This Body of Death

by Elizabeth George

  “They’d pay,” he said. “Like you said, it’d be a tabloid. They’d pay you a lot for an interview. They’d pay you a fortune.”

  She’d backed off, white faced. “You’re mad,” she said. “If it’s even possible, you’re actually madder than you were—”

  “All right,” he’d said fiercely. Then, “What’ve you done with the coin? Where is it? Where’s the stone?”

  “Why?” she asked. “How’s that your business?”

  “I mean to take them back to Hampshire, obviously.”

  “Do you indeed?”

  “You know I do. They must go back, Jemima. It’s the only way.”

  “No. There’s another way entirely.”

  “What way is that?”

  “I think you might already know. Especially as you’ve been looking for me.”

  That was the moment when he knew she did indeed have someone else. That was when he understood, despite her declarations to the contrary, how likely it was that the darkest part of his soul was going to be revealed to someone, if it had not already been revealed. His only hope—his guarantee of her silence and the silence of whoever else knew the truth—lay in complying with whatever she was about to ask of him.

  He knew she was about to ask something because he knew Jemima. And his curse for the rest of his life was going to be the knowledge that once again he and no one else had put himself into a place of complete destruction. He’d wanted to return the coin and the stone to the earth in which they’d laid buried for more than a thousand years. More than that, he’d wanted to know that Jemima would keep his secret safe. So he’d put up those cards and in doing so he’d forced her hand. And now she was going to play it.

  She’d said, “We need the money.”

  “What money? Who’s we?”

  “You know what money. We have plans, Gordon, and that money—”

  “That’s what this is about, then? That’s why you left? Not because of me, but because you want to sell whatever’s dug up from the ground and then …what?”

  But no, that hadn’t been it at all, not at first. Money was fine but money had not driven Jemima. Money bought things, but what it didn’t buy, could never buy, had never bought was what she needed most.

  He said, understanding things further, “It’s the bloke. He’s the one, isn’t he? He wants it. For whatever your plans are.”

  He’d known he’d hit upon the truth. He’d seen as much in the high colour that swept across her cheeks. Indeed, she had left him to get away from the truth of who he was, but she’d met another man in her inimitable fashion and it was to this other man that she’d told his secrets.

  He said, “Why did it take you so long, then? All these months? Why’d you not tell him at once?”

  After a moment in which she’d looked away from him, she said, “Those postcards,” and he’d seen how his own fear of discovery, his own need for reassurance, which was unlike her need and yet ironically identical to it, had brought about this very meeting between them. Any new lover of hers would have asked why someone was trying to find her. Where she could have lied, she had told the truth.

  He said to her, “What do you want then, Jemima?”

  “I’ve already told you.”

  To which he’d said, “I’ll need to think.”

  “About what?”

  “How to make it happen.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it? If you mean to dig the lot of it up, I have to disappear. If I don’t …Or is it that you want me found out as well? Perhaps you want me dead? I mean, we were something to each other for a while, weren’t we?”

  She was silent at this. The day around them was bright and hot and clear, and the sounds of the birds intensified suddenly. She finally said, “I don’t want you dead. I don’t even want you harmed, Gordon. I just want to forget about it. About us. I want a new life. We’re going to emigrate and open a business and to do that …And it’s your own fault. If you hadn’t put up those cards. If you hadn’t. I was in a state, and he wanted to know, so I told him. He asked—well, anyone would—how I’d come to find out because he reckoned it’d be the last thing you’d tell anyone. So I told him that part as well.”

  “About the paddock.”

  “Not the paddock itself but what you’d found there. How I expected we’d use it or sell it or whatever one does, how you hadn’t wanted to, and then …well, yes. Why. I had to tell him why.”

  “Had to?”

  “Of course. Don’t you see? There aren’t supposed to be secrets between people who love each other.”

  “And he loves you.”

  “He does.”

  Yet Gordon could see her doubts, and he understood how the existence of her doubts had also served a role in what was happening. She wanted to secure him, whoever he was. He wanted money. These desires combined to produce betrayal.

  “When?” he asked her.

  “What?”

  “When did you decide to do this, Jemima?”

  “I’m not doing anything. You asked to see me. I didn’t ask to see you. You looked for me, I didn’t look for you. If you hadn’t done any of that, there’d have been no need to tell anyone about you.”

  “And when money had come up between you? What then?”

  “It never did come up, till I told him why …” Her voice drifted off at that point, and he could tell that she was reasoning something out on her own, determining the possibility of something that he himself was only too able to see.

  He said, “It’s the money. He wants the money. Not you. You see that, don’t you?”

  She said, “No. That’s not the truth.”

  He said, “And I expect you’ve had your doubts all along.”

  “He loves me.”

  “If that’s how you see it.”

  “You’re a rotten person.”

  “I suppose I am.”

  He’d said that he would cooperate with her plan to return to the holding and stake her claim. He would be gone, but it would take time to effect the sort of disappearance that was required. She asked how long and he said he wasn’t sure. He would have to speak to certain people and then he would let her know. She could, naturally, ring up the media in the meantime and make some additional cash that way. He said this last bitterly before he’d walked off. What a mess he’d made of everything, he thought.

  And now Gina. Or whoever the hell she was. He told himself that if he hadn’t decided to replace the bloody fence of the bloody paddock, none of this would have happened. But the truth of the matter was that the first event that had brought him ultimately to this moment had occurred in a crowded McDonald’s when let’s jus’ take him had led to let’s make him cry had led to shut him up! how do we shut him up?

  When Zachary Whiting showed up at the Royal Oak pub a few hours after his arrival at the work site, Gordon was up on the roof’s ridge. He saw the familiar vehicle pull into the car park, but he felt neither nervous nor afraid. He’d prepared himself for Whiting’s eventual appearance. Since they’d been interrupted during their last encounter, Gordon knew the chief superintendent was probably unwilling to let that moment between them go uncompleted.

  The cop signaled him down from the roof. Cliff was handing a bundle of straw up to him, so Gordon told him to take a break. The day was as hot as every day that had preceded it, so he said, “Have a cider,” and he said the cider would be on him. “Enjoy,” he told him. “I’ll be along directly.”

  Cliff was happy to comply although he muttered, “Anything wrong, mate?” as Whiting approached. He likely didn’t know who Whiting was, but he could sense the man’s menace. Whiting wore it like skin.

  “Not a bit,” was Gordon’s reply. “Take your time in there,” he added, with a nod to the doorway. And he repeated, “I’ll be along.”

  With Cliff out of the way, he waited for Whiting. The chief superintendent stopped in front of him. He did his usual, getting in too close, but Gordon didn’t pu
ll away from the man.

  “You’re out of here,” Whiting said.

  “What?”

  “You heard. You’re being moved. Home Office orders. You’ve an hour. Let’s go. Leave the pickup. You won’t be needing it.”

  “My dog’s in—”

  “Fuck the dog. The dog stays. The pickup stays. This—” with a jerk of his head towards the pub, by which Gordon reckoned he meant the thatching, the job he was doing, his source of employment. “This’s done for. Get in the car.”

  “Where are they sending me?”

  “No bloody idea and even less interest. Get in the fucking car. We don’t want a scene. You don’t want a scene.”

  Gordon wasn’t about to cooperate without more information. He wasn’t about to get into that car unprepared. There were any number of isolated lanes between this spot and his holding near Sway, and the unfinished business between him and this man suggested that he wouldn’t be driven home directly, no matter what Whiting was claiming. He had no way to be sure the cop was even telling the truth, although Jemima’s death and the presence of New Scotland Yard in Hampshire suggested that it was likely.

  Still, he said, “I’m not leaving that dog here. I go, she goes.”

  Whiting took off the clip-on sunglasses and polished them on the front of his shirt. It was clinging to him where he was sweating. Heat of day or anticipation. Gordon reckoned it could be either. Whiting said, “Do you think you can negotiate with me?”

  “I’m not negotiating. I’m stating a fact.”

  “Are you now, laddie.”

  “I expect your brief is to take me somewhere and hand me over. I expect you’ve got a time line involved. I expect you’ve been told not to cock it up, not to cause a scene, not to make it look like anything other than two blokes having a chat right here, with me climbing into your car at the end of it. Anything else and it’s likely to attract notice, eh? Like the notice of those people in the beer garden over there. You and I have a dustup and someone’s going to ring the cops, and if it’s a proper dustup—a head-banging sort of dustup—then it gets even more attention and someone wonders how you managed to make such a mess out of something so simple as—”

  “Fetch the sodding dog,” Whiting said. “I want you out of Hampshire. You pollute the air.”

  Gordon smiled thinly. The truth of the matter was that sweat was dripping down his sides and pouring like a waterfall along his spine. His words were hard but there was nothing behind them except the only means he had to protect himself. He went to the pickup.

  Tess was within, thank God, dozing across the length of the seat. Her lead was looped through the steering wheel, and he took it up swiftly and dropped it on the floor where it was safe to fumble round. Tess awakened, blinked, and yawned widely, exhaling a cloud of dog breath. She began to rise. He told her to stay and climbed inside. With one hand he attached the lead to her collar while with the other, he made himself ready. He had a wind-breaker, so he donned it. He flipped down the sun visors. He opened and closed the glove box. He heard Whiting approaching across the gravel car park, and he said, “I expect you don’t want me to go into the pub. Cliff’ll need a note,” and he was thankful he had the presence of mind to say that much.

  Whiting said, “Hurry it up then,” and returned to his car. He didn’t get inside but rather lit a cigarette and watched and waited.

  His note was brief, This is yours till I need it, mate. Cliff didn’t need to know anything else. If Gordon had a chance later to get the vehicle back, he’d do so. If not, at least it wouldn’t fall into Whiting’s hands.

  He’d left the keys in the ignition, which was his habit. He removed the cottage key from the ring, told Tess to come, and climbed out of the truck. The whole procedure had taken less than two minutes. Less than two minutes to alter the course of his life once again.

  “I’m ready,” he said to Whiting as he and the dog—wagging her tail as always, as if the wanker in front of them was just another someone who might pat her damn head—approached the man.

  “Oh, I expect you are,” was Whiting’s reply.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  LATER BARBARA HAVERS WOULD THINK WITH SOME ASTONISHMENT that everything ultimately had come down to the fact that Lyndhurst had a one-way traffic system in the heart of the village. It formed a nearly perfect triangle, and the direction from which she was traveling forced her to follow the triangle’s northern side. This put her into the high street where, midway down the street and just beyond the half-timbered front of the Crown Hotel, she was meant to turn into the Romsey Road, which would take her to the police station. Because of the traffic light at the Romsey Road junction, a tailback formed during most hours of the day. This was the case when Barbara followed the curve round the expanse of lawn and thatched cottages comprising Swan Green and set her course into and through the village.

  She found herself caught behind a lorry belching a hideous amount of exhaust fumes through her open windows. She reckoned she might as well have a smoke as she waited for the light to change. No point in avoiding an opportunity to add to the pollution that was blackening her lungs, she thought.

  She was reaching for her bag when she saw Frazer Chaplin. He came out of a building just ahead of her, and there was no mistaking the bloke. She was quite close to the left-hand kerb in preparation for her turn into the Romsey Road, and the building in question—its sign identified it as the Mad Hatter Tea Rooms—was on the left side of the street. She thought briefly, What the bloody hell …And then she clocked the woman with him. They came onto the pavement in the unmistakable manner of lovers in post-trysting mode, but there was something about Frazer’s two-handed hold upon his companion that wasn’t quite right. He had his right arm tightly round her waist. He had his left arm across his own body to grip her left arm above the elbow. They paused for a moment in front of the tea room windows, and he said something to her. Then he kissed her cheek and gave her a look that was soulful, admiring, and love struck. Had it not been for that grip and a decided stiffness about the woman’s body, Barbara might have thought Frazer was up to what she’d quickly concluded he was apt to get up to the only time she’d met him: that wide-legged posture of his when he was sitting, that look-what-I’ve-got-for-you-here-baybee expression in the eyes, and the rest was history. But the woman with him—who the hell was she, Barbara wondered—did not appear to be floating somewhere in the aftermath of sexual rapture. Instead she appeared to be …well, captive seemed a fairly good description.

  They headed in the same direction Barbara was taking. A few cars ahead of her, however, they crossed the road. They continued down the pavement and, within a few yards, disappeared into an alley on the right. Barbara muttered, “Damn, damn, damn,” and waited in mounting agitation for the lights at the junction to begin their change from red to amber to green. She saw that the alley on the right was marked with that universal white P on a square blue background, indicating that there was a car park somewhere behind the buildings in the high street. She reckoned it stood to reason that Frazer was taking the woman to it.

  She said, “Come on, come on, come on,” to the lights, and they finally cooperated. The traffic began to move. She had thirty yards to go to get to that alley.

  It felt like forever till she made the turn and zoomed between the buildings, where she saw that the car park was not only for shoppers come to do their weekly business in the village. It also served the New Forest Museum and the public facilities as well. So it was massed with cars and for a moment Barbara thought she’d lost Frazer and his companion somewhere within the rows of vehicles. But then she saw him some distance away at the side of a Polo and if before she might have given idle thought to this being the end of a romantic tryst between Frazer Chaplin and his companion, the manner in which they got into the vehicle put the matter to rest.

  The woman entered the passenger’s side as one would expect, but Frazer kept his grip upon her and climbed right in behind her. From there Barbara cou
ldn’t see the action, but it seemed fairly clear that Frazer’s goal was to force his companion into moving over to the driver’s side, and he had no intention of losing his grip upon her while she did so.

  A horn honked suddenly. Barbara looked into her rear view mirror. Naturally, she thought, this would be the moment that someone else would come into the car park. She couldn’t wave them round her, for the passage was far too narrow.

  She turned into one of the rows of cars and blasted up it and down another. By the time she had herself back into a position where she could see the vehicle into which Frazer had climbed, it had pulled back from the bay where it had been parked and was heading in the direction of the exit.

  Barbara followed, hoping for twofold luck: that no one would come along and keep her from catching Frazer up, that traffic in the high street would allow her to slip in behind him relatively easily and unseen. For it was obvious to her that she had to follow. Her intention to confront Chief Superintendent Whiting at the police station had to be set aside for the moment because if Frazer Chaplin had come to the New Forest, she reckoned that he hadn’t done so to take pictures of the ponies.

  The only question was the identity of the young woman with him. She’d been tall, thin, and decked out in something that looked like an African nightdress. It covered her from shoulders to toes. She was either in costume or protecting herself from the summer sun, but in either case, Barbara felt sure she’d not seen her before these moments in Lyndhurst.

  From what she’d learned earlier from Rob Hastings, Barbara concluded that it had to be Meredith Powell. If, indeed, Meredith Powell had been conducting some sort of mad investigation on her own—as, according to Hastings, it seemed she had done—then it stood to reason that somehow she’d stumbled upon Frazer Chaplin whose presence here in Hampshire suggested he was into things up to his neck as well. And the body language between them told a tale, didn’t it: Meredith—if that was who it was and who else could it be if it wasn’t Meredith?—didn’t want to be in Frazer’s company, while Frazer had no intention of allowing her to set off somewhere on her own.