“Cupcake business?” Nkata asked the question. “What’d that be?”

“The Cupcake Queen. Sounds daft, eh? But thing is, she was that good in the kitchen, quite a hand with baking, Jemima. She had a score of customers buying cupcakes off her, fancy decorated and the like, special occasions, holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, gatherings. Worked herself up to being able to open a business of it in Ringwood-that would be the Cupcake Queen-and it was doing good, but then it all came to naught ’cause she left Jossie and she left the area.”

As Nkata noted this, Barbara said, “Gordon Jossie tells us he has no idea why Jemima left him.”

Hastings snorted. “He told me he reckoned she had someone on the side and left him for that one.”

“What did she tell you?”

“That she was going off to think.”

“That’s all, is it?”

“That’s the limit. That’s what she said. She needed time to think.” Hastings rubbed his hands on his face. “Thing is, I didn’t see that as bad, you know? That she wanted to go off? I reckoned that finally she didn’t want to rush things with some bloke, that she wanted to get herself sorted before she settled it permanently with someone. I thought it was a good idea.”

“But she didn’t indicate anything more than that?”

“Nothing more than she was going off to think. She stayed in touch with me regular. Got herself a new mobile and let me know she’d done it ’cause Gordon kept ringing her, but I didn’t consider what that could mean, see. Just that he wanted her back. Well, so did I.”

“Did you?”

“I bloody well did. She’s…She’s all I had in the way of family. I wanted her home.”

“Here, you mean?” Barbara asked.

“Just home. However she wanted that to mean. Long as it was Hampshire.”

Barbara nodded and asked for a list of Jemima’s friends and acquaintances in the area, as best he could give it them. She also told him they would need-regretfully-to know his own whereabouts on the day his sister died. Last, they asked him what he knew of Jemima’s activities in London and he said that he knew little enough except that she had “someone up there, some new bloke that she was ‘madly in love with.’ As usual.”

“Did she give you his name?”

“Wouldn’t even whisper it. It was all brand new, she said, this relationship, and she didn’t want to throw a spanner in it. All she’d say was that she was over the moon. That and ‘this is the one.’ Well, she’d said that before, hadn’t she? She always said it. So I didn’t take much notice.”

“That’s all you know? Nothing at all about him?”

Hastings appeared to consider this. Next to him, Frank gave a gusty sigh. He’d lowered himself to the floor, but when Hastings moved restlessly in his chair, the dog was up at once, attending to him. Hastings smiled at the animal and pulled gently on one of his ears. He said, “She’d started taking ice-skating instruction. God knows why, but that was Jemima. There’s a rink named after the Queen or some other Royal, maybe the Prince of Wales, and…” He shook his head. “I expect it was her skating instructor. That’d be just like Jemima. Someone skating her round the rink with his arm round her waist? She’d fall for that. She’d think it meant something when all it meant was that he was keeping her on her feet.”

“Like that, was she?” Nkata asked. “Taking things wrong?”

“Always taking things to mean love when they meant nothing of the sort,” Hastings said.

ONCE THE POLICE had left him, Robbie Hastings went above stairs. He wanted to remove the smell of dead pony with a shower. He also wanted a place to weep.

He realised how little the police had told him: death in a cemetery somewhere in London and that was all. He also realised how little he had asked them. Not how she had died, not where she had died within the cemetery, and not even when, exactly. Not who had found her. Not what did they know so far. And recognising this, he felt deep shame. He wept for that as much as he wept for the incalculable loss of his little sister. It came to him that as long as he’d had Jemima, no matter where she was, he hadn’t ever been completely alone. But now his life seemed finished. He couldn’t imagine how he would cope.

But that was the absolute end of what he would allow himself. There were things to be done. He got out of the shower, put on fresh clothes, and went out to the Land Rover. Frank hopped in beside him and together he and the dog traveled west, towards Ringwood. It was slow country driving, which gave him time to think. What he thought of was Jemima and what she had told him in their many conversations after she’d gone to London. What he tried to recall was anything that might have indicated she was on a path to her death.

It could have been a random killing, but he didn’t think it was. Not only could he not begin to face the possibility that his sister had merely been the victim of someone who had seen her and decided that she was perfect for one of those sick thrill killings so commonplace these days, but also there was the matter of where she had been. The Jemima he knew didn’t go into cemeteries. The last thing she wanted was to be reminded of death. She never read obituaries, she didn’t go to films if she knew a leading character was going to die, she avoided books with unhappy endings, and she turned newspapers facedown if death was on the front page as it so often was. So if she’d entered a cemetery on her own, she had a reason for doing so. And a reflection on Jemima’s life led him to the one reason he didn’t really want to consider.

A rendezvous. The latest bloke she’d been mad about was likely married. That wouldn’t have mattered to Jemima. Married or single, partnered or partnerless…These were fine distinctions she wouldn’t have made. Where love-as she considered it-was concerned, she would have seen the greater good as making a connection with a man. She would have defined as love whatever it was between them. She would have called it love, and she would have expected it would run the course of love as she saw it: two people fulfilling each other as soul mates-another daft term of hers-and then having miraculously found each other, walking hand in hand into happily ever after. When that did not happen, she would cling and demand. And then what? he asked himself. Then what, Jemima?

He wanted to blame Gordon Jossie for what had happened to his sister. He knew that Jossie had been looking for her. Jemima had told him as much although not how she knew this, so at the time he’d thought it could well be just another one of her fancies. But if Gordon Jossie had been looking and if he had found her, he could have gone up to London…

Why was the problem. Jossie had another lover now. So had Jemima if she was to be believed. So what was the point? Dog in the manger? It had been known to happen. A bloke is rejected, finds another woman, but still cannot rid his mind of the first one. He decides the only way to scour his brain of the memories associated with her is to eliminate her so he can move on with her replacement. Jemima had been, upon Jossie’s own admission and despite his age, his first lover. And that first rejection is always the worst, isn’t it?

Those eyes of his behind the dark glasses, Robbie thought. The fact that he had so little to say. Hard worker, Jossie, but what did that mean? Strong focus on one thing-building his business-could just as easily turn into strong focus on something else.

Robbie thought all this as he made his way to Ringwood. He would face off with Jossie, he decided, but now wasn’t the time. He wanted to see him without Jemima’s replacement at his side.

Ringwood was tricky to negotiate. Robbie came at it from Hightown Hill. This forced him to drive past the abandoned Cupcake Queen, which he couldn’t bear to look at. He parked the Land Rover not far from the parish church of St. Peter and Paul, overlooking the market square from a hillock where it rose among ancient graves. From the car park, Robbie could hear the constant rumble and even smell the exhaust of the lorries chugging along the Ringwood Bypass. From the market square he could see the bright flowers in the church’s graveyard and the hand-washed fronts of the Georgian buildings along the high street. It was in the high street that Gerber & Hudson Graphic Design had its small suite of offices, above a shop called Food for Thought. He told Frank to stay in the doorway there, and he went up the stairs.