This Body of Death

  “Did she give you his name?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “She said—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Me? Why?”

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

  “What? To accuse us? You? Me?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Chapter Fourteen

  “’COURSE HE WAS HERE,” HAD BEEN CLIFF COWARD’S CONFIRMATION of Gordon Jossie’s alibi. “Where else’s he s’posed to be, eh?” A short cocky little bloke wearing crusty blue jeans and a sweat-stained headband, he’d been leaning against the bar at his regular watering hole in the village of Winstead, a pint in front of him and an empty crisp bag balled up next to his fist. He played with this as they spoke. He gave few details. They were working on a pub roof near Frith and he expected he’d know well enough if Gordon Jossie hadn’t been there six days ago as it was only the two of them and someone was up on that scaffold grabbing the bundles of reeds as he’d hoisted them up. “’Spect that was Gordon,” he’d said with a grin. “Why? What’s he s’posed to’ve done? Mugged some old lady in Ringwood market square?”

  “It’s more a question of murder,” Barbara told him.

  Cliff’s face altered, but his story did not. Gordon Jossie had been with him, he said, and Gordon Jossie was no murderer. “I think I’d bloody well know,” he noted. “Been working for him over a year. Who’s he s’posed to have done?”

  “Jemima Hastings.”

  “Jemima? Not a chance.”

  They went from Winstead up to Itchen Abbas, bypassing Winchester on the motorway. On a small property between Itchen Abbas and the hamlet of Abbotstone, they found the master thatcher at whose side Gordon Jossie had worked years earlier to learn the trade. He was called Ringo Heath—“Don’t ask,” Heath said sourly. “It might have been John, Paul, or George and don’t I bloody well know it”—and when they arrived, he was seated on a battered be
nch, on the shady side of a brick house. He seemed to be whittling, as in one hand he had a wicked-looking knife with a sharp blade curving into a hook, and he was applying this to a thin switch, splitting it first and then sharpening both of its ends into arrow-tip points. At his feet lay a pile of switches yet to be seen to. In a wooden box next to him on the bench, he was placing those that had already been whittled. To Barbara, they looked like toothpicks for a giant, each of them perhaps a yard or more long. They also looked like potential weapons. As did the knife itself, which she learned was called a spar hook. And the toothpicks were the spars, which were used to make staples.

  Heath held one up, extended between his two palms. He bent it nearly double and then released it. It sprang back to its original straight line. “Pliable,” he told them although they hadn’t asked. “Hazel wood. You c’n use willow at a pinch, but hazel’s best.” It would be twisted into a staple, he told them, and the staple would be used to hold the reed in place once it was in position on the rooftop. “Gets buried in the reeds and eventually rots away, but that’s no matter. Reeds’re all compressed by then and that’s what you want: compression. Best rooftop money can buy, thatch is. It’s not all about chocolate-box houses and front gardens done up with pansies, is it?”

  “I expect not,” Barbara said cooperatively. “What d’you think, Winnie?”

  “Looks good to me, roof like that,” Nkata said. “Bit of a problem with fire, I’d ’spect.”

  “Bah, nonsense,” Heath said. “Old wives’ tale.”

  Barbara doubted it. But they weren’t there to talk about the flammable nature of reeds on rooftops. She stated their purpose: Gordon Jossie and his apprenticeship with Ringo Heath. They’d phoned Heath in advance to track him down. He’d said, “Scotland Yard? What’re you lot doing out here?” but otherwise he’d been cooperative.