This Body of Death

by Elizabeth George

  So it had been a double insult, both to Jemima and to the man she ostensibly loved. Thus Meredith had never seen the fruits of Jemima’s labours when it came to launching the Cupcake Queen.

  Unfortunately, she didn’t see the fruits of those labours now either. When Meredith parked, scooped up the chocolate cake—it was looking ever more as if the chocolate itself were actually perspiring, she thought, which could not have been a very good sign—and carried her offering to the door of the Cupcake Queen, she found the shop locked tightly, its windowsills grimy, and its interior speaking of a business failed. Meredith could see an empty display case, along with a dusty selling counter and an old-fashioned baker’s étagère showing off neither utensils nor baked goods. And this was …what? Ten months after she’d opened? Six months after? Eight? Meredith couldn’t remember exactly, but she certainly didn’t like what she saw, and she had difficulty believing that Jemima’s business could have gone under so quickly. She’d had more than a score of regular customers she had served from her cottage alone, and they would have followed her to Ringwood. So what had happened?

  Meredith decided she would seek out the one person who could probably explain. She had her own, immediate theory about matters, but she wanted to be forearmed when she finally saw Jemima herself.

  ULTIMATELY, MEREDITH FOUND Lexie Streener at Jean Michel’s Hair Styling, in the High Street. She went first to the teenager’s home where the girl’s mother stopped what she was doing—typing a lengthy tract on the third beatitude—to expound in some tedious detail what it truly meant to be among the meek. When pressed for information, she revealed that Lexie was washing hair at Jean Michel’s. (“There’s no Jean Michel,” she pointed out sharply. “That’s a lie, that is, which is against God’s law.”)

  At Jean Michel’s Hair Styling, Meredith had to wait for Lexie Streener to finish scrubbing energetically at the scalp of a heavyset lady who’d already had more than enough summer sun and was currently showing far too much flesh as an illustration of this troubling fact. Meredith wondered if Lexie was planning on a career of styling hair. She hoped not, for if the girl’s own head was any indication of her talents in this area, no one with any sense would allow her near them as long as she had either scissors or dye in hand. Her locks were pink, blond, and blue. They’d either been cropped to a punitive length—one thought at once of head lice—or they’d broken off, incapable of anything else after repeated exposures to bleach and to colour.

  “She just phoned up one day,” Lexie said when Meredith had the girl to herself. She’d had to wait for Lexie’s break and it had cost her a Coke, but that was fine by her if the minimal expense provided her with maximum details. “I reckoned I’d been doing a good job wif ever’thing, but all’s of a sudden, she phones me up and she says not to come to work tomorrow. I aksed her was it summick I done, like smoke a fag too close to the door like I might of done, you know, or what have you, but all she says is…like…, ‘No, it’s not you.’ So I reckon it’s my mum or dad with all their Bible stuff and I reckon they been preaching at her or leaving, you know, those tracks Mum writes? Like under her windscreen wipers? But she says, ‘It’s me. It’s not you. It’s not them. Things’s changed.’ I say what things but she won’t tell me. She says she’s sorry and not to aks her nuffink else.”

  “Did the business go bad?” Meredith asked.

  “Don’t think so. There was always people there, buying stuff. You aks me, it was weird she wanted to close up, and I knew that, innit. So I rang her ’bout a week after she talked to me. Maybe more. Dunno exactly. I ring her on her mobile to find out what’s what, but all’s I get is just her voice mail. I leave a message. At least twice, this was. But she never rang me back and when I tried another time, the phone was…There was nothing. Like she lost it or summick.”

  “Did you phone her at home?”

  Lexie shook her head. She picked at a healing cut on her arm. It was what she did—cutting herself—and Meredith knew this, for Lexie’s aunt owned the graphic design company where Meredith worked while she waited to break into what she really wanted to do, which was fabric design, and as Meredith greatly admired Lexie’s aunt and as Lexie’s aunt worried about the girl and talked about her and wondered wasn’t there something that could get her out of the house and away from her half-mad parents for a few hours each day …Meredith had suggested Lexie to Jemima as the Cupcake Queen’s first employee. The plan had been for her to help Jemima in setting up the shop first and then behind the counter second. Jemima couldn’t do everything herself and Lexie needed the job and Meredith wanted to score points with her employer. It had all seemed perfect.

  But something clearly had not worked out right. Meredith said, “So you didn’t talk to …well, to him? She didn’t say anything about what might have been going on at home? And you didn’t ring her there?”

  Lexie shook her head. “Just reckoned she di’n’t want me,” the girl replied. “No one gen’rally does.”

  SO, REALLY, SHE had to go to Jemima’s home. There was nothing else for it. Meredith didn’t actually like this idea because she felt it gave Jemima a sort of advantage over her in the conversation that was to come. But she knew that if she was going to be serious about making up with her friend, then she was going to have to do what it took.

  Jemima lived with her partner between Sway and Mount Pleasant. There, she and Gordon Jossie had somehow lucked their way into the rights of a commoner, so there was land attached to the holding. True there was not a lot of it but, still, twelve acres were nothing to sniff at. There were buildings as well: an old cob cottage, a barn, and a shed. Part of the land comprised ancient paddocks to serve the needs of the holding’s ponies should they get out of condition during the winter. The rest of it was vacant land, characterised largely by a heath that, in the distance, gave way to woodland, which was not part of the holding.

  The buildings on the property were shaded by sweet chestnut trees, all of them pollarded long ago so that now their branches grew above head height from the bulbous remains of those early amputations, which had saved the trees in their youth from the hungry mouths of animals. They were huge, those chestnuts. In summer, they lowered the temperature around the cottage and they scented the air with a heady fragrance.

  As she pulled past the tall hawthorn hedge and into the drive that sketched a pebbled line between the cottage and the west paddock, Meredith saw that beneath one of the chestnut trees in front of the house, a rusty iron table, four chairs, and a wheeled tea trolley formed a picturesque summer dining area, complete with potted ferns, candles on the table, colourful cushions on the chairs, and three ornate torchères, all of it giving the place the look of a photo from a home living magazine. This was not like Jemima at all, Meredith thought. She wondered how else her friend had changed in the months that had passed since they’d last seen each other.

  She pulled to a stop not far from the cottage, just behind the second sign of change. This constituted a late-model Mini Cooper, bright red with white striping, newly polished, its chrome agleam and its convertible top lowered. Meredith stirred a bit in her seat when she saw this vehicle. It brought home to her what she’d arrived in: an old Polo held together by duct tape and dreams, the passenger’s seat of which was currently beginning to accept an ooze of melted chocolate from the cake that sat upon it.

  The cake seemed like a truly ridiculous offering now, Meredith thought. She should have listened to her mother. Not that she’d ever listened to her mother before. Which in itself was a thought that brought Jemima even more firmly into her mind, how she’d always said, “At least you have a mum,” whenever Meredith complained about the good woman. And that made her miss Jemima with a stab to the heart, so she gathered her courage and her lopsided cake, and she made her way to the cottage door. Not the front door, which she’d never used, but the door at the back, the one that led out from a lean-to laundry room into an open space edged by the cottage, the barn, the shed, a little farm lane, and the east
paddock.

  There was no answer to her knock; there was no reply to her call of, “Jem? Hey? Hullo? Birthday girl, where are you?” She was thinking of letting herself inside—no one locked doors in this part of the world—and leaving the cake along with a note when she heard someone call in return, “Hello? C’n I help you? I’m over here.”

  It was not Jemima. Meredith knew that at once from the voice, without having to turn from the door. But turn she did, and it was to see a young blonde coming round the side of the barn, shaking off a straw sunhat, which she then put on her head as she drew near. She was saying, “Sorry. I was having a go with the horses. It’s the oddest thing. For some reason this hat seems to frighten them, so I take it off when I go near the paddock.”

  Perhaps, Meredith thought, she was someone they’d hired, Gordon and Jemima. With common rights, they were allowed to keep wild ponies, and they were also required to care for them if the animals weren’t able to graze freely on the Forest for some reason. With Gordon’s work and Jemima’s work keeping them busy, it wasn’t completely out of the question that they’d had to bring along someone in the event they were forced to keep ponies on the holding. Except …This woman didn’t look like a stable-girl. True, she wore blue jeans, but they were of the designer sort one saw on celebrities, hugging her curves. She wore boots, but they were polished leather and very stylish, not boots for mucking out in. She wore a work shirt, but its sleeves were rolled to show tanned arms and its collar stood up to frame her face. She looked like someone’s image of a countrywoman, not like an actual countrywoman at all.

  “Hullo.” Meredith felt awkward and ungainly. She and the other woman were of similar height, but that was the extent of their similarities. Meredith wasn’t put together like this vision of life-in-Hampshire approaching her. In her body-shrouding caftan, she felt like a giraffe in draperies. “Sorry. I think I’ve blocked you in.” She tilted her head in the direction of her car.

  “No worries,” the woman replied. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Not … ?” Meredith hadn’t thought that Jemima and Gordon might have moved house, but that seemed to be the case. She said, “Do Gordon and Jemima not live here any longer?”

  “Gordon certainly does,” the other replied. “But who’s Jemima?”

  In looking at everything that happened to John Dresser, one must begin with the canal. Part of the nineteenth century’s means of transporting goods from one area of the UK to another, the particular section of the Midlands Trans-Country Canal that concerns us bisects the city in such a way as to create a divide between socioeconomic areas. Three-quarters of a mile of its length runs along the north boundary of the Gallows. As is the case with most of the canals in Great Britain, a towpath gives walkers and cyclists access to the canal, and various types of housing back onto the waterway.

  One might harbour romantic images invoked by the word canal or by canal life, but there is little romantic about the length of the Midlands Trans-Country Canal that flows just north of the Gallows. It’s a greasy strip of water uninhabited by ducks, swans, or any other sort of aquatic life, and there are no reeds, willow trees, wildflowers, or grasses growing along the towpath. What bobs at the canal’s edges is usually rubbish, and its water carries a putrid odour suggestive of faulty sewer pipes.

  The canal has long been used by residents of the Gallows as a dumping ground for items too bulky to be taken away by the rubbish collectors. When Michael Spargo, Reggie Arnold, and Ian Barker arrived there at roughly nine-thirty A.M., they found a shopping trolley in the water, and they commenced using it as a target at which they threw rocks, bottles, and bricks found along the towpath. Going to the canal appears to have been Reggie’s idea, one initially rejected by Ian, who accused the other two boys of wanting to go there “to wank each other or do it like doggies,” which can be seen as an apparent reference to what he himself had witnessed in the bedroom he was forced to share with his mother. He also seems to have harassed Michael about his right eye, as reported by Reggie. (The nerves of his cheek having been damaged during a forceps delivery at his birth, Michael’s right eye drooped and did not blink in concert with his left eye.) But Reggie indicates he himself “sorted Ian proper,” and the boys went on to other things.

  As the back gardens of the houses along the towpath are separated from it only by wooden fences, the boys had easy access to properties where the wooden fences were in disrepair. Once they exhausted the possibilities presented by throwing things at and into the shopping trolley, they wandered along the towpath and found mischief where they were able: They removed fresh washing from a line behind one house and dumped this in the canal; at another they found a lawn mower (“But it were rusty,” Michael explains) and did the same with it.

  Perhaps the perambulator gave them the ultimate idea. They found this object sitting next to the back door of yet another of the houses. Unlike the lawn mower, the perambulator was not only new, but it also had a metallic blue helium balloon attached to it. On this balloon was printed “It’s a Boy!” and the boys knew the words referred to a brand-new baby.

  The perambulator was more difficult to get their hands on because the fence here was not in bad condition. Thus it is suggestive of a sort of escalation of intent that two of the boys (Ian and Reggie, according to Michael; Ian and Michael, according to Reggie; Reggie and Michael, according to Ian) climbed over the fence, stole the perambulator, and hoisted it over and onto the towpath. There the boys pushed each other for perhaps one hundred yards before tiring of this game and shoving the perambulator into the canal.

  Michael Spargo’s interview indicates that, at this point, Ian Barker said, “Too bad it weren’t a baby inside. That’d make a lovely splash, eh?” Ian Barker denies this, and when questioned, Reggie Arnold becomes hysterical, shrieking, “There weren’t no baby, ever! Mum, there weren’t no baby!”

  According to Michael, Ian went on to talk about “how wicked it’d be to get a baby from somewheres.” They could, he suggested, take it to “that bridge over West Town Road and we could drop it on its head and see it splat. Blood and brains’d come out. That’s what he said,” Michael reports. Michael goes on to insist that he spoke hotly against this idea, as if he knows where his interview with the police is heading when they get to this topic. Ultimately the boys grew tired of playing in the environs of the canal, Michael reports. Ian Barker, he tells the police, was the one to suggest they “clear out of here” and go to the Barriers.

  It should be noted that not one of the boys denies being in the Barriers that day, although all of them repeatedly change their stories when it comes to what they did when they got there.

  West Town Road Arcade has been known as the Barriers for such a length of time that most people have no idea that the shopping arcade actually has another name. Early in its commercial lifetime, it developed this appellation because it sprawls neatly between the bleak world of the Gallows and an orderly grid of semidetached and detached houses occupied by middle-class working families. These buildings comprise the Windsor, Mountbatten, and Lyon Housing Estates.

  While there are four distinct entrances to the Barriers, the two most commonly used are those giving access to residents of the Gallows and to residents of the Windsor Estate. The shops at these entrances are rather depressingly indicative of the expected clientele. For example, at the Gallows entrance, one finds a William Hill betting lounge, two off-licences, a tobacconist, an Items-for-a-Pound shop, and several take-away food enterprises featuring fish and chips, jacket potatoes, and pizza. At the Windsor Estate entrance, on the other hand, one can shop in Marks & Spencer, Boots, Russell & Bromley, Accessorize, Ryman’s, and independent shops offering lingerie, chocolates, tea, and clothing. While it’s true that nothing stops someone from entering at the Gallows and traversing the arcade to shop where she pleases, the implication is clear: If you are poor, on benefits, or working class, you’re likely to be interested in spending your money on cholesterol-laden food, tobacco, alcohol
, or gambling.

  All three of the boys agree that when they entered the Barriers, they went into the video arcade at the centre of the place. They had no money, but this did not stop them from “driving” the Jeep in the Let’s Go Jungle video game, or “piloting” the Ocean Hunter on a search for sharks. It’s an interesting fact that the participatory video games allowed for only two players at one time. Although, as previously noted, they had no money, when they pretended to play it was Michael and Reggie who manned the controls, leaving Ian the odd man out. He claims he was not bothered by this exclusion, and all the boys declare themselves unbothered by the fact that they had no money to spend in the video arcade, but one cannot help speculating if the day would have turned out differently had the boys been able to sublimate pathological tendencies through engaging in some of the bellicose activities provided by the video games they encountered but were not able to use. (I don’t mean to imply here that video games can or should take the place of parenting, but as an outlet for young boys with limited resources and even less insight into their individual dysfunction, they might have been helpful.)

  Unfortunately, their time in the video arcade came to a precipitate end when a security guard noticed them and shooed them on their way. It was still school hours (the CCTV film has it at half-past ten), and he told them he would phone the police, the schools, or the truant officer if he saw them again on the premises. His interview with the police has him claiming that he “never saw the little yobs again,” but this seems more like an effort to relieve himself of guilt and responsibility than the truth. The boys did nothing to hide from him once they left the video arcade, and had he only made good on his threat, the boys would never have encountered little John Dresser.