That was fine with the boss and off she went, and when she got to Lyndhurst she parked by the New Forest Museum and walked the short distance up to the tea rooms on the high street. Midsummer, and Lyndhurst was thick with tourists. The town sat squarely in the centre of the Perambulation and was generally the first stop for visitors wishing to familiarise themselves with this part of Hampshire.
Gina’s lodgings above the Mad Hatter Tea Rooms were accessed by a doorway that was separate from the tea rooms themselves, from which at this time of day the scent of baked goods rolled out onto the street. There were two lodging rooms only and since from one hip-hop music was blasting, Meredith chose the other. It was here she applied the knowledge she’d gained from watching police programmes on the telly. She used a credit card to ease the catch back. It took five tries and she was drenched in sweat-both from nerves and from the ambient temperature in the building-before she got inside. But when she managed it, she knew she’d made the right decision. For a mobile phone on the nightstand was ringing and as far as she was concerned, the ringing was fairly screaming clue.
She made a dash for it. She picked it up. She said, “Yes?” with as much authority as she could muster and as breathlessly as she could manage, in order to disguise her voice. As she did this, she looked round the room. It was furnished simply: a bed, a chest of drawers, a bedside table, a desk, a wardrobe. There was a basin with a mirror above it, but no en suite bath. As the window was closed, it was deadly hot.
There was silence on the other end of the phone. She thought she’d missed the call and she cursed to herself. Then a man’s voice said, “Babe, Scotland Yard’s been. How the hell much longer?” and she went cold from head to toe, as if a blast of refrigerated air had shot through the room.
She said, “Who is this? Tell me who this is!”
Silence in reply. Then, “Shit,” in a low mutter. And then nothing.
She said, “Hello? Hello? Who is this?” but she knew that whoever it was, he had already disconnected himself from the call. She punched the send button to return the call, although she reckoned that the man on the other end would hardly answer. But she didn’t need him to do so. She needed only to see the number from which the call had come. What she got, though, was PRIVATE NUMBER printed on the small screen. Damn, she thought. Whoever he was, he was calling from a withheld number. When the call went through, it rang and rang, as she’d expected. No voice mail, no message. It had been a call from someone in cahoots with Gina Dickens.
Meredith felt a surge of triumph at this knowledge. It proved that she’d been right from the first. She’d known that Gina Dickens was dirty. All that remained was to find out the real purpose of her presence in the New Forest, because no matter what Gina had declared about her programme to help girls at risk, Meredith didn’t buy it. As far as she was concerned, the only girl at risk had been Jemima.
Through the walls of the room, the hip-hop music continued to thump. From below, the noise from the tea rooms rose. From without, the street noise reverberated through the windows: lorries passing through Lyndhurst High Street and grinding through their gears when they hit the gentle slope, cars heading for Southampton or Beaulieu, tour coaches the size of small cottages ferrying their passengers south to Brockenhurst or even as far as the port town of Lymington and an excursion over to the Isle of Wight. Meredith remembered how Gina had spoken of the cacophony in the street beneath her window. In this, at least, she had not been lying. But in other matters…Well, that was what Meredith was here to discover.
She had to be quick. She was going from cold to hot again, and she knew she couldn’t risk opening a window and drawing attention to the room in this way. But the temperature made the air close and herself claustrophobic.
She attacked the bedside table first. The clock radio upon it was tuned to Radio Five, which didn’t seem to indicate anything, and within the single drawer of the table there was nothing but a box of tissues and an old, opened package of Blu-Tac with a small chunk of it missing. On the shelf of the table was a stack of magazines, too ancient to have belonged to Gina Dickens, Meredith reckoned.
In the wardrobe there were clothes, but not the quantity that one would associate with permanency. They were of good quality, though, in keeping with what Meredith had already seen Gina wearing. She had expensive taste. Nothing was trendy rubbish. But the clothes gave no other clue about their owner. They did make Meredith wonder how Gina expected to maintain her wardrobe on what Gordon Jossie made as a thatcher, but that was it.
She had similar luck with the chest of drawers, where the one piece of information she gleaned was that Gina definitely did not buy her knickers at discount prices. They seemed to be silk or satin, at least six different colours and prints and each pair of knickers possessed a bra to match. Meredith allowed herself a moment of knicker envy before she looked through the rest of the drawers. She saw neatly folded T-shirts, jerseys, and a few scarves. That was it.
The desk offered even less information. It displayed some tourist brochures in a wooden holder atop it and some exceedingly cheap stationery in its centre drawer along with two postcards featuring the Mad Hatter Tea Rooms. There was a single pen in a shallow depression within this drawer, but that was all. Meredith pushed it shut, sat on the desk chair, and thought about what she had seen.
Virtually nothing of use. Gina had nice clothes, she liked nice knickers, and she had a mobile phone. Why she didn’t have that phone with her was an interesting point. Had she forgotten it? Did she not want Gordon Jossie to know that she had it? Was she worried that possession of it would indicate something she didn’t wish him to know? Was she avoiding a caller to whom she didn’t wish to speak? Was she therefore on the run? The only way to get an answer to any of those questions was to ask her directly, which Meredith could hardly do without revealing she’d broken into her room, so she was out of luck.
She gazed round the place. For want of anything else to do, she looked under the bed but was not surprised when she found nothing but a suitcase, which itself contained nothing. She even examined it for a false bottom-at this point feeling fairly ridiculous-but she came up empty-handed at that. She heaved herself to her feet, once again noting the closeness of the room. She thought about splashing some water on her face, and she reckoned it wouldn’t hurt to use the basin to revive herself but the water was tepid and would have needed running for several minutes to become cool enough to do any good.
She patted her face on the hand towel provided, rehung it neatly on its rack, and then gave a closer look to the sink. It hung from the wall and was fairly modern in appearance. It was feminine as well, with flowers and vines painted onto the porcelain. Meredith ran her hand along it and then, thinking that as she’d noted it so also might have Gina, she ran her hand beneath it as well. Her fingers came to something that didn’t feel right. She squatted to have a better look.
There, beneath the basin, something had been lodged with Blu-Tac. It appeared to be a small, taped and folded package made of paper. She eased it off the underside of the basin and carried it to the desk. Carefully, she removed both the tape and the Blu-Tac for future use.
Unfolded, the paper turned out to be a piece of the room’s cheap stationery. It had been fashioned into something akin to a pouch and what that pouch held appeared to be a small medallion. Meredith would have vastly preferred a message, cryptic or otherwise. She would have liked to see “I asked Gordon Jossie to murder Jemima Hastings so that he would be free for me” although she would not have said no to, “I believe Gordon Jossie is a killer although I myself had nothing to do with it.” Instead what she had was a roundish object, looking as if it had been made as part of a metallurgy class. Clearly, it was supposed to be a perfect circle, but it hadn’t quite made it. The metal in question looked like dirty gold, but it could have been anything that headed remotely in the direction of gold, as Meredith reckoned there weren’t a lot of classes on offer that allowed students to experiment with something so expensive.