This Body of Death

Chapter Thirty

GORDON HADN’T PHONED THE SCOTLAND YARD DETECTIVE when Gina returned home on the previous night. He wanted instead to watch her. He had to learn exactly what she was doing here in Hampshire. He had to know what she knew.

He was rotten at acting, but that couldn’t be helped. She’d realised something was wrong the moment she’d come onto the property and found him sitting in the front garden at the table in the darkness. She was very late, and he was grateful for this. He let her think that the hour of her return was the reason for his silence and his observation of her.

She said she’d got caught up in things, but she was vague when it came to what those things were. She’d lost track of time, she said, and there she was in a meeting with a social worker from Winchester and another from Southampton, and there was a very, very good chance that from a special programme established for immigrant girls, funding could be diverted for the use of…On and on she chattered. Gordon wondered how he hadn’t seen earlier that words came far too easily to Gina.

They’d got through the rest of the evening and then to bed. She’d spooned against him closely in the darkness and her hips moved rhythmically against his bum. He was meant to turn and take her, and he did his part. They coupled in a furious silence meant to pose as wild desire. They were slick with sweat when the act was done.

She murmured, “Wonderful, darling,” and she cradled him as she fell into sleep. He remained awake, with despair rising in him. Which way to turn was his only concern.

In the morning she was wanton, as she’d been so often, her eyelids fluttering open, her long slow smile, her stretching of limbs, the dance of her body as she eased beneath the sheet to find him with her mouth.

He pulled himself away abruptly. He swung out of bed. He didn’t shower but dressed in what he’d worn on the previous day and went downstairs to the kitchen where he made himself coffee. She joined him there.

She hesitated at the doorway. He was at the table, beneath the shelf where Jemima had displayed a row of her childhood plastic ponies, a minor representation of one of her many collections of items she couldn’t bear to part with. He couldn’t remember where he’d put those plastic ponies now, and this concerned him. His memory didn’t generally give him any problems.

Gina cocked her head at him, and her expression was soft. “You’re worried about something. What’s happened?”

He shook his head. He wasn’t yet ready. Speaking wasn’t the difficult part for him. It was listening that he didn’t want to face.

“You didn’t sleep, did you?” she asked. “What’s wrong? Will you tell me? Is it that man again…?” She indicated the out-of-doors.

The driveway onto the property was just outside the kitchen window, so he assumed she was talking about Whiting and wondering if there’d been another visit from him while she’d been gone from home. There hadn’t, but Gordon knew there would be. Whiting had not yet got what he wanted.

Gina went to the fridge. She poured an orange juice. She was wearing a linen dressing gown, naked beneath it, and the morning sunlight made of her body a voluptuous silhouette. She was, he thought, a real man’s woman. She knew the power of the sensual. She knew that when it came to men, the sensual always overwhelmed the sensible.

She stood at the sink, looking out of the window. She said something about the morning. It was not yet hot, but it would be. Was it more difficult, she wanted to know, working with reeds when the day was so hot?

It didn’t seem to bother her when he didn’t reply. She bent forward as if something outside had caught her attention. Then she said, “I can help you with clearing the rest of the paddock now the horses are gone.”

Horses. He wondered for the first time at the word, at the fact that she called them horses instead of what they were, which was ponies. She’d called them horses from the first, and he hadn’t corrected her because…Why? he wondered. What had she represented to him that he hadn’t wondered about all the things that had told him from the first there was something wrong?

She continued. “I’m happy to do it. I could use the exercise and I’ve nothing on for today anyway. They think it’ll take a week or so for the money to come through, less if I’m lucky.”

“What money?”

“For the programme.” She turned to look at him. “Have you forgotten already? I told you last night. Gordon, what’s wrong?”

“D’you mean the west paddock?” he asked her.

She looked puzzled before she apparently twigged how his line of thought was zigzagging. “Helping you clear the rest of the west paddock?” she clarified. “Yes. I c’n work on that overgrown bit by the old section of fence. Like I said, the exercise would be-”

“Leave the paddock alone,” he said abruptly. “I want it left the way it is.”

She seemed taken aback. But she collected herself enough to curve her lips in a smile and say, “Darling, of course. I was only trying to-”

“That detective was here,” he told her. “That woman who came before with the black.”

“The Scotland Yard woman?” she asked. “I can’t remember her name.”

“Havers,” he said. He reached beneath a holder for paper napkins that stood on the table, and he brought out the card that DS Havers had given him.

“What did she want?” Gina asked.

“She wanted to talk about thatching tools. Crooks, especially. She was interested in crooks.”

“Whatever for?”

“I think she could be considering a new line of work.”

She touched her throat. “You’re joking, of course. Gordon, darling, what are you talking about? You don’t look at all well. Can I do something…?”

He waited for her to finish, but she didn’t. Her words drifted off and she was left gazing upon him, as if waiting for inspiration. He said, “You knew her, didn’t you?”

“I’ve never seen her before in my life. How would I know her?”

“I’m not talking about the detective,” he said. “I’m talking about Jemima.”

Her eyes widened. “Jemima? How on earth could I have known Jemima?”

“From London,” he said. “That’s why you call them horses, isn’t it? You’re not from round here. You’re not even from Winchester, and you’re not from the countryside. It’s to do with their size but you wouldn’t know that, would you? You knew her from London.”

“Gordon! This is rubbish. Did that detective tell you-”

“Showed me.”

“What? What?”

He told her then about the magazine spread, the society pictures and her own among them. At the National Portrait Gallery, he told her. There she was in the background at the gallery show where Jemima’s photo had been hung.

Her posture altered as her body stiffened. “That,” she said, “is absolute rubbish. The National Portrait Gallery? I was no more there than I was in Oz. And when was I supposed to have been there?”

“The night the show opened.”

“My God.” She shook her head, her eyes fixed on him. She placed her orange juice on the work top. The click made by the glass against the tiles sounded so sharp he expected the glass to shatter, but it did not. “And what else am I supposed to have done? Killed Jemima as well? Is that what you think?” She didn’t wait for a reply. She strode to the table and said, “Give me that card. What’s her name again? Where is she, Gordon?”

“Havers,” he said. “Sergeant Havers. I don’t know where she’s gone.”

She snatched the card from him and grabbed up the phone. She punched in the numbers. She waited for the call to go through. She said at last, “Is this Sergeant Havers?…Thank you…Please confirm that for Gordon Jossie, Sergeant.” She extended the phone to him. She said, “I’d like you to be sure I’ve phoned her, Gordon, and not someone else.”

He took the phone. He said, “Sergeant-”

Her unmistakable London working-class voice said, “Bloody hell. D’you know what time…? What’s going on? Is that Gina Dickens? You were s’posed to ring me when she came home, Mr. Jossie.”

Gordon handed the phone back to Gina, who said to him archly, “Satisfied, darling?” And then into the phone, “Sergeant Havers, where are you?…Sway? Thank you. Please wait for me there. I shall be half an hour, all right?…No, no. Please don’t. I’ll come to you. I want to see this magazine photo you’ve shown to Gordon…There’s a dining room in the hotel, isn’t there?…I’ll meet you there.”

She hung up the phone, then turned back to him. She looked at him the way one might view roadkill. She said, “It’s extraordinary to me.”

His lips felt dry. “What?”

“That it never occurred to you that it might only be someone who resembled me, Gordon. How completely pathetic you and I have become.”

AFTER A NIGHT in which Michele Daugherty’s paranoia had entirely robbed her of sleep, Meredith Powell had departed her parents’ house in Cadnam, leaving a note to tell her mother that she’d gone into Ringwood earlier than usual to deal with a massive pile of work. After the previous day’s lecture from Mr. Hudson, Meredith knew she couldn’t afford any sort of cock-up without putting her job in jeopardy, but she also knew there was no way she’d be able to apply herself creatively to graphic designs if she didn’t sort out the enigma that was Gina Dickens. So at five in the morning, she’d given up on the idea of sleep and she’d brought herself down to Gordon Jossie’s holding, where she’d found a suitable place to park her car in the rutted entrance to a farmer’s field a short distance down the lane. She reversed into this spot and settled down to gaze in the direction of Gordon’s cottage, itself hidden by the hedge at the edge of the property.

She spent a good deal of time trying to go over everything that Gina Dickens had said to her from the moment they’d met. She found, however, that there was simply so much information that it was difficult to keep everything straight. But that had likely been Gina’s intention from the first, she concluded. The more details Gina Dickens threw out, the more difficult it would prove for Meredith to sort through them all and get to the truth. She just hadn’t counted on Meredith hiring Michele Daugherty to do the sorting for her.

Because of the way things were developing, Meredith reckoned they were all in cahoots: Chief Superintendent Whiting, Gina Dickens, and Gordon Jossie. She wasn’t sure how the partnership among them worked, but she was certain at this point that each of them had played a part in what had happened to Jemima.

It was just after seven in the morning when Gina reversed her shiny red Mini Cooper into the lane. She headed in the general direction of Mount Pleasant and, beyond it, the Southampton Road. Meredith waited a moment and followed her. There weren’t so many lanes in the area that she was likely to lose her, and she didn’t want to risk being seen.

Gina drove casually, the sunlight glinting off her hair because, as before, the top was down on her Mini Cooper. She drove like someone out for a day in the countryside, with her right arm resting on the upper ledge of the door when it wasn’t raised to finger her wind-ruffled hair. She wound through Mount Pleasant’s narrow byways, taking care to honk as a warning to potential oncoming cars when she rounded a curve, and finally when she came to the Southampton Road, she turned in the direction of Lymington.

Had the hour been later, Meredith would have assumed Gina Dickens meant to do her shopping. Indeed, when she drifted across the roundabout and headed into Marsh Lane, Meredith briefly considered that Gina might actually be getting a very early start on things by parking somewhere near Lymington High Street and perhaps having a morning coffee at a café that she knew would be open. But in advance of the high street, Gina made another turn, which took her over the river, and for a moment that chilled her with its implication of flight, Meredith was certain Gina Dickens meant to catch the ferry that would take her to the Isle of Wight.

Here again Meredith was wrong albeit relieved. Gina went in the opposite direction when she reached the other side of the river, setting a course towards the north. In very short order she was on the straight towards Hatchet Pond.

Meredith dropped back to remain unseen. She worried she might lose Gina at the junction just beyond Hatchet Pond, and she peered ahead through the windscreen, grateful for the bright sun and the way in which it winked on the chrome bits of Gina’s car, allowing them to act as a guide.

As the pond loomed ahead, Meredith gave thought to the fact that Gina Dickens might be meeting someone there, much as she herself had met Gina a few days earlier. But here again, Gina kept going and Meredith saw her make the turn east towards Beaulieu’s Georgian redbrick cottages, but instead of driving into the village, Gina went northwest at the triangular junction above Hatchet Pond, and in less than two miles she turned into North Lane.

Yes! was Meredith’s thought. North Lane was an absolute treasure trove of meeting places. While it was true that Gina had taken a completely mad route to get to the area, what couldn’t be denied was that its woodlands and its inclosures provided the kind of seclusion that someone like Gina-who was bloody well up to something, Meredith reckoned-would require.

North Lane followed the Beaulieu River, which disappeared from sight, off to the left beneath the trees, and Meredith dropped back once again. She was familiar with this area as it ultimately brought one to the Marchwood Bypass, which was the route to her own home in Cadnam. And when Gina led her directly to this bypass instead of stopping anywhere at all along North Lane, Meredith’s first assumption was that the other woman had spotted her following and intended to drive to Meredith’s house, where she would park, get out of her car, and wait for Meredith to come sheepishly upon her.

But again she was wrong. Gina did indeed take them to Cadnam, but she made no stop there any more than she’d stopped anywhere else along the way. Instead she now headed south towards Lyndhurst, and while Meredith gave fleeting thought to the Mad Hatter Tea Rooms and Gina Dickens’ bed-sit, it made absolutely no sense to her that Gina would drive to Lyndhurst by this circuitous route.

Thus, Meredith could hardly call herself surprised when Gina cruised even farther south, kept up the pace through Brockenhurst, and finally dipped onto the road towards Sway. Sway, of course, was not her destination and Meredith had twigged this long before Gina made no turn towards that village. Instead, she ended up back at Gordon Jossie’s holding, where she had begun her wild ride, like Mr. Toad in his new motorcar, as if out for a morning cruise to waste petrol and time.

Meredith cursed: for being a fool, for putting her employment at risk, and for being seen, as she must have been seen for Gina to have driven so uselessly round the countryside. She also cursed Gina for being wily, more than a match for Meredith and likely more than a match for everyone else.

Still, she paused for a moment instead of admitting defeat and heading to Ringwood with a ready excuse to give to Mr. Hudson as to the lateness of her arrival.

She pulled back into the spot she’d earlier chosen to keep watch on Gordon Jossie’s house, and she thought about her own consideration of Gina’s lengthy drive round the New Forest. Wasting petrol and time, she’d concluded just a moment earlier, and she realised there was something to this simple conclusion and that something was the wasting of time. Killing time was the expression she wanted. If Gina Dickens hadn’t spotted Meredith, wasn’t it possible that killing time was what she had been doing?

As Meredith weighed this possibility and the reasons for it, the likeliest was the most obvious as well: She was killing time so that Gordon Jossie would leave the property for his own employment, allowing Gina to return.

This did actually seem to be the reason, Meredith saw, for from her place of hiding she heard the slam of the Mini Cooper’s door, followed by a second door slam coming from the cottage as Gina went inside. Meredith left the Polo then, and she sought a vantage point where roaming animals had munched a spy hole in the hedge along Gordon’s property. From here, Meredith could see both the cottage and the west paddock and, as she observed them, Gina emerged from the cottage again.

She’d changed her clothes. Where before she’d worn a summer sundress, now she’d donned jeans and a T-shirt, and she’d covered her blond head with a baseball cap. She strode over to the barn, disappeared within, and a few moments later came out trundling a wheelbarrow from which the handles of various tools stuck out. She wheeled this over to the west paddock. There she opened the gate and then went inside. Considering the wheelbarrow and the tools, Meredith first concluded that, now the ponies were gone, Gina intended to shovel up their manure and cart it off to a compost heap for future use. It seemed a mad sort of employment for someone like Gina, but at this point Meredith was beginning to reckon that pretty much anything was possible.

Gina, however, began gardening, of all bloody things. Not taking up or putting down manure, but rather clipping madly away on an overgrown area at the far side of the paddock, where Gordon Jossie had not made much progress in his rehabilitation of the fencing. Bracken, weeds, and brambles grew here. They formed a mound that Gina was attacking with some considerable vigour. Reluctantly, Meredith had to admire the energy that the young woman was putting into the activity. She herself could have lasted no more than five minutes given the strength and the fury of Gina’s progress. She clipped, she threw, she dug, she clipped. She threw, she dug. She clipped again. The casual nature of her drive round the countryside appeared to be cast aside. She was completely single-minded of purpose. Meredith wondered what the purpose was.

She had no time to dwell on possibilities, however. As she watched, a car pulled into the holding’s driveway, having come to Gordon Jossie’s property from the direction beyond where Meredith was standing. She waited to see what would happen next, and somehow she was not the least surprised when Chief Superintendent Whiting looked round for a moment as if for watchers just like Meredith, and then walked over and into the paddock to speak to Gina Dickens.

WHEN, AFTER A forty-minute wait, Gina Dickens had still not shown up at the Forest Heath Hotel in Sway, Barbara Havers reckoned that she was not coming. Sway was less than a ten-minute drive from Gordon Jossie’s holding, and it was inconceivable that Gina had somehow got lost between the two locations. Barbara rang Gordon Jossie’s mobile phone in an attempt to locate her, only to be told by Jossie that Gina had departed not fifteen minutes after phoning Barbara.

“She says it’s not her in that magazine picture,” he added.

Yeah right was Barbara’s mental reply. She rang off and shoved her mobile into her bag. There was always the unlikely possibility that Gina Dickens had run herself off the road somewhere along the route to Sway, so she thought a quick recce of the area wouldn’t be entirely amiss.

It took Barbara little enough time to accomplish this. The entire journey from Sway to Jossie’s holding required exactly two turns, and the most complicated part was making a quick jog when one came to Birchy Hill Road. This was hardly a complex manoeuvre. Nonetheless Barbara slowed to a crawl and peered round just in case there was a car upended into a hedge or catapulted into the sitting room of one of the nearby cottages.

There was nothing of the like, and nothing at all the entire way to Gordon Jossie’s property. When Barbara arrived, she found the place deserted. Jossie had gone off to work, she reckoned, and she’d caught him on a rooftop when she’d rung his mobile. As for Gina Dickens, who the hell knew where she’d taken herself off to? What was interesting, though, was what her disappearing act implied.

Barbara had a look round the property to make sure that Gina’s car was not hidden away somewhere, with Gina herself cowering behind the cottage curtains. Finding no other car but Jemima Hastings’ Figaro in its usual place, Barbara returned to her Mini. Burley, she thought, was her next stop.

Her mobile rang midway to the village, at a point where she’d pulled to the side of the road to have a look at her map in order to make sense of the myriad lanes she was finding herself in. She flipped it open, assuming that she was finally hearing from Gina Dickens-no doubt with a ready excuse as to how she managed to get lost on the way to Barbara’s hotel-but she found it was DI Lynley ringing her.

Superintendent Ardery, he informed her, was more or less on board with Barbara’s unauthorised trip to Hampshire, but Barbara needed to make it a quick one and she needed to bring back some sort of result.

“What’s that mean, exactly?” Barbara asked him. It was the more or less part she questioned.

“I assume it means she has a lot on her plate, and she’ll deal with you later.”

“Ah. That’s bloody reassuring,” Barbara said.

“She’s getting rather a lot of pressure from Hillier and from the Directorate of Public Affairs,” he told her. “It’s to do with Matsumoto. She’s come up with two e-fits, but I’m afraid they’re not much use, and the manner in which she got them turned out to be questionable, so Hillier’s had her on the carpet. He’s given her two days to bring the case to a close. If she doesn’t, she’s finished. There’s a chance she’s finished regardless, as well.”

“Lord. And she told the team this? That’ll bloody well inspire confidence among the foot soldiers, eh?”

There was a pause. “No. Actually, the team haven’t been told. I found out yesterday evening.”

“Hillier told you? Christ. Why? He wants you back on, leading the team?”

Another pause. “No. Isabelle told me.” Lynley went on quickly, saying something about John Stewart and a confrontation, but what Barbara had heard served to block her awareness of anything else. Isabelle told me.

Isabelle? she thought. Isabelle?

“When was this?” she finally asked him.

“At the briefing yesterday afternoon,” he said. “I’m afraid it was one of John’s typical-”

“I don’t mean her face-off with Stewart,” Barbara said. “I mean when did she tell you? Why did she tell you?”

“I did say yesterday evening.”

“Where?”

“Barbara, what does this have to do with anything? And, by the way, I’m telling you in confidence. I probably shouldn’t be telling you at all. I hope you can keep the information to yourself.”

She felt chilled at this, and she didn’t particularly want to consider what lay behind his remark. She said politely, “So why are you telling me, sir?”

“To bring you into the picture. So you understand the need…the need to…well, I suppose the best way to put it is the need to…to lasso information and bring it back as quickly as possible.”

At this, Barbara was utterly gobsmacked. She had no words with which to frame a reply. Hearing Lynley stumble round in such a manner…Lynley, of all people…Lynley who’d learned what he knew on the previous evening from Isabelle…Barbara didn’t want to venture another inch closer to the subject that she was inferring from his remarks, his tone, and his awkward language. She also didn’t want to think about why she didn’t want to venture into that subject.

She said briskly, “Well. Right. C’n you get those e-fits down to me? C’n you ask Dee Harriman to send them by fax? I expect the hotel has a machine and you c’n ask Dee to ring them for the number. Forest Heath Hotel. They’ve probably got a computer as well if e-mail’s better. D’you think there’s any chance that one of the e-fits could be a woman? Disguised as a man?”

Lynley seemed relieved at this change in direction. He matched her briskness when he said, “Truth to tell, I think anything’s possible. We’re relying on descriptions supplied by a man who’s drawn seven-foot-tall angels on the walls of his bed-sitting room.”

“Bloody hell,” Barbara murmured.

“Quite.”

She brought him up to date on Gordon Jossie, his crooks, and whether they matched up with the sort of crook that was used by the killer, his reaction to the photo of Gina Dickens, and the phone call she’d had from that same woman. She told him she was heading to Burley for another conversation with Rob Hastings as well. Crooks and blacksmithing would be among her topics, she said. What, she asked Lynley, was on for him?

Frazer Chaplin, he told her, and an earnest attempt at alibi breaking.

Didn’t he think that was akin to spitting in the wind? she enquired.

When in doubt, go back to the beginning, he replied. He said something about ending up in the beginning at the end of a journey and knowing the place for the first time, but she reckoned this was some sort of mad quote come into his mind so she said, “Yes. Well. Right. Whatever,” and rang off to go about her business. Going about her business, she decided, was the best balm for the disturbance she was feeling towards whatever business was going on with Lynley.

She found Rob Hastings at home. He was doing some kind of major cleaning of his Land Rover, for he seemed to have it stripped of everything it could be stripped of without removing its engine, tyres, steering wheel, and seats. What had been inside it now lay on the ground round the vehicle and he was sorting through it. He didn’t exactly keep a pin-neat Land Rover. From the amount of clobber, it looked to Barbara as if the bloke used it as a mobile home.

“Late spring cleaning?” she asked him.

“Something like.” His Weimaraner had come loping round the side of the house at the sound of Barbara’s Mini, and he told the dog to sit, which it did at once, although it panted and looked pleased to have a visitor on the property.

Barbara asked Hastings if he would show her his blacksmithing equipment, and logically Hastings asked her why. She thought about deflecting his question, but she decided his reaction to the truth might be more revealing. She said that the weapon used upon his sister had likely been handmade by a blacksmith, although she didn’t tell him what the weapon was.

At this, he didn’t move. His gaze fixed on her. He said, “D’you think I killed my own sister now?”

“We’re looking for someone with access to blacksmith’s equipment or to tools made by blacksmith’s equipment,” Barbara told him. “Everyone who fits the bill and knew Jemima is going to be examined. I can’t think you’d want it any other way.”

Hastings dropped his gaze. He admitted that he wouldn’t.

She could see, however, when he showed her the equipment, that it hadn’t been used in years. She knew little enough about the workings of a smithy, but everything he owned that was related to his training and time as a blacksmith suggested that neither he nor anyone else had interfered with so much as its placement since it had first been deposited in the outbuilding where he kept it now. Everything was shoved and piled together with no room to move among it. A heavy bench held most of the equipment: tongs, preens, chisels, forks, and punches. Wrought-iron bars lay disused to one side of this in a hotchpotch pile, and two anvils were upended against the front of the bench as well. There were several old tubs, three vices, and what looked like a grinder. There was, tellingly however, no forge. Even had this last not been the case, the unmolested dust upon everything bore not a mark of having been disturbed in ages. Barbara saw all this at once but still took her time with an examination of everything there. She finally nodded and thanked the agister. She said, “I’m sorry. It had to be done.”

“What was used to kill her, then?” Hastings sounded numb.

Barbara said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Hastings, but I can’t-”

“It was a thatching tool, wasn’t it?” he said. “It has to be. It was a thatching tool.”

“Why?”

“Because of him.” Hastings looked towards the broad doorway through which they’d entered the old building in which his equipment was stored. His face hardened.

Barbara said, “Mr. Hastings, Gordon Jossie’s not the only thatcher we’ve spoken to in the investigation. He has thatching equipment, indeed. No doubt. But so does a bloke called Ringo Heath.”

Hastings thought about this. “Heath trained Jossie.”

“Yes. We’ve spoken to him. My point is that every connection we make has to be tracked down and ticked off the list. Jossie’s not the only-”

“What about Whiting?” he asked. “What about that connection?”

“Between him and Jossie? We know there’s something, but that’s all at this point. We’re still working on it.”

“As well you might. It’s taken Whiting to Jossie’s holding to have more than one heart-to-heart with the bloke.” Hastings told Barbara about Jemima’s old friend and schoolmate Meredith Powell, about what Meredith Powell had revealed to him about Whiting’s trips to see Jossie. She had the information from Gina Dickens, he said, and he ended with, “And Jossie was in London on the day Jemima died. Or isn’t that one of the connections you’ve made? Gina Dickens found the rail tickets. She got her hands on the hotel receipt.”

Barbara felt her eyes widen, and her breath hissed in. “How long have you known this? You had my card. Why didn’t you ring me in London, Mr. Hastings? Or DS Nkata. You had his card as well. Either one of us-”

“Because Whiting said it was all in hand. He told Meredith the information had been sent up to London. To you lot. To New Scotland Yard.”

A DIRTY COP. She wasn’t surprised. Barbara had known from the first that something was off with Zachary Whiting, right from the moment he’d looked at those forged letters in praise of Gordon Jossie’s performance as a student at Winchester Technical College II. He’d slipped up there, with his remark about the apprenticeship, and now she and the good chief superintendent were going to have a little chat about it.

Praise God, she saw as she looked feverishly at her map of the New Forest. She had only to retrace her route from Honey Lane back through Burley village. From there it was a straight route to Lyndhurst. Possibly, she thought, the only bloody straight route in all of Hampshire.

She set off. Her mind was spinning. Gordon Jossie in London on the day of Jemima’s death. Zachary Whiting paying calls upon him. Ringo Heath in possession of thatching tools. Gina Dickens giving information to the chief superintendent. And now Meredith Powell, whom they’d have tracked down earlier had that bloody stupid Isabelle Ardery not ordered them precipitately back to London. Isabelle Ardery. Isabelle told me. Which took Barbara back to considering Lynley-that last place she wanted to be-so she forced herself again to Whiting.

Disguise. That was it. She’d been thinking that the baseball cap and sunglasses comprised the disguise because it seemed so obviously one. But what about the other? Dark clothes, dark hair. God, Whiting was bald as a newborn, but putting his mitts on a wig would have been child’s play for him, wouldn’t it?

Her mind tumbling from point to point, she paid scant attention to the road. There was a Y she hadn’t taken note of on the map, and she veered left when she came to it, at the Queen’s Head pub, on the edge of Burley village. She saw her error at once as the road began to narrow-she’d been meant to veer right-and she zipped into the broad car park behind the pub to turn round. She began to negotiate her way past the tour coaches, and that was when her mobile rang.

She excavated it and barked, “Havers,” when she finally got it open.

“Drinks tonight, luv?” a man’s voice asked her.

“What the bloody hell?”

“Drinks tonight, luv?” He sounded extremely intense.

“Drinks? Who the hell…? This is DS Barbara Havers. Who is this?”

“I realise that. Drinks tonight, luv?” He spoke as if through gritted teeth. “Drinks, drinks, drinks?”

At this, Barbara twigged. It was Norman Whatsisname from the Home Office, her own official snout, brought to her courtesy of Dorothea Harriman and her friend Stephanie Thompson-Smythe. He was giving her the code words and they were meant to meet at the Barclay’s cash-point machine in Victoria Street and he had something for her and-

“Bloody hell,” she said. “Norman. I’m in Hampshire. Tell me on the phone.”

“Can’t do, darling,” he said breezily. “Absolutely crushed with work at the moment. But drinks tonight would be the ticket. How about our regular watering hole? C’n I talk you into a gin and tonic? At the regular place?”

She thought frantically. She said, “Norman, listen. I c’n get someone there in…let’s say an hour? It’ll be a bloke. He’ll say gin and tonic, all right? That’s how you’ll know him. In an hour, Norman. At the cash-point machine in Victoria Street. Gin and tonic, Norman. Someone’ll be there.”

In the U.K. “detention at the pleasure of the reigning monarch”-a euphemism for imprisonment for life-is the only sentence that can be given to someone who is convicted of murder. But that is the law as it is applied to murderers over twenty-one years old. In the case of John Dresser, the killers were children. This, as well as the sensational nature of the crime, could not but have had an impact on Mr. Justice Anthony Cameron as he considered what recommendations he would make upon intoning the required sentence.

The climate that surrounded the trial was hostile, with an undercurrent of hysteria that could be seen most often in the reaction of those gathered outside the Royal Courts of Justice. Whereas within the courtroom, there was tension but no overt display of aggression towards the three boys, outside the courtroom, this was not the case. Initial displays of rage towards the three defendants-characterised first by the moblike gatherings at their homes and then by repeated attempts to attack the armed vans in which they daily traveled to and from their trial-segued into organised demonstrations and culminated in what became known as the Silent March for Justice, a noiseless gathering of an astonishing twenty thousand people who walked the distance from the Barriers to the Dawkins building site, where they were led in candlelit prayer and where they listened to Alan Dresser’s broken eulogy for his little boy. “John’s passing cannot go unmarked”-Alan Dresser’s words of conclusion-became the watchword for public sentiment.

One can only imagine how Justice Cameron wrestled with his decision regarding the recommendation he would make. It was not for nothing that he’d long been known as “Maximum Tony” for his propensity to let stand the maximum sentence at the conclusion of trials in his courtroom. But he’d never been faced with ten-and eleven-year-old criminals before, and he could not have been blind to all the ways in which the perpetrators of this horrible deed were themselves only children. His brief, however, demanded he consider only what would be appropriate for both retribution and deterrence. His recommendation was a custodial sentence of eight years, a punishment that, in the eyes of the public and the tabloid press, was deemed akin to walking away scot-free. Thus a series of heretofore unheard-of legal maneuvers were made. Within a week, the Lord Chief Justice reviewed the case and increased the sentence to ten years, but within six months the Dressers had amassed a petition of 500,000 signatures demanding that the killers be jailed for life.

This was a story that refused to die. The tabloids had seized hold of John Dresser’s parents and of John himself and had made his death a cause célèbre. Once the verdicts were handed down in the trial of his killers, their identities and photographs could be revealed to the public, as could salient details of his murder. The monstrous nature of his killing became a rallying point for those who deemed punishment the only appropriate response to such a crime. Thus the Home Secretary became involved, increasing the sentence once again to an incredible twenty years in order, he said, “To assure the public that their confidence in the judicial system is not misplaced, to allow them to see that crime will be punished, no matter the age of the perpetrator.” There the sentence remained until it went before the European Court in Luxembourg where it was successfully argued by the boys’ lawyers that their rights were being infringed by the fact that a politician-who would perforce be influenced by public opinion-was allowed to set the terms of their imprisonment.

When the boys’ prison term was reduced back to ten years, the tabloids flung themselves once again into the fray. Those who loathed the entire idea of European unification, seeing it as the root of all evils in the country, used the Luxembourg decision as an example of outside intrusion into the internal affairs of British society. What would come next? they pondered. Would it be Luxembourg forcing the euro upon us? What about a declaration that the Monarchy would have to be abolished? Those who supported unification saw the wisdom in making no comment at all. For any agreement with Luxembourg’s decision was a dangerous position to take, somehow implying that a mere decade was suitable punishment for the torture and death of an innocent baby.

No one could possibly envy the officials-elected or not-who had to make the decisions about the fate of Michael Spargo, Reggie Arnold, and Ian Barker. The nature of the crime has always suggested that the three boys were deeply disturbed, social victims themselves. There can be no doubt that their family circumstances were wretched, but there can also be no doubt that other children grow up in circumstances just as wretched or worse and they do not kill small children in reaction.

Perhaps the truth is that on their own as individuals the boys would not have committed an act of violence such as this one. Perhaps the truth is that it was a confluence of events that day that led to the abduction and the death of John Dresser.

As an enlightened society, surely we must admit that something at some level was wrong with Michael Spargo, Reggie Arnold, and Ian Barker, and equally as an enlightened society, surely we owed those three boys relief in the form of direct intervention long before the crime ever occurred or at the very least therapeutic assistance once they were taken from their homes and held for trial. Can we not say that in failing to provide either intervention or assistance we as a society failed Michael Spargo, Reggie Arnold, and Ian Barker just as surely as we failed to protect young John Dresser from their attack upon him?

It’s a simple matter to declare the boys evil, but even as we do so, we must keep in mind that at the time of the crime’s commission, they were children. And we must ask what purpose is served by putting children on public display for a criminal trial rather than by immediately providing them with the help they need.