This Body of Death (30 page)

Meredith was silent. His hand was still on her arm and he became aware of how hard he was gripping her and how he must be hurting her, actually. He felt her fingers move against his where they were like claws on her bare skin and it came to him that she wasn’t trying to loosen his grip but rather she was caressing his fingers and then his hand, making small, slow circles to tell him that she understood his grief, although the truth of the matter was that she could not understand, nor could anyone else, what it was like to be robbed of everyone, and to have no hope of filling the void.

“’C
OURSE HE WAS HERE,” HAD BEEN
C
LIFF
C
OWARD’S CONFIRMATION
of Gordon Jossie’s alibi. “Where else’s he s’posed to be, eh?” A short cocky little bloke wearing crusty blue jeans and a sweat-stained headband, he’d been leaning against the bar at his regular watering hole in the village of Winstead, a pint in front of him and an empty crisp bag balled up next to his fist. He played with this as they spoke. He gave few details. They were working on a pub roof near Frith and he expected he’d know well enough if Gordon Jossie hadn’t been there six days ago as it was only the two of them and
someone
was up on that scaffold grabbing the bundles of reeds as he’d hoisted them up. “’Spect that was Gordon,” he’d said with a grin. “Why? What’s he s’posed to’ve done? Mugged some old lady in Ringwood market square?”

“It’s more a question of murder,” Barbara told him.

Cliff’s face altered, but his story did not. Gordon Jossie had been with him, he said, and Gordon Jossie was no murderer. “I think I’d bloody well know,” he noted. “Been working for him over a year. Who’s he s’posed to have done?”

“Jemima Hastings.”

“
Jemima?
Not a chance.”

They went from Winstead up to Itchen Abbas, bypassing Winchester on the motorway. On a small property between Itchen Abbas and the hamlet of Abbotstone, they found the master thatcher at whose side Gordon Jossie had worked years earlier to learn the trade. He was called Ringo Heath—“Don’t ask,” Heath said sourly. “It might have been John, Paul, or George and don’t I bloody well know it”—and when they arrived, he was seated on a battered bench, on the shady side of a brick house. He seemed to be whittling, as in one hand he had a wicked-looking knife with a sharp blade curving into a hook, and he was applying this to a thin switch, splitting it first and then sharpening both of its ends into arrow-tip points. At his feet lay a pile of switches yet to be seen to. In a wooden box next to him on the bench, he was placing those that had already been whittled. To Barbara, they looked like toothpicks for a giant, each of them perhaps a yard or more long. They also looked like potential weapons. As did the knife itself, which she learned was called a spar hook. And the toothpicks were the spars, which were used to make staples.

Heath held one up, extended between his two palms. He bent it nearly double and then released it. It sprang back to its original straight line. “Pliable,” he told them although they hadn’t asked. “Hazel wood. You c’n use willow at a pinch, but hazel’s best.” It would be twisted into a staple, he told them, and the staple would be used to hold the reed in place once it was in position on the rooftop. “Gets buried in the reeds and eventually rots away, but that’s no matter. Reeds’re all compressed by then and that’s what you want: compression. Best rooftop money can buy, thatch is. It’s not all about chocolate-box houses and front gardens done up with pansies, is it?”

“I expect not,” Barbara said cooperatively. “What d’you think, Winnie?”

“Looks good to me, roof like that,” Nkata said. “Bit of a problem with fire, I’d ’spect.”

“Bah, nonsense,” Heath said. “Old wives’ tale.”

Barbara doubted it. But they weren’t there to talk about the flammable nature of reeds on rooftops. She stated their purpose: Gordon Jossie and his apprenticeship with Ringo Heath. They’d phoned Heath in advance to track him down. He’d said, “Scotland Yard? What’re you lot doing out here?” but otherwise he’d been cooperative.

What could he tell them about Gordon Jossie? Barbara began. Did he remember him?

“Oh. Aye. No reason to forget Gordon.” Heath continued his work as he gave his history with Jossie. He’d come to work as an apprentice a bit older than usual. He’d been twenty-one. Usually an apprentice was sixteen “which’s better for training as they don’t know a thing about a thing, do they, and they’re still at the point when they even might
believe
they don’t know a thing about a thing, eh? But twenty-one’s a bit old ’cause you don’t want some bloke set in his ways. I was a bit reluctant to take him on.”

But take him on he did, and things turned out well. Hard worker, Jossie was. A bloke who talked very little and listened a lot and “didn’t go round wearing those sodding earphones with music blasting away like kids do now. Half the time you can’t even get their attention, eh? You’re up on the scaffold shouting at ’em and they’re down below listening to whoever and bobbing their heads to the
beat
.” He said this last word scornfully, a man who obviously did not share his namesake’s passion for music.

Jossie, on the other hand, hadn’t been like the typical apprentice.
And
he’d been willing to do anything he’d been assigned to do, without claiming something was “beneath him or rubbish like that.” Once he was given actual thatching jobs to do—which, by the way, did not happen for the first nine months of his apprenticeship—he wasn’t ever above asking a question. And it would be a
good
question and never once did it have to do with “How much money c’n I expect to make, Ringo?” like he was thinking he’d be going out to buy some Maserati on what a thatcher makes. “It’s a good living, I tell him, but it’s not
that
good, so if you’re ’specting to impress the ladies with golden cuff links or whatever, you’re barking up a tree with no leaves, if you know what I mean. What I tell him is that there’s always need for a thatcher ’cause we’re talking ’bout listed buildings, eh? And they’re all round the south and up into Gloucestershire and beyond and they got to
stay
thatched. There’s no replacing ’em with tiles or anything else. So if you’re good—and he meant to be good, let me tell you—you work all year and you’ve gen’rally got more bookings than you c’n handle.”

Gordon Jossie had apparently been a model apprentice: With no complaint he’d started out doing nothing more than fetching, carrying, hoisting, cleaning up, burning rubbish—and according to Heath he “did it all
right
, mind you. No cutting corners. I could tell he was going to be good when I got him on the scaffold. This is detail work, this is. Oh, it looks like slapping reeds onto the rafters and that’s that, doesn’t it, but it’s step-by-step and a decent roof—a big one, say—takes months to put on ’cause it’s not like laying tiles or pounding shingles, is it? It’s working with a natural product, it is, so there’s no two reeds the same diameter and the length of them’s not exact. This is something takes patience and skill and it takes years to get it down so you can do a roof properly.”

Gordon Jossie worked for him as an apprentice for nearly four years, and by that time he’d gone far beyond the apprentice stage and was more like a partner. In fact, Ringo Heath had wanted to bring him on as a bona fide partner, but Gordon wanted to have his own business. So he’d left with Heath’s blessing, and had begun the way they all began: subcontracted to someone with a larger concern till he was able to break out on his own.

“Ever since, I end up with one after ’nother lazy sods to work as apprentices,” Heath concluded, “and believe me, I’d take ’nother older bloke like Gordon Jossie in the blink of an eye, if one came round.”

He’d filled the wooden box with completed spars as they were speaking, and he heaved it up and took it over to an open-back lorry, where he slung it alongside various crates that sat among a collection of curious implements, which Heath was happy to identify for them without being asked to do so. He was building up a real head of steam on his topic. They had shearing hooks for carving into the thatch—

“Takes about a millimeter off, it does, sharp as anything, and you got to use it with care lest you slice into your hand.”

—leggetts which were used to dress the thatch and which, to Barbara, looked like nothing more than an aluminium grill with a handle, something one might use on the cooker to fry up bacon; the Dutchman, which was used in
place
of the leggett to dress the thatch when the roof was curved …

Barbara nodded sagely and Nkata jotted everything in his notebook, as if expecting he’d be tested on it later. She was having trouble keeping it all straight and determining how she would bring the thatcher away from his lengthy exposition on the process of thatching a roof and back to the subject of Gordon Jossie, when Heath mentioned “and ever’one of them’s different,” which brought her round to pay closer attention to what he was saying.

“…bits an’ bobs that the blacksmith provides, like the crooks an’ the pins.” The crooks were curved at one end—hence the name, as they resembled a shepherd’s crook in miniature—and these were hooked round the reeds and driven into the rafters to hold them in place. The pins, which resembled long spikes with an eye at one end and a sharp point at the other, held the reeds in place while the thatcher was working. These came from the blacksmith, and the interesting bit was that every blacksmith made them according to however he wanted to make them, especially as far as the point was concerned.

“Forged on four sides, forged on two sides, cut to give it a slash tip, spun on a grinding wheel …Whatever the blacksmith fancies. I like the Dutch ones best. I like a
proper
forging, I do.” He said this last as if one could not expect such a thing as proper forging to go on in England any longer.

But Barbara was taken by the very idea of blacksmithing and how it might relate to making a weapon. The thatching tools
themselves
were weaponlike, if it came to that, no matter Heath’s referring to them dismissively as the bits and bobs of his job. Barbara picked one up—she chose a pin—and found its tip was nice and sharp and suitable for murder. She handed it to Nkata and saw by his expression that they were of the same mind on the matter.

She said, “Why was he twenty-one years old when he came to you, Mr. Heath? Do you know?”

Heath took a moment, apparently to adjust to the abrupt change in topic as he’d been nattering on about why the Dutch took more pride in their work than the English and this seemed to have to do with the EU and the mass migration of Albanians and other Eastern Europeans into the UK. He blinked and said, “Eh? Who?”

“Twenty-one was old for an apprentice, you said. What had Gordon Jossie been doing before he came to you?”

College, Ringo Heath told them. He’d been a student in some college in Winchester, studying one trade or another although Heath couldn’t recall which it was. He’d brought two letters with him, though. Recommendations these were, from someone or other who’d taught him. It wasn’t the typical way an apprentice presented himself for potential employment, so he’d been quite impressed with that. Did they want to see the letters? He thought he still had them.

When Barbara told him that they did indeed want to see them, Heath turned towards his house and bellowed, “Kitten! You’re needed.” To this a most unkittenlike woman emerged. She carried a rolling pin under her arm and she looked the type who’d be happy to use it: big, brawling, and muscular.

Kitten said, “Really, pet, why’ve you got to yell? I’m only just inside, in the kitchen,” in a surprisingly genteel voice, completely at odds with her appearance. She sounded like an upstairs someone from a costume drama, but she looked like someone who’d be washing the cook pots in a decidedly downstairs scullery.

Heath simpered at her, saying, “Darling girl. Don’t know the strength of my own voice, do I. Sorry. Have we still got them letters that Gordon Jossie handed over when he first wanted a job? You know which ones I mean, don’t you? The ones from his college? You remember them?” And to Barbara and Winston, “She keeps the books and such, does my Kitten. And the girl’s got a mind for facts and figures that’d make you dizzy. I keep telling her to go on telly. One of those quiz programmes or summat, if you know what I mean. I say we could be millionaires, we could, if she got herself on a quiz show.”

“Oh, you do go on, Ringo,” Kitten said. “I made that chicken and leek pie you love, by the by.”

“Precious girl.”

“Silly boy.”

“I’ll see you when I see you.”

“Oh, you do talk, Ring.”

“Uh …About those letters?” Barbara cut in. She glanced at Winston, who was watching the exchange between man and wife like a bloke at an amorous Ping-Pong match.

Kitten said that she would fetch them, as she reckoned they were in Ringo’s business files. She wouldn’t be a moment, she said, because she liked to stay organised since “leave things to Ringo, we’d be living under mounds of paperwork, let me tell you.”

“True enough,” Ringo said, “darling girl.”

“Handsome—”

“
Thank
you, Mrs. Heath,” Barbara said pointedly.

Kitten made kissy noises at her husband, who made a gesture that seemed to indicate he’d love to swat her on the bum, at which she giggled and disappeared inside the house. Within two minutes, she was back with them, and she carried a manila folder from which she extricated the aforementioned letters for their inspection.

These were, Barbara saw, recommendations attesting to Gordon Jossie’s character, his work ethic, his pleasant demeanour, his willingness to take instruction, and all the et ceteras. They were written on the letterhead of Winchester Technical College II, and one of them came from a Jonas Bligh while the other had been written by a Keating Crawford. They’d both indicated knowledge of Gordon Jossie from within the classroom and from outside the classroom. Fine young man, they declared, trustworthy and good-hearted and well deserving of an opportunity to learn a trade like thatching. One would not go wrong in hiring him. He was bound to succeed.

Barbara asked could she keep the letters. She’d return them to the Heaths, of course, but for the time being, if they didn’t mind …

They didn’t mind. At this point, however, Ringo Heath asked what Scotland Yard wanted with Gordon Jossie anyway. “What’s he s’posed to’ve done?” he asked them.