silent for a moment, thinking. Then she said, "And this is down to him, isn't it? This is down to Gordon. Oh, maybe not the killing itself, but part of it. Some small part. Something we can't see or understand just yet. Somehow. Some part of it."
And then she did begin to cry, which was when she took one of the kneelers from its holder and dropped to her knees upon it. He thought she intended to pray, but she talked instead: to him but with her face towards the altar and its reredos of carved angels holding up their quatrefoil shields. These depicted the instruments of the passion. Interesting, he thought helplessly, they had nothing to do with instruments of defence.
Meredith told him about looking into Gordon's new partner, Gina Dickens, about looking into the claims she had made about what she was doing in this part of Hampshire. There was no programme for girls at risk that anyone knew of, Meredith told him and she sounded bitter as she gave him the news, no programme at the college in Brockenhurst, no programme through the district council, not one anywhere at all. "She's lying," Meredith concluded. "She met Gordon somewhere a long time ago, believe me, and she wanted him and he wanted her. It wasn't enough that they just do it in a hotel or something" - She said this last with the bitterness of a woman who'd done exactly that - "with no one the wiser. She wanted more. She wanted it all.
But she couldn't get it with Jemima round, could she, so she got him to drive Jemima off. Rob, she isn't who she pretends to be."
Robbie didn't know how to respond to this, so far-fetched seemed the notion. Truth was, he wondered about Meredith's real purpose in looking into Gina Dickens and into what Gina Dickens claimed to be doing in Hampshire. Meredith had something of a history of disapproving of people whom she herself could not understand, and more than once over the years of their friendship Jemima had found herself at odds with Meredith because of this, because of Meredith's inability to see why Jemima could simply not be without a man, as Meredith herself was fully and perfectly capable of being. Meredith was not a serial manhunter; ergo, in her mind, neither should Jemima be.
But there was more to it than that in this particular matter, and Robbie reckoned he knew what it was: If Gina had wanted Gordon and had wanted him to remove Jemima from his life in order to have him, then Gordon had done for Gina what Meredith's long-ago London lover had not done for her, despite what had been a greater need in the form of her pregnancy. Gordon had driven Jemima off, opening the door to Gina's complete entry into his life, no secret lover but rather overt life partner. This would rankle with Meredith. She wasn't made of stone.
"Police have been to talk to Gordon," Robbie told her. "I expect they talked to her as well. To Gina. They asked me where I was when Jemima ...when it happened and - "
Meredith whirled to him. "They didn't!"
"'Course. They have to. So they also asked him. Her, too, probably. And if they didn't, they will. They'll come to talk to you as well."
"Me? Why?"
"Because you were her friend. I was meant to give them names of anyone who might tell them something, anything. That's what they're here for."
"What? To accuse us? You? Me?"
"No. No. Just to make sure they know everything there is to know about her. Which means ..." He hesitated.
She cocked her head. Her hair touched her shoulder. He saw in places where her skin was bare that it was also freckled, as her face was freckled. He recalled her and his sister in a state about the spots on their young adolescent faces, trying this and that product and using makeup and just being growing girls together. The acuteness of the memory struck him.
He said, "Ah, Merry," and could go no further. He didn't want to weep in front of her. It felt weak and useless. He was suddenly, stupidly, selfishly aware of how bloody ugly he was, of how weeping would make him seem all the uglier to Jemima's friend, and where that had never mattered before, it mattered now, because he wanted comfort. And he thought how there was no comfort and never had been and never would be for ugly