This Body of Death (27 page)

Jossie fixed his eyes on the postcard. He finally said, “This is months old, this is. I got a stack of them …I dunno …round April, it was. I didn’t know you then.”

“Want to explain?” Barbara asked him. Nkata opened his neat leather notebook.

Gina said, “Is something going on?”

Barbara wasn’t about to give any more information than was necessary at this point, so she said nothing. Nor did Winston, except to murmur, “So …Mr. Jossie?”

Gordon Jossie made a restless movement in his chair. The story he told was brief but direct. Jemima Hastings was his former lover; she’d left him after more than two years together; he’d wanted to find her. He’d seen an advertisement for the photographic portrait show in the
Mail on Sunday
by purest chance and this—with a nod at the postcard—was the photo that had been used in the advert for that show. So he’d gone to London. No one at the gallery would tell him where the model was, and he hadn’t a clue how to contact the photographer. So he bought up the postcards—forty, fifty, or sixty because he couldn’t recall but they’d had to fetch more from their storage room—and he’d stuck them in phone boxes, in shop windows, in any spot where he thought they’d get noticed. He’d worked in widening rings round the gallery itself till he ran out of cards. And then he waited.

“Any luck?” Barbara asked him.

“I never heard from anyone about her.” He said again to Gina, “This was before I’d met you. It’s nothing to do with you and me. Far as I knew, far as I
know
, wasn’t anyone who ever saw them, saw her, and put two and two together. Waste of time and money, it was. But I felt like I had to try.”

“To find her, you mean,” Gina said in a quiet voice.

He said to her, “It was the
time
we’d put in together. Over two years. I just wanted to know. It doesn’t mean anything.” Jossie turned to Barbara. “Where’d you get this, anyway? What’s going on?”

She answered his question with one of her own. “Care to tell us why Jemima left you?”

“I’ve no bloody idea. One day she decided it was over, and off she went. She made the announcement and the next day she was gone.”

“Just like that?”

“I reckoned she’d been planning it for weeks. I phoned her at first once she’d gone. I wanted to know what the hell was going on. Who wouldn’t, after two years together when someone says it’s over and just disappears and you’ve not seen it coming? But she never took the calls and she never returned them and then the mobile number got changed altogether or she got a new mobile or
whatever
, because the phone calls stopped going through. I asked her brother about it—”

“Her brother?” Nkata looked up from his notebook, and when Gordon Jossie identified the brother as Robbie Hastings, Nkata jotted this down.

“But he said he didn’t know anything about what she was up to. I didn’t believe him—he never liked me and I expect he was dead chuffed when Jemima ended things—but I couldn’t get a single detail out of him. I finally gave up. And then”—with a look at Gina Dickens that had to be called grateful—“I met Gina last month.”

“When did you last see Jemima Hastings, then?” Barbara asked.

“The morning of the day she left me.”

“Which was?”

“Day after Guy Fawkes. Last year.” He took a swig of his drink and then wiped his mouth on his arm. He said, “Now are you going to tell me what this is all about?”

“I’m going to ask you if you’ve made any journeys out of Hampshire in the last week or so.”

“Why?”

“Will you answer the question, please?”

Jossie’s face suffused with colour. “I don’t think I will. What the hell is going on? Where’d you get that postcard? I didn’t break any laws. You see postcards in phone boxes all over London and they’re a damn sight more suggestive than that one.”

“This was among Jemima’s belongings in her lodgings,” Barbara told him. “I’m sorry to tell you that she’s dead. She was murdered in London about six days ago. So again, I’ll ask you if you’ve made any journeys out of Hampshire.”

Barbara had heard the expression
pale to the lips
but she’d never seen it occur so rapidly. She reckoned it had to do with Gordon Jossie’s natural colouring: His face gained colour quickly, and it seemed to lose it in much the same manner.

“Oh my God,” Gina Dickens murmured. She reached for his hand.

Her movement made him flinch away. “What d’you mean, murdered?” he asked Barbara.

“Is there more than one meaning to
murdered
?” she inquired. “Have you been out of Hampshire, Mr. Jossie?”

“Where did she die?” he asked as a response, and when Barbara didn’t answer he said to Nkata, “Where did this happen? How? Who?”

“She was murdered in a place called Abney Park Cemetery,” Barbara told him. “So again, Mr. Jossie, I’ll have to ask you—”

“Here,” he said numbly. “I’ve not left. I’ve been here. I was here.”

“Here at home?”

“No. ’Course not. I’ve been working. I was …” He seemed dazed. Either that, Barbara reckoned, or he was trying to do a mental two-step to come up with an alibi that he hadn’t expected to have to give. He explained that he was a thatcher and that he’d been working on a job, which was what he did every day except weekends and some Friday afternoons. When asked if someone could confirm that fact, he said yes, of course, for God’s sake, he had an apprentice. He gave the name—Cliff Coward—and the phone number as well. Then he said, “How … ?” and licked his lips. “How did she …die?”

“She was stabbed, Mr. Jossie,” Barbara said. “She bled out before anyone found her.”

Gina did clasp Jossie’s hand at that point, but she didn’t say anything. What, really,
could
she say, given her position?

Barbara considered this last: her position, its security, or its lack thereof. She said, “And you, Ms. Dickens? Have you been out of Hampshire?”

“No, of course not.”

“And six days ago?”

“I’m not sure. Six days? I’ve been only to Lymington. The shopping …in Lymington.”

“Who can confirm that?”

She was silent. It was the moment when someone was supposed to say, “You aren’t bloody well suggesting that I had something to do with this?” but neither of them did. Instead they glanced at each other and then Gina said, “I don’t expect anyone can confirm it except Gordon. But why should someone be able to confirm it?”

“Keep the receipts from your shopping, did you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I mean, one doesn’t, ordinarily. I can look, but I certainly didn’t think …” She looked frightened. “I’ll try to find them,” she said. “But if I can’t …”

“Don’t be stupid.” Jossie directed this remark not to Gina but to Barbara and Winston. “What’s she supposed to have done? Obliterated the competition? There isn’t any. We were finished, Jemima and me.”

“Right,” Barbara said. She gave a nod to Winston and he made much of flipping his notebook closed. “Well, you are now, aren’t you, you and Jemima? Finished is definitely the word for it.”

H
E WENT INTO
the barn. He thought to brush Tess—as he usually did in this kind of moment—but the dog wouldn’t come despite his whistling and his calls. He stood stupidly at her brushing table, fruitlessly and with a very dry mouth shouting, “Tess! Tess! Get in here, dog!” with absolutely no result because, of course, animals were intuitive and Tess damn well knew something wasn’t right.

Gina did come, however. She said quietly, “Gordon, why didn’t you tell them the truth?” She sounded fearful and he cursed himself for that fear in her voice.

She
would
ask, of course. It was, after all, the question of the hour. He wanted to thank her for having said nothing to the Scotland Yard cops because he knew what it must look like that he’d lied to them.

She said, “You
did
go to Holland, didn’t you? You
were
there, weren’t you? That new source for reeds? That site where they’re growing them? Because the reeds from Turkey are becoming rubbish … ? That’s where you were, isn’t it? Why didn’t you tell them?”

He didn’t want to look at her. He heard it all in her voice, so he bloody well didn’t want to see it in her face. But he had to look her in the eye for the simple reason that she was Gina, and not just anyone.

So he looked. He saw not fear but rather concern. It was for him and he knew it and knowing it made him weak and desperate. He said, “Yes.”

“You went to Holland?”

“Yes.”

“Then why didn’t you just tell them? Why did you say … ? You weren’t at work, Gordon.”

“Cliff’ll say I was.”

“He’ll lie for you?”

“If I ask him, yes. He doesn’t like coppers.”

“But why would you ask him? Why not just tell them the truth? Gordon, has something …Is something … ?”

He wanted her to approach him as she’d done before, early in the morning, in bed and then in the shower because although it was sex and only sex, it
meant
more than sex, and that was what he needed. How odd that he’d understand in that moment what Jemima had wanted from him and from the act. A lifting up and a carrying off and an end to that which could never be ended because it was imprisoned within and no simple conjoining of bodies could free it.

He set down the brush. Obviously, the dog was not going to obey—even for a brushing—and he felt like a fool for waiting for her. He said, “Geen,” and Gina said in return, “Tell me the truth.”

He said, “If I told them I was in Holland, they’d take it further.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’d want me to prove it.”

“Can’t you? Why would you not be able to prove … ? Did you not
go
to Holland, Gordon?”

“Of course I went. But I tossed the ticket.”

“But there’re records. All sorts of records. And there’s the hotel. And whoever you saw …the farmer …whoever …Who grows the reeds? He’ll be able to say …You can phone the police and just tell them the truth and that’ll be the end …”

“It’s easier like this.”

“How on earth can it be easier to ask Cliff to lie? Because if he lies and if they find out that he lied … ?”

Now she did look frightened, but frightened was something that he could deal with. Frightened was something he understood. He approached her the way he approached the ponies in the paddock, one hand out and the other visible: No surprises here, Gina, nothing to fear.

He said, “Can you trust me on this?
Do
you trust me?”

“Of course I trust you. Why shouldn’t I trust you? But I don’t understand …”

He touched her bare shoulder. “You’re here with me. You’ve been with me …what? A month? Longer? Are you thinking I would’ve hurt Jemima? Gone up to London? Found her wherever she was and stabbed her to death? Is that how I seem to you? That sort of bloke? He goes to London, murders a woman for no real reason since she’s already long gone out of his life, then comes home and makes love to this woman, this woman right here, the centre of his whole flaming world? Why?
Why?
”

“Let me look at your eyes.” She reached up and took off his dark glasses, which he hadn’t removed on coming into the barn. She set them on the brushing table and then she put her hand on his cheek. He met her gaze. She looked at him and he didn’t flinch and finally her expression softened. She kissed his cheek and then his closed eyelids. Then she kissed his mouth. Then her own mouth opened, and her hands went down to his arse and she pulled him close.

After a moment, breathless, she said, “Take me right here,” and he did so.

T
HEY FOUND
R
OBBIE
Hastings between Vinney Ridge and Anderwood, which were two stopping-off spots on the Lyndhurst Road between Burley and the A35. They had reached him on his mobile, from a number that Gordon Jossie had given them. “He’ll doubtless tell you the worst about me,” Jossie said abruptly.

It was no easy matter to locate Jemima Hastings’ brother since so many roads in the New Forest had convenient names but no signs. They finally discovered exactly where he was by chance, having stopped at a cottage where the road they were taking made a dogleg, only to discover it was called Anderwood Cottage. By heading farther along the route, they were led to believe by the cottage owner, they would locate Rob Hastings on a track leading to Dames Slough Inclosure. He was an agister, they were told, and he’d been called to do “the usual bit of sad business.”

This business turned out to be the shooting of one of the New Forest ponies that had been hit by a car on A35. The poor animal had apparently managed to stagger across acres of heath before collapsing. When Barbara and Nkata found the agister, he’d put the horse to death with one merciful shot from a .32 pistol, and he’d brought the animal’s body to the edge of the lane. He was talking on his mobile, and sitting attentively next to him was a majestic-looking Weimaraner, so well trained as to ignore not only the interlopers but also the dead pony lying a short distance from the Land Rover in which Robbie Hastings had apparently come to this lonely spot.

Nkata pulled off the lane as far as he was able. Hastings nodded as they approached him. They’d told him only that they wanted to speak with him at once, and he looked grave. It was hardly likely that he had many calls from the Metropolitan police in this part of the world.

He said, “Stay, Frank,” to the dog and came towards them. “You might want to keep back from the pony. It’s not a happy sight.” He said he was waiting for the New Forest Hounds and then added, “Ah. Here he is,” in reference to an open-bed lorry that rumbled towards them. It was pulling a low trailer with shallow sides, and into this the dead animal was going to be loaded. It would be used for meat to feed the dogs, Robbie Hastings informed them as the lorry got into position. At least some good would come of the reckless stupidity of drivers who thought the Perambulation was their personal playground, he added.