This Body of Death

by Elizabeth George

  “Woodwork? What woodwork?”

  He smiled faintly. “The kind one can fade into.”

  He looked at her hands, and she realised she was still holding his wedding picture. She set it back on the table and said, “Your wife was lovely, Thomas. I’m sorry about her death.”

  “Thank you,” he said. And then with a perfect frankness that startled Isabelle, so appealing was it, “We were completely wrong for each other, which ultimately made us right for each other. I quite adored her.”

  “How lucky to love so much,” she said.

  “Yes.” Like Charlie Denton, he offered her a drink, and again she demurred. Also like Charlie Denton, he gestured towards a seating area, but this one not before the fireplace. Rather, he chose two chairs on either side of a chessboard where a game was in progress. He glanced at this, frowned, and after a moment made a move with his white knight that captured one of the two black bishops. “Charlie only appears to be showing mercy,” Lynley noted. “That means he’s got something up his sleeve. What can I do for you, Superintendent? I’d like to think this is a social call, but I’m fairly sure it’s not.”

  “There’s been a murder in Abney Park. Stoke Newington. It’s a cemetery, actually.”

  “The young woman. Yes. I heard the report on the radio news. You’re investigating? What’s wrong with having a local team?”

  “Hillier pulled strings. There’s also another cock-up with SO5. I think it’s more of the former and less of the latter, though. He wants to see how I compare with you. And with John Stewart if it comes to it.”

  “I see you’ve pegged Hillier already.”

  “Not a difficult task.”

  “He wears a lot on his sleeve, doesn’t he?” Lynley smiled again. Isabelle noted, however, that the smile was more form than feeling. He was well guarded, as she supposed anyone would be in the same situation. She had no real cause to call upon him. He knew it and was waiting to hear the reason for her visit.

  She said, “I’d like you to join the investigation, Thomas.”

  “I’m on leave,” he replied.

  “I realise that. But I’m hoping to persuade you to take a leave from your leave. At least for a few weeks.”

  “You’re working with the team I worked with, aren’t you?”

  “I am. Stewart, Hale, Nkata …”

  “Barbara Havers as well?”

  “Oh yes. The redoubtable Sergeant Havers is among us. Aside from her deplorable fashion sense, I’ve a feeling she’s a very good cop.”

  “She is.” He steepled his fingers. His gaze went to the chessboard and he seemed to be calculating Charlie Denton’s next move although Isabelle knew it was more likely that he was calculating hers. He said, “So clearly, you don’t need my presence. Not as an investigating officer.”

  “Can any murder team have enough investigating officers?”

  That smile again. “Facile response,” he told her. “Good for the politics of the Met. Bad for …” He hesitated.

  “A relationship with you?” She stirred in her chair and leaned towards him. “All right. I want you on the team because I want to be able to say your name without a reverential hush falling over the incident room and this is the likeliest route to get me there. Also because I want to get on some sort of normal footing with everyone at the Met, and that’s because I very much want this job.”

  “You’re forthright enough when your back’s against the wall.”

  “And I always will be. With you and with everyone else. Before my back’s against the wall.”

  “That’ll play good and bad for you. Good for the team you’re directing, bad for your relationship with Hillier. He prefers kid gloves to the iron fist. Or have you already discovered that?”

  “It seems to me the crucial association at the Yard is between myself and the team and not between myself and David Hillier. And as for the team, they want you back. They want you as their superintendent—well, all except John Stewart, but you’re not to take that personally—”

  “Nor would I.” He smiled, genuinely this time.

  “Yes. Good. All right. They want you back and the only thing that will satisfy them is to know you don’t want to be what they want you to be and you’re quite happy with someone else in the position.”

  “With you in the position.”

  “I think you and I can work together, Thomas. I think we can work very well together if it comes down to it.”

  He seemed to study her, and she wondered what he was reading on her face. A moment passed and she let it hang there and extend, thinking how completely quiet it was in the house and wondering if it had been so when his wife was living. They’d had no children, she recalled. They had been married less than a year at her death.

  “How are your boys?” he asked her abruptly.

  It was a disarming question and likely intended to be so. She wondered how on earth he knew that she had two sons.

  He said as if she had spoken, “You were on your mobile one day when we met in Kent. Your former husband …you were having a discussion with him …you mentioned the boys.”

  “They’re near Maidstone, with him as it happens.”

  “That can’t be a happy arrangement for you.”

  “It’s neither happy nor unhappy. There was simply no point moving them to London if I’ve no idea whether this job is going to be permanent.” She realised after she’d spoken that the words had come out more stiffly than she’d intended. She tried to ameliorate the effect by adding, “I miss them, naturally. But their summer holidays are probably better spent with their father in the countryside than with me here in London. They can run a bit wild there. Here, that would be out of the question.”

  “And if you’re appointed permanently to this job?”

  He had a way of watching one when he asked a question. He could probably sort out truth from lie quickly enough, but in this particular case there was simply no way he would be able to suss out the reason for the lie she was about to tell him. “Then, of course, they would join me in London. But I don’t like to make premature moves. That’s never seemed wise, and in this case it would be completely foolhardy.”

  “Like counting your chickens.”

  “Exactly like,” she said. “So that’s another reason, Inspector—”

  “We’d got to Thomas.”

  “Thomas,” she said. “All right. I’m laying out the truth for you. I want you to be involved in this case because I want to improve my chances for a permanent assignment here. With you working with me, it will set minds at rest and put an end to speculation at the same time as it will demonstrate a form of cooperation that will act as …” She looked for the appropriate term.

  He supplied it. “As an endorsement of you.”

  “Yes. If we work together well, it will do that. As I said, I’ll never lie to you.”

  “And my part would be played out at your side? Is that how you see it?”

  “For the present, yes. It may alter. We’d take it as it comes.”

  He was quiet, but she could tell he was considering her request: setting it against his life as he was currently living it, evaluating how things would alter and whether that alteration would make a difference to whatever he was coping with now.

  He finally said, “I must think about it.”

  “How long?”

  “Have you a mobile?”

  “Of course.”

  “Give me the number, then. I’ll let you know by the end of the day.”

  THE REAL QUESTION for him was what it meant, not whether he would do it. He’d tried to leave police work behind him, but police work had found him and was likely to continue to find him whether he willed it or not.

  Once Isabelle Ardery left him, Lynley went to the window and watched her stride back to her car. She was quite tall—six feet at least because he was six feet two inches and they’d been virtually eye to eye—and everything about her shouted professional, from her tailored clothing to her polished
pumps to her smooth amber-coloured hair falling just below her ears and tucked behind them. She’d had on gold button-shaped earrings and a necklace with a similarly shaped pendant of gold, but that had been the extent of her jewellery. She wore a watch but no rings, and her hands were well cared for, with manicured nails cut to her fingertips and skin that looked soft. She was definitely a mixture of masculine and feminine, as she would have to be. To succeed in their world, she would be regularly forced to be one of the boys while remaining, at heart, one of the girls. It wouldn’t be easy.

  He watched her open her bag at her car. She dropped her keys, scooped them up, and unlocked the vehicle. She paused to search through her shoulder bag for something, but apparently she couldn’t find it because she tossed her bag inside the car and in a moment she’d started it and had driven off.

  He stood looking at the street for a moment once she’d gone. He hadn’t done this in quite some time as it was in the street that Helen had died, and he’d not been able to bring himself to look lest his imagination take him back to that moment. But looking now, he saw that the street was merely a street like so many others in Belgravia. Stately white buildings, wrought-iron railings that gleamed in the sunlight, window boxes that spilled forth ivy and star jasmine in a sweet perfume.

  He turned from the sight. He made for the stairway and climbed, but he did not return to the library where he’d been reading the Financial Times. Instead, he went to the bedroom next to the room he’d shared with his wife, and he opened its door for the first time since the previous February. And for the first time since the previous February, he also went inside.

  It was not quite finished. A cot required assembling, as they’d only got it as far as unloaded from its box. Six rolls of wallpaper tilted against the wainscoting, which had been painted once but definitely needed another coat. A new ceiling light remained in its box, and a changing table stood beneath one of the windows, but it was still bare of appropriate padding. The quilted padding was itself rolled up in a Peter Jones carrier bag, among other carrier bags that contained pillows, nappies, a breast pump, bottles …It was astonishing how much gear was required for a creature likely weighing upon birth seven pounds or less.

  The room was airless and quite hot, and Lynley moved to the windows and shoved them open. There was little breeze to mitigate the temperature, and he wondered they hadn’t thought of that when they’d chosen this room for their son’s nursery. Of course, it had been late autumn then, and on into winter, so summer heat would have been the last thing on their minds. Instead, they’d been consumed with the fact of the pregnancy alone, and not actually with what the pregnancy was going to produce. He supposed many couples approached it that way. Get through the tough bits leading up to and through childbirth and then shift into parenting mode. One couldn’t be a parent or think like a parent without someone to parent, he concluded.

  “M’ lord.”

  Lynley swung around. Charlie Denton was in the doorway. He knew Lynley disliked the use of his title, but they’d never settled on what Denton was supposed to say or do to get his attention aside from using the title in some form, mumbled if necessary or said in the midst of a cough.

  “Yes? What is it, Charlie? Are you off, then?”

  He shook his head. “I’ve been already.”

  “And?”

  “One never knows about these things. I thought the manner of dress would do it, but there were no words of approbation from the director.”

  “Were there not? Damn.”

  “Hmm. I did hear someone murmur, ‘He has the look,’ but that was it. The rest is waiting.”

  “As always,” Lynley said. “How long will it take?”

  “For a callback? Not long. Commercials, you know. They’re picky but they’re not that picky.”

  He sounded resigned. It was, Lynley thought, the way of the acting world. Making one’s way there was a microcosm of life itself. Desire and compromise. Putting oneself in a position of chance and feeling the slap of rejection more often than the embrace of success. But there was no success without taking the chance, without risk and consequence, without a willingness to leap.

  He said, “In the meantime, Charlie, while you’re waiting to be cast as Hamlet …”

  “Sir?” Denton said.

  “We need to pack up this room. If you’ll make us a jug of Pimm’s and bring it up here, we should be able to accomplish it by the end of the day.”

  Chapter Seven

  MEREDITH FINALLY TRACKED GORDON JOSSIE TO FRITHAM. She’d assumed he’d still be working on the building in Boldre Gardens where Gina Dickens had met him, but when she got there it was obvious from the state of the roof that he was long gone to another job. The thatch had been dressed and Gordon’s signature piece was in place on the ridge: an elegant peacock whose tail protected the vulnerable corner of the ridge and trailed in sculpted straw several feet down the roof.

  Meredith muttered a disappointed expletive—low so that Cammie couldn’t hear it—and said to her daughter, “Let’s wander over to the duck pond, shall we, ’cause there’s supposed to be a pretty green bridge over it that we can walk on.”

  The duck pond and the bridge ate up an hour, but it turned out to be well spent as things happened. They stopped at the refreshment kiosk afterwards and while purchasing a Cornetto for Cammie and a bottle of water for herself, Meredith learned where she could find Gordon Jossie without having to ring him and thus allow him time to ready himself to see her.

  He was working on the pub near Eyeworth Pond. She gathered this from the girl at the till who apparently possessed the information because she’d had her eye on Gordon’s apprentice for the entire time the two men had worked at Boldre Gardens. She’d managed to make inroads into this person’s affections, apparently, and despite—or perhaps because of—having legs so bowed she was shaped like a turkey wishbone. That’s where Meredith could find the thatchers, she said, near Eyeworth Pond. She narrowed her eyes and asked which one of the men Meredith was looking for. Meredith wanted to tell her to save her anxiety for something worthwhile. A man in any condition, of any age, and in any form was the last thing she wished to add to her life. But she said she was trying to find Gordon Jossie, at which point the girl helpfully indicated the exact location of Eyeworth Pond, just east of Fritham. And the pub was nearer to Fritham than it was to the pond anyway, she added.

  The idea of another pond and more ducks made it easy to get Cammie from the lawns and flowers of Boldre Gardens into the car, never her favourite place to be because she positively loathed the restrictions of her car seat and the vehicle’s lack of air-conditioning, and she had long been very happy to make her displeasure known. As luck would have it, though, Fritham was some quarter hour only from the gardens, just on the other side of the A31. Meredith drove there with all the windows rolled down and instead of her affirmation tape, she popped in a cassette that was a favourite of Cammie’s. Cammie was partial—of all things—to tenors, and she could actually warble “Nessuno Dorma” with astonishing operatic flair.

  It was easy enough to find the pub in question. Called the Royal Oak, it was a mishmash of styles that reflected different periods when extensions had been built upon it. So the place blended cob, half-timber, and brick, and its roof was part thatch and another part slate tiles. Gordon had removed the old thatch right down to the rafters. When Meredith arrived he was in the midst of climbing down from the scaffolding where, beneath the pub’s eponymous oak, his apprentice was organising bundles of reeds. Cammie was happy to play upon a swing at the far side of the pub’s beer garden, so Meredith knew she’d be well occupied while her mum had a chat with the master thatcher.

  Gordon didn’t look surprised to see her. Meredith reckoned Gina Dickens had likely reported her visit, and who could blame her? She wondered if, after making her report, Gina had also grilled Gordon on the matter of a car that was not his and on the matter of clothing stored in his attic. She thought the younger woman might have done. Sh
e’d seemed unnerved enough when Meredith had brought her more fully into the picture of the place Jemima Hastings had occupied in Gordon Jossie’s life.

  Meredith wasted no time with preambles once she saw Cammie climb safely onto the swing. She strode up to Gordon Jossie and she said, “What I’d like to know is how she was supposed to get up to London without her car, Gordon,” and she waited to hear how he’d answer the question and what his face would look like as he did so.

  Gordon glanced at his apprentice. He said, “Let’s have a break, Cliff,” and added nothing more till the younger man had nodded and disappeared into the pub. Then he removed the baseball cap he’d been wearing and wiped down his face and his balding pate with a handkerchief that he removed from his jeans. He had his sunglasses on and he didn’t remove them, which, Meredith knew, was going to make it more difficult to read him. She’d always thought he wore dark glasses so often because he didn’t want people to see his shifty eyes, but Jemima had said, “Oh, that’s nonsense,” and apparently thought there was nothing odd about a man in dark glasses rain or shine, sometimes even indoors as well. But that had been the problem from the first: Meredith had thought there were scores of things about Gordon Jossie that just weren’t right, while Jemima had wanted to see none of them. He was, after all, m-a-n, one of a subspecies among whom Jemima had been careening for years like someone controlled by the Pinball Wizard.

  Now Gordon removed those dark glasses, but he kept them off only long enough to wipe them down with his handkerchief, whereupon he replaced them, shoved the handkerchief back into his pocket, and said calmly, “What d’you have against me, Meredith?”

  “The fact that you separated Jemima from her friends.”

  He nodded slowly, as if taking this in. He finally said, “From you, you mean.”

  “From everyone, Gordon. You don’t deny it, do you?”

  “No point to denying what’s dead wrong, eh? Stupid as well, if you don’t mind me saying. You stopped coming round, didn’t you, so if any separating was being done, you’re the one who did it. D’you want to talk about why?”