She said, "I should have stayed in contact with her, this last year, Rob. If I had done, she might've not gone off."
"You mustn't think that," he said. "It's not your doing. You were her friend and the two of you were just going through a bad patch. That happens, sometimes."
"It was more than a bad patch. It was ...I wanted her to listen, Rob, to hear, just for once.
But there were things she never would change her mind about and Gordon was one of them.
Because they were sexual by that time and whenever she was sexual with a bloke - "
He gripped her arm to stop her. He felt a cry building in him, but he wouldn't and he couldn't let it escape. He couldn't look at her, so he looked at the stained-glass windows round the altar and he thought how they had to be Victorian because the church had been rebuilt, hadn't it, and there was Jesus saying, "It is I, be not afraid," and there was St. Peter, and there the Good Shepherd, and there oh there was Jesus with the children and he was suffering the little children to come unto him and that was the problem, wasn't it, that the little children with all their troubles had not been suffered? Wasn't that the real problem when everything else was stripped away?
Meredith was silent. His hand was still on her arm and he became aware of how hard he was gripping her and how he must be hurting her, actually. He felt her fingers move against his where they were like claws on her bare skin and it came to him that she wasn't trying to loosen his grip but rather she was caressing his fingers and then his hand, making small, slow circles to tell him that she understood his grief, although the truth of the matter was that she could not understand, nor could anyone else, what it was like to be robbed of everyone, and to have no hope of filling the void.
Chapter Fourteen
"'COURSE HE WAS HERE," HAD BEEN CLIFF COWARD'S CONFIRMATION of Gordon Jossie's alibi. "Where else's he s'posed to be, eh?" A short cocky little bloke wearing crusty blue jeans and a sweat-stained headband, he'd been leaning against the bar at his regular watering hole in the village of Winstead, a pint in front of him and an empty crisp bag balled up next to his fist. He played with this as they spoke. He gave few details. They were working on a pub roof near Frith and he expected he'd know well enough if Gordon Jossie hadn't been there six days ago as it was only the two of them and someone was up on that scaffold grabbing the bundles of reeds as he'd hoisted them up. "'Spect that was Gordon," he'd said with a grin.
"Why? What's he s'posed to've done? Mugged some old lady in Ringwood market square?"
"It's more a question of murder," Barbara told him.
Cliff's face altered, but his story did not. Gordon Jossie had been with him, he said, and Gordon Jossie was no murderer. "I think I'd bloody well know," he noted. "Been working for him over a year. Who's he s'posed to have done?"
"Jemima Hastings."
"Jemima? Not a chance."
They went from Winstead up to Itchen Abbas, bypassing Winchester on the motorway.
On a small property between Itchen Abbas and the hamlet of Abbotstone, they found the master thatcher at whose side Gordon Jossie had worked years earlier to learn the trade. He was called Ringo Heath - "Don't ask," Heath said sourly. "It might have been John, Paul, or George and don't I bloody well know it" - and when they arrived, he was seated on a battered bench, on the shady side of a brick house. He seemed to be whittling, as in one hand he had a wicked-looking knife with a sharp blade curving into a hook, and he was applying this to a thin switch, splitting it first and then sharpening both of its ends into arrow-tip points. At his feet lay a pile of switches yet to be seen to. In a wooden box next to him on the bench, he was placing those that had already been whittled. To Barbara, they looked like toothpicks for a giant, each of them perhaps a yard or more long. They also looked like potential weapons. As did the knife itself, which she learned was called a spar hook. And the