This Body of Death

by Elizabeth George

  Meredith tore at the skin round her fingernails. There was truth here somewhere. She meant to have it. She said, “I know all about you, Gina. There’s no programme anywhere round here for young girls at risk. Not at the college in Brockenhurst, and not at the comprehensive. Social services haven’t even heard of a programme and social services haven’t even heard of you. I know because I checked, all right? So why don’t you tell me what you’re doing here, really. Why don’t you tell me the truth about you and Gordon? About when you really met and how you met and what that meant to him and Jemima.”

  Gina’s lips parted then pursed. She said, “Honestly. You’ve been checking on me? What’s wrong with you, Meredith? Why are you so—”

  “Don’t you dare turn this on me. That’s clever of you, but I’m not about to be dragged in that direction.”

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous. No one’s dragging you anywhere.” She pushed past Meredith on the narrow path along the water. “If we’re going to walk, let’s bloody well walk.”

  Gina stalked off. After a moment, she began to speak over her shoulder, saying sharply, “Just think, if you’re capable of it. I told you I was establishing a programme. I didn’t tell you it existed. And the first step in establishing a programme is assessing need, for heaven’s sake. That’s what I’m doing. That’s what I was doing when I met Gordon. And yes, all right, I admit. I haven’t been as diligent as I could have been about it, I haven’t been as …as dedicated as I was when I first came to the New Forest. And yes, all right, the reason for that is that I got involved with Gordon. And yes, I’ve rather liked being Gordon’s partner and having Gordon provide for me. But as far as I know, none of that is a crime, Meredith. So what I want to know—if you don’t mind—is why you dislike Gordon so much? Why can’t you stand the thought of me—or anyone else I daresay—being with him? Because this really isn’t about me, is it? This is about Gordon.”

  “How did you meet him? How did you really meet him?”

  “I told you! I’ve told you the absolute truth from the first. I met him last month, in Boldre Gardens. I saw him later that day and we went for a drink. He asked me for a drink and he looked harmless enough and it was a public place and …Oh, why am I bothering with all this? Why don’t you just come out with it? Why don’t you tell me what you suspect me of? Murdering Jemima? Encouraging the man I love to murder her? Or is it loving him at all that bothers you and why would that be?”

  “This isn’t about loving anyone.”

  “Oh, isn’t it? Then perhaps you’re accusing me of sending Gordon off to murder Jemima for some reason. Perhaps you see me standing on the front step and waving a handkerchief as he drives off to do whatever he was supposed to do. But why would I do that? She was gone from his life.”

  “Perhaps she got in touch with him. Perhaps she wanted to come back. Perhaps they met somewhere and she said she wanted him and you couldn’t have that because then you’d have to—”

  “So I killed her? Not Gordon at all, but me this time? Do you know how ridiculous you sound? And do you want to be meeting out here in the wilds of Hatchet Pond with a killer?” She put her hands on her hips as if thinking about the answer to her question. She smiled and said bitterly, “Ah. Yes. I see why you didn’t want Hinchelsea Wood. How foolish of me. I might have killed you there. I’ve no idea how I would have done it, but that’s what you think. That I’m a killer. Or that Gordon is. Or that we both are, somehow in cahoots to eliminate Jemima for reasons that are so bloody obscure …” She turned away. There was a weather-beaten bench nearby and she made for this and dropped upon it. She whipped off her scarf and shook back her hair. She removed her dark glasses, folded them up, and held them tightly in her hand.

  Meredith stood before her, arms crossed against her chest. She was suddenly and acutely aware of how different they were: Gina tanned and voluptuous and obviously appealing to any man and herself a miserable, freckled beanpole of a thing, alone and likely to stay that way. Only that wasn’t the issue here.

  Yet as if Gina had read her mind, she said in a tone no longer bitter at all but instead resigned, “I’m wondering if this is just what you do to any woman who has a nice relationship with a man. I know you didn’t approve of Gordon and Jemima. He said you didn’t want him to be with her. But I couldn’t sort out why, what it was to you if she and Gordon were partners. Was it because you yourself have no one? Because, perhaps, you keep trying and failing while all round you women and men get attached with no trouble at all? I mean, I know what happened to you. Gordon told me. Jemima told him. Because, of course, he was trying to sort out why you disliked him so much and she said it had to do with London, with when you lived there and got involved with the married man, the one you didn’t know was married, and there you were pregnant …”

  Meredith felt her throat close. She wanted to stop the flow of words but she couldn’t: the catalogue of her personal failures. She felt weak and dizzy as Gina kept talking …about betrayal and then desertion and then bloody little fool, don’t claim you didn’t know I was married because you are simply not that stupid and I never lied, I never once lied, and why the hell weren’t you taking precautions unless it was that you wanted to trap me is that what it was did you want to trap me well I won’t be trapped not by the likes of you or by anyone else if it comes down to it and yes, yes, you can damn well sort out exactly what that means my dear.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Here. Please sit.” Gina rose and urged Meredith onto the bench next to her. She said nothing more for several minutes as across the surface of the placid water dragonflies flitted, their fragile wings flashing purple and green in the light.

  “Listen,” Gina said quietly, “can you and I possibly be friends? Or if not friends, perhaps nodding acquaintances? Or maybe nodding acquaintances at first and then afterwards friends?”

  “I don’t know,” Meredith said dully, and she wondered how widely her shame was known. She reckoned it was known everywhere. It was, she thought, as much as she deserved. For stupid is as stupid does, and she’d been unforgivably stupid.

  By the time John Dresser’s body was found two days after his disappearance, he was national news. What was known to the public at that point was what was seen in the CCTV films from the Barriers, in which a toddler seems to walk off happily hand in hand with three little boys. The still photos released by the police thus offered images that could be interpreted in one of two ways: as children having found the toddler wandering and setting out to take him to an adult who ultimately did him harm or as children intent upon the abduction and possible terrorising of another child. These images played across the front page of every national tabloid, of every broadsheet, of the local newspaper, and on the television.

  With Michael Spargo wearing that unmistakable, overlarge mustard anorak, his identity was quickly established by his own mother. Sue Spargo took her son straight to the police station. That he’d been beaten beforehand was evident by the heavy bruising on his face, although there is no record of anyone’s having questioned Sue Spargo about this beating.

  Following the rules of law, Michael Spargo was interrogated in the presence of a social worker and his mother. The detective in charge of this questioning was a twenty-nine-year veteran of the police force, DI Ryan Farrier, a man with three children and two grandchildren of his own. Farrier had been working criminal investigations for nineteen years of his twenty-nine-year career, but he had never come across a killing that affected him as did the murder of John Dresser. Indeed, so deeply was he harrowed by what he saw and heard during the investigation that he has since retired from the police and has remained under the care of a psychiatrist. It’s worth noting, as well, that the police department made both psychological and psychiatric services available to all the individuals who worked upon the crime once John Dresser’s body was found.

  As might be expected, Michael Spargo denied everything at first, claiming that he was in school that day and maintaining that claim until pres
ented not only with the CCTV film but also with evidence from his teacher as to his truancy. “All right, I was with Reg and Ian,” is all that he says on tape at this point. When asked for their surnames, he tells the police, “It was their idea, wasn’t it. I didn’t never want to nick that kid.”

  This enrages Sue Spargo, whose eruption into verbal abuse and whose attempts at physical abuse are immediately halted by the other adults in the room. Her screams of, “You tell them the bloody truth or I’ll fucking kill you, I will,” are the last words she will speak to Michael during the course of the investigation and up until the moments she shares with him following his sentencing. This abandonment of her son at a crucial moment in his life is characteristic of her parenting style and perhaps speaks more loudly than anything else as to the source of Michael’s psychological disturbance.

  Arrests of Reggie Arnold and Ian Barker quickly followed Michael Spargo’s mentioning of their names, and what was known at the time of their arrests was only that John Dresser had been seen with them and had disappeared. When they were brought to the police station (each boy was taken to a different station, and they did not see each other until their trial began), Reggie was accompanied by his mother Laura and later joined by his father Rudy, and Ian was alone although his grandmother arrived prior to his being interviewed. The whereabouts of Ian’s mother Tricia at the time of his arrest are never made clear in the documentation, and she did not attend his trial.

  At first no one suspected that John Dresser was dead. Transcripts and tapes of early questioning by the police indicate that their initial belief was that the boys took John in an act of mischief, grew tired of his company, and left him somewhere to fend for himself. Although each of the boys was already known to the police, they were none of them known for anything more than truancy, acts of petty vandalism, and minor thefts. (One does wonder how Ian Barker, with a history of small animal torture, managed to go unnoticed for so long, however.) It was only when repeated witnesses began to step forward in the first thirty-six hours following John’s disappearance—communicating the level of the toddler’s distress—that the police seem to have developed a sense that something more ominous than a prank had occurred.

  A search for the little boy had already begun, and as the area surrounding the Barriers was picked through by police and by concerned citizens in an organised and ever-widening circumference, it was not overlong before the Dawkins building site came under scrutiny.

  Constable Martin Neild, twenty-four years old at the time and a brand-new father, was the individual who found the body of John Dresser, alerted to the possibility of its proximity by the sight of John’s blue snowsuit crumpled and bloodied on the ground near a disused Port-A-Loo. Inside this loo, Neild found the baby’s body, stuffed callously into the chemical toilet. Nield reports that he “wanted to think it was a doll or something,” but he knew otherwise.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “WHAT’S THE DECISION ABOUT SUNDAY LUNCH, ISABELLE? I’ve mentioned it to the boys, by the way. They’re quite keen.”

  Isabelle Ardery pressed her fingers to her forehead. She’d taken two paracetamol but they’d done nothing to ease her headache. Nor had they done much for her stomach. She knew she should have eaten something before gulping them down, but the thought of food on top of an already roiling gut was more than she could have managed.

  She said, “Let me speak to them, Bob. Are they there?”

  He said, “You don’t sound quite yourself. Are you unwell, Isabelle?” Which wasn’t what he meant, of course. Unwell was a euphemism, and only barely. Unwell stood in place of everything else he didn’t intend to ask but fully intended to communicate.

  She said, “I was up late last night. I’m on a case. You might have read about it. A woman’s been murdered in a North London cemetery … ?”

  He clearly wasn’t interested in that part of her life, only in the other. He said, “Hitting it rather hard then, are you?”

  “There are usually late nights when it comes to a murder investigation,” she replied, deliberately choosing to misunderstand him. “You know that, Bob. So may I speak to the boys? Where are they? Certainly they’re not out somewhere at this hour of the morning.”

  “Still asleep,” he said. “I don’t like to wake them.”

  “Surely they can go back to sleep if I just say hello.”

  “You know how they are. And they need their rest.”

  “They need their mother.”

  “They have a mother, as things stand. Sandra’s quite—”

  “Sandra has two children of her own.”

  “You aren’t suggesting she treats them differently, I hope. Because, frankly, I’m not listening to that. Because, also frankly, she treats them a damn sight better than their natural mother does since she’s fully conscious and in possession of all her faculties when she’s round them. Do you really want to have this kind of conversation, Isabelle? Now, are you coming for lunch on Sunday or are you not?”

  “I’ll send the boys a note,” she said quietly, beating down her incipient rage. “May I assume, Bob, that you and Sandra aren’t forbidding my sending a note to them?”

  “We’re not forbidding anything,” he said.

  “Oh please. Let’s not pretend.” She rang off without a goodbye. She knew she’d pay for that later—Did you actually hang up on me, Isabelle? Surely we must have been disconnected somehow, yes?—but at the moment, she could do nothing else. To remain on the line with him meant being exposed to an extended display of his ostensible paternal concern, and she wasn’t up to it. She wasn’t, in fact, up to much that morning, and she was going to have to do something to alter that before heading into work.

  Four cups of black coffee—all right, it was Irish coffee, but she could be forgiven for that as she’d used only a dash of spirits—one slice of toast, and a shower later, she was feeling fit. She was actually in the middle of the morning briefing before she felt the urge once more. But then, it was easy to fight it off because she could hardly duck into the ladies’, and that was just how it was. What she could do instead was keep her mind on her work and vow to have a different kind of evening and night at the end of this day. Which, she decided, she could easily manage.

  Sergeants Havers and Nkata had reported in first thing from the New Forest. They were staying in a hotel in Sway—Forest Heath Hotel, it was called, Havers said—and this bit of information was met with guffaws and remarks of the “Hope Winnie’s managed to get his own room” ilk, which Isabelle cut off with a sharp, “That’ll do,” while they assessed the information the two sergeants had unearthed so far. Havers appeared to be building up a head of steam over the fact that Gordon Jossie was a master thatcher and that thatching tools were not only deadly but made by hand. For his part, Nkata seemed to be more interested in the fact of another woman being present in Gordon Jossie’s life. Havers also mentioned Gordon Jossie’s letters of reference from a Winchester college and then brought up a thatcher called Ringo Heath. She concluded by listing the names of individuals still needing to be spoken to.

  “C’n we get you lot on to background checks?” Havers then asked. “Hastings, Jossie, Heath, Dickens …” They’d spoken to the local rozzers, by the way, but there wasn’t a lot of joy to be had from that quarter. New Scotland Yard were welcome to nose round the locals’ patch, according to the CS in Lyndhurst, but as the murder was in London, it wasn’t the locals’ problem.

  Ardery assured the sergeant that they’d get on things at this end, since she herself wished to know everything there was to know about anyone even remotely concerned with Jemima Hastings. “I want to know every detail there is, down to whether their bowels move regularly,” she told the team. She instructed Philip Hale to carry on with the names from Hampshire and she ticked off the additional London names in case he’d forgotten them: Yolanda the Psychic, aka Sharon Price; Jayson Druther; Abbott Langer; Paolo di Fazio; Frazer Chaplin; Bella McHaggis. “Alibis for everyone, with confirmation, and tr
y for two sources. John, I’ll want you handling that part. Coordinate with SO7 as well. Light a fire over there. We need some good information.”

  Stewart gave no indication that he’d heard her, so Isabelle said, “Did you get that, John?” to which he smiled sardonically and pointed an index finger to his temple.

  “All in there …guv,” he noted, and, “Anything else?” as if he suspected that she was the one in need of a good prodding.

  She narrowed her eyes. She was about to respond when Thomas Lynley did so. He was standing at the back of the room, politely keeping himself out of the way although she couldn’t decide if this was a benefit to her or merely a reminder to everyone else of what was likely the immense contrast between their styles. He said, “Perhaps Matt Jones? Sidney St. James’s partner? It’s likely nothing, but if he’d been to the cigar shop as Barbara indicated …”

  “Matt Jones as well,” Isabelle said. “Philip, can someone on your team … ?”

  “Will do,” Hale said.

  She told them all to get on with it, then, and said, “Thomas? If you’ll come with me …”

  They would seek out Paolo di Fazio’s studio, she told him. Between their interview with the sculptor and Barbara Havers’ report of her conversation with Bella McHaggis about Paolo and the pregnancy test, there existed an ocean that wanted swimming.

  Lynley nodded, amenable to anything, it seemed. She said she would meet him at her car. Five minutes for her to use the ladies’, she told him. He said certainly in that well-bred fashion of his and she felt him watching her as she walked off. She stopped in her office to grab her handbag, and she took it with her to the toilet. No one could possibly fault her for that, she thought.

  As before, he was waiting patiently at her car, but this time on the passenger’s side. She raised an eyebrow, to which he said, “I expect you need the practice, guv. London traffic and all that … ?”