This Body of Death

by Elizabeth George

  “There you have it,” Isabelle told him. “You know, second thought on this: I’m going to set things in motion myself. From this end. On that score. The treasure. We’ll get the authorities to come out there. You have enough on your plate.” She looked up at a movement in her office doorway. Lynley was standing there. She held up a finger, a gesture that asked him to wait. He came inside and took the seat that angled from her desk. He looked relaxed. She wondered if anything ever ruffled the man.

  She completed her phone call. The duty press officer from Lyndhurst would be identifying Gordon Jossie as Ian Barker. While this would undoubtedly drag forth all the details of John Dresser’s inhuman murder once again, the Home Office wanted it known that one of the three killers of the toddler was now dead himself, at his own hand.

  Isabelle wondered at this. Was it supposed to be a cautionary tale? Something to give the Dresser family peace at last? Something to strike fear into Michael Spargo and Reggie Arnold, wherever they were? She didn’t see how releasing Gordon Jossie’s true identity would serve to do any of that. But she had no say in the matter.

  When she and Whiting rang off, she and Lynley sat in silence for a moment. Outside of her office, the sounds of a day ending were unmistakable. She badly wanted a drink but more badly did she want to know about Lynley’s meeting with Sir David Hillier. She knew that was where he’d disappeared to.

  She said, “It’s a form of blackmail.”

  He drew his eyebrows together. His lips parted as if he would speak, but he said nothing. He had a faint scar, she noted for the first time, on his upper lip. It looked like quite an old one. She wondered how he’d come to have it.

  “What he’s said is that he’ll keep it under wraps as long as the boys stay in Kent with him and Sandra. He says, ‘You don’t want a custody battle over them, Isabelle. You don’t want to end up in court. You know what will come to light and you don’t want that.’ So I’m stuffed. He can destroy my career. And even if he didn’t have that power, I’d lose custody permanently if we went to court. He knows that.”

  Lynley was silent at first. He regarded her, and she couldn’t tell what he was thinking although she reckoned it had to do with how to tell her that her career was over anyway, despite her efforts to save it.

  When he spoke, however, it was just to say, “Alcoholism.”

  She said, “I’m not an alcoholic, Tommy. I drink too much occasionally. Most people do. That’s all.”

  “Isabelle …” He sounded disappointed.

  She said, “It’s the truth. I’m no more an alcoholic than …than you are. Than Barbara Havers is. Where is she, by the way? How the hell long does it take someone to drive from Hampshire to London?”

  He wasn’t to be diverted. He said, “There are cures. There are programmes. There are …You don’t have to live—”

  “It was stress,” she said. “How you found me the other night. That’s all it was. For God’s sake, Tommy. You told me yourself that you drank heavily when your wife was murdered.”

  He said nothing. But his eyes narrowed the way one’s eyes would do when something is thrown. Sand, a handful of earth, an unkindness.

  She said, “Forgive me.”

  He stirred in his chair. “He keeps the boys, then?”

  “He keeps the boys. I can have …He calls it supervised visits. What he means is that I go to Kent to see them, they don’t come here, and when I see them, he and Sandra or he or Sandra is present.”

  “And that’s how it stands? Till when?”

  “Till he decides otherwise. Till he decides what I must do to redeem myself. Till …I don’t know.” She didn’t want to talk more about it. She couldn’t think why she’d told him as much as she had. It indicated an opening where she couldn’t afford one and didn’t want one. She was tired, she thought.

  He said, “You stay.”

  She didn’t understand at first that he’d switched the topic. “Stay?”

  “I don’t know how long. He agrees this wasn’t the best test of your skills.”

  “Ah.” She had to admit that she was surprised. “But he did say …Because with Stephenson Deacon …They told me—”

  “That was before the Home Office business came to light.”

  “Tommy, you and I both know my mistakes had nothing to do with the Home Office and whatever mad secrets they were keeping over there.”

  He nodded. “It was useful, nonetheless. Had everything been straightforward from the first, the ending to this story would be different, I daresay.”

  She was still astonished. But astonishment slowly gave way to realisation. The assistant commissioner, at the end of the day, would hardly have granted her a stay of professional execution merely because the Home Office hadn’t told her the real identity of Gordon Jossie. There was more involved, and she had a very good idea that the additional bargaining to keep her in place had to do with promises made by Lynley. She said, “Exactly what did you agree to, Tommy?”

  He smiled. “You see? You’re learning quickly.”

  “What did you agree to?”

  “Something I was likely to do anyway.”

  “You’re coming back permanently.”

  “For my sins. Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “As I said, I was likely—”

  “No. I mean why did you do this for me?”

  He fixed his eyes on her. She didn’t look away. “I’m not sure,” he finally said.

  They sat in silence for another moment, observing each other. At last, she opened the centre drawer of her desk. She took out a metal ring that she’d placed there earlier in the day. From this dangled a single key. She’d had it made but hadn’t been sure and she still wasn’t sure, if the truth had to be told. But she’d long been adept at avoiding truths, so she did so now.

  She slid the ring across her desk to him. He looked from it to her.

  “There can never be more between us than there is just now,” she told him. “We need to understand that from the first. I want you, but I’m not in love with you, Tommy, and I never will be.”

  He looked at the key. Then her. Then the key again.

  She waited for him to make his decision, telling herself it didn’t matter, knowing the truth was that it always would.

  Finally, he reached for what she’d offered. “I understand,” he said.

  THE LOOSE ENDS took hours, so Barbara Havers didn’t arrive back in London till quite late. She’d considered staying the night in Hampshire, but at the last moment she decided that home was more appealing despite the fact that her bungalow was likely to be the temperature of a sauna after being closed up in the heat for two days. On the drive back, she replayed what had occurred in the paddock, and she looked at it from every angle, wondering if any other ending had been possible.

  At first, she hadn’t recognised the name. She’d been a young teenager at the time of John Dresser’s murder and while the name Ian Barker was not completely unfamiliar to her, she had not immediately connected it with that death in the midlands and with the man standing in the paddock with a gun in his hand. Her more immediate concern had been Meredith Powell’s injury, Frazer Chaplin’s condition, and the distinct possibility that Gordon Jossie was going to shoot someone else.

  She hadn’t expected him to turn the gun on himself. Afterwards, however, his reason for doing so was more than clear. He was, at that point, hemmed in on all sides. There would be no escaping the public revelation of his true identity in one way or another. When that occurred, the incomprehensible evil act of his childhood would be once more dissected before a public who always, eternally, and understandably, demanded payment.

  With the dog barking, herself shouting, Whiting roaring, and Georgina Francis screaming, he’d put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. And then utter silence. The poor damn dog crawled on its belly then, like a soldier in battle. She reached her master, whimpering, while the rest of them raced to look to the injured.

  A helicopter came
from the air support unit near Lee-on-Solent to fetch Meredith to hospital. Officers arrived from the Lyndhurst station. Hot on their heels, as always, came the journalists, and to attend to them the duty press officer manned a position at the end of Paul’s Lane. Georgina Francis was taken off to the custody suite at the Lyndhurst station, while everyone waited two hours for the forensic pathologist to arrive. Eventually, matters came to a close as far as Barbara’s participation was concerned. She spent some time on her mobile with Lynley in London, some time with Whiting going over the situation in Hampshire, and then she was finished. Time to stay the night or time to go. She chose to go.

  She was completely done in by the time she arrived in London. She was surprised to see that lights were still on inside the ground-floor flat of the Big House as she trudged through the gate, but she didn’t give much thought to it.

  She saw the note on her door as she used her key in the lock. It was too dark outside to read it, but she could see her name written in Hadiyyah’s hand, with four exclamation marks after it.

  She opened the door and flipped on the lights. She half-expected another fashion offering to be laid out on the daybed. There was nothing, however. She slung her shoulder bag on the table where she took her meals, and she saw that the message light on her answer phone was blinking. She went for the phone as she unfolded Hadiyyah’s note to her. Both contained the same communication: Come to see us, Barbara! No matter what time!!

  Barbara was knackered. She didn’t much feel like a spate of socialising but, as it was Hadiyyah making the request, she thought she could survive a few minutes of conversation.

  She returned the way she’d come. As she was crossing the patch of lawn to the French windows that served as entrance to Taymullah Azhar’s flat, one of those doors opened. Mrs. Silver emerged, calling back over her shoulder, “Delighted. Truly,” with a happy wave. She saw Barbara, then, and said, “Really quite charming,” and she patted her turbanned head and went on her way to the front steps of the house.

  Barbara thought, What the hell … ? as she approached the door. She reached it at the same moment that Taymullah Azhar was about to close it.

  He saw her. He said, “Ah, Barbara.” And then he called back over his shoulder, “Hadiyyah. Khushi. Here is Barbara.”

  “Oh yes, yes, yes!” Hadiyyah cried. She appeared beneath her father’s arm, beaming so much that her face alone could have lit a room. “Come see! Come see!” she called out to Barbara. “It’s the surprise!”

  Then a woman’s voice from within the flat and Barbara knew who it was before she appeared: “I’ve never been called a surprise before. Introduce me, darling. But at least call me Mummy.”

  Barbara knew her name. Angelina. She’d never seen a photograph of her, but she’d allowed herself to imagine what she might look like. She hadn’t been far wrong. The same height as Azhar and thin like him. Transluscent skin, blue eyes, dark brows and lashes, fashionably cut hair. Slim trousers, crisp blouse, narrow feet in heelless shoes. They were the sort of shoes a woman wore when she didn’t want to be taller than her partner.

  “Barbara Havers,” Barbara said to Angelina. “You’re Hadiyyah’s mum. I’ve heard volumes about you.”

  “She has!” Hadiyyah crowed. “Mummy, I’ve told her lots about you. You’ll be such friends.”

  “I hope we will.” Angelina put her arm round her daughter’s shoulders. Hadiyyah put her arm round her mother’s waist. “Will you come in, Barbara?” Angelina asked. “I’ve been hearing volumes about you as well.” She turned to Azhar. “Hari, do we have—”

  “Dead knackered,” Barbara cut in. Hari. No. She couldn’t take part in the moment. “I only just got back from work. Rain check? Tomorrow? Whatever? That okay with you, kiddo?” to Hadiyyah.

  Hadiyyah hung from her mother’s waist and gazed up at her. She spoke to Barbara but looked at her mother. “Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes,” she declared. “We’ve lots of time tomorrow, don’t we, Mummy?”

  Angelina replied, “Lots and lots of time, darling.”

  Barbara said good night. She gave a mad little salute to them all. She was far too done in to process all this. Tomorrow would be time enough to do so.

  She was heading for her bungalow when he called her name. She paused on the path at the side of the house. She didn’t want to have this conversation, but she reckoned there wasn’t much hope of avoiding it.

  “This is—” Azhar began, but Barbara stopped him.

  “You’ll never get her to sleep tonight,” she said cheerfully. “I expect she’ll be dancing round till dawn.”

  “Yes. I expect.” He looked back the way he had come and then at Barbara. “She wanted to tell you earlier, but I thought it best that she wait until …” He hesitated. There was an entire relationship between him and Hadiyyah’s mother that rested in the pause.

  “Absolutely,” Barbara said, to rescue him.

  “If she did not return, you see, as she said she would do, I didn’t wish Hadiyyah then to have to explain. It seemed to me it would make her disappointment that much worse.”

  “Absolutely,” Barbara said.

  “So you see.”

  “Clear as anything.”

  “Hadiyyah always believed.”

  “She did. She always said.”

  “I don’t know why.”

  “Well, it’s her mum after all. There’s a bond. She’d know that. She’d feel it.”

  “You don’t quite …” Azhar felt in his pockets. Barbara knew what he was looking for, but she’d come without her cigarettes. He found his own packet and offered her one. She shook her head. He lit up himself. “Why she returned,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The truth behind why she returned is what I do not yet know.”

  “Oh. Well.” Barbara didn’t know what to say. The subject of exactly why Angelina had left Azhar and her daughter in the first place was something that had never come up. The euphemism had long been a trip to Canada. While Barbara had reckoned it stood for something other than a tour round that country—if that was even where Angelina had been—she had never pressed for more information. Hadiyyah, she assumed, would not have it and Azhar would not be willing to give it.

  “I suspect it wasn’t quite what Angelina thought it might be,” Azhar said. “Living with him.”

  Barbara nodded. “Right. Well. That’s usually the story, isn’t it,” she said. “The bloom fades, and at the end of the day people’s knickers start showing no matter how they try to hide them, eh?”

  “You knew there was another, then?”

  “Another bloke?” Barbara shook her head. “I wondered why she left and where she really was, but I didn’t know there was someone else involved.” She looked towards the front of the house when she went on. “’F I’m honest with you, Azhar … ? It always seemed dead mad to me that she’d leave the two of you. Especially Hadiyyah. I mean, men and women have their troubles, and I get that, but I never got her leaving Hadiyyah.”

  “So you understand.” He drew in on his cigarette. The lighting was dim along the path on the side of the house and, in the darkness, Barbara could barely see his face. But the tip of his cigarette glowed fire with how deeply he drew upon it. She recalled that Angelina didn’t like his smoking. She wondered if he would now give it up.

  “Understand what?” she asked him.

  “That she will take Hadiyyah, Barbara. Next time. She will take her. And that is something …I cannot lose Hadiyyah. I will not lose Hadiyyah.”

  He sounded so fierce and, if it was possible, at the same time so bleak that Barbara felt something give way within her, a crack in a surface she would have preferred to keep forever solid. She said, “Azhar, you’re doing the right thing here. I’d do the same. Anyone would.”

  For he had no choice and she well knew it. He was caught in circumstances of his own devising, having left his wife and two other children for Angelina, having never divorced, having never remarried …It was a nightmare situation t
hat would end up in court if Angelina so chose and he’d be the loser and what he’d be the loser of was the only person left in his shattered life who mattered to him.

  “I must do what I can to keep her here,” he said.

  “I completely agree,” Barbara said.

  And she meant those words despite the fact that they changed her world as much as they changed the world of the man who stood in the darkness with her.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  TWELVE DAYS WENT BY BEFORE ROB HASTINGS COULD BRING himself to call upon Meredith. During that time, he rang the hospital daily till she was at last released into the care of her parents, but he found he could do no more than merely ask for information about her condition. What he gathered from these phone calls was little enough, and he knew he could have learned more had he gone in person. He could, indeed, have seen her for himself. But it was too much for him and even if it hadn’t been, he found he had no clear idea how to talk to her any longer.

  In those twelve days, he discovered who had taken the pistol from his Land Rover and what had been done with that gun. It had since been returned to him, but it was a black mark on his career that he’d managed to have the weapon taken in the first place. Two people were dead because of this, and had he not been a Hastings with the Hastings history of service to the New Forest behind him, he’d likely have been given the sack.

  The news was bursting with the story of Ian Barker, the wicked child killer of a toddler, a bloke who’d managed to keep his identity secret for the years since his release from wherever he and his murderous mates had been held. Reporters from every media source in the country had at first sought out everyone whose life had touched on Gordon Jossie’s, no matter how remotely. There was, it seemed, a hideous kind of romance to the story that the tabloids especially wanted to feature. It was the story of the Notorious Child Killer Who Killed Again, with a minor headline indicating that this time he’d done it to save a woman in danger, before going on to kill himself. This didn’t actually appear to be the case, according to Meredith Powell and Chief Superintendent Zachary Whiting, since the truth of the matter according to them was that Frazer Chaplin had charged towards Jossie and only then did Jossie shoot him, but that wasn’t as symbolic an act of redemption as was the idea that Jossie had saved someone prior to ridding the world of his presence, so it was that story and not the other that got the most ink from the tabloids. Ian Barker’s childhood photo was printed every day for a week, along with Gordon Jossie’s more recent visage. Some of the tabloids demanded how people in Hampshire had possibly failed to recognise the bloke, but really, why would they have recognised in a quiet thatcher a long-ago child who, they probably suspected, had cloven hooves for feet and horns beneath his schoolboy cap? No one was looking for Ian Barker to be hidden away in Hampshire, anyway, leading an unassuming life.