Elizabeth George - This Body of Death

That turned out to be the case. When Rob reversed up the cottage drive and positioned the horse trailer near the paddock that contained the two ponies from the Minstead area, no one came out of the cottage to stop him. The absence of Jossie’s golden retriever told him, as well, that no one was home. He let Frank out of the Land Rover to have a run, but told the Weimaraner to keep his distance when he brought the ponies from the paddock. As if he understood this perfectly, Frank headed in the direction of the barn, snuffling along the ground as he went.

The ponies weren’t as skittish as some within the Perambulation, so it wasn’t difficult to get them into the horse trailer. This went some way towards explaining how Jossie had managed them when he brought them here as, unlike Rob, he wasn’t an experienced horseman. It did not, however, explain what Jossie was doing with the two ponies in the first place, so far from where they normally grazed and belonging to someone else. He would have seen how their tails were clipped, so even had he mistaken them for his own ponies upon a glance, a closer look would have told him they were from another area. Keeping them on his holding when they weren’t his responsibility, and longer than they clearly needed to be there, was an expense any other commoner would have avoided. Rob couldn’t reckon why Gordon Jossie had taken it on.

When he had them ready for transport, Rob returned to the paddock to close its gate. There he noticed what he might have noticed on earlier visits to the holding had he not been first consumed with concerns about his sister and then later taken up by considerations ranging from Gina Dickens’ presence to that of the ponies. Jossie, he saw, had been putting some work into the paddock. The gate was relatively new, a number of the fence posts were new, and the barbed wire strung between them was new as well. The freshness of all this, however, comprised only one part of the paddock. The rest had yet to be seen to. Indeed, the rest was something of a ruin, with posts atilt and areas overgrown with weeds.

This gave him pause. It wasn’t, he knew, unusual for a commoner to make improvements upon his holding. This was generally necessary. It was, however, odd that someone like Jossie-characterised by the nearly compulsive care with which he did everything else-would have left a job such as this one unfinished. He went back inside the inclosure for a closer look.

Rob recalled Gina Dickens’ desire for a garden, and for a moment he wondered if she and Jossie had taken the unlikely decision to have that garden here. If Gordon intended to build another paddock somewhere else for ponies, it would explain why the thatcher had gone no further with his scheme to improve this one as a holding pen for stock. On the other hand, discontinuing this paddock’s use as a holding pen would mean moving the heavy granite trough to another location, a task requiring the sort of equipment Gordon didn’t possess.

Rob frowned at this. The trough suddenly seemed to him very much like the presence of the ponies: unnecessary. For hadn’t there been a trough here already? Within the paddock? Surely, there had.

He looked for it. It didn’t take long. He found the old trough in the unrestored section of the paddock, heavily overgrown with brambles, vines, and weeds. It stood some distance from the water source, which made the new trough not altogether unreasonable as it could be more easily reached by hosepipe. Still, it was strange that Gordon would go to the expense of a new trough without having uncovered the old one. He had to have suspected it was there.

It was a curiosity. Rob intended to have a word with Gordon Jossie about it.

He returned to his vehicle and murmured to the ponies moving restlessly within the trailer. He called to Frank, the dog came running, and they set off to the northernmost part of the Perambulation.

It took nearly an hour to get there, even keeping to the main roads. Rob was stymied in his progress by a train stopped on the railway tracks in Brockenhurst, blocking the crossing, and then again by a tour coach with a flat tyre that caused a tailback on the south side of Lyndhurst. When he finally got beyond it and into Lyndhurst itself, the restiveness of the animals in the trailer told him that taking them up to Minstead was a bad idea. As a result, he veered onto the Bournemouth Road and made for Bank. Beyond it and along a sheltered lane stood the tiny enclave of Gritnam, a circle of back-to-back gardenless cottages facing outward onto the lawns, the trees, and the streams that comprised the expanse of Gritnam Wood. The lane itself went no farther than Gritnam, so there was likely no safer place in the New Forest to release ponies that had too long been kept in Gordon Jossie’s paddock.

Rob parked in the middle of the lane that encircled the cottages, as the place was so tiny there was no other spot to leave a vehicle. There amid a silence broken only by the call of chaffinches and the trill of wrens, he eased the ponies out into freedom once more. Two children emerged from one of the cottages to watch him at work, but long schooled in the ways of the New Forest, they did not approach. Only when the ponies were making their way towards a stream that gleamed some distance into the trees did either child speak and then it was to say, “We got kittens here, if you want to see ’em. We got six. Mum says we’re meant to give ’em way.”

Rob went over to where the two children stood, barefoot and freckled in the summer heat. A boy and girl, each of them held a kitten in arms.

“Why’ve you got the ponies?” the boy asked. He seemed to be the elder of the two by several years. His sister watched him adoringly. She put Rob in mind of the way Jemima had once watched him. She put Rob in mind of how he’d failed her.

He was about to explain what he was doing with the ponies when his mobile rang. It was on the seat of his Land Rover, but he could hear it clearly.

He set off to take the call, heard the news all of the agisters dreaded hearing, and swore when he was given it. For the second time in a week, a New Forest pony had been hit by a motorist. Rob’s services were wanted in the manner in which he least wished to give them: The animal was going to have to be killed.

THE WORRY MEREDITH Powell felt had grown to full-blown anxiety by the morning. All of it had to do with Gina. They’d shared the double bed in Meredith’s bedroom, and Gina had asked in the darkness if Meredith didn’t mind holding her hand till she went to sleep. She’d said, “I know it’s ridiculous to ask but I think it might soothe me a bit…,” and Meredith had told her yes, of course, she didn’t even need to explain, and she’d covered Gina’s hand with her own and Gina’s hand had turned and clasped hers and there their hands had lain for hours upon hours on the mattress between them. Gina had fallen asleep quickly-which of course made perfect sense as the poor girl was exhausted by what she’d gone through at Gordon Jossie’s cottage-but her sleep was light and fitful and every time Meredith had tried to ease her hand away from Gina’s, Gina’s fingers tightened, she gave a small whimper, and Meredith’s heart had gone out to her again. So in the darkness, she’d thought about what to do about Gina’s situation. For Gina had to be protected from Gordon, and Meredith knew that she herself might be the only person willing to protect her.

Asking for police participation in the matter was out of the question. Chief Superintendent Whiting and his relationship with Gordon-whatever it was-put paid to that, and even if that were not the situation, the police weren’t about to deploy their resources upon the protection of a single individual based on the strength of her bruises. Truth was that cops wanted a lot more than a few bruises before they did anything. They generally wanted a court order, an injunction filed, charges made, and the like, and Meredith had a very good feeling that Gina Dickens was too frightened to apply herself to any of this anyway.