This Body of Death (14 page)

She said, “He told me she’s been gone for months, that he’s not heard a single word from her in all that time, that she likely isn’t coming back again, that they’d …well, he didn’t say they’d had a row, just that they’d parted. He said it was something coming on for ages and it had been her idea, and as he was hoping to move on with his life, he’d boxed up everything, but not thrown it away. He reckons she’ll want her things eventually and ask to have them sent when she gets …settled, I suppose.” She removed her sunglasses and looked at him frankly. “I’m babbling,” she said. “Sorry. I’m nervous about all this. I mean about how it looks and everything. Her car here, her things boxed up.”

“You believed Gordon?” Robbie ran his hand along Jemima’s car. It was dust free and it shone with a glossy patina. She’d always taken good care of it. So Meredith was right in this: Why’d she not taken it with her? True, it would be difficult to have a car in London. But Jemima wouldn’t have considered that. When an impulse came upon her, she’d never stopped to consider a thing.

Gina said in a somewhat altered voice, “Well, I actually had no reason not to, Mr. Hastings. To believe him, that is. Do you think otherwise?”

“Robbie,” he said. “Name’s Robbie. You can call me that.”

“I’m Gina.”

“Yes. I know.” He looked at her. “Where’s Gordon, then?”

“Working near Fritham.” She rubbed her arms as if a chill had come over her. She said, “Would you like to come inside? The house, I mean.”

He didn’t particularly want to, but he followed her, hoping he might learn something that could settle his concern. They went in through the laundry area and from there to the kitchen. She set her map on the table and he saw that it was indeed an ordnance survey map, as he’d thought. She’d marked the property on it, and she’d attached to it a second sheet of paper with a penciled drawing. This, too, was of the property, but enlarged. Gina apparently saw him looking it over because she said, “We’re…,” and she sounded hesitant, as if leery of parting with the information. “Well, we’re thinking of making some changes round here.”

That certainly said a great deal about Jemima’s absence from the scene. Robbie looked at Gina Dickens. She’d removed her hat. Her hair was pure gold. It was shaped to her head like a close-fitting cap, in a style that brought to mind the Roaring Twenties. She removed her gloves and tossed them on the table. “Amazing weather,” she said. “Would you like water? Cider? A Coke?” And when he shook his head, she came to the table to stand beside him. She cleared her throat. He could tell she felt uncomfortable. Here she was with the brother of her lover’s former lover. It was
bloody
awkward. He felt it as well. She said, “I was thinking how lovely it would be to have a proper garden, but I wasn’t quite sure where. I was trying to determine where the property actually ends, and I thought the survey map would help, but it doesn’t, actually. So I’d decided that
perhaps
in the second paddock …as we’re not …as
he’s
not using it. I thought it would make a lovely garden, a place where I could bring my girls.”

“You’ve children?”

“Oh no. I work with adolescent girls. The sort who might get themselves into trouble if they don’t have someone to take an interest. Girls at risk? I hoped to have a place besides an office somewhere …” Her voice drifted. She used her teeth to pull on the inside of her lip.

He wanted to dislike her, but he couldn’t. It wasn’t her fault Gordon Jossie had chosen to move on once Jemima had left him.
If
indeed that was what had happened. Robbie looked at the map and then at Gina’s drawing. She’d created a grid from the paddock, he saw, and she’d numbered the squares within it. She said as if in explanation, “I was trying to get an idea of the exact size. So I’d know what we …what I was working with. I’m not sure the paddock itself will do for what I have in mind, so if it doesn’t, then perhaps part of the heath … ? That’s why I’m trying to sort out where the property ends, in case I have to have the garden …
we
have to have the garden somewhere else.”

“You do,” Robbie said.

“What?”

“You can’t have it in the paddock.”

She seemed surprised. “Whyever not?”

“Gordon and Jemima”—Robbie wouldn’t allow his sister not to be part of the conversation—“have common rights here, and the paddocks are meant for the ponies, if they’re out of condition.”

Her face fell. She said, “I had no idea …”

“That he has common rights?”

“I don’t even know what the expression means, to tell you the truth.”

Rob explained briefly, how some of the land within the Perambulation had certain rights attached to it—the right of pasture, the right of mast, the right of estovers or marl or turbary—and this particular property had the right of common pasture. It meant that Gordon and Jemima had been allowed ponies which could graze freely upon the New Forest but the proviso was that land near the house had to be kept free for the ponies should they need to be removed from the forest for any reason. “Gordon didn’t tell you this?” he said. “Odd that he’d be thinking of putting a garden in the paddock when he knows he can’t.”

She fingered the edge of the map. “I haven’t actually
told
him about the garden. He knows I’d like to bring my girls out here. So they can see the horses, walk on the forest or in the inclosures, picnic by one pond or another …But I hadn’t really gone further than that. I thought I’d make a plan of it first. You know …sketch it out?”

Robbie nodded. “It’s not a bad idea. Are these city girls, then? From Winchester or Southampton or the like?”

“No, no. They’d be from Brockenhurst. I mean they’d go to school in Brockenhurst—the college or the comprehensive?—but they could be from anywhere in the New Forest, I expect.”

“Hmmm. Except they’d be from properties just like this, some of them,” he noted. “So it wouldn’t be that much of a diversion for them, would it?”

She frowned. “I hadn’t thought of that.” She walked to the kitchen window. It overlooked the driveway into the property and the west paddock beyond the driveway. She said with a sigh, “All this land …It seemed such a shame not to put it to good use.”

“Depends on how you define ‘good use,’” Robbie said. As he spoke he looked round the kitchen. It was bare of those items that had belonged to Jemima: her set of cookbooks, her colourful wall hangings, and on a shelf above the table, her model horses—some of that collection which she’d kept at her family home, his own home—were gone. In their place were propped a dozen antique postcards of the sort that predated greeting cards: one for Easter, one for Valentine’s Day, two for Christmas, etc. They were not Jemima’s.

Seeing these, it came to Robbie that Meredith Powell was correct in her surmise. Gordon Jossie had wiped Robbie’s sister completely from his life. That wasn’t unreasonable. But having her car and her clothing was. Jossie wanted talking to. There was no doubt of that.

G
ORDON LAY IN BED THE NEXT MORNING WITH THE SWEATS
come upon him, and their source had nothing to do with the summer heat, as it was early—shortly after six—and the day was not yet baking. He’d suffered through another nightmare.

He always woke with a start, a gasp for air, a weight on his chest like a test for witchery, and then the sweats. These regularly drenched him, the pyjamas he wore in winter, and the bedsheets. And when he was drenched, he began to shiver, which woke Gina up as it had once awakened Jemima.

Their reactions were completely different, though. Jemima always wanted answers to the
whys.
Why do you have nightmares? Why are you not talking to someone about them? Why haven’t you seen a doctor about the sweats? There could be something wrong, she told him. A sleep disorder, a lung disorder, a weakness of the heart …God only knew. But whatever the reason, he needed to take an action because this kind of thing could
kill
him.

Which was how Jemima always thought: people dying. It was her greatest fear and no one needed to explain to him the reason for this. His own fears were different but no less real to him than hers were to her, and that was what life was like. People had fears. They learned to cope. He’d learned to cope with his and he didn’t like to talk about them.

Gina didn’t require talking about them. With Gina, when he woke with the sweats in the morning after a night she’d spent with him—which was most nights, actually, and there was really no point to her keeping her place in Lyndhurst any longer, was there?—she rose from the bed and went to the bathroom for a flannel, which she dampened and then returned to use it upon his body. She brought a bowl of cool water with her, and when the flannel grew too hot from his skin, she dipped it in the water and then used it against him again. He wore nothing in summer when he went to bed, so there were no clammy pyjamas to remove. She smoothed the flannel against his limbs and his face and his chest and when he became aroused by this, she smiled and she mounted him or she did other things equally pleasurable and when she did this, every nightmare he’d had sleeping
or
waking was forgotten and very nearly every thought he harboured was gone from his mind.

Except one. Jemima.

Gina asked nothing of him. She merely wanted to love and be with him. Jemima, on the other hand, had asked the world. She had ultimately asked the impossible. And when he’d explained why he could not give her what she asked for, that had ended everything.

Before Jemima, he’d kept clear of women. But when he’d met her, he’d seen the light hearted girl that she presented to the world, the fun-loving spirit with a childlike gap between her front teeth. He’d thought, I need someone like this in my life, but he’d been wrong. It hadn’t yet been time and it probably never would be, but here he was now with another woman, as unlike Jemima as was humanly possible.

He couldn’t say he loved Gina. He knew he ought to love her, as she was certainly worthy of any man’s love. When they’d first gone into the hotel in Sway for a drink on the afternoon he’d seen her up in the woods, more than one bloke had looked her over and looked at him and he knew what each of them was thinking because one thought such things about Gina Dickens, one couldn’t help it and still be a human male. Gina didn’t seem to mind. She looked at him frankly, in a way that said, It’s yours if you want it, when you’re ready. And when he’d decided that by God he
was
ready because he couldn’t live as he’d been living with Jemima gone, he’d accepted her offer and now here she was and he didn’t regret his decision in the least.

She bathed him now. And all the rest. And if he took her forcefully instead of allowing himself to be taken by her, that was fine with Gina. She gave a breathless laugh as he moved her roughly onto her back and her legs spread and then went round him. He found her mouth and it opened to him like the rest of her and he wondered how he’d got lucky just this once and what he would have to pay for his good fortune.

Afterwards, they both were soaking. They separated and laughed at the sucking sound that came from damp skin disengaging from other damp skin. They showered together and she washed his hair and when he became aroused again, she said, “Good lord, Gordon,” with a breathless laugh and she dealt with it—with him—again. He said, “Enough,” but she said, “Not enough,” and she proved it to him. His knees went weak.

He said, “Where’d you learn this, woman?” and she said, “Did Jemima not like sex?”

He said, “Not like this,” and by that he meant wanton. For Jemima it had been reassurance.
Love me
,
don’t leave me
. But she had done the leaving.

It was nearly eight when they went down to the kitchen for breakfast. Gina talked to him about her desire for a garden. He didn’t want a garden with all the unnecessary disruption it would bring to his life, not to mention the laying of walks, the arranging of borders, the digging, the planting, the building of sheds or greenhouses or conservatories or whatever. He didn’t want any of it. He hadn’t told her as much because he liked the look of her as she went on about what a garden would mean to her, to them, and to “her girls” as she called them. But then she also brought up Rob Hastings and what he had told her about the land.

Gordon confirmed this, but that was all he intended to say about Rob. The agister had tracked him down to the Royal Oak pub much as Meredith Powell had done, and just as when Meredith had shown her face, Gordon had told Cliff to take a break so that whatever Rob Hastings had to say could be said out of earshot of anyone. To make sure this was the case, they’d walked up the lane to Eyeworth Pond, which wasn’t so much a pond as it was a damming of a long-ago stream upon which ducks now floated placidly and on whose banks willows crowded one upon the other and draped leafy branches into the water. There was a small two-tiered car park nearby, and a path beyond it led into the wood, where the ground was thick with decades of beech and chestnut leaves.

They walked to the edge of the pond. Gordon lit a cigarette and waited. Whatever Rob Hastings had to say, it would be about Jemima, and he had nothing to tell him about Jemima beyond that which Rob obviously already knew.

“She left because of her,” Rob said, “didn’t she? The one at your house. That’s how it was, eh?”

“I see you’ve been talking to Meredith.” Gordon felt weary with the fuss.

“But Jemima wouldn’t want me to know about that,” Rob Hastings said, following the line of conversation that he’d established. “She wouldn’t want me to know about Gina, owing to the shame of it all.”

Despite himself and his reluctance to discuss Jemima, Gordon found this an interesting theory, wrong as it was. He said, “How’d you reckon, then, Rob?”

“Like this. She must have seen the two of you. You’d’ve been in Ringwood, maybe, or even Winchester or Southampton if she’d gone for supplies for the Cupcake Queen like she did on occasion. She’d’ve seen something that told her what was going on between the two of you, and she’d’ve left you because of it. But she couldn’t bring herself to tell me because of her pride and the shame of it all.”

“What shame?”

“Being cheated on. She’d be ’shamed of that, knowing I’d warned her from the first something wasn’t right about you.”

Gordon flicked ash from his cigarette onto the ground and twisted the toe of his boot upon it. “Never much liked me, then. You hid it well.”

“I would do, after she took up with you anyways, wouldn’t I. I wanted her to be happy and if you were the person making her happy, who was I to make it clear I smelled something bad?”

“What would that something be?”

“You tell me.”

Gordon shook his head, signaling not negation but the fact that it was hopeless to attempt to explain himself since Robbie Hastings would be unlikely to believe whatever he said. He sought to elucidate this with, “When a bloke like you—like any bloke, really—doesn’t like someone, anything looks like a reason for it, Rob. You know what I mean?”

“Truth is, I don’t.”

“Well, I can’t help you. Jemima left me, full stop. If anyone had someone else on the side, I’d reckon it’d be Jemima ’cause it wasn’t me.”

“Who’d you have before her, then, Gor?”

“No one,” Gordon said. “Ever, actually.”

“Come on, man. You’re …what?” Rob appeared to think it over. “Thirty-one years old and you’ll have me think you’d not had a woman before you had my sister?”

“That’s exactly what I’d have you think because it’s the truth.”

“That you were a virgin. That you come to her a blank slate where no other ladies’ names’ve been written, eh?”

“That’s it, Rob.”

Robbie, Gordon could tell, didn’t believe a word of it. “You queer, then, Gor?” he asked. “You a fallen Catholic priest or something?”

Gordon glanced at him. “You sure you want to go this way, Rob?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, I think you know.”

Rob’s face flamed.

“See, she speculated about you now and again,” Gordon said. “Well, she would do, wouldn’t she? All things considered, it’s a bit unusual. Bloke your age. Forty-something, eh?”

“Don’t make this about me.”

“Nor about me,” Gordon said. Any conversation along these lines would, he knew, proceed in circles, so he ended it there. What he had to tell Robbie Hastings was what Robbie Hastings had doubtless already heard from Meredith Powell, even from Jemima herself. But he found out quickly enough that that was not going to satisfy Jemima’s brother.

“She left because she didn’t want to be with me any longer,” Gordon said. “That’s it and that’s an end to the matter. She was in a hurry because that’s what she always was and you damn well know that. She made up her mind in an instant and then she acted. If she was hungry, she ate. If she was thirsty, she drank. If she decided she wanted a different sort of bloke, no one was going to talk her out of it. That’s it.”

“In a nutshell, Gor?”

“That’s how it is.”

“Happens I don’t believe you,” Rob said.

“Happens I can’t do anything about it.”

But when Robbie left him back at the Royal Oak, to which they’d returned in a silence broken only by the sound of their footfalls on the stony verge and the crying of skylarks on the heath, Gordon found he wanted to
make
him believe because anything else meant exactly what happened the next morning while he and Gina were saying their good-byes for the day outside on the driveway by Gordon’s pickup.

An Austin pulled directly behind the old Toyota. Out stepped a bloke in bottle-thick spectacles with clip-on sunglasses covering them. He had on a tie but he’d loosened it to hang from his neck. He took off the clip-on sunglasses, as if this would allow him to see Gordon and Gina better. He nodded knowingly and said, “Ah.”

Gordon heard Gina say his name in a questioning murmur, and he said to her, “Wait here.” He’d got the door of the pickup open, but he pushed it shut and walked over to the Austin.

“Morning, Gordon,” the bloke said. “It’s going to be dead hot again, isn’t it?”

“It is that,” Gordon replied. He said nothing more because he reckoned things about the visitor would be made clear for him soon enough.

And so they were. The man said affably, “We need to have a chat, you and me.”

M
EREDITH
P
OWELL HAD
phoned in ill to her place of employment, going so far as to plug her nose in order to simulate a summer cold. She didn’t like doing this and she certainly didn’t like the example it set for Cammie, who watched her with wide-eyed curiosity from the kitchen table where she’d been spooning Cheerios into her mouth. But there’d seemed to be no alternative.

Meredith had paid a call at the police station the prior afternoon and had got exactly nowhere. The conversation had gone a route that had ended with her feeling a perfect fool. What did she have to report that equated to grave suspicions and doubts? Her friend Jemima’s car in a barn on the property where she’d lived with her partner for some two years, Jemima’s clothes boxed up in the attic, Jemima with a new mobile phone to prevent Gordon Jossie from tracking her down, and the Cupcake Queen deserted in Ringwood.
None of this is like Jemima
,
don’t you see?
had hardly impressed the plod she’d spoken to at the Brockenhurst station, where she’d stopped and asked to see someone “on a matter of extreme urgency.” She’d been given to a sergeant whose name she didn’t recall and didn’t
want
to recall, and at the end of her tale he’d enquired rather pointedly that couldn’t it be, madam, that these people were merely going about their daily lives without reporting their movements to her because this was none of her business? Of course, she’d prompted this remark herself by admitting to the sergeant that Robbie Hastings had spoken to his sister regularly since her removal to London. But still, there had been
no
reason for the sergeant to look upon her as if she’d been something unsavoury that he’d found on the sole of his shoe. She
wasn’t
a busybody. She was a concerned citizen. And wasn’t a concerned citizen—a taxpayer, mind you—supposed to let the police know when something was off? Nothing sounds
off
to me, the sergeant had said. One woman leaves and this bloke Jossie finds another. How’s that measure up to fishy, eh? Way of the world, you ask me. And to her declaration of
for God’s sake
, he’d told her to take her troubles to the main station in Lyndhurst if she didn’t like what she was getting from him.

Well, she wasn’t about to put herself through
that
, Meredith decided. She’d phone the main station but that was
all
. Then she would take matters into her own hands. She knew that something was going on out there and she had a fairly good idea where to begin digging to find it.