This Body of Death (69 page)

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.

W
HEN, 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, as 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?”

Lynley seemed relieved at this change in direction. He matched her briskness when he said, “Truth to tell, I think anything’s possible. We’re relying on descriptions supplied by a man who’s drawn seven-foot-tall angels on the walls of his bed-sitting room.”

“Bloody hell,” Barbara murmured.

“Quite.”

She brought him up to date on Gordon Jossie, his crooks, and whether they matched up with the sort of crook that was used by the killer, his reaction to the photo of Gina Dickens, and the phone call she’d had from that same woman. She told him she was heading to Burley for another conversation with Rob Hastings as well. Crooks and blacksmithing would be among her topics, she said. What, she asked Lynley, was on for him?

Frazer Chaplin, he told her, and an earnest attempt at alibi breaking.

Didn’t he think that was akin to spitting in the wind? she enquired.

When in doubt, go back to the beginning, he replied. He said something about ending up in the beginning at the end of a journey and knowing the place for the first time, but she reckoned this was some sort of mad quote come into his mind so she said, “Yes. Well. Right. Whatever,” and rang off to go about her business. Going about her business, she decided, was the best balm for the disturbance she was feeling towards whatever business was going on with Lynley.

She found Rob Hastings at home. He was doing some kind of major cleaning of his Land Rover, for he seemed to have it stripped of everything it could be stripped of without removing its engine, tyres, steering wheel, and seats. What had been inside it now lay on the ground round the vehicle and he was sorting through it. He didn’t exactly keep a pin-neat Land Rover. From the amount of clobber, it looked to Barbara as if the bloke used it as a mobile home.

“Late spring cleaning?” she asked him.

“Something like.” His Weimaraner had come loping round the side of the house at the sound of Barbara’s Mini, and he told the dog to sit, which it did at once, although it panted and looked pleased to have a visitor on the property.

Barbara asked Hastings if he would show her his blacksmithing equipment, and logically Hastings asked her why. She thought about deflecting his question, but she decided his reaction to the truth might be more revealing. She said that the weapon used upon his sister had likely been handmade by a blacksmith, although she didn’t tell him what the weapon was.

At this, he didn’t move. His gaze fixed on her. He said, “D’you think I killed my own sister now?”

“We’re looking for someone with access to blacksmith’s equipment or to tools made by blacksmith’s equipment,” Barbara told him. “Everyone who fits the bill and knew Jemima is going to be examined. I can’t think you’d want it any other way.”

Hastings dropped his gaze. He admitted that he wouldn’t.

She could see, however, when he showed her the equipment, that it hadn’t been used in years. She knew little enough about the workings of a smithy, but everything he owned that was related to his training and time as a blacksmith suggested that neither he nor anyone else had interfered with so much as its placement since it had first been deposited in the outbuilding where he kept it now. Everything was shoved and piled together with no room to move among it. A heavy bench held most of the equipment: tongs, preens, chisels, forks, and punches. Wrought-iron bars lay disused to one side of this in a hotchpotch pile, and two anvils were upended against the front of the bench as well. There were several old tubs, three vices, and what looked like a grinder. There was, tellingly however, no forge. Even had this last not been the case, the unmolested dust upon everything bore not a mark of having been disturbed in ages. Barbara saw all this at once but still took her time with an examination of everything there. She finally nodded and thanked the agister. She said, “I’m sorry. It had to be done.”

“What was used to kill her, then?” Hastings sounded numb.

Barbara said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Hastings, but I can’t—”

“It was a thatching tool, wasn’t it?” he said. “It has to be. It
was
a thatching tool.”

“Why?”

“Because of him.” Hastings looked towards the broad doorway through which they’d entered the old building in which his equipment was stored. His face hardened.

Barbara said, “Mr. Hastings, Gordon Jossie’s not the only thatcher we’ve spoken to in the investigation. He has thatching equipment, indeed. No doubt. But so does a bloke called Ringo Heath.”