This Body of Death (58 page)

God, why were they
always
in black? Isabelle wondered.

—who carried a rucksack and who made for the trees. Away from the chapel, out of sight altogether.

Yukio waited then. But Jemima Hastings did not return to the chapel clearing. So he went to look for her and that was how he discovered what he had not seen before: that there was a tiny building abutting the chapel. In this building Jemima lay wounded, her hands scrabbling round her throat, which was how he saw the spike. He thought she was trying to pull it out, and so he helped her.

And thus, Isabelle thought, the river of blood from her artery, which had already spurted out upon the yellow shirt worn by her killer, began to pulse out with every beat of her heart. Nothing Yukio could have done would have saved her. Not with a wound like that, exacerbated when he’d removed the spike.

If
, she thought, he was to be believed. And she had a terrible feeling that he was indeed.

One man in sunglasses and a baseball cap. The other in black. They would need to try to get e-fits of both of them, and Isabelle prayed only that this could be managed before Zaynab Bourne got there and threw a spanner in everything.

R
OBBIE
H
ASTINGS HAD ENCOUNTERED NO DIFFICULTY WHEN
he went to the Lyndhurst police station. His thought had been to insist on quick action, but that wasn’t necessary as it turned out. Upon identifying himself, he’d been escorted into the chief superintendent’s office, where Zachary Whiting had offered him mid-morning coffee and heard him out with not a single interruption. As Rob spoke, Whiting frowned in concern, but the frown turned out to be about Rob’s upset rather than about the questions he was asking or the demands for action he was making. At the conclusion of Rob’s recitation of concerns, Whiting had said, “Good God, it’s all in hand, Mr. Hastings. You should have been informed of this, and I can’t think why you weren’t.”

Rob wondered
what
was in hand, and this he asked, adding that there were train tickets, there was a hotel receipt. He knew that these had been given to Whiting and what had Whiting done about them? What had he done about Jossie, as a matter of fact?

Again, Whiting reassured him. What he meant when he said that things were in hand was that everything he—Whiting—knew, everything he had been told, and everything that had been handed to him was now in the possession of the Scotland Yard detectives who’d come down to Hampshire in connection with the London murder enquiry. That meant the tickets and the hotel receipt as well, Whiting told him. They were likely in London at this point, as he’d sent them up by special messenger. Mr. Hastings wasn’t to worry about that. If Gordon Jossie had perpetrated this crime against Mr. Hastings’s sister—

“
If
?” Rob had said.

—then Mr. Hastings could expect Scotland Yard to come calling again in very short order.

“I don’t understand why the London police and not you lot here—”

Whiting held up his hand. He said it was a complicated matter because more than one police jurisdiction was involved. As to why it was Scotland Yard looking into matters and not the locals from where Mr. Hastings’ sister had been killed, he couldn’t say. That was likely due to some political situation up in London. But what Whiting
could
say was that the reason the Hampshire constabulary was not handling the case had to do with this being a killing that had not occurred in Hampshire in the first place. The Hampshire police
would
cooperate and
were
cooperating fully with London, naturally. That meant handing over whatever they had or were given or what they learned, and once again he wanted to assure Mr. Hastings that this had been done and was continuing to be done.

“Jossie admits to being in London,” Rob told Whiting again. “I spoke to him myself. The bastard
admits
it.”

And that, too, would be transmitted to the London police. There would be someone brought to justice, Mr. Hastings. That was likely to happen in very short order.

Whiting personally ushered Rob to the reception area at the end of their meeting. He introduced him along the way to the duty press officer, to the sergeant in charge of the custody suite, and to two special constables who liaised with the community.

In reception, Whiting informed the special on duty that until an arrest had been made in the London murder of Jemima Hastings, whenever her brother needed to see the chief superintendent, he was to be given access. Rob appreciated all of this. It went a great way towards soothing his mind.

He returned to his home and hooked up the horse trailer. With Frank as his companion—head hanging out of the window, tongue and ears flapping—he trundled from Burley along the lanes to Sway and from there to Gordon Jossie’s holding. The narrowness of the roads and the fact of the horse trailer made the going slow, but it was of no account. He didn’t expect Gordon Jossie to be on the property at this time of day.

That turned out to be the case. When Rob reversed up the cottage drive and positioned the horse trailer near the paddock that contained the two ponies from the Minstead area, no one came out of the cottage to stop him. The absence of Jossie’s golden retriever told him, as well, that no one was home. He let Frank out of the Land Rover to have a run, but told the Weimaraner to keep his distance when he brought the ponies from the paddock. As if he understood this perfectly, Frank headed in the direction of the barn, snuffling along the ground as he went.

The ponies weren’t as skittish as some within the Perambulation, so it wasn’t difficult to get them into the horse trailer. This went some way towards explaining how Jossie had managed them when he brought them here as, unlike Rob, he wasn’t an experienced horseman. It did not, however, explain what Jossie was doing with the two ponies in the first place, so far from where they normally grazed and belonging to someone else. He would have seen how their tails were clipped, so even had he mistaken them for his own ponies upon a glance, a closer look would have told him they were from another area. Keeping them on his holding when they weren’t his responsibility, and longer than they clearly needed to be there, was an expense any other commoner would have avoided. Rob couldn’t reckon why Gordon Jossie had taken it on.

When he had them ready for transport, Rob returned to the paddock to close its gate. There he noticed what he might have noticed on earlier visits to the holding had he not been first consumed with concerns about his sister and then later taken up by considerations ranging from Gina Dickens’ presence to that of the ponies. Jossie, he saw, had been putting some work into the paddock. The gate was relatively new, a number of the fence posts were new, and the barbed wire strung between them was new as well. The freshness of all this, however, comprised only one part of the paddock. The rest had yet to be seen to. Indeed, the rest was something of a ruin, with posts atilt and areas overgrown with weeds.

This gave him pause. It wasn’t, he knew, unusual for a commoner to make improvements upon his holding. This was generally necessary. It was, however, odd that someone like Jossie—characterised by the nearly compulsive care with which he did everything else—would have left a job such as this one unfinished. He went back inside the inclosure for a closer look.

Rob recalled Gina Dickens’ desire for a garden, and for a moment he wondered if she and Jossie had taken the unlikely decision to have that garden here. If Gordon intended to build another paddock somewhere else for ponies, it would explain why the thatcher had gone no further with his scheme to improve this one as a holding pen for stock. On the other hand, discontinuing this paddock’s use as a holding pen would mean moving the heavy granite trough to another location, a task requiring the sort of equipment Gordon didn’t possess.

Rob frowned at this. The trough suddenly seemed to him very much like the presence of the ponies: unnecessary. For hadn’t there been a trough here already? Within the paddock? Surely, there had.

He looked for it. It didn’t take long. He found the old trough in the unrestored section of the paddock, heavily overgrown with brambles, vines, and weeds. It stood some distance from the water source, which made the new trough not altogether unreasonable as it could be more easily reached by hosepipe. Still, it was strange that Gordon would go to the expense of a new trough without having uncovered the old one. He had to have suspected it was there.

It was a curiosity. Rob intended to have a word with Gordon Jossie about it.

He returned to his vehicle and murmured to the ponies moving restlessly within the trailer. He called to Frank, the dog came running, and they set off to the northernmost part of the Perambulation.

It took nearly an hour to get there, even keeping to the main roads. Rob was stymied in his progress by a train stopped on the railway tracks in Brockenhurst, blocking the crossing, and then again by a tour coach with a flat tyre that caused a tailback on the south side of Lyndhurst. When he finally got beyond it and into Lyndhurst itself, the restiveness of the animals in the trailer told him that taking them up to Minstead was a bad idea. As a result, he veered onto the Bournemouth Road and made for Bank. Beyond it and along a sheltered lane stood the tiny enclave of Gritnam, a circle of back-to-back gardenless cottages facing outward onto the lawns, the trees, and the streams that comprised the expanse of Gritnam Wood. The lane itself went no farther than Gritnam, so there was likely no safer place in the New Forest to release ponies that had too long been kept in Gordon Jossie’s paddock.

Rob parked in the middle of the lane that encircled the cottages, as the place was so tiny there was no other spot to leave a vehicle. There amid a silence broken only by the call of chaffinches and the trill of wrens, he eased the ponies out into freedom once more. Two children emerged from one of the cottages to watch him at work, but long schooled in the ways of the New Forest, they did not approach. Only when the ponies were making their way towards a stream that gleamed some distance into the trees did either child speak and then it was to say, “We got kittens here, if you want to see ’em. We got six. Mum says we’re meant to give ’em way.”

Rob went over to where the two children stood, barefoot and freckled in the summer heat. A boy and girl, each of them held a kitten in arms.

“Why’ve you got the ponies?” the boy asked. He seemed to be the elder of the two by several years. His sister watched him adoringly. She put Rob in mind of the way Jemima had once watched him. She put Rob in mind of how he’d failed her.

He was about to explain what he was doing with the ponies when his mobile rang. It was on the seat of his Land Rover, but he could hear it clearly.

He set off to take the call, heard the news all of the agisters dreaded hearing, and swore when he was given it. For the second time in a week, a New Forest pony had been hit by a motorist. Rob’s services were wanted in the manner in which he least wished to give them: The animal was going to have to be killed.

T
HE WORRY
M
EREDITH
Powell felt had grown to full-blown anxiety by the morning. All of it had to do with Gina. They’d shared the double bed in Meredith’s bedroom, and Gina had asked in the darkness if Meredith didn’t mind holding her hand till she went to sleep. She’d said, “I know it’s ridiculous to ask but I think it might soothe me a bit …,” and Meredith had told her yes, of course, she didn’t even
need
to explain, and she’d covered Gina’s hand with her own and Gina’s hand had turned and clasped hers and there their hands had lain for hours upon hours on the mattress between them. Gina had fallen asleep quickly—which of course made perfect sense as the poor girl was exhausted by what she’d gone through at Gordon Jossie’s cottage—but her sleep was light and fitful and every time Meredith had tried to ease her hand away from Gina’s, Gina’s fingers tightened, she gave a small whimper, and Meredith’s heart had gone out to her again. So in the darkness, she’d thought about what to do about Gina’s situation. For Gina had to be protected from Gordon, and Meredith knew that she herself might be the only person willing to protect her.

Asking for police participation in the matter was out of the question. Chief Superintendent Whiting and his relationship with Gordon—whatever it was—put paid to that, and even if that were not the situation, the police weren’t about to deploy their resources upon the protection of a single individual based on the strength of her bruises. Truth was that cops wanted a lot more than a few bruises before they did anything. They generally wanted a court order, an injunction filed, charges made, and the like, and Meredith had a very good feeling that Gina Dickens was too frightened to apply herself to any of this anyway.

She could be urged to remain at Meredith’s house, but that could hardly go on indefinitely. While it was true that no one was more accommodating than Meredith’s own parents, it was also true that they were already sheltering Meredith and her daughter and anyway, since Meredith had impulsively come up with the gas leak tale to explain Gina’s presence, her mum and dad would assume the gas leak would be fixed within twenty-four hours.

That being the case, Gina would be expected to return to her bed-sit above the Mad Hatter Tea Rooms. This, of course, was the worst place for her because Gordon Jossie knew where to find her. So an alternative needed to be developed, and by morning Meredith had an idea what that alternative might be.

“Rob Hastings will protect you,” she told Gina over breakfast. “Once we tell him what Gordon did to you, he’ll certainly help. Rob’s never liked him. He’s got rooms in his house that no one’s using and he’ll offer one without our even asking.”

Gina hadn’t eaten much, merely picking at a bowl of grapefruit segments and taking one bite of a piece of dry toast. She was silent for a moment before she said, “You must have been a very good friend to Jemima, Meredith.”

That was hardly the case since she hadn’t been able to talk Jemima out of taking up with Gordon and look what had happened. Meredith was about to say this, but Gina went on.

She said, “I need to go back.”

“To your bed-sit? Bad idea. You can’t put yourself where he knows where to find you. He’ll never think you might be at Rob’s. It’s the safest place.”

But, surprisingly, Gina had said, “Not the bed-sit. I must go back to Gordon’s. I’ve had the night to sleep on it, and I’ve thought about what happened. I can see how I was the one to provoke—”

“No, no, no!” Meredith cried. For this was how abused women always acted. Given time to “think,” what they generally ended up thinking was that
they
were at fault, somehow provoking their men to do what they’d done to hurt them. They ended up telling themselves that if they’d only kept their mouths shut or acted compliant or said something different, fists would
never
have been swung in their direction.

Meredith had tried her best to explain this to Gina, but Gina had been obdurate. She’d said to Meredith in reply, “I know all that, Meredith. I’ve got my degree in sociology. But this is different.”