This Body of Death

by Elizabeth George

  The two cops exchanged a long look. It was the man who picked up the conversation next. He said, “You’re right. That wasn’t a particularly helpful direction. I think the superintendent merely meant that Frazer’s got something of an appeal for women.”

  “What if he does?” she demanded. “It’s hardly his fault.”

  “I wouldn’t disagree.” Lynley went on to ask could they just go back over what she’d told them about Frazer’s whereabouts on the day that Jemima Hastings died?

  She said she’d told them. She’d told them and told them and telling them again was not going to change things. Frazer had done what he always did—

  Which turned out to be their point. If one day looked exactly like another in the life of Frazer Chaplin, was there a possibility that she was mistaken, that she was merely telling them what she thought he’d done, that he had perhaps done or said something later on to make her believe or assume he’d been home during that time when he was usually home, while the truth of the matter was that he wasn’t at home at all? Did she always see him when he came home to shower and change between his two jobs? Did she always hear him? Was she always, in fact, here at that time? Did she sometimes go to the shops? Putter round the back garden? Meet a friend? Go out for a coffee? Become caught up in a phone conversation or a television programme or a commitment to something that took her out of the house or even to another part of the house, resulting in the possibility that she didn’t actually know, couldn’t swear to, hadn’t seen, couldn’t confirm …

  Bella felt dizzy. They were spinning her round and round with all their possibilities. The truth of the matter was that Frazer was a good boy and they couldn’t see this about him because they were cops and she knew about cops, she did. Didn’t they all? Didn’t they all know that what cops did best was find a supposed killer and then massage the facts to pin guilt upon him? And hadn’t the newspapers shown that to the public time after time with the Met putting supposed IRA blokes away for years on spurious evidence and God, God, Frazer was Irish, God he was Irish and didn’t that make him guilty in their eyes?

  Then Lynley started talking about the National Portrait Gallery. He mentioned Jemima and Jemima’s picture and Bella understood from this that the topic had changed, moving from Frazer to society photos and, frankly, she was only too happy to look at them.

  “…something too coincidental for our liking,” Lynley was saying. He mentioned someone by the name of Dickens and he connected that person to Hampshire for some reason and then he said something more about Frazer and then Jemima and then it didn’t matter at all because, “What’s she doing there?” Bella demanded. She went quite light-headed, and her hands got icy.

  “Who?” Lynley asked.

  “Her. Her,” and Bella used her icy finger to point at the picture that was bringing reality home. It was coming at her fast, an express train from the truth. Its whistle blew fool, fool, fool and the sound was deafening as the train screamed towards her.

  “That’s the woman we’re talking about,” the superintendent told her, leaning over to have a look at the woman in the photograph. “That’s Gina Dickens, Mrs. McHaggis. We’re assuming that Frazer met her that night—”

  “Gina Dickens?” Bella said. “You’re both mad. That’s Georgina Francis large as life. I tossed her out last year for breaking one of my rules.”

  “Which rule?” the superintendent asked.

  “The rule about …” Fool, fool, fool.

  “Yes?” the detective inspector urged her.

  “Frazer. Her,” Bella said. Fool, fool, fool, fool. “He said she was gone. He said he never saw her once she left. He said she was the one who wanted him …but he didn’t want it at all …Not with her.”

  “Ah. I expect he lied to you,” Lynley told her. “May we talk again about what you remember of the day that Jemima Hastings died?”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  SHE WAS IN BIG TROUBLE, NO DOUBT ABOUT IT. SHE WAS already so late for work that Meredith knew she was going to have to come up with an excuse for her absence that was akin to an alien abduction. Anything less was unlikely to result in her continued employment.

  And it was going to be absence at this point, not mere tardiness. That was certain. For once she saw Zachary Whiting in conversation with Gina Dickens, Meredith felt afire to take action, and the action she felt afire to take had nothing to do with driving over to Ringwood and sitting obediently within her cubicle at Gerber & Hudson Graphic Design.

  Still, she didn’t ring Mr. Hudson. She knew she ought, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. He was going to be livid, and she reckoned if she could somehow sort out Gina Dickens, Zachary Whiting, Gordon Jossie, and Jemima’s death by the end of the day, emerging as a heroine who wrestles villains into submission would bring her enough glory to translate into a chance that she wouldn’t lose her job.

  She felt a bit like a headless chicken at first, seeing the chief superintendent chatting with Gina Dickens. She hadn’t known what to do, what to think, or where to go. She crept back to her car and started off in the direction of Lyndhurst because that was where the police station was and one was meant to rely on the police. Only what was the point in going there, she realised, when the head of the Lyndhurst police was here, and he was obviously thick as thieves with Gina Dickens?

  Meredith pulled to the side of the road, and she tried to sort through what she’d heard from Gina Dickens, what she’d discovered about her during her own investigation, and what she’d learned about her from Michele Daugherty. She tried to remember every statement made to her and from these statements she tried to sort out who Gina Dickens really was. What she ended up with was the decision that there had to be something somewhere about Gina, a piece of truth about her that Gina herself had not realised she was revealing. Meredith needed to find that truth because when she found it, it would tell her exactly what to do.

  The problem, of course, was the where of it. Where was she supposed to find this piece of truth? If Gina Dickens did not actually exist, then what was she—Meredith Powell—supposed to do to sort out who she really was and why she was in cahoots with Chief Superintendent Whiting in the matter of …what? What, exactly, was the reason for their partnership?

  It seemed to Meredith that any information about Gina, her purpose in Hampshire, and her true identity was information that Gina herself would keep quite close. She would keep it secreted on her person, or in her bag, or in her car, perhaps.

  Except, Meredith thought, that didn’t make sense. Gina Dickens couldn’t risk it. For Gordon Jossie might well stumble upon it if she kept it nearby, and Gina would know that, so she’d want some place far more secure to keep the key to who she really was and what she was up to.

  Meredith grasped the steering wheel tightly as she realised the obvious answer. There was one spot where Gina could be freely who she really was: within the four walls of her own bed-sitting room. For while Meredith had searched that room from top to bottom, she hadn’t looked everywhere, had she? She hadn’t looked between the mattress and the box springs on the bed, for instance. Nor had she removed drawers to look for anything that might be taped beneath them. Or behind pictures for that matter.

  That damn bed-sitting room had to hold all the answers, Meredith reckoned, because when it came down to it, it had never made sense that Gina would be living with Gordon while maintaining her own digs, did it? Why go to the expense of doing that unless there was a reason? So the answers to every riddle about Gina Dickens were in Lyndhurst, where they had always been. For not only was Lyndhurst the site of Gina’s room, but it was also the location of Whiting’s police station. And how bloody convenient was that?

  Despite all of this delicate thinking and supposing, Meredith knew she was perilously close to being completely out of her depth in the situation. Murder, police malfeasance, false identities …None of this was exactly up her alley. Still, she knew she had to get to the bottom of everything because there seemed to be no one else who
was interested in doing so.

  Although …Of course, Meredith thought. She took out her mobile and punched in Rob Hastings’ number.

  He was—as wonderful luck would have it—actually in Lyndhurst! He was—as less than wonderful luck would have it—just stepping into a meeting of all the agisters, which was likely to go on for more than ninety minutes and closer to two hours.

  She said to him in a rush, “Rob, it’s Gina Dickens and that chief superintendent. It’s them together. And there’s no Gina Dickens at all anyway. And Chief Superintendent Whiting told Michele Daugherty that she had to stop looking into Gordon Jossie, but she hadn’t even started the process of looking into him yet and—”

  “Hang on. What’re you banging on about?” Rob asked. “Merry, what the hell … ? Who’s Michele Daugherty?”

  She said, “I’m going to her room in Lyndhurst.”

  “Michele Daugherty’s room?”

  “Gina’s room. She’s got a bed-sit over the Mad Hatter, Rob. On the high street. You know where it is? The tea rooms over the road from—”

  “’Course I know,” he said. “But—”

  “There’s got to be something there, something I overlooked the last time. Will you meet me there? It’s important because I saw them together. On Gordon’s property. Rob, he drove right up and got out and went into the paddock and they stood there talking—”

  “Whiting?”

  “Yes, yes. Who else? That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  He said, “Scotland Yard’s back, Merry. It’s a woman called Havers. You need to ring her about this. I’ve got her number.”

  “Scotland Yard? Rob, how c’n we trust them if we can’t trust Whiting? They’re all cops. And what do we tell them? That Whiting’s talking to Gina Dickens who isn’t really Gina Dickens anyway except we don’t know who she is? No, no. We’ve got to—”

  “Merry! For God’s sake, listen. I told this woman—this Havers—everything. What you told me about Whiting. How you gave him the information. How he said it was all in hand. She’ll want to hear whatever else you know. I expect she’ll want to see that bed-sit as well. Listen to me.”

  That was when he told her he was heading into the agisters’ meeting. He couldn’t skip it because among other things, he had to …Oh, never mind, he said, he just had to be there. And she had to ring the detective from Scotland Yard.

  “Oh no,” she cried. “Oh no, oh no. If I do that, there’s no way she’ll agree to break into Gina’s room. You know that.”

  “Break in?” he said. “Break in? Merry, what’ve you got planned?” He went on to ask could she wait for him. He would meet her at the Mad Hatter immediately after his meeting. He would be there as soon as he could. “Don’t do anything mad,” he told her. “Promise me, Merry. If something happens to you …” He stopped.

  At first she said nothing. Then she promised and quickly rang off. She intended to keep her promise and to wait for Rob Hastings, but when she got to Lyndhurst, she knew that waiting was out of the question. She couldn’t wait. Whatever was up there in Gina’s room was something she intended to put her hands on now.

  She parked by the New Forest Museum and hoofed up Lyndhurst High Street to the Mad Hatter Tea Rooms. At that time of morning, the tea rooms were open and doing a brisk business, so no one took notice of Meredith as she went through the doorway set at an angle to the tea rooms themselves.

  She dashed quickly up the stairs. At the top, she was stealthy about her movements. She listened at the doorway of the room opposite Gina’s. No sound from within. She tapped upon it just to make sure. No one answered. Good. Once again there would be no witness to what she was about to do.

  She fished in her bag for her bank card. Her hands felt slick, but she reckoned it was nerves. There was more menace about breaking into Gina’s room than there had been the last time she’d done so. Then her suspicions had driven her. Now she had certain knowledge.

  She fumbled with the card and dropped it twice before she finally managed to get the door open. A final time, she looked round the corridor. She stepped inside the room.

  There was sudden movement to her left. A rush of air and a blur of darkness. The door shut behind her and she heard an inner bolt driven home. She swung round and found herself face-to-face with an utter stranger. A man. For a moment, and it was just a single moment, her mind said ridiculously and in rapid succession that she’d got the wrong room, that the room had been let out to someone else, that Gina’s room had never been here above the Mad Hatter in the first place. And then her mind said she was in real danger, for the man grabbed her arm, swung her round, clamped his hand brutally over her mouth. She felt something press into her neck. It was wickedly sharp.

  “Now what have we here?” he whispered in her ear. “And what are we going to do about it?”

  ONCE HE RECEIVED the phone call from the Scotland Yard sergeant, Gordon Jossie knew he’d reached the absolute endgame with Gina. There had been a moment in the kitchen that morning when Gina’s denials about Jemima had nearly convinced him she was speaking the truth, but after DS Havers phoned him wondering why Gina had not shown up at her hotel in Sway, he understood that being convinced by Gina had more to do with how he wanted things to be than how things actually were. That, indeed, served as a good description of his entire adult life, he thought morosely. There had been at least two years of that life—those years after he’d first met Jemima and become enmeshed with her—when he’d developed a fantasy future. It had seemed as if the fantasy could be turned into reality because of Jemima herself and because she’d seemed to need him so. She’d appeared to need him the way a plant needs decent soil and adequate water, and he’d reckoned that that kind of need would make the mere fact of having a man in her life more important than who the man was. She’d seemed exactly what he’d been looking for, although he hadn’t been looking at all. There had been no sense to looking, he’d decided. Not when the world he had constructed for himself—or perhaps, better said, the world that had been constructed for him—could come crashing down round his ears at any time. And then, suddenly, there she had been on Longslade Bottom with her brother and his dog. And there he had been with Tess. And she had been the one to make “the first move,” as it was called. An invitation to her brother’s house, which was her own house, an invitation for drinks on a Sunday afternoon although he didn’t drink, couldn’t and wouldn’t ever risk a drink.

  He’d gone because of her eyes. Ridiculous now to think that’s why he’d driven to Burley to see her again but that was it. He’d never seen anyone with two entirely different-coloured eyes, and he’d liked studying them, or at least that was what he’d told himself. So he’d gone. And the rest of it … ? What did it matter? The rest had brought him to where he was now.

  Her hair was longer those months later when he saw her in London after she’d left him. It seemed a bit lighter as well, but that could have been a trick of memory. As to the remainder of the package that was Jemima: She was all the same.

  He hadn’t understood at first why she’d chosen the cemetery in Stoke Newington for their meeting, but when he saw the place with its winding paths, ruined monuments, and unrestrained growth of vegetation he realised her choice had had to do with not being seen in his company. This should have reassured him about her intentions, but still he’d wanted to hear it from her lips. He’d also wanted both the coin and the stone returned to him. Those he was determined to have. He had to have them because if she kept them in her possession, there was no telling what she’d do with them.

  She’d said, “So how did you find me? I know about the postcards. But how … ? Who … ?”

  He said he didn’t know who’d phoned him, just that it was a bloke’s voice, telling him about the cigar shop in Covent Garden.

  She’d said, “A man,” to herself, not to him. She seemed to be going over in her mind the various possibilities. There would, he knew, likely be many. Jemima had never gone in for friendship wit
h other women in a big way, but men she had sought, men who somehow completed her in ways that friendship with women never could. He wondered if that was why Jemima had died. Perhaps a man had misunderstood the nature of her need, wanting something from her that far exceeded what she wanted from him. It explained in some ways the phone call he’d received, which itself could be described as a betrayal, a tit for tat as it were, you don’t do what I want and I turn you over to …well, to whoever seems to be looking for you because I don’t care who it is, I only want to balance the scales in which you and I do harm to each other.

  He’d said, “Have you told anyone?”

  “That’s why you’ve been looking for me?”

  “Jemima, have you told anyone?”

  “Do you actually think I’d want anyone to know?”

  He could see her point although he felt it like a wound she was inflicting upon him instead of merely an answer to his question. Still, there was something in the way she said it that made him doubt her. He knew her too well.

  “D’you have a new bloke?” he asked her abruptly, not because he really wanted to know but because of what it could mean if she had.

  “I don’t see that’s any business of yours.”

  “Do you?”

  “Why?”

  “You know.”

  “I most certainly do not know.”

  He said, “If you’ve told …Jemima, just tell me if you’ve told someone.”

  “Why? Worried, are you? Yes, I suppose you would be. I’d be worried as well. So let me ask you this, Gordon: Have you thought how I’d feel if other people knew? Have you considered the wreck my life could become? ‘Just please give us an interview, Miss Hastings. Just a word about what it’s been like for you. Did you never suspect? Did you not recognise … ? What sort of woman wouldn’t know there was something terribly wrong here … ?’ D’you actually think I’d want that, Gordon? My picture smeared on the front of some tabloid along with yours?”