This Body of Death (78 page)

He fixed his eyes on her. She didn’t look away. “I’m not sure,” he finally said.

They sat in silence for another moment, observing each other. At last, she opened the centre drawer of her desk. She took out a metal ring that she’d placed there earlier in the day. From this dangled a single key. She’d had it made but hadn’t been sure and she still wasn’t sure, if the truth had to be told. But she’d long been adept at avoiding truths, so she did so now.

She slid the ring across her desk to him. He looked from it to her.

“There can never be more between us than there is just now,” she told him. “We need to understand that from the first. I want you, but I’m not in love with you, Tommy, and I never will be.”

He looked at the key. Then her. Then the key again.

She waited for him to make his decision, telling herself it didn’t matter, knowing the truth was that it always would.

Finally, he reached for what she’d offered. “I understand,” he said.

T
HE LOOSE ENDS
took hours, so Barbara Havers didn’t arrive back in London till quite late. She’d considered staying the night in Hampshire, but at the last moment she decided that home was more appealing despite the fact that her bungalow was likely to be the temperature of a sauna after being closed up in the heat for two days. On the drive back, she replayed what had occurred in the paddock, and she looked at it from every angle, wondering if any other ending had been possible.

At first, she hadn’t recognised the name. She’d been a young teenager at the time of John Dresser’s murder and while the name Ian Barker was not completely unfamiliar to her, she had not immediately connected it with that death in the midlands and with the man standing in the paddock with a gun in his hand. Her more immediate concern had been Meredith Powell’s injury, Frazer Chaplin’s condition, and the distinct possibility that Gordon Jossie was going to shoot someone else.

She hadn’t expected him to turn the gun on himself. Afterwards, however, his reason for doing so was more than clear. He was, at that point, hemmed in on all sides. There would be no escaping the public revelation of his true identity in one way or another. When that occurred, the incomprehensible evil act of his childhood would be once more dissected before a public who always, eternally, and understandably, demanded payment.

With the dog barking, herself shouting, Whiting roaring, and Georgina Francis screaming, he’d put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. And then utter silence. The poor damn dog crawled on its belly then, like a soldier in battle. She reached her master, whimpering, while the rest of them raced to look to the injured.

A helicopter came from the air support unit near Lee-on-Solent to fetch Meredith to hospital. Officers arrived from the Lyndhurst station. Hot on their heels, as always, came the journalists, and to attend to them the duty press officer manned a position at the end of Paul’s Lane. Georgina Francis was taken off to the custody suite at the Lyndhurst station, while everyone waited two hours for the forensic pathologist to arrive. Eventually, matters came to a close as far as Barbara’s participation was concerned. She spent some time on her mobile with Lynley in London, some time with Whiting going over the situation in Hampshire, and then she was finished. Time to stay the night or time to go. She chose to go.

She was completely done in by the time she arrived in London. She was surprised to see that lights were still on inside the ground-floor flat of the Big House as she trudged through the gate, but she didn’t give much thought to it.

She saw the note on her door as she used her key in the lock. It was too dark outside to read it, but she could see her name written in Hadiyyah’s hand, with four exclamation marks after it.

She opened the door and flipped on the lights. She half-expected another fashion offering to be laid out on the daybed. There was nothing, however. She slung her shoulder bag on the table where she took her meals, and she saw that the message light on her answer phone was blinking. She went for the phone as she unfolded Hadiyyah’s note to her. Both contained the same communication:
Come to see us
,
Barbara! No matter what time!!

Barbara was knackered. She didn’t much feel like a spate of socialising but, as it was Hadiyyah making the request, she thought she could survive a few minutes of conversation.

She returned the way she’d come. As she was crossing the patch of lawn to the French windows that served as entrance to Taymullah Azhar’s flat, one of those doors opened. Mrs. Silver emerged, calling back over her shoulder, “Delighted. Truly,” with a happy wave. She saw Barbara, then, and said, “Really
quite
charming,” and she patted her turbanned head and went on her way to the front steps of the house.

Barbara thought, What the hell … ? as she approached the door. She reached it at the same moment that Taymullah Azhar was about to close it.

He saw her. He said, “Ah, Barbara.” And then he called back over his shoulder, “Hadiyyah.
Khushi
. Here is Barbara.”

“Oh yes, yes, yes!” Hadiyyah cried. She appeared beneath her father’s arm, beaming so much that her face alone could have lit a room. “Come see! Come see!” she called out to Barbara. “It’s the surprise!”

Then a woman’s voice from within the flat and Barbara knew who it was before she appeared: “I’ve never been called a surprise before. Introduce me, darling. But at least call me Mummy.”

Barbara knew her name. Angelina. She’d never seen a photograph of her, but she’d allowed herself to imagine what she might look like. She hadn’t been far wrong. The same height as Azhar and thin like him. Transluscent skin, blue eyes, dark brows and lashes, fashionably cut hair. Slim trousers, crisp blouse, narrow feet in heelless shoes. They were the sort of shoes a woman wore when she didn’t want to be taller than her partner.

“Barbara Havers,” Barbara said to Angelina. “You’re Hadiyyah’s mum. I’ve heard volumes about you.”

“She has!” Hadiyyah crowed. “Mummy, I’ve told her
lots
about you. You’ll be
such
friends.”

“I hope we will.” Angelina put her arm round her daughter’s shoulders. Hadiyyah put her arm round her mother’s waist. “Will you come in, Barbara?” Angelina asked. “I’ve been hearing volumes about you as well.” She turned to Azhar. “Hari, do we have—”

“Dead knackered,” Barbara cut in. Hari. No. She couldn’t take part in the moment. “I only just got back from work. Rain check? Tomorrow? Whatever? That okay with you, kiddo?” to Hadiyyah.

Hadiyyah hung from her mother’s waist and gazed up at her. She spoke to Barbara but looked at her mother. “Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes,” she declared. “We’ve lots of time tomorrow, don’t we, Mummy?”

Angelina replied, “Lots and lots of time, darling.”

Barbara said good night. She gave a mad little salute to them all. She was far too done in to process all this. Tomorrow would be time enough to do so.

She was heading for her bungalow when he called her name. She paused on the path at the side of the house. She didn’t want to have this conversation, but she reckoned there wasn’t much hope of avoiding it.

“This is—” Azhar began, but Barbara stopped him.

“You’ll never get her to sleep tonight,” she said cheerfully. “I expect she’ll be dancing round till dawn.”

“Yes. I expect.” He looked back the way he had come and then at Barbara. “She wanted to tell you earlier, but I thought it best that she wait until …” He hesitated. There was an entire relationship between him and Hadiyyah’s mother that rested in the pause.

“Absolutely,” Barbara said, to rescue him.

“If she did not return, you see, as she said she would do, I didn’t wish Hadiyyah then to have to explain. It seemed to me it would make her disappointment that much worse.”

“Absolutely,” Barbara said.

“So you see.”

“Clear as anything.”

“Hadiyyah always believed.”

“She did. She always said.”

“I don’t know why.”

“Well, it’s her mum after all. There’s a bond. She’d know that. She’d feel it.”

“You don’t quite …” Azhar felt in his pockets. Barbara knew what he was looking for, but she’d come without her cigarettes. He found his own packet and offered her one. She shook her head. He lit up himself. “Why she returned,” he said.

“What?”

“The truth behind why she returned is what I do not yet know.”

“Oh. Well.” Barbara didn’t know what to say. The subject of exactly why Angelina had left Azhar and her daughter in the first place was something that had never come up. The euphemism had long been a trip to Canada. While Barbara had reckoned it stood for something other than a tour round that country—if that was even where Angelina had been—she had never pressed for more information. Hadiyyah, she assumed, would not have it and Azhar would not be willing to give it.

“I suspect it wasn’t quite what Angelina thought it might be,” Azhar said. “Living with him.”

Barbara nodded. “Right. Well. That’s usually the story, isn’t it,” she said. “The bloom fades, and at the end of the day people’s knickers start showing no matter how they try to hide them, eh?”

“You knew there was another, then?”

“Another bloke?” Barbara shook her head. “I wondered why she left and where she really was, but I didn’t know there was someone else involved.” She looked towards the front of the house when she went on. “’F I’m honest with you, Azhar … ? It always seemed dead mad to me that she’d leave the two of you. Especially Hadiyyah. I mean, men and women have their troubles, and I get that, but I never got her leaving Hadiyyah.”

“So you understand.” He drew in on his cigarette. The lighting was dim along the path on the side of the house and, in the darkness, Barbara could barely see his face. But the tip of his cigarette glowed fire with how deeply he drew upon it. She recalled that Angelina didn’t like his smoking. She wondered if he would now give it up.

“Understand what?” she asked him.

“That she will take Hadiyyah, Barbara. Next time. She will take her. And that is something …I cannot lose Hadiyyah. I will not lose Hadiyyah.”

He sounded so fierce and, if it was possible, at the same time so bleak that Barbara felt something give way within her, a crack in a surface she would have preferred to keep forever solid. She said, “Azhar, you’re doing the right thing here. I’d do the same. Anyone would.”

For he had no choice and she well knew it. He was caught in circumstances of his own devising, having left his wife and two other children for Angelina, having never divorced, having never remarried …It was a nightmare situation that would end up in court if Angelina so chose and he’d be the loser and what he’d be the loser of was the only person left in his shattered life who mattered to him.

“I must do what I can to keep her here,” he said.

“I completely agree,” Barbara said.

And she meant those words despite the fact that they changed her world as much as they changed the world of the man who stood in the darkness with her.

T
WELVE DAYS WENT BY BEFORE
R
OB
H
ASTINGS COULD BRING
himself to call upon Meredith. During that time, he rang the hospital daily till she was at last released into the care of her parents, but he found he could do no more than merely ask for information about her condition. What he gathered from these phone calls was little enough, and he knew he could have learned more had he gone in person. He could, indeed, have seen her for himself. But it was too much for him and even if it hadn’t been, he found he had no clear idea how to talk to her any longer.

In those twelve days, he discovered who had taken the pistol from his Land Rover and what had been done with that gun. It had since been returned to him, but it was a black mark on his career that he’d managed to have the weapon taken in the first place. Two people were dead because of this, and had he not been a Hastings with the Hastings history of service to the New Forest behind him, he’d likely have been given the sack.

The news was bursting with the story of Ian Barker, the wicked child killer of a toddler, a bloke who’d managed to keep his identity secret for the years since his release from wherever he and his murderous mates had been held. Reporters from every media source in the country had at first sought out everyone whose life had touched on Gordon Jossie’s, no matter how remotely. There was, it seemed, a hideous kind of romance to the story that the tabloids especially wanted to feature. It was the story of the Notorious Child Killer Who Killed Again, with a minor headline indicating that this time he’d done it to save a woman in danger, before going on to kill himself. This didn’t actually appear to be the case, according to Meredith Powell and Chief Superintendent Zachary Whiting, since the truth of the matter according to them was that Frazer Chaplin had charged towards Jossie and only then did Jossie shoot him, but that wasn’t as symbolic an act of redemption as was the idea that Jossie had saved someone prior to ridding the world of his presence, so it was that story and not the other that got the most ink from the tabloids. Ian Barker’s childhood photo was printed every day for a week, along with Gordon Jossie’s more recent visage. Some of the tabloids demanded how people in Hampshire had possibly failed to recognise the bloke, but really, why would they have recognised in a quiet thatcher a long-ago child who, they probably suspected, had cloven hooves for feet and horns beneath his schoolboy cap? No one was looking for Ian Barker to be hidden away in Hampshire, anyway, leading an unassuming life.

Neighbours along Paul’s Lane were interviewed.
Never suspected
and
I’ll keep my doors locked from now on
,
I will
were the general comments. Both Zachary Whiting and a Home Office spokesman made a few statements about the duty of the local police in matters of new identities, and for several days sightings of both Michael Spargo and Reggie Arnold were reported. But finally, the story faded away, as these stories do, when a member of the Royal family got into an unfortunate struggle with a paparazzo in front of a nightclub at 3:45
A.M.
in Mayfair.

Rob Hastings had managed to weather all this without speaking to any of the journalists. He let his phone take the messages, but he returned no calls. He had no desire to discuss how the former Ian Barker had come into his life. He had less desire to talk about how his sister had taken up with the bloke. He understood now why Jemima had left the New Forest. He did not understand why she had not confided in him, however.

He spent days pondering this question and trying to work out what it meant that his sister had not told him what had driven her from Hampshire. He was not a man prone to violence, and she surely had known that, so she could hardly have expected him to accost Jossie and do damage to him for deceiving Jemima. What would have been the point of that anyway? He could also keep a secret, and Jemima had to have known that as well. Beyond that, he would have only too happily welcomed his sister home without question had she wanted to come back to Honey Lane.

He was left considering what all of this said about him. But the only answer he was able to come up with was the one that asked another question:
What would have been the point of your knowing the truth
,
Robbie?
And that question led to the next:
What kind of action would you have taken
,
you who have always been so fearful about taking action in the first place?

The why of that fear was what he couldn’t cope with in the aftermath of all the revelations and the deaths. The why of that fear led directly to the heart of who and what he was, of who and what he had been for years. Solitary not out of choice. Solitary not out of necessity. Solitary not out of inclination. The sad truth was that he and his sister had long been, in fact, much the same sort of people. It was only the manner in which they’d muddled through their lives that was different.

Understanding this at the end of days and days upon horseback on the Forest was what finally prompted Robbie to go to Cadnam. He went at midafternoon, with the hope that Meredith might be alone at her parents’ home at that time of day so he could speak to her without anyone being there.

This was not to be. Her mother was in. So was Cammie. They answered the door together.

He’d not seen Janet Powell in ages, he realised. In the early years of the girls’ friendship, he and Meredith’s mother had met now and again when the act of fetching Meredith and Jemima from this place or that had been called for. But he’d not seen the woman once the girls had each been old enough to have a driving licence, which put an end to the adults in their lives having to ferry them here and there. He recognised her, though.

He said by way of introduction, “Missus Powell. Afternoon. I’m—”

“Well, hullo, Robert,” she broke in kindly. “What a nice surprise it is to see you. Do come in.”

He didn’t know quite how to react to the welcome. What he thought was, Well, of course, she would remember him. He had a rather unforgettable face.

He’d worn his baseball cap as was his habit, but he removed this as he stepped into the house. He glanced at Cammie as he tucked the cap into the back pocket of his jeans. She dodged at once behind her grandmother’s legs, and she peered out at him with rounded eyes. He offered the little girl a smile. He said, “’Spect Cammie doesn’t remember me, eh? Been donkey’s years since I’ve seen her. Must’ve been only two years old last time. Maybe less. She won’t know who I am.”

“Bit shy with strangers, she is.” Janet Powell put her hand on Cammie’s shoulder and drew her forward, cuddling her to her hip. “This’s Mr. Hastings, luv,” she said. “You say hullo to Mr. Hastings.”

“It’s Rob,” he said. “Or Robbie. Want to shake a hand here, Cammie?”

She shook her head, and she took a step backward. “Gran …,” she said. She hid her face in her grandmother’s skirt.

“Ah, it’s no matter,” Robbie said. He added with a wink, “Present something of a sight, I do, this toothy old face, eh?” But the wink was forced and he saw that Janet Powell knew this.

She said, “You come right in, Robbie. I’ve a lemon cake in the kitchen that’s begging to be eaten. Will you?”

“Oh, ta, but no. I was on my way to …Actually, I just come to …I was hoping Meredith was …” He drew in a calming breath. It was the fact that the little girl was hiding and he knew she was hiding because of him. He didn’t know how to put her at ease, and he wanted to do so. He said to Mrs. Powell, “I was wondering if Meredith … ?”

“Of course,” Janet Powell said. “You’ve come to check on Meredith, haven’t you. Terrible thing. To think I had that young woman here in the house for a night. She might have …well, you know …” She cast a glance at Cammie. “She could have m-u-r-d-e-r-e-d us all in our beds. Meredith’s just in the garden with the dog. Cammie, luv, will you take this nice gentleman out to see Mummy?”

Cammie scratched one ankle with the toes of her other bare foot. She seemed to hesitate. She kept her gaze on the floor. When her grandmother said her name again, the little girl murmured, “Mummy’s been in hospital.”

“Aye,” Robbie said. “That I know. It’s why I’ve come. To say hullo and to see how she’s feeling. Bet you were a bit worried about her, weren’t you.”

Cammie nodded. She said to the floor, “That dog’s taking care of her, though.” And then looking up, “Hospitals’re like where the hedgehogs go.”

“Really?” Robbie said. “You like hedgehogs, do you, Cammie?”

“They got a hospital for them. Gran told me. She said we c’n go there an’ see them.”

“I ’spect they’ll like that, the hedgehogs.”

“She says not yet, though. She says when I’m older. Cos we’re meant to spend the night when we go. Cos it’s far.”

“Right. That makes sense. I ’spect she wants to make sure you don’t miss your mum if you spend the night,” Rob said.

Cammie frowned and looked away. “How’d you know that?” she asked.

“The bit about missing your mum?” And when she nodded, “I had a little sister once.”

“Like me?” she asked.

“Just like you,” he said.

That appeared to put her at ease. She stepped away from her grandmother and said to him quietly, “We got to go through the kitchen to get to the garden. The dog might bark, but she’s quite nice.” And she took him outside.

Meredith was sitting on a lounge chair in the only shade there was, on the far side of a garden shed. The rest of the area was given over to rose bushes, and they filled the air with a fragrance so intense that Robbie imagined he could feel it move like a silk scarf against his skin.

“Mummy,” Cammie called as she led him along a gravel path. “Are you still resting like you’re meant to? Are you asleep? Cos there’s someone to see you.”

Meredith wasn’t asleep. She had been drawing, Robbie saw. She had a large sketch pad spread on her knees and she’d used coloured pencils upon it. She’d created squares of patterns, he saw. Fabric designs, he reckoned. She still held on to her original dream. At the side of the lounge chair lay Gordon Jossie’s dog. Tess raised her head, then lowered it to her paws. Her tail swished twice on the ground in greeting.

Meredith closed her sketch pad and set it to one side. She said, “Why, hullo, Rob.” And as Cammie made to climb into her lap, she said, “Not yet, darling. Still a bit too much for me,” but she moved to one side and patted the seat.

Cammie managed to squeeze in next to her, squirming round to make her little bottom fit the space. Meredith smiled, rolled her eyes at Robbie, but kissed the top of her daughter’s head. “She was worried,” she said in explanation, nodding at the little girl. “I’ve never been in hospital before, far as she’s concerned. Didn’t know what to think.”

He wondered what Meredith’s daughter had been told about what had happened to her mother on Gordon Jossie’s holding that day. Very little, he expected. She didn’t need to know.

He said, with a nod at the golden retriever, “How’d you come by her?”

“I asked Mum to fetch her. It seemed like …poor thing. I couldn’t bear the thought …you know.”

“Aye. Good for you, that, Merry.” He looked round and spied a wooden folding chair leaning against the garden shed. He said to Meredith, “Mind if I … ?” with a gesture towards it.

She said, colouring, “Oh, of course. I’m sorry. Do sit. Don’t know what I was …Only, it’s quite nice to see you, Rob. I’m glad you’ve come. They told me at the hospital you’d phoned.”

“I wanted to see were you coping,” he said.

“Oh, I was that.” She touched her fingers to the bandage on her neck, doubtless a much smaller one than what she’d had wrapping her wound originally. The gesture seemed an unconscious one to him, but it was apparently not because she said with a humourless laugh, “Well, I’ll look like Frankenstein’s wife when this comes off, I s’pose.”

“Who’s that?” Cammie asked her.

“Frankenstein’s wife? Just someone from a story,” Meredith said.

“Means she’ll have a bit of a scar,” Robbie told her. “It’ll give her distinction, that will.”

“What’s distinction?”

“Something making one person look different from everyone else,” Robbie said.

“Oh,” Cammie said. “Like you. You look different. I never saw anyone looks like you.”

“Cammie!” Meredith cried, aghast. Her hand went down automatically to cover her daughter’s mouth.

“’T’s all right,” Robbie said although he felt himself go red in the face. “Not like I don’t know that—”

“But, Mummy …” Cammie had wiggled from beneath her mother’s grasp. “He
does
look different. Cos his—”

“Camille! Stop that this instant!”

Silence at that. Into it, cars from the road in front of the house
swooshed
by, a dog barked, Tess lifted her head and growled, the motor of a lawn mower sputtered. Suffer the little children, Robbie thought bleakly. Didn’t they always tell the truth.

He felt all thumbs and elbows then. He might as well have been a two-headed bull. He looked round and wondered how long he had to remain in the garden in order not to seem rude by running off at once.

Meredith said in a low voice, “I’m that sorry, Rob. She doesn’t mean anything by it.”

He managed a chuckle. “Well, it’s not like she’s saying something we don’t all know, is it, Cammie.” He offered the little girl a smile.

“Still and all,” Meredith said. “Cammie, you know better than that.”

Cammie looked up at her mother, then back at Rob. She frowned. Then she said quite reasonably, “But I never ever saw two colours of eyes before, Mummy. Did you?”

Meredith’s lips parted. Then closed. Then she rested her head against the back of her chair. She said, “Oh Lord.” And then to Cammie, “Only once before, Cam. You’re completely right.” She looked away.

And Robbie saw, to his surprise, that Meredith was deeply embarrassed. Not by her daughter, however, but by her own reaction, by what she’d assumed. Yet all she had done was reach the same conclusion that he himself had reached, hearing Cammie’s words: He was truly ugly and all three of them knew it, but only two of them had thought the matter worthy of comment.