This Body of Death (59 page)

“That’s also what they always say!” Meredith had cut in.

“I know. Trust me. I
do
know. But you can’t think I’d let him hurt me again. And the truth is …” She looked away from Meredith, as if gathering the courage to admit the worst. “I do honestly love him.”

Meredith was aghast. Her face must have shown it because Gina went on to say, “I just can’t think, at the end of the day, that he hurt Jemima. He’s not that kind of man.”

“He went to London! He lied about going! He lied to you, to Scotland Yard as well. Why would he lie if he didn’t have a reason to be lying?
And
he lied to you from the very first about going there. He said it was Holland. He said it was to buy reeds. You told me that and you must see what it means.”

Gina let Meredith have her entire say in the matter before she herself drew the conversation to its conclusion. She said, “He knew I’d be upset if he told me he’d gone to see Jemima. He knew I’d be a bit unreasonable. Which is what I’ve been, which is certainly what I was last night. Look. You’ve been good to me. You’ve been the best friend I have in the New Forest. But I love him and I
must
see if there’s a chance he and I can make things work. He’s under terrible stress right now because of Jemima. He’s reacted badly, but I’ve not reacted well either. I can’t throw it all away because he did something that hurt me a bit.”

“He may have hurt you,” Meredith cried, “but he
killed
Jemima!”

Gina said firmly, “I don’t believe that.”

There was no more talking to her about the matter, Meredith discovered. There was only her intention to return to Gordon Jossie, to “give things another try” in the fashion of abused women everywhere. This was bad, but what was worse was that Meredith had no choice. She had to let her go.

Still, worry over Gina Dickens dominated most of her morning. She had no creative energy to apply to her work for Gerber & Hudson and when a phone call came into the office for her, she was happy enough to have to use her elevenses in a dash over to the office of Michele Daugherty, who’d made that call and said to her, “Got something for you. Have you time to meet?”

Meredith purchased a take-away orange juice and drank it on her route to the private investigator’s office. She’d nearly forgotten that she’d hired Michele Daugherty, so much having happened since she’d asked her to look into Gina Dickens.

The investigator was on the phone when she arrived. At long last Michele Daugherty called her into her office, where a reassuring stack of papers seemed to indicate she’d been hard at work on the brief that Meredith had given her.

The investigator wasted no time with social preliminaries. “There is no Gina Dickens,” she said. “Are you sure you’ve got the right name? The right spelling?”

At first, Meredith didn’t understand what the investigator meant, so she said, “This is someone I
know
, Ms. Daugherty. She’s not just a name I heard mentioned in a pub or something. She’s actually …rather …well, she’s rather a friend.”

Michele Daugherty didn’t question why Meredith was having a friend investigated. She merely said, “Be that as it may. There’s no Gina Dickens that I can find. There’re Dickenses aplenty but no one called Gina in her age range. Or in any other age range, if it comes down to it.”

She went on to explain that she’d tried every possible spelling and variation of the given name. Considering that Gina was likely a nickname or an abbreviated form of a longer name, she’d gone into her databases with Gina, Jean, Janine, Regina, Virginia, Georgina, Marjorina, Angelina, Jacquelina, Gianna, Eugenia, and Evangelina. She said, “I
could
go on like this indefinitely, but I expect you’d rather not pay for that. At the end of the day, when things go in this direction, I tell my clients it’s safe to say that there is no person by that name ’less she’s managed to slip through the system without having left a mark on it anywhere, which isn’t possible. She
is
a Brit, isn’t she? No doubt of that? Chance she might be a foreigner? Aussie? New Zealander? Canadian?”

“Of course she’s British. I spent last night with her, for heaven’s sake.” As if
that
meant anything, Meredith thought as soon as she said it. “She’s been living with a man called Gordon Jossie, but she has a bed-sit in Lyndhurst above the Mad Hatter Tea Rooms. Tell me how you searched. Tell me where you looked.”

“Where I always look. Where any investigator, including the police, would look. My dear, people leave records. They leave trails without knowing: birth, education, health, credit history, financial dealings throughout their lives, parking tickets, the ownership of
anything
that might have required financing or provided a guarantee or warranty and thus needed to be registered, magazine subscriptions, newspaper subscriptions, phone bills, water bills, electricity bills. One searches through all this.”

“What exactly are you saying, then?” Meredith was feeling quite numb.

“I’m saying that there is no Gina Dickens, full stop. It’s impossible not to leave a trail, no matter who you are or where you live. So if a person
doesn’t
leave a trail, it’s fairly safe to conclude she isn’t who she says she is. And there you have it.”

“So who is she?” Meredith considered the possibilities. “
What
is she?”

“I’ve no idea. But the facts suggest she’s someone very different from whoever it is she’s pretending to be.”

Meredith stared at the investigator. She didn’t want to understand, but the fact was that she was understanding all of it too terribly well. She said numbly, “Gordon Jossie, then. J-o-s-s-i-e.”

“What about Gordon Jossie?”

“Start on him.”

G
ORDON HAD TO
return to his holding for a load of Turkish reeds. These had been held for inspection at the port for a maddening length of time, a circumstance that had considerably slowed his progress on the roof of the Royal Oak Pub. It seemed to Gordon that the terrorist attacks of recent years had resulted in all port authorities believing there were Muslim extremists hidden within every crate on every ship that docked in England. They were especially suspicious of items having their provenance in countries with which they were not personally familiar. That reeds actually
grew
in Turkey was a piece of information most port officials did not possess. So those reeds had to be examined at excruciating length, and if such examination ate up a week or two, there was not much he could do about it. It was yet another reason to try to get the reeds from the Netherlands, Gordon thought. At least Holland was a familiar place in the eyes of the hopeless blokes who were assigned the duty of inspecting that which was shipped into the country.

When he and Cliff Coward returned to his holding for the delivery of the reeds, he saw at once that Rob Hastings had made good on his word. The two ponies were gone from the paddock. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do about this, but then perhaps, he thought wearily, there was nothing to be done, things being the way they were at the moment.

This was something that Cliff had wanted to discuss. Seeing Gina’s car gone from the vicinity of Gordon’s house, Cliff asked about her. Not where she was but how she was, the same “How’s our Gina then,” that he asked nearly every day. Cliff had been quite taken with Gina from the first.

Gordon had told him the truth. “Gone,” was how he put it.

Cliff repeated the word dumbly, as if the term were slow to sink into his head. When it got to his brain, he said, “What? She’s left you?”

To which Gordon replied, “That’s how it works, Cliff.”

This prompted a lengthy discourse from Cliff on the subject of what kind of shelf life—as he put it—girls like Gina generally had. “You got six days or less to get her back, man,” Cliff informed him. “You think blokes’re going to let a girl like Gina walk round the streets without trying it on? Ring her up, say sorry, get her back. Say sorry even if you didn’t do nothing to make her leave. Say anything. Just
do
something.”

“Nothing to be done,” Gordon told him.

“You’re off your nut,” Cliff decided.

So when Gina actually showed up while they were loading reeds into the back of Gordon’s pickup, Cliff made himself scarce. From the elevated bed of the truck, he saw her red Mini Cooper coming along the lane, said, “Give you twenty minutes to sort this one, Gordon,” and then he was gone, heading in the direction of the barn.

Gordon walked towards the end of the driveway, so when Gina drove in, he was in the vicinity of the front garden. At heart, he knew that Cliff was right. She was the kind of woman blokes lined up to have the slightest chance of winning over, and he was a fool if he didn’t try to get her back.

She braked when she saw him. The car roof was down, and her hair was windblown from the drive. He wanted to touch it because he knew how it would feel, so soft against his hands.

He approached the car. “Can we talk?”

She was wearing her sunglasses against the brightness of another fine summer day, but she shoved them to the top of her head. Her eyes, he saw, were red rimmed. He was the one who’d brought this on, her crying. It was another burden, yet another failure to be the man he wanted to be.

“Please. Can we talk?” he repeated.

She looked at him warily. She pressed her lips together, and he could see her bite down on them. Not as if she wanted to keep herself from speaking but as if she feared what might happen if she did speak. He reached for the handle of the door, and she flinched slightly.

He said, “Oh, Gina.” He took a step back, in order to allow her to decide. When she opened the door, he felt he could breathe again. He said, “C’n we … ? Let’s sit over here.”

“Over here” was the garden she’d made so lovely for them, with the table and chairs, the torches and the candles. “Over here” was where they’d had their suppers in the fine weather of the summer amid the flowers she’d planted and painstakingly watered. He walked to the table and waited for her. He watched her but said nothing. She had to make the decision on her own. He prayed she’d make the one that would give them a future.

She got out of the car. She glanced at his pickup, at the reeds he was loading into it, at the paddock beyond it. He saw her draw her eyebrows together. She said, “What’s happened to the horses?”

He said, “They’re gone.”

When she looked at him, her expression told him she thought he’d done this for her, because she was afraid of the animals. Part of him wanted to tell her the truth: that Rob Hastings had taken them because Gordon hadn’t the need—let alone the right—to hang on to them. But the other part of him saw how he could use the moment to win her and he wanted to win her. So he let her believe whatever she wanted to believe about the ponies’ removal.

She came to join him in the garden. They were separated from the lane by the hedge. They were also sequestered from Cliff Coward’s curious eyes by the cottage that stood between the front garden and the barn. They could speak here and not be heard or seen. This went some distance towards making Gordon easier although it seemed to have the opposite effect on Gina, who looked round, shivered as if with cold, and clasped her arms to her body.

“What’ve you done to yourself?” he asked her. For he saw deep bruises upon her arms, ugly marks that made him move towards her. “Gina, what’s happened?”

She looked down at her arms as if she’d forgotten. She said dully, “I hit myself.”

“What did you say?”

She said, “Have you never wanted to hurt yourself because nothing you do ever seems to come out right?”

“What? How did you—?”

“I pounded,” she said. “When it wasn’t enough, I used …” She’d not been looking at him, but now she did, and he saw her eyes were full.

“You used something to hurt yourself with? Gina …” He took a step towards her. She backed away. He felt struck. He said, “Why did you do this?”

A tear spilled over. She wiped it away with the back of her hand. “I’m so ashamed,” she said. “I did it.”

For a horrible moment he thought she meant that
she’d
killed Jemima, but she clarified with, “I took those tickets, that hotel receipt. I found them and I took them and I was the one who gave them to …I’m so
sorry
.”

She began to weep in earnest then, and he went to her. He drew her into his arms and she allowed this and because she allowed it, he felt his heart open to her as it had not ever opened to anyone, even to Jemima.

He said, “I shouldn’t have lied to you. I shouldn’t have said I was going to Holland. I should have told you from the first that I was seeing Jemima, but I thought I couldn’t.”

“Why?” She clenched her fist against his chest. “What did you think? Why don’t you trust me?”

“Everything I told you about seeing Jemima was true. I swear to God. I saw her, but she was alive when I left her. We didn’t part well, but we didn’t part in anger.”

“Then what?” Gina waited for his answer, and he struggled to give it, with his body, his soul, and his very life hanging in the balance of whatever words he chose. He swallowed and she said, “What on earth are you so afraid of, Gordon?”

He put his hands on either side of her lovely face. He said, “You’re only my second.” He bent to kiss her, and she allowed this. Her mouth opened to him and she accepted his tongue and her hands went to the back of his neck and held him to her so the kiss went on and on and on. He felt enflamed, and he—not she—was the one to break off. He was breathing so hard that he might have been running. “Only Jemima and you. No one else,” he said.

“Oh, Gordon,” she said.

“Come back to me. What you saw in me …that anger …the fear …”

“Shh,” she murmured. She touched his face with those fingers of hers, and where she touched he felt his skin take fire.

“You make it all disappear,” he said. “Come back. Gina. I swear.”