“What about the signature?”

“Same thing, I’m afraid. Someone likely nicked letterhead from an office-or even designed it on their computer, I suppose, if they had an example in front of them-and then wrote their own recommendations. It happens sometimes, although you’d think this bloke would have checked first to see who taught what. Looks to me like he gave a quick glance at a list of the staff and chose our names at random.”

“Exactly,” Bligh said.

Barbara looked at Winston. “It explains how someone who can’t read or write managed to ‘complete’ course work at the college, eh?”

Winston nodded. “But not how someone who can’t read or write wrote these letters, cos he didn’t.”

“That looks like the case.”

Which meant, of course, that someone else had written them for Gordon Jossie, someone who knew him from years gone by, someone they likely hadn’t spoken to yet.

ROBBIE HASTINGS KNEW that if he was going to get to the bottom of what had happened to his sister and why, and if he was going to be able to go on living-no matter how bleakly-he had to begin looking squarely at a few basic truths. Meredith had been attempting to tell him at least one of those truths in the church in Ringwood. He’d stopped her abruptly because he was, quite simply, a bloody coward. But he knew he couldn’t go on that way. So he finally picked up the phone.

She said, “How are you?” when she heard his voice. “I mean, how are you doing, Rob? How are you coping? I can’t sleep or eat. Can you? Have you? I just want to do-”

“Merry.” He cleared his throat. Part of him was shouting better not to know, better never to know and part of him was trying to ignore those cries. “What did…In the church when you and I were talking about her…What did you mean?”

“When?”

“You said whenever. That was the word you used.”

“I did? Rob, I don’t know-”

“With a bloke, you said. Whenever she was with a bloke.” God, he thought, don’t make me say more.

“Oh.” Meredith’s voice was small. “Jemima and sex, you mean.”

He whispered it. “Aye.”

“Oh, Rob. I s’pose I shouldn’t actually have said that.”

“But you did, didn’t you. So you need to tell me. If you know something that’s to do with her death…”

“It’s nothing,” she said quickly. “I’m sure of it. It’s not that.”

He said nothing more, reckoning that if he was silent, she would be forced to continue, which she did.

She said, “She was younger then. It was years ago anyway. And she would have changed, Rob. People do change.”

He wanted so much to believe her. Such a simple matter to say, “Oh. Right. Well, thanks,” and ring off. In the background he could hear murmurs of conversation. He’d phoned Meredith at work, and he could have used this alone as an excuse to end their conversation at that point. So could have she, for that matter. But he didn’t take that turn. He couldn’t do so now and live with the knowledge that he’d run again, just as he’d turned a blind eye to what he knew at heart she was going to tell him if he insisted upon it.

“Seems it’s time for me to know it all, Merry. It’s no betrayal on your part. Mind, there’s nothing you can say would make a difference now.”

When she spoke at last, it sounded to him as if she were talking inside a tube, as the sound was hollow, although it could well have been that his heart was hollow. She said finally, “Eleven, then, Rob.”

“Eleven what?” he asked. Lovers? he wondered. Had Jemima had so many already? And by what age? And had she actually kept count?

“Years,” Meredith said. “That’s how old.” And when he said nothing, she rushed on with, “Oh, Rob. You don’t want to know. Really. And she wasn’t bad. She just…See, she equated things. ’Course, I didn’t know that at the time, why she did it, I mean. I just knew she might end up pregnant but she said no because she took precautions. She even knew that word, precautions. I don’t know what she used or where she got it because she wouldn’t say. Just that it wasn’t up to me to tell her right from wrong, and if I was her friend, I would know that, wouldn’t I. And then it became a matter of me not having boyfriends, see. ‘You’re only jealous, Merry.’ But that wasn’t it, Rob. She was my friend. I only wanted to keep her safe. And people talked about her so. Specially at school.”

Robbie wasn’t sure he could speak. He was standing in the kitchen and he felt blindly behind him for a chair onto which he could lower himself with infinite slowness. “Boys at school?” he said. “Boys at school were having Jemima when she was eleven? Who? How many?” Because he would find them, he thought. He would find them and he would sort them even now, so many years after the fact.

Meredith said, “I don’t know how many. I mean, she always had boyfriends, but I don’t expect…Surely not all of them, Rob.”

But he knew she was lying to protect his feelings or perhaps because she believed she’d betrayed Jemima enough, even as he was the one who’d betrayed her by not seeing what was in front of him all along.

“Tell me the rest,” he said. “There’s more, isn’t there?”

Her voice altered as she replied and he could tell she was crying. “No, no. There’s really no more.”

“God damn it, Merry-”

“Really.”

“Tell me.”

“Rob, please don’t ask.”

“What else?” And then his own voice broke when he said, “Please,” and perhaps that was what made her continue.

“If there was a boy she was doing it with and another boy wanted her…She didn’t understand. She didn’t know how to be faithful. She didn’t mean it as anything and she wasn’t a tart. She just didn’t understand how it looked to other people. I mean what they thought or might do or might ask of her. I tried to tell her, but there was this boy and that boy and this man and that man and she just couldn’t see that it really had nothing to do with love-what they wanted-and when I tried to tell her, she reckoned I was being-”

“Yes,” he said. “All right. Yes.”

She was quiet again although he could hear the rustle of something against the phone. Tissue likely. She’d wept the entire time she’d spoken. She said, “We used to quarrel. Remember? We used to talk for hours in her bedroom. Remember?”

“Aye. Aye. I remember that.”

“So you see…I tried…I should have told someone, but I didn’t know who.”

“You didn’t think to tell me?”

“I did think. Yes. But then sometimes I thought…All the men and perhaps even you…”

“Oh God, Merry.”

“I’m sorry. So sorry.”

“Why did you…? Did she say…?”

“Never. Nothing. Not that.”

“But still you thought…” He felt a laugh bubbling in him, one of simple despair at so outrageous an idea, so far from the truth of who he was and how he lived his life.

At least, he thought, with Gordon Jossie had come an alteration in his sister. Somehow she’d found what she was looking for because surely she’d been faithful to him. She had to have been. He said, “She stuck with Jossie, though. She was true to him. I mean like I told you before, he wanted to marry her and he wouldn’t have done if he had the slightest suspicion or indication that-”

“Did he?”

Something about the way she asked the question stopped him. “Did he what?”

“Want to marry her. Really.”

“’Course he did. She left because she wanted time to think about it and I expect he worried it was over between them because he phoned her and phoned her and she got herself a new mobile. So you see, she’d finally got to the point…I told you all this, Merry.” He was fairly babbling at this point, and he knew it because he reckoned there was something more to come from his sister’s friend.

There was. Meredith said, “But, Rob, before our…what do I call it? Our breakup? Our row? The end of our friendship? Before that, she told me Gordon didn’t want to marry at all. It wasn’t her, she said. He didn’t want to marry, full stop. He was afraid of marriage, she said. He was afraid of getting too close to anyone.”