“So we’re left with the sighting of the Oriental man, and let’s hope that something comes of it,” Ardery said.

“Or that something comes of this bloke in Hampshire,” Lynley noted.

“There’s that as well. How d’you expect Sergeant Havers will cope with that part of the investigation, Thomas?”

“In her usual fashion,” he replied.

Chapter Thirteen

“BLOODY INCREDIBLE. I’VE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE IT.” This was Barbara Havers’ reaction to the New Forest and the herds of ponies running wild upon it. There were hundreds of them-thousands perhaps-and they grazed freely wherever they had a mind to graze. On the vast swatches of the grassland, they munched on greenery with their foals nearby. Beneath primeval oaks and beeches and wandering among both rowan and birch, they fed on the scrub growth and left in their wake a woodland floor dappled with sunlight; spongy with decomposing leaves; and devoid of weeds, bushes, and brambles.

It was nearly impossible not to be enchanted by a place where ponies lapped water in splashes and ponds and thatched cottages of whitewashed cob looked like buildings scrubbed on a daily basis. Grand vistas of hillsides displayed a patchwork in which the green of the bracken had begun to brown and the yellow of gorse was giving way to the increasing purple of heather.

“Almost makes me want to pack in London,” Barbara declared. She had the big A-Z road atlas open upon her lap, having acted as navigator for Winston Nkata during their drive. They’d stopped once for lunch and another time for coffee and now they were wending their way from the A31 over to Lyndhurst where they would make their presence known to the local coppers whose patch they were invading.

“Nice, yeah,” was Nkata’s assessment of the New Forest. “Expect it’d be a bit quiet for me, though. Not to mention…” He glanced at her. “There’s the raisin in the rice pud aspect of things.”

“Oh. Right. Well,” Barbara said, and she reckoned he was correct on that score. The country wasn’t a place where they’d be finding a minority population and certainly not a population with Nkata’s background of Brixton via West Africa and the Caribbean, with a bit of a sidetrack into gang warfare on the housing estate. “Good place for a holiday, though. Mind how you go through town. We’ve got a one-way system coming up.”

They negotiated this with little trouble and found the Lyndhurst police station just beyond town in the Romsey Road. An undistinguished brick building in the tedious architectural style that fairly shouted 1960s, it squatted on the top of a small knoll, with a crown of concertina wire and a necklace of CCTV cameras marking it as an area of out-of-bounds to anyone not wishing his every movement to be monitored. A few trees and a flower garden in front of the building attempted to soften the overall dismal air of the place, but there was no disguising its institutional nature.

They showed their identification to the special constable apparently in charge of reception, a young bloke who emerged from an internal room once they rang a buzzer placed on the counter for this purpose. He looked interested but not overwhelmed by the idea that New Scotland Yard had come calling. They told him they needed to speak to his chief super and he made much of going from their ID pictures to their faces as if suspecting them of ill intentions. He said, “Hang on, then,” and disappeared with their IDs into the bowels of the station. It was nearly ten minutes before he reappeared, handed back their warrant cards, and told them to follow him.

Chief Super, he said, was a bloke called Zachary Whiting. He’d been in a meeting but he’d cut it short.

“We won’t keep him long,” Barbara said. “Just a courtesy call, this, if you know what I mean. Bring him into the picture so there’s no misunderstanding later.”

Lyndhurst was the operational command headquarters for all the police stations in the New Forest. It was under the authority of a chief superintendent who himself reported to the constabulary in Winchester. One cop didn’t wander onto another cop’s patch without making nice and all the et ceteras, and that was what Barbara and Winston were there to do. If anything currently going on in the area happened to apply to their investigation, all the better. Barbara didn’t expect this to be the case, but one never knew where a professional obligation like this one could lead.

Chief Superintendent Zachary Whiting stood waiting for them at his desk. Behind spectacles, his eyes watched them with some speculation, hardly a surprising response to a call from New Scotland Yard. When the Met arrived, it often meant trouble of the internal investigation sort.

Winston gave Barbara the nod, so she did the honours, making the introductions and then sketching out the details of the death in London. She named Jemima Hastings as the victim. She concluded with the reason for their incursion into his patch.

“There was a mobile number on a postcard related to the victim,” Barbara told Whiting. “We’ve traced that number to a Gordon Jossie here in Hampshire. So…” She didn’t add the rest. The chief inspector would know the drill.

Whiting said, “Gordon Jossie?” and he sounded thoughtful.

“Know him?” Nkata asked.

Whiting went to his desk and leafed through some paperwork. Barbara and Winston exchanged glances.

“Has he been in trouble round here?” Barbara asked.

Whiting didn’t reply directly at first. He repeated the surname, and then he said, “No, not in trouble,” putting a hesitation before the final word as if Gordon Jossie had been in something else.

“But you know the bloke?” Nkata said again.

“It’s just the name.” The chief superintendent apparently found what he was searching for in his stack of paperwork, and this turned out to be a phone message. “We’ve had a phone call about him. Crank call, if you ask me, but evidently she was insistent, so the message got passed along.”

“Is that normal procedure?” Barbara asked. Why would a chief superintendent want to be informed about phone calls, crank or otherwise?

He said that it wasn’t normal procedure at all, but in this case the young lady wasn’t taking no for an answer. She wanted something done about a bloke called Gordon Jossie. She’d been asked did she want to make a formal complaint against the man, but she was having none of that. “Said she finds him a suspicious character,” Whiting said.

“Bit odd that you’d be informed, sir,” Barbara noted.

“I wouldn’t have been in the normal course of things. But then a second young lady phoned, saying much the same thing, and that’s when I learned about it. Seems odd to you, no doubt, but this isn’t London. It’s a small, close place and I find it wise to know what’s going on in it.”

“Anticipating this bloke Jossie might be up to something?” Nkata asked.

“Nothing suggests that. But this”-Whiting indicated the phone message-“puts him onto the radar.”

He went on to tell the Scotland Yard officers they were welcome to go about their business on his patch, and when they gave him Jossie’s address, he told them how to find the man’s property, near the village of Sway. If they needed his help or the help of one of his officers…There was something about the way he made the offer. Barbara had the feeling he was doing more than just making nice with them.

Sway was located off the regularly traveled routes in the New Forest, the apex of a triangle created by itself, Lymington, and New Milton. They drove there on lanes that became progressively narrower, and they ended up in a stretch of road called Paul’s Lane, where houses had names but no numbers and tall hedges blocked most of them from view.

There were a number of cottages strung along the lane, but only two substantial properties. Jossie’s turned out to be one of them.