Gordon confirmed this, but that was all he intended to say about Rob. The agister had tracked him down to the Royal Oak pub much as Meredith Powell had done, and just as when Meredith had shown her face, Gordon had told Cliff to take a break so that whatever Rob Hastings had to say could be said out of earshot of anyone. To make sure this was the case, they’d walked up the lane to Eyeworth Pond, which wasn’t so much a pond as it was a damming of a long-ago stream upon which ducks now floated placidly and on whose banks willows crowded one upon the other and draped leafy branches into the water. There was a small two-tiered car park nearby, and a path beyond it led into the wood, where the ground was thick with decades of beech and chestnut leaves.

They walked to the edge of the pond. Gordon lit a cigarette and waited. Whatever Rob Hastings had to say, it would be about Jemima, and he had nothing to tell him about Jemima beyond that which Rob obviously already knew.

“She left because of her,” Rob said, “didn’t she? The one at your house. That’s how it was, eh?”

“I see you’ve been talking to Meredith.” Gordon felt weary with the fuss.

“But Jemima wouldn’t want me to know about that,” Rob Hastings said, following the line of conversation that he’d established. “She wouldn’t want me to know about Gina, owing to the shame of it all.”

Despite himself and his reluctance to discuss Jemima, Gordon found this an interesting theory, wrong as it was. He said, “How’d you reckon, then, Rob?”

“Like this. She must have seen the two of you. You’d’ve been in Ringwood, maybe, or even Winchester or Southampton if she’d gone for supplies for the Cupcake Queen like she did on occasion. She’d’ve seen something that told her what was going on between the two of you, and she’d’ve left you because of it. But she couldn’t bring herself to tell me because of her pride and the shame of it all.”

“What shame?”

“Being cheated on. She’d be ’shamed of that, knowing I’d warned her from the first something wasn’t right about you.”

Gordon flicked ash from his cigarette onto the ground and twisted the toe of his boot upon it. “Never much liked me, then. You hid it well.”

“I would do, after she took up with you anyways, wouldn’t I. I wanted her to be happy and if you were the person making her happy, who was I to make it clear I smelled something bad?”

“What would that something be?”

“You tell me.”

Gordon shook his head, signaling not negation but the fact that it was hopeless to attempt to explain himself since Robbie Hastings would be unlikely to believe whatever he said. He sought to elucidate this with, “When a bloke like you-like any bloke, really-doesn’t like someone, anything looks like a reason for it, Rob. You know what I mean?”

“Truth is, I don’t.”

“Well, I can’t help you. Jemima left me, full stop. If anyone had someone else on the side, I’d reckon it’d be Jemima ’cause it wasn’t me.”

“Who’d you have before her, then, Gor?”

“No one,” Gordon said. “Ever, actually.”

“Come on, man. You’re…what?” Rob appeared to think it over. “Thirty-one years old and you’ll have me think you’d not had a woman before you had my sister?”

“That’s exactly what I’d have you think because it’s the truth.”

“That you were a virgin. That you come to her a blank slate where no other ladies’ names’ve been written, eh?”

“That’s it, Rob.”

Robbie, Gordon could tell, didn’t believe a word of it. “You queer, then, Gor?” he asked. “You a fallen Catholic priest or something?”

Gordon glanced at him. “You sure you want to go this way, Rob?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, I think you know.”

Rob’s face flamed.

“See, she speculated about you now and again,” Gordon said. “Well, she would do, wouldn’t she? All things considered, it’s a bit unusual. Bloke your age. Forty-something, eh?”

“Don’t make this about me.”

“Nor about me,” Gordon said. Any conversation along these lines would, he knew, proceed in circles, so he ended it there. What he had to tell Robbie Hastings was what Robbie Hastings had doubtless already heard from Meredith Powell, even from Jemima herself. But he found out quickly enough that that was not going to satisfy Jemima’s brother.

“She left because she didn’t want to be with me any longer,” Gordon said. “That’s it and that’s an end to the matter. She was in a hurry because that’s what she always was and you damn well know that. She made up her mind in an instant and then she acted. If she was hungry, she ate. If she was thirsty, she drank. If she decided she wanted a different sort of bloke, no one was going to talk her out of it. That’s it.”

“In a nutshell, Gor?”

“That’s how it is.”

“Happens I don’t believe you,” Rob said.

“Happens I can’t do anything about it.”

But when Robbie left him back at the Royal Oak, to which they’d returned in a silence broken only by the sound of their footfalls on the stony verge and the crying of skylarks on the heath, Gordon found he wanted to make him believe because anything else meant exactly what happened the next morning while he and Gina were saying their good-byes for the day outside on the driveway by Gordon’s pickup.

An Austin pulled directly behind the old Toyota. Out stepped a bloke in bottle-thick spectacles with clip-on sunglasses covering them. He had on a tie but he’d loosened it to hang from his neck. He took off the clip-on sunglasses, as if this would allow him to see Gordon and Gina better. He nodded knowingly and said, “Ah.”

Gordon heard Gina say his name in a questioning murmur, and he said to her, “Wait here.” He’d got the door of the pickup open, but he pushed it shut and walked over to the Austin.

“Morning, Gordon,” the bloke said. “It’s going to be dead hot again, isn’t it?”

“It is that,” Gordon replied. He said nothing more because he reckoned things about the visitor would be made clear for him soon enough.

And so they were. The man said affably, “We need to have a chat, you and me.”

MEREDITH POWELL HAD phoned in ill to her place of employment, going so far as to plug her nose in order to simulate a summer cold. She didn’t like doing this and she certainly didn’t like the example it set for Cammie, who watched her with wide-eyed curiosity from the kitchen table where she’d been spooning Cheerios into her mouth. But there’d seemed to be no alternative.

Meredith had paid a call at the police station the prior afternoon and had got exactly nowhere. The conversation had gone a route that had ended with her feeling a perfect fool. What did she have to report that equated to grave suspicions and doubts? Her friend Jemima’s car in a barn on the property where she’d lived with her partner for some two years, Jemima’s clothes boxed up in the attic, Jemima with a new mobile phone to prevent Gordon Jossie from tracking her down, and the Cupcake Queen deserted in Ringwood. None of this is like Jemima, don’t you see? had hardly impressed the plod she’d spoken to at the Brockenhurst station, where she’d stopped and asked to see someone “on a matter of extreme urgency.” She’d been given to a sergeant whose name she didn’t recall and didn’t want to recall, and at the end of her tale he’d enquired rather pointedly that couldn’t it be, madam, that these people were merely going about their daily lives without reporting their movements to her because this was none of her business? Of course, she’d prompted this remark herself by admitting to the sergeant that Robbie Hastings had spoken to his sister regularly since her removal to London. But still, there had been no reason for the sergeant to look upon her as if she’d been something unsavoury that he’d found on the sole of his shoe. She wasn’t a busybody. She was a concerned citizen. And wasn’t a concerned citizen-a taxpayer, mind you-supposed to let the police know when something was off? Nothing sounds off to me, the sergeant had said. One woman leaves and this bloke Jossie finds another. How’s that measure up to fishy, eh? Way of the world, you ask me. And to her declaration of for God’s sake, he’d told her to take her troubles to the main station in Lyndhurst if she didn’t like what she was getting from him.