This Body of Death (8 page)

“It’s Jemima. Robbie, I went to the Cupcake Queen and saw it was closed. Then I talked to Lexie Streener and then I went to their place—Gordon and Jemima’s—and there’s this woman Gina Dickens there. She’s not exactly living there or anything but she’s …I s’pose you’d call it established. And she didn’t know the first thing about Jemima.”

“You haven’t heard from her, then?”

“From Jemima? No.” Meredith hesitated. She felt dead awkward. She looked at him earnestly, trying to read him. “Well, she must have told you …”

“’Bout what happened ’tween the two of you?” he asked. “Oh, aye. She told me you had a falling out some time back. Didn’t think it was permanent, though.”

“Well, I
had
to tell her I had doubts about Gordon. Aren’t friends meant to do that?”

“I’d say they are.”

“But all she’d say in return is, ‘Robbie doesn’t have doubts about him, so why do you?’”

“Said that, did she?”

“
Did
you have doubts? Like me? Did you?”

“Oh, that I did. Something about the bloke. I didn’t dislike him ’xactly, but if she was going to have a partner, I would’ve liked it to be someone I knew through and through. I didn’t know Gordon Jossie like that. But as things turned out, I needn’t have worried—same applies to you—because Jemima found out whatever she needed to find out when she hooked up with him and she was clever enough to end it when it needed to be ended.”

“What’s that mean, exactly?” Meredith shifted. She was absolutely baking in the heat. At this point she felt as if her entire body were melting, like her poor chocolate cake in the car. “Look, can we get out of the sun?” she asked. “Can we get a drink? Have you the time? We need to talk. I think …There’s something not quite right.”

Robbie gave a look to the pony and then a look to Meredith. He nodded and said, “Not the pub, though,” and he led them across the car park to a little arcade of shops, one of which offered sandwiches and drinks. They took theirs to a sweet chestnut that spread its leafy branches on the edge of the car park, where a bench faced a lawn opening out in the shape of a fan.

A smattering of tourists were taking photos of ponies that grazed with their foals nearby. The foals were especially appealing, but they were also skittish, which made approaching them and their dams more dangerous than usual. Robbie watched the action. “One damn well wonders,” he said darkly. “That bloke over there? He’s likely to be bit. And then he’ll want the pony put down or he’ll want to sue God knows who. Not that the wanting is going to get him anywhere. Still, I always think there’s some kinds need to be permanently removed from the gene pool.”

“Do you?”

He coloured slightly at the question, then he looked at her. “S’pose not,” he said. And then, “She’s gone to London, Merry. She phoned me up one day, somewhere near the end of October this was, and she announced she was going to London. I thought she meant for the day, for supplies or something for the shop. But she says, ‘No, no, it’s not the shop. I need time to think,’ she says. ‘Gordon’s talking about marriage,’ she says.”

“Are you sure about that? That he talked about marriage?”

“That’s what she said. Why?”

“But what about the Cupcake Queen? Why would she leave her business just to go off and
think
about anything?”

“Yeah. Bit odd that, eh? I tried to talk to her about that, but she wasn’t having anything off me.”

“London.” Meredith worked on the word. She tried to relate it to her friend. “Think about what? Does she not want to marry him any longer? Why?”

“She wouldn’t say, Merry. She still won’t say.”

“You talk to her?”

“Oh, aye. ’Course I do. Once a week or more. She’s that good about ringing me. Well, she would be. You know Jemima. She worries a bit, how I’m doing without her coming round like she did. So she stays in touch.”

“Lexie told me she tried to ring Jemima. First she left messages and then the calls didn’t go through. So how’re you talking to her once—”

“New mobile,” Robbie said. “She didn’t want Gordon to have the number. He kept ringing her. She doesn’t want him to know where she is.”

“D’you think something happened between them?”

“That I don’t know, and she won’t say. I went over there once she’d gone ’cause she’d been in a bit of a state and I thought to have a word with Gordon.”

“And … ?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. Gordon says, ‘You know what I know, mate. I still feel the same as always. She’s the one whose feelings changed.’”

“Someone else?”

“On Jemima’s part?” Robbie lifted his can of Coke and downed most of it. “Wasn’t someone when she left. I asked her that. You know Jemima. Hard to think she’d leave Gordon without having someone ready to partner up with.”

“Yes. I know. That ‘being alone’ business. She can’t cope, can she?”

“Who’s to blame her, really? After Mum and Dad.”

They were both silent, considering this, what fears that losing her parents in childhood had wrought in Jemima and how those fears had played out in her life.

Across the lawn from them, an elderly man with a zimmer frame was getting too close to one of the foals. Its dam’s head snapped up, but then, no worries. The foal scampered off and the small herd moved as well. They were more than a match for a bloke with a zimmer. He called out to them, a carrot extended.

Robbie sighed. “Should have saved my breath for the porridge, all the good it does to tell them, eh? Reckon some people have cotton wool up there ’stead of brains. Look at him, Merry.”

“You need a loud hailer,” she told him.

“I need my shotgun.” Robbie rose. He would confront the man, as indeed he must. But there was something more that Meredith wanted him to know. Things might have been explained with regard to Jemima, but things were still not right.

She said, “Rob, how did Jemima get up to London?”

“I expect she drove.”

And this was the crux of the matter. It was the answer she’d feared. It constituted the bells and whistles, and it became the alarm. Meredith felt it in the tingling of her arms and the shiver—despite the heat—that went up her spine. “No,” she said. “She didn’t do that.”

“What?” Robbie turned to look at her.

“She didn’t drive up there.” Meredith rose as well. “That’s just it. That’s why I’ve come. Her car’s in the barn at Gordon’s, Robbie. Gina Dickens showed it to me. It was under a tarp like he was hiding it.”

“You’re joking.”

“Why would I joke? She’d asked him about it, Gina Dickens. He said it was his. But he hasn’t ever driven it, which made her think …” Meredith’s throat was dry once more, desertlike, as it had been during her conversation with Gina.

Robbie was frowning. “It made her think what? What’s going on, Merry?”

“That’s what I want to know.” She curved her hand round his work-muscled arm. “Because, Rob, there’s more.”

R
OBBIE
H
ASTINGS TRIED
not to be concerned. He had obligations to perform—the most important at the moment being the transport of the pony in the horse trailer—and he needed to keep his mind on his duty. But Jemima was a large part of that duty, despite the fact that she was now an adult. For Jemima’s becoming an adult hadn’t changed things between them. He was still her father figure, while to Robbie she’d always be his sister-child, the waif who’d lost her parents after a late-night dinner on holiday in Spain: too much to drink, confusion over which side of the road to be driving on, and that had been that, gone in an instant, mown down by a lorry. Jemima hadn’t been with them, and thank God for that. For had she been, everyone he’d known as family would have been wiped out. Instead, he’d been staying with her in the family home, and so his stay had become permanent.

Thus even as Robbie delivered the pony to the commoner who owned her and even as he had a talk with that gentleman about what ailed the animal—Robbie reckoned it was cancer, sir, and the pony was going to have to be put down although you might want to phone the vet for a second opinion in the matter—he still thought about Jemima. He’d phoned her upon waking that morning because it was her birthday, and he phoned her again along the road back to Burley after leaving the pony with its owner. But he got this second time what he’d got when he phoned the first time: his sister’s cheerful voice on her voice mail.

He hadn’t given that fact a thought when he’d first phoned, for it had been early in the day, and he reckoned she’d switched the mobile off for the night if she wanted a lie-in on her birthday. But she generally phoned right back when she got a message from him, so when he left a second message, he became concerned. He phoned her place of employment after that, but he learned that she’d taken a half day off on the previous day and today was not a workday for her. Did he want to leave a message, sir? He didn’t.

He rang off and worried the tattered leather cover on his steering wheel. All right, he told himself, Meredith’s concerns aside, it was Jemima’s birthday and likely she was merely having a bit of fun. And she
would
do that, wouldn’t she? As he recalled, she’d enthused about ice skating recently. Lessons or something. So she
could
be off doing that. It would be exactly like Jemima.

Truth of the matter was that Robbie hadn’t told Meredith everything beneath the sweet chestnut tree in Burley. There hadn’t seemed to be a point, mostly because Jemima had a history of attachments to men while Meredith—bless her heart—definitely had not. He hadn’t wanted to rub this fact in Meredith’s face, her being a single mum as the result of the only disastrous relationship she’d managed. Besides, Robbie respected Meredith Powell: how she’d stepped onto the pitch of motherhood and was making a proper job of it. And anyway, Jemima
hadn’t
left Gordon Jossie for another man, so that much of what Robbie had told Meredith had been true. But, exactly in character, she’d found another man quickly enough. Robbie hadn’t told Meredith that. Afterwards, he wondered if he should have.

“He’s very special, Rob,” Jemima had burbled in that way she had. “Oh, I’m
madly
in love with him.”

That’s what she always was: madly in love. No point in like or interest or curiosity or friendship when one could be madly in love. For
madly in love
equated warding off solitude. She’d gone to London to think, but thinking was something that led Jemima to fear, and God knew she’d long rather run from fear than face it head-on. Well, didn’t everyone? Wouldn’t he if he could?

Robbie wound up the hill that was Honey Lane, a short distance outside Burley. In midsummer it was a lush green tunnel, sided by holly and arced by beech and oak. It was packed earth only—no paving here—and he passed along it with care, doing his best to avoid the occasional pothole that made the going rough. He was less than a mile outside the village, but one stepped back in time in this area. The trees sheltered paddocks and beyond them ancient buildings marked both common holdings and farms. These were backed by a wood, and the wood was thick with fragrant scotch pines, with hazel, and with beech, providing a habitat for everything from deer to dormice, from stoats to shrews. One could walk the distance here from Burley, but people seldom did. There were easier paths to follow, and in Robbie’s experience people liked their ease.

At the crest of the hill, he made the left turn onto what had long been Hastings land. This comprised thirty-five acres of paddock and wood, with the rooftop of Burley Hill House just visible to the northeast and the peak of Castle Hill Lane beyond it. In one of the paddocks his own two horses happily grazed, delighted not to be carrying his weight round the New Forest on this hot summer day.

Robbie parked near the tumbledown barn and its attendant shed, trying not to see them so he would not have to think about how much work he needed to put into them. He climbed out of the Land Rover and slammed the door. The noise brought his dog loping from round the side of the house where he’d no doubt been sleeping in the shade, his tail wagging and his tongue hanging, and all of himself looking out of character. The Weimaraner was normally elegant in appearance. But he hated the heat and he’d rolled in the compost heap as if this would help him to escape it. He now wore a fragrantly decomposing mantle. He paused to shake himself off.

“Think that’s amusing, do you, Frank?” Robbie asked the dog. “You’re a real sight. You know that, eh? I shouldn’t let you near the house.”

But no woman lived there to admonish him or to usher Frank from the house herself. So when he went inside and the dog tagged along, Robbie allowed it and was grateful for the company. He fetched the Weimaraner a fresh bowl of water. Frank slopped it happily onto the kitchen floor.

Robbie left him to it and went for the stairs. He was sweaty and he smelled all of horse from transporting the pony, but instead of heading for a shower—he could hardly be bothered with that at this time of day, as he’d only get sweaty and smelly again—he went into Jemima’s room.

He told himself to be calm. He couldn’t think if he got himself into a state, and he needed to think. In his experience, there was an explanation for everything, and there was going to be an explanation for the rest of what Meredith Powell had told him.

“Her clothes are there, Rob. But not in the bedroom. He’s boxed them all up and he’s put them in the attic. Gina found them because, she said, there was something a little strange—that’s how she put it—when he was talking about Jemima’s car.”

“So she did what? Take you up to see them? Up to the attic?”

“She just told me about them at first,” Meredith said. “I asked to look. I reckoned they could’ve been there awhile—from before Gordon and Jemima took the place—so they could’ve been someone else’s. But they weren’t. The boxes weren’t old, and there was something I recognised. Well, it was mine, actually, and she’d borrowed it and I’d never got it back. So you see … ?”

He did and he didn’t. Had he not heard from his sister at least weekly since her departure, he would have headed to Sway at once, determined to have a face-to-face with Gordon Jossie. But he
had
heard from her and what she’d repeated at the end of each phone call had been the reassurance, “Not to worry, Rob. It’ll all come right.”