He couldn’t say he loved Gina. He knew he ought to love her, as she was certainly worthy of any man’s love. When they’d first gone into the hotel in Sway for a drink on the afternoon he’d seen her up in the woods, more than one bloke had looked her over and looked at him and he knew what each of them was thinking because one thought such things about Gina Dickens, one couldn’t help it and still be a human male. Gina didn’t seem to mind. She looked at him frankly, in a way that said, It’s yours if you want it, when you’re ready. And when he’d decided that by God he was ready because he couldn’t live as he’d been living with Jemima gone, he’d accepted her offer and now here she was and he didn’t regret his decision in the least.
She bathed him now. And all the rest. And if he took her forcefully instead of allowing himself to be taken by her, that was fine with Gina. She gave a breathless laugh as he moved her roughly onto her back and her legs spread and then went round him. He found her mouth and it opened to him like the rest of her and he wondered how he’d got lucky just this once and what he would have to pay for his good fortune.
Afterwards, they both were soaking. They separated and laughed at the sucking sound that came from damp skin disengaging from other damp skin. They showered together and she washed his hair and when he became aroused again, she said, “Good lord, Gordon,” with a breathless laugh and she dealt with it—with him—again. He said, “Enough,” but she said, “Not enough,” and she proved it to him. His knees went weak.
He said, “Where’d you learn this, woman?” and she said, “Did Jemima not like sex?”
He said, “Not like this,” and by that he meant wanton. For Jemima it had been reassurance. Love me, don’t leave me. But she had done the leaving.
It was nearly eight when they went down to the kitchen for breakfast. Gina talked to him about her desire for a garden. He didn’t want a garden with all the unnecessary disruption it would bring to his life, not to mention the laying of walks, the arranging of borders, the digging, the planting, the building of sheds or greenhouses or conservatories or whatever. He didn’t want any of it. He hadn’t told her as much because he liked the look of her as she went on about what a garden would mean to her, to them, and to “her girls” as she called them. But then she also brought up Rob Hastings and what he had told her about the land.
Gordon confirmed this, but that was all he intended to say about Rob. The agister had tracked him down to the Royal Oak pub much as Meredith Powell had done, and just as when Meredith had shown her face, Gordon had told Cliff to take a break so that whatever Rob Hastings had to say could be said out of earshot of anyone. To make sure this was the case, they’d walked up the lane to Eyeworth Pond, which wasn’t so much a pond as it was a damming of a long-ago stream upon which ducks now floated placidly and on whose banks willows crowded one upon the other and draped leafy branches into the water. There was a small two-tiered car park nearby, and a path beyond it led into the wood, where the ground was thick with decades of beech and chestnut leaves.
They walked to the edge of the pond. Gordon lit a cigarette and waited. Whatever Rob Hastings had to say, it would be about Jemima, and he had nothing to tell him about Jemima beyond that which Rob obviously already knew.
“She left because of her,” Rob said, “didn’t she? The one at your house. That’s how it was, eh?”
“I see you’ve been talking to Meredith.” Gordon felt weary with the fuss.
“But Jemima wouldn’t want me to know about that,” Rob Hastings said, following the line of conversation that he’d established. “She wouldn’t want me to know about Gina, owing to the shame of it all.”
Despite himself and his reluctance to discuss Jemima, Gordon found this an interesting theory, wrong as it was. He said, “How’d you reckon, then, Rob?”
“Like this. She must have seen the two of you. You’d’ve been in Ringwood, maybe, or even Winchester or Southampton if she’d gone for supplies for the Cupcake Queen like she did on occasion. She’d’ve seen something that told her what was going on between the two of you, and she’d’ve left you because of it. But she couldn’t bring herself to tell me because of her pride and the shame of it all.”
“What shame?”
“Being cheated on. She’d be ’shamed of that, knowing I’d warned her from the first something wasn’t right about you.”
Gordon flicked ash from his cigarette onto the ground and twisted the toe of his boot upon it. “Never much liked me, then. You hid it well.”
“I would do, after she took up with you anyways, wouldn’t I. I wanted her to be happy and if you were the person making her happy, who was I to make it clear I smelled something bad?”
“What would that something be?”
“You tell me.”
Gordon shook his head, signaling not negation but the fact that it was hopeless to attempt to explain himself since Robbie Hastings would be unlikely to believe whatever he said. He sought to elucidate this with, “When a bloke like you—like any bloke, really—doesn’t like someone, anything looks like a reason for it, Rob. You know what I mean?”
“Truth is, I don’t.”
“Well, I can’t help you. Jemima left me, full stop. If anyone had someone else on the side, I’d reckon it’d be Jemima ’cause it wasn’t me.”
“Who’d you have before her, then, Gor?”
“No one,” Gordon said. “Ever, actually.”
“Come on, man. You’re …what?” Rob appeared to think it over. “Thirty-one years old and you’ll have me think you’d not had a woman before you had my sister?”
“That’s exactly what I’d have you think because it’s the truth.”
“That you were a virgin. That you come to her a blank slate where no other ladies’ names’ve been written, eh?”
“That’s it, Rob.”
Robbie, Gordon could tell, didn’t believe a word of it. “You queer, then, Gor?” he asked. “You a fallen Catholic priest or something?”
Gordon glanced at him. “You sure you want to go this way, Rob?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, I think you know.”
Rob’s face flamed.
“See, she speculated about you now and again,” Gordon said. “Well, she would do, wouldn’t she? All things considered, it’s a bit unusual. Bloke your age. Forty-something, eh?”
“Don’t make this about me.”
“Nor about me,” Gordon said. Any conversation along these lines would, he knew, proceed in circles, so he ended it there. What he had to tell Robbie Hastings was what Robbie Hastings had doubtless already heard from Meredith Powell, even from Jemima herself. But he found out quickly enough that that was not going to satisfy Jemima’s brother.
“She left because she didn’t want to be with me any longer,” Gordon said. “That’s it and that’s an end to the matter. She was in a hurry because that’s what she always was and you damn well know that. She made up her mind in an instant and then she acted. If she was hungry, she ate. If she was thirsty, she drank. If she decided she wanted a different sort of bloke, no one was going to talk her out of it. That’s it.”
“In a nutshell, Gor?”
“That’s how it is.”
“Happens I don’t believe you,” Rob said.
“Happens I can’t do anything about it.”
But when Robbie left him back at the Royal Oak, to which they’d returned in a silence broken only by the sound of their footfalls on the stony verge and the crying of skylarks on the heath, Gordon found he wanted to make him believe because anything else meant exactly what happened the next morning while he and Gina were saying their good-byes for the day outside on the driveway by Gordon’s pickup.
An Austin pulled directly behind the old Toyota. Out stepped a bloke in bottle-thick spectacles with clip-on sunglasses covering them. He had on a tie but he’d loosened it to hang from his neck. He took off the clip-on sunglasses, as if this would allow him to see Gordon and Gina better. He nodded
knowingly and said, “Ah.”
Gordon heard Gina say his name in a questioning murmur, and he said to her, “Wait here.” He’d got the door of the pickup open, but he pushed it shut and walked over to the Austin.
“Morning, Gordon,” the bloke said. “It’s going to be dead hot again, isn’t it?”
“It is that,” Gordon replied. He said nothing more because he reckoned things about the visitor would be made clear for him soon enough.
And so they were. The man said affably, “We need to have a chat, you and me.”
MEREDITH POWELL HAD phoned in ill to her place of employment, going so far as to plug her nose in order to simulate a summer cold. She didn’t like doing this and she certainly didn’t like the example it set for Cammie, who watched her with wide-eyed curiosity from the kitchen table where she’d been spooning Cheerios into her mouth. But there’d seemed to be no alternative.
Meredith had paid a call at the police station the prior afternoon and had got exactly nowhere. The conversation had gone a route that had ended with her feeling a perfect fool. What did she have to report that equated to grave suspicions and doubts? Her friend Jemima’s car in a barn on the property where she’d lived with her partner for some two years, Jemima’s clothes boxed up in the attic, Jemima with a new mobile phone to prevent Gordon Jossie from tracking her down, and the Cupcake Queen deserted in Ringwood. None of this is like Jemima, don’t you see? had hardly impressed the plod she’d spoken to at the Brockenhurst station, where she’d stopped and asked to see someone “on a matter of extreme urgency.” She’d been given to a sergeant whose name she didn’t recall and didn’t want to recall, and at the end of her tale he’d enquired rather pointedly that couldn’t it be, madam, that these people were merely going about their daily lives without reporting their movements to her because this was none of her business? Of course, she’d prompted this remark herself by admitting to the sergeant that Robbie Hastings had spoken to his sister regularly since her removal to London. But still, there had been no reason for the sergeant to look upon her as if she’d been something unsavoury that he’d found on the sole of his shoe. She wasn’t a busybody. She was a concerned citizen. And wasn’t a concerned citizen—a taxpayer, mind you—supposed to let the police know when something was off? Nothing sounds off to me, the sergeant had said. One woman leaves and this bloke Jossie finds another. How’s that measure up to fishy, eh? Way of the world, you ask me. And to her declaration of for God’s sake, he’d told her to take her troubles to the main station in Lyndhurst if she didn’t like what she was getting from him.
Well, she wasn’t about to put herself through that, Meredith decided. She’d phone the main station but that was all. Then she would take matters into her own hands. She knew that something was going on out there and she had a fairly good idea where to begin digging to find it.
To do this, she needed Lexie Streener. So she made her phone call to the graphic-design firm where she herself was employed, talked about a rotten summer cold that she didn’t want to pass on to the other employees, and after offering a few artificial sneezes so that Cammie would not suffer damage from this brief exposure to her mother’s prevarication, she set out to fetch Lexie Streener.
Lexie hadn’t needed the slightest persuading to take a day off from the hair salon, where her future as the Nicky Clarke of Ringwood wasn’t exactly arriving on the wings of Mercury. Her dad was off selling coffee, tea, biscuits, and such from his caravan in a lay-by on the A336, and her mum was slipping tracts on the fourth beatitude under the windscreen wipers of cars waiting for the Isle of Wight ferries on Lymington Pier where, she reckoned, she had a captive audience who needed to hear about what constituted righteousness in the current world situation. Neither of them would have any way of knowing that Lexie had done a runner from work—not that it mattered much to them anyway, Lexie groused—so it was no big deal for her to ring Jean Michel’s hair salon, groan her way through an excuse of sicking up all night long after a bad beef burger, and then ring off with a “lemme get meself sorted” to Meredith.
Getting sorted consisted of decking herself out in platform shoes, lace tights, a very short skirt—she definitely wouldn’t want to be bending over, Meredith thought—and a blouse whose empire waist suggested Jane Austen films or maternity wear. This last bit was a nice touch, indicating that Lexie had somehow worked out Meredith’s intentions.
These were devious but not illegal. Lexie was to play the role of a girl in dire need of serious mentoring, one whose elder sister—that would be Meredith—had heard of a programme being run by a very nice young woman recently down from Winchester. I can’t do a bloody thing with her and I’m that worried she’ll go off the rails if we don’t take steps was the general line Meredith planned to take. And she planned to take that line first at Brockenhurst College where girls just Lexie’s age took themselves after leaving the comprehensive, in the hope of learning something there that would lead to future employment rather than to the dole.
The college was just beyond the Snake Catcher pub, on the Lyndhurst Road. Lexie’s role called for her to smoke and sulk and generally act uncooperative, at risk for everything from pregnancy to STDs to rampant heroin addiction. Although Meredith would never have mentioned it to the girl, the fact that her short-sleeved blouse revealed several cutting scars on her arms lent credence to the story they were concocting.
She managed to find a shady spot to leave the car, and together she and Lexie made their way across the baking tarmac to the administrative offices. There they spoke to a harried secretary who was trying to meet the needs of a group of foreign students with limited English. She said to Meredith, “You want what?” And then, “You need to speak with Monica Patterson-Hughes in Nursing,” which suggested that she didn’t quite understand what Meredith was driving at with regard to her “younger sister’s situation.” But Monica Patterson-Hughes being better than no one, she and Lexie went in search of such a person. They found her demonstrating nappy changing to a group of adolescent girls who had the distinctly attentive look of future nannies. They were quite intent upon a worn-looking Cabbage Patch doll that was being used for the demonstration. Evidently, anatomically correct artificial infants were beyond the limited funding of the organisation.
“We use actual infants in part two of the course,” Monica Patterson-Hughes informed Meredith upon stepping aside to let the future nannies loose upon the Cabbage Patch doll. “And we’re encouraging the use of cloth nappies again. It’s all about bringing up baby green.” She looked at Lexie. “Are you wanting to enrol, my dear? It’s quite a popular course. We have girls placed all over Hampshire once they finish up. You’d have to rethink your appearance—the hair’s just a bit over the top—but with guidance as to dressing and grooming, you could go far. If you’ve an interest, of course.”
Lexie looked surly, without prompting. Meredith took Monica Patterson-Hughes aside. It wasn’t that, she explained. It was something quite different. Lexie here has gone a bit wild and I’m the responsible adult in her life and I’ve been told that there’s a programme for girls just like Lexie, girls who need to be taken in hand by someone who sets an example for them, takes an interest, acts like an older sister. Which I of course am: her older sister, that is. But sometimes a real older sister isn’t the thing a younger sister wants to listen to, especially a younger sister like Lexie who’s already been in a bit of trouble—“wild boys and binge drinking and such,” Meredith murmured—and who doesn’t want to listen to someone she frankly considers a “bloody preaching cow.”
“I’d heard of a programme … ?” she repeated hopefully. “A young lady down from …I believe it was Winchester? …who’s taking on troubled girls?”
Monica Patterson-Hughes frowned. Then she shook her head. There was no such programme associated with the college. Nor did she know of one in the process of being set up. Girls at risk …Well, generally they were dealt with at a younger age, weren’t they? Mightn’t this programme be somethin
g more likely to come from the New Forest District Council?
Lexie, apparently getting quite into her role, cooperatively snarled that she wasn’t having “nought to do wiv no fooking council,” and she brought out her cigarettes as if she meant to light up there in the classroom. Monica Patterson-Hughes looked suitably appalled. She said, “My dear, you can’t—” to which Lexie informed her she’d damn well do what she bloody liked. Meredith thought this might be smearing things on a bit thick, and she got her “younger sister” out of the classroom posthaste.
Lexie crowed once they were outside. She said, “Tha’ was great fun, that,” and “Where’re we off to next?” and “I’ll talk ’bout me boyfriend at the next place. What d’you think?”
Meredith wanted to tell her that a wee bit less drama would serve them better but Lexie had few enough diversions in her life and if this little jaunt of theirs had the potential of supplying her with some excitement in the absence of such from her Bible-thumping parents, that was fine by her. So at the New Forest District Council offices—which they found in Lyndhurst in a U of buildings called Appletree Court—they put on a performance of such conviction that they were immediately ushered into the presence of a social worker called Dominic Cheeters, who brought them coffee and lemony ginger biscuits and seemed so eager to help that Meredith felt a nagging sense of guilt that they were lying to the man.
But here, too, in the council offices they learned there was no programme being established for girls at risk, and definitely no programme being established by one Gina Dickens from Winchester. Dominic, helpful to the core of his being, even went to the trouble of phoning round various of his “personal sources,” as he called them. But the result was the same. Nothing. So then he went further afield, phoning the local education offices in Southampton to see if they could be of help. By this time, Meredith reckoned she knew that they could not help and such was the case.