Read This Body of Death Online
Authors: Elizabeth George
Tags: #Mystery, #Thriller, #Suspense, #Adult
This Body of Death (32 page)
“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m
sorry
. Here. Please sit.” Gina rose and urged Meredith onto the bench next to her. She said nothing more for several minutes as across the surface of the placid water dragonflies flitted, their fragile wings flashing purple and green in the light.
“Listen,” Gina said quietly, “can you and I possibly be friends? Or if not friends, perhaps nodding acquaintances? Or maybe nodding acquaintances at first and then
afterwards
friends?”
“I don’t know,” Meredith said dully, and she wondered how widely her shame was known. She reckoned it was known everywhere. It was, she thought, as much as she deserved. For stupid is as stupid does, and she’d been unforgivably stupid.
By the time John Dresser’s body was found two days after his disappearance, he was national news. What was known to the public at that point was what was seen in the CCTV films from the Barriers, in which a toddler seems to walk off happily hand in hand with three little boys. The still photos released by the police thus offered images that could be interpreted in one of two ways: as children having found the toddler wandering and setting out to take him to an adult who ultimately did him harm or as children intent upon the abduction and possible terrorising of another child. These images played across the front page of every national tabloid, of every broadsheet, of the local newspaper, and on the television.
With Michael Spargo wearing that unmistakable, overlarge mustard anorak, his identity was quickly established by his own mother. Sue Spargo took her son straight to the police station. That he’d been beaten beforehand was evident by the heavy bruising on his face, although there is no record of anyone’s having questioned Sue Spargo about this beating.
Following the rules of law, Michael Spargo was interrogated in the presence of a social worker and his mother. The detective in charge of this questioning was a twenty-nine-year veteran of the police force, DI Ryan Farrier, a man with three children and two grandchildren of his own. Farrier had been working criminal investigations for nineteen years of his twenty-nine-year career, but he had never come across a killing that affected him as did the murder of John Dresser. Indeed, so deeply was he harrowed by what he saw and heard during the investigation that he has since retired from the police and has remained under the care of a psychiatrist. It’s worth noting, as well, that the police department made both psychological and psychiatric services available to all the individuals who worked upon the crime once John Dresser’s body was found.
As might be expected, Michael Spargo denied everything at first, claiming that he was in school that day and maintaining that claim until presented not only with the CCTV film but also with evidence from his teacher as to his truancy. “All right, I was with Reg and Ian,” is all that he says on tape at this point. When asked for their surnames, he tells the police, “It was their idea, wasn’t it. I didn’t never want to nick that kid.”
This enrages Sue Spargo, whose eruption into verbal abuse and whose attempts at physical abuse are immediately halted by the other adults in the room. Her screams of, “You tell them the bloody truth or I’ll fucking kill you, I will,” are the last words she will speak to Michael during the course of the investigation and up until the moments she shares with him following his sentencing. This abandonment of her son at a crucial moment in his life is characteristic of her parenting style and perhaps speaks more loudly than anything else as to the source of Michael’s psychological disturbance.
Arrests of Reggie Arnold and Ian Barker quickly followed Michael Spargo’s mentioning of their names, and what was known at the time of their arrests was only that John Dresser had been seen with them and had disappeared. When they were brought to the police station (each boy was taken to a different station, and they did not see each other until their trial began), Reggie was accompanied by his mother Laura and later joined by his father Rudy, and Ian was alone although his grandmother arrived prior to his being interviewed. The whereabouts of Ian’s mother Tricia at the time of his arrest are never made clear in the documentation, and she did not attend his trial.
At first no one suspected that John Dresser was dead. Transcripts and tapes of early questioning by the police indicate that their initial belief was that the boys took John in an act of mischief, grew tired of his company, and left him somewhere to fend for himself. Although each of the boys was already known to the police, they were none of them known for anything more than truancy, acts of petty vandalism, and minor thefts. (One does wonder how Ian Barker, with a history of small animal torture, managed to go unnoticed for so long, however.) It was only when repeated witnesses began to step forward in the first thirty-six hours following John’s disappearance—communicating the level of the toddler’s distress—that the police seem to have developed a sense that something more ominous than a prank had occurred.
A search for the little boy had already begun, and as the area surrounding the Barriers was picked through by police and by concerned citizens in an organised and ever-widening circumference, it was not overlong before the Dawkins building site came under scrutiny.
Constable Martin Neild, twenty-four years old at the time and a brand-new father, was the individual who found the body of John Dresser, alerted to the possibility of its proximity by the sight of John’s blue snowsuit crumpled and bloodied on the ground near a disused Port-A-Loo. Inside this loo, Neild found the baby’s body, stuffed callously into the chemical toilet. Nield reports that he “wanted to think it was a doll or something,” but he knew otherwise.
“W
HAT’S THE DECISION ABOUT
S
UNDAY LUNCH
, I
SABELLE?
I’ve mentioned it to the boys, by the way. They’re quite keen.”
Isabelle Ardery pressed her fingers to her forehead. She’d taken two paracetamol but they’d done nothing to ease her headache. Nor had they done much for her stomach. She knew she should have eaten something before gulping them down, but the thought of food on top of an already roiling gut was more than she could have managed.
She said, “Let me speak to them, Bob. Are they there?”
He said, “You don’t sound quite yourself. Are you unwell, Isabelle?” Which wasn’t what he meant, of course.
Unwell
was a euphemism, and only barely.
Unwell
stood in place of everything else he didn’t intend to ask but fully intended to communicate.
She said, “I was up late last night. I’m on a case. You might have read about it. A woman’s been murdered in a North London cemetery … ?”
He clearly wasn’t interested in that part of her life, only in the other. He said, “Hitting it rather hard then, are you?”
“There are usually late nights when it comes to a murder investigation,” she replied, deliberately choosing to misunderstand him. “You know that, Bob. So may I speak to the boys? Where are they? Certainly they’re not out somewhere at this hour of the morning.”
“Still asleep,” he said. “I don’t like to wake them.”
“Surely they can go back to sleep if I just say hello.”
“You know how they are. And they need their rest.”
“They need their mother.”
“They have a mother, as things stand. Sandra’s quite—”
“Sandra has two children of her own.”
“You aren’t suggesting she treats them differently, I hope. Because, frankly, I’m not listening to that. Because,
also
frankly, she treats them a damn sight better than their natural mother does since she’s fully conscious and in possession of all her faculties when she’s round them. Do you really want to have this kind of conversation, Isabelle? Now, are you coming for lunch on Sunday or are you not?”
“I’ll send the boys a note,” she said quietly, beating down her incipient rage. “May I assume, Bob, that you and Sandra aren’t forbidding my sending a note to them?”
“We’re not
forbidding
anything,” he said.
“Oh please. Let’s not pretend.” She rang off without a goodbye. She knew she’d pay for that later—
Did you actually hang up on me
,
Isabelle? Surely we must have been disconnected somehow
,
yes?
—but at the moment, she could do nothing else. To remain on the line with him meant being exposed to an extended display of his ostensible paternal concern, and she wasn’t up to it. She wasn’t, in fact, up to much that morning, and she was going to have to do something to alter that before heading into work.
Four cups of black coffee—all right, it was Irish coffee, but she could be forgiven for that as she’d used only a
dash
of spirits—one slice of toast, and a shower later, she was feeling fit. She was actually in the middle of the morning briefing before she felt the urge once more. But then, it was easy to fight it off because she could hardly duck into the ladies’, and that was just how it was. What she could do instead was keep her mind on her work and vow to have a different kind of evening and night at the end of this day. Which, she decided, she could easily manage.
Sergeants Havers and Nkata had reported in first thing from the New Forest. They were staying in a hotel in Sway—Forest Heath Hotel, it was called, Havers said—and this bit of information was met with guffaws and remarks of the “Hope Winnie’s managed to get his own room” ilk, which Isabelle cut off with a sharp, “That’ll do,” while they assessed the information the two sergeants had unearthed so far. Havers appeared to be building up a head of steam over the fact that Gordon Jossie was a master thatcher and that thatching tools were not only deadly but made by hand. For his part, Nkata seemed to be more interested in the fact of another woman being present in Gordon Jossie’s life. Havers also mentioned Gordon Jossie’s letters of reference from a Winchester college and then brought up a thatcher called Ringo Heath. She concluded by listing the names of individuals still needing to be spoken to.
“C’n we get you lot on to background checks?” Havers then asked. “Hastings, Jossie, Heath, Dickens …” They’d spoken to the local rozzers, by the way, but there wasn’t a lot of joy to be had from that quarter. New Scotland Yard were welcome to nose round the locals’ patch, according to the CS in Lyndhurst, but as the murder was in London, it wasn’t the locals’ problem.
Ardery assured the sergeant that they’d get on things at this end, since she herself wished to know everything there was to know about anyone even remotely concerned with Jemima Hastings. “I want to know every detail there is, down to whether their bowels move regularly,” she told the team. She instructed Philip Hale to carry on with the names from Hampshire and she ticked off the additional London names in case he’d forgotten them: Yolanda the Psychic, aka Sharon Price; Jayson Druther; Abbott Langer; Paolo di Fazio; Frazer Chaplin; Bella McHaggis. “Alibis for everyone, with confirmation, and try for two sources. John, I’ll want you handling that part. Coordinate with SO7 as well. Light a fire over there. We need some good information.”
Stewart gave no indication that he’d heard her, so Isabelle said, “Did you get that, John?” to which he smiled sardonically and pointed an index finger to his temple.
“All in there …guv,” he noted, and, “Anything else?” as if he suspected that she was the one in need of a good prodding.
She narrowed her eyes. She was about to respond when Thomas Lynley did so. He was standing at the back of the room, politely keeping himself out of the way although she couldn’t decide if this was a benefit to her or merely a reminder to everyone else of what was likely the immense contrast between their styles. He said, “Perhaps Matt Jones? Sidney St. James’s partner? It’s likely nothing, but if he’d been to the cigar shop as Barbara indicated …”
“Matt Jones as well,” Isabelle said. “Philip, can someone on your team … ?”
“Will do,” Hale said.
She told them all to get on with it, then, and said, “Thomas? If you’ll come with me …”
They would seek out Paolo di Fazio’s studio, she told him. Between their interview with the sculptor and Barbara Havers’ report of her conversation with Bella McHaggis about Paolo and the pregnancy test, there existed an ocean that wanted swimming.
Lynley nodded, amenable to anything, it seemed. She said she would meet him at her car. Five minutes for her to use the ladies’, she told him. He said certainly in that well-bred fashion of his and she felt him watching her as she walked off. She stopped in her office to grab her handbag, and she took it with her to the toilet. No one could possibly fault her for that, she thought.
As before, he was waiting patiently at her car, but this time on the passenger’s side. She raised an eyebrow, to which he said, “I expect you need the practice, guv. London traffic and all that … ?”
She tried to read him for underlying meanings, but he was very good at a poker face. “Very well,” she told him. “And it’s Isabelle, Thomas.”
“Due respect, guv …”
She sighed impatiently. “Oh for God’s sake, Thomas. What did you call your last superintendent behind the scenes?”
“
Sir
, mostly. Other times it would have been
guv
.”
“Fine. Wonderful. Well, I’m ordering you to call me Isabelle when we’re alone together. Have you an aversion to that?”
He seemed to consider this, the aversion bit. He examined the door handle on which he’d already placed his hand. When he looked up, his brown eyes were candidly on her face and the sudden openness of his expression was disconcerting. “I think ‘guv’ gives a distance you might prefer,” he said. “All things considered.”
“What things?” she said.
“All things.”
The frank look they exchanged made her wonder about him. She said, “You play your cards quite close, don’t you, Thomas.”
He said, “I have no cards at all.”
She snorted at this and got into the car.
P
AOLO DI
F
AZIO’S
studio was near Clapham Junction. This was south of the river, he told her, not terribly far from Putney. Their best course was to drive along the Embankment. Did she want him to give her directions?
“I think I can just about manage the route to the river,” she told him.
Paolo di Fazio himself had indicated where to find him. Upon being contacted he’d declared that he had given them
all
the information there was to give about himself and Jemima Hastings, but if they wanted to spend their time going over old ground, then so be it. He’d be where he was most mornings, at the studio.
The studio turned out to be tucked into one of the many railway arches created by the viaducts leading out of Clapham railway station. Most of these had long ago been put to use, being converted from tunnels into wine cellars, clothing outlets, car repair shops, and—in one case—even a delicatessen selling imported olives, meats, and cheeses. Paolo di Fazio’s studio was between a picture framer and a bicycle shop, and they arrived to find its front doors open and its overhead lights brightly illuminating the space. This space was whitewashed and set up in two sections. One section appeared to be given over to the early work that went on when an artist took a sculpture from clay on its way to bronze, so there were masses of wax, latex, fibre glass, and bags of plaster everywhere, along with the grit and the grime one might associate with working with such substances. The other section accommodated workstations for four artists, whose pieces were currently shrouded in plastic and likely in varying stages of completion. Finished bronze sculptures had places in a row along the centre of the studio, and they ranged in style from the realistic to the fantastical.
When they came upon it, Paolo di Fazio’s style turned out to be figurative, but of a nature that favoured bulbous elbows, long limbs, and disproportionately small heads. Lynley murmured, “Shades of Giacometti,” and he paused in front of it, and Isabelle glanced at him sharply to gauge his expression. She had no idea what he was talking about, and she absolutely hated a show-off. But she saw he was taking out his spectacles to give the sculpture a closer look, and he seemed unaware that he’d even spoken. She wondered what it meant that he moved round the sculpture slowly, looking thoughtful. She realised yet again that he was impossible to read, and she additionally wondered if she could actually work with someone who’d so mastered the art of keeping his thoughts to himself.
Paolo di Fazio wasn’t in the studio. Nor was anyone else. But he entered as they were having a look at his work area, which was identifiable by more of the masks—similar to those he made in Jubilee Market Hall—that stood on dusty wooden pedestals upon shelves at the rear. Specifically, they were having a look at his tools and at his tools’ potential to do harm.
Di Fazio said, “Please touch nothing,” as he came in their direction. He was carrying a take-away coffee and a bag from which he brought out two bananas and an apple. These he placed carefully on one of the shelves as if arranging them for a still life. He was dressed as he’d been dressed when they’d earlier seen him: blue jeans, a T-shirt, and dress shoes, which as before, seemed an odd getup for someone at work with clay, particularly the dress shoes, as he somehow managed to keep them perfectly clean. They would have passed muster at a military inspection. He said, “I’m at work here, as you can see.” He gestured with his coffee in the direction of a shrouded piece.
Isabelle said, “And may we look at your work?”
He apparently needed to think about this for a moment before he shrugged and removed its swaddling of plastic and cloth. It was another elongated, knobby-limbed piece, apparently male and apparently in agony if the expression was anything to go by. A mouth gaped open, limbs stretched out, the neck curved back, and the shoulders arched. At its feet lay a grill of some sort, and to Isabelle it looked for all the world as if the figure were in anguish over a broken barbecue. She reckoned it all meant something deep and she readied herself to hear Lynley make an insufferably illuminating remark about it. But he said nothing, and di Fazio himself didn’t shed any light on matters for Isabelle when he identified the figure only as St. Lawrence. He went on to tell them that he was doing a series of Christian martyrs for a Sicilian monastery, by which Isabelle took it that St. Lawrence’s gruesome means of death had actually been by barbecue. This made her wonder what belief, if any, she’d be willing to die for, and
this
in turn made her wonder how or if the deaths of martyrs tied in with Jemima Hastings’ own end.
“I’ve done Sebastian, Lucy, and Cecilia for them,” di Fazio was saying. “This is the fourth of a series of ten. They’ll be placed in the niches in the monastery chapel.”
“You’re well known in Italy, then,” Lynley said.
“No. My uncle is well known in the monastery.”
“Your uncle’s a monk?”
Di Fazio gave a sardonic laugh. “My uncle is a criminal. He thinks he can buy his way into heaven if he makes enough donations to them. Money, food, wine, my art. It is all the same to him. And as he pays me for the work, I don’t question the …” He looked thoughtful, as if seeking the proper word. “…the effectiveness of his actions.”
At the street end of the studio, a figure appeared in the double doorway, silhouetted by the light outside. It was a woman, who called out, “Ciao, baby,” and strode over to one of the other work areas. She was short and rather plump, with an enormous shelflike bosom and coils of espresso-coloured hair. She whipped the protective covering off her piece of sculpture and set to work without another look in their direction. Nonetheless, her presence seemed to make di Fazio uneasy, for he suggested that they continue their conversation elsewhere.