road again. He reckoned he'd got all there was to be had from Yolanda the Psychic. Until the spirit world revealed more to her, she seemed like a closed book to him.
Chapter Twenty-One
WHEN ROBBIE HASTINGS PULLED ONTO GORDON JOSSIE'S holding, he wasn't sure what he intended to do, for Jossie had lied to him not only about wanting to remain with Jemima, but also - as things turned out - about when he'd last seen her. Rob had had this latter piece of information from Meredith Powell, and it was a phone call from her that had sent him to Jossie's property. She'd been to see the police in Lyndhurst; she'd given them proof positive that Gordon had traveled into London on the morning of Jemima's death. He'd even stayed the night in a hotel, she told Rob, and she'd given the police that information as well.
"But, Rob," she had said and through his mobile he could hear anxiety in her voice, "I think we've made a mistake."
"„We'?" Half of we turned out to be Gina Dickens, in whose company Meredith had been ushered into the presence of Chief Superintendent Whiting - "because we said, Rob, that we wouldn't talk to anyone but the man at the top" - and there they'd demanded to know the whereabouts of the two detectives who'd come to the New Forest from New Scotland Yard.
They had something of grave importance to hand over to those detectives, they told him, and of course he asked what it was. Once he knew what it was, he asked to see it. Once he saw it, he put it into a filing folder and asked where it had come from. "Gina didn't want to tell him, Rob. She seemed afraid of him. Afterwards she told me he's been on the property to talk to Gordon and when he came to talk to Gordon, she didn't know he was police. He didn't say, and Gordon didn't either. She said she went all cold when we walked into his office and she saw him cos she reckons Gordon must've known who he was all along. So now she's nearly out of her mind with fear because if this bloke shows up on the property and if he takes that evidence with him, then Gordon'll know how he got it because how else could he have got it except from Gina?"
As the information continued to pile up, Robbie had difficulty taking it all in. Train tickets, a hotel receipt, Gina Dickens in possession of both, Gordon Jossie, Chief Superintendent Whiting, New Scotland Yard ...And then there was the not small matter of Gordon's complete lie about Jemima's departure: that she had someone in London or elsewhere, that he himself had wanted to remain with her and she had left him rather than what the truth probably was, that he had driven her off.
Meredith had gone on to say that Chief Superintendent Whiting had kept the rail tickets and the hotel receipt in his possession, but once she and Gina had left him and once Gina had revealed the man's connection - "whatever it is, Rob" - to Gordon Jossie, Meredith herself had known absolutely that he was not going to give the information to New Scotland Yard although she couldn't say why. "And we didn't know where to find them," Meredith wailed, "those detectives, Rob. I've not even talked to them yet anyway, so I don't know who they are, so I wouldn't recognise them if I saw them on the street. Why haven't they come to talk to me? I was her friend, her best friend, Rob."
To Rob, only one detail actually mattered. It wasn't that Chief Superintendent Whiting had potential evidence in his hands and it wasn't the whereabouts of the Scotland Yard detectives or why they hadn't spoken yet to Meredith Powell. What mattered was that Gordon Jossie had been to London.
Rob had taken the call from Meredith just at the end of a meeting of the New Forest's verderers, which they'd held, as usual, in the Queen's House. And although this location was not far from the police station where the chief superintendent operated, Rob didn't even think about going there to question Chief Superintendent Whiting about what he intended to do with the information from Meredith and Gina Dickens. He had only one destination in mind and he set off for it with a grinding of the Land Rover's gears and Frank lurching on the