases in one or more of the tourist shops. These last largely defined the village. They comprised everything from the Coven of Witches-proudly the former home of a bona fide witch who’d had to leave the area when her fame exceeded her willingness to have her privacy invaded-to Burley Fudge Shop and everything in between. The Queen’s Head presided over all of this, the largest structure in the village and the off-season gathering place for those who lived in the area and who wisely avoided both it and Burley itself during the summer.

Meredith had phoned Robbie’s home first, although she knew how unlikely it was that he’d be there in the middle of the day. As an agister, he was responsible for the well-being of all the free-roaming animals in his assigned area-the area that she’d told Gina Dickens was referred to as the Hastings-and he’d be out on the Forest either in his vehicle or on horseback making sure that the donkeys, ponies, cows, and the occasional sheep were being left in peace. For this was the biggest challenge that faced anyone who worked on the Forest, especially during the summer months. It was appealing to see animals so unrestricted by fences, walls, and hedges. It was even more appealing to feed them. People meant well, but they were, alas, congenitally stupid. They did not understand that to feed a sweet little pony in summer conditioned the animal to think that someone was likely to be standing in the car park of the Queen’s Head ready to feed him in the dead of winter as well.

Robbie Hastings was apparently explaining this to a throng of camera-wielding pensioners in Bermuda shorts and lace-up shoes. Robbie had them gathered by his Land Rover, to which a horse trailer was attached. It seemed to Meredith that he’d come for one of the New Forest ponies, which would be unusual at this time of year. She could see the animal, restless, in the trailer. Robbie gestured to it as he spoke.

She gave a glance at her chocolate cake as she climbed out of her car. Its frosting had melted into it on the top and begun to pool viscously at its base. Several flies had managed to find it, but it was like one of those insect-eating plants: Whatever landed upon it was becoming mired in sugar and cocoa. Death by delight. The cake was done for.

It no longer mattered. Things were wildly out of joint, and Robbie Hastings had to be informed. For he’d been his sister’s sole parent from her tenth year onward, a car crash catapulting him into this position when he was twenty-five. That same car crash had also catapulted him into the career he had thought never to attain: one of only five agisters in the New Forest, replacing his own father.

“…for what we mustn’t have is the ponies hanging about one spot.” Robbie seemed to be completing his remarks to an audience looking rather guilty for what they apparently had stowed on themselves: apples, carrots, sugar, and whatever else might appeal to a pony otherwise meant to forage. When Robbie was finished with his remarks-made patiently while visitors continually snapped his picture although he wasn’t wearing his formal attire but rather jeans, T-shirt, and a baseball cap-he gave a sharp nod and opened the Land Rover’s door, preparatory to driving off. The tourists drifted towards the village proper and the pub, and Meredith worked her way through them, calling Robbie’s name.

He turned. Meredith felt the way she’d always felt when she saw him: warmly fond but nonetheless terribly sorry for what he looked like with those huge front teeth of his. They made his mouth the only thing one noticed about him, which was a shame, really. He was very well built, tough and masculine, and his eyes were unique-one brown and one green, just like Jemima’s.

His face brightened. He said, “Merry Contrary. It’s been donkey’s years, girl. What’re you up to in this part of the world?” He was wearing gloves, but he removed them and spontaneously held out his arms to her, as he’d always done.

She embraced him. They were both hot and sweaty, and he was acrid with the mixed odours of horse and man. “What a day, eh?” He took off his baseball cap, revealing hair that would have been thick and wavy had he not kept it shorn close to his skull. It was brown flecked with grey, and this served as a reminder of Meredith’s estrangement from Jemima. For it seemed to Meredith that his hair had been completely brown the last time she had seen him.

She said, “I phoned the verderers’ office. They said you’d be here.”

He wiped his forehead on his arm, replaced the cap, and tugged it down. “Did you, now? What’s up?” He glanced over his shoulder as the pony within the horse trailer clomped restlessly and bumped against its side. The trailer shuddered. Robbie said, “Hey now,” and he made a clucking sound. “You know you can’t stay here at the Queen’s Head, mate. Settle. Settle.”

“Jemima,” Meredith said. “It’s her birthday, Robbie.”

“So it is. Which makes it yours as well. Which means you’re twenty-six years old and that means I’m…Blimey, I’m forty-one. You’d think by now I would’ve found a lass willing to marry this heap of manhood, eh?”

“No one’s snapped you up?” Meredith said. “The women of Hampshire are half mad then, Rob.”

He smiled. “You?”

“Oh, I’m full mad. I’ve had my one man, thank you very much. Not about to repeat the experience.”

He chuckled. “Damn, then, Merry. You’ve no idea how often I’ve heard that said. So why’re you looking for me since it’s not to offer your hand in marriage?”

“It’s Jemima. Robbie, I went to the Cupcake Queen and saw it was closed. Then I talked to Lexie Streener and then I went to their place-Gordon and Jemima’s-and there’s this woman Gina Dickens there. She’s not exactly living there or anything but she’s…I s’pose you’d call it established. And she didn’t know the first thing about Jemima.”

“You haven’t heard from her, then?”

“From Jemima? No.” Meredith hesitated. She felt dead awkward. She looked at him earnestly, trying to read him. “Well, she must have told you…”

“’Bout what happened ’tween the two of you?” he asked. “Oh, aye. She told me you had a falling out some time back. Didn’t think it was permanent, though.”

“Well, I had to tell her I had doubts about Gordon. Aren’t friends meant to do that?”

“I’d say they are.”

“But all she’d say in return is, ‘Robbie doesn’t have doubts about him, so why do you?’”

“Said that, did she?”

“Did you have doubts? Like me? Did you?”

“Oh, that I did. Something about the bloke. I didn’t dislike him ’xactly, but if she was going to have a partner, I would’ve liked it to be someone I knew through and through. I didn’t know Gordon Jossie like that. But as things turned out, I needn’t have worried-same applies to you-because Jemima found out whatever she needed to find out when she hooked up with him and she was clever enough to end it when it needed to be ended.”

“What’s that mean, exactly?” Meredith shifted. She was absolutely baking in the heat. At this point she felt as if her entire body were melting, like her poor chocolate cake in the car. “Look, can we get out of the sun?” she asked. “Can we get a drink? Have you the time? We need to talk. I think…There’s something not quite right.”

Robbie gave a look to the pony and then a look to Meredith. He nodded and said, “Not the pub, though,” and he led them across the car park to a little arcade of shops, one of which offered sandwiches and drinks. They took theirs to a sweet chestnut that spread its leafy branches on the edge of the car park, where a bench faced a lawn opening out in the shape of a fan.

A smattering of tourists were taking photos of ponies that grazed with their foals nearby. The foals were especially appealing, but they were also skittish, which made approaching them and their dams more dangerous than usual. Robbie watched the action. “One damn well wonders,” he said darkly. “That bloke over there? He’s likely to be bit. And then he’ll want the pony put down or he’ll want to sue God knows who. Not that the wanting is going to get him anywhere. Still, I always think there’s some kinds need to be permanently removed from the gene pool.”

“Do you?”

He coloured slightly at the question, then he looked at her. “S’pose not,” he said. And then, “She’s gone to London, Merry. She phoned me up one day, somewhere near the end of October this was, and she announced she was going to London. I thought she meant for the day, for supplies or something for the shop. But she says, ‘No, no, it’s not the shop. I need time to think,’ she says. ‘Gordon’s talking about marriage,’ she says.”

“Are you sure about that? That he talked about marriage?”

“That’s what she said. Why?”

“But what about the Cupcake Queen? Why would she leave her business just to go off and think about anything?”

“Yeah. Bit odd that, eh? I tried to talk to her about that, but she wasn’t having anything off me.”

“London.” Meredith worked on the word. She tried to relate it to her friend. “Think about what? Does she not want to marry him any longer? Why?”

“She wouldn’t say, Merry. She still won’t say.”

“You talk to her?”

“Oh, aye. ’Course I do. Once a week or more. She’s that good about ringing me. Well, she would be. You know Jemima. She worries a bit, how I’m doing without her coming round like she did. So she stays in touch.”

“Lexie told me she tried to ring Jemima. First she left messages and then the calls didn’t go through. So how’re you talking to her once-”

“New mobile,” Robbie said. “She didn’t want Gordon to have the number. He kept ringing her. She doesn’t want him to know where she is.”

“D’you think something happened between them?”

“That I don’t know, and she won’t say. I went over there once she’d gone ’cause she’d been in a bit of a state and I thought to have a word with Gordon.”

“And…?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. Gordon says, ‘You know what I know, mate. I still feel the same as always. She’s the one whose feelings changed.’”

“Someone else?”

“On Jemima’s part?” Robbie lifted his can of Coke and downed most of it. “Wasn’t someone when she left. I asked her that. You know Jemima. Hard to think she’d leave Gordon without having someone ready to partner up with.”

“Yes. I know. That ‘being alone’ business. She can’t cope, can she?”

“Who’s to blame her, really? After Mum and Dad.”

They were both silent, considering this, what fears that losing her parents in childhood had wrought in Jemima and how those fears had played out in her life.

Across the lawn from them, an elderly man with a zimmer frame was getting too close to one of the foals. Its dam’s head snapped up, but then, no worries. The foal scampered off and the small herd moved as well. They were more than a match for a bloke with a zimmer. He called out to them, a carrot extended.

Robbie sighed. “Should have saved my breath for the porridge, all the good it does to tell them, eh? Reckon some people have cotton wool up there ’stead of brains. Look at him, Merry.”

“You need a loud hailer,” she told him.

“I need my shotgun.” Robbie rose. He would confront the man, as indeed he must. But there was something more that Meredith wanted him to know. Things might have been explained with regard to Jemima, but things were still not right.

She said, “Rob, how did Jemima get up to London?”

“I expect she drove.”

And this was the crux of the matter. It was the answer she’d feared. It constituted the bells and whistles, and it became the alarm. Meredith felt it in the tingling of her arms and the shiver-despite the heat-that went up her spine. “No,” she said. “She didn’t do that.”

“What?” Robbie turned to look at her.

“She didn’t drive up there.” Meredith rose as well. “That’s just it. That’s why I’ve come. Her car’s in the barn at Gordon’s, Robbie. Gina Dickens showed it to me. It was under a tarp like he was hiding it.”

“You’re joking.”

“Why would I joke? She’d asked him about it, Gina Dickens. He said it was his. But he hasn’t ever driven it, which made her think…” Meredith’s throat was dry once more, desertlike, as it had been during her conversation with Gina.

Robbie was frowning. “It made her think what? What’s going on, Merry?”

“That’s what I want to know.” She curved her hand round his work-muscled arm. “Because, Rob, there’s more.”

ROBBIE HASTINGS TRIED not to be concerned. He had obligations to perform-the most important at the moment being the transport of the pony in the horse trailer-and he needed to keep his mind on his duty. But Jemima was a large part of that duty, despite the fact that she was now an adult. For Jemima’s becoming an adult hadn’t changed things between them. He was still her father figure, while to Robbie she’d always be his sister-child, the waif who’d lost her parents after a late-night dinner on holiday in Spain: too much to drink, confusion over which side of the road to be driving on, and that had been that, gone in an instant, mown down by a lorry. Jemima hadn’t been with them, and thank God for that. For had she been, everyone he’d known as family would have been wiped out. Instead, he’d been staying with her in the family home, and so his stay had become permanent.

Thus even as Robbie delivered the pony to the commoner who owned her and even as he had a talk with that gentleman about what ailed the animal-Robbie reckoned it was cancer, sir, and the pony was going to have to be put down although you might want to phone the vet for a second opinion in the matter-he still thought about Jemima. He’d phoned her upon waking that morning because it was her birthday, and he phoned her again along the road back to Burley after leaving the pony with its owner. But he got this second time what he’d got when he phoned the first time: his sister’s cheerful voice on her voice mail.

He hadn’t given that fact a thought when he’d first phoned, for it had been early in the day, and he reckoned she’d switched the mobile off for the night if she wanted a lie-in on her birthday. But she generally phoned right back when she got a message from him, so when he left a second message, he became concerned. He phoned her place of employment after that, but he learned that she’d taken a half day off on the previous day and today was not a workday for her. Did he want to leave a message, sir? He didn’t.

He rang off and worried the tattered leather cover on his steering wheel. All right, he told himself, Meredith’s concerns aside, it was Jemima’s birthday and likely she was merely having a bit of fun. And she would do that, wouldn’t she? As he recalled, she’d enthused about ice skating recently. Lessons or something. So she could be off doing that. It would be exactly like Jemima.

Truth of the matter was that Robbie hadn’t told Meredith everything beneath the sweet chestnut tree in Burley. There hadn’t seemed to be a point, mostly because Jemima had a history of attachments to men while Meredith-bless her heart-definitely had not. He hadn’t wanted to rub this fact in Meredith’s face, her being a single mum as the result of the only disastrous relationship she’d managed. Besides, Robbie respected Meredith Powell: how she’d stepped onto the pitch of motherhood and was making a proper job of it. And anyway, Jemima hadn’t left Gordon Jossie for another man, so that much of what Robbie had told Meredith had been true. But, exactly in character, she’d found another man quickly enough. Robbie hadn’t told Meredith that. Afterwards, he wondered if he should have.

“He’s very special, Rob,” Jemima had burbled in that way she had. “Oh, I’m madly in love with him.”

That’s what she always was: madly in love. No point in like or interest or curiosity or friendship when one could be madly in love. For madly in love equated warding off solitude. She’d gone to London to think, but thinking was something that led Jemima to fear, and God knew she’d long rather run from fear than face it head-on. Well, didn’t everyone? Wouldn’t he if he could?

Robbie wound up the hill that was Honey Lane, a short distance outside Burley. In midsummer it was a lush green tunnel, sided by holly and arced by beech and oak. It was packed earth only-no paving here-and he passed along it with care, doing his best to avoid the occasional pothole that made the going rough. He was less than a mile outside the village, but one stepped back in time in this area. The trees sheltered paddocks and beyond them ancient buildings marked both common holdings and farms. These were backed by a wood, and the wood was thick with fragrant scotch pines, with hazel, and with beech, providing a habitat for everything from deer to dormice, from stoats to shrews. One could walk the distance here from Burley, but people seldom did. There were easier paths to follow, and in Robbie’s experience people liked their ease.

At the crest of the hill, he made the left turn onto what had long been Hastings land. This comprised thirty-five acres of paddock and wood, with the rooftop of Burley Hill House just visible to the northeast and the peak of Castle Hill Lane beyond it. In one of the paddocks his own two horses happily grazed, delighted not to be carrying his weight round the New Forest on this hot summer day.

Robbie parked near the tumbledown barn and its attendant shed, trying not to see them so he would not have to think about how much work he needed to put into them. He climbed out of the Land Rover and slammed the door. The noise brought his dog loping from round the side of the house where he’d no doubt been sleeping in the shade, his tail wagging and his tongue hanging, and all of himself looking out of character. The Weimaraner was normally elegant in appearance. But he hated the heat and he’d rolled in the compost heap as if this would help him to escape it. He now wore a fragrantly decomposing mantle. He paused to shake himself off.

“Think that’s amusing, do you, Frank?” Robbie asked the dog. “You’re a real sight. You know that, eh? I shouldn’t let you near the house.”

But no woman lived there to admonish him or to usher Frank from the house herself. So when he went inside and the dog tagged along, Robbie allowed it and was grateful for the company. He fetched the Weimaraner a fresh bowl of water. Frank slopped it happily onto the kitchen floor.

Robbie left him to it and went for the stairs. He was sweaty and he smelled all of horse from transporting the pony, but instead of heading for a shower-he could hardly be bothered with that at this time of day, as he’d only get sweaty and smelly again-he went into Jemima’s room.

He told himself to be calm. He couldn’t think if he got himself into a state, and he needed to think. In his experience, there was an explanation for everything, and there was going to be an explanation for the rest of what Meredith Powell had told him.

“Her clothes are there, Rob. But not in the bedroom. He’s boxed them all up and he’s put them in the attic. Gina found them because, she said, there was something a little strange-that’s how she put it-when he was talking about Jemima’s car.”

“So she did what? Take you up to see them? Up to the attic?”

“She just told me about them at first,” Meredith said. “I asked to look. I reckoned they could’ve been there awhile-from before Gordon and Jemima took the place-so they could’ve been someone else’s. But they weren’t. The boxes weren’t old, and there was something I recognised. Well, it was mine, actually, and she’d borrowed it and I’d never got it back. So you see…?”

He did and he didn’t. Had he not heard from his sister at least weekly since her departure, he would have headed to Sway at once, determined to have a face-to-face with Gordon Jossie. But he had heard from her and what she’d repeated at the end of each phone call had been the reassurance, “Not to worry, Rob. It’ll all come right.”

He’d said at first, “What’ll all come right?” and she’d sidestepped the question. Her avoidance had forced him more than once to ask, “Did Gordon do something to you, my girl?” to which she’d replied, “Of course not, Rob.”

Robbie knew he’d now have assumed the worst had Jemima not stayed in touch: Gordon had killed her and buried her on the property somewhere. Or out on the Forest and deep within a wood so that if her body were ever found, it would be in fifty years, when it was too late to matter. Somehow, an unspoken prophecy-a belief or a fear-would have been fulfilled by her disappearance because the truth of the matter was-he did not like Gordon Jossie. He’d said to her often enough, “There’s something about him, Jemima,” to which she’d laughed and replied, “You mean he’s not like you.”

He’d been forced finally to agree with her. It was easy to like and embrace people just like oneself. It was another matter with people who were different.

In her bedroom now, he phoned her again. Again, no reply. Just the voice, and he left a message once he was asked to do so. He kept it cheerful to match her own tone. “Hey, birthday girl, ring me, eh? Not like you not to get back in touch and I’m having a bit of a worry, I am. Merry Contrary came to see me. She had a cake for you, luv. Got itself all melted in the bloody heat but it’s the thought, eh? Ring me, luv. I want to tell you about the foals.”

He found he wanted to go on a bit, but he was talking into a void. He didn’t want to leave his sister a message. He wanted his sister herself.

He walked to her bedroom window, its sill yet another depository for what Jemima Clutterduck could not bear to part with, which was nearly everything she’d ever possessed. In this spot, it was plastic ponies, crammed one upon the next and covered with dust. Beyond them he could see the real thing: his horses in the paddock with the sunlight glowing off their well-groomed coats.

The fact that Jemima had not returned for the foaling season was what should have told him, he thought. It had long been her favourite time of year. Like him, she was of the New Forest. He’d sent her to college in Winchester as he himself had been sent, but she’d come home when her course work was completed, rejecting computer technology for baking. “I belong here,” she’d told him. As indeed she did.

Perhaps she’d gone to London not for time to think but just for time. Perhaps she’d wanted to break it off with Gordon Jossie but hadn’t known how else to bring it about. Perhaps she reckoned if she was gone long enough, Gordon would find someone else and she herself could then return. But none of that was in character, was it?

Not to worry, she’d say. Not to worry, Rob.

What a monstrous joke.