Elizabeth George - This Body of Death

There was a car in the drive of her parents’ home in Cadnam when Meredith arrived. She didn’t recognise it, and the sight of it gave her pause. She briefly considered the possibility that she always considered and hated herself for considering when something unexpected happened that might concern Cammie: Her daughter’s father had decided to visit. This was never the case, but Meredith had not yet managed to school her mind not to go there at the least provocation.

Inside the house, she was startled to see the private investigator from Ringwood sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and a plate of Fig Newtons before her. On her lap was Cammie, and Michele Daugherty was reading to her. Not a children’s book, for Cammie was not remotely interested in stories about elephants, boys and girls, puppies, or bunnies. Rather the investigator was reading to Meredith’s daughter from an unauthorised biography of Placido Domingo, a book whose purchase Cammie had insisted upon when she’d seen it in a shop in Ringwood and recognised one of her favourite tenors on the cover.

Meredith’s mother stood at the cooker, doing fish fingers and chips for Cammie’s tea. She said unnecessarily, “We’ve a visitor, luv,” and to Cammie, “That’s enough for now. Put Placido back on the shelf, there’s a good girl. We’ll have more of him after your bath.”

“But, Gran…”

“Camille.” Meredith used her mother tone. Cammie made a face but slid off Michele Daugherty’s lap and trudged dramatically in the direction of the sitting room.

Michele Daugherty gave a glance in the direction of the cooker. Meredith decided pleasantries were in order until her mum was supervising Cammie’s meal. Indeed, since she didn’t know whether her mother had been told exactly what Michele Daugherty did for a living, she decided to wait and see what this unexpected visit was all about rather than to question it.

Janet Powell, unfortunately, was taking her time, probably in order to hear why this stranger had come calling upon her daughter. They’d run out of chat and still she cooked. There was nothing for it but to offer Michele Daugherty a look at the back garden, which Meredith did. Michele accepted with alacrity. Janet Powell shot Meredith a look. I’ll have it out of you anyway was the message.

There was, thank God, at least a back garden to see. Meredith’s parents were both avid about roses, and they were in full bloom, and since the Powells insisted upon planting roses with fragrance and not just with colour, the scent was heady, impossible not to notice and to comment upon. Michele Daugherty did both, but then took Meredith by the arm and led her as far from the house as possible.

“I couldn’t ring you,” she said.

“How did you know where to find me? I didn’t tell you where-”

“My dear, you did hire me because I’m a PI, didn’t you? How difficult do you suppose it is to find someone who isn’t worried about being found?”

There was that, of course, Meredith realised. She wasn’t exactly in hiding. Which brought her immediately to the person who was in hiding. Or in something else. She said, “You’ve found out…?” and waited for her thought to be completed by the other woman.

“It’s not safe,” she said. “Nothing appears to be. That’s why I couldn’t phone you. I don’t trust the phone in my office, and when it comes to mobiles, they’re just about as risky. Listen, my dear. I went on with my research once you left me. I started in on the other name, Gordon Jossie.”

Meredith felt a shiver crawl up her arms, like fingertips tapping from the other world. “You’ve found out something,” she murmured. “I knew it.”

“It’s not that.” Michele glanced round, as if expecting someone to leap over the brick wall and come charging across the roses to accost her. “It’s not that at all.”

“More on Gina Dickens, then?”

“Not that either. I had a visit from the cops, my dear. A gentleman called Whiting showed up. He let me know in very clear terms having a great deal to do with my license to do business that a bloke called Gordon Jossie was off limits to me and to my endeavours. ‘It’s all in hand,’ is how he put it.”

“Thank God,” Meredith breathed.

Michele Daugherty frowned. “What’s that you say?”

“I stopped to see him on my way home this afternoon. Chief Superintendent Whiting. I told him what you’d discovered about Gina Dickens. And I’d already told him about Gordon. I’d been to talk to him about Gordon earlier. Before I came to you, in fact. I’d tried to interest him in what was going on, but-”

“You’re not understanding me, my dear,” Michele Daugherty said. “Chief Superintendent Whiting came to see me this morning. Not an hour after you left me. I’d begun my search but I’d not got far. I’d not even rung the local police. Or any police for that matter. Did you ring him and tell him I was investigating? Before you saw him this afternoon?”

Meredith shook her head. She began to feel ill.

Michele lowered her voice. “Do you see what this means?”

Meredith had an idea but she didn’t particularly want to give it voice. She said, “You’d only begun the process when he showed up? What does that mean, exactly?”

“It means I went into the national data banks. It means that somehow entering Gordon Jossie’s name into those national data banks set off bells and whistles somewhere and brought Chief Superintendent Whiting on the run to my doorstep. It means there’s far more here than meets the eye. It means I can’t help you further.”

BARBARA HAVERS DROVE directly to Gordon Jossie’s holding, arriving there in late afternoon and without being intercepted by a phone call from Isabelle Ardery, for which she thanked her lucky stars. She only hoped that DI Lynley would run interference for her with the acting superintendent when it came to light that Barbara had taken herself to Hampshire. If he did not, her goose was in the oven.

No cars were in the drive that ran alongside the cottage. Barbara parked and knocked on the cottage’s back door for good measure although she reckoned no one was at home, which turned out to be the case. No matter, she thought. Time to have a look round. She took herself over to the barn and tried its vast sliding door. It was conveniently unlocked. She left it ajar to give herself some light.

It was cool within, and musty smelling, a combination of stone, dust, and cob. The first thing she saw was an ancient car, two tones of colour on it in the fashion of the 1950s. It was in pristine condition and looked as if someone came out to the barn to dust it every day. Barbara went to have a closer look. A Figaro, she saw. Italian? Inspector Lynley would know, car buff that he was. She herself had never seen a vehicle like it. It wasn’t locked, so she checked it over, stem to stern, beneath the seats and in the glove box as well. There was nothing of interest.

The Figaro was parked towards the back of the building, to give clear access to the rest of the barn. This space contained any number of unsealed crates, which Barbara reckoned had to do with Gordon Jossie’s employment. She went to them next.

There were crooks galore, she found. This was unsurprising since they were a principal element of thatching. It wasn’t rocket science to work out how they were used either. The hooked end did just that: It hooked over one end of a bunched collection of reeds and held them in place. The pointed end got pounded into the rafters beneath. When it came to murder, the use of the crook was equally simple to sort out. The hooked end was the handle and the pointed end did the business on the victim.

What was interesting about the crooks that Jossie had was that they were not all the same. Among the wooden boxes, three contained crooks but in each of the boxes the crooks were slightly different. This difference had to do with the business end of the tool: Each pointed tip had been created differently. In one box, the points had been fashioned as a diagonal cut. In another, the points had been created by turning and pounding the iron four times upon taking the crook from the blacksmith’s fire. In the third, a smoother point had been achieved by rolling the iron when it was molten. The end was the same in each case, but the means of getting there apparently formed the blacksmith’s signature. For a city denizen like Barbara, the fact that these implements were made by hand in this day and age was nothing short of remarkable. Seeing them was like stepping back in time. But then, she reckoned, so was seeing thatched roofs.