Elizabeth George - This Body of Death

She went back along the hedge. She didn’t fancy clawing her way through it. It was thickly grown and for all practical purposes impassable, so she needed another way to get onto Jossie’s property. She found this way where the hedge made an angle and headed inwards to run along part of the property’s east boundary. There, she discovered, it gave onto another paddock defined by the same wire fencing that was used elsewhere on Jossie’s land. This was easier to climb through, and she did so. Now what stood between her and the west paddock and Frazer Chaplin within that paddock was the barn in which Jossie kept Jemima’s car and his thatching equipment. If she circled that barn, she knew she would arrive at the north side of the west paddock, where Frazer Chaplin had taken the woman who was with him.

There was no immediate sign of Gina Dickens, but as Barbara slunk in the direction of the barn and towards its rear, she could see Gina’s well-kept Mini Cooper in the drive. Now was the moment to phone for backup, but before she did that, she had to make certain that the shiny red vehicle did indeed indicate the presence of its owner.

She gained the rear of the barn. Behind it, some fifty yards away, the woods began, edged thickly with chestnuts and crowned with oaks. They could have afforded her excellent refuge, a place of hiding from which she could observe what was going on in the paddock. But from that distance, there was no way to hear what was being said and, even if she’d had the means to hear, getting to the woods without being seen from the paddock itself was impossible. Even low crawling wouldn’t do it, for the paddock was fenced in wire, not in stone, and the area between paddock and woods afforded only the protection of occasional gorse. Anyone on the outside was going to be easily seen by anyone on the inside.

That worked both ways, though. For from the edge of the barn, Barbara could see within the paddock easily enough. And what she saw when she eased her head round to have a peek was Frazer Chaplin with his fist clenching a weapon and that weapon held to the neck of Meredith Powell. His other arm gripped Meredith round her waist. If she moved, what Frazer held-and it had to be a thatcher’s crook, Barbara reckoned, considering where they were-was going to pierce Meredith Powell’s carotid artery, just as another crook had pierced Jemima’s artery in Abney Park Cemetery.

Backup was utterly useless, Barbara realised. By the time the cops from Lyndhurst arrived, Meredith Powell would likely be severely injured or entirely dead. If that was to be avoided, Barbara was going to have to come up with the way.

HE CALLED HER George. Meredith thought, stupidly, What sort of name is that for a woman? until she understood it was short for Georgina. For her part, Gina called him Frazer. And she wasn’t exactly pleased to see him.

They’d interrupted her in the midst of what looked like a spate of gardening in the paddock where Gordon kept ponies off the forest when they needed special care. She’d been clearing out a mass of growth on the northwest edge of the paddock and she’d uncovered an old stone trough that had likely been there for two hundred years.

She’d said, “What the hell are you…,” when she’d turned from what she was doing and spied Meredith being frog-marched in her direction. She’d added, “Oh, Christ, Fraze. What in God’s name happened?”

To which he answered, “A surprise, I’m afraid.”

She cast a hurried look at Meredith before she said to him, “And did you have to-”

“Couldn’t leave her there now, could I, George?”

“Well, this is just grand. What in God’s name’re we supposed to do with her?” She gestured towards her gardening project. “It’s got to be here. There’s nowhere else. We don’t have time to mess about with any more problems than we already have.”

“That can’t be helped.” Frazer sounded quite philosophical. “I didn’t meet her in the street, did I. She broke into your bed-sit. She’s got to be dealt with and there’s an end to it. And it makes more sense to deal with her here than anywhere else.”

Got to be dealt with. Meredith felt her bowels loosen. She said, “You mean to blame Gordon, don’t you? That’s what you did from the first.”

“So as you see…?” Frazer said to Gina. He had a meaningful tone to his voice.

It didn’t take genius to work out what he meant: The bloody cow has got to the bottom of things and now she’s got to die. They would kill her the same way they had killed Jemima. Then they would plant her body-that was the word for it, wasn’t it?-on Gordon’s holding. Perhaps she’d lie undiscovered for a day or a week or a month or a year. But when she was discovered, Gordon would take the blame because the two of them would be long gone. But why? Meredith wondered. “Why?”

She hadn’t realised she’d spoken till Frazer’s arm tightened round her waist and the tip of his weapon dipped into her skin. She felt the skin break and she whimpered and he murmured, “Just a taste,” and “Shut the fuck up.” And then he said to Gina, “We need a grave.” He gave a rough laugh as he noted, “Hell, you were going to dig anyway. It’ll just be a two-for-one deal.”

“Right here in the paddock?” Gina asked. “Why the hell would anyone ever believe that he’d bury her here?”

“We don’t have the luxury of answering that question, do we,” he noted. “Start digging, Georgina.”

“We don’t have the time.”

“We don’t have a choice. It doesn’t have to be deep. Just enough to cover her body. Get a better shovel. There has to be one in the barn.”

“I don’t want to see it when you-”

“Fine. Shut your God damn eyes when it comes down to it. But just get the fucking shovel and start digging her sodding grave because I can’t fucking kill her till we’ve got a place where she can bleed out.”

Meredith whimpered again. “Please. I’ve a little girl. You can’t.”

“Oh that’s where you’re very much wrong,” Frazer said.

THEY RODE IN silence. Whiting occasionally broke it with a lilting tune that he whistled in some merriment. Tess occasionally broke it with a long whine that told Gordon the dog understood something was wrong.

The journey took no longer than it would ever have taken to bridge the distance between Fritham and Sway in the middle of the day. It felt as if they were crawling, though. It seemed to him he’d be trapped forever in the passenger seat of Whiting’s car.

When they finally turned into Paul’s Lane, Whiting gave him his instructions: one suitcase and he was meant to pack it in a quarter of an hour. As to Gordon’s question of what would be done with the rest of his belongings…He would have to take that up with whatever authority came to fetch him since the matter was of no interest to Whiting.

The chief superintendent made a gun of his thumb and index finger and used his next statement as the trigger which he cocked while saying, “Consider yourself lucky I didn’t pull the plug on you when I first got told about that little trip of yours up to London. Could have done it then, you know,” he said. “Consider yourself bloody well lucky.”

Gordon saw how it had worked in Whiting’s mind and understood how his trip to London-revealed to Whiting by Gina, there could be no doubt of that-had obliterated whatever caution Whiting might have felt in dealing with him in the past. Before that trip to London, Whiting had merely lurked on the periphery of his life, showing up to make sure he was “keeping the snout clean,” as he’d put it time and again, intimidating him, but not crossing any lines other than those defined by garden bullying. Learning he’d been to London, however, and connecting that knowledge to Jemima’s death had opened the floodgates that had previously held back the waters of the chief superintendent’s loathing. One word from him to the Home Office and Gordon Jossie went back inside, a violator of the conditions of his release, and always a danger to society. The Home Office would remove his liberty first and ask questions later. Gordon had known how it would play out and this knowledge had kept him cooperative.