Elizabeth George - This Body of Death

He said evenly, “It’s neither, sir. She’s had a rough transition with little time to adjust to the job before she was thrust into the middle of an investigation. In addition to that, enquiries into murder beg for facts. She never had them all. And that, with respect, can’t be attributed to her.”

“Are you suggesting-”

“I’m not suggesting it can be attributed to you either, sir. Your hands were tied as well, I suspect.”

“Then…?”

“It’s because of this that she needs-I think-another opportunity. That’s all. I’m not saying she should be given the position permanently. I’m not saying that you should even consider giving her the position permanently. I’m merely saying that, based upon what I saw during these past days and based upon what you yourself asked me to do with respect to her being here, she should have another go.”

Hillier’s lips curved. It was not a smile so much as it was acknowledgement of a point well made and a point perhaps reluctantly taken. He said, “A compromise, then?”

“Sir?” Lynley said.

“Your presence. Here.” Hillier chuckled, but it seemed self-directed. It declared itself as Who could have thought I would end up here?

“Back at work at the Met, you mean,” Lynley noted.

“That would be the deal on offer.”

Lynley nodded slowly in comprehension. The assistant commissioner would always, he thought, play a very decent game of chess. They hadn’t come to checkmate yet, but they were close. “May I think about it, sir, before I commit myself?” he asked.

“You absolutely may not,” Hillier said.

ISABELLE WAS ON the phone with Chief Superintendent Whiting out of the operational command unit at the Lyndhurst station. The gun in question, he told her, belonged to one of the agisters. He didn’t explain what an agister was and she didn’t ask. She did ask who the agister was and how Gordon Jossie had come to have his weapon. The agister turned out to be the brother of their original victim, and he’d reported his gun missing only that morning. He didn’t tell the police, however, not at first and not that it would have helped had he done so. He told the head agister during a meeting, which set the wheels in motion, which was, of course, too late. Jossie, Whiting continued, apparently had the gun upon his person, either in his windcheater’s pocket or tucked into his trousers with the windcheater covering it. Or, Whiting went on as if to test the waters of another theory, he could have been keeping it in the cottage as he’d gone inside to pack. The first theory seemed likeliest, Whiting said. But he gave no cogent reason why.

“There’s a chance a treasure hoard’s involved in all this,” Isabelle told him. “You’ll want to keep an eye out for that.”

A what? Whiting wanted to know. Treasure? he asked. Treasure? What the hell…?

“A Roman treasure,” Isabelle told him. “We reckon that’s behind what’s gone on. We reckon Jossie was doing something on the property-likely some kind of work-and he came across the first of it. He was able to sort out what he’d come upon but so was Jemima.”

And then what? Whiting asked.

“She probably wanted to report it. It would be valuable and the law requires that. Considering who he was, though, he probably wanted to keep it buried. He’d have had to tell her why eventually because keeping it buried would’ve made no sense. Once he told her…Well, there she was, living with one of the most notorious child killers we’ve ever locked away. That must have been a rather staggering piece of information for her to process.”

Whiting made a sound of agreement.

“So is there anything on the property to indicate he’d been doing some work? I mean, doing some work during which he might have stumbled upon evidence of a treasure hoard?”

There was, Whiting told her in a meditative tone: Part of a paddock had been refenced while the other part had been left as it was. When everything was blown to hell a short time earlier that day, the woman-Gina Dickens-had been working in part of the paddock that hadn’t yet been seen to. Perhaps that was why…?

Isabelle thought about this. “It would be the other part,” she noted. “The newer section. The part already worked on. Because it stands to reason that Jossie would have discovered something where he himself had been digging. Any digging that’s gone on there? Anything new in that spot? Anything unusual?”

New fence posts, new wire fencing, new trough, Whiting said. Bloody huge trough if it came down to it. Must’ve weighed half a tonne.

“There you have it,” Isabelle told him. “You know, second thought on this: I’m going to set things in motion myself. From this end. On that score. The treasure. We’ll get the authorities to come out there. You have enough on your plate.” She looked up at a movement in her office doorway. Lynley was standing there. She held up a finger, a gesture that asked him to wait. He came inside and took the seat that angled from her desk. He looked relaxed. She wondered if anything ever ruffled the man.

She completed her phone call. The duty press officer from Lyndhurst would be identifying Gordon Jossie as Ian Barker. While this would undoubtedly drag forth all the details of John Dresser’s inhuman murder once again, the Home Office wanted it known that one of the three killers of the toddler was now dead himself, at his own hand.

Isabelle wondered at this. Was it supposed to be a cautionary tale? Something to give the Dresser family peace at last? Something to strike fear into Michael Spargo and Reggie Arnold, wherever they were? She didn’t see how releasing Gordon Jossie’s true identity would serve to do any of that. But she had no say in the matter.

When she and Whiting rang off, she and Lynley sat in silence for a moment. Outside of her office, the sounds of a day ending were unmistakable. She badly wanted a drink but more badly did she want to know about Lynley’s meeting with Sir David Hillier. She knew that was where he’d disappeared to.

She said, “It’s a form of blackmail.”

He drew his eyebrows together. His lips parted as if he would speak, but he said nothing. He had a faint scar, she noted for the first time, on his upper lip. It looked like quite an old one. She wondered how he’d come to have it.

“What he’s said is that he’ll keep it under wraps as long as the boys stay in Kent with him and Sandra. He says, ‘You don’t want a custody battle over them, Isabelle. You don’t want to end up in court. You know what will come to light and you don’t want that.’ So I’m stuffed. He can destroy my career. And even if he didn’t have that power, I’d lose custody permanently if we went to court. He knows that.”

Lynley was silent at first. He regarded her, and she couldn’t tell what he was thinking although she reckoned it had to do with how to tell her that her career was over anyway, despite her efforts to save it.

When he spoke, however, it was just to say, “Alcoholism.”

She said, “I’m not an alcoholic, Tommy. I drink too much occasionally. Most people do. That’s all.”

“Isabelle…” He sounded disappointed.

She said, “It’s the truth. I’m no more an alcoholic than…than you are. Than Barbara Havers is. Where is she, by the way? How the hell long does it take someone to drive from Hampshire to London?”

He wasn’t to be diverted. He said, “There are cures. There are programmes. There are…You don’t have to live-”

“It was stress,” she said. “How you found me the other night. That’s all it was. For God’s sake, Tommy. You told me yourself that you drank heavily when your wife was murdered.”

He said nothing. But his eyes narrowed the way one’s eyes would do when something is thrown. Sand, a handful of earth, an unkindness.