WHEN HE WAS alone again, Gordon whistled urgently for Tess. The dog came running. She’d been out on the property since early morning, ultimately taking herself to her favourite shady spot, beneath a climbing hydrangea on the north side of the cottage. There she had a lair of beaten earth kept moist even on the hottest summer days.
He fetched the retriever’s brush, and Tess gave him that loopy smile and wagged her tail. She leapt up onto the short-legged table he used for this purpose, and he drew his stool near and began with her ears. She needed a proper brushing daily anyway, and now was a good time to do it.
He wanted a smoke, but he didn’t have any fags on him, so he applied himself forcefully and rapidly to the brushing of the dog. He felt tight from head to toe, and he wanted to get loose and be easy. He didn’t know how to manage that, so he brushed the dog and he brushed the dog.
They’d walked away from the car towards and ultimately into the barn. Gina would have wondered why, but that couldn’t be allowed to matter because Gina was untouched, like a lily growing out of an excrement heap, and he meant to keep her that way. So he left her standing in the driveway looking puzzled or frightened or concerned or anxious or whatever it was that a woman might feel when the man she’s opened her heart to seems to be under the thumb of someone who could hurt him or hurt them both.
He brushed the dog and he brushed the dog. He heard Tess whine. He was being too rough. He eased the pressure. He brushed the dog.
So they’d gone into the barn and before they got there, Gordon had tried to make it look as if the call from this stranger had to do with the land. He’d gestured here and there, and that had amused. The other chuckled.
“Understand your lady love’s gone missing,” he’d said, once they were within the cooler confines of the barn. “But looks to me”-with a wink and coarse gesture that he was meant to take as sexual and did-“like you’ve no worries on that score. She’s a nice bit, that one, nicer than the other. Good, firm thighs, I expect. Strong as well. Other one was littler, wasn’t she.”
“What d’you want?” he’d asked. “Because I’ve work to do and so does Gina and you’re blocking the driveway.”
“That does make it a bit rough, doesn’t it? Me blocking the driveway. Where’d the other go?”
“What other?”
“You know what I mean, lad. The grapevine tells me someone’s got their knickers twisted up over you. Where’s the other? Make the leap here with me, Gordon. I know you can.”
He’d had no choice but to tell him: Jemima, leaving the New Forest without her car for God knows what reason, leaving most of her belongings as well, because if he didn’t tell that he knew damn well it would come out anyway and there’d be hell to pay.
“Just took herself off, you say?” he’d asked.
“That’s what happened.”
“Why? You not doing the job on her proper, Gordon? Fine, strapping man like you, man with all the right parts in all the right places?”
“I don’t know why she left.”
The other examined him. He took off his glasses and polished them on a special cloth he removed from his pocket. “Don’t give me that one,” he said and his tone of voice was no longer the spuriously jovial one he’d used before but was now rather icy the way a blade is icy if someone presses it against hot skin. “Don’t you be playing me for a fool. I don’t like hearing your name come up in general conversation. Makes me feel dead uneasy, it does. So you still want to say she just left you and you don’t know why? I’ll not have that.”
Gordon’s worry had been that Gina would come into the barn, that she would want to know or to help, to intercede or to protect, for that was her nature.
“She said she couldn’t cope,” Gordon said. “All right? She said she couldn’t cope.”
“With what?” And then he’d smiled slowly. No humour in it, but there wouldn’t have been. “Cope with what, my love?” he’d repeated.
“You bloody well know,” said between his teeth.
“Ah…Now don’t get cheeky with me, lad. Cheekiness? It doesn’t become you.”
Chapter Nine
THE STOKE NEWINGTON HOUSE-TO-HOUSE TURNED UP nothing, as did the perimeter search of the environs of the chapel and gridding off the whole blooming cemetery and conducting a search that way. They had enough manpower to carry it all off-both from the local station and from officers on loan from other areas-but the end result was no witness, no weapon, no handbag, no shoulder bag, no purse, and no identification. Just an admirable rubbish cleanup of the cemetery. On the other hand, they’d had phone calls aplenty, and a description shuffled to SO5 had actually produced a possible lead. In this, they were assisted by the fact that the body in question had unusual eyes: one green and one brown. Once they plugged that into the computer, the field of missing persons narrowed down to one.
She’d been reported as having disappeared from her lodgings in Putney, and it was to Putney that Barbara Havers was sent two days after the discovery of the body; specifically she was sent to Oxford Road, which was equidistant from Putney High Street and Wandsworth Park. There she parked illegally in a residents-only space, propped a police ID in plain sight, and rang the bell on a terrace house whose front garden appeared to be the street’s recycling centre, if the bins and plastic containers were anything to go by. She was admitted to the house by an older woman with a military haircut and a bit of a military moustache. She wore exercise clothing and pristine white trainers done up with pink and purple laces. She said that she was Bella McHaggis and it was bloody well time a cop’d shown up and was this sort of incompetence what her taxes paid for and the bloody government can’t do a thing right, can they, because just look at the condition of the streets, not to mention the Underground, and she’d phoned the cops two days ago, and…
Blah, blah, blah, Barbara thought. While Bella McHaggis gave vent to her feelings, she herself had a look round the place: uncarpeted wood floor, hall stand with umbrellas and coats, and on the wall a framed document announcing itself as HOUSE RULES FOR OCCUPANTS, with a sign saying LANDLADY ON PREMISES posted beneath it. “With lodgers, one can’t bang on about the rules enough,” Bella McHaggis asserted. “I’ve got them everywhere. The rules, that is. It helps, I find, if people know what’s what.”
She led Barbara into a dining room, through a large kitchen, and into a sitting room at the back of the house. There she announced that her lodger-who was called Jemima Hastings-had gone missing and if the body that had been found in Abney Park had one brown eye and one green eye…Here, Bella stopped. She seemed to try to read Barbara’s face.
Barbara said, “Have you got a picture of the young lady?”
Yes, yes indeed, Bella said.
She said to “come this way,” and she led Barbara out of a door on the far side of the sitting room, which took them to a narrow corridor that ran in the direction of the front door of the house. To one side of this corridor, the reverse side of a staircase rose, and facing them beneath it was a door otherwise hidden from anyone entering the building. On this door was a poster. The lighting was dim but Barbara could see that the poster featured a black-and-white photograph of a young woman, light hair blowing across her face. She was sharing the picture with three-quarters of a lion’s head, somewhat out of focus behind her. The lion was male, marble, slightly streaked from weather, and asleep. The poster itself was an advertisement for the Cadbury Photographic Portrait of the Year. Evidently, it was some sort of contest, and its winners comprised an ongoing show at the National Portrait Gallery in Trafalgar Square.