seat next to him.
When he saw from the absence of vehicles that no one was at home on Jossie's holding, Rob paced intently round the cottage as if he'd be able to find evidence of the man's guilt leaping out of the flower beds. He looked into windows and tested doors, and the fact that they were locked in a place where virtually no one locked their doors seemed to declare the worst.
He went from the cottage to the barn and swung open the doors. He strode inside to his sister's car, saw that the key was in the old Figaro's ignition, and tried to make something of this, but the only thing he could make of it didn't amount to sense anyway: that Jemima had never gone to London but had been murdered here and buried on the property, which of course hadn't happened at all. Then he saw that the ring attached to the ignition key held another, and assuming this was the key to the cottage, Robbie took it and hurried back to the door.
What he intended to look for, he didn't know. He only understood that he had to do something. So he opened drawers in the kitchen. He opened the fridge. He looked in the oven.
He went from there to the sitting room and took the cushions off the sofa and the chairs. Finding nothing, he dashed up the stairs. Clothes cupboards were neat. Pockets were empty. Nothing languished under the beds. Towels in the bathroom were damp. A ring in the toilet bowl spoke of cleaning needing to be done, and although he wanted something to be hidden inside the cistern, there was nothing.
Then Frank started barking outside. Then another dog began barking as well. This took Robbie to one of the windows where he saw two things simultaneously. One was that Gordon Jossie had come home in the company of his golden retriever. The other was that the ponies in the paddock were just that, still in the damn paddock when Rob would have sworn to God that they belonged out on the forest, so why the hell were they still here?
The barking increased in frenzy, and Rob dashed down the stairs. Never mind that he was the one trespassing. There were questions to be asked.
Frank sounded insane, as did the other dog. Rob saw as he burst out of the cottage that for some reason Jossie had stupidly opened the door of the Land Rover and had let Frank jump out and he himself was now bent into the vehicle and searching through it as if he didn't bloody well already know who owned it.
The Weimaraner was actually howling. It came to Rob that the animal was howling not at the other dog but at Jossie himself. This fueled Rob's rage because if Frank howled it was because he'd been harmed, and no one was meant to lay a hand on his dog and certainly not Jossie who'd laid hands elsewhere and death was the result.
The retriever was yelping now because Frank was howling. Two dogs from the property across the lane joined in and the resulting cacophony set the ponies in motion inside the paddock.
They began to trot back and forth along the line of the fence, tossing their heads, neighing.
"What the hell're you doing?" Robbie demanded.
Jossie swung round from the Land Rover and asked a variation of the same question and with far more reason, as the door to the cottage stood wide open and it was only too clear what Rob had been up to. Rob shouted at Frank to be quiet, which only set the dog into a complete paroxysm of barking. He ordered the Weimaraner back into the vehicle, but instead Frank approached Jossie as if he intended to go for the thatcher's throat. Jossie said, "Tess. That'll do,"
and his own animal ceased barking at once, and this made Rob think of power and control and how a need for power and control could be at the heart of what had happened to Jemima and then he thought of the railway tickets, of the hotel receipt, of Jossie's trip to London, of his lies, and he strode over to the thatcher and heaved him against the side of the Land Rover.
He said through his teeth, "London, you bastard."
"What the hell ..." Gordon Jossie cried.
"She didn't leave you because she had someone else," Robbie said. "She wanted to marry you, although God knows why." He pressed Jossie back,