This Body of Death (9 page)

He’d said at first, “
What’ll
all come right?” and she’d sidestepped the question. Her avoidance had forced him more than once to ask, “Did Gordon do something to you, my girl?” to which she’d replied, “Of course not, Rob.”

Robbie knew he’d now have assumed the worst had Jemima not stayed in touch: Gordon had killed her and buried her on the property somewhere. Or out on the Forest and deep within a wood so that if her body were ever found, it would be in fifty years, when it was too late to matter. Somehow, an unspoken prophecy—a belief or a fear—would have been fulfilled by her disappearance because the truth of the matter was—he did not like Gordon Jossie. He’d said to her often enough, “There’s something
about
him, Jemima,” to which she’d laughed and replied, “You mean he’s not like you.”

He’d been forced finally to agree with her. It was easy to like and embrace people just like oneself. It was another matter with people who were different.

In her bedroom now, he phoned her again. Again, no reply. Just the voice, and he left a message once he was asked to do so. He kept it cheerful to match her own tone. “Hey, birthday girl, ring me, eh? Not like you not to get back in touch and I’m having a bit of a worry, I am. Merry Contrary came to see me. She had a cake for you, luv. Got itself all melted in the bloody heat but it’s the thought, eh? Ring me, luv. I want to tell you about the foals.”

He found he wanted to go on a bit, but he was talking into a void. He didn’t want to leave his sister a message. He wanted his sister herself.

He walked to her bedroom window, its sill yet another depository for what Jemima Clutterduck could not bear to part with, which was nearly everything she’d ever possessed. In this spot, it was plastic ponies, crammed one upon the next and covered with dust. Beyond them he could see the real thing: his horses in the paddock with the sunlight glowing off their well-groomed coats.

The fact that Jemima had not returned for the foaling season was what should have told him, he thought. It had long been her favourite time of year. Like him, she was
of
the New Forest. He’d sent her to college in Winchester as he himself had been sent, but she’d come home when her course work was completed, rejecting computer technology for baking. “I belong here,” she’d told him. As indeed she did.

Perhaps she’d gone to London not for time to think but just for time. Perhaps she’d wanted to break it off with Gordon Jossie but hadn’t known how else to bring it about. Perhaps she reckoned if she was gone long enough, Gordon would find someone else and she herself could then return. But none of that was in character, was it?

Not to worry, she’d say. Not to worry, Rob.

What a monstrous joke.

D
AVID
E
MERY CONSIDERED HIMSELF ONE OF
S
TOKE
N
EWINGTON’S
very few Cemetery Experts, which he always thought of in uppercase letters, David being an Uppercase sort of bloke. He’d made an understanding of Abney Park Cemetery his Life’s Work (another uppercase situation for him), and it had taken him ages of wandering and getting lost and refusing to be cowed by the general creepiness of the area before he was willing to call himself its Master. He’d been locked in more times than he could begin to count, but he’d never let the cemetery’s nightly closure impinge upon his plans while he was there. If he arrived at any of the gates and found them chained against his wishes, he didn’t bother to ring the Hackney police for rescue as the sign on the gate recommended he do. For him, it was no huge matter just to hoist himself up the railings and over the top, landing either in Stoke Newington High Street or, preferably, in the back garden of one of the terrace houses that lined the cemetery’s northeast boundary.

Making himself a Master of the Park allowed him to use its paths and crannies in any number of ways but particularly in ways amorous. He did this several times a month. He was good with the ladies—they often told him he had soulful eyes, whatever that meant—and since One Thing generally led to Another with women in David’s life, a suggestion that they take a stroll in the park was rarely refused, especially since
park
was such a …well, such an innocuous word compared to
cemetery
, wasn’t it.

His intention was always a shag. Indeed,
taking a walk
,
having a stroll
, or
going for a bit of a wander
were all euphemisms for shagging, and the ladies knew that although they pretended not to. They would always say things like, “Oooh, Dave, that place gives me the jumps, it does,” or words to that effect, but they were perfectly willing to accompany him there once he put an arm round them—going for a bit of breast with his fingers if he could—and told them they’d be safe with him.

So in they’d go, directly through the main gates, which was his preferred route as the path was broad and less intimidating there than it was if they entered by means of Stoke Newington Church Road. There you were beneath the trees and in the clutches of the gravestones before you’d gone twenty yards. On the main path you had at least the illusion of safety till you veered right or left onto one of the narrower routes that disappeared into the towering plane trees.

On this particular day, Dave had coaxed Josette Hendricks to come along with him. At fifteen Josette was a little younger than Dave was accustomed to, not to mention the fact that she was something of a giggler, which he
hadn’t
known until he got her onto the first of the narrow paths, but she was a pretty girl with a lovely complexion and those luscious baps of hers were no small matter, in more ways than one. So when he said, “What d’you say to the park?” and she said, all bright eyed and moist lipped, “Oh
yes
, Dave,” off they went.

He had a little hollow in mind, a place created by a fallen sycamore behind a tomb and between two gravestones. There, Interesting Developments could occur. But he was too much the schemer to head to the hollow straightaway. He started off with a bit of hand-in-hand statue gazing—“Oooh, dead sad that little angel looks, eh?”—and went on from there to a hand on the back of the neck, a caress—“Dave, that makes me go all tingly!”—and the kind of kiss that
suggested
but nothing more.

Josette was a little slower than most girls, probably as a result of her upbringing. Unlike other girls of fifteen, she was something of an innocent who’d never even been out on a date—“Mum and Dad say not yet”—and therefore she didn’t pick up on the signs as well as she might have done. But he was patient, and when at last she was pressing against him of her own volition and clearly wanting more of his kisses and at greater length, he suggested they get off the path and “see if there’s somewhere …you know what I mean” with a wink.

Who would have bloody thought that the hollow, his own
particular
Site of Seduction, would be flaming occupied? It was an outrage, it was, but there you have it. Dave heard the moaning and groaning as he and Josette approached and there was no mistaking the arms and legs all a’tangle in the undergrowth, especially since there were four of each and none of them had a stitch of clothing on. There was also the naked arse of the bloke pumping madly away, his head turned toward them and a grimace on his face …Cor, do we all look like
that?
Dave wondered.

Josette giggled when she saw, and this was a good thing. Anything else would have suggested either fear or prurience, and while Dave certainly didn’t expect her to be some sort of shrinking Puritan in this day and age, one never knew. He backed away from the hollow, Josette’s hand in his, and he gave some thought to where he might take her. There were nooks and hollows aplenty, to be sure, but he wanted a location close to this one, Josette being on the boil.

And then he thought, Of course. They were not far from the chapel at the centre of the cemetery. They couldn’t get inside the building, but right next to it—indeed, built
into
it—was a shelter that they could easily use. It offered a roof and walls and that was better than the hollow, come to think of it.

He inclined his head in the direction of the coupling couple in the bushes and winked at Josette. “Mmmm, not bad, eh?” he said.

“Dave!” She gave a little gasp of faux horror. How
could
you mention such a thing!

“Well?” he said. “You saying you don’t … ?”

“Didn’t say that,” was how she replied.

As good as an invitation, that was. It was off to the chapel they went. Hand in hand and in a bit of a hurry. Josette, Dave decided, was definitely a flower ready to be plucked.

They reached the grassy clearing where the chapel stood. “Just round here, luv,” Dave murmured.

He took her beyond the chapel entrance and around its far corner. And there his plans ground themselves to a sudden halt.

For a teenage boy with a barrel for a bum was stumbling out of Dave’s trysting place. He had such a look on his face that one almost didn’t notice he was holding up his obviously unzipped trousers. He dashed across the clearing and then was gone.

All this at first caused David Emery to think the boy had relieved himself inside the trysting place. This cheesed Dave off, as he could hardly expect Josette to want to roll round in a spot reeking of piss. But as she was ready and as he was ready and as there
was
the slightest possibility that the boy had not used the shelter as a public convenience, Dave shrugged and urged Josette forward, saying, “Just in there, luv,” as he followed her.

He was so much thinking of Just One Thing that he nearly jumped out of his skin, he did, when Josette went into the shelter and started screaming.

“N
O, NO, NO,
Barbara,” Hadiyyah said. “We can’t just go shopping. Not without a plan. That would be far too over
whel
ming.
First
we got to make a list, but before we do that we got to consider what we want. And to do
that
we got to decide on the type of
body
you have. It’s how these things are done. One sees it on telly all the time.”

Barbara Havers eyed her companion doubtfully. She wondered whether she should be seeking sartorial advice from a nine-year-old girl. But aside from Hadiyyah, there was only Dorothea Harriman to turn to if she was to take Isabelle Ardery’s “advice” to heart, and Barbara wasn’t about to throw herself upon the mercy of Scotland Yard’s foremost style icon. With Dorothea at the helm, the ship of shopping was likely to sail straight down the King’s Road or—worse—into Knightsbridge, where in a boutique operated by rail-thin shop assistants with sculptured hair and similar fingernails, she would be forced to lay out a week’s pay on a pair of knickers. At least with Hadiyyah there was a slight chance that what had to be done could be done in Marks & Spencer.

But Hadiyyah was having none of that. “Topshop,” she said. “We got to go to Topshop, Barbara. Or Jigsaw. Or
maybe
H and M but just maybe.”

“I don’t want to look trendy,” Barbara told her. “It’s got to be professional. Nothing with ruffles. Or spikes sprouting from it. Nothing with chains.”

Hadiyyah rolled her eyes. “
Bar
bara,” she said. “Really. Do you think
I’d
wear spikes and chains?”

Her father would have had something to say about that, Barbara thought. Taymullah Azhar kept his daughter on what had to be called a very short lead. Even now in her summer holidays she wasn’t allowed to run about with other children her age. Instead, she was studying Urdu and cookery and when she wasn’t studying Urdu or cookery, she was being minded by Sheila Silver, an elderly pensioner whose brief period of glory—endlessly recounted—had occurred singing backup for a Cliff Richard wannabe on the Isle of Wight. Mrs. Silver lived in a flat in the Big House, as they called it, an elaborate yellow Edwardian structure in Eton Villas; Barbara lived behind this building on the same property in a hobbit-size bungalow. Hadiyyah and her father were neighbours, domiciled in the ground-floor flat of the Big House with an area in front of it that served as its terrace. This was where Barbara and Hadiyyah were conferring, each with a Ribena in front of her, both of them bent over a wrinkled section of the
Daily Mail
, which Hadiyyah had apparently been saving for an occasion precisely like this one.

She’d fetched the newspaper from her bedroom once Barbara had explained her wardrobe quest. “I have
just
the thing,” she’d announced happily and, her long plaits flying, she’d disappeared into the flat and returned with the article in question. She laid this open on the wicker table to reveal a story about clothing and body types. Spread across two pages were models who supposedly demonstrated all possibilities of build, excluding anorexia and obesity, of course, as the
Daily Mail
did not wish to encourage extremes.

Hadiyyah had informed Barbara that they had to begin with body type and they couldn’t
exactly
work out Barbara’s body type if she didn’t change into something …well, something that would allow them to see what they were working with? She dismissed Barbara back to her bungalow to change her clothes—“It’s awfully hot for corduroy and wool jumpers anyway,” she noted helpfully—and she bent over the paper to scrutinize the models. Barbara did her bidding and returned, although Hadiyyah sighed when she saw the drawstring trousers and T-shirt.

“
What
?” Barbara said.

“Oh, well. Never mind,” Hadiyyah told her airily. “We’ll do our best.”

Their best consisted of Barbara standing on a chair—feeling like a perfect fool—while Hadiyyah crossed the grass “to get a bit of distance so I c’n compare you to the ladies in the pictures.” This she did by holding up the newspaper and crinkling her nose as she switched her gaze from it to Barbara to it to Barbara before announcing, “Pear, I think. Short waisted as well. C’n you lift your trousers?  …Barbara, you have lovely ankles! Whyever don’t you show them? Girls should
always
emphasise their best features, you know.”

“And I’d do that by … ?”

Hadiyyah considered this. “High heels. You have to wear high heels. Do you have high heels, Barbara?”

“Oh yeah,” Barbara said. “I find them just the thing for my line of work, crime scenes being otherwise rather grim.”

“You’re making fun. You
can’t
make fun if we’re to do this properly.” Hadiyyah bounced across the lawn back to her, trailing the
Daily Mail
article from her fingers. She spread this out on the wicker table once again and perused it for a moment, after which she announced, “A-line skirt. The staple of all wardrobes. Your jacket has to be a length that doesn’t draw attention to your hips and as your face is roundish—”

“Still working to lose the baby fat,” Barbara said.

“—the neckline of your blouse should be soft, not angular. Blouse necklines, you see, should
mirror
the face. Well, the chin, really. I mean the whole line from the ears to the chin, which includes the jaw.”

“Ah. Got it.”

“We want the skirt midknee and the shoes to have straps.
That’s
because of your lovely ankles.”

“Straps?”

“Hmm. It says so right here.
And
we must accessorise as well. The mistake so many women make is failure to accessorise appropriately or—what’s worse—failure to accessorise at all.”

“Bloody hell. We don’t want that,” Barbara said fervently. “What’s it mean, exactly?”

Hadiyyah folded up the newspaper neatly, running her fingers lovingly along each crease. “Oh, scarves and hats and belts and lapel pins and necklaces and bracelets and earrings and handbags. Gloves as well, but that would be only in winter.”

“God,” Barbara said. “Won’t I be a bit overdone with all that?”

“You don’t use it all at
once
.” Hadiyyah sounded like patience itself. “Honestly, Barbara, it’s not really that difficult. Well, maybe it’s a
bit
difficult, but I’ll help you with it. It’ll be such fun.”

Barbara doubted this, but off they went. They phoned her father first at the university, where they managed to catch him between a lecture and a meeting with a postgraduate student. Early in her relationship with Taymullah Azhar and his daughter, Barbara had learned that one did not make off with Hadiyyah without bringing her father fully into the picture. She hated having to admit why she wanted to take Hadiyyah with her on a shopping excursion, so she made do with, “Got to buy some bits and bobs for work and I thought Hadiyyah might like to come along. Give her something of an outing and all that. Thought we’d stop for an ice somewhere when we’re finished.”