This Body of Death

by Elizabeth George

  What could he tell them about Gordon Jossie? Barbara began. Did he remember him?

  “Oh. Aye. No reason to forget Gordon.” Heath continued his work as he gave his history with Jossie. He’d come to work as an apprentice a bit older than usual. He’d been twenty-one. Usually an apprentice was sixteen “which’s better for training as they don’t know a thing about a thing, do they, and they’re still at the point when they even might believe they don’t know a thing about a thing, eh? But twenty-one’s a bit old ’cause you don’t want some bloke set in his ways. I was a bit reluctant to take him on.”

  But take him on he did, and things turned out well. Hard worker, Jossie was. A bloke who talked very little and listened a lot and “didn’t go round wearing those sodding earphones with music blasting away like kids do now. Half the time you can’t even get their attention, eh? You’re up on the scaffold shouting at ’em and they’re down below listening to whoever and bobbing their heads to the beat.” He said this last word scornfully, a man who obviously did not share his namesake’s passion for music.

  Jossie, on the other hand, hadn’t been like the typical apprentice. And he’d been willing to do anything he’d been assigned to do, without claiming something was “beneath him or rubbish like that.” Once he was given actual thatching jobs to do—which, by the way, did not happen for the first nine months of his apprenticeship—he wasn’t ever above asking a question. And it would be a good question and never once did it have to do with “How much money c’n I expect to make, Ringo?” like he was thinking he’d be going out to buy some Maserati on what a thatcher makes. “It’s a good living, I tell him, but it’s not that good, so if you’re ’specting to impress the ladies with golden cuff links or whatever, you’re barking up a tree with no leaves, if you know what I mean. What I tell him is that there’s always need for a thatcher ’cause we’re talking ’bout listed buildings, eh? And they’re all round the south and up into Gloucestershire and beyond and they got to stay thatched. There’s no replacing ’em with tiles or anything else. So if you’re good—and he meant to be good, let me tell you—you work all year and you’ve gen’rally got more bookings than you c’n handle.”

  Gordon Jossie had apparently been a model apprentice: With no complaint he’d started out doing nothing more than fetching, carrying, hoisting, cleaning up, burning rubbish—and according to Heath he “did it all right, mind you. No cutting corners. I could tell he was going to be good when I got him on the scaffold. This is detail work, this is. Oh, it looks like slapping reeds onto the rafters and that’s that, doesn’t it, but it’s step-by-step and a decent roof—a big one, say—takes months to put on ’cause it’s not like laying tiles or pounding shingles, is it? It’s working with a natural product, it is, so there’s no two reeds the same diameter and the length of them’s not exact. This is something takes patience and skill and it takes years to get it down so you can do a roof properly.”

  Gordon Jossie worked for him as an apprentice for nearly four years, and by that time he’d gone far beyond the apprentice stage and was more like a partner. In fact, Ringo Heath had wanted to bring him on as a bona fide partner, but Gordon wanted to have his own business. So he’d left with Heath’s blessing, and had begun the way they all began: subcontracted to someone with a larger concern till he was able to break out on his own.

  “Ever since, I end up with one after ’nother lazy sods to work as apprentices,” Heath concluded, “and believe me, I’d take ’nother older bloke like Gordon Jossie in the blink of an eye, if one came round.”

  He’d filled the wooden box with completed spars as they were speaking, and he heaved it up and took it over to an open-back lorry, where he slung it alongside various crates that sat among a collection of curious implements, which Heath was happy to identify for them without being asked to do so. He was building up a real head of steam on his topic. They had shearing hooks for carving into the thatch—

  “Takes about a millimeter off, it does, sharp as anything, and you got to use it with care lest you slice into your hand.”

  —leggetts which were used to dress the thatch and which, to Barbara, looked like nothing more than an aluminium grill with a handle, something one might use on the cooker to fry up bacon; the Dutchman, which was used in place of the leggett to dress the thatch when the roof was curved …

  Barbara nodded sagely and Nkata jotted everything in his notebook, as if expecting he’d be tested on it later. She was having trouble keeping it all straight and determining how she would bring the thatcher away from his lengthy exposition on the process of thatching a roof and back to the subject of Gordon Jossie, when Heath mentioned “and ever’one of them’s different,” which brought her round to pay closer attention to what he was saying.

  “…bits an’ bobs that the blacksmith provides, like the crooks an’ the pins.” The crooks were curved at one end—hence the name, as they resembled a shepherd’s crook in miniature—and these were hooked round the reeds and driven into the rafters to hold them in place. The pins, which resembled long spikes with an eye at one end and a sharp point at the other, held the reeds in place while the thatcher was working. These came from the blacksmith, and the interesting bit was that every blacksmith made them according to however he wanted to make them, especially as far as the point was concerned.

  “Forged on four sides, forged on two sides, cut to give it a slash tip, spun on a grinding wheel …Whatever the blacksmith fancies. I like the Dutch ones best. I like a proper forging, I do.” He said this last as if one could not expect such a thing as proper forging to go on in England any longer.

  But Barbara was taken by the very idea of blacksmithing and how it might relate to making a weapon. The thatching tools themselves were weaponlike, if it came to that, no matter Heath’s referring to them dismissively as the bits and bobs of his job. Barbara picked one up—she chose a pin—and found its tip was nice and sharp and suitable for murder. She handed it to Nkata and saw by his expression that they were of the same mind on the matter.

  She said, “Why was he twenty-one years old when he came to you, Mr. Heath? Do you know?”

  Heath took a moment, apparently to adjust to the abrupt change in topic as he’d been nattering on about why the Dutch took more pride in their work than the English and this seemed to have to do with the EU and the mass migration of Albanians and other Eastern Europeans into the UK. He blinked and said, “Eh? Who?”

  “Twenty-one was old for an apprentice, you said. What had Gordon Jossie been doing before he came to you?”

  College, Ringo Heath told them. He’d been a student in some college in Winchester, studying one trade or another although Heath couldn’t recall which it was. He’d brought two letters with him, though. Recommendations these were, from someone or other who’d taught him. It wasn’t the typical way an apprentice presented himself for potential employment, so he’d been quite impressed with that. Did they want to see the letters? He thought he still had them.

  When Barbara told him that they did indeed want to see them, Heath turned towards his house and bellowed, “Kitten! You’re needed.” To this a most unkittenlike woman emerged. She carried a rolling pin under her arm and she looked the type who’d be happy to use it: big, brawling, and muscular.

  Kitten said, “Really, pet, why’ve you got to yell? I’m only just inside, in the kitchen,” in a surprisingly genteel voice, completely at odds with her appearance. She sounded like an upstairs someone from a costume drama, but she looked like someone who’d be washing the cook pots in a decidedly downstairs scullery.

  Heath simpered at her, saying, “Darling girl. Don’t know the strength of my own voice, do I. Sorry. Have we still got them letters that Gordon Jossie handed over when he first wanted a job? You know which ones I mean, don’t you? The ones from his college? You remember them?” And to Barbara and Winston, “She keeps the books and such, does my Kitten. And the girl’s got a mind for facts and figures that’d make you dizzy. I keep telling her to
go on telly. One of those quiz programmes or summat, if you know what I mean. I say we could be millionaires, we could, if she got herself on a quiz show.”

  “Oh, you do go on, Ringo,” Kitten said. “I made that chicken and leek pie you love, by the by.”

  “Precious girl.”

  “Silly boy.”

  “I’ll see you when I see you.”

  “Oh, you do talk, Ring.”

  “Uh …About those letters?” Barbara cut in. She glanced at Winston, who was watching the exchange between man and wife like a bloke at an amorous Ping-Pong match.

  Kitten said that she would fetch them, as she reckoned they were in Ringo’s business files. She wouldn’t be a moment, she said, because she liked to stay organised since “leave things to Ringo, we’d be living under mounds of paperwork, let me tell you.”

  “True enough,” Ringo said, “darling girl.”

  “Handsome—”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Heath,” Barbara said pointedly.

  Kitten made kissy noises at her husband, who made a gesture that seemed to indicate he’d love to swat her on the bum, at which she giggled and disappeared inside the house. Within two minutes, she was back with them, and she carried a manila folder from which she extricated the aforementioned letters for their inspection.

  These were, Barbara saw, recommendations attesting to Gordon Jossie’s character, his work ethic, his pleasant demeanour, his willingness to take instruction, and all the et ceteras. They were written on the letterhead of Winchester Technical College II, and one of them came from a Jonas Bligh while the other had been written by a Keating Crawford. They’d both indicated knowledge of Gordon Jossie from within the classroom and from outside the classroom. Fine young man, they declared, trustworthy and good-hearted and well deserving of an opportunity to learn a trade like thatching. One would not go wrong in hiring him. He was bound to succeed.

  Barbara asked could she keep the letters. She’d return them to the Heaths, of course, but for the time being, if they didn’t mind …

  They didn’t mind. At this point, however, Ringo Heath asked what Scotland Yard wanted with Gordon Jossie anyway. “What’s he s’posed to’ve done?” he asked them.

  “We’re investigating a murder up in London,” Barbara told them. “A girl called Jemima Hastings. D’you know her?”

  They didn’t. But what they did know and were willing to assert was that Gordon Jossie was definitely no killer. Kitten, however, added an intriguing detail to the Jossie résumé as they were about to leave.

  He couldn’t read, she told them, which always made her wonder at the fact that he somehow completed courses in college. While obviously there were classes one took that might not require reading, she had always found it a bit odd that he’d managed such success at the Winchester college. She said to her husband, “You know, darling boy, that does suggest something not quite right about Gordon, doesn’t it? I mean, if he could actually manage to get through his course work and still hide the fact that he couldn’t read …It does rather imply an ability to hide other things, wouldn’t you say?”

  “What d’you mean he couldn’t read?” Ringo demanded. “That’s rubbish, that is. Bah.”

  “No, precious. It’s the truth. I saw it. He absolutely could not read.”

  “D’you mean he had trouble with reading?” Nkata asked. “Or he couldn’t read.”

  He couldn’t read, she said. In fact, while he knew the alphabet, he had to print it out in order to know it for certain. It was the most peculiar thing she’d ever seen. Because of this, she’d wondered more than once about how he’d gone through school. “Reckoned he’d been performing for the instructors in ways not entirely academic,” she concluded, “if you know what I mean.”

  THROUGHOUT THE REST of the day, Meredith Powell felt a dull fire burning within her. It was accompanied by pounding in her head, one that wasn’t connected to pain but rather to the words she’s dead. The simple fact of Jemima’s death was bad: It put Meredith into a state of disbelief and sorrow, and the sorrow was more profound than she would ever have expected to feel for someone who was not a member of her immediate family. Beyond the fact of her death, though, was the additional fact that Jemima had been taken away before Meredith had been able to put things right between them, and this gnawed at her conscience and her heart. She could no longer remember what it even was that had actually so damaged their long friendship. Had it been a slow chipping away of their affection for each other, or had it suffered one deadly blow? She couldn’t recall, which told her how unimportant it must have been.

  “I’m not like you, Meredith,” Jemima had said so many times. “Why can’t you just accept that?”

  Because having a man’s not going to make you stop being afraid had been the answer. But it had been a reply that Jemima had pooh-poohed as an indication of Meredith’s jealousy. Except she hadn’t been jealous, not really. She’d merely been concerned. She’d watched Jemima flit from boy to boy to man to man for years in a restless search for something not a single one of them would ever be able to give her. And that had been what she’d wished her friend to understand and what she’d tried again and again to get across to her until finally she’d thrown up her hands—or Jemima had done, because she couldn’t remember now—and that had been that as far as friendship went between them.

  But there had been a bigger issue that Meredith had failed to see till now: Why had it been so incredibly important to her that Jemima Hastings see things Meredith Powell’s way? And for that question, Meredith had no answer. But she was determined to find one.

  She phoned Gordon Jossie’s house before leaving work at the end of the day. Gina Dickens answered, and this was good, as it was Gina Dickens whom Meredith wished to see. She said, “I need to talk to you. Will you meet me? I’m in Ringwood just now, but I can meet you anywhere, wherever you like. Just not at …not at Gordon’s please.” She didn’t want to see the house again. She didn’t think she could face it just now, not with another woman there, happily going about a life with Gordon Jossie while Jemima lay dead, cold, and murdered up in London.

  Gina said, “The police have been here. They said that Jemima—”

  Meredith squeezed her eyes shut, and the telephone felt cold and slick in her hand. She said, “I need to speak with you.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll meet you. You name the place.”

  “Why? You’re making me nervous, Meredith.”

  “I don’t mean to. Please. I’ll meet you anywhere. Just not at Gordon’s.”

  There was a pause. Then Gina named Hinchelsea Wood. Meredith didn’t want to risk a wood, with all its solitude and everything that solitude suggested about danger, no matter what Gina Dickens said about being nervous of her and all that this was supposed to imply about Gina Dickens’ apparent innocence. Meredith suggested a heath instead. What about Longslade Heath? There was a car park and they could—

  “Not a heath,” Gina said at once.

  “Why not?”

  “Snakes.”

  “What snakes?”

  “Adders. There’re adders on the heath. You must know that. I read that somewhere, and I don’t want to—”

  “Hatchet Pond, then,” Meredith cut in. “It’s outside Beaulieu.” They agreed on this.

  There were other people at Hatchet Pond when Meredith arrived. There were ponies and foals as well. The people strolled along the edge of the water, they walked their dogs, they sat in cars reading, they fished, they chatted to each other on benches. The ponies lapped water and grazed.

  The pond itself stretched out a good distance, with a finger of land on the far side that reached into the water and was topped with beech and chestnut trees and a single, graceful willow. It was a good trysting place for young people at night, tucked off the road so that parked cars could not be seen, but still conveniently located at the intersection of several routes: with Beaulieu immediately to its east, East Boldre to the south, and Brockenhurst to the west. A
ll sorts of trouble between hot-blooded adolescents could be got into here. Meredith knew that from Jemima.

  She waited some twenty minutes for Gina to arrive. She herself had barreled the distance from Ringwood, driven by determination. It was one thing to be deeply suspicious about Gordon Jossie, Gina Dickens, and the fact that most of Jemima’s belongings were packed away in Gordon’s house. It was another thing to learn that Jemima had been murdered. All the way from Ringwood, Meredith had engaged in a mental conversation with Gina about these and other matters. When Gina finally arrived in her little red convertible with her enormous film star dark glasses covering half her face and a scarf keeping her hair in place—as if she were Audrey flipping Hepburn or something—Meredith was quite ready for her.

  Gina got out of the car. She cast a look at one of the ponies nearby, as Meredith crossed the car park to her. Meredith said, “Let’s walk,” and when Gina hesitated, saying, “I’m a bit leery of the horses,” Meredith countered with, “Oh for God’s sake. They won’t hurt you. They’re just ponies. Don’t be stupid.” She took Gina’s arm.

  Gina pulled away. “I can walk on my own,” she said stiffly. “But not near the horses.”

  “Fine.” Meredith headed along a path that skirted the water. She cooperatively chose a direction away from the ponies, towards a lone fisherman who was casting his line not far from a heron, motionless as it waited to scoop up an unsuspecting eel.

  “What’s this about?” Gina demanded.

  “What do you think this is about? Gordon has her car. He has her clothes. Now she’s dead in London.”

  Gina stopped walking, and Meredith turned to her. Gina said, “If you’re suggesting or even trying to get me to believe that Gordon—”

  “Wouldn’t she have sent for her clothes? Eventually?”

  “She wouldn’t need her country clothing in London,” Gina said. “What was she going to do with it there? The same goes for her car. She didn’t need a car. Where would she keep it? Why would she drive it?”