This Body of Death

  He went from the cottage to the barn and swung open the doors. He strode inside to his sister’s car, saw that the key was in the old Figaro’s ignition, and tried to make something of this, but the only thing he could make of it didn’t amount to sense anyway: that Jemima had never gone to London but had been murdered here and buried on the property, which of course hadn’t happened at all. Then he saw that the ring attached to the ignition key held another, and assuming this was the key to the cottage, Robbie took it and hurried back to the door.

  What he intended to look for, he didn’t know. He only understood that he had to do something. So he opened drawers in the kitchen. He opened the fridge. He looked in the oven. He went from there to the sitting room and took the cushions off the sofa and the chairs. Finding nothing, he dashed up the stairs. Clothes cupboards were neat. Pockets were empty. Nothing languished under the beds. Towels in the bathroom were damp. A ring in the toilet bowl spoke of cleaning needing to be done, and although he wanted something to be hidden inside the cistern, there was nothing.

  Then Frank started barking outside. Then another dog began barking as well. This took Robbie to one of the windows where he saw two things simultaneously. One was that Gordon Jossie had come home in the company of his golden retriever. The other was that the ponies in the paddock were just that, still in the damn paddock when Rob would have sworn to God that they belonged out on the forest, so why the hell were they still here?

  The barking increased in frenzy, and Rob dashed down the stairs. Never mind that he was the one trespassing. There were questions to be asked.

  Frank sounded insane, as did the other dog. Rob saw as he burst out of the cottage that for some reason Jossie had stupidly opened the door of the Land Rover and had let Frank jump out and he himself was now bent into the vehicle and searching through it as if he didn’t bloody well already know who owned it.

  The Weimaraner was actually howling. It came to Rob that the animal was howling not at the other dog but at Jossie himself. This fueled Rob’s rage because if Frank howled it was because he’d been harmed, and no one was meant to lay a hand on his dog and certainly not Jossie who’d laid hands elsewhere and death was the result.

  The retriever was yelping now because Frank was howling. Two dogs from the property across the lane joined in and the resulting cacophony set the ponies in motion inside the paddock. They began to trot back and forth along the line of the fence, tossing their heads, neighing.

  “What the hell’re you doing?” Robbie demanded.

  Jossie swung round from the Land Rover and asked a variation of the same question and with far more reason, as the door to the cottage stood wide open and it was only too clear what Rob had been up to. Rob shouted at Frank to be quiet, which only set the dog into a complete paroxysm of barking. He ordered the Weimaraner back into the vehicle, but instead Frank approached Jossie as if he intended to go for the thatcher’s throat. Jossie said, “Tess. That’ll do,” and his own animal ceased barking at once, and this made Rob think of power and control and how a need for power and control could be at the heart of what had happened to Jemima and then he thought of the railway tickets, of the hotel receipt, of Jossie’s trip to London, of his lies, and he strode over to the thatcher and heaved him against the side of the Land Rover.

  He said through his teeth, “London, you bastard.”

  “What the hell …” Gordon Jossie cried.

  “She didn’t leave you because she had someone else,” Robbie said. “She wanted to marry you, although God knows why.” He pressed Jossie back, had his arm across the thatcher’s throat before Jossie could defend himself. With his other hand, he knocked the man’s sunglasses to the ground because he damn well intended to see his eyes for once. Jossie’s hat went with them, a baseball cap that left a line across his forehead like the mark put on Cain. “But you didn’t want that, did you?” Rob demanded. “You didn’t want her. First you used her, then you drove her away, and then you went after her.”

  Jossie pushed Rob away. He was breathing hard, and he was, Rob found, far stronger than he looked. He said, “What’re you talking about? Used her for what, for the love of God?”

  “I can even see how it worked, you bastard.” It seemed so obvious now that Rob wondered he hadn’t seen it before. “You wanted this place—this holding, didn’t you?—and you reckoned I could help you get it, because it’s part of my area, and land with common rights isn’t easy to come by. And I’d want to help because of Jemima, eh? It’s all fitting now.”

  “You’re round the bend,” Jossie said. “Get the hell out of here.” Rob didn’t move. Jossie said, “If you don’t get off this property, I’ll—”

  “What? Call the cops? I don’t think so. You were in London, Jossie, and they know it now.”

  That stopped him cold. He was dead in whatever tracks he thought he was about to make. He said nothing, but Robbie could tell he was thinking like mad.

  The upper hand his, Rob decided to play it. “You were in London the very day she was murdered. They’ve got your rail tickets. How d’you like that? They’ve got the receipt from the hotel and I expect your name’s on it large as life, eh? So how long d’you expect it’ll be before they come after you for a little chat? An hour? More? An afternoon? A day?”

  If Jossie had been considering lying at this point, his face betrayed him. As did his body, which went limp, all fight gone because he knew he was done for. He bent, picked up his sunglasses, rubbed them against the front of his T-shirt, which was marked by sweat and stained from work. He returned the glasses to his face, seeming to hide his wary eyes, but it didn’t matter now because Rob had seen in them everything he wanted to see.

  “Yes,” Robbie said. “Endgame, Gordon. And don’t think you can run because I’ll follow you to hell if I have to and I’ll bring you back.”

  Jossie reached for his cap next, and he slapped it against his jeans, although he didn’t put it back on. He’d removed his windcheater and left it in a lump on the Land Rover’s seat. He grabbed it up in the same lump and said, “All right, Rob.” His voice was quiet and Rob saw that his lips had gone the colour of putty. “All right,” he said again.

  “Meaning what exactly?”

  “You know.”

  “You were there.”

  “If I was, whatever I say won’t make a difference.”

  “You’ve lied about Jemima from the first.”

  “I’ve not—”

  “She wasn’t running to someone in London. She didn’t leave you for that. She had no one else, in London or anywhere. There was only you, and you were who she wanted. But you didn’t want her: commitment, marriage, whatever. So you drove her away.”

  Jossie looked towards the ponies in the paddock. He said, “That’s not how it was.”

  “Are you denying you were there, man? Cops check the CCTV films from the railway station—in Sway, in London—and you’ll not be on them the day she died? They take your photo to that hotel and no one’ll remember you were there for a night?”

  “I had no reason to kill Jemima.” Gordon licked his lips. He glanced over his shoulder, back towards the lane, as if seeking someone coming to rescue him from this confrontation. “Why the hell would I want her dead?”

  “She’d met someone new once she got to London. She told me as much. And then it was dog in the manger for you, wasn’t it. You didn’t want her but, by God, no one else was going to have her.”

  “I’d no idea she had anyone else. I still don’t know that. How was I to know?”

  “Because you tracked her. You found her, and you talked to her. She would have told you.”

  “And if that’s what happened, why would I care? I had someone else as well. I have someone else. I didn’t kill her. I swear to God—”

  “You don’t deny being there. There in London.”

  “I wanted to talk to her, Rob. I’d been trying to find her for months. Then I got a phone call …Some bloke had seen the cards I’d put up. He left
a message saying where Jemima was. Just where she worked, in Covent Garden. I phoned there—a cigar shop—but she wouldn’t talk to me. Then she rang me a few days later and said yes, all right, she was willing to meet me. Not where she worked, she said, but at that place.”

  At the cemetery, Rob thought. But what Jossie was saying didn’t make sense. Jemima had someone new. Jossie had someone new. What had they to talk about?

  Rob walked to the paddock, where the ponies had gone back to grazing. He stood at the fence and looked at them. They were too sleek, too well fed. Gordon was doing them no service by keeping them here. They were meant to forage all year long; they were part of a herd. Rob opened the gate and went into the paddock.

  “What are you doing?” Jossie demanded.

  “My job.” Behind him, Rob heard the thatcher follow him into the paddock. “Why’re they here?” he asked him. “They’re meant to be on the forest with the others.”

  “They were lame.”

  Rob went closer to the ponies. He shushed them gently as, behind him, Jossie closed the paddock gate. It didn’t take any longer than a moment for Rob to see that the ponies were perfectly fine, and he could feel their restless need to be out of there and with the others in the herd.

  He said, “They’re not lame now. So why’ve you not—” And then he saw something far more curious than the oddity of healthy ponies locked up in a paddock in July. He saw the way their tails were clipped. Despite the growth of hair since the last autumn drift when the ponies had been marked, the pattern of the clipping on these ponies’ tails was still quite readable and what that pattern said was that neither one of the animals belonged in this particular area of the New Forest at all. Indeed, the ponies were branded as well, and the brand identified them as coming from the north part of the Perambulation, near Minstead, from a holding located next to Boldre Gardens.

  He said, unnecessarily, “These ponies aren’t yours. What the hell are you up to?”

  Jossie said nothing.

  Robbie waited. They had a moment of stalemate. It came to Rob that further conversation or argument with the thatcher was going to be pointless. It also came to him that it didn’t matter. The cops were on to him now.

  He said, “Right then. Whatever you want. I’ll come tomorrow with a trailer to fetch them. They need to go back where they belong. And you need to keep your hands off other people’s livestock.”

  AT FIRST GORDON tried to believe Robbie Hastings had been bluffing, because to believe anything else would mean one of two things. Either he himself had blindly misplaced trust yet another mad time in his life or someone had broken into his house, found damning evidence that he had not even known would be damning, and taken it away to bide his time or her time and to present it to the cops when it could do the most damage to him.

  Of the two possibilities, he preferred the second one because although it would mean the end was near, at least it would not mean he’d been betrayed by someone he trusted. If, on the other hand, it was the first one, he believed he might not recover from the blow.

  Yet he knew it was far more likely that Gina had found the railway tickets and the hotel receipt than it was that Meredith Powell or someone with equal antipathy for him had entered his house, gone through the rubbish, and pocketed those materials without his knowledge. So when Gina returned home, he was waiting for her.

  He heard her car first. It was odd because she cut the engine as she came into the driveway, and she coasted to a stop behind his pickup. When she got out, she closed the door so quietly that he couldn’t even hear the click of it. Nor could he hear her footsteps on the gravel or the sound of the back door opening.

  She didn’t call his name as she usually did. Instead, she came up the stairs and into the bedroom and she gave a start when she saw him by the window, the sun behind him and the rest of him, he knew, just a silhouette to her. But she made a quick recovery. She said, “Here you are,” and she smiled as if nothing was wrong, and for that single moment how he wanted to believe that she had not given him up to the police.

  He said nothing as he tried to gather his wits together. She brushed an errant lock of hair from her cheek. She said his name, and when he didn’t reply, she took a step towards him and said, “Is something wrong, Gordon?”

  Something. Everything. Had there been a moment when he’d thought that things could ever be right? And why had he thought that? A woman’s smile, perhaps, the touch of a hand that was soft and smooth against his skin, his hands on the fullness of hips or buttocks, his mouth on the sweetness of breasts …Had he been so much of a fool that the mere act of having a woman somehow could obliterate all that had gone before?

  He wondered what Gina knew at this point. The fact that she was here suggested it was little enough, but the fact that she had possibly—probably—found the rail tickets, found the hotel’s receipt, keeping them close to her until she could use them to harm him …And why had he not thrown them away on the platform in Sway upon his return? That was the real question. Had he only thought to do so, he and this woman would not be standing here in this bedroom, in the insufferable summer heat, facing each other with the sin of betrayal in both of their hearts, not only in hers, because he could not claim she was the only sinner.

  He hadn’t thrown the tickets away on the station platform and he hadn’t rid himself of the receipt because he hadn’t considered that something might happen to Jemima, that his possession of those bits of paper might damn him, that Gina might find them and keep them and say nothing about his lie to her of having gone to Holland, allowing him to dig himself in deeper and deeper and still not saying a word about what she knew about where he had really been, which was not in Holland, not on a farm talking to someone about reeds, not out of the country at all but rather in the heart of a London cemetery trying to wrest from Jemima’s possession those things she could use to destroy him if she chose.

  Gina said, “Gordon, why’re you not answering me? Why’re you looking at me like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you’re …” She brushed at her hair again, although this time none of it was out of place. Her lips curved but her smile faltered. “Why won’t you answer? Why’re you staring? Is something wrong?”

  “I went to talk to her, Gina,” he said. “That’s all I did.”

  She furrowed her brow. “Who?”

  “I needed to talk to her. She agreed to meet me. I didn’t tell you only because there was no reason to tell you. It was over between us, but she had something of mine that I wanted back.”

  She said, the realisation apparently coming to her, “You saw Jemima? When?”

  He said, “Don’t pretend you haven’t sussed that. Rob Hastings was here.”

  She said, “Gordon, I don’t see how …Rob Hastings?” She gave a small laugh but it held no humour. “You know, you’re actually frightening me. You sound …I don’t know …fierce? Did Rob Hastings say something to you about me? Did he do something? Did you argue with him?”

  “He told me about the rail tickets and the hotel receipt.”

  “What rail tickets? What hotel receipt?”

  “The ones you found. The ones you handed over.”

  Her hand rose. She placed the tips of her fingers between her breasts. She said, “Gordon, honestly. You’re …What are you talking about? Did Rob Hastings claim that I gave him something? Something of yours?”

  “The cops,” he said.

  “What about them?”

  “You gave the rail tickets and that hotel receipt to the cops. But if you’d asked me about them instead, I would have told you the truth. I didn’t before this because I didn’t want you to worry. I didn’t want you to think there might still be something between us, because there wasn’t.”

  Gina’s eyes—wide, blue, more beautiful than the northern sky—observed him as her head slowly tilted to one side. She said, “What on earth are you talking about? What tickets? What receipts? What did Rob Hastings claim I did?”
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  He’d claimed nothing, of course. Gordon had merely concluded. And he’d done that because it seemed to him that, unless someone had surreptitiously gone through his rubbish, no one else could have come across those items save Gina. He said, “Rob told me the cops in Lyndhurst have what proves I was in London that day. The day she died.”

  “But you weren’t.” Gina’s voice sounded perfectly reasonable. “You were in Holland. You went about the reeds because those from Turkey are becoming rubbish. You didn’t keep the tickets to Holland, so you had to say you were working that day. And Cliff told the police—that man and woman from Scotland Yard—that you were working because you knew they’d think you were lying if you didn’t produce those tickets. And that’s what happened.”

  “No. What happened is I went to London. What happened is that I met Jemima in the place she died. On the day she died.”

  “Don’t say that!”

  “It’s the truth. But when I left her, she was alive. She was sitting on a stone bench at the edge of a clearing where there’s an old chapel and she was alive. I’d not got from her what I wanted to get, but I didn’t hurt her. I came home the next day so you’d think I’d gone to Holland, and I threw those tickets in the rubbish bin. That’s where you found them.”

  “No,” she said. “Absolutely not. And if I had found them and been confused by them, I would’ve talked to you. I would’ve asked you why you lied to me. You know that, Gordon.”

  “So how do the cops—”

  “Rob Hastings told you they have the tickets?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Then Rob Hastings is lying. He wants you to be blamed. He wants you to …I don’t know …to do something crazy so the police will think…Good heavens, Gordon, he could’ve gone through the rubbish himself, found those tickets, and handed them over to the police. Or he could be holding on to them, just waiting for the moment to use them against you. Or if not him, then someone else with equal dislike for you. But why would I do anything with any tickets other than simply talk to you about them? Have I the slightest reason to do something that might cause you trouble? Look at me. Have I?”