but she made no stop there any more than she'd stopped anywhere else along the way. Instead she now headed south towards Lyndhurst, and while Meredith gave fleeting thought to the Mad Hatter Tea Rooms and Gina Dickens' bed-sit, it made absolutely no sense to her that Gina would drive to Lyndhurst by this circuitous route.
Thus, Meredith could hardly call herself surprised when Gina cruised even farther south, kept up the pace through Brockenhurst, and finally dipped onto the road towards Sway. Sway, of course, was not her destination and Meredith had twigged this long before Gina made no turn towards that village. Instead, she ended up back at Gordon Jossie's holding, where she had begun her wild ride, like Mr. Toad in his new motorcar, as if out for a morning cruise to waste petrol and time.
Meredith cursed: for being a fool, for putting her employment at risk, and for being seen, as she must have been seen for Gina to have driven so uselessly round the countryside. She also cursed Gina for being wily, more than a match for Meredith and likely more than a match for everyone else.
Still, she paused for a moment instead of admitting defeat and heading to Ringwood with a ready excuse to give to Mr. Hudson as to the lateness of her arrival.
She pulled back into the spot she'd earlier chosen to keep watch on Gordon Jossie's house, and she thought about her own consideration of Gina's lengthy drive round the New Forest. Wasting petrol and time, she'd concluded just a moment earlier, and she realised there was something to this simple conclusion and that something was the wasting of time. Killing time was the expression she wanted. If Gina Dickens hadn't spotted Meredith, wasn't it possible that killing time was what she had been doing?
As Meredith weighed this possibility and the reasons for it, the likeliest was the most obvious as well: She was killing time so that Gordon Jossie would leave the property for his own employment, allowing Gina to return.
This did actually seem to be the reason, Meredith saw, for from her place of hiding she heard the slam of the Mini Cooper's door, followed by a second door slam coming from the cottage as Gina went inside. Meredith left the Polo then, and she sought a vantage point where roaming animals had munched a spy hole in the hedge along Gordon's property. From here, Meredith could see both the cottage and the west paddock and, as she observed them, Gina emerged from the cottage again.
She'd changed her clothes. Where before she'd worn a summer sundress, now she'd donned jeans and a T-shirt, and she'd covered her blond head with a baseball cap. She strode over to the barn, disappeared within, and a few moments later came out trundling a wheelbarrow from which the handles of various tools stuck out. She wheeled this over to the west paddock.
There she opened the gate and then went inside. Considering the wheelbarrow and the tools, Meredith first concluded that, now the ponies were gone, Gina intended to shovel up their manure and cart it off to a compost heap for future use. It seemed a mad sort of employment for someone like Gina, but at this point Meredith was beginning to reckon that pretty much anything was possible.
Gina, however, began gardening, of all bloody things. Not taking up or putting down manure, but rather clipping madly away on an overgrown area at the far side of the paddock, where Gordon Jossie had not made much progress in his rehabilitation of the fencing. Bracken, weeds, and brambles grew here. They formed a mound that Gina was attacking with some considerable vigour. Reluctantly, Meredith had to admire the energy that the young woman was putting into the activity. She herself could have lasted no more than five minutes given the strength and the fury of Gina's progress. She clipped, she threw, she dug, she clipped. She threw, she dug. She clipped again. The casual nature of her drive round the countryside appeared to be cast aside. She was completely single-minded of purpose. Meredith wondered what the purpose was.
She had no time to dwell on possibilities, however. As she watched, a car pulled into the holding's driveway, having come to Gordon Jossie's property from the direction beyond where Meredith was standing. She waited to see what would happen next, and somehow she was not the least surprised when Chief Superintendent Whiting looked round for a moment