Elizabeth George - This Body of Death

She could be urged to remain at Meredith’s house, but that could hardly go on indefinitely. While it was true that no one was more accommodating than Meredith’s own parents, it was also true that they were already sheltering Meredith and her daughter and anyway, since Meredith had impulsively come up with the gas leak tale to explain Gina’s presence, her mum and dad would assume the gas leak would be fixed within twenty-four hours.

That being the case, Gina would be expected to return to her bed-sit above the Mad Hatter Tea Rooms. This, of course, was the worst place for her because Gordon Jossie knew where to find her. So an alternative needed to be developed, and by morning Meredith had an idea what that alternative might be.

“Rob Hastings will protect you,” she told Gina over breakfast. “Once we tell him what Gordon did to you, he’ll certainly help. Rob’s never liked him. He’s got rooms in his house that no one’s using and he’ll offer one without our even asking.”

Gina hadn’t eaten much, merely picking at a bowl of grapefruit segments and taking one bite of a piece of dry toast. She was silent for a moment before she said, “You must have been a very good friend to Jemima, Meredith.”

That was hardly the case since she hadn’t been able to talk Jemima out of taking up with Gordon and look what had happened. Meredith was about to say this, but Gina went on.

She said, “I need to go back.”

“To your bed-sit? Bad idea. You can’t put yourself where he knows where to find you. He’ll never think you might be at Rob’s. It’s the safest place.”

But, surprisingly, Gina had said, “Not the bed-sit. I must go back to Gordon’s. I’ve had the night to sleep on it, and I’ve thought about what happened. I can see how I was the one to provoke-”

“No, no, no!” Meredith cried. For this was how abused women always acted. Given time to “think,” what they generally ended up thinking was that they were at fault, somehow provoking their men to do what they’d done to hurt them. They ended up telling themselves that if they’d only kept their mouths shut or acted compliant or said something different, fists would never have been swung in their direction.

Meredith had tried her best to explain this to Gina, but Gina had been obdurate. She’d said to Meredith in reply, “I know all that, Meredith. I’ve got my degree in sociology. But this is different.”

“That’s also what they always say!” Meredith had cut in.

“I know. Trust me. I do know. But you can’t think I’d let him hurt me again. And the truth is…” She looked away from Meredith, as if gathering the courage to admit the worst. “I do honestly love him.”

Meredith was aghast. Her face must have shown it because Gina went on to say, “I just can’t think, at the end of the day, that he hurt Jemima. He’s not that kind of man.”

“He went to London! He lied about going! He lied to you, to Scotland Yard as well. Why would he lie if he didn’t have a reason to be lying? And he lied to you from the very first about going there. He said it was Holland. He said it was to buy reeds. You told me that and you must see what it means.”

Gina let Meredith have her entire say in the matter before she herself drew the conversation to its conclusion. She said, “He knew I’d be upset if he told me he’d gone to see Jemima. He knew I’d be a bit unreasonable. Which is what I’ve been, which is certainly what I was last night. Look. You’ve been good to me. You’ve been the best friend I have in the New Forest. But I love him and I must see if there’s a chance he and I can make things work. He’s under terrible stress right now because of Jemima. He’s reacted badly, but I’ve not reacted well either. I can’t throw it all away because he did something that hurt me a bit.”

“He may have hurt you,” Meredith cried, “but he killed Jemima!”

Gina said firmly, “I don’t believe that.”

There was no more talking to her about the matter, Meredith discovered. There was only her intention to return to Gordon Jossie, to “give things another try” in the fashion of abused women everywhere. This was bad, but what was worse was that Meredith had no choice. She had to let her go.

Still, worry over Gina Dickens dominated most of her morning. She had no creative energy to apply to her work for Gerber & Hudson and when a phone call came into the office for her, she was happy enough to have to use her elevenses in a dash over to the office of Michele Daugherty, who’d made that call and said to her, “Got something for you. Have you time to meet?”

Meredith purchased a take-away orange juice and drank it on her route to the private investigator’s office. She’d nearly forgotten that she’d hired Michele Daugherty, so much having happened since she’d asked her to look into Gina Dickens.

The investigator was on the phone when she arrived. At long last Michele Daugherty called her into her office, where a reassuring stack of papers seemed to indicate she’d been hard at work on the brief that Meredith had given her.

The investigator wasted no time with social preliminaries. “There is no Gina Dickens,” she said. “Are you sure you’ve got the right name? The right spelling?”

At first, Meredith didn’t understand what the investigator meant, so she said, “This is someone I know, Ms. Daugherty. She’s not just a name I heard mentioned in a pub or something. She’s actually…rather…well, she’s rather a friend.”

Michele Daugherty didn’t question why Meredith was having a friend investigated. She merely said, “Be that as it may. There’s no Gina Dickens that I can find. There’re Dickenses aplenty but no one called Gina in her age range. Or in any other age range, if it comes down to it.”

She went on to explain that she’d tried every possible spelling and variation of the given name. Considering that Gina was likely a nickname or an abbreviated form of a longer name, she’d gone into her databases with Gina, Jean, Janine, Regina, Virginia, Georgina, Marjorina, Angelina, Jacquelina, Gianna, Eugenia, and Evangelina. She said, “I could go on like this indefinitely, but I expect you’d rather not pay for that. At the end of the day, when things go in this direction, I tell my clients it’s safe to say that there is no person by that name ’less she’s managed to slip through the system without having left a mark on it anywhere, which isn’t possible. She is a Brit, isn’t she? No doubt of that? Chance she might be a foreigner? Aussie? New Zealander? Canadian?”

“Of course she’s British. I spent last night with her, for heaven’s sake.” As if that meant anything, Meredith thought as soon as she said it. “She’s been living with a man called Gordon Jossie, but she has a bed-sit in Lyndhurst above the Mad Hatter Tea Rooms. Tell me how you searched. Tell me where you looked.”

“Where I always look. Where any investigator, including the police, would look. My dear, people leave records. They leave trails without knowing: birth, education, health, credit history, financial dealings throughout their lives, parking tickets, the ownership of anything that might have required financing or provided a guarantee or warranty and thus needed to be registered, magazine subscriptions, newspaper subscriptions, phone bills, water bills, electricity bills. One searches through all this.”

“What exactly are you saying, then?” Meredith was feeling quite numb.

“I’m saying that there is no Gina Dickens, full stop. It’s impossible not to leave a trail, no matter who you are or where you live. So if a person doesn’t leave a trail, it’s fairly safe to conclude she isn’t who she says she is. And there you have it.”

“So who is she?” Meredith considered the possibilities. “What is she?”