This Body of Death

by Elizabeth George

  Bligh was “having his surgery hours,” they were told, and they found his office tucked beneath a stairway up and down which, during their initial conversation with him, herds of students pounded incessantly. Barbara couldn’t imagine anyone actually accomplishing anything in this environment, but when they introduced themselves to Bligh, the wax earplugs he removed from his ears explained how he managed to cope with the place. He suggested they get out of there, go for a coffee, have a walk, whatever. Barbara countersuggested that they track down Crawford, a plan that she hoped would save them some time.

  That was managed by way of mobile phone, and they met the telecommunications instructor in the car park where a caravan selling ice cream and juice was attracting a crowd. Crawford was one of them. Heavy was a sympathetic way to describe him. He certainly didn’t need the Cornetto he was attacking. He finished it and immediately purchased another, calling over his shoulder, “You lot want one?” to the detectives and to his colleague.

  Fully capable of seeing her future when her feet were held to the flames, Barbara demurred. Winston did likewise. So did Bligh, who muttered, “Dead before he’s fifty, just you wait,” although he said pleasantly, “Don’t blame you,” to Crawford in reference to the second Cornetto. “Damned hot summer, eh?”

  They went through the usual prefatory conversational motions that were peculiar to the English: a brief discussion of the weather. They strolled to a patch of browning lawn that was shaded by a sturdy sycamore. There were no benches or chairs here, but it was a relief to get out of the sun.

  Barbara handed each of the men the letter of reference he’d written for Gordon Jossie. Bligh put on a pair of spectacles; Crawford dropped a dollop of vanilla ice cream on the sheet. He wiped it off on his trouser leg, said, “Sorry, occupational hazard,” and began to read. In a moment, he frowned and said, “What the hell … ?” and Bligh simultaneously shook his head. They spoke nearly in unison.

  “This is bogus,” Bligh said as Crawford declared, “I didn’t write this.”

  Barbara and Winston exchanged a glance. “Are you sure?” she asked the instructors. “Could you have forgotten? I mean, you must be asked to write a lot of letters at the end of students’ course work, right?”

  “Naturally,” Bligh agreed. His voice was dry. “But I’m generally asked to write letters in my own field, Sergeant. This is college letterhead, I’ll give you that, but the letter itself deals with Gordon Jossie’s accomplishments in Accounts and Finance, which I don’t teach. And that’s not my signature.”

  “You?” Barbara said to Crawford. “I take it … ?”

  He nodded. “Large appliance repair,” he said, indicating the contents of the letter by extending it to her. “Not my bailiwick. Not even close.”

  “What about the signature?”

  “Same thing, I’m afraid. Someone likely nicked letterhead from an office—or even designed it on their computer, I suppose, if they had an example in front of them—and then wrote their own recommendations. It happens sometimes, although you’d think this bloke would have checked first to see who taught what. Looks to me like he gave a quick glance at a list of the staff and chose our names at random.”

  “Exactly,” Bligh said.

  Barbara looked at Winston. “It explains how someone who can’t read or write managed to ‘complete’ course work at the college, eh?”

  Winston nodded. “But not how someone who can’t read or write wrote these letters, cos he didn’t.”

  “That looks like the case.”

  Which meant, of course, that someone else had written them for Gordon Jossie, someone who knew him from years gone by, someone they likely hadn’t spoken to yet.

  ROBBIE HASTINGS KNEW that if he was going to get to the bottom of what had happened to his sister and why, and if he was going to be able to go on living—no matter how bleakly—he had to begin looking squarely at a few basic truths. Meredith had been attempting to tell him at least one of those truths in the church in Ringwood. He’d stopped her abruptly because he was, quite simply, a bloody coward. But he knew he couldn’t go on that way. So he finally picked up the phone.

  She said, “How are you?” when she heard his voice. “I mean, how are you doing, Rob? How are you coping? I can’t sleep or eat. Can you? Have you? I just want to do—”

  “Merry.” He cleared his throat. Part of him was shouting better not to know, better never to know and part of him was trying to ignore those cries. “What did …In the church when you and I were talking about her …What did you mean?”

  “When?”

  “You said whenever. That was the word you used.”

  “I did? Rob, I don’t know—”

  “With a bloke, you said. Whenever she was with a bloke.” God, he thought, don’t make me say more.

  “Oh.” Meredith’s voice was small. “Jemima and sex, you mean.”

  He whispered it. “Aye.”

  “Oh, Rob. I s’pose I shouldn’t actually have said that.”

  “But you did, didn’t you. So you need to tell me. If you know something that’s to do with her death …”

  “It’s nothing,” she said quickly. “I’m sure of it. It’s not that.”

  He said nothing more, reckoning that if he was silent, she would be forced to continue, which she did.

  She said, “She was younger then. It was years ago anyway. And she would have changed, Rob. People do change.”

  He wanted so much to believe her. Such a simple matter to say, “Oh. Right. Well, thanks,” and ring off. In the background he could hear murmurs of conversation. He’d phoned Meredith at work, and he could have used this alone as an excuse to end their conversation at that point. So could have she, for that matter. But he didn’t take that turn. He couldn’t do so now and live with the knowledge that he’d run again, just as he’d turned a blind eye to what he knew at heart she was going to tell him if he insisted upon it.

  “Seems it’s time for me to know it all, Merry. It’s no betrayal on your part. Mind, there’s nothing you can say would make a difference now.”

  When she spoke at last, it sounded to him as if she were talking inside a tube, as the sound was hollow, although it could well have been that his heart was hollow. She said finally, “Eleven, then, Rob.”

  “Eleven what?” he asked. Lovers? he wondered. Had Jemima had so many already? And by what age? And had she actually kept count?

  “Years,” Meredith said. “That’s how old.” And when he said nothing, she rushed on with, “Oh, Rob. You don’t want to know. Really. And she wasn’t bad. She just …See, she equated things. ’Course, I didn’t know that at the time, why she did it, I mean. I just knew she might end up pregnant but she said no because she took precautions. She even knew that word, precautions. I don’t know what she used or where she got it because she wouldn’t say. Just that it wasn’t up to me to tell her right from wrong, and if I was her friend, I would know that, wouldn’t I. And then it became a matter of me not having boyfriends, see. ‘You’re only jealous, Merry.’ But that wasn’t it, Rob. She was my friend. I only wanted to keep her safe. And people talked about her so. Specially at school.”

  Robbie wasn’t sure he could speak. He was standing in the kitchen and he felt blindly behind him for a chair onto which he could lower himself with infinite slowness. “Boys at school?” he said. “Boys at school were having Jemima when she was eleven? Who? How many?” Because he would find them, he thought. He would find them and he would sort them even now, so many years after the fact.

  Meredith said, “I don’t know how many. I mean, she always had boyfriends, but I don’t expect …Surely not all of them, Rob.”

  But he knew she was lying to protect his feelings or perhaps because she believed she’d betrayed Jemima enough, even as he was the one who’d betrayed her by not seeing what was in front of him all along.

  “Tell me the rest,” he said. “There’s more, isn’t there?”

  Her voice altered as she replied and he c
ould tell she was crying. “No, no. There’s really no more.”

  “God damn it, Merry—”

  “Really.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Rob, please don’t ask.”

  “What else?” And then his own voice broke when he said, “Please,” and perhaps that was what made her continue.

  “If there was a boy she was doing it with and another boy wanted her …She didn’t understand. She didn’t know how to be faithful. She didn’t mean it as anything and she wasn’t a tart. She just didn’t understand how it looked to other people. I mean what they thought or might do or might ask of her. I tried to tell her, but there was this boy and that boy and this man and that man and she just couldn’t see that it really had nothing to do with love—what they wanted—and when I tried to tell her, she reckoned I was being—”

  “Yes,” he said. “All right. Yes.”

  She was quiet again although he could hear the rustle of something against the phone. Tissue likely. She’d wept the entire time she’d spoken. She said, “We used to quarrel. Remember? We used to talk for hours in her bedroom. Remember?”

  “Aye. Aye. I remember that.”

  “So you see …I tried …I should have told someone, but I didn’t know who.”

  “You didn’t think to tell me?”

  “I did think. Yes. But then sometimes I thought …All the men and perhaps even you …”

  “Oh God, Merry.”

  “I’m sorry. So sorry.”

  “Why did you … ? Did she say … ?”

  “Never. Nothing. Not that.”

  “But still you thought …” He felt a laugh bubbling in him, one of simple despair at so outrageous an idea, so far from the truth of who he was and how he lived his life.

  At least, he thought, with Gordon Jossie had come an alteration in his sister. Somehow she’d found what she was looking for because surely she’d been faithful to him. She had to have been. He said, “She stuck with Jossie, though. She was true to him. I mean like I told you before, he wanted to marry her and he wouldn’t have done if he had the slightest suspicion or indication that—”

  “Did he?”

  Something about the way she asked the question stopped him. “Did he what?”

  “Want to marry her. Really.”

  “’Course he did. She left because she wanted time to think about it and I expect he worried it was over between them because he phoned her and phoned her and she got herself a new mobile. So you see, she’d finally got to the point …I told you all this, Merry.” He was fairly babbling at this point, and he knew it because he reckoned there was something more to come from his sister’s friend.

  There was. Meredith said, “But, Rob, before our …what do I call it? Our breakup? Our row? The end of our friendship? Before that, she told me Gordon didn’t want to marry at all. It wasn’t her, she said. He didn’t want to marry, full stop. He was afraid of marriage, she said. He was afraid of getting too close to anyone.”

  “Blokes always say that, Merry. At the beginning.”

  “No. Listen. She told me it was all she could do to talk him into living together, and before that it was all she could do to talk him into letting her spend the night with him, and before that it was all she could do to coax him into having sex. So to think he was mad to marry her …What would have changed him?”

  “Living with her. Getting used to that. Seeing that there was no big fear to being with someone. Learning that—”

  “What? Learning what? Truth is, Rob, if there was something to learn …something to discover …wouldn’t it likely be that he discovered that Jemima—”

  “No.” He said it not because he believed it but because he wanted to believe it: that his sister had been to Gordon Jossie what she hadn’t been to her own brother. An open book. Wasn’t that what couples were meant to be to each other? he asked himself. But he had no answer. How bloody could he since being one half of a couple was for him the stuff of fantasy?

  Meredith said, “I wish you hadn’t asked. I wish I hadn’t said. What does it matter really, now? I mean, at the end of the day she only wanted someone to love her, I think. I didn’t see that at the time, when we were girls. And when I finally did see it, when we were older, our paths were so different that when I tried to talk to her about it, it seemed like I had a problem, not Jemima.”

  “It got her killed,” he said. “That’s what happened, isn’t it?”

  “Surely not. Because if she’d changed as you said she’d changed, if she was faithful to Gordon …And she’d been with him longer than anyone else, hadn’t she? More than two years? Three?”

  “She left in a rush. He kept ringing her.”

  “You see? That means he wanted her back, which he wouldn’t have wanted if she’d been unfaithful. I think she’d grown out of all that, Rob. Really, I do.”

  But Robbie could tell by the eagerness of Meredith’s tone that whatever she said from this moment onwards would be said to assuage his feelings. He felt turned every which way, and he was dizzy. Among all the new information he had gathered, there had to be an essential truth about his sister. There had to be a way to explain both her life and her death. And he had to find that truth, for he knew that its discovery would be the only way he could forgive himself for failing Jemima when she had needed him most.

  BARBARA HAVERS AND Winston Nkata returned to the Operational Command Unit where they handed over the forged letters from Winchester Technical College II to the chief superintendent. Whiting read them. He was the sort of reader who formed the words with his lips as he went along. He took his time.

  Barbara said, “We’ve spoken to these two blokes, sir. They didn’t write the letters. They don’t know Gordon Jossie.”

  He looked up. “That,” he said, “is problematical.”

  In a nutshell, Barbara thought, although he didn’t seem wildly interested in the matter. She said, “Last time we were here, you said two women had phoned up about him.”

  “Did I.” Whiting seemed to be musing on the matter. “There were two calls, I believe. Two women suggesting that Jossie needed looking into.”

  “And?” Barbara asked.

  “And?” Whiting said.

  Barbara exchanged a glance with Winston. He did the honours. “We got these letters now, see. We got a dead girl up in London connected with this bloke. He went up there on a search for her sometime back, which he doesn’t deny, and he stuck up cards with her picture on them, asking for phone calls should anyone see her. And you got two phone calls yourself drawing your ’tention to him.”

  “Those calls didn’t mention a card in London,” Whiting said. “Nor did they mention your dead girl.”

  “Point is the calls themselves and how things’re stacking up ’gainst Jossie.”

  “Yes,” Whiting said. “That can make things look iffy. I do see that.”

  Barbara decided indirection was clearly not the path to take with the chief superintendent. She said, “Sir, what do you know about Gordon Jossie that you’re not telling us?”

  Whiting handed the letters back to her. “Not a bloody thing,” he said.

  “Did you check him out based on those phone calls?”

  “Sergeant …Is it Havers? And Nkata?” Whiting waited for their nods although Barbara could have sworn he knew their names very well despite the fact that he mispronounced both of them. “I’m not very likely to use manpower to investigate someone based on a phone call from a woman who might well be upset because a gentleman stood her up for a date.”

  “You said two women,” Nkata pointed out.

  “One woman, two women. The point is that they had no complaint, only suspicions, and their suspicions amounted to being suspicious, if you understand.”

  “Meaning what?” Barbara asked.

  “Meaning that they had nothing to be suspicious about. He wasn’t peeping in windows. He wasn’t hanging about primary schools. He wasn’t snatching handbags from old ladies. He wasn’t moving questiona
ble bits of this or that into his house or out of it. He wasn’t inviting women on the street to step into his vehicle for a bit of you-know-what. As far as they could tell us—these phone callers who, by the way, wouldn’t leave their names—he was just a suspicious type. Those letters of yours”—he indicated the forgeries from the college—“don’t add anything to the mix. Seems to me the important bit is not that he forged them—”

  “He didn’t,” Barbara said. “He can’t read or write.”

  “All right. Someone else forged them. A mate of his. A girlfriend. Who knows. Have you ever considered that he wouldn’t have got himself hired as an apprentice at his age had he not had something to show he was a worthwhile risk? I daresay that’s all these letters show.”

  “True enough,” Barbara said. “But the fact remains—”

  “The fact remains that the important bit is whether he did his job well once he got it. And that’s what he did, yes? He served a fine apprenticeship up in Itchen Abbas. Then he began his own business. He’s built that business up and, as far as I know, he has kept his nose clean.”

  “Sir—”

  “I think that’s the end of the story, don’t you?”

  As it happened, she didn’t, but Barbara said nothing. Nor did Nkata. And as she was careful not to look at Winston, so was he careful not to look at her. For there was something that the chief superintendent wasn’t dealing with: They’d said nothing at all to him about Gordon Jossie’s serving an apprenticeship to Ringo Heath or to anyone else, and the fact that Whiting knew about one suggested once again that there was more to Gordon Jossie and his life in the New Forest than met the eye. To Barbara there was no question about it: Chief Superintendent Zachary Whiting was fully apprised as to what the more was.

  MEREDITH DECIDED FURTHER action was called for after the phone call from Rob Hastings. She could tell the poor man was equal parts crushed to the core and riddled by guilt, and since part of this was due to her mouth running on about matters best left unsaid, she took a step to rectify things. She had seen just enough cop shows on the telly to know what to do when she made the decision to go to Lyndhurst. She was fairly confident that Gina Dickens wouldn’t be in the lodgings that she claimed was hers above the Mad Hatter Tea Rooms since Gina had seemed fairly intent upon establishing her life with Gordon Jossie. Meredith reckoned that, in the pursuit of this end, she likely hadn’t darkened her own doorway in days. Should she actually be in, Meredith had her excuse ready: Came to say sorry for being such a pest. I’m just upset. That part was the truth, at least, although being upset was only the half of it.