Meredith was silent. His hand was still on her arm and he became aware of how hard he was gripping her and how he must be hurting her, actually. He felt her fingers move against his where they were like claws on her bare skin and it came to him that she wasn’t trying to loosen his grip but rather she was caressing his fingers and then his hand, making small, slow circles to tell him that she understood his grief, although the truth of the matter was that she could not understand, nor could anyone else, what it was like to be robbed of everyone, and to have no hope of filling the void.

“’COURSE HE WAS HERE,” HAD BEEN CLIFF COWARD’S CONFIRMATION of Gordon Jossie’s alibi. “Where else’s he s’posed to be, eh?” A short cocky little bloke wearing crusty blue jeans and a sweat-stained headband, he’d been leaning against the bar at his regular watering hole in the village of Winstead, a pint in front of him and an empty crisp bag balled up next to his fist. He played with this as they spoke. He gave few details. They were working on a pub roof near Frith and he expected he’d know well enough if Gordon Jossie hadn’t been there six days ago as it was only the two of them and someone was up on that scaffold grabbing the bundles of reeds as he’d hoisted them up. “’Spect that was Gordon,” he’d said with a grin. “Why? What’s he s’posed to’ve done? Mugged some old lady in Ringwood market square?”

“It’s more a question of murder,” Barbara told him.

Cliff’s face altered, but his story did not. Gordon Jossie had been with him, he said, and Gordon Jossie was no murderer. “I think I’d bloody well know,” he noted. “Been working for him over a year. Who’s he s’posed to have done?”

“Jemima Hastings.”

“Jemima? Not a chance.”

They went from Winstead up to Itchen Abbas, bypassing Winchester on the motorway. On a small property between Itchen Abbas and the hamlet of Abbotstone, they found the master thatcher at whose side Gordon Jossie had worked years earlier to learn the trade. He was called Ringo Heath-“Don’t ask,” Heath said sourly. “It might have been John, Paul, or George and don’t I bloody well know it”-and when they arrived, he was seated on a battered bench, on the shady side of a brick house. He seemed to be whittling, as in one hand he had a wicked-looking knife with a sharp blade curving into a hook, and he was applying this to a thin switch, splitting it first and then sharpening both of its ends into arrow-tip points. At his feet lay a pile of switches yet to be seen to. In a wooden box next to him on the bench, he was placing those that had already been whittled. To Barbara, they looked like toothpicks for a giant, each of them perhaps a yard or more long. They also looked like potential weapons. As did the knife itself, which she learned was called a spar hook. And the toothpicks were the spars, which were used to make staples.

Heath held one up, extended between his two palms. He bent it nearly double and then released it. It sprang back to its original straight line. “Pliable,” he told them although they hadn’t asked. “Hazel wood. You c’n use willow at a pinch, but hazel’s best.” It would be twisted into a staple, he told them, and the staple would be used to hold the reed in place once it was in position on the rooftop. “Gets buried in the reeds and eventually rots away, but that’s no matter. Reeds’re all compressed by then and that’s what you want: compression. Best rooftop money can buy, thatch is. It’s not all about chocolate-box houses and front gardens done up with pansies, is it?”

“I expect not,” Barbara said cooperatively. “What d’you think, Winnie?”

“Looks good to me, roof like that,” Nkata said. “Bit of a problem with fire, I’d ’spect.”

“Bah, nonsense,” Heath said. “Old wives’ tale.”

Barbara doubted it. But they weren’t there to talk about the flammable nature of reeds on rooftops. She stated their purpose: Gordon Jossie and his apprenticeship with Ringo Heath. They’d phoned Heath in advance to track him down. He’d said, “Scotland Yard? What’re you lot doing out here?” but otherwise he’d been cooperative.

What could he tell them about Gordon Jossie? Barbara began. Did he remember him?

“Oh. Aye. No reason to forget Gordon.” Heath continued his work as he gave his history with Jossie. He’d come to work as an apprentice a bit older than usual. He’d been twenty-one. Usually an apprentice was sixteen “which’s better for training as they don’t know a thing about a thing, do they, and they’re still at the point when they even might believe they don’t know a thing about a thing, eh? But twenty-one’s a bit old ’cause you don’t want some bloke set in his ways. I was a bit reluctant to take him on.”

But take him on he did, and things turned out well. Hard worker, Jossie was. A bloke who talked very little and listened a lot and “didn’t go round wearing those sodding earphones with music blasting away like kids do now. Half the time you can’t even get their attention, eh? You’re up on the scaffold shouting at ’em and they’re down below listening to whoever and bobbing their heads to the beat.” He said this last word scornfully, a man who obviously did not share his namesake’s passion for music.

Jossie, on the other hand, hadn’t been like the typical apprentice. And he’d been willing to do anything he’d been assigned to do, without claiming something was “beneath him or rubbish like that.” Once he was given actual thatching jobs to do-which, by the way, did not happen for the first nine months of his apprenticeship-he wasn’t ever above asking a question. And it would be a good question and never once did it have to do with “How much money c’n I expect to make, Ringo?” like he was thinking he’d be going out to buy some Maserati on what a thatcher makes. “It’s a good living, I tell him, but it’s not that good, so if you’re ’specting to impress the ladies with golden cuff links or whatever, you’re barking up a tree with no leaves, if you know what I mean. What I tell him is that there’s always need for a thatcher ’cause we’re talking ’bout listed buildings, eh? And they’re all round the south and up into Gloucestershire and beyond and they got to stay thatched. There’s no replacing ’em with tiles or anything else. So if you’re good-and he meant to be good, let me tell you-you work all year and you’ve gen’rally got more bookings than you c’n handle.”

Gordon Jossie had apparently been a model apprentice: With no complaint he’d started out doing nothing more than fetching, carrying, hoisting, cleaning up, burning rubbish-and according to Heath he “did it all right, mind you. No cutting corners. I could tell he was going to be good when I got him on the scaffold. This is detail work, this is. Oh, it looks like slapping reeds onto the rafters and that’s that, doesn’t it, but it’s step-by-step and a decent roof-a big one, say-takes months to put on ’cause it’s not like laying tiles or pounding shingles, is it? It’s working with a natural product, it is, so there’s no two reeds the same diameter and the length of them’s not exact. This is something takes patience and skill and it takes years to get it down so you can do a roof properly.”

Gordon Jossie worked for him as an apprentice for nearly four years, and by that time he’d gone far beyond the apprentice stage and was more like a partner. In fact, Ringo Heath had wanted to bring him on as a bona fide partner, but Gordon wanted to have his own business. So he’d left with Heath’s blessing, and had begun the way they all began: subcontracted to someone with a larger concern till he was able to break out on his own.

“Ever since, I end up with one after ’nother lazy sods to work as apprentices,” Heath concluded, “and believe me, I’d take ’nother older bloke like Gordon Jossie in the blink of an eye, if one came round.”