It was easy enough to find the pub in question. Called the Royal Oak, it was a mishmash of styles that reflected different periods when extensions had been built upon it. So the place blended cob, half-timber, and brick, and its roof was part thatch and another part slate tiles. Gordon had removed the old thatch right down to the rafters. When Meredith arrived he was in the midst of climbing down from the scaffolding where, beneath the pub’s eponymous oak, his apprentice was organising bundles of reeds. Cammie was happy to play upon a swing at the far side of the pub’s beer garden, so Meredith knew she’d be well occupied while her mum had a chat with the master thatcher.

Gordon didn’t look surprised to see her. Meredith reckoned Gina Dickens had likely reported her visit, and who could blame her? She wondered if, after making her report, Gina had also grilled Gordon on the matter of a car that was not his and on the matter of clothing stored in his attic. She thought the younger woman might have done. She’d seemed unnerved enough when Meredith had brought her more fully into the picture of the place Jemima Hastings had occupied in Gordon Jossie’s life.

Meredith wasted no time with preambles once she saw Cammie climb safely onto the swing. She strode up to Gordon Jossie and she said, “What I’d like to know is how she was supposed to get up to London without her car, Gordon,” and she waited to hear how he’d answer the question and what his face would look like as he did so.

Gordon glanced at his apprentice. He said, “Let’s have a break, Cliff,” and added nothing more till the younger man had nodded and disappeared into the pub. Then he removed the baseball cap he’d been wearing and wiped down his face and his balding pate with a handkerchief that he removed from his jeans. He had his sunglasses on and he didn’t remove them, which, Meredith knew, was going to make it more difficult to read him. She’d always thought he wore dark glasses so often because he didn’t want people to see his shifty eyes, but Jemima had said, “Oh, that’s nonsense,” and apparently thought there was nothing odd about a man in dark glasses rain or shine, sometimes even indoors as well. But that had been the problem from the first: Meredith had thought there were scores of things about Gordon Jossie that just weren’t right, while Jemima had wanted to see none of them. He was, after all, m-a-n, one of a subspecies among whom Jemima had been careening for years like someone controlled by the Pinball Wizard.

Now Gordon removed those dark glasses, but he kept them off only long enough to wipe them down with his handkerchief, whereupon he replaced them, shoved the handkerchief back into his pocket, and said calmly, “What d’you have against me, Meredith?”

“The fact that you separated Jemima from her friends.”

He nodded slowly, as if taking this in. He finally said, “From you, you mean.”

“From everyone, Gordon. You don’t deny it, do you?”

“No point to denying what’s dead wrong, eh? Stupid as well, if you don’t mind me saying. You stopped coming round, didn’t you, so if any separating was being done, you’re the one who did it. D’you want to talk about why?”

“What I want to talk about is why her car’s in your barn. I want to know why you told that…that…that blonde at your house that the car belongs to you. I also want to know why her clothes’re packed up and nothing even vaguely Jemima is on display anywhere.”

“Why am I supposed to tell you all that?”

“Because if you don’t or if you do and I’m not satisfied with what you tell me…” She let the threat hang there. He wasn’t a fool. He knew what the rest of the sentence would be.

Still he said, “What?” He was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and from its breast pocket he took a packet of cigarettes. He shook one out and lit it with a plastic lighter. And then he waited for her reply. He turned his head briefly to look beyond her where, across the street from the pub, a redbrick farmhouse stood at the edge of the heath. The heath itself rolled into the distance, purple with heather. A wood lay beyond it. The treetops seemed to shimmer in the summer heat.

“Oh, just answer me,” Meredith said. “Where is she and why’d she not take her car?”

His head turned towards her once again. “What was she to do with a car up in London? She didn’t take it because she didn’t need it.”

“Then how did she get there?”

“No idea.”

“That’s absurd. You can’t expect me to believe-”

“Train, bus, helicopter, hang glider, roller skates,” he cut in. “I don’t know, Meredith. One day she said she was going and the next day she went. She was gone when I got home from work. I expect she took a taxi into Sway and the train from there. So what?”

“You did something to her.” Meredith hadn’t intended to accuse him, not like this and not so quickly. But the thought of that car and the lies about it and Gina Dickens taking up residence while Jemima’s belongings languished in boxes up in the attic…“Didn’t you?” she demanded. “Rob’s tried to phone her and she’s not answering and she’s not returning his messages and-”

“Interested there, are you? Well, he’s always been available and, all things considered, I suppose it’s a wise move.”

She wanted to strike him. Not so much for the remark, which was totally ridiculous, but for the fact that that’s what he would think, that like Jemima she was always looking for a man, that she was somehow incomplete and unfulfilled and otherwise so…so…so desperate without one that she’d have her female antennae up just in case a free bloke floated by in her vicinity. Which-as it applied to Rob Hastings-was completely absurd as he was fifteen years her senior and she’d known him since she was eight years old.

“So where did this Gina person come from?” she demanded. “How long have you known her? You met her prior to Jemima leaving, didn’t you, Gordon. She’s at the root of all this.”

He shook his head, eloquently communicating both disbelief and disgust. He drew in deeply on his cigarette, in a breath that looked angry to Meredith.

She said, “You met this Gina person-”

“Her name is Gina. Gina Dickens, full stop. Don’t call her ‘this Gina person.’ I don’t much like it.”

“I’m supposed to care about what you don’t like? You met this person and you decided you’d rather have her than Jemima, didn’t you?”

“That’s bloody rubbish. I’m getting back to work.” He turned to do so.

Meredith raised her voice. “You drove her off. She might be in London now but there was never a reason to go there except for you. She had her own business. She’d hired Lexie Streener. She was making a go of the Cupcake Queen, but you didn’t like that, did you? You made it rough for her. And somehow you used that or her interest in it or the hours she was gone or something to make her feel she had to leave. And then you brought in Gina…” It all seemed so reasonable to Meredith, so much the way men behave.

He said again, “I’m getting back to work,” and he walked to the ladder that gave him access to the scaffolding that stretched the length of the building. Before he climbed, though, he turned to her. He said, “For the record, Meredith, Gina didn’t live here-in the New Forest-till June. She came down from Winchester and-”

“That’s where you’re from! You went to school in Winchester. You met her then.” She knew she sounded shrill, but she couldn’t help it. For some reason that she couldn’t identify, she’d begun to feel desperate to know what was going on and had been going on for the months that she and Jemima had been estranged.

Gordon waved her off. “Believe what you want. But what I want is to know why you’ve hated me from the first.”

“This isn’t about me.”

“It’s all about you, and so’s the reason you hated me on sight. Think about that before you come round again. And leave Gina alone while you’re at it.”