This Body of Death

  “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 som
eone 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, a
s 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?”