Despite all of this delicate thinking and supposing, Meredith knew she was perilously close to being completely out of her depth in the situation. Murder, police malfeasance, false identities…None of this was exactly up her alley. Still, she knew she had to get to the bottom of everything because there seemed to be no one else who was interested in doing so.
Although…Of course, Meredith thought. She took out her mobile and punched in Rob Hastings’ number.
He was-as wonderful luck would have it-actually in Lyndhurst! He was-as less than wonderful luck would have it-just stepping into a meeting of all the agisters, which was likely to go on for more than ninety minutes and closer to two hours.
She said to him in a rush, “Rob, it’s Gina Dickens and that chief superintendent. It’s them together. And there’s no Gina Dickens at all anyway. And Chief Superintendent Whiting told Michele Daugherty that she had to stop looking into Gordon Jossie, but she hadn’t even started the process of looking into him yet and-”
“Hang on. What’re you banging on about?” Rob asked. “Merry, what the hell…? Who’s Michele Daugherty?”
She said, “I’m going to her room in Lyndhurst.”
“Michele Daugherty’s room?”
“Gina’s room. She’s got a bed-sit over the Mad Hatter, Rob. On the high street. You know where it is? The tea rooms over the road from-”
“’Course I know,” he said. “But-”
“There’s got to be something there, something I overlooked the last time. Will you meet me there? It’s important because I saw them together. On Gordon’s property. Rob, he drove right up and got out and went into the paddock and they stood there talking-”
“Whiting?”
“Yes, yes. Who else? That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
He said, “Scotland Yard’s back, Merry. It’s a woman called Havers. You need to ring her about this. I’ve got her number.”
“Scotland Yard? Rob, how c’n we trust them if we can’t trust Whiting? They’re all cops. And what do we tell them? That Whiting’s talking to Gina Dickens who isn’t really Gina Dickens anyway except we don’t know who she is? No, no. We’ve got to-”
“Merry! For God’s sake, listen. I told this woman-this Havers-everything. What you told me about Whiting. How you gave him the information. How he said it was all in hand. She’ll want to hear whatever else you know. I expect she’ll want to see that bed-sit as well. Listen to me.”
That was when he told her he was heading into the agisters’ meeting. He couldn’t skip it because among other things, he had to…Oh, never mind, he said, he just had to be there. And she had to ring the detective from Scotland Yard.
“Oh no,” she cried. “Oh no, oh no. If I do that, there’s no way she’ll agree to break into Gina’s room. You know that.”
“Break in?” he said. “Break in? Merry, what’ve you got planned?” He went on to ask could she wait for him. He would meet her at the Mad Hatter immediately after his meeting. He would be there as soon as he could. “Don’t do anything mad,” he told her. “Promise me, Merry. If something happens to you…” He stopped.
At first she said nothing. Then she promised and quickly rang off. She intended to keep her promise and to wait for Rob Hastings, but when she got to Lyndhurst, she knew that waiting was out of the question. She couldn’t wait. Whatever was up there in Gina’s room was something she intended to put her hands on now.
She parked by the New Forest Museum and hoofed up Lyndhurst High Street to the Mad Hatter Tea Rooms. At that time of morning, the tea rooms were open and doing a brisk business, so no one took notice of Meredith as she went through the doorway set at an angle to the tea rooms themselves.
She dashed quickly up the stairs. At the top, she was stealthy about her movements. She listened at the doorway of the room opposite Gina’s. No sound from within. She tapped upon it just to make sure. No one answered. Good. Once again there would be no witness to what she was about to do.
She fished in her bag for her bank card. Her hands felt slick, but she reckoned it was nerves. There was more menace about breaking into Gina’s room than there had been the last time she’d done so. Then her suspicions had driven her. Now she had certain knowledge.
She fumbled with the card and dropped it twice before she finally managed to get the door open. A final time, she looked round the corridor. She stepped inside the room.
There was sudden movement to her left. A rush of air and a blur of darkness. The door shut behind her and she heard an inner bolt driven home. She swung round and found herself face-to-face with an utter stranger. A man. For a moment, and it was just a single moment, her mind said ridiculously and in rapid succession that she’d got the wrong room, that the room had been let out to someone else, that Gina’s room had never been here above the Mad Hatter in the first place. And then her mind said she was in real danger, for the man grabbed her arm, swung her round, clamped his hand brutally over her mouth. She felt something press into her neck. It was wickedly sharp.
“Now what have we here?” he whispered in her ear. “And what are we going to do about it?”
ONCE HE RECEIVED the phone call from the Scotland Yard sergeant, Gordon Jossie knew he’d reached the absolute endgame with Gina. There had been a moment in the kitchen that morning when Gina’s denials about Jemima had nearly convinced him she was speaking the truth, but after DS Havers phoned him wondering why Gina had not shown up at her hotel in Sway, he understood that being convinced by Gina had more to do with how he wanted things to be than how things actually were. That, indeed, served as a good description of his entire adult life, he thought morosely. There had been at least two years of that life-those years after he’d first met Jemima and become enmeshed with her-when he’d developed a fantasy future. It had seemed as if the fantasy could be turned into reality because of Jemima herself and because she’d seemed to need him so. She’d appeared to need him the way a plant needs decent soil and adequate water, and he’d reckoned that that kind of need would make the mere fact of having a man in her life more important than who the man was. She’d seemed exactly what he’d been looking for, although he hadn’t been looking at all. There had been no sense to looking, he’d decided. Not when the world he had constructed for himself-or perhaps, better said, the world that had been constructed for him-could come crashing down round his ears at any time. And then, suddenly, there she had been on Longslade Bottom with her brother and his dog. And there he had been with Tess. And she had been the one to make “the first move,” as it was called. An invitation to her brother’s house, which was her own house, an invitation for drinks on a Sunday afternoon although he didn’t drink, couldn’t and wouldn’t ever risk a drink.
He’d gone because of her eyes. Ridiculous now to think that’s why he’d driven to Burley to see her again but that was it. He’d never seen anyone with two entirely different-coloured eyes, and he’d liked studying them, or at least that was what he’d told himself. So he’d gone. And the rest of it…? What did it matter? The rest had brought him to where he was now.
Her hair was longer those months later when he saw her in London after she’d left him. It seemed a bit lighter as well, but that could have been a trick of memory. As to the remainder of the package that was Jemima: She was all the same.
He hadn’t understood at first why she’d chosen the cemetery in Stoke Newington for their meeting, but when he saw the place with its winding paths, ruined monuments, and unrestrained growth of vegetation he realised her choice had had to do with not being seen in his company. This should have reassured him about her intentions, but still he’d wanted to hear it from her lips. He’d also wanted both the coin and the stone returned to him. Those he was determined to have. He had to have them because if she kept them in her possession, there was no telling what she’d do with them.