This Body of Death (35 page)

“Aye. Aye. I remember that.”

“So you see …I tried …I should have told someone, but I didn’t know who.”

“You didn’t think to tell me?”

“I did think. Yes. But then sometimes I thought …All the men and perhaps even you …”

“Oh God, Merry.”

“I’m sorry. So sorry.”

“Why did you … ? Did she say … ?”

“Never. Nothing. Not that.”

“But still you thought …” He felt a laugh bubbling in him, one of simple despair at so outrageous an idea, so far from the truth of who he was and how he lived his life.

At least, he thought, with Gordon Jossie had come an alteration in his sister. Somehow she’d found what she was looking for because surely she’d been faithful to him. She had to have been. He said, “She stuck with Jossie, though. She was true to him. I mean like I told you before, he wanted to marry her and he wouldn’t have done if he had the slightest suspicion or indication that—”

“
Did
he?”

Something about the way she asked the question stopped him. “Did he what?”

“Want to marry her. Really.”

“’Course he did. She left because she wanted time to think about it and I expect he worried it was over between them because he phoned her and phoned her and she got herself a new mobile. So you see, she’d finally got to the point …I told you all this, Merry.” He was fairly babbling at this point, and he knew it because he reckoned there was something more to come from his sister’s friend.

There was. Meredith said, “But, Rob, before our …what do I call it? Our breakup? Our row? The end of our friendship? Before that, she told me Gordon didn’t want to marry at all. It wasn’t her, she said. He didn’t want to marry, full stop. He was afraid of marriage, she said. He was afraid of getting too close to anyone.”

“Blokes always say that, Merry. At the beginning.”

“No. Listen. She told me it was all she could do to talk him into living together, and before that it was all she could do to talk him into letting her spend the night with him, and before that it was all she could do to coax him into having sex. So to think he was mad to marry her …What would have changed him?”

“Living with her. Getting used to that. Seeing that there was no big fear to being with someone. Learning that—”

“What? Learning
what
? Truth is, Rob, if there was something to learn …something to discover …wouldn’t it likely be that he discovered that Jemima—”

“
No
.” He said it not because he believed it but because he wanted to believe it: that his sister had been to Gordon Jossie what she hadn’t been to her own brother. An open book. Wasn’t that what couples were meant to be to each other? he asked himself. But he had no answer. How bloody could he since being one half of a couple was for him the stuff of fantasy?

Meredith said, “I wish you hadn’t asked. I wish I hadn’t said. What does it matter really, now? I mean, at the end of the day she only wanted someone to love her, I think. I didn’t see that at the time, when we were girls. And when I finally did see it, when we were older, our paths were so different that when I tried to talk to her about it, it seemed like I had a problem, not Jemima.”

“It got her killed,” he said. “That’s what happened, isn’t it?”

“Surely not. Because if she’d changed as you said she’d changed, if she was faithful to Gordon …And she’d been with him longer than anyone else, hadn’t she? More than two years? Three?”

“She left in a rush. He kept ringing her.”

“You see? That means he wanted her back, which he wouldn’t have wanted if she’d been unfaithful. I think she’d grown out of all that, Rob. Really, I do.”

But Robbie could tell by the eagerness of Meredith’s tone that whatever she said from this moment onwards would be said to assuage his feelings. He felt turned every which way, and he was dizzy. Among all the new information he had gathered, there had to be an essential truth about his sister. There had to be a way to explain both her life and her death. And he had to find that truth, for he knew that its discovery would be the only way he could forgive himself for failing Jemima when she had needed him most.

B
ARBARA
H
AVERS AND
Winston Nkata returned to the Operational Command Unit where they handed over the forged letters from Winchester Technical College II to the chief superintendent. Whiting read them. He was the sort of reader who formed the words with his lips as he went along. He took his time.

Barbara said, “We’ve spoken to these two blokes, sir. They didn’t write the letters. They don’t know Gordon Jossie.”

He looked up. “That,” he said, “is problematical.”

In a nutshell, Barbara thought, although he didn’t seem wildly interested in the matter. She said, “Last time we were here, you said two women had phoned up about him.”

“Did I.” Whiting seemed to be musing on the matter. “There
were
two calls, I believe. Two women suggesting that Jossie needed looking into.”

“And?” Barbara asked.

“And?” Whiting said.

Barbara exchanged a glance with Winston. He did the honours. “We got these letters now, see. We got a dead girl up in London connected with this bloke. He went up there on a search for her sometime back, which he doesn’t deny, and he stuck up cards with her picture on them, asking for phone calls should anyone see her. And you got two phone calls yourself drawing your ’tention to him.”

“Those calls didn’t mention a card in London,” Whiting said. “Nor did they mention your dead girl.”

“Point is the calls themselves and how things’re stacking up ’gainst Jossie.”

“Yes,” Whiting said. “That can make things look iffy. I do see that.”

Barbara decided indirection was clearly
not
the path to take with the chief superintendent. She said, “Sir, what do you know about Gordon Jossie that you’re not telling us?”

Whiting handed the letters back to her. “Not a bloody thing,” he said.

“Did you check him out based on those phone calls?”

“Sergeant …Is it Havers? And Nkata?” Whiting waited for their nods although Barbara could have sworn he knew their names very well despite the fact that he mispronounced both of them. “I’m not very likely to use manpower to investigate someone based on a phone call from a woman who might well be upset because a gentleman stood her up for a date.”

“You said two women,” Nkata pointed out.

“One woman, two women. The point is that they had no complaint, only suspicions, and their suspicions amounted to being suspicious, if you understand.”

“Meaning what?” Barbara asked.

“Meaning that they had nothing to be suspicious about. He wasn’t peeping in windows. He wasn’t hanging about primary schools. He wasn’t snatching handbags from old ladies. He wasn’t moving questionable bits of this or that into his house or out of it. He wasn’t inviting women on the street to step into his vehicle for a bit of you-know-what. As far as they could tell us—these phone callers who, by the way, wouldn’t leave their names—he was just a suspicious type. Those letters of yours”—he indicated the forgeries from the college—“don’t add anything to the mix. Seems to me the important bit is not that he forged them—”

“He didn’t,” Barbara said. “He can’t read or write.”

“All right. Someone else forged them. A mate of his. A girlfriend. Who knows. Have you ever considered that he wouldn’t have got himself hired as an apprentice at his age had he not had something to show he was a worthwhile risk? I daresay that’s all these letters show.”

“True enough,” Barbara said. “But the fact remains—”

“The fact remains that the important bit is whether he did his job well once he got it. And that’s what he did, yes? He served a fine apprenticeship up in Itchen Abbas. Then he began his own business. He’s built that business up and, as far as I know, he has kept his nose clean.”

“Sir—”

“I think that’s the end of the story, don’t you?”

As it happened, she didn’t, but Barbara said nothing. Nor did Nkata. And as she was careful not to look at Winston, so was he careful not to look at her. For there was something that the chief superintendent wasn’t dealing with: They’d said nothing at all to him about Gordon Jossie’s serving an apprenticeship to Ringo Heath or to anyone else, and the fact that Whiting knew about one suggested once again that there was more to Gordon Jossie and his life in the New Forest than met the eye. To Barbara there was no question about it: Chief Superintendent Zachary Whiting was fully apprised as to what the
more
was.

M
EREDITH DECIDED FURTHER
action was called for after the phone call from Rob Hastings. She could tell the poor man was equal parts crushed to the core and riddled by guilt, and since part of this was due to her mouth running on about matters best left unsaid, she took a step to rectify things. She had seen just enough cop shows on the telly to know what to do when she made the decision to go to Lyndhurst. She was fairly confident that Gina Dickens wouldn’t be in the lodgings that she claimed was hers above the Mad Hatter Tea Rooms since Gina had seemed fairly intent upon establishing her life with Gordon Jossie. Meredith reckoned that, in the pursuit of this end, she likely hadn’t darkened her own doorway in days. Should she actually be in, Meredith had her excuse ready: Came to say sorry for being such a pest. I’m just upset. That part was the truth, at least, although being upset was only the half of it.

She’d begged the rest of the day off. Splitting headache, the heat, and that time of the month. She’d work at home if they didn’t mind, where she could put a cold compress on her head. She nearly had most of the graphic done anyway. An hour more was all it would take to get it finished.

That was fine with the boss and off she went, and when she got to Lyndhurst she parked by the New Forest Museum and walked the short distance up to the tea rooms on the high street. Midsummer, and Lyndhurst was thick with tourists. The town sat squarely in the centre of the Perambulation and was generally the first stop for visitors wishing to familiarise themselves with this part of Hampshire.

Gina’s lodgings above the Mad Hatter Tea Rooms were accessed by a doorway that was separate from the tea rooms themselves, from which at this time of day the scent of baked goods rolled out onto the street. There were two lodging rooms only and since from one hip-hop music was blasting, Meredith chose the other. It was here she applied the knowledge she’d gained from watching police programmes on the telly. She used a credit card to ease the catch back. It took five tries and she was drenched in sweat—both from nerves and from the ambient temperature in the building—before she got inside. But when she managed it, she knew she’d made the right decision. For a mobile phone on the nightstand was ringing and as far as she was concerned, the ringing was fairly screaming
clue
.

She made a dash for it. She picked it up. She said, “Yes?” with as much authority as she could muster and as breathlessly as she could manage, in order to disguise her voice. As she did this, she looked round the room. It was furnished simply: a bed, a chest of drawers, a bedside table, a desk, a wardrobe. There was a basin with a mirror above it, but no en suite bath. As the window was closed, it was deadly hot.

There was silence on the other end of the phone. She thought she’d missed the call and she cursed to herself. Then a man’s voice said, “Babe, Scotland Yard’s been. How the
hell
much longer?” and she went cold from head to toe, as if a blast of refrigerated air had shot through the room.

She said, “Who is this? Tell me who this is!”

Silence in reply. Then, “Shit,” in a low mutter. And then nothing.

She said, “Hello? Hello? Who is this?” but she knew that whoever it was, he had already disconnected himself from the call. She punched the
send
button to return the call, although she reckoned that the man on the other end would hardly answer. But she didn’t need him to do so. She needed only to see the number from which the call had come. What she got, though, was P
RIVATE
N
UMBER
printed on the small screen. Damn, she thought. Whoever he was, he was calling from a withheld number. When the call went through, it rang and rang, as she’d expected. No voice mail, no message. It had been a call from someone in cahoots with Gina Dickens.

Meredith felt a surge of triumph at this knowledge. It proved that she’d been right from the first. She’d
known
that Gina Dickens was dirty. All that remained was to find out the real purpose of her presence in the New Forest, because no matter what Gina had declared about her programme to help girls at risk, Meredith didn’t buy it. As far as she was concerned, the only girl at risk had been Jemima.

Through the walls of the room, the hip-hop music continued to thump. From below, the noise from the tea rooms rose. From without, the street noise reverberated through the windows: lorries passing through Lyndhurst High Street and grinding through their gears when they hit the gentle slope, cars heading for Southampton or Beaulieu, tour coaches the size of small cottages ferrying their passengers south to Brockenhurst or even as far as the port town of Lymington and an excursion over to the Isle of Wight. Meredith remembered how Gina had spoken of the cacophony in the street beneath her window. In this, at least, she had not been lying. But in other matters …Well, that was what Meredith was here to discover.

She had to be quick. She was going from cold to hot again, and she knew she couldn’t risk opening a window and drawing attention to the room in this way. But the temperature made the air close and herself claustrophobic.

She attacked the bedside table first. The clock radio upon it was tuned to Radio Five, which didn’t seem to indicate anything, and within the single drawer of the table there was nothing but a box of tissues and an old, opened package of Blu-Tac with a small chunk of it missing. On the shelf of the table was a stack of magazines, too ancient to have belonged to Gina Dickens, Meredith reckoned.