This Body of Death

by Elizabeth George

  Robbie gave a look to the pony and then a look to Meredith. He nodded and said, “Not the pub, though,” and he led them across the car park to a little arcade of shops, one of which offered sandwiches and drinks. They took theirs to a sweet chestnut that spread its leafy branches on the edge of the car park, where a bench faced a lawn opening out in the shape of a fan.

  A smattering of tourists were taking photos of ponies that grazed with their foals nearby. The foals were especially appealing, but they were also skittish, which made approaching them and their dams more dangerous than usual. Robbie watched the action. “One damn well wonders,” he said darkly. “That bloke over there? He’s likely to be bit. And then he’ll want the pony put down or he’ll want to sue God knows who. Not that the wanting is going to get him anywhere. Still, I always think there’s some kinds need to be permanently removed from the gene pool.”

  “Do you?”

  He coloured slightly at the question, then he looked at her. “S’pose not,” he said. And then, “She’s gone to London, Merry. She phoned me up one day, somewhere near the end of October this was, and she announced she was going to London. I thought she meant for the day, for supplies or something for the shop. But she says, ‘No, no, it’s not the shop. I need time to think,’ she says. ‘Gordon’s talking about marriage,’ she says.”

  “Are you sure about that? That he talked about marriage?”

  “That’s what she said. Why?”

  “But what about the Cupcake Queen? Why would she leave her business just to go off and think about anything?”

  “Yeah. Bit odd that, eh? I tried to talk to her about that, but she wasn’t having anything off me.”

  “London.” Meredith worked on the word. She tried to relate it to her friend. “Think about what? Does she not want to marry him any longer? Why?”

  “She wouldn’t say, Merry. She still won’t say.”

  “You talk to her?”

  “Oh, aye. ’Course I do. Once a week or more. She’s that good about ringing me. Well, she would be. You know Jemima. She worries a bit, how I’m doing without her coming round like she did. So she stays in touch.”

  “Lexie told me she tried to ring Jemima. First she left messages and then the calls didn’t go through. So how’re you talking to her once—”

  “New mobile,” Robbie said. “She didn’t want Gordon to have the number. He kept ringing her. She doesn’t want him to know where she is.”

  “D’you think something happened between them?”

  “That I don’t know, and she won’t say. I went over there once she’d gone ’cause she’d been in a bit of a state and I thought to have a word with Gordon.”

  “And … ?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing. Gordon says, ‘You know what I know, mate. I still feel the same as always. She’s the one whose feelings changed.’”

  “Someone else?”

  “On Jemima’s part?” Robbie lifted his can of Coke and downed most of it. “Wasn’t someone when she left. I asked her that. You know Jemima. Hard to think she’d leave Gordon without having someone ready to partner up with.”

  “Yes. I know. That ‘being alone’ business. She can’t cope, can she?”

  “Who’s to blame her, really? After Mum and Dad.”

  They were both silent, considering this, what fears that losing her parents in childhood had wrought in Jemima and how those fears had played out in her life.

  Across the lawn from them, an elderly man with a zimmer frame was getting too close to one of the foals. Its dam’s head snapped up, but then, no worries. The foal scampered off and the small herd moved as well. They were more than a match for a bloke with a zimmer. He called out to them, a carrot extended.

  Robbie sighed. “Should have saved my breath for the porridge, all the good it does to tell them, eh? Reckon some people have cotton wool up there ’stead of brains. Look at him, Merry.”

  “You need a loud hailer,” she told him.

  “I need my shotgun.” Robbie rose. He would confront the man, as indeed he must. But there was something more that Meredith wanted him to know. Things might have been explained with regard to Jemima, but things were still not right.

  She said, “Rob, how did Jemima get up to London?”

  “I expect she drove.”

  And this was the crux of the matter. It was the answer she’d feared. It constituted the bells and whistles, and it became the alarm. Meredith felt it in the tingling of her arms and the shiver—despite the heat—that went up her spine. “No,” she said. “She didn’t do that.”

  “What?” Robbie turned to look at her.

  “She didn’t drive up there.” Meredith rose as well. “That’s just it. That’s why I’ve come. Her car’s in the barn at Gordon’s, Robbie. Gina Dickens showed it to me. It was under a tarp like he was hiding it.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Why would I joke? She’d asked him about it, Gina Dickens. He said it was his. But he hasn’t ever driven it, which made her think …” Meredith’s throat was dry once more, desertlike, as it had been during her conversation with Gina.

  Robbie was frowning. “It made her think what? What’s going on, Merry?”

  “That’s what I want to know.” She curved her hand round his work-muscled arm. “Because, Rob, there’s more.”

  ROBBIE HASTINGS TRIED not to be concerned. He had obligations to perform—the most important at the moment being the transport of the pony in the horse trailer—and he needed to keep his mind on his duty. But Jemima was a large part of that duty, despite the fact that she was now an adult. For Jemima’s becoming an adult hadn’t changed things between them. He was still her father figure, while to Robbie she’d always be his sister-child, the waif who’d lost her parents after a late-night dinner on holiday in Spain: too much to drink, confusion over which side of the road to be driving on, and that had been that, gone in an instant, mown down by a lorry. Jemima hadn’t been with them, and thank God for that. For had she been, everyone he’d known as family would have been wiped out. Instead, he’d been staying with her in the family home, and so his stay had become permanent.

  Thus even as Robbie delivered the pony to the commoner who owned her and even as he had a talk with that gentleman about what ailed the animal—Robbie reckoned it was cancer, sir, and the pony was going to have to be put down although you might want to phone the vet for a second opinion in the matter—he still thought about Jemima. He’d phoned her upon waking that morning because it was her birthday, and he phoned her again along the road back to Burley after leaving the pony with its owner. But he got this second time what he’d got when he phoned the first time: his sister’s cheerful voice on her voice mail.

  He hadn’t given that fact a thought when he’d first phoned, for it had been early in the day, and he reckoned she’d switched the mobile off for the night if she wanted a lie-in on her birthday. But she generally phoned right back when she got a message from him, so when he left a second message, he became concerned. He phoned her place of employment after that, but he learned that she’d taken a half day off on the previous day and today was not a workday for her. Did he want to leave a message, sir? He didn’t.

  He rang off and worried the tattered leather cover on his steering wheel. All right, he told himself, Meredith’s concerns aside, it was Jemima’s birthday and likely she was merely having a bit of fun. And she would do that, wouldn’t she? As he recalled, she’d enthused about ice skating recently. Lessons or something. So she could be off doing that. It would be exactly like Jemima.

  Truth of the matter was that Robbie hadn’t told Meredith everything beneath the sweet chestnut tree in Burley. There hadn’t seemed to be a point, mostly because Jemima had a history of attachments to men while Meredith—bless her heart—definitely had not. He hadn’t wanted to rub this fact in Meredith’s face, her being a single mum as the result of the only disastrous relationship she’d managed. Besides, Robbie respected Meredith Powell: how she’d s
tepped onto the pitch of motherhood and was making a proper job of it. And anyway, Jemima hadn’t left Gordon Jossie for another man, so that much of what Robbie had told Meredith had been true. But, exactly in character, she’d found another man quickly enough. Robbie hadn’t told Meredith that. Afterwards, he wondered if he should have.

  “He’s very special, Rob,” Jemima had burbled in that way she had. “Oh, I’m madly in love with him.”

  That’s what she always was: madly in love. No point in like or interest or curiosity or friendship when one could be madly in love. For madly in love equated warding off solitude. She’d gone to London to think, but thinking was something that led Jemima to fear, and God knew she’d long rather run from fear than face it head-on. Well, didn’t everyone? Wouldn’t he if he could?

  Robbie wound up the hill that was Honey Lane, a short distance outside Burley. In midsummer it was a lush green tunnel, sided by holly and arced by beech and oak. It was packed earth only—no paving here—and he passed along it with care, doing his best to avoid the occasional pothole that made the going rough. He was less than a mile outside the village, but one stepped back in time in this area. The trees sheltered paddocks and beyond them ancient buildings marked both common holdings and farms. These were backed by a wood, and the wood was thick with fragrant scotch pines, with hazel, and with beech, providing a habitat for everything from deer to dormice, from stoats to shrews. One could walk the distance here from Burley, but people seldom did. There were easier paths to follow, and in Robbie’s experience people liked their ease.

  At the crest of the hill, he made the left turn onto what had long been Hastings land. This comprised thirty-five acres of paddock and wood, with the rooftop of Burley Hill House just visible to the northeast and the peak of Castle Hill Lane beyond it. In one of the paddocks his own two horses happily grazed, delighted not to be carrying his weight round the New Forest on this hot summer day.

  Robbie parked near the tumbledown barn and its attendant shed, trying not to see them so he would not have to think about how much work he needed to put into them. He climbed out of the Land Rover and slammed the door. The noise brought his dog loping from round the side of the house where he’d no doubt been sleeping in the shade, his tail wagging and his tongue hanging, and all of himself looking out of character. The Weimaraner was normally elegant in appearance. But he hated the heat and he’d rolled in the compost heap as if this would help him to escape it. He now wore a fragrantly decomposing mantle. He paused to shake himself off.

  “Think that’s amusing, do you, Frank?” Robbie asked the dog. “You’re a real sight. You know that, eh? I shouldn’t let you near the house.”

  But no woman lived there to admonish him or to usher Frank from the house herself. So when he went inside and the dog tagged along, Robbie allowed it and was grateful for the company. He fetched the Weimaraner a fresh bowl of water. Frank slopped it happily onto the kitchen floor.

  Robbie left him to it and went for the stairs. He was sweaty and he smelled all of horse from transporting the pony, but instead of heading for a shower—he could hardly be bothered with that at this time of day, as he’d only get sweaty and smelly again—he went into Jemima’s room.

  He told himself to be calm. He couldn’t think if he got himself into a state, and he needed to think. In his experience, there was an explanation for everything, and there was going to be an explanation for the rest of what Meredith Powell had told him.

  “Her clothes are there, Rob. But not in the bedroom. He’s boxed them all up and he’s put them in the attic. Gina found them because, she said, there was something a little strange—that’s how she put it—when he was talking about Jemima’s car.”

  “So she did what? Take you up to see them? Up to the attic?”

  “She just told me about them at first,” Meredith said. “I asked to look. I reckoned they could’ve been there awhile—from before Gordon and Jemima took the place—so they could’ve been someone else’s. But they weren’t. The boxes weren’t old, and there was something I recognised. Well, it was mine, actually, and she’d borrowed it and I’d never got it back. So you see … ?”

  He did and he didn’t. Had he not heard from his sister at least weekly since her departure, he would have headed to Sway at once, determined to have a face-to-face with Gordon Jossie. But he had heard from her and what she’d repeated at the end of each phone call had been the reassurance, “Not to worry, Rob. It’ll all come right.”

  He’d said at first, “What’ll all come right?” and she’d sidestepped the question. Her avoidance had forced him more than once to ask, “Did Gordon do something to you, my girl?” to which she’d replied, “Of course not, Rob.”

  Robbie knew he’d now have assumed the worst had Jemima not stayed in touch: Gordon had killed her and buried her on the property somewhere. Or out on the Forest and deep within a wood so that if her body were ever found, it would be in fifty years, when it was too late to matter. Somehow, an unspoken prophecy—a belief or a fear—would have been fulfilled by her disappearance because the truth of the matter was—he did not like Gordon Jossie. He’d said to her often enough, “There’s something about him, Jemima,” to which she’d laughed and replied, “You mean he’s not like you.”

  He’d been forced finally to agree with her. It was easy to like and embrace people just like oneself. It was another matter with people who were different.

  In her bedroom now, he phoned her again. Again, no reply. Just the voice, and he left a message once he was asked to do so. He kept it cheerful to match her own tone. “Hey, birthday girl, ring me, eh? Not like you not to get back in touch and I’m having a bit of a worry, I am. Merry Contrary came to see me. She had a cake for you, luv. Got itself all melted in the bloody heat but it’s the thought, eh? Ring me, luv. I want to tell you about the foals.”

  He found he wanted to go on a bit, but he was talking into a void. He didn’t want to leave his sister a message. He wanted his sister herself.

  He walked to her bedroom window, its sill yet another depository for what Jemima Clutterduck could not bear to part with, which was nearly everything she’d ever possessed. In this spot, it was plastic ponies, crammed one upon the next and covered with dust. Beyond them he could see the real thing: his horses in the paddock with the sunlight glowing off their well-groomed coats.

  The fact that Jemima had not returned for the foaling season was what should have told him, he thought. It had long been her favourite time of year. Like him, she was of the New Forest. He’d sent her to college in Winchester as he himself had been sent, but she’d come home when her course work was completed, rejecting computer technology for baking. “I belong here,” she’d told him. As indeed she did.

  Perhaps she’d gone to London not for time to think but just for time. Perhaps she’d wanted to break it off with Gordon Jossie but hadn’t known how else to bring it about. Perhaps she reckoned if she was gone long enough, Gordon would find someone else and she herself could then return. But none of that was in character, was it?

  Not to worry, she’d say. Not to worry, Rob.

  What a monstrous joke.

  Chapter Four

  DAVID EMERY CONSIDERED HIMSELF ONE OF STOKE NEWINGTON’S very few Cemetery Experts, which he always thought of in uppercase letters, David being an Uppercase sort of bloke. He’d made an understanding of Abney Park Cemetery his Life’s Work (another uppercase situation for him), and it had taken him ages of wandering and getting lost and refusing to be cowed by the general creepiness of the area before he was willing to call himself its Master. He’d been locked in more times than he could begin to count, but he’d never let the cemetery’s nightly closure impinge upon his plans while he was there. If he arrived at any of the gates and found them chained against his wishes, he didn’t bother to ring the Hackney police for rescue as the sign on the gate recommended he do. For him, it was no huge matter just to hoist himself up the railings and over the top, landing either in Stoke Newington
High Street or, preferably, in the back garden of one of the terrace houses that lined the cemetery’s northeast boundary.

  Making himself a Master of the Park allowed him to use its paths and crannies in any number of ways but particularly in ways amorous. He did this several times a month. He was good with the ladies—they often told him he had soulful eyes, whatever that meant—and since One Thing generally led to Another with women in David’s life, a suggestion that they take a stroll in the park was rarely refused, especially since park was such a …well, such an innocuous word compared to cemetery, wasn’t it.

  His intention was always a shag. Indeed, taking a walk, having a stroll, or going for a bit of a wander were all euphemisms for shagging, and the ladies knew that although they pretended not to. They would always say things like, “Oooh, Dave, that place gives me the jumps, it does,” or words to that effect, but they were perfectly willing to accompany him there once he put an arm round them—going for a bit of breast with his fingers if he could—and told them they’d be safe with him.

  So in they’d go, directly through the main gates, which was his preferred route as the path was broad and less intimidating there than it was if they entered by means of Stoke Newington Church Road. There you were beneath the trees and in the clutches of the gravestones before you’d gone twenty yards. On the main path you had at least the illusion of safety till you veered right or left onto one of the narrower routes that disappeared into the towering plane trees.

  On this particular day, Dave had coaxed Josette Hendricks to come along with him. At fifteen Josette was a little younger than Dave was accustomed to, not to mention the fact that she was something of a giggler, which he hadn’t known until he got her onto the first of the narrow paths, but she was a pretty girl with a lovely complexion and those luscious baps of hers were no small matter, in more ways than one. So when he said, “What d’you say to the park?” and she said, all bright eyed and moist lipped, “Oh yes, Dave,” off they went.