query at the bottom of the card and she flipped it over and saw the phone number printed across the back. She said nothing. Instead, she placed the card gently on the table and poured each of them a glass of whatever it was she'd concocted.
The heat seemed to grow more oppressive in the silence. Gina herself was the one to break it. She said, "I'd no idea ..." Her fingers touched her throat. Barbara could see her pulse beating there. It put her in mind of the manner in which Jemima Hastings had died. "How long have you been looking for her, Gordon?" Gina asked.
Jossie fixed his eyes on the postcard. He finally said, "This is months old, this is. I got a stack of them ...I dunno ...round April, it was. I didn't know you then."
"Want to explain?" Barbara asked him. Nkata opened his neat leather notebook.
Gina said, "Is something going on?"
Barbara wasn't about to give any more information than was necessary at this point, so she said nothing. Nor did Winston, except to murmur, "So ...Mr. Jossie?"
Gordon Jossie made a restless movement in his chair. The story he told was brief but direct. Jemima Hastings was his former lover; she'd left him after more than two years together; he'd wanted to find her. He'd seen an advertisement for the photographic portrait show in the Mail on Sunday by purest chance and this - with a nod at the postcard - was the photo that had been used in the advert for that show. So he'd gone to London. No one at the gallery would tell him where the model was, and he hadn't a clue how to contact the photographer. So he bought up the postcards - forty, fifty, or sixty because he couldn't recall but they'd had to fetch more from their storage room - and he'd stuck them in phone boxes, in shop windows, in any spot where he thought they'd get noticed. He'd worked in widening rings round the gallery itself till he ran out of cards. And then he waited.
"Any luck?" Barbara asked him.
"I never heard from anyone about her." He said again to Gina, "This was before I'd met you. It's nothing to do with you and me. Far as I knew, far as I know, wasn't anyone who ever saw them, saw her, and put two and two together. Waste of time and money, it was. But I felt like I had to try."
"To find her, you mean," Gina said in a quiet voice.
He said to her, "It was the time we'd put in together. Over two years. I just wanted to know. It doesn't mean anything." Jossie turned to Barbara. "Where'd you get this, anyway?
What's going on?"
She answered his question with one of her own. "Care to tell us why Jemima left you?"
"I've no bloody idea. One day she decided it was over, and off she went. She made the announcement and the next day she was gone."
"Just like that?"
"I reckoned she'd been planning it for weeks. I phoned her at first once she'd gone. I wanted to know what the hell was going on. Who wouldn't, after two years together when someone says it's over and just disappears and you've not seen it coming? But she never took the calls and she never returned them and then the mobile number got changed altogether or she got a new mobile or whatever, because the phone calls stopped going through. I asked her brother about it - "
"Her brother?" Nkata looked up from his notebook, and when Gordon Jossie identified the brother as Robbie Hastings, Nkata jotted this down.
"But he said he didn't know anything about what she was up to. I didn't believe him - he never liked me and I expect he was dead chuffed when Jemima ended things - but I couldn't get a single detail out of him. I finally gave up. And then" - with a look at Gina Dickens that had to be called grateful - "I met Gina last month."
"When did you last see Jemima Hastings, then?" Barbara asked.
"The morning of the day she left me."
"Which was?"
"Day after Guy Fawkes. Last year." He took a swig of his drink and then wiped his mouth on his arm. He said, "Now are you going to tell me what this is all about?"
"I'm going to ask you if you've made any journeys out of Hampshire in the last week or so."