Read This Body of Death Online
Authors: Elizabeth George
Tags: #Mystery, #Thriller, #Suspense, #Adult
This Body of Death (70 page)
Hastings thought about this. “Heath trained Jossie.”
“Yes. We’ve spoken to him. My point is that every connection we make has to be tracked down and ticked off the list. Jossie’s not the only—”
“What about Whiting?” he asked. “What about
that
connection?”
“Between him and Jossie? We know there’s something, but that’s all at this point. We’re still working on it.”
“As well you might. It’s taken Whiting to Jossie’s holding to have more than one heart-to-heart with the bloke.” Hastings told Barbara about Jemima’s old friend and schoolmate Meredith Powell, about what Meredith Powell had revealed to him about Whiting’s trips to see Jossie. She had the information from Gina Dickens, he said, and he ended with, “And Jossie was in London on the day Jemima died. Or isn’t that one of the connections you’ve made? Gina Dickens found the rail tickets. She got her hands on the hotel receipt.”
Barbara felt her eyes widen, and her breath hissed in. “How long have you known this? You had my card. Why didn’t you ring me in London, Mr. Hastings? Or DS Nkata. You had his card as well. Either one of us—”
“Because Whiting said it was all in hand. He told Meredith the information had been sent up to London. To you lot. To New Scotland Yard.”
A
DIRTY COP.
She wasn’t surprised. Barbara had known from the first that something was off with Zachary Whiting, right from the moment he’d looked at those forged letters in praise of Gordon Jossie’s performance as a student at Winchester Technical College II. He’d slipped up there, with his remark about the apprenticeship, and now she and the good chief superintendent were going to have a little chat about it.
Praise God, she saw as she looked feverishly at her map of the New Forest. She had only to retrace her route from Honey Lane back through Burley village. From there it was a straight route to Lyndhurst. Possibly, she thought, the only bloody straight route in all of Hampshire.
She set off. Her mind was spinning. Gordon Jossie in London on the day of Jemima’s death. Zachary Whiting paying calls upon him. Ringo Heath in possession of thatching tools. Gina Dickens giving information to the chief superintendent. And now Meredith Powell, whom they’d have tracked down earlier had that bloody stupid Isabelle Ardery not ordered them precipitately back to London. Isabelle Ardery.
Isabelle told me
. Which took Barbara back to considering Lynley—that last place she wanted to be—so she forced herself again to Whiting.
Disguise. That was it. She’d been thinking that the baseball cap and sunglasses comprised the disguise because it seemed so obviously one. But what about the other? Dark clothes, dark hair. God, Whiting was bald as a newborn, but putting his mitts on a wig would have been child’s play for him, wouldn’t it?
Her mind tumbling from point to point, she paid scant attention to the road. There was a Y she hadn’t taken note of on the map, and she veered left when she came to it, at the Queen’s Head pub, on the edge of Burley village. She saw her error at once as the road began to narrow—she’d been meant to veer right—and she zipped into the broad car park behind the pub to turn round. She began to negotiate her way past the tour coaches, and that was when her mobile rang.
She excavated it and barked, “Havers,” when she finally got it open.
“Drinks tonight, luv?” a man’s voice asked her.
“What the bloody hell?”
“Drinks tonight, luv?” He sounded extremely intense.
“Drinks? Who the hell … ? This is DS Barbara Havers. Who is this?”
“I realise that.
Drinks
tonight, luv?” He spoke as if through gritted teeth. “Drinks, drinks, drinks?”
At this, Barbara twigged. It was Norman Whatsisname from the Home Office, her own official snout, brought to her courtesy of Dorothea Harriman and her friend Stephanie Thompson-Smythe. He was giving her the code words and they were meant to meet at the Barclay’s cash-point machine in Victoria Street and he had something for her and—
“Bloody hell,” she said. “Norman. I’m in Hampshire. Tell me on the phone.”
“Can’t do, darling,” he said breezily. “Absolutely crushed with work at the moment. But drinks tonight would be the ticket. How about our regular watering hole? C’n I talk you into a gin and tonic? At the regular place?”
She thought frantically. She said, “Norman, listen. I c’n get someone there in …let’s say an hour? It’ll be a bloke. He’ll say
gin and tonic
, all right? That’s how you’ll know him. In an hour, Norman. At the cash-point machine in Victoria Street. Gin and tonic, Norman. Someone’ll be there.”
In the U.K. “detention at the pleasure of the reigning monarch”—a euphemism for imprisonment for life—is the only sentence that can be given to someone who is convicted of murder. But that is the law as it is applied to murderers over twenty-one years old. In the case of John Dresser, the killers were children. This, as well as the sensational nature of the crime, could not but have had an impact on Mr. Justice Anthony Cameron as he considered what recommendations he would make upon intoning the required sentence.
The climate that surrounded the trial was hostile, with an undercurrent of hysteria that could be seen most often in the reaction of those gathered outside the Royal Courts of Justice. Whereas within the courtroom, there was tension but no overt display of aggression towards the three boys, outside the courtroom, this was not the case. Initial displays of rage towards the three defendants—characterised first by the moblike gatherings at their homes and then by repeated attempts to attack the armed vans in which they daily traveled to and from their trial—segued into organised demonstrations and culminated in what became known as the Silent March for Justice, a noiseless gathering of an astonishing twenty thousand people who walked the distance from the Barriers to the Dawkins building site, where they were led in candlelit prayer and where they listened to Alan Dresser’s broken eulogy for his little boy. “John’s passing cannot go unmarked”—Alan Dresser’s words of conclusion—became the watchword for public sentiment.
One can only imagine how Justice Cameron wrestled with his decision regarding the recommendation he would make. It was not for nothing that he’d long been known as “Maximum Tony” for his propensity to let stand the maximum sentence at the conclusion of trials in his courtroom. But he’d never been faced with ten-and eleven-year-old criminals before, and he could not have been blind to all the ways in which the perpetrators of this horrible deed were themselves only children. His brief, however, demanded he consider only what would be appropriate for both retribution and deterrence. His recommendation was a custodial sentence of eight years, a punishment that, in the eyes of the public and the tabloid press, was deemed akin to walking away scot-free. Thus a series of heretofore unheard-of legal maneuvers were made. Within a week, the Lord Chief Justice reviewed the case and increased the sentence to ten years, but within six months the Dressers had amassed a petition of 500,000 signatures demanding that the killers be jailed for life.
This was a story that refused to die. The tabloids had seized hold of John Dresser’s parents and of John himself and had made his death a cause célèbre. Once the verdicts were handed down in the trial of his killers, their identities and photographs could be revealed to the public, as could salient details of his murder. The monstrous nature of his killing became a rallying point for those who deemed punishment the
only
appropriate response to such a crime. Thus the Home Secretary became involved, increasing the sentence once again to an incredible twenty years in order, he said, “To assure the public that their confidence in the judicial system is not misplaced, to allow them to see that crime
will
be punished, no matter the age of the perpetrator.” There the sentence remained until it went before the European Court in Luxembourg where it was successfully argued by the boys’ lawyers that their rights were being infringed by the fact that a politician—who would perforce be influenced by public opinion—was allowed to set the terms of their imprisonment.
When the boys’ prison term was reduced back to ten years, the tabloids flung themselves once again into the fray. Those who loathed the entire idea of European unification, seeing it as the root of all evils in the country, used the Luxembourg decision as an example of outside intrusion into the internal affairs of British society. What would come next? they pondered. Would it be Luxembourg forcing the euro upon us? What about a declaration that the Monarchy would have to be abolished? Those who supported unification saw the wisdom in making no comment at all. For any agreement with Luxembourg’s decision was a dangerous position to take, somehow implying that a mere decade was suitable punishment for the torture and death of an innocent baby.
No one could possibly envy the officials—elected or not—who had to make the decisions about the fate of Michael Spargo, Reggie Arnold, and Ian Barker. The nature of the crime has always suggested that the three boys were deeply disturbed, social victims themselves. There can be no doubt that their family circumstances were wretched, but there can also be no doubt that other children grow up in circumstances just as wretched or worse and they do not kill small children in reaction.
Perhaps the truth is that on their own as
individuals
the boys would not have committed an act of violence such as this one. Perhaps the truth is that it was a confluence of events that day that led to the abduction and the death of John Dresser.
As an enlightened society, surely we must admit that something at some level was wrong with Michael Spargo, Reggie Arnold, and Ian Barker, and equally as an enlightened society, surely we owed those three boys relief in the form of direct intervention long before the crime ever occurred or at the very least therapeutic assistance once they were taken from their homes and held for trial. Can we not say that in failing to provide either intervention or assistance we as a society failed Michael Spargo, Reggie Arnold, and Ian Barker just as surely as we failed to protect young John Dresser from their attack upon him?
It’s a simple matter to declare the boys evil, but even as we do so, we must keep in mind that at the time of the crime’s commission, they were children. And we must ask what purpose is served by putting children on public display for a criminal trial rather than by immediately providing them with the help they need.
S
HE’D SAID AFTERWARDS
, “I’
M NOT IN LOVE WITH YOU
. I
T’S
just something that happened.”
He’d replied, “Of course. I understand completely.”
She’d gone on with, “No one can know about this.”
He’d said, “I think that might be the most obvious point.”
She’d said, “Why? Are there others?”
“What?”
“Obvious points. Other than I’m a woman, and you’re a man, and these things sometimes happen.”
Of course there were other points, he’d thought. Aside from raw animal instinct, there was his motivation to consider. There was hers as well. There was also what now, what next, and what do we do when the ground has shifted beneath our feet.
“Regret, I suppose,” he’d told her.
“And do you? Because I don’t. As I said, these things happen. You can’t say they haven’t happened to you, of all people. I won’t believe that.”
He wasn’t quite as she seemed to think him, but he didn’t disagree with her. He swung himself out of her bed, sat on the edge, and considered her question. The answer was yes and it was also no, but he didn’t speak either.
He’d felt her hand on his back. It was cool, and her voice had altered when she said his name. No longer clipped and professional, her voice was …Was it
maternal
? God, no. She was not in the least a maternal sort of woman.
She’d said, “Thomas, if we’re to be lovers—”
“I can’t just now,” had been his reply. Not that he couldn’t conceive of himself as the lover of Isabelle Ardery, but that he could conceive of it only too well, and that frightened him for all it implied. “I ought to leave,” he said.
“We’ll speak later,” she had responded.
He’d arrived home quite late. He’d slept very little. In the morning he spoke by mobile to Barbara Havers, a conversation he’d have preferred to avoid. As soon as he was able afterwards, he set upon the work of Frazer Chaplin and his alibi.
DragonFly Tonics had its offices in a mews behind Brompton Oratory and Holy Trinity Church. It faced the churchyard, although a wall, a hedge, and a path separated the two. Across the alley from the establishment, he saw that two Vespas were parked. One bright orange and the other fuchsia, each bore transfers with DragonFly Tonics printed upon them, much like those he’d seen on Frazer Chaplin’s motor scooter outside Duke’s Hotel.
Lynley parked the Healey Elliott directly in front of the building. He paused to look at the array of goods that were displayed in its front window. These consisted of bottles of substances with names like Wake-up Peach, Detox Lemon, and Sharpen-up Orange. He inspected these and thought wryly of the one he’d choose had they only manufactured it: Show Some Sense Strawberry came to mind. So did Get a Grip Grapefruit. He could have used two of those, he reckoned.
He went inside. The office was quite spare. Aside from some cardboard boxes with the DragonFly Tonics logo printed on the side, there was only a reception desk with a middle-aged woman sitting behind it. She wore a man’s seersucker suit. At least it looked like a man’s since its jacket hung loosely round her. It was a size that would have fitted Churchill.
She was stuffing brochures into envelopes, and she continued with this as she said, “Help you?” She sounded surprised. It seemed that her day was rarely interrupted by someone wandering in off the street.
Lynley asked her about their method of advertising, and she jumped to the conclusion that he meant to cover the Healey Elliott—visible through the window from within the reception area—with DragonFly Tonics transfers. He shuddered inwardly at the thought of such a desecration. He wanted to demand in outrage, “Are you quite mad, woman?” but instead he maintained an expression of interest. She pulled from her desk a crisp manila folder, from which she slid what appeared to be a contract. She spoke of rates paid for the size and number of transfers applied and the typical mileage expected from the driver of the vehicle. Obviously, she noted, black cabs received the most money, followed quite closely by motorcycle and motor scooter couriers. What sort of driving did he do? she asked Lynley.
This prompted him to correct her notion. He showed her his identification, and he asked her about the records kept of people who had vehicles of one sort or another decorated—and he used that term loosely—with the transfers from DragonFly Tonics. She told him that, of course, there were records because how else were people meant to be paid for swanning round London and regions beyond with advertising plastered to their vehicles?
Lynley was hoping to discover that there was no Frazer Chaplin with a contract to advertise DragonFly Tonics at all. From this, he had decided, it could be assumed that the Vespa Frazer had shown to Lynley outside Duke’s Hotel was not his at all but one produced on a moment’s inspiration and declared to be a Chaplin possession. He gave the receptionist Frazer’s name and asked if she could produce his contract.
Unfortunately, she did just that, and all of it was as Frazer had avowed. The Vespa was his. It was lime green. To it, transfers had been applied. They were, in fact, applied professionally in Shepherd’s Bush since DragonFly Tonics hardly wanted a slapdash job done with them. They were put on to last, not to be easily removed, and when they
were
removed at the end of the contract, the vehicle would be repainted.
Lynley sighed when he saw this. Unless Frazer had used a different vehicle to get up to Stoke Newington, they were back to any and all CCTV films from the area and the possibility that one of them had recorded his Vespa in the vicinity of the cemetery. They were also back to the door-to-door slog—which was going on anyway per Isabelle’s instructions—and the hope that someone had seen the scooter. Or, he reckoned, they were down to Frazer using someone else’s scooter or motorcycle to get there, because with ninety minutes to do what needed to be done and to get to Duke’s Hotel on time afterwards, he would have had to go to north London by that means. There was simply no other way that he could have managed the traffic.
Lynley was considering all this when his eyes lit upon the date of the contract: one week before Jemima died. This prompted him to dwell on dates in general, which made him realise there was a detail he had overlooked. There was indeed another way the murder of Jemima Hastings could have been managed, he thought.
H
E WAS GETTING
into his car when Havers rang him. He said, “Lynley,” whereupon the sergeant began babbling—there was no other word for it—about Victoria Street, a cash-point machine, the Home Office, and having a gin and tonic.
He thought at first that was what she’d done—had a gin and tonic or two or three—but then in the midst of her frantic monologue he picked up the word
snout
and from this he finally was able to decipher that she was asking him to meet someone at a cash-point in Victoria Street, although he still wasn’t sure why he was meant to do this.
As she finally drew breath, he said, “Havers, what’s this got to do with—”
“He was in London. The day she died. Jossie. And Whiting’s known it all along.”
That got his attention. “Who’s given you that information?”
“Hastings. The brother.” And then she banged on about Gina Dickens and someone called Meredith Powell, as well as tickets, receipts, Gordon Jossie’s habit of wearing dark glasses and a baseball cap and wasn’t
that
exactly how Yukio Matsumoto had described the man he’d seen in the cemetery and please, please, get down to Victoria Street to that cash-point because whatever Norman Whatsisname knows he isn’t spilling it on the phone and they need to know what it is. She herself was going to beard Whiting in his den or whatever the proper term was but before she could do that she needed to know what Norman had to say, so they were back to Norman and Lynley
had
to get to Victoria Street and where was he, anyway?
She took another breath, which gave Lynley the chance to tell her he was in Ennismore Gardens Mews, behind Brompton Oratory and Holy Trinity Church. He was working on the Frazer Chaplin end of things, and he reckoned—
“Sod Frazer Chaplin for a lark,” was her reply. “This is hot, this is Whiting, and this is the trail. For God’s sake, Inspector, I need you to do this.”
“What about Winston? Where is he?”
“It has to be you. Look, Winnie’s doing those CCTV films, isn’t he? The Stoke Newington films? And anyway, if Norman Whoever …God, why can’t I remember his bloody name …He’s a public school bloke. He wears pink shirts. He’s got that
voice
. He says every sentence so far back in his throat that you practically need to perform a tonsillectomy just to excavate the words. If Winnie shows up at the cash-point machine and starts talking to him …Winnie of all people …Winnie …Sir, think it
through
.”
“All right,” Lynley said. “Havers, all right.”
“Thank you,
thank
you,” she intoned. “This thing’s all a tangle, but I think we’re getting it sorted.”
He wasn’t so sure. For every time he made that his consideration, further facts seemed only to complicate matters.
He made good time over to Victoria Street by carving a route that took him ultimately through Belgrave Square. He parked in the underground car park at the Met and walked back over to Victoria Street, where he found the Barclay’s cash-point machine closest to Broadway, next to a Ryman’s stationery shop.
Havers’ snout was a case of by-his-clothes-shalt-thee-know-him. His shirt wasn’t pink. It was bright fuchsia, and his necktie featured ducklings. He clearly wasn’t cut out for a life of intrigue since he was pacing the pavement and pausing to peer into the window of Ryman’s as if studying which kind of filing tray he wished to purchase.
Lynley felt inordinately foolish, but he approached the man and said, “Norman?” When the other started, he said to him affably, “Barbara Havers thought I might interest you in a gin and tonic.”
Norman cast a look left and right. He said, “Christ, for a moment I thought you were one of them.”
“One of whom?”
“Look. We can’t talk here.” He looked at his watch, one of those multidial affairs useful for diving and, one presumed, going to the moon as well. He said as he did so, “Act like you’re asking me the time please. Reset your own watch or something …Christ, you carry a
pocket
watch? I’ve not seen one of those in—”
“Family heirloom.” Lynley looked at the time as Norman made much of showing him the face of his own piece. Lynley wasn’t sure which one of the dials he was meant to look at but he nodded cooperatively.
“We can’t talk here,” Norman said when they’d completed this part of the charade.
“Whyever—”
“CCTV,” Norman murmured. “We’ve got to go somewhere else. They’re going to pick us up on film and I’m dead if they do.”
This seemed wildly dramatic until Lynley realised Norman was talking about losing his job and not his life. He said, “I think that’s a bit of a problem, don’t you? There’re cameras everywhere.”
“Look, go up to the cash machine. Get some money. I’m going into Ryman’s to make a purchase. You do the same.”
“Norman, Ryman’s will likely have a camera.”
“Just bloody
do
it,” Norman said through his teeth.
It came to Lynley that the man was honestly afraid, not just playing at spies and spy masters. So he fished out his bank card and went to the cash-point machine cooperatively. He withdrew some money, ducked into Ryman’s, and found Norman looking at a display of sticky pads. He didn’t join him there, assuming that proximity would unnerve the man. Instead, he went to the greeting cards and studied them, picking up one then another then a third and fourth, a man intent upon finding something appropriate. When he saw Norman at last approach the till, he chose a card at random and did likewise. It was there they had their extremely brief tête-à-tête, spoken in a fashion that Norman seemed intent upon making look as casual as possible, if such was even conceivable, considering he spoke out of the side of his mouth.
He said, “There’s something of a scrum over there.”
“At the Home Office? What’s going on?”
“It’s definitely to do with Hampshire,” he said. “It’s something big, something serious, and they’re moving dead fast to deal with it before word gets out.”
I
SABELLE
A
RDERY HAD
spent a good number of years putting the details of her life into separate compartments. Thus, she had no difficulty doing just that on the day following Thomas Lynley’s call upon her. There was DI Lynley on her team, and there was Thomas Lynley in her bed. She had no intention of confusing the two. Besides, she was not stupid enough to consider their encounter as anything other than sex, mutually satisfying and potentially duplicable. Beyond that, her daytime dilemma at the Met did not allow for even a moment of recollection about anything, and especially about her previous night with Lynley. For this was Day One in the End of Days scenario that Assistant Commissioner Hillier had spelled out for her, and if she was going to be shown the door at New Scotland Yard, then it was her intention to go out of that door with a case sewn up behind her.
This was her thinking when Lynley arrived in her office. She felt a disagreeable jump of her heart at the sight of him, so she said briskly, “What is it, Thomas?” and she rose from her desk, brushed past him, and called into the corridor, “Dorothea? What’re we hearing from the Stoke Newington door-to-door? And where’s Winston got to with that CCTV footage?”
She got no reply and shouted, “Dorothea! Where the hell …!” and then said, “Damn it,” and returned to her desk where again she said, “What
is
it, Thomas?” but this time remained standing.
He started to close the door. She said, “Leave it open, please.”