“He went to London! He lied about going! He lied to you, to Scotland Yard as well. Why would he lie if he didn’t have a reason to be lying? And he lied to you from the very first about going there. He said it was Holland. He said it was to buy reeds. You told me that and you must see what it means.”
Gina let Meredith have her entire say in the matter before she herself drew the conversation to its conclusion. She said, “He knew I’d be upset if he told me he’d gone to see Jemima. He knew I’d be a bit unreasonable. Which is what I’ve been, which is certainly what I was last night. Look. You’ve been good to me. You’ve been the best friend I have in the New Forest. But I love him and I must see if there’s a chance he and I can make things work. He’s under terrible stress right now because of Jemima. He’s reacted badly, but I’ve not reacted well either. I can’t throw it all away because he did something that hurt me a bit.”
“He may have hurt you,” Meredith cried, “but he killed Jemima!”
Gina said firmly, “I don’t believe that.”
There was no more talking to her about the matter, Meredith discovered. There was only her intention to return to Gordon Jossie, to “give things another try” in the fashion of abused women everywhere. This was bad, but what was worse was that Meredith had no choice. She had to let her go.
Still, worry over Gina Dickens dominated most of her morning. She had no creative energy to apply to her work for Gerber & Hudson and when a phone call came into the office for her, she was happy enough to have to use her elevenses in a dash over to the office of Michele Daugherty, who’d made that call and said to her, “Got something for you. Have you time to meet?”
Meredith purchased a take-away orange juice and drank it on her route to the private investigator’s office. She’d nearly forgotten that she’d hired Michele Daugherty, so much having happened since she’d asked her to look into Gina Dickens.
The investigator was on the phone when she arrived. At long last Michele Daugherty called her into her office, where a reassuring stack of papers seemed to indicate she’d been hard at work on the brief that Meredith had given her.
The investigator wasted no time with social preliminaries. “There is no Gina Dickens,” she said. “Are you sure you’ve got the right name? The right spelling?”
At first, Meredith didn’t understand what the investigator meant, so she said, “This is someone I know, Ms. Daugherty. She’s not just a name I heard mentioned in a pub or something. She’s actually…rather…well, she’s rather a friend.”
Michele Daugherty didn’t question why Meredith was having a friend investigated. She merely said, “Be that as it may. There’s no Gina Dickens that I can find. There’re Dickenses aplenty but no one called Gina in her age range. Or in any other age range, if it comes down to it.”
She went on to explain that she’d tried every possible spelling and variation of the given name. Considering that Gina was likely a nickname or an abbreviated form of a longer name, she’d gone into her databases with Gina, Jean, Janine, Regina, Virginia, Georgina, Marjorina, Angelina, Jacquelina, Gianna, Eugenia, and Evangelina. She said, “I could go on like this indefinitely, but I expect you’d rather not pay for that. At the end of the day, when things go in this direction, I tell my clients it’s safe to say that there is no person by that name ’less she’s managed to slip through the system without having left a mark on it anywhere, which isn’t possible. She is a Brit, isn’t she? No doubt of that? Chance she might be a foreigner? Aussie? New Zealander? Canadian?”
“Of course she’s British. I spent last night with her, for heaven’s sake.” As if that meant anything, Meredith thought as soon as she said it. “She’s been living with a man called Gordon Jossie, but she has a bed-sit in Lyndhurst above the Mad Hatter Tea Rooms. Tell me how you searched. Tell me where you looked.”
“Where I always look. Where any investigator, including the police, would look. My dear, people leave records. They leave trails without knowing: birth, education, health, credit history, financial dealings throughout their lives, parking tickets, the ownership of anything that might have required financing or provided a guarantee or warranty and thus needed to be registered, magazine subscriptions, newspaper subscriptions, phone bills, water bills, electricity bills. One searches through all this.”
“What exactly are you saying, then?” Meredith was feeling quite numb.
“I’m saying that there is no Gina Dickens, full stop. It’s impossible not to leave a trail, no matter who you are or where you live. So if a person doesn’t leave a trail, it’s fairly safe to conclude she isn’t who she says she is. And there you have it.”
“So who is she?” Meredith considered the possibilities. “What is she?”
“I’ve no idea. But the facts suggest she’s someone very different from whoever it is she’s pretending to be.”
Meredith stared at the investigator. She didn’t want to understand, but the fact was that she was understanding all of it too terribly well. She said numbly, “Gordon Jossie, then. J-o-s-s-i-e.”
“What about Gordon Jossie?”
“Start on him.”
GORDON HAD TO return to his holding for a load of Turkish reeds. These had been held for inspection at the port for a maddening length of time, a circumstance that had considerably slowed his progress on the roof of the Royal Oak Pub. It seemed to Gordon that the terrorist attacks of recent years had resulted in all port authorities believing there were Muslim extremists hidden within every crate on every ship that docked in England. They were especially suspicious of items having their provenance in countries with which they were not personally familiar. That reeds actually grew in Turkey was a piece of information most port officials did not possess. So those reeds had to be examined at excruciating length, and if such examination ate up a week or two, there was not much he could do about it. It was yet another reason to try to get the reeds from the Netherlands, Gordon thought. At least Holland was a familiar place in the eyes of the hopeless blokes who were assigned the duty of inspecting that which was shipped into the country.
When he and Cliff Coward returned to his holding for the delivery of the reeds, he saw at once that Rob Hastings had made good on his word. The two ponies were gone from the paddock. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do about this, but then perhaps, he thought wearily, there was nothing to be done, things being the way they were at the moment.
This was something that Cliff had wanted to discuss. Seeing Gina’s car gone from the vicinity of Gordon’s house, Cliff asked about her. Not where she was but how she was, the same “How’s our Gina then,” that he asked nearly every day. Cliff had been quite taken with Gina from the first.
Gordon had told him the truth. “Gone,” was how he put it.
Cliff repeated the word dumbly, as if the term were slow to sink into his head. When it got to his brain, he said, “What? She’s left you?”
To which Gordon replied, “That’s how it works, Cliff.”
This prompted a lengthy discourse from Cliff on the subject of what kind of shelf life-as he put it-girls like Gina generally had. “You got six days or less to get her back, man,” Cliff informed him. “You think blokes’re going to let a girl like Gina walk round the streets without trying it on? Ring her up, say sorry, get her back. Say sorry even if you didn’t do nothing to make her leave. Say anything. Just do something.”
“Nothing to be done,” Gordon told him.
“You’re off your nut,” Cliff decided.
So when Gina actually showed up while they were loading reeds into the back of Gordon’s pickup, Cliff made himself scarce. From the elevated bed of the truck, he saw her red Mini Cooper coming along the lane, said, “Give you twenty minutes to sort this one, Gordon,” and then he was gone, heading in the direction of the barn.