Elizabeth George - This Body of Death

She hung up the phone, then turned back to him. She looked at him the way one might view roadkill. She said, “It’s extraordinary to me.”

His lips felt dry. “What?”

“That it never occurred to you that it might only be someone who resembled me, Gordon. How completely pathetic you and I have become.”

AFTER A NIGHT in which Michele Daugherty’s paranoia had entirely robbed her of sleep, Meredith Powell had departed her parents’ house in Cadnam, leaving a note to tell her mother that she’d gone into Ringwood earlier than usual to deal with a massive pile of work. After the previous day’s lecture from Mr. Hudson, Meredith knew she couldn’t afford any sort of cock-up without putting her job in jeopardy, but she also knew there was no way she’d be able to apply herself creatively to graphic designs if she didn’t sort out the enigma that was Gina Dickens. So at five in the morning, she’d given up on the idea of sleep and she’d brought herself down to Gordon Jossie’s holding, where she’d found a suitable place to park her car in the rutted entrance to a farmer’s field a short distance down the lane. She reversed into this spot and settled down to gaze in the direction of Gordon’s cottage, itself hidden by the hedge at the edge of the property.

She spent a good deal of time trying to go over everything that Gina Dickens had said to her from the moment they’d met. She found, however, that there was simply so much information that it was difficult to keep everything straight. But that had likely been Gina’s intention from the first, she concluded. The more details Gina Dickens threw out, the more difficult it would prove for Meredith to sort through them all and get to the truth. She just hadn’t counted on Meredith hiring Michele Daugherty to do the sorting for her.

Because of the way things were developing, Meredith reckoned they were all in cahoots: Chief Superintendent Whiting, Gina Dickens, and Gordon Jossie. She wasn’t sure how the partnership among them worked, but she was certain at this point that each of them had played a part in what had happened to Jemima.

It was just after seven in the morning when Gina reversed her shiny red Mini Cooper into the lane. She headed in the general direction of Mount Pleasant and, beyond it, the Southampton Road. Meredith waited a moment and followed her. There weren’t so many lanes in the area that she was likely to lose her, and she didn’t want to risk being seen.

Gina drove casually, the sunlight glinting off her hair because, as before, the top was down on her Mini Cooper. She drove like someone out for a day in the countryside, with her right arm resting on the upper ledge of the door when it wasn’t raised to finger her wind-ruffled hair. She wound through Mount Pleasant’s narrow byways, taking care to honk as a warning to potential oncoming cars when she rounded a curve, and finally when she came to the Southampton Road, she turned in the direction of Lymington.

Had the hour been later, Meredith would have assumed Gina Dickens meant to do her shopping. Indeed, when she drifted across the roundabout and headed into Marsh Lane, Meredith briefly considered that Gina might actually be getting a very early start on things by parking somewhere near Lymington High Street and perhaps having a morning coffee at a café that she knew would be open. But in advance of the high street, Gina made another turn, which took her over the river, and for a moment that chilled her with its implication of flight, Meredith was certain Gina Dickens meant to catch the ferry that would take her to the Isle of Wight.

Here again Meredith was wrong albeit relieved. Gina went in the opposite direction when she reached the other side of the river, setting a course towards the north. In very short order she was on the straight towards Hatchet Pond.

Meredith dropped back to remain unseen. She worried she might lose Gina at the junction just beyond Hatchet Pond, and she peered ahead through the windscreen, grateful for the bright sun and the way in which it winked on the chrome bits of Gina’s car, allowing them to act as a guide.

As the pond loomed ahead, Meredith gave thought to the fact that Gina Dickens might be meeting someone there, much as she herself had met Gina a few days earlier. But here again, Gina kept going and Meredith saw her make the turn east towards Beaulieu’s Georgian redbrick cottages, but instead of driving into the village, Gina went northwest at the triangular junction above Hatchet Pond, and in less than two miles she turned into North Lane.

Yes! was Meredith’s thought. North Lane was an absolute treasure trove of meeting places. While it was true that Gina had taken a completely mad route to get to the area, what couldn’t be denied was that its woodlands and its inclosures provided the kind of seclusion that someone like Gina-who was bloody well up to something, Meredith reckoned-would require.

North Lane followed the Beaulieu River, which disappeared from sight, off to the left beneath the trees, and Meredith dropped back once again. She was familiar with this area as it ultimately brought one to the Marchwood Bypass, which was the route to her own home in Cadnam. And when Gina led her directly to this bypass instead of stopping anywhere at all along North Lane, Meredith’s first assumption was that the other woman had spotted her following and intended to drive to Meredith’s house, where she would park, get out of her car, and wait for Meredith to come sheepishly upon her.

But again she was wrong. Gina did indeed take them to Cadnam, but she made no stop there any more than she’d stopped anywhere else along the way. Instead she now headed south towards Lyndhurst, and while Meredith gave fleeting thought to the Mad Hatter Tea Rooms and Gina Dickens’ bed-sit, it made absolutely no sense to her that Gina would drive to Lyndhurst by this circuitous route.

Thus, Meredith could hardly call herself surprised when Gina cruised even farther south, kept up the pace through Brockenhurst, and finally dipped onto the road towards Sway. Sway, of course, was not her destination and Meredith had twigged this long before Gina made no turn towards that village. Instead, she ended up back at Gordon Jossie’s holding, where she had begun her wild ride, like Mr. Toad in his new motorcar, as if out for a morning cruise to waste petrol and time.

Meredith cursed: for being a fool, for putting her employment at risk, and for being seen, as she must have been seen for Gina to have driven so uselessly round the countryside. She also cursed Gina for being wily, more than a match for Meredith and likely more than a match for everyone else.

Still, she paused for a moment instead of admitting defeat and heading to Ringwood with a ready excuse to give to Mr. Hudson as to the lateness of her arrival.

She pulled back into the spot she’d earlier chosen to keep watch on Gordon Jossie’s house, and she thought about her own consideration of Gina’s lengthy drive round the New Forest. Wasting petrol and time, she’d concluded just a moment earlier, and she realised there was something to this simple conclusion and that something was the wasting of time. Killing time was the expression she wanted. If Gina Dickens hadn’t spotted Meredith, wasn’t it possible that killing time was what she had been doing?

As Meredith weighed this possibility and the reasons for it, the likeliest was the most obvious as well: She was killing time so that Gordon Jossie would leave the property for his own employment, allowing Gina to return.

This did actually seem to be the reason, Meredith saw, for from her place of hiding she heard the slam of the Mini Cooper’s door, followed by a second door slam coming from the cottage as Gina went inside. Meredith left the Polo then, and she sought a vantage point where roaming animals had munched a spy hole in the hedge along Gordon’s property. From here, Meredith could see both the cottage and the west paddock and, as she observed them, Gina emerged from the cottage again.