And then? Isabelle asked.

Nothing. At least not at first, not for some minutes. Then a man appeared from that same side of the ruined chapel. A man in black-

God, why were they always in black? Isabelle wondered.

– who carried a rucksack and who made for the trees. Away from the chapel, out of sight altogether.

Yukio waited then. But Jemima Hastings did not return to the chapel clearing. So he went to look for her and that was how he discovered what he had not seen before: that there was a tiny building abutting the chapel. In this building Jemima lay wounded, her hands scrabbling round her throat, which was how he saw the spike. He thought she was trying to pull it out, and so he helped her.

And thus, Isabelle thought, the river of blood from her artery, which had already spurted out upon the yellow shirt worn by her killer, began to pulse out with every beat of her heart. Nothing Yukio could have done would have saved her. Not with a wound like that, exacerbated when he’d removed the spike.

If, she thought, he was to be believed. And she had a terrible feeling that he was indeed.

One man in sunglasses and a baseball cap. The other in black. They would need to try to get e-fits of both of them, and Isabelle prayed only that this could be managed before Zaynab Bourne got there and threw a spanner in everything.

Chapter Twenty-Six

ROBBIE HASTINGS HAD ENCOUNTERED NO DIFFICULTY WHEN he went to the Lyndhurst police station. His thought had been to insist on quick action, but that wasn’t necessary as it turned out. Upon identifying himself, he’d been escorted into the chief superintendent’s office, where Zachary Whiting had offered him mid-morning coffee and heard him out with not a single interruption. As Rob spoke, Whiting frowned in concern, but the frown turned out to be about Rob’s upset rather than about the questions he was asking or the demands for action he was making. At the conclusion of Rob’s recitation of concerns, Whiting had said, “Good God, it’s all in hand, Mr. Hastings. You should have been informed of this, and I can’t think why you weren’t.”

Rob wondered what was in hand, and this he asked, adding that there were train tickets, there was a hotel receipt. He knew that these had been given to Whiting and what had Whiting done about them? What had he done about Jossie, as a matter of fact?

Again, Whiting reassured him. What he meant when he said that things were in hand was that everything he-Whiting-knew, everything he had been told, and everything that had been handed to him was now in the possession of the Scotland Yard detectives who’d come down to Hampshire in connection with the London murder enquiry. That meant the tickets and the hotel receipt as well, Whiting told him. They were likely in London at this point, as he’d sent them up by special messenger. Mr. Hastings wasn’t to worry about that. If Gordon Jossie had perpetrated this crime against Mr. Hastings’s sister-

“If?” Rob had said.

– then Mr. Hastings could expect Scotland Yard to come calling again in very short order.

“I don’t understand why the London police and not you lot here-”

Whiting held up his hand. He said it was a complicated matter because more than one police jurisdiction was involved. As to why it was Scotland Yard looking into matters and not the locals from where Mr. Hastings’ sister had been killed, he couldn’t say. That was likely due to some political situation up in London. But what Whiting could say was that the reason the Hampshire constabulary was not handling the case had to do with this being a killing that had not occurred in Hampshire in the first place. The Hampshire police would cooperate and were cooperating fully with London, naturally. That meant handing over whatever they had or were given or what they learned, and once again he wanted to assure Mr. Hastings that this had been done and was continuing to be done.

“Jossie admits to being in London,” Rob told Whiting again. “I spoke to him myself. The bastard admits it.”

And that, too, would be transmitted to the London police. There would be someone brought to justice, Mr. Hastings. That was likely to happen in very short order.

Whiting personally ushered Rob to the reception area at the end of their meeting. He introduced him along the way to the duty press officer, to the sergeant in charge of the custody suite, and to two special constables who liaised with the community.

In reception, Whiting informed the special on duty that until an arrest had been made in the London murder of Jemima Hastings, whenever her brother needed to see the chief superintendent, he was to be given access. Rob appreciated all of this. It went a great way towards soothing his mind.

He returned to his home and hooked up the horse trailer. With Frank as his companion-head hanging out of the window, tongue and ears flapping-he trundled from Burley along the lanes to Sway and from there to Gordon Jossie’s holding. The narrowness of the roads and the fact of the horse trailer made the going slow, but it was of no account. He didn’t expect Gordon Jossie to be on the property at this time of day.

That turned out to be the case. When Rob reversed up the cottage drive and positioned the horse trailer near the paddock that contained the two ponies from the Minstead area, no one came out of the cottage to stop him. The absence of Jossie’s golden retriever told him, as well, that no one was home. He let Frank out of the Land Rover to have a run, but told the Weimaraner to keep his distance when he brought the ponies from the paddock. As if he understood this perfectly, Frank headed in the direction of the barn, snuffling along the ground as he went.

The ponies weren’t as skittish as some within the Perambulation, so it wasn’t difficult to get them into the horse trailer. This went some way towards explaining how Jossie had managed them when he brought them here as, unlike Rob, he wasn’t an experienced horseman. It did not, however, explain what Jossie was doing with the two ponies in the first place, so far from where they normally grazed and belonging to someone else. He would have seen how their tails were clipped, so even had he mistaken them for his own ponies upon a glance, a closer look would have told him they were from another area. Keeping them on his holding when they weren’t his responsibility, and longer than they clearly needed to be there, was an expense any other commoner would have avoided. Rob couldn’t reckon why Gordon Jossie had taken it on.

When he had them ready for transport, Rob returned to the paddock to close its gate. There he noticed what he might have noticed on earlier visits to the holding had he not been first consumed with concerns about his sister and then later taken up by considerations ranging from Gina Dickens’ presence to that of the ponies. Jossie, he saw, had been putting some work into the paddock. The gate was relatively new, a number of the fence posts were new, and the barbed wire strung between them was new as well. The freshness of all this, however, comprised only one part of the paddock. The rest had yet to be seen to. Indeed, the rest was something of a ruin, with posts atilt and areas overgrown with weeds.

This gave him pause. It wasn’t, he knew, unusual for a commoner to make improvements upon his holding. This was generally necessary. It was, however, odd that someone like Jossie-characterised by the nearly compulsive care with which he did everything else-would have left a job such as this one unfinished. He went back inside the inclosure for a closer look.

Rob recalled Gina Dickens’ desire for a garden, and for a moment he wondered if she and Jossie had taken the unlikely decision to have that garden here. If Gordon intended to build another paddock somewhere else for ponies, it would explain why the thatcher had gone no further with his scheme to improve this one as a holding pen for stock. On the other hand, discontinuing this paddock’s use as a holding pen would mean moving the heavy granite trough to another location, a task requiring the sort of equipment Gordon didn’t possess.