Elizabeth George - This Body of Death

“What, then? He’s sleeping with her? With her, with Jemima, with…who else, Thomas?”

“With Gina Dickens, I dare say.”

She stared at him. “Gina Dickens?”

“Think about it. There she is in the magazine pictures of the Portrait Gallery’s opening show. If Frazer was there-and we know he was-how impossible is it to believe he met Gina Dickens that night? How impossible is it to believe that, meeting Gina Dickens, he fell for her? Wanted to add her to his list of conquests? Ultimately decided to replace Jemima with her? Sent her down to Hampshire to get herself involved with Jossie so that-”

“D’you realise how many things are unaccounted for in all of this?” She put her head in her hands. Her brain felt sodden. “We can suppose this and suppose that, Thomas, but we have no evidence that anything you’re saying actually happened, so what’s the point?”

Lynley went on, seeming undeterred. They did have evidence, he pointed out, but he reckoned they hadn’t been putting it together correctly.

“What, for example?”

“The handbag and the bloodstained shirt from the Oxfam bin, just to begin,” he said. “We’ve assumed someone planted them there to implicate one of the inhabitants of Bella McHaggis’s house. We haven’t considered that, knowing the bin wasn’t emptied regularly, one of the inhabitants of the house put the items there merely to store them.”

“Store them?”

“Until they could be taken down to Hampshire, handed over to Gina Dickens, and placed somewhere on Gordon Jossie’s property.”

“God. This is madness. Why wouldn’t he just-”

“Listen.” Lynley returned to the table and sat. He leaned across it and put his hand over her arm. “Isabelle, it’s not as mad as it seems. This crime depended upon two things. First, the killer had to have knowledge of Jemima’s past, her present, and her intentions towards Gordon Jossie. Second, the killer couldn’t have worked alone.”

“Whyever not?”

“Because he had to gather what evidence was going to be necessary to frame Gordon Jossie for this murder and that evidence was to be found in Hampshire: the murder weapon and a yellow shirt from Jossie’s clothes cupboard, I expect. At the same time the killer had to know what Jemima was doing with regard to Jossie. If Frazer was indeed her lover, isn’t it reasonable to assume that she showed him those postcards that Jossie had put up round the gallery in an attempt to locate her? Isn’t it reasonable to conclude that, learning about these cards and already being involved with Gina Dickens, Frazer Chaplin began to see a way in which he could have everything: the treasure that he’d learned about, a means to get to that treasure, and Gina Dickens as well?”

Isabelle thought about this. She tried to see how it had been managed: a phone call made to the number on the postcard that would tell Gordon Jossie where to find Jemima; Jemima’s decision to meet Jossie in a private location; someone in Hampshire to keep an eye on Jossie and monitor his movements and someone in London doing the same with Jemima, and both of these someones intimately involved with Jossie and with Jemima, privy to the nature of the relationship they’d had with each other; both of these someones additionally in contact; both of these someones engaged in a delicate minuet of timing…?

“It makes my head swim,” she finally said. “It’s impossible.”

“It isn’t,” he said, “especially if Gina Dickens and Frazer knew each other from the night of the gallery opening. And it would have worked, Isabelle. Carefully planned as it was, it would have worked perfectly. The only thing they didn’t take into account was Yukio Matsumoto’s presence in the cemetery that day. Frazer didn’t know Matsumoto was being Jemima’s guardian angel. Jemima likely didn’t know it herself. So neither Frazer nor Gina Dickens took into account that someone would see Jemima meet Gordon Jossie and also see Gordon Jossie leave her, very much alive.”

“If that was Gordon Jossie at all.”

“I don’t see how it could have been anyone else, do you?”

Isabelle considered this from every angle. All right, it could have happened that way. But there was a problem with everything Lynley had said, and she couldn’t ignore it any more than he could. She said, “Jemima left Hampshire ages ago, Thomas. If there’s a Roman treasure hoard sitting down there on the property she shared with Gordon Jossie, why the hell in all that time did neither one of them-Jossie or Jemima-do a single thing about it?”

“That’s what I’d like to find out,” he said. “But I’d like to break Frazer’s alibi first.”

STILL IN HER dressing gown, she walked outside with him. She didn’t look much better than when he dumped her into the shower, but it seemed to Lynley that her spirits were raised enough that she was unlikely to drink again that evening. He was reassured by this thought. He didn’t like to think why.

She came as far as the narrow stairs that led from her basement flat up to the street. He’d mounted the first two steps when she said his name. He turned. She stood beneath him with one hand on the rail as if she intended to follow him up and the other hand at her throat, holding her dressing gown closed.

She said, “All of this could have waited till morning, couldn’t it.”

He thought about it for a moment before he said, “I suppose it could.”

“Why, then?”

“Why now instead of the morning, d’you mean?”

“Yes.” She tilted her head towards the flat, the door standing open but no lights on within. “Did you suspect?”

“What?”

“You know.”

“I thought there was a chance of it.”

“Why bother, then?”

“To sober you up? I wanted to toss round ideas with you, and I could hardly do that if you were in a stupor.”

“Why?”

“I like the give and take of a partnership. It’s how I work best, Isabelle.”

“You were meant to do this.” She touched her fingers to her chest, seeming to indicate with this gesture that she was referring to the superintendent’s job. “I wasn’t,” she added. “That’s clear enough now.”

“I wouldn’t say that. You made the point yourself: The case is complicated. You’ve been handed something with a learning curve steeper than any curve I’ve had to travel.”

“I don’t believe that at all, Thomas. But thank you for saying it. You’re a very good man.”

“Often, I think the opposite.”

“You’re thinking nonsense then.” Her eyes held his. “Thomas,” she said, “I…” But then she seemed to lose the courage to say anything more. This seemed uncharacteristic of her, so he waited to hear what she wanted to conclude with. He came down one step. She was directly below him, no longer virtually eye to eye with him but instead her head reaching just beneath his lips.

The silence between them stretched too long. It evolved from quiet into tension. It moved from tension into desire. The most natural thing in the world became the simple movement to kiss her, and when her mouth opened beneath his, that was as natural as the kiss itself. Her arms slipped round him and his round her. His hands slid beneath the dressing gown’s folds to touch her cool, soft skin.

“I want you,” she murmured at last, “to make love to me.”

“I don’t think that’s wise, Isabelle,” he said.

“I don’t care in the least,” she replied.

GORDON HADN’T PHONED THE SCOTLAND YARD DETECTIVE when Gina returned home on the previous night. He wanted instead to watch her. He had to learn exactly what she was doing here in Hampshire. He had to know what she knew.

He was rotten at acting, but that couldn’t be helped. She’d realised something was wrong the moment she’d come onto the property and found him sitting in the front garden at the table in the darkness. She was very late, and he was grateful for this. He let her think that the hour of her return was the reason for his silence and his observation of her.