This Body of Death: An Inspector Lynley Novel

by Elizabeth George

  “Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Jossie’s got thatching tools. Ringo Heath’s got thatching tools. Rob Hastings likely once made thatching tools, which’re probably lying round his barn. Then there’s the bloke that works with Jossie—Cliff Coward—who could put his mitts on a thatching tool, and there’s that cop Whiting as well because something’s not right with him, in case you’re about to tell me I should’ve rung up the Lyndhurst station and given him the news about the crook. I’ve got a snout at the Home Office, by the way, looking into Whiting.” Which is more than you were able to do, she wanted to say but did not.

  If she thought Lynley would be impressed with the leaps and bounds she was making while he’d been swanning round London doing whatever Isabelle Ardery had asked him to do, she was proven wrong almost at once. He said, “Barbara, I want you to stay where you are.”

  She said, “What? Sir, listen to me—”

  “You can’t take matters—”

  “…into my own hands? That’s what you’re going to say, isn’t it? Well, I wouldn’t have to if the superintendent—the acting superintendent, mind you—had something other than tunnel vision. She’s dead wrong about that Japanese bloke and you know it.”

  “And she knows it now as well.” He told her what Ardery had managed to get from her interview with Yukio Matsumoto.

  Barbara said, “Two men in the cemetery with her? Aside from Matsumoto? Bloody hell, sir. Don’t you see that one of them—and possibly both of them—came up from Hampshire?”

  “I don’t disagree in the least,” Lynley told her. “But you’ve only got one part of this puzzle under your pillow, and you know as well as I that if you play that part too soon, you’ve lost the game.”

  Barbara smiled then, in spite of herself. “Are you aware of how many metaphors you just mixed?”

  She could hear the smile in his own voice when he said, “Call it the passion of the moment. It prevents me from thinking cleverly.”

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  She listened then to what he had to say about Roman treasure hoards, about the British Museum, about the law, about finders of treasures and what they were owed. When he was finished, she whistled and said, “Brilliant. Whiting must know this. He has to.”

  “Whiting?” Lynley sounded incredulous. “Barbara—”

  “No. Listen. Someone unearths a treasure. Jossie, let’s say. In fact, it’s got to be Jossie. He doesn’t know what to do, so he rings the coppers. Who else to ring if you don’t know the law, eh? Word gets up the food chain at the Lyndhurst station to Whiting and Bob’s your uncle: Out he trots. He lays eyes on the booty; he sees what the future could hold for him if he manages to claim it as his own—cops’ pensions being what they are—and then—”

  “What?” Lynley demanded. “He scarpers up to London and kills Jemima Hastings? Might I ask why?”

  “’Cause he’s got to kill anyone who knows about the treasure, and if she went to see this Sheldon Mockworth bloke—”

  “Pockworth,” Lynley said. “Sheldon Pockworth. And he doesn’t exist. That’s just the name of the shop.”

  “Whatever. She goes to see him. She verifies what the coin is. She knows there’s more—lots more, piles of more—and now she knows it’s the real thing. Vast amounts of lolly all waiting to be scooped up. And Whiting bloody knows it as well.” Barbara was building a real head of steam on the topic. They were so close to cracking what was going on. She could feel her entire body tingling with the knowledge.

  Lynley said patiently, “Barbara, are you at all aware of how much you’re actually ignoring with all this?”

  “Like what?”

  “Just to begin, why did Jemima Hastings abruptly leave Hampshire in the first place if there was a vast treasure of Roman coins sitting there waiting for her to share in it? Why, after she identified the coin—months and months ago, by the way—did she apparently do nothing more about it? Why, if the man she lived with in Hampshire had dug up an entire Roman treasure, did she never mention the slightest thing about this to anyone, including, mind you, a psychic whom she apparently visited numerous times to ask about her love life instead?”

  “There’s an explanation, for God’s bloody sake.”

  “All right. Do you have it?”

  “I damn well would if you—”

  “What?”

  If you would work with me. That was the answer. But Barbara couldn’t bring herself to say it because of what the declaration implied.

  He knew her well, though. Far too well. He said in that most reasonable tone of his, “Listen, Barbara. Will you wait for me? Will you stay where you are? I can be there in less than an hour. You were about to have a meal. Have it. Then wait. Will you do that much?”

  She thought about this, even though she knew what her answer would be. He was, after all, still her longtime partner. He was, after all, still and always Lynley.

  She sighed. “All right. I’ll wait,” she told him. “Have you had lunch? Sh’ll I order you a fry-up?”

  “Good God, no,” he replied.

  LYNLEY KNEW THAT the last thing Barbara Havers was was a woman given to cooling her heels merely because she’d agreed to hold off momentarily on a course of action she was determined to take. So he was unsurprised when he walked into the Little Chef some ninety minutes later—frustratingly delayed by a burst water main in South London—to discover that she was burning up minutes on her mobile phone. The remains of her meal lay before her. In typical Havers fashion, it was a veritable monument to arterial blockage. To her credit, at least a few of the chips remained uneaten, but the presence of a bottle of malt vinegar told him that the rest of the meal had likely consisted—as she’d promised—of cod deep fried and sealed in copious amounts of batter. She’d followed this up with sticky toffee pudding, it seemed. He looked at all this and then at her. She was incorrigible.

  She nodded a hello as he examined the plastic chair opposite her for the remains of a previous diner’s meal. Finding it free of grease and food scraps, he sat. She said, “Now that’s interesting,” to whoever was the recipient of her phone call, and when she had at last ended the conversation, she jotted a few lines in her tattered spiral notebook. She said to Lynley, “Something to eat?”

  “I’m thinking of giving it up entirely.”

  She grinned. “My dining habits inspire you that much, do they, sir?”

  “Havers,” he replied solemnly, “believe me, words fail.”

  She chuckled and rooted out her cigarettes from her shoulder bag. She would know, of course, that smoking was forbidden inside the eatery. He waited to see if she would light up anyway and wait to be thrown out of the place. She did not. Instead, she set the Players to one side and did some further excavation, which produced a roll of Polos. She dislodged one for herself and offered him another. He demurred.

  “Bit more on Whiting,” she told him, with a nod at her mobile on the table between them.

  “And?”

  “Oh, I definitely think we’re heading where we need to be heading when it comes to that bloke. Just you wait. Heard from Ardery yet? D’we have an e-fit from Matsumoto on either of the blokes he saw in the cemetery?”

  “I think that’s in hand, but I haven’t heard.”

  “Well, I c’n tell you if one of them’s a ringer for Jossie then the other will be Whiting’s identical twin if it’s not Whiting himself.”

  “And what are you basing this inference upon?”

  “That was Ringo Heath I was talking to. You know. The bloke—”

  “—under whom Gordon Jossie learned his trade. Yes. I know who he is.”

  “Right. Well. Seems our Ringo’s had more than one visit from Chief Superintendent Whiting over the years, and the first of them came before Gordon Jossie ever signed on as Ringo’s apprentice.”

  Lynley considered what Havers was saying. To him, she was sounding rather more triumphant than the information seemed to call for. He replied with, “And this is important becau
se … ?”

  “Because of what he wanted to know when he first came to see him: Did Ringo Heath take on apprentices. And, by the way, what was Mr. Heath’s familial situation?”

  “Meaning?”

  “Did he have a wife, kids, dogs, cats, mynah birds, the whole cricket match. Two weeks later—p’rhaps three or four, but who knows as it was a long time ago, he says—along comes this bloke Gordon Jossie with, it turns out and we bloody well know this, phony letters from Winchester Technical College Two in hand. So Ringo—who’s already told Whiting he takes on apprentices, remember—hires our Gordon and that should’ve been that.”

  “I take it that that wasn’t that?”

  “Too bloody right. On the odd occasion, Whiting shows up. Sometimes he runs into Ringo at his local, even. Which, you can bet, isn’t Whiting’s local. He makes enquiries, casual ones. They’re in the nature of how’s-the-work-coming-along-my-friend, but Ringo isn’t exactly dead between the ears, is he, so he reckons this has to do with more than just a friendly enquiry from one of the local rozzers as he hoists a pint. ’Sides, who likes to have the local rozzers being friendly? That’d make me dead nervous and I’m one of them.” She drew in a breath. It seemed to Lynley the first time she’d done so. Clearly, she was heading for the peroration of her remarks because she said, “Now. Like I told you, I’ve got a snout in place at the Home Office looking into our Zachary Whiting. Meantime, there’s the thatching crook to be dealt with. None of the principles in London’re going to have got their mitts on a thatching tool—”

  “Hang on,” Lynley said. “Why not?”

  That stopped her in her tracks. She said, “What d’you mean ‘Why not?’ You can’t expect these things to be growing in flower beds.”

  “Havers, this particular tool was old and rusty,” Lynley said. “What does that suggest to you?”

  “That it was old and rusty. Left lying about. Taken from an old roof. Discarded in a barn. What else is it supposed to mean?”

  “Sold in a London market by a dealer in tools?”

  “No bloody way.”

  “Why not? You know as well as I do that there are antique markets in every part of town, from formal markets to casual affairs set up on Sunday afternoons. If we come down to it, there’s a market right inside Covent Garden where one of the suspects—you do remember Paolo di Fazio, don’t you?—actually has a stall. The crime was committed in London, not Hampshire, and it stands to reason—”

  “No bloody way!” Havers’ voice was loud. Several diners in the Little Chef glanced in their direction. She saw them do so and said, “Sorry,” to Lynley, adding in a hiss, “Sir. Sir. You can’t be telling me that the use of a thatching tool to kill Jemima Hastings was an absolute and completely incredible coincidence. You can’t, you just can’t, be saying that our killer conveniently picked out something to do away with her and that ‘something’ just happened to be one of the very same somethings that Gordon Jossie uses in his work? That horse won’t run once round the track, and you bloody well know it.”

  “I’m not saying that.”

  “Then what? What?”

  He considered this. “Perhaps it was used to frame Gordon Jossie. Can we believe that Jemima never told a soul in London about the man she left behind in Hampshire, about the fact that her former lover was a master thatcher? Once Jossie came looking for her, once he began putting up those cards with his phone number on them round the streets, doesn’t it stand to reason that she would have told someone—Paolo di Fazio, Jayson Druthers, Frazer Chaplin, Abbott Langer, Yolanda, Bella McHaggis…someone—who this person was?”

  “What would she have told them?” Havers said. “Okay, my ex-boyfriend, p’rhaps. I’ll give you that. But my ex-boyfriend the thatcher? Why would she tell someone he was a thatcher?”

  “Why wouldn’t she?”

  Havers threw herself back in her seat. She’d been leaning forward, intent upon making her every point, but now she observed him. Round them, the noise of the Little Chef rose and fell. When Havers finally spoke again, Lynley was unprepared for the direction she took.

  She said, “It’s Ardery, isn’t it, sir?”

  “What’s Ardery? What are you talking about?”

  “You know bloody well. You’re talking like this because of her, because she thinks this’s a London situation.”

  “It is a London situation. Havers, I hardly need remind you that the crime was committed in London.”

  “Right. Excellent. Bloody brilliant of you. You don’t need to remind me. And I don’t think I need to remind you that we aren’t living in the age of transportation by horseback. You seem to think that no one from Hampshire—and for that you c’n read Jossie or Whiting or Hastings or Father Bleeding Christmas—could’ve got up to London in any number of ways, done the deed, and then gone home.”

  “Father Christmas hardly comes from Hampshire,” Lynley said dryly.

  “You know damn well what I’m talking about.”

  “Havers, listen. Don’t be—”

  “What? Absurd? That’s the word you’d use, isn’t it. But at the end of the day the real issue here is you’re protecting her and we both know it although only one of us knows why you’re doing it.”

  “That’s outrageous and untrue,” Lynley replied. “And, might I add, although it’s never stopped you before, now you’re out of order.”

  “Don’t you bloody pull rank on me,” Barbara told him. “From the first, she’s wanted to think this is a London case. She had it that way when she decided Matsumoto did it, and she’ll have it that way once she gets an e-fit off him, just you wait for that. Meantime, Hampshire’s crawling with nasties that no one’s beginning to want to look at—”

  “For the love of God, Barbara, she sent you to Hampshire.”

  “And she ordered me back before I was finished. Webberly would’ve never done that. You wouldn’t have done it. Even that wanker Stewart wouldn’t ever have done it. She’s wrong, wrong, wrong, and—” Havers stopped abruptly. She seemed to have run out of steam. She said, “I need a fag,” and she grabbed up her belongings. She strode towards the doors of the place. He followed her, weaving between the tables of onlookers who’d become understandably curious about what was going on between them.

  Lynley thought he knew. It was a logical leap that Havers was making. It was just the wrong one.

  Outside, she was striding towards her car, on the far side of the car park in the direction of the petrol pumps. He was parked nearer the Little Chef than she, so he got into the Healey Elliott and drove after her. He came up alongside her. She was smoking furiously, muttering to herself. She tossed a glance his way and increased her speed.

  He said, “Havers, get in.”

  “I’d rather walk.”

  “Don’t be stupid. Get in. That’s an order.”

  “I don’t obey orders.”

  “You will now, Sergeant.” And then, seeing her face and reading the pain that he knew was at the heart of why she was acting as she was, he said, “Barbara, please get into the car.”

  She stared at him. He stared at her. Finally, she tossed away her cigarette and climbed into the car. He said nothing until he’d driven across the car park to the only spot of shade available, provided by an enormous lorry the driver of which was likely inside the Little Chef as they themselves had just been.

  Havers groused, “This car must’ve cost you a mint. Why’s it not got air-conditioning, for God’s bloody sake?”

  “It was built in 1948, Barbara.”

  “Stupid excuse.” She didn’t look at him, nor did she look straight ahead of them into the shrubbery beyond which the M3 offered a broken view of traffic whizzing towards the south. Instead, she looked out of her side window, offering him the sight of the back of her head.

  “You’ve got to stop cutting your own hair,” he told her.

  “Shut up,” she said quietly. “You sound like her.”

  A moment passed. He raised his head and looked at the
pristine ceiling of the car. He thought about praying for guidance, but he didn’t really need it. He knew what had to be said between them. Yet it constituted the Great Unmentionable that had been governing his life for months. He didn’t want to mention it. He just wanted to get on.

  He said quietly, “She was the light, Barbara. That was the most extraordinary thing about her. She had this …this ability that was simply at the core of who she was. It wasn’t that she made light of things—situations, people, you know what I mean—but that she was able to bring light with her, to uplift merely by virtue of who she was. I saw her do this time and again, with Simon, with her sisters, with her parents, and then of course with me.”

  Havers cleared her throat. Still she did not look at him.

  He said, “Barbara, do you believe—do you honestly believe—that I could walk away from that so easily? That, so desperate to get out of the wilderness, because I admit I am desperate to get out of it, I would take any route that appeared before me? Do you believe that?”

  She didn’t reply. But her head lowered. He heard a small sound emanate from her, and he knew what it meant. God, how he knew.

  He said, “Let it go, Barbara. Stop worrying so. Learn to trust me, because if you don’t, how will I learn to trust myself?”

  She began to weep in earnest, then, and Lynley knew what her show of emotion was costing her. He said nothing else, for there was, indeed, nothing more to say.

  Moments passed before she turned to him, and then it was to say, “I don’t have a damn tissue.” She began to scramble round her seat, as if looking for something. He fished out his handkerchief and handed it over. She used it, saying, “Ta. Trust you to have the linen ready.”

  “The curse of my upbringing,” he told her. “It’s even ironed.”

  “I noticed,” she said. “I expect you didn’t iron it, though.”

  “God, no.”

  “Figures. You don’t even know how.”

  “Well, I admit that ironing isn’t among my talents. But I expect if I knew where the iron was kept in my house—which, thank God, I don’t—I could put it to use. On something simple like a handkerchief, mind you. Anything more complicated would completely defeat me.”