This Body of Death

by Elizabeth George

  Gina said, “I’d found these already. I was taking out the rubbish—this was the day after his return—and they were tucked into the bottom. I wouldn’t have seen them at all had I not dropped an earring into the wastepaper basket. I reached in to find it and I saw the colour of the ticket and I knew what it was, of course. And when I saw it, I reckoned he’d gone up there because of Jemima. I thought at first that it wasn’t over between them, like he’d told me, or if it was, they had unfinished business of some sort. And I wanted to talk to him about it at once, but I didn’t. I was …You know how it is when you’re afraid to hear the truth?”

  “What truth? God, did you know he’d done something to her?”

  “No, no! I didn’t know she was dead! I mean I thought it wasn’t over between them. I thought he still loved her and if I confronted him, that’s what he’d have to say. Then it would be over between us and she’d return and I hated the thought of her returning.”

  Meredith narrowed her eyes. She could see the trick, if trick it was: For perhaps Jemima and Gordon had mended their fences. Perhaps Jemima had intended to return. And if that was the case, what was to prevent Gina herself from making the trip to London, doing away with Jemima, and keeping the ticket and the hotel receipt to pin the crime on Gordon? What a nice bit of vengeance from a woman scorned.

  Yet something wasn’t right in all this. But the various possibilities made Meredith’s head pound.

  Gina said, “I’ve been afraid. Something’s very wrong, Meredith.”

  Meredith handed the envelope back to her. “Well, you’ve got to turn this over to the police.”

  “But then they’ll come to see him again. He’ll know I was the one to turn him in and if he did hurt Jemima—”

  “Jemima’s dead. She’s not hurt. She’s murdered. And whoever killed her needs to be found.”

  “Yes. Of course. But if it’s Gordon …It can’t be Gordon. I refuse to think …There has to be an explanation somewhere.”

  “Well, you’ll have to ask him, won’t you?”

  “No! I’m not safe if he …Meredith, don’t you see? Please. If you don’t help me …I can’t do it on my own.”

  “You must.”

  “Won’t you … ?”

  “No. You’ve got the story. You know the lies. There’d be only one outcome if I went to the police.”

  Gina was silent. Her lips quivered. When her shoulders dropped, Meredith saw that Gina had worked things out for herself. Should Meredith take the rail tickets and the hotel receipt to the local police or to the Scotland Yard cops, she would only be repeating what someone else had told her. That someone else was exactly the person the police would seek next, and Gordon Jossie would likely be right there when the detectives arrived to put questions to Gina.

  Gina’s tears fell then, but she brushed them away. She said, “Will you come with me? I’ll go to the police, but I can’t face it alone. It’s such a betrayal and it might mean nothing and if it means nothing, don’t you see what I’m doing?”

  “It doesn’t mean nothing,” Meredith said. “We both know that.”

  Gina dropped her gaze. “Yes. All right. But what if I get to the station and lose my courage when it comes to going inside and talking and …What will I do when they come for Gordon? Because they will come, won’t they? They’ll see he lied and they’ll come and he’ll know. Oh God. Oh God. How did I do this to myself?”

  The door to Gerber & Hudson opened, and out popped Randall Hudson’s head. He didn’t look pleased and he made the reason clear when he said, “Are you coming back to work today, Meredith?”

  Meredith felt heat in her cheeks. She’d never been scolded at her work before. She said in a low voice to Gina Dickens, “All right. I’ll go with you. Be here at half past five.” And then to Hudson, “Sorry, sorry, Mr. Hudson. Just a small emergency. It’s taken care of now.”

  Not quite true, the taken care of part. But that would be settled in a very few hours.

  BARBARA HAVERS HAD made the phone call to Lynley earlier, out of Winston Nkata’s presence. It wasn’t so much because she hadn’t wanted Winston to know she was phoning her erstwhile partner. It was more a matter of timing. She’d wanted to get in touch with the inspector prior to his arrival at the Yard that day. This had necessitated an early morning call, which she’d made from her room in the Sway hotel.

  She’d reached Lynley at the breakfast table. He’d brought her up to speed on the goings-on in London, and he’d sounded guarded on the topic of Isabelle Ardery’s performance as superintendent, which made Barbara wonder what it was that he wasn’t telling her. She recognised in his reticence that peculiar form of Lynley loyalty that she herself had long been the recipient of, and she felt a pang that she didn’t want to name.

  To her question of, “If she thinks she’s got her man, why d’you think she hasn’t recalled us to London?” he said, “Things have moved quickly. I expect you’ll hear from her today.”

  “What do you reckon about what’s going on?”

  In the background she heard the clink of cutlery against china. She could picture Lynley in the dining room of his town house, The Times and the Guardian nearby on the table and a silver pot of coffee within reach. He was the sort of bloke who’d pour that coffee without spilling a drop, and when he stirred it within his cup, he’d manage to do so without making a sound. How did people do that? she wondered. “She’s not jumping to a wild conclusion,” he settled on saying. “Matsumoto had what looked like the weapon in his room. It’s gone to forensics. He also had one of the postcards tucked into a book. His brother doesn’t believe he harmed her, but I don’t think anyone else will go along with him on that.”

  Barbara noted that he’d avoided her question. “And you, sir?” she persisted.

  She heard him sigh. “Barbara, I just don’t know. Simon has the photo of that stone from her pocket, by the way. It’s curious. I want to know what it means.”

  “Someone killing her to get it?”

  “Again, I don’t know. But there are more questions than answers just now. That makes me uneasy.” Barbara waited for more. Finally, he said, “I can understand the desire to sew the case up quickly. But if it’s mismanaged or botched altogether because of someone rushing to judgement, that’s not going to look good.”

  “For her, you mean. For Ardery.” And then she had to add because of what it meant to her and to her own future with the Yard, “You care about that, sir?”

  “She seems a decent sort.”

  Barbara wondered what that meant, but she didn’t ask. It wasn’t her business, she told herself, even as it felt like her business in every way.

  She brought up the reason for her call: Chief Superintendent Zachary Whiting, the forged letters from Winchester Technical College II, and Whiting’s knowledge of Gordon Jossie’s apprenticeship in Itchen Abbas with Ringo Heath. She said, “We didn’t mention any apprenticeship, let alone where it was, so why would he know about it? Does he keep his fingers on the pulse of every individual in the whole bloody New Forest? Seems to me there’s something going on with Whiting and this Jossie bloke, sir, because Whiting definitely knows more than he’s willing to tell us.”

  “What are you considering?”

  “Something illegal. Whiting taking payoffs for whatever Jossie’s doing when he’s not off thatching old buildings. He’s working on people’s houses, Jossie is. He sees what’s inside them, and some of them will have valuables. This isn’t exactly a poverty-stricken part of the country, sir.”

  “Burglaries orchestrated by Jossie and discovered by Whiting? Pocketing ill-gotten gains instead of making an arrest?”

  “Or could be they’re into something together.”

  “Something that Jemima Hastings discovered?”

  “That’s definitely a possibility. So I’m wondering …Could you do some checking on him? Bit of snooping. Background and such. Who is this bloke Zachary Whiting? Where’d he do his police training? Where’d he come from before he
ended up here?”

  “I’ll see what I can sort out,” Lynley said.

  WHILE ALL ROADS weren’t exactly leading to Gordon Jossie, Barbara thought, they were certainly circling the bloke. It was time to see what the rest of the team in London had come up with when checking on him—not to mention when checking on every other name she’d handed over—so after breakfast when she and Winston were making their preparations for the day, she took out her mobile to make the call.

  It rang before she had a chance. The caller was Isabelle Ardery. Her remarks were brief, of the pack-up-and-come-home variety. They had a solid suspect, they had what was undoubtedly the murder weapon; they had his shoes and his clothing, which were going to test positive for Jemima’s blood; they had an established connection between them.

  “And he’s a nutter,” Ardery concluded. “Schizophrenic who won’t take meds.”

  “He can’t be tried, then,” Barbara said.

  “Trying him’s hardly the point, Sergeant,” Ardery told her. “Getting him permanently off the street is.”

  “Understood. But there’s more than one curious person down this way, guv,” Barbara told her. “I mean, just considering Jossie, f’r instance, you might want us to stay and nose round till we—”

  “What I want is your return to London.”

  “C’n I ask where we are with the background checks?”

  “So far there’s nothing questionable on anyone,” Ardery told her. “Especially not down there. Your holiday’s over. Get back to London. Today.”

  “Right.” Barbara ended the call and made a face at the phone. She knew an order when she heard an order. She wasn’t convinced, however, that the order made sense.

  “So?” Winston said to her.

  “That’s definitely the question of the hour.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  ALTHOUGH BELLA MCHAGGIS LIKED TO THINK THAT HER lodgers would scrupulously do their own recycling, she’d learned over time that they were far more likely to toss items into the rubbish. So weekly, she made rounds inside her house. She found broadsheets and tabloids piled here and there, old magazines under beds, Coke cans crushed inside wastepaper baskets, and all sorts of otherwise valuable articles in nearly every location.

  It was for this reason that she emerged from her house with a laundry basket whose contents she intended to deposit among the many receptacles she had long ago placed in her front garden for this purpose. On the step, however, basket in arms, Bella halted abruptly. For after their previous encounter, the last person she expected to see just inside her front gate was Yolanda the Pyschic. She was in the midst of waving in the air what looked like a large green cigar. A plume of smoke rose from it, and as she waved it, Yolanda chanted sonorously in her husky masculine tone.

  This was the bloody limit, Bella thought. She dropped her basket and yelped, “You! What the bloody hell will it take? Get off my property this instant.”

  Yolanda’s eyes had been shut, but they flew open. She appeared to shake off some trance she was in. That was likely another one of her completely spurious performances, Bella thought. The woman was an utter charlatan.

  Bella kicked the laundry basket to one side and strode over to the psychic, who was holding her ground. “Did you hear me?” she demanded. “Leave the property this instant or I’ll have you arrested. And stop waving that …that thing in my face.”

  Closer to it now, Bella saw that that thing was a collection of pale leaves, rolled tightly and bound up with thin twine. Its smoke was, frankly, not bad smelling, more like incense than tobacco. But that was hardly the point.

  “Black as the night,” was Yolanda’s reply. Her eyes looked odd, and Bella wondered if the woman was high on drugs. “Black as the night and the sun, the sun.” Yolanda waved her stick of smoking whatever-it-was directly in Bella’s face. “Ooze from the windows. Ooze from the doors. Purity is needed or the evil within—”

  “Oh for God’s sake,” Bella snapped. “Don’t pretend you’re here for anything other than causing trouble.”

  Yolanda continued to wave the smoking object like a priestess in the performance of an arcane rite. Bella grabbed her arm and attempted to hold it in place. She was surprised to find the psychic was quite strong, and for a moment they stood there like two ageing female wrestlers, each trying to throw the other to the mat. Bella finally won, for which she was thankful as it did her good to see that her hours of yoga and athletic training were doing something besides lengthening her life on this miserable planet. She mastered Yolanda’s arm, lowered it, and knocked the green cigar from her hand. She stamped upon it till it was extinguished while Yolanda moaned, mumbled, and murmured about God, purity, evil, black, the night, and the sun.

  “Oh, stop your nonsense.” Yolanda’s arm still in her grasp, Bella began to march her towards the gate.

  Yolanda, however, had other things on her mind. She put on the metaphorical brakes. Legs as stiff as a two-year-old’s in the midst of a tantrum, she planted herself firmly and would not be budged.

  “This is a place of evil,” she hissed. To Bella, the woman’s expression looked wild. “If you won’t purify, then you must leave. What happened to her will happen again. All of you are in danger.”

  Bella rolled her eyes.

  “Listen to me!” Yolanda cried. “He died within, and when that happens in a place of abode—”

  “Oh rubbish. Stop pretending you’re here to do anything other than spy and cause trouble. Which you’ve done from the first and don’t deny it. What do you want now? Who do you want now? Looking to talk someone else out of living here? Well, there’s no one else yet. Are you satisfied? Now, get the hell—Be gone before I phone the police.”

  It seemed that the idea of police finally got through. Yolanda immediately stopped resisting and allowed herself to be propelled towards the gate. But still she nattered on about death and the need for a ritual of purification. Bella was able to determine from Yolanda’s rambling that all of this was due to the untimely passing of Mr. McHaggis, and truth to tell, the fact that Yolanda seemed to know about McHaggis’s death inside the house did give Bella pause. But she shook off the pause—because, obviously, Jemima could have told her about McHaggis’s death since Bella herself had mentioned it more than once—and with no further conversation between them, she directed Yolanda from the property to the pavement.

  There, Yolanda said, “Heed my warning.”

  To which Bella said, “You bloody heed mine. Next time you show your face round here, you’ll be explaining your presence to the coppers. Understand? Now scarper.”

  Yolanda started to speak. Bella made a threatening movement towards her. That apparently did it, because she hustled down the pavement in the direction of the river. Bella waited till she disappeared round the corner into Putney Bridge Road. Then she went back to what she’d intended to do. She grabbed the laundry basket and approached the serried rank of rubbish bins with their neat labels upon them.

  It was in the Oxfam bin that she found it. Later she would think what a miracle it was that she’d opened that particular bin at all, for she emptied the Oxfam bin least often, as items for Oxfam were tossed away infrequently by herself, by residents of her house, and by people who lived nearby. As it was, she had nothing to deposit in the Oxfam bin on this day. She merely removed its lid to take note of when it was likely to need emptying. The newspaper bin was itself nearly full and the plastics bin was likewise; the glass bins were fine—separating green from brown from clear kept them from filling too quickly—and since she was looking at the bins in general, she’d gone on to the Oxfam bin as a matter of course.

  The handbag was buried beneath a jumble of clothing. Bella had removed this with a curse about people’s enduring laziness as evidenced by the fact that they couldn’t be bothered to fold what they wished to have carted off to the charity and she was about to fold it all herself, item by item, when she saw the handbag and recognised it.

  It was Jemima’s. There was n
o doubt about it, and even if there had been doubt, Bella scooped it up and opened it and there inside were Jemima’s purse, her driving licence, her address book, and her mobile phone. There were other bits and bobs as well, but these didn’t matter as much as the fact that Jemima had died in Stoke Newington where she’d no doubt had her handbag with her, and here it was now in Putney, as large as the life she no longer possessed.

  There was no question in Bella’s mind what she had to do about this sudden discovery. She was headed for the front door with the handbag in her grasp when the front gate opened behind her and she turned, expecting to see Yolanda’s stubborn return. But it was Paolo di Fazio coming through, and when his eyes lit on the handbag that Bella was carrying, she saw from his expression that, like her, he knew exactly what it was.

  BY RETURNING TO St. Thomas’ Hospital and remaining there for most of the previous night to await word on Yukio Matsumoto’s condition, Isabelle had managed to put off the meeting with AC Hillier. Since he’d instructed her to deliver herself to his office upon her return to the Yard, she’d decided merely not to return to the Yard until long after the assistant commissioner had vacated Tower Block for the night. This would give her time to sort through what had happened in order to be able to speak clearly about it.

  That plan had worked. It had also allowed her to be first in line to know what was going on with the violinist’s condition. This was simple enough: He remained in a coma throughout the night. He was not out of danger, but the coma was artificial, induced to allow the brain time to recover. Had she been given suzerainty in this situation, Yukio Matsumoto would have been brought round and then thoroughly questioned once he’d emerged from the operating theatre. As it was, the most she was able to manage was a police guard in the vicinity of intensive care to make certain the man didn’t suddenly regain consciousness on his own, realise the depth of the trouble he was in, and do a runner. It was, she knew, a laughable possibility. He was in no condition to go anywhere. But appropriate procedure had to be followed, and she was going to follow appropriate procedure.