Elizabeth George - This Body of Death

“‘We’?” Half of we turned out to be Gina Dickens, in whose company Meredith had been ushered into the presence of Chief Superintendent Whiting-“because we said, Rob, that we wouldn’t talk to anyone but the man at the top”-and there they’d demanded to know the whereabouts of the two detectives who’d come to the New Forest from New Scotland Yard. They had something of grave importance to hand over to those detectives, they told him, and of course he asked what it was. Once he knew what it was, he asked to see it. Once he saw it, he put it into a filing folder and asked where it had come from. “Gina didn’t want to tell him, Rob. She seemed afraid of him. Afterwards she told me he’s been on the property to talk to Gordon and when he came to talk to Gordon, she didn’t know he was police. He didn’t say, and Gordon didn’t either. She said she went all cold when we walked into his office and she saw him cos she reckons Gordon must’ve known who he was all along. So now she’s nearly out of her mind with fear because if this bloke shows up on the property and if he takes that evidence with him, then Gordon’ll know how he got it because how else could he have got it except from Gina?”

As the information continued to pile up, Robbie had difficulty taking it all in. Train tickets, a hotel receipt, Gina Dickens in possession of both, Gordon Jossie, Chief Superintendent Whiting, New Scotland Yard…And then there was the not small matter of Gordon’s complete lie about Jemima’s departure: that she had someone in London or elsewhere, that he himself had wanted to remain with her and she had left him rather than what the truth probably was, that he had driven her off.

Meredith had gone on to say that Chief Superintendent Whiting had kept the rail tickets and the hotel receipt in his possession, but once she and Gina had left him and once Gina had revealed the man’s connection-“whatever it is, Rob”-to Gordon Jossie, Meredith herself had known absolutely that he was not going to give the information to New Scotland Yard although she couldn’t say why. “And we didn’t know where to find them,” Meredith wailed, “those detectives, Rob. I’ve not even talked to them yet anyway, so I don’t know who they are, so I wouldn’t recognise them if I saw them on the street. Why haven’t they come to talk to me? I was her friend, her best friend, Rob.”

To Rob, only one detail actually mattered. It wasn’t that Chief Superintendent Whiting had potential evidence in his hands and it wasn’t the whereabouts of the Scotland Yard detectives or why they hadn’t spoken yet to Meredith Powell. What mattered was that Gordon Jossie had been to London.

Rob had taken the call from Meredith just at the end of a meeting of the New Forest’s verderers, which they’d held, as usual, in the Queen’s House. And although this location was not far from the police station where the chief superintendent operated, Rob didn’t even think about going there to question Chief Superintendent Whiting about what he intended to do with the information from Meredith and Gina Dickens. He had only one destination in mind and he set off for it with a grinding of the Land Rover’s gears and Frank lurching on the seat next to him.

When he saw from the absence of vehicles that no one was at home on Jossie’s holding, Rob paced intently round the cottage as if he’d be able to find evidence of the man’s guilt leaping out of the flower beds. He looked into windows and tested doors, and the fact that they were locked in a place where virtually no one locked their doors seemed to declare the worst.

He went from the cottage to the barn and swung open the doors. He strode inside to his sister’s car, saw that the key was in the old Figaro’s ignition, and tried to make something of this, but the only thing he could make of it didn’t amount to sense anyway: that Jemima had never gone to London but had been murdered here and buried on the property, which of course hadn’t happened at all. Then he saw that the ring attached to the ignition key held another, and assuming this was the key to the cottage, Robbie took it and hurried back to the door.

What he intended to look for, he didn’t know. He only understood that he had to do something. So he opened drawers in the kitchen. He opened the fridge. He looked in the oven. He went from there to the sitting room and took the cushions off the sofa and the chairs. Finding nothing, he dashed up the stairs. Clothes cupboards were neat. Pockets were empty. Nothing languished under the beds. Towels in the bathroom were damp. A ring in the toilet bowl spoke of cleaning needing to be done, and although he wanted something to be hidden inside the cistern, there was nothing.

Then Frank started barking outside. Then another dog began barking as well. This took Robbie to one of the windows where he saw two things simultaneously. One was that Gordon Jossie had come home in the company of his golden retriever. The other was that the ponies in the paddock were just that, still in the damn paddock when Rob would have sworn to God that they belonged out on the forest, so why the hell were they still here?

The barking increased in frenzy, and Rob dashed down the stairs. Never mind that he was the one trespassing. There were questions to be asked.

Frank sounded insane, as did the other dog. Rob saw as he burst out of the cottage that for some reason Jossie had stupidly opened the door of the Land Rover and had let Frank jump out and he himself was now bent into the vehicle and searching through it as if he didn’t bloody well already know who owned it.

The Weimaraner was actually howling. It came to Rob that the animal was howling not at the other dog but at Jossie himself. This fueled Rob’s rage because if Frank howled it was because he’d been harmed, and no one was meant to lay a hand on his dog and certainly not Jossie who’d laid hands elsewhere and death was the result.

The retriever was yelping now because Frank was howling. Two dogs from the property across the lane joined in and the resulting cacophony set the ponies in motion inside the paddock. They began to trot back and forth along the line of the fence, tossing their heads, neighing.

“What the hell’re you doing?” Robbie demanded.

Jossie swung round from the Land Rover and asked a variation of the same question and with far more reason, as the door to the cottage stood wide open and it was only too clear what Rob had been up to. Rob shouted at Frank to be quiet, which only set the dog into a complete paroxysm of barking. He ordered the Weimaraner back into the vehicle, but instead Frank approached Jossie as if he intended to go for the thatcher’s throat. Jossie said, “Tess. That’ll do,” and his own animal ceased barking at once, and this made Rob think of power and control and how a need for power and control could be at the heart of what had happened to Jemima and then he thought of the railway tickets, of the hotel receipt, of Jossie’s trip to London, of his lies, and he strode over to the thatcher and heaved him against the side of the Land Rover.

He said through his teeth, “London, you bastard.”

“What the hell…” Gordon Jossie cried.

“She didn’t leave you because she had someone else,” Robbie said. “She wanted to marry you, although God knows why.” He pressed Jossie back, had his arm across the thatcher’s throat before Jossie could defend himself. With his other hand, he knocked the man’s sunglasses to the ground because he damn well intended to see his eyes for once. Jossie’s hat went with them, a baseball cap that left a line across his forehead like the mark put on Cain. “But you didn’t want that, did you?” Rob demanded. “You didn’t want her. First you used her, then you drove her away, and then you went after her.”