This Body of Death

by Elizabeth George

  “But you didn’t report this,” Isabelle said. “The only report we had was from the young couple who saw you, Marlon. Why didn’t you report it?”

  “Them carvings,” he said. “An’ the magazine.”

  “Ah.” Defacing public property, buying pornographic magazines, masturbating—or at least intending to do so—in public: These had been his considerations, as had no doubt been the displeasure of his father, and the fact that his father seemed to express that displeasure by means of a cricket bat. “I see. Well, we’re going to need a few things from you. Will you cooperate with us?”

  He nodded vigorously. Cooperation? No problem. Anything at all.

  They would need a sample of his DNA, which a swab from his mouth would happily provide. They would also require his shoes, and his fingerprints, which would be easy enough to obtain. And his carving tools were going to have to be handed over for inspection by forensics. “I expect,” Isabelle said, “you’ve got any number of sharp objects among them? Yes? Well, we need to test them all, Marlon.”

  The welling of eyes, the whimper, the father’s impatient and bull-like breath.

  “It’s all to prove you’re telling the truth,” she assured the boy. “Are you, Marlon? Are you telling the truth?”

  “Swear,” he said. “Swear, swear, swear.”

  Isabelle wanted to tell him that one swearing was enough, but she reckoned she’d be wasting her time.

  AS THEY WALKED back to the car, the superintendent asked Lynley what he was thinking. She said to him, “It’s not entirely necessary for you to keep silent in that sort of situation, you know.”

  He glanced at her. Considering the heat of the day and their encounter with the Kays, she was managing to look remarkably collected, unruffled, professional, even cool in the blasting sun. Wisely—if unusually—she wore not a summer suit but a sleeveless dress, and Lynley realised it served more than one purpose in that it likely made her more comfortable at the same time as it made her less intimidating when she questioned people. People like Marlon, he thought, an adolescent boy whose trust she needed to garner.

  He said, “I didn’t think you needed my—”

  “Help?” she cut in sharply. “That’s not what I was implying, Thomas.”

  Lynley looked at her again. “Actually, I was going to say my participation,” he told her.

  “Ah. Sorry.”

  “You’re prickly about it, then.”

  “Not at all.” She fished in her bag and brought out a pair of dark glasses. Then she sighed and said, “Well, that’s not true. I am prickly. But one has to be, in our line of work. It’s not easy for a woman.”

  “Which part isn’t easy? The investigation? Promoting? Navigating the corridors of power in Victoria Street, dubious though they may be?”

  “Oh, it’s easy for you to have the odd chuckle at my expense,” she noted. “But I don’t expect any man comes up against the kinds of things a woman has to cope with. Especially a man …” She seemed unwilling to finish her thought.

  He did it for her. “A man like me?”

  “Well, really, Thomas. You can hardly argue that a life of privilege—the family pile in Cornwall, Eton, Oxford …remember I do know a bit about you—has made it difficult for you to succeed in your line of work. And why do you do it, anyway? Certainly you don’t need to be a policeman. Doesn’t your sort of man generally do something less—” She seemed to be searching for the right term and she settled on, “Less elbow rubbing with the great unwashed?”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know. Sit on boards of hospitals and universities? Breed thoroughbred horses? Manage property—his own, naturally—and collect rent from farmers wearing flat caps and Wellingtons?”

  “Those would be the ones who come to the kitchen door and keep their eyes cast downward? The ones who hastily remove those flat caps in my presence? Pulling on their forelocks and all the rest?”

  “What in God’s name is a forelock?” she asked. “I’ve always wondered. I mean, it’s clear that it’s hair and it’s in the front but how much of it constitutes a ‘fore’ of it and why on earth would someone pull it?”

  “It’s all part of the bowing and scraping,” he said solemnly. “Part of the general peasant-and-master routine that comprises life for my sort of man.”

  She looked at him. “Damn you, your eyes are actually twinkling.”

  He said, “Sorry,” and he smiled.

  She said, “It’s bloody hot, isn’t it. Look, I need something cool to drink, Thomas. And we could use the time to talk. There’s got to be a pub nearby.”

  He reckoned there was, but he also wanted to have a look at the spot where the body had been found. They’d arrived back at her car at the front of the cemetery, and he made his request: Would she take him to the chapel where Jemima Hastings’ body had been found? Even as he spoke the words, he recognised another step being taken. Five months since his wife’s murder on the front steps of their house. In February even a hint that he might be willing to look upon a place where someone had died had been unthinkable.

  As he reckoned she might, the superintendent asked why he wanted to see it. She sounded suspicious, as if she thought he was checking up on her work. She pointed out that the site had been checked, had been cleared, had been reopened to the public, and he told her that it was curiosity and nothing more. He’d seen the pictures; he wanted to see the place.

  She acquiesced. He followed her inside the cemetery and along paths that twisted into the trees. It was cooler here, with foliage sheltering them from the sun and no concrete pavements sending the heat upward in unavoidable waves. He noticed that she was what once would have been called “a fine figure of a woman” as she strode ahead of him, and she walked as she seemed to do everything else: with confidence.

  At the chapel, she directed him round the side. There the shelter stood and beyond it the baked grass of a clearing gave onto more of the graveyard, a stone bench on the edge of this. Another stone bench was across from the first, with three overgrown tombs and one crumbling mausoleum behind it.

  “Fingertip, perimeter, and a grid, producing a diligent search,” Ardery told him. “Nothing except what you’d expect in this kind of place.”

  “Which would be … ?”

  “Soft drink cans and other assorted rubbish, pencils, pens, plans of the park, crisp bags, chocolate wrappers, old Oyster cards—yes, they’re being checked into—and enough used condoms to give one hope that sexually transmitted diseases might one day be a thing of the past.” And then, “Oh. Sorry. That wasn’t appropriate.”

  He’d been standing in the doorway to the shelter, and he turned to see that a dark flush was climbing up her neck.

  She said, “The condom thing. Other way round, it could be construed as sexual harassment. I apologise for the comment.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Well, no offence taken. But I’ll be on guard in the future, so take care, guv.”

  “Isabelle,” she said. “You can call me Isabelle.”

  “I’m on duty,” he said. “What d’you make of the graffito?” He indicated the wall of the shelter where GOD GOES WIRELESS and the eye in the triangle were rendered in black.

  “Old,” she said. “Placed here long before her death. And smacking of the Masons. You?”

  “We’re of the same mind.”

  “Good,” she said. And when he turned back to her, he saw that the flush on her skin was receding. She said, “If you’ve seen enough, then, I’d like that drink. There’re cafés on Stoke Newington Church Street, and I expect we can find a pub as well.”

  They left the cemetery by a different route, this one taking them past the monument which Lynley recognised as the background that Deborah St. James had used for her photograph of Jemima Hastings. It sat at the junction of two paths: a marble life-size male lion on a plinth. He paused and read the monument’s inscription that they “would all meet again on some happy Easter morning.” Were that only the truth, he thou
ght.

  The superintendent was watching him, but she said nothing other than, “It’s this way, Thomas,” and she led him to the street.

  They found both a café and a pub in very short order. Ardery chose the pub. Once inside, she disappeared into the ladies’, telling him to order her a cider and saying, “For God’s sake, it’s mild, Thomas,” when he apparently looked surprised at her choice, as they would be on duty for hours. She told him that she wasn’t about to police her team regarding their choice of liquid refreshment. If someone wanted a lager in the middle of the day, she didn’t care. It’s the work that matters, she informed him, and the quality of that work. Then off she went to the ladies’. For his part, he ordered her cider—“And make it a pint, please” she’d said—and got a bottle of mineral water for himself. He took these to a table tucked away in a corner, then he changed his mind and chose another one, more suitable, he thought, for two colleagues at work.

  She proved herself a typical woman, at least in matters pertaining to her disappearance into the ladies’. She was gone at least five minutes and when she returned, she’d rearranged her hair. It was behind her ears now, revealing earrings, he saw. They were navy, edged in gold. The navy matched the colour of her dress. He wondered about the little vanities of women. Helen had never merely dressed in the morning: She had put together entire ensembles.

  For God’s sake, Helen, aren’t you only going out to buy petrol?

  Darling Tommy, I might actually be seen!

  He blinked, poured water into his glass. There was lime with it, and he squeezed the wedge hard.

  Ardery said, “Thank you.”

  He said, “They had only one brand.”

  “I didn’t mean the cider. I meant thank you for not standing up. I expect you usually do.”

  “Ah. That. Well, the manners are beaten into one from birth, but I reckoned you’d rather I eschewed them at work.”

  “Have you ever had a female superior officer before?” And when he shook his head, “You’re coping rather well.”

  “It’s what I do.”

  “You cope?”

  “Yes.” When he said it, though, he saw how it could lead to a discussion he didn’t want to have. So he said, “And what about you, Superintendent Ardery?”

  “You won’t call me Isabelle, will you?”

  “I won’t.”

  “Whyever not? This is private, Thomas. We’re colleagues, you and I.”

  “On duty.”

  “Will that be your answer for everything?”

  He thought about this, how convenient it was. “Yes. I expect it will.”

  “And should I be offended?”

  “Not at all. Guv.”

  He looked at her and she held the look. The moment became a man-woman thing. That was always the risk when the sexes mixed. With Barbara Havers it had always been something so far out of the question as to be nearly laughable. With Isabelle Ardery, this was not the case. He looked away.

  She said lightly, “I believed him. You? I realise he could have been going back to the scene of the crime, checking on the body to see if she’d been found yet, but I don’t think it’s likely. He doesn’t seem clever enough to have thought it all through.”

  “You mean taking the magazine with him so it would appear he had a reason to duck into the shelter?”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  Lynley agreed with her. Marlon Kay was an unlikely killer. The superintendent had gone the way of wisdom in dealing with the situation, though. Before they’d left the boy and his surly father, she made the arrangements for his fingerprints to be taken and his mouth to be swabbed, and she’d had a look through his clothing. There was nothing yellow among it. As for the trainers he’d worn that day in the cemetery, they were devoid of visible signs of blood but would be sent to forensics anyway. In all of this Marlon had been completely cooperative. He seemed anxious to please them at the same time as he was eager to show he had nothing to do with the death of Jemima Hastings.

  “So we’re left with the sighting of the Oriental man, and let’s hope that something comes of it,” Ardery said.

  “Or that something comes of this bloke in Hampshire,” Lynley noted.

  “There’s that as well. How d’you expect Sergeant Havers will cope with that part of the investigation, Thomas?”

  “In her usual fashion,” he replied.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “BLOODY INCREDIBLE. I’VE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE IT.” This was Barbara Havers’ reaction to the New Forest and the herds of ponies running wild upon it. There were hundreds of them—thousands perhaps—and they grazed freely wherever they had a mind to graze. On the vast swatches of the grassland, they munched on greenery with their foals nearby. Beneath primeval oaks and beeches and wandering among both rowan and birch, they fed on the scrub growth and left in their wake a woodland floor dappled with sunlight; spongy with decomposing leaves; and devoid of weeds, bushes, and brambles.

  It was nearly impossible not to be enchanted by a place where ponies lapped water in splashes and ponds and thatched cottages of whitewashed cob looked like buildings scrubbed on a daily basis. Grand vistas of hillsides displayed a patchwork in which the green of the bracken had begun to brown and the yellow of gorse was giving way to the increasing purple of heather.

  “Almost makes me want to pack in London,” Barbara declared. She had the big A-Z road atlas open upon her lap, having acted as navigator for Winston Nkata during their drive. They’d stopped once for lunch and another time for coffee and now they were wending their way from the A31 over to Lyndhurst where they would make their presence known to the local coppers whose patch they were invading.

  “Nice, yeah,” was Nkata’s assessment of the New Forest. “Expect it’d be a bit quiet for me, though. Not to mention …” He glanced at her. “There’s the raisin in the rice pud aspect of things.”

  “Oh. Right. Well,” Barbara said, and she reckoned he was correct on that score. The country wasn’t a place where they’d be finding a minority population and certainly not a population with Nkata’s background of Brixton via West Africa and the Caribbean, with a bit of a sidetrack into gang warfare on the housing estate. “Good place for a holiday, though. Mind how you go through town. We’ve got a one-way system coming up.”

  They negotiated this with little trouble and found the Lyndhurst police station just beyond town in the Romsey Road. An undistinguished brick building in the tedious architectural style that fairly shouted 1960s, it squatted on the top of a small knoll, with a crown of concertina wire and a necklace of CCTV cameras marking it as an area of out-of-bounds to anyone not wishing his every movement to be monitored. A few trees and a flower garden in front of the building attempted to soften the overall dismal air of the place, but there was no disguising its institutional nature.

  They showed their identification to the special constable apparently in charge of reception, a young bloke who emerged from an internal room once they rang a buzzer placed on the counter for this purpose. He looked interested but not overwhelmed by the idea that New Scotland Yard had come calling. They told him they needed to speak to his chief super and he made much of going from their ID pictures to their faces as if suspecting them of ill intentions. He said, “Hang on, then,” and disappeared with their IDs into the bowels of the station. It was nearly ten minutes before he reappeared, handed back their warrant cards, and told them to follow him.

  Chief Super, he said, was a bloke called Zachary Whiting. He’d been in a meeting but he’d cut it short.

  “We won’t keep him long,” Barbara said. “Just a courtesy call, this, if you know what I mean. Bring him into the picture so there’s no misunderstanding later.”

  Lyndhurst was the operational command headquarters for all the police stations in the New Forest. It was under the authority of a chief superintendent who himself reported to the constabulary in Winchester. One cop didn’t wander onto another cop’s patch without making nice and all the e
t ceteras, and that was what Barbara and Winston were there to do. If anything currently going on in the area happened to apply to their investigation, all the better. Barbara didn’t expect this to be the case, but one never knew where a professional obligation like this one could lead.

  Chief Superintendent Zachary Whiting stood waiting for them at his desk. Behind spectacles, his eyes watched them with some speculation, hardly a surprising response to a call from New Scotland Yard. When the Met arrived, it often meant trouble of the internal investigation sort.

  Winston gave Barbara the nod, so she did the honours, making the introductions and then sketching out the details of the death in London. She named Jemima Hastings as the victim. She concluded with the reason for their incursion into his patch.

  “There was a mobile number on a postcard related to the victim,” Barbara told Whiting. “We’ve traced that number to a Gordon Jossie here in Hampshire. So …” She didn’t add the rest. The chief inspector would know the drill.

  Whiting said, “Gordon Jossie?” and he sounded thoughtful.

  “Know him?” Nkata asked.

  Whiting went to his desk and leafed through some paperwork. Barbara and Winston exchanged glances.

  “Has he been in trouble round here?” Barbara asked.

  Whiting didn’t reply directly at first. He repeated the surname, and then he said, “No, not in trouble,” putting a hesitation before the final word as if Gordon Jossie had been in something else.

  “But you know the bloke?” Nkata said again.

  “It’s just the name.” The chief superintendent apparently found what he was searching for in his stack of paperwork, and this turned out to be a phone message. “We’ve had a phone call about him. Crank call, if you ask me, but evidently she was insistent, so the message got passed along.”

  “Is that normal procedure?” Barbara asked. Why would a chief superintendent want to be informed about phone calls, crank or otherwise?