This Body of Death

by Elizabeth George

The enterprise with Lexie Streener ate up most of her day, as things turned out. But Meredith considered it time well spent. She now had proof positive, she decided, that Gina Dickens was a flaming liar about her life in the New Forest. And Meredith knew from personal experience that where a person told one lie, dozens of others existed.

  WHEN HE WAS alone again, Gordon whistled urgently for Tess. The dog came running. She’d been out on the property since early morning, ultimately taking herself to her favourite shady spot, beneath a climbing hydrangea on the north side of the cottage. There she had a lair of beaten earth kept moist even on the hottest summer days.

  He fetched the retriever’s brush, and Tess gave him that loopy smile and wagged her tail. She leapt up onto the short-legged table he used for this purpose, and he drew his stool near and began with her ears. She needed a proper brushing daily anyway, and now was a good time to do it.

  He wanted a smoke, but he didn’t have any fags on him, so he applied himself forcefully and rapidly to the brushing of the dog. He felt tight from head to toe, and he wanted to get loose and be easy. He didn’t know how to manage that, so he brushed the dog and he brushed the dog.

  They’d walked away from the car towards and ultimately into the barn. Gina would have wondered why, but that couldn’t be allowed to matter because Gina was untouched, like a lily growing out of an excrement heap, and he meant to keep her that way. So he left her standing in the driveway looking puzzled or frightened or concerned or anxious or whatever it was that a woman might feel when the man she’s opened her heart to seems to be under the thumb of someone who could hurt him or hurt them both.

  He brushed the dog and he brushed the dog. He heard Tess whine. He was being too rough. He eased the pressure. He brushed the dog.

  So they’d gone into the barn and before they got there, Gordon had tried to make it look as if the call from this stranger had to do with the land. He’d gestured here and there, and that had amused. The other chuckled.

  “Understand your lady love’s gone missing,” he’d said, once they were within the cooler confines of the barn. “But looks to me”—with a wink and coarse gesture that he was meant to take as sexual and did—“like you’ve no worries on that score. She’s a nice bit, that one, nicer than the other. Good, firm thighs, I expect. Strong as well. Other one was littler, wasn’t she.”

  “What d’you want?” he’d asked. “Because I’ve work to do and so does Gina and you’re blocking the driveway.”

  “That does make it a bit rough, doesn’t it? Me blocking the driveway. Where’d the other go?”

  “What other?”

  “You know what I mean, lad. The grapevine tells me someone’s got their knickers twisted up over you. Where’s the other? Make the leap here with me, Gordon. I know you can.”

  He’d had no choice but to tell him: Jemima, leaving the New Forest without her car for God knows what reason, leaving most of her belongings as well, because if he didn’t tell that he knew damn well it would come out anyway and there’d be hell to pay.

  “Just took herself off, you say?” he’d asked.

  “That’s what happened.”

  “Why? You not doing the job on her proper, Gordon? Fine, strapping man like you, man with all the right parts in all the right places?”

  “I don’t know why she left.”

  The other examined him. He took off his glasses and polished them on a special cloth he removed from his pocket. “Don’t give me that one,” he said and his tone of voice was no longer the spuriously jovial one he’d used before but was now rather icy the way a blade is icy if someone presses it against hot skin. “Don’t you be playing me for a fool. I don’t like hearing your name come up in general conversation. Makes me feel dead uneasy, it does. So you still want to say she just left you and you don’t know why? I’ll not have that.”

  Gordon’s worry had been that Gina would come into the barn, that she would want to know or to help, to intercede or to protect, for that was her nature.

  “She said she couldn’t cope,” Gordon said. “All right? She said she couldn’t cope.”

  “With what?” And then he’d smiled slowly. No humour in it, but there wouldn’t have been. “Cope with what, my love?” he’d repeated.

  “You bloody well know,” said between his teeth.

  “Ah …Now don’t get cheeky with me, lad. Cheekiness? It doesn’t become you.”

  Chapter Nine

  THE STOKE NEWINGTON HOUSE-TO-HOUSE TURNED UP nothing, as did the perimeter search of the environs of the chapel and gridding off the whole blooming cemetery and conducting a search that way. They had enough manpower to carry it all off—both from the local station and from officers on loan from other areas—but the end result was no witness, no weapon, no handbag, no shoulder bag, no purse, and no identification. Just an admirable rubbish cleanup of the cemetery. On the other hand, they’d had phone calls aplenty, and a description shuffled to SO5 had actually produced a possible lead. In this, they were assisted by the fact that the body in question had unusual eyes: one green and one brown. Once they plugged that into the computer, the field of missing persons narrowed down to one.

  She’d been reported as having disappeared from her lodgings in Putney, and it was to Putney that Barbara Havers was sent two days after the discovery of the body; specifically she was sent to Oxford Road, which was equidistant from Putney High Street and Wandsworth Park. There she parked illegally in a residents-only space, propped a police ID in plain sight, and rang the bell on a terrace house whose front garden appeared to be the street’s recycling centre, if the bins and plastic containers were anything to go by. She was admitted to the house by an older woman with a military haircut and a bit of a military moustache. She wore exercise clothing and pristine white trainers done up with pink and purple laces. She said that she was Bella McHaggis and it was bloody well time a cop’d shown up and was this sort of incompetence what her taxes paid for and the bloody government can’t do a thing right, can they, because just look at the condition of the streets, not to mention the Underground, and she’d phoned the cops two days ago, and …

  Blah, blah, blah, Barbara thought. While Bella McHaggis gave vent to her feelings, she herself had a look round the place: uncarpeted wood floor, hall stand with umbrellas and coats, and on the wall a framed document announcing itself as HOUSE RULES FOR OCCUPANTS, with a sign saying LANDLADY ON PREMISES posted beneath it. “With lodgers, one can’t bang on about the rules enough,” Bella McHaggis asserted. “I’ve got them everywhere. The rules, that is. It helps, I find, if people know what’s what.”

  She led Barbara into a dining room, through a large kitchen, and into a sitting room at the back of the house. There she announced that her lodger—who was called Jemima Hastings—had gone missing and if the body that had been found in Abney Park had one brown eye and one green eye …Here, Bella stopped. She seemed to try to read Barbara’s face.

  Barbara said, “Have you got a picture of the young lady?”

  Yes, yes indeed, Bella said.

  She said to “come this way,” and she led Barbara out of a door on the far side of the sitting room, which took them to a narrow corridor that ran in the direction of the front door of the house. To one side of this corridor, the reverse side of a staircase rose, and facing them beneath it was a door otherwise hidden from anyone entering the building. On this door was a poster. The lighting was dim but Barbara could see that the poster featured a black-and-white photograph of a young woman, light hair blowing across her face. She was sharing the picture with three-quarters of a lion’s head, somewhat out of focus behind her. The lion was male, marble, slightly streaked from weather, and asleep. The poster itself was an advertisement for the Cadbury Photographic Portrait of the Year. Evidently, it was some sort of contest, and its winners comprised an ongoing show at the National Portrait Gallery in Trafalgar Square.

  “So is it Jemima?” Bella McHaggis said. “It’s not like her to be gone without telling any of us. Wh
en I saw the story in the Evening Standard, I reckoned if the girl had eyes like those—two different colours …” Her words tapered off as Barbara turned to her.

  “I’d like to see her room,” Barbara said.

  Bella McHaggis made a small sound, something between a sigh and a cry. Barbara saw that she was a decent soul. She said, “I’m not actually sure, Mrs. McHaggis.”

  “It’s just that they become rather like family,” Bella said. “Most of my lodgers …”

  “You’ve others, then? I’ll want to speak with them.”

  “They’re not here at present. At work, you know. There’re just two of them, beyond Jemima, that is. Young men, they are. Quite nice young men.”

  “Any possibility she could have been involved with either of them?”

  Bella shook her head. “Against the rules. I find it’s not a good thing if my gentlemen and ladies begin keeping company while living under the same roof. I had no rule about it at first, once Mr. McHaggis died and I started with lodgers. But I found …” She looked at the poster on the door. “I found things became unnecessarily complicated if the lodgers …Shall we say if they fraternized? Unspoken tensions, the possibility of breakups, jealousy, tears? Rows over the breakfast table? So I made the rule.”

  “And how do you know if the lodgers abide by it?”

  “Believe me,” Bella said, “I know.”

  Barbara wondered if this meant an examination of the bedsheets. “But Jemima was acquainted with the male lodgers, I assume?”

  “’Course. She knew Paolo best, I expect. He brought her here. That’s Paolo di Fazio. Born in Italy but you wouldn’t know it. No accent at all. And no …well, no odd Italian habits, if you know what I mean.”

  Barbara didn’t, but she nodded helpfully. She wondered what odd Italian habits might be. Putting tomato sauce on the Weetabix?

  “—room nearest to hers,” Bella was saying. “She worked in a shop somewhere round Covent Garden and Paolo has a stall in Jubilee Market Hall. I had a vacant room; I wanted a lodger; I hoped for another female; he knew she was looking for permanent lodgings.”

  “And your other lodger?”

  “Frazer Chaplin. He’s got the basement flat.” She nodded at the door on which the poster hung.

  “So that’s his? The poster?”

  “No. That’s just the way to his flat. She brought the poster to me, Jemima did. I suppose she wasn’t altogether happy that I hung it here, where it’s out of sight. But …well, there you have it. There wasn’t really another suitable space.”

  Barbara wondered about that. It seemed to her that there was space aplenty, even with the plethora of signs depicting the household rules. She gave the poster a final quick glance before asking once again to see Jemima Hastings’ room. She looked like the young woman whose autopsy pictures Barbara had seen Isabelle Ardery put up only that morning in the incident room. But it was, as always, incredible to see the difference between someone in life and someone in death.

  She followed Bella to the next floor, where Jemima had a bedroom at the front of the house. Paolo’s room was just along the corridor at the back, Bella said, while her own room was yet another floor above.

  She opened the door to Jemima’s room. It had not been locked, and there was no key stuck in the keyhole on the inside. But that was not to say there wouldn’t be a key somewhere in the room, Barbara saw, although it would be a challenge worthy of Hercules in the Augean Stables to find it.

  “She was something of a hoarder,” Bella said, which was like declaring that Noah was something of a rowing-boat builder.

  Barbara had never seen such clutter. The room was a nice size, but it contained masses of belongings. Clothes strewn on the unmade bed and across the floor and drooping from drawers in the chest; magazines and tabloids and maps and brochures and handouts from people in the street; decks of playing cards mingling with business cards and postcards; stacks of photographs bound with rubber bands …

  “How long did she live here?” Barbara asked. It was inconceivable to her that one person could amass so much clobber in anything less than five solid years.

  “Nearly seven months,” Bella said. “I did speak to her about this. She said she’d get round to it, but I think …”

  Barbara looked at the woman. Bella was pulling thoughtfully at her lower lip. “What?” Barbara asked.

  “I think it gave her some sort of comfort. At the end of the day I daresay she couldn’t let any of it go.”

  “Yeah. Well.” Barbara gave a sigh. “All of it’s got to be gone through.” She dug out her mobile and flipped it open. “I’m going to have to ring for backup,” she told Bella.

  LYNLEY USED THE car as an excuse because that was the easiest thing to tell both himself and Charlie Denton, not that he generally told Denton where he was going but he knew the young man had not yet stopped worrying about his state of mind. So he popped into the kitchen where Denton was applying his considerable culinary skills to making a marinade for a piece of fish and he said, “I’m off for a bit, Charlie. Over to Chelsea for an hour or so,” and he didn’t miss the look of delight that briefly touched on the other’s features. Chelsea could mean a hundred different destinations, but Denton would reckon there was only a single one that was taking Lynley out of Belgravia. Lynley added, “Thought I’d show off the new motor,” and Denton said, “Mind how you go, then. You don’t want anything marring that paint job.”

  Lynley promised he’d do whatever was necessary to prevent such a tragedy, and he walked to the mews where he kept the car that he’d finally bought to replace his Bentley, which had been reduced to a tangle of metallic rubble five months earlier at the hands of Barbara Havers. He unlocked the garage and there it was, and the truth of the matter was that he did feel the slightest thrill of ownership to look upon the copper beauty of the thing. Four wheels and it was only transportation, but there was transportation and there was Transportation and this was definitely Transportation.

  Owning the Healey Elliott gave him something to think about when he was driving, besides thinking of the subjects he didn’t want to think about. That had been one of the reasons he’d purchased it. One had to consider issues like where to park it and which route to choose from point A to point B in order to keep it safe from run-ins with cyclists, taxis, buses, and pedestrians pulling wheeled suitcases without a mind for where they were going. Then there was the critical issue of keeping it clean, of keeping it well within sight when parking it in a slightly less than salubrious area, of keeping its oil pristine and its spark plugs practically sterilized and its wheels balanced and its tyres filled to the appropriate degree. It was, thus, a vintage English car like all vintage English cars. It required constant vigilance and just as much maintenance. In short, it was exactly what he required at this juncture in his life.

  The distance from Belgravia to Chelsea was so minimal that he could have walked it, no matter the heat and the crowds of shoppers along the King’s Road. Less than ten minutes from the moment he closed the front door of his house, he was crawling along Cheyne Row in the hope of finding a spot to park near to the corner of Lordship Place. As luck would have it, a spot was vacated by a van making a delivery to the King’s Head and Eight Bells as he approached the pub. He was at last walking towards the tall brick house on the corner of Lordship Place and Cheyne Row when he heard his name called out by a woman’s voice, crying, “Tommy! Hullo!”

  This came from the direction of the pub where, he saw, his friends were just rounding the corner from Cheyne Walk and the Embankment beyond it. Likely they’d been for a walk along the river, he decided, for Simon St. James was carrying their dog—a long-haired dachshund who hated the heat as much as she hated walkies—and his wife, Deborah, was at his side, her hand through his arm and a pair of sandals dangling from her fingers.

  “Isn’t the pavement hot on your feet?” he called back.

  “Absolutely horrible,” she admitted cheerfully. “I wanted Simon to carry me but gi
ven the choice between Peach and myself, the wretch chose Peach.”

  “Divorce is the only answer,” Lynley said. They came up to him then, and Peach—recognising him as she would do—squirmed to be put down so that she could jump up and demand to be held again. She barked, wagged her tail, and jumped a few more times as Lynley shook St. James’s hand and accepted Deborah’s fierce hug. He said, “Hullo, Deb,” against her hair.

  She said, “Oh, Tommy,” in reply. And then stepping back and scooping up the dachshund who continued to writhe, bark, and demand to be noticed, “You’re looking very well. It’s so good to see you. Simon, doesn’t Tommy look well?”

  “Almost as well as the car.” St. James had gone to have a look at the Healey Elliott. He gave an admiring whistle. “Have you brought it by to gloat?” he said to Lynley. “My God, it’s a beauty. Nineteen forty-eight, isn’t it?”

  St. James had long been a lover of vintage cars and himself drove an old MG, modified to cope with his braced left leg. It was a TD classic, circa 1955, but the age of the Healey Elliott along with its shape made it rare and a virtual eyeful. St. James shook his head—dark hair overlong as always and doubtless Deborah was banging on daily about his need for a haircut—and gave a long sigh. “Where’d you find it?” he asked.

  “Exeter,” Lynley said. “I saw it advertised. Poor bloke spent years of his life restoring it but his wife considered it a rival—”

  “And who can blame her?” Deborah said pointedly.

  “—and wouldn’t let go of the matter till he’d sold it.”

  “Complete madness,” St. James murmured.

  “Yes. Well. There I was with cash in hand and a Healey Elliott in front of me.”

  “You know, we’ve been to Ranelagh Gardens having a chat about some new adoption possibilities,” St. James said to Lynley. “That’s where we were coming from just now. But truth to tell? Babies be damned. I’d like to adopt this motor instead.”

  Lynley laughed.