This Body of Death

Chapter Twenty-Six

ROBBIE HASTINGS HAD ENCOUNTERED NO DIFFICULTY WHEN he went to the Lyndhurst police station. His thought had been to insist on quick action, but that wasn’t necessary as it turned out. Upon identifying himself, he’d been escorted into the chief superintendent’s office, where Zachary Whiting had offered him mid-morning coffee and heard him out with not a single interruption. As Rob spoke, Whiting frowned in concern, but the frown turned out to be about Rob’s upset rather than about the questions he was asking or the demands for action he was making. At the conclusion of Rob’s recitation of concerns, Whiting had said, “Good God, it’s all in hand, Mr. Hastings. You should have been informed of this, and I can’t think why you weren’t.”

Rob wondered what was in hand, and this he asked, adding that there were train tickets, there was a hotel receipt. He knew that these had been given to Whiting and what had Whiting done about them? What had he done about Jossie, as a matter of fact?

Again, Whiting reassured him. What he meant when he said that things were in hand was that everything he-Whiting-knew, everything he had been told, and everything that had been handed to him was now in the possession of the Scotland Yard detectives who’d come down to Hampshire in connection with the London murder enquiry. That meant the tickets and the hotel receipt as well, Whiting told him. They were likely in London at this point, as he’d sent them up by special messenger. Mr. Hastings wasn’t to worry about that. If Gordon Jossie had perpetrated this crime against Mr. Hastings’s sister-

“If?” Rob had said.

– then Mr. Hastings could expect Scotland Yard to come calling again in very short order.

“I don’t understand why the London police and not you lot here-”

Whiting held up his hand. He said it was a complicated matter because more than one police jurisdiction was involved. As to why it was Scotland Yard looking into matters and not the locals from where Mr. Hastings’ sister had been killed, he couldn’t say. That was likely due to some political situation up in London. But what Whiting could say was that the reason the Hampshire constabulary was not handling the case had to do with this being a killing that had not occurred in Hampshire in the first place. The Hampshire police would cooperate and were cooperating fully with London, naturally. That meant handing over whatever they had or were given or what they learned, and once again he wanted to assure Mr. Hastings that this had been done and was continuing to be done.

“Jossie admits to being in London,” Rob told Whiting again. “I spoke to him myself. The bastard admits it.”

And that, too, would be transmitted to the London police. There would be someone brought to justice, Mr. Hastings. That was likely to happen in very short order.

Whiting personally ushered Rob to the reception area at the end of their meeting. He introduced him along the way to the duty press officer, to the sergeant in charge of the custody suite, and to two special constables who liaised with the community.

In reception, Whiting informed the special on duty that until an arrest had been made in the London murder of Jemima Hastings, whenever her brother needed to see the chief superintendent, he was to be given access. Rob appreciated all of this. It went a great way towards soothing his mind.

He returned to his home and hooked up the horse trailer. With Frank as his companion-head hanging out of the window, tongue and ears flapping-he trundled from Burley along the lanes to Sway and from there to Gordon Jossie’s holding. The narrowness of the roads and the fact of the horse trailer made the going slow, but it was of no account. He didn’t expect Gordon Jossie to be on the property at this time of day.

That turned out to be the case. When Rob reversed up the cottage drive and positioned the horse trailer near the paddock that contained the two ponies from the Minstead area, no one came out of the cottage to stop him. The absence of Jossie’s golden retriever told him, as well, that no one was home. He let Frank out of the Land Rover to have a run, but told the Weimaraner to keep his distance when he brought the ponies from the paddock. As if he understood this perfectly, Frank headed in the direction of the barn, snuffling along the ground as he went.

The ponies weren’t as skittish as some within the Perambulation, so it wasn’t difficult to get them into the horse trailer. This went some way towards explaining how Jossie had managed them when he brought them here as, unlike Rob, he wasn’t an experienced horseman. It did not, however, explain what Jossie was doing with the two ponies in the first place, so far from where they normally grazed and belonging to someone else. He would have seen how their tails were clipped, so even had he mistaken them for his own ponies upon a glance, a closer look would have told him they were from another area. Keeping them on his holding when they weren’t his responsibility, and longer than they clearly needed to be there, was an expense any other commoner would have avoided. Rob couldn’t reckon why Gordon Jossie had taken it on.

When he had them ready for transport, Rob returned to the paddock to close its gate. There he noticed what he might have noticed on earlier visits to the holding had he not been first consumed with concerns about his sister and then later taken up by considerations ranging from Gina Dickens’ presence to that of the ponies. Jossie, he saw, had been putting some work into the paddock. The gate was relatively new, a number of the fence posts were new, and the barbed wire strung between them was new as well. The freshness of all this, however, comprised only one part of the paddock. The rest had yet to be seen to. Indeed, the rest was something of a ruin, with posts atilt and areas overgrown with weeds.

This gave him pause. It wasn’t, he knew, unusual for a commoner to make improvements upon his holding. This was generally necessary. It was, however, odd that someone like Jossie-characterised by the nearly compulsive care with which he did everything else-would have left a job such as this one unfinished. He went back inside the inclosure for a closer look.

Rob recalled Gina Dickens’ desire for a garden, and for a moment he wondered if she and Jossie had taken the unlikely decision to have that garden here. If Gordon intended to build another paddock somewhere else for ponies, it would explain why the thatcher had gone no further with his scheme to improve this one as a holding pen for stock. On the other hand, discontinuing this paddock’s use as a holding pen would mean moving the heavy granite trough to another location, a task requiring the sort of equipment Gordon didn’t possess.

Rob frowned at this. The trough suddenly seemed to him very much like the presence of the ponies: unnecessary. For hadn’t there been a trough here already? Within the paddock? Surely, there had.

He looked for it. It didn’t take long. He found the old trough in the unrestored section of the paddock, heavily overgrown with brambles, vines, and weeds. It stood some distance from the water source, which made the new trough not altogether unreasonable as it could be more easily reached by hosepipe. Still, it was strange that Gordon would go to the expense of a new trough without having uncovered the old one. He had to have suspected it was there.

It was a curiosity. Rob intended to have a word with Gordon Jossie about it.

He returned to his vehicle and murmured to the ponies moving restlessly within the trailer. He called to Frank, the dog came running, and they set off to the northernmost part of the Perambulation.

It took nearly an hour to get there, even keeping to the main roads. Rob was stymied in his progress by a train stopped on the railway tracks in Brockenhurst, blocking the crossing, and then again by a tour coach with a flat tyre that caused a tailback on the south side of Lyndhurst. When he finally got beyond it and into Lyndhurst itself, the restiveness of the animals in the trailer told him that taking them up to Minstead was a bad idea. As a result, he veered onto the Bournemouth Road and made for Bank. Beyond it and along a sheltered lane stood the tiny enclave of Gritnam, a circle of back-to-back gardenless cottages facing outward onto the lawns, the trees, and the streams that comprised the expanse of Gritnam Wood. The lane itself went no farther than Gritnam, so there was likely no safer place in the New Forest to release ponies that had too long been kept in Gordon Jossie’s paddock.

Rob parked in the middle of the lane that encircled the cottages, as the place was so tiny there was no other spot to leave a vehicle. There amid a silence broken only by the call of chaffinches and the trill of wrens, he eased the ponies out into freedom once more. Two children emerged from one of the cottages to watch him at work, but long schooled in the ways of the New Forest, they did not approach. Only when the ponies were making their way towards a stream that gleamed some distance into the trees did either child speak and then it was to say, “We got kittens here, if you want to see ’em. We got six. Mum says we’re meant to give ’em way.”

Rob went over to where the two children stood, barefoot and freckled in the summer heat. A boy and girl, each of them held a kitten in arms.

“Why’ve you got the ponies?” the boy asked. He seemed to be the elder of the two by several years. His sister watched him adoringly. She put Rob in mind of the way Jemima had once watched him. She put Rob in mind of how he’d failed her.

He was about to explain what he was doing with the ponies when his mobile rang. It was on the seat of his Land Rover, but he could hear it clearly.

He set off to take the call, heard the news all of the agisters dreaded hearing, and swore when he was given it. For the second time in a week, a New Forest pony had been hit by a motorist. Rob’s services were wanted in the manner in which he least wished to give them: The animal was going to have to be killed.

THE WORRY MEREDITH Powell felt had grown to full-blown anxiety by the morning. All of it had to do with Gina. They’d shared the double bed in Meredith’s bedroom, and Gina had asked in the darkness if Meredith didn’t mind holding her hand till she went to sleep. She’d said, “I know it’s ridiculous to ask but I think it might soothe me a bit…,” and Meredith had told her yes, of course, she didn’t even need to explain, and she’d covered Gina’s hand with her own and Gina’s hand had turned and clasped hers and there their hands had lain for hours upon hours on the mattress between them. Gina had fallen asleep quickly-which of course made perfect sense as the poor girl was exhausted by what she’d gone through at Gordon Jossie’s cottage-but her sleep was light and fitful and every time Meredith had tried to ease her hand away from Gina’s, Gina’s fingers tightened, she gave a small whimper, and Meredith’s heart had gone out to her again. So in the darkness, she’d thought about what to do about Gina’s situation. For Gina had to be protected from Gordon, and Meredith knew that she herself might be the only person willing to protect her.

Asking for police participation in the matter was out of the question. Chief Superintendent Whiting and his relationship with Gordon-whatever it was-put paid to that, and even if that were not the situation, the police weren’t about to deploy their resources upon the protection of a single individual based on the strength of her bruises. Truth was that cops wanted a lot more than a few bruises before they did anything. They generally wanted a court order, an injunction filed, charges made, and the like, and Meredith had a very good feeling that Gina Dickens was too frightened to apply herself to any of this anyway.

She could be urged to remain at Meredith’s house, but that could hardly go on indefinitely. While it was true that no one was more accommodating than Meredith’s own parents, it was also true that they were already sheltering Meredith and her daughter and anyway, since Meredith had impulsively come up with the gas leak tale to explain Gina’s presence, her mum and dad would assume the gas leak would be fixed within twenty-four hours.

That being the case, Gina would be expected to return to her bed-sit above the Mad Hatter Tea Rooms. This, of course, was the worst place for her because Gordon Jossie knew where to find her. So an alternative needed to be developed, and by morning Meredith had an idea what that alternative might be.

“Rob Hastings will protect you,” she told Gina over breakfast. “Once we tell him what Gordon did to you, he’ll certainly help. Rob’s never liked him. He’s got rooms in his house that no one’s using and he’ll offer one without our even asking.”

Gina hadn’t eaten much, merely picking at a bowl of grapefruit segments and taking one bite of a piece of dry toast. She was silent for a moment before she said, “You must have been a very good friend to Jemima, Meredith.”

That was hardly the case since she hadn’t been able to talk Jemima out of taking up with Gordon and look what had happened. Meredith was about to say this, but Gina went on.

She said, “I need to go back.”

“To your bed-sit? Bad idea. You can’t put yourself where he knows where to find you. He’ll never think you might be at Rob’s. It’s the safest place.”

But, surprisingly, Gina had said, “Not the bed-sit. I must go back to Gordon’s. I’ve had the night to sleep on it, and I’ve thought about what happened. I can see how I was the one to provoke-”

“No, no, no!” Meredith cried. For this was how abused women always acted. Given time to “think,” what they generally ended up thinking was that they were at fault, somehow provoking their men to do what they’d done to hurt them. They ended up telling themselves that if they’d only kept their mouths shut or acted compliant or said something different, fists would never have been swung in their direction.

Meredith had tried her best to explain this to Gina, but Gina had been obdurate. She’d said to Meredith in reply, “I know all that, Meredith. I’ve got my degree in sociology. But this is different.”

“That’s also what they always say!” Meredith had cut in.

“I know. Trust me. I do know. But you can’t think I’d let him hurt me again. And the truth is…” She looked away from Meredith, as if gathering the courage to admit the worst. “I do honestly love him.”

Meredith was aghast. Her face must have shown it because Gina went on to say, “I just can’t think, at the end of the day, that he hurt Jemima. He’s not that kind of man.”

“He went to London! He lied about going! He lied to you, to Scotland Yard as well. Why would he lie if he didn’t have a reason to be lying? And he lied to you from the very first about going there. He said it was Holland. He said it was to buy reeds. You told me that and you must see what it means.”

Gina let Meredith have her entire say in the matter before she herself drew the conversation to its conclusion. She said, “He knew I’d be upset if he told me he’d gone to see Jemima. He knew I’d be a bit unreasonable. Which is what I’ve been, which is certainly what I was last night. Look. You’ve been good to me. You’ve been the best friend I have in the New Forest. But I love him and I must see if there’s a chance he and I can make things work. He’s under terrible stress right now because of Jemima. He’s reacted badly, but I’ve not reacted well either. I can’t throw it all away because he did something that hurt me a bit.”

“He may have hurt you,” Meredith cried, “but he killed Jemima!”

Gina said firmly, “I don’t believe that.”

There was no more talking to her about the matter, Meredith discovered. There was only her intention to return to Gordon Jossie, to “give things another try” in the fashion of abused women everywhere. This was bad, but what was worse was that Meredith had no choice. She had to let her go.

Still, worry over Gina Dickens dominated most of her morning. She had no creative energy to apply to her work for Gerber & Hudson and when a phone call came into the office for her, she was happy enough to have to use her elevenses in a dash over to the office of Michele Daugherty, who’d made that call and said to her, “Got something for you. Have you time to meet?”

Meredith purchased a take-away orange juice and drank it on her route to the private investigator’s office. She’d nearly forgotten that she’d hired Michele Daugherty, so much having happened since she’d asked her to look into Gina Dickens.

The investigator was on the phone when she arrived. At long last Michele Daugherty called her into her office, where a reassuring stack of papers seemed to indicate she’d been hard at work on the brief that Meredith had given her.

The investigator wasted no time with social preliminaries. “There is no Gina Dickens,” she said. “Are you sure you’ve got the right name? The right spelling?”

At first, Meredith didn’t understand what the investigator meant, so she said, “This is someone I know, Ms. Daugherty. She’s not just a name I heard mentioned in a pub or something. She’s actually…rather…well, she’s rather a friend.”

Michele Daugherty didn’t question why Meredith was having a friend investigated. She merely said, “Be that as it may. There’s no Gina Dickens that I can find. There’re Dickenses aplenty but no one called Gina in her age range. Or in any other age range, if it comes down to it.”

She went on to explain that she’d tried every possible spelling and variation of the given name. Considering that Gina was likely a nickname or an abbreviated form of a longer name, she’d gone into her databases with Gina, Jean, Janine, Regina, Virginia, Georgina, Marjorina, Angelina, Jacquelina, Gianna, Eugenia, and Evangelina. She said, “I could go on like this indefinitely, but I expect you’d rather not pay for that. At the end of the day, when things go in this direction, I tell my clients it’s safe to say that there is no person by that name ’less she’s managed to slip through the system without having left a mark on it anywhere, which isn’t possible. She is a Brit, isn’t she? No doubt of that? Chance she might be a foreigner? Aussie? New Zealander? Canadian?”

“Of course she’s British. I spent last night with her, for heaven’s sake.” As if that meant anything, Meredith thought as soon as she said it. “She’s been living with a man called Gordon Jossie, but she has a bed-sit in Lyndhurst above the Mad Hatter Tea Rooms. Tell me how you searched. Tell me where you looked.”

“Where I always look. Where any investigator, including the police, would look. My dear, people leave records. They leave trails without knowing: birth, education, health, credit history, financial dealings throughout their lives, parking tickets, the ownership of anything that might have required financing or provided a guarantee or warranty and thus needed to be registered, magazine subscriptions, newspaper subscriptions, phone bills, water bills, electricity bills. One searches through all this.”

“What exactly are you saying, then?” Meredith was feeling quite numb.

“I’m saying that there is no Gina Dickens, full stop. It’s impossible not to leave a trail, no matter who you are or where you live. So if a person doesn’t leave a trail, it’s fairly safe to conclude she isn’t who she says she is. And there you have it.”

“So who is she?” Meredith considered the possibilities. “What is she?”

“I’ve no idea. But the facts suggest she’s someone very different from whoever it is she’s pretending to be.”

Meredith stared at the investigator. She didn’t want to understand, but the fact was that she was understanding all of it too terribly well. She said numbly, “Gordon Jossie, then. J-o-s-s-i-e.”

“What about Gordon Jossie?”

“Start on him.”

GORDON HAD TO return to his holding for a load of Turkish reeds. These had been held for inspection at the port for a maddening length of time, a circumstance that had considerably slowed his progress on the roof of the Royal Oak Pub. It seemed to Gordon that the terrorist attacks of recent years had resulted in all port authorities believing there were Muslim extremists hidden within every crate on every ship that docked in England. They were especially suspicious of items having their provenance in countries with which they were not personally familiar. That reeds actually grew in Turkey was a piece of information most port officials did not possess. So those reeds had to be examined at excruciating length, and if such examination ate up a week or two, there was not much he could do about it. It was yet another reason to try to get the reeds from the Netherlands, Gordon thought. At least Holland was a familiar place in the eyes of the hopeless blokes who were assigned the duty of inspecting that which was shipped into the country.

When he and Cliff Coward returned to his holding for the delivery of the reeds, he saw at once that Rob Hastings had made good on his word. The two ponies were gone from the paddock. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do about this, but then perhaps, he thought wearily, there was nothing to be done, things being the way they were at the moment.

This was something that Cliff had wanted to discuss. Seeing Gina’s car gone from the vicinity of Gordon’s house, Cliff asked about her. Not where she was but how she was, the same “How’s our Gina then,” that he asked nearly every day. Cliff had been quite taken with Gina from the first.

Gordon had told him the truth. “Gone,” was how he put it.

Cliff repeated the word dumbly, as if the term were slow to sink into his head. When it got to his brain, he said, “What? She’s left you?”

To which Gordon replied, “That’s how it works, Cliff.”

This prompted a lengthy discourse from Cliff on the subject of what kind of shelf life-as he put it-girls like Gina generally had. “You got six days or less to get her back, man,” Cliff informed him. “You think blokes’re going to let a girl like Gina walk round the streets without trying it on? Ring her up, say sorry, get her back. Say sorry even if you didn’t do nothing to make her leave. Say anything. Just do something.”

“Nothing to be done,” Gordon told him.

“You’re off your nut,” Cliff decided.

So when Gina actually showed up while they were loading reeds into the back of Gordon’s pickup, Cliff made himself scarce. From the elevated bed of the truck, he saw her red Mini Cooper coming along the lane, said, “Give you twenty minutes to sort this one, Gordon,” and then he was gone, heading in the direction of the barn.

Gordon walked towards the end of the driveway, so when Gina drove in, he was in the vicinity of the front garden. At heart, he knew that Cliff was right. She was the kind of woman blokes lined up to have the slightest chance of winning over, and he was a fool if he didn’t try to get her back.

She braked when she saw him. The car roof was down, and her hair was windblown from the drive. He wanted to touch it because he knew how it would feel, so soft against his hands.

He approached the car. “Can we talk?”

She was wearing her sunglasses against the brightness of another fine summer day, but she shoved them to the top of her head. Her eyes, he saw, were red rimmed. He was the one who’d brought this on, her crying. It was another burden, yet another failure to be the man he wanted to be.

“Please. Can we talk?” he repeated.

She looked at him warily. She pressed her lips together, and he could see her bite down on them. Not as if she wanted to keep herself from speaking but as if she feared what might happen if she did speak. He reached for the handle of the door, and she flinched slightly.

He said, “Oh, Gina.” He took a step back, in order to allow her to decide. When she opened the door, he felt he could breathe again. He said, “C’n we…? Let’s sit over here.”

“Over here” was the garden she’d made so lovely for them, with the table and chairs, the torches and the candles. “Over here” was where they’d had their suppers in the fine weather of the summer amid the flowers she’d planted and painstakingly watered. He walked to the table and waited for her. He watched her but said nothing. She had to make the decision on her own. He prayed she’d make the one that would give them a future.

She got out of the car. She glanced at his pickup, at the reeds he was loading into it, at the paddock beyond it. He saw her draw her eyebrows together. She said, “What’s happened to the horses?”

He said, “They’re gone.”

When she looked at him, her expression told him she thought he’d done this for her, because she was afraid of the animals. Part of him wanted to tell her the truth: that Rob Hastings had taken them because Gordon hadn’t the need-let alone the right-to hang on to them. But the other part of him saw how he could use the moment to win her and he wanted to win her. So he let her believe whatever she wanted to believe about the ponies’ removal.

She came to join him in the garden. They were separated from the lane by the hedge. They were also sequestered from Cliff Coward’s curious eyes by the cottage that stood between the front garden and the barn. They could speak here and not be heard or seen. This went some distance towards making Gordon easier although it seemed to have the opposite effect on Gina, who looked round, shivered as if with cold, and clasped her arms to her body.

“What’ve you done to yourself?” he asked her. For he saw deep bruises upon her arms, ugly marks that made him move towards her. “Gina, what’s happened?”

She looked down at her arms as if she’d forgotten. She said dully, “I hit myself.”

“What did you say?”

She said, “Have you never wanted to hurt yourself because nothing you do ever seems to come out right?”

“What? How did you-?”

“I pounded,” she said. “When it wasn’t enough, I used…” She’d not been looking at him, but now she did, and he saw her eyes were full.

“You used something to hurt yourself with? Gina…” He took a step towards her. She backed away. He felt struck. He said, “Why did you do this?”

A tear spilled over. She wiped it away with the back of her hand. “I’m so ashamed,” she said. “I did it.”

For a horrible moment he thought she meant that she’d killed Jemima, but she clarified with, “I took those tickets, that hotel receipt. I found them and I took them and I was the one who gave them to…I’m so sorry.”

She began to weep in earnest then, and he went to her. He drew her into his arms and she allowed this and because she allowed it, he felt his heart open to her as it had not ever opened to anyone, even to Jemima.

He said, “I shouldn’t have lied to you. I shouldn’t have said I was going to Holland. I should have told you from the first that I was seeing Jemima, but I thought I couldn’t.”

“Why?” She clenched her fist against his chest. “What did you think? Why don’t you trust me?”

“Everything I told you about seeing Jemima was true. I swear to God. I saw her, but she was alive when I left her. We didn’t part well, but we didn’t part in anger.”

“Then what?” Gina waited for his answer, and he struggled to give it, with his body, his soul, and his very life hanging in the balance of whatever words he chose. He swallowed and she said, “What on earth are you so afraid of, Gordon?”

He put his hands on either side of her lovely face. He said, “You’re only my second.” He bent to kiss her, and she allowed this. Her mouth opened to him and she accepted his tongue and her hands went to the back of his neck and held him to her so the kiss went on and on and on. He felt enflamed, and he-not she-was the one to break off. He was breathing so hard that he might have been running. “Only Jemima and you. No one else,” he said.

“Oh, Gordon,” she said.

“Come back to me. What you saw in me…that anger…the fear…”

“Shh,” she murmured. She touched his face with those fingers of hers, and where she touched he felt his skin take fire.

“You make it all disappear,” he said. “Come back. Gina. I swear.”

“I will.”