Kitabı oku: «The Grave Tattoo»

The Prelude

September 2005

All landscapes hold their own secrets. Layer on layer, the past is buried beneath the surface. Seldom irretrievable, it lurks, waiting for human agency or meteorological accident to force the skeleton up through flesh and skin back into the present. Like the poor, the past is always with us.

That summer, it rained as if England had been transported to the tropics. Water fell in torrents, wrecking glorious gardens, turning meadows into quagmires where livestock struggled hock-deep in mud. Rivers burst their banks, their suddenly released waters finding their own level by demolishing whatever was vulnerable in their path. In the flooded streets of one previously picturesque village, cars were swept up like toys and deposited in the harbour, choking it in a chaos of mangled metal. Landslips swamped cars with mud and farmers mourned lost crops.

No part of the country was immune from the sheets of stinging rain. City and countryside alike struggled under the weight of water. In the Lake District, it sheeted down over fell and dale, subtly altering the contours of a centuries-old landscape. The water levels in the lakes reached record summer highs; the only discernible benefit was that when the sun did occasionally shine, it revealed a lusher green than usual.

Above the village of Fellhead on the shores of Langmere, ancient peat hags were carved into new shapes under the onslaught of water. And as autumn crept in, gradually the earth gave up one of its close-held secrets.

From a distance, it looked like a scrunched-up tarpaulin stained brown by the brackish water of the bog. At first glance, it seemed insignificant; another piece of discarded rubbish that had worked its way to the surface. But closer inspection revealed something far more chilling. Something that would reach across the centuries and bring even more profound changes in its wake than the weather.

My beloved son,

I trust you and the children are in good health. I have found this day troubling matter in your father’s hand. It may surprise you that, in spite of the close confidence between us, I was in ignorance of this while he lived, and wish heartily I had remained in that state. You, will easily see the need for secrecy while your father lived, and he left me no instructions concerning its disposition. Since it closely touches you, and may be the occasion of more pain, I wish to leave to you the decision as to what should be done. I will convey the matter to you by a faithful hand. You must do as you see fit.

Your loving Mother

1

The way it rained that summer It would have broken your heart to see. It smashed its sheets to smithereens And flowed down the corrugated roofs Of dismal railway stations. And I would sit waiting for trains, Feet in puddles, My head starry with rain, Thinking of you miles from me In Grecian sunlight Where rain never falls.

Jane Gresham stared at what she had written then with an impatient stroke of her pen crossed it through so firmly the paper tore and split in the wake of the nib. Bloody Jake, she thought angrily. She was a grownup, not some lovestruck adolescent. Sub-poetic maundering was something she should have left behind years ago. She’d had insight enough to know she was never going to be a poet by the time she’d finished her first degree. Studying other people’s poetry was what she was good at; interpreting their work, exploring thematic links in their verse and opening up their complexity to those who were, she hoped, an assorted number of steps behind her in the process. ‘Bloody, bloody Jake,’ she said out loud, crumpling the paper savagely and tossing it in the bin. He wasn’t worth the expense of her intellectual energy. Nor the familiar claw of pain that grabbed at her chest at the thought of him.

Eager to shunt aside thoughts of Jake, Jane turned to the stack of CDs beside the desk in the poky room that the council classified as a bedroom but which she called, with knowing pretentiousness, her study. She scanned the titles, deliberately starting at the bottom, looking for something that held no resonance of her…what was he? Her ex? Her erstwhile lover? Her lover-in-abeyance? Who knew? She certainly didn’t. And she doubted very much whether he gave her a second thought from one week to the next. Muttering at herself under her breath, she pulled out Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads and slotted it into the CD drive of her computer. The dark growl of his voice matched her mood so perfectly, it became a paradoxical antidote. In spite of herself, Jane found she was almost smiling.

She picked up the book she had been attempting to study before Jake Hartnell had intruded on her thoughts. But it took her only a few minutes to realise how far her focus had drifted. Irritated with herself again, she slammed it shut. Wordsworth’s letters of 1807 would have to wait.

Before she could decide what to attack next, the alarm on her mobile phone beeped. Jane frowned, checking the time on her phone against the watch on her wrist. ‘Hell and damnation,’ she said. How could it be half past eleven already? Where had the morning gone?

‘Bloody Jake,’ she said again, jumping to her feet and switching off her computer. All that time wasted mooning over him when there were better things to be passionate about. She grabbed her bag and went through to the other room. Officially this was the living room, but Jane used it as a bedsit, preferring to have a completely separate space to work in. It made the rest of her life even more cramped by comparison, but that felt like a small price to pay for the luxury of having somewhere she could lay out her books and papers without having to shift them every time she wanted to eat or sleep.

The small room could barely accommodate even her Spartan existence. Her sofa bed, although folded away now, dominated the space. A table sat against the opposite wall, three wooden chairs tucked under it. A small TV set was mounted on a bracket high on the wall, and a bean bag slouched in the furthest corner. But the room was fresh, its soft green paintwork clean and light. On the wall opposite the sofa hung a series of digital colour photographs of the Lake District, blown up to A3 size and laminated. At the heart of the landscape, Gresham’s Farm, where her family had eked out a meagre living as far back as anyone could trace. No matter what was outside her windows, Jane could wake up in the morning to the world she’d grown up in, the world she still missed every city day.

She stripped off her sweatpants and fleece top, swapping them for tight-fitting black jeans and a black v-neck stretch top that accentuated generous breasts. It wasn’t her first choice of outfit, but experience had taught her that making the most of her assets meant better tips from customers. Luckily her olive skin meant she didn’t look terminal in black, and her co-worker Harry had assured her she didn’t look as lumpy as she felt in the tight top. A glance outside the window at the weather and she grabbed her rainproof jacket from its hook, shrugging into it as she hurried towards the front door. She didn’t care that it lacked any pretence of chic; in this downpour, she cared more about arriving at work dry and warm.

Jane took her invariable last look at the Lakeland vista before walking into a completely different universe. She doubted whether anyone in Fellhead could conjure up her present environment even in their worst imaginings. When she’d told her mother she’d been granted a council flat on the Marshpool Farm Estate, Judy Gresham’s face had lit up. ‘That’s nice, love,’ she’d said. ‘I didn’t know you got farms in London.’

Jane shook her head in amused exasperation. ‘There hasn’t been a farm there in donkey’s years, Mum. It’s a sixties council estate. Concrete as far as the eye can see.’

Her mother’s face fell. ‘Oh. Well, at least you’ve got a roof over your head.’

They’d left it at that. Jane knew her mother well enough to know that she wouldn’t want the truth–that Jane had so few qualifying points that the only accommodation the council was going to offer her was exactly the sort of place she’d ended up with. A hard-to-let box on a run-down East End estate where almost nobody had any form of legitimate employment, where kids ran wild day and night, and where there were more used condoms and hypodermic needles than blades of grass. No, Judy Gresham definitely wouldn’t like to think of her daughter living somewhere like that. Apart from anything else, it would seriously impair her ability to boast about how well their Jane was doing.

She’d told her brother Matthew, however. Anything to blunt the edge of the resentment he carried because she was the one who had got away while he’d been left, in his words, to rot in the back of beyond because somebody had to stay for the sake of their parents. It didn’t matter that, as the elder, he’d been the first to fly the nest for university and that he’d chosen to come back to the job he’d always wanted. Matthew, Jane thought, had been born aggrieved.

The irony, of course, was that Jane would have swapped London for Fellhead in the blink of an eye if it had held the faintest possibility of doing the work she loved. But there were no jobs for academics in the Lakes, not even for a Wordsworth specialist like her. Not unless she wanted to swap intellectual rigour and research for lecturing to schoolkids about the Lakeland poets. Nothing would kill her passion for the words faster than that, she knew. So instead, she was stuck in the worst kind of urban hell. Jane tucked her head into her chest as she walked along the galleried balcony to the stairs. By what she could only believe to be the evil whim of the architect, her block had been constructed so that the prevailing wind was funnelled down the walkways, rendering even a gentle summer breeze blustery and uncomfortable. On a showery autumn day, it drove the rain into every nook and cranny of the building as well as the clothes of any inhabitants who bothered to emerge from their flats.

Jane turned into the stairwell and gained a brief respite. No point in even trying the lift. Ignoring the badly spelled graffiti, the unsavoury collections of rubbish blown into the corners and the stink of decay and piss, she trotted downwards. At the first turn of the stairs, her stomach flipped over. It was a sight she’d seen so often she knew she should have been inured to it, but every time she saw the tiny frame perched precariously in the lotus position on the narrow concrete banister three floors up, Jane’s knees trembled.

‘Hey, Jane,’ the slight figure called softly.

‘Hey, Tenille,’ Jane replied, forcing a smile through her fear.

With what felt like death-defying casualness, Tenille unfolded her legs and dropped down to the dank concrete next to Jane. ‘Whatchu know?’ the thirteen-year-old demanded as she fell into step beside her.

‘I know I’m going to be late for work if I don’t get a move on,’ Jane said, letting gravity give her momentum as she took the stairs at a faster pace. Tenille kept stride with her, her long dreads bouncing on her narrow shoulders.

‘I’ll walk wi’chu,’ Tenille said, her attempt at a swagger a pathetic parody of the wannabe gangstas that hung around the dismal maze of the estate learning their trade from older brothers, cousins and anyone else who managed to stay out of custody for long enough to teach them.

‘I hate to sound like a middle-aged, middle-class pain in the arse, Tenille, but shouldn’t you be in school?’ It was an old line and Jane mentally predicted the response.

‘Teachers got nothin’ to say to me,’ Tenille said mechanically, lengthening her stride to catch up with Jane as they hit street level. ‘What they know about my livin’?’

Jane sighed. ‘I get so tired of hearing the same old, same old from you, Tenille. You’re way too smart to settle for the crap that’s coming your way unless you get enough of an education to sidestep it.’

Tenille stuffed her hands into the pockets of her skinny fake leather jacket and raised her narrow shoulders defensively. ‘Fuck dat,’ she said. ‘I ain’t gonna be no mo’fo’s incubator. None of that baby mamma drama for Tenille.’

They cut through a walkway under the block of flats and emerged beside a stretch of dual carriageway where cars surged past, their drivers rejoicing at finally getting out of second gear, their tyres hissing on the wet tarmac. ‘Hard to see how you’re going to avoid it unless you harness your brain,’ Jane said drily, keeping well away from the kerb and the spray of the passing vehicles.

‘I wanna be like you, Jane.’ It was a plaintive cry that Jane had heard from Tenille more times than she could count.

‘So go to school,’ she said, trying not to let her exasperation show.

‘I hate the useless stuff they make us do,’ Tenille said, a lip-curling sneer transforming her unselfconscious attractiveness into a mask of scorn. ‘It’s not like what you give me to read.’ Her speech had shifted from street to standard English, as if leaving the confines of the estate allowed her to slip from persona to person.

‘I’m sure it isn’t. But I’m not where I want to be yet, you know. Working part-time in bars and seminar rooms while I get my book finished so I can land a proper job is not what I had in mind when I started out. But I still had to go through the same crap to get even this far. And yes, mostly I did think it was crap,’ she continued, drowning whatever Tenille had been about to add. She wished there was something she could offer apart from platitudes, but she didn’t know what else to say to a thirteen-year-old mixed-race orphan who not only adored but also seemed to grasp the significance of the writings of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and De Quincey with an ease that had taken Jane herself a decade of close study to achieve.

Tenille sidestepped to avoid a buggy containing a moon-faced toddler, chocolate smeared across its cheeks, a dummy jammed in its mouth like a stopper designed to keep the chubby child inflated. The pram pusher didn’t look that much older than Tenille herself. ‘I’m not going to make it that way, Jane,’ Tenille said despondently. ‘Maybe I could use the poetry another way. Be a rapper like Ms Dynamite,’ she added without conviction.

They both knew it was never going to happen. Not unless someone invented a self-esteem drug that Jane could pump into Tenille’s veins ahead of the heroin that kept what seemed like half the estate sedated. Jane halted at the bus stop, turning to face Tenille. ‘Nobody can ever take the words out of your head,’ she said.

Tenille picked at a chewed fingernail and stared at the pavement. ‘You think I don’t know that?’ she almost shouted. ‘How the fuck else do you think I survive?’ Suddenly she spun round on the balls of her feet and she was off, scudding down the uneven pavement like a gazelle, long limbs surprisingly elegant in motion. She disappeared into an alley and Jane felt the familiar mixture of affection and frustration. It stayed with her on the ten-minute bus ride and it still nagged her as she pushed open the door of the wine bar.

Five minutes before noon, the Viking Bar and Grill felt hollow with emptiness. The blond wood, chrome and glass still gleamed in the halogen spots, evidence that nobody had been in since the cleaner finished her shift. Harry had put Michael Nyman’s music from The End of the Affair on the CD player, and the strings seemed almost to shimmer visibly in the calm air. In twenty minutes’ time, the Viking would be transformed as the city slickers piled in, desperate to cram as much food and drink into their short lunch breaks as they could. The air would thicken with conversation, body heat and smoke, and Jane wouldn’t have a second to think about anything other than the press of bodies at the bar.

For now, though, it was peaceful. Harry Lambton stood at one end of the long pale birch curve of the bar, leaning on his forearms as he skimmed the morning paper. The light gleamed on the spiky halo of his short fair hair, turning him into a post-modern saint. He glanced up at the sound of Jane’s feet on the wooden floor and sketched a wave of greeting, a smile animating his sharp, narrow face. ‘Still raining?’ he asked.

‘Still raining.’ Jane leaned in and planted a kiss on Harry’s cheek as she passed him on her way to the cubbyhole where the staff hung their coats. ‘Everybody in?’ she asked as she returned to the main bar, corralling her long dark corkscrew curls and pushing them into a scrunchy.

Harry nodded. That was a relief, Jane thought, slipping past Harry’s tightly muscled back and checking everything was where she needed it to be for her shift to run as smoothly as possible. She’d landed this job because Harry’s boyfriend Dan was a friend and colleague at the university, but she didn’t want anybody accusing her of taking advantage of that relationship. Besides, Harry claimed that managing the bar was only a stopgap. One day he might decide what he wanted to do with his life and Jane didn’t want to provide her co-workers with any excuse to grass her up to a new boss as lazy or incompetent. Working at the Viking was demanding, exhausting and poorly paid, but she needed the job.

‘I finally came up with a title,’ she said, tying the long white bistro apron round her waist. ‘For the book.’ Harry cocked his head interrogatively. ‘The Laureate of Spin: Politics, Poetics and Pretence in the Writings of William Wordsworth. What do you think?’

Harry frowned, considering. ‘I like it,’ he said. ‘Makes the boring old bastard sound halfway interesting.’

‘Interesting is good, it sells books.’

Harry nodded, flicking over a page of his paper and giving it a cursory look. Then his dark blue eyes narrowed and frown lines appeared between his sandy brows. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Isn’t Fellhead where you come from?’

Jane turned, a bottle of olives in her hand. ‘That’s right. Don’t tell me somebody finally did something newsworthy?’

Harry raised his eyebrows. ‘You could say that. They found a body.’

I am minded tonight of the time we spent at Alfoxden, & the suspicion that fell upon Coleridge and myself, viz. that we were agents of the enemy, gathering information as spies for Bonaparte. I recall Coleridge’s assertion that it was beyond the bounds of good sense to give credence to the notion that poets were suited for such an endeavour since we see all before us as matter for our verse & would have no inclination to hold any secrets to our breasts that might serve our calling. In that important respect, he was correct, for the events of this day already ferment within me, seeking an expression, in verse. But in the more important respect of maintaining our own counsel, I pray he is mistaken, for my encounter within the secluded bounds of our garden has already laid a heavy burden of knowledge on my shoulders, a burden that could yet bear down heavy on me and on my family. At first, I believed myself to be dreaming, for I hold no belief in the ghostly manifestations of the dead. But this was no apparition. It was a man of flesh and blood, a man I had thought never to see more.

2

Matthew Gresham gulped his last mouthful of coffee and dumped the mug in the sink. Members of staff were supposed to do their own washing up, but Matthew reckoned there had to be some advantages to rank so ever since his promotion to head teacher he’d left his dirty crockery for someone else to deal with. Besides, he had more important things to occupy him. So far nobody had commented on his presumptuousness, though he’d noticed disapproving glares from Marcia Porter more than once. But Marcia was a busted flush. When he’d leapfrogged her into the top job, she’d stopped trying to get the world to bend to her will. It was as if she’d thrown in the towel. She might not like what Matthew did, but she didn’t attempt to challenge him. Not like before, when they were theoretically equal except for her constant assertion of her seniority. These days, she gave him as wide a berth as was possible in a village school with a staff of five teachers and four teaching assistants.

Teaching assistants. That was a joke. Mothers with time on their hands and the misplaced notion that somehow, merely by giving birth, they had the inside track on how to educate kids. But they’d gone through the school system before SATs and the National Curriculum. They didn’t have a bloody clue about the pressures that real teachers like him had to live with on a daily basis. Matthew missed no opportunity to remind them of how much the world had changed. The main result was that, as with the rest of his staff, they spent as little time as possible slacking in the staffroom. That suited Matthew fine; his office was, to his way of thinking, barely adequate for his needs. He much preferred working in the staffroom, where he could brew himself a coffee whenever he felt like it.

He had to stoop to glance in the mirror above the sink which had been placed to suit the stature of female teachers rather than six-foot headmasters. Dark blue eyes stared back at him from olive skin a couple of shades darker than the local norm. The legacy of his Cornish grandfather, passed on to Matthew and Jane from their mother. He ran a hand through the dark mop of mutinous curls, inherited from the other side of the family. They looked glorious on his sister but simply made him feel like a poor man’s Harpo Marx. He smiled wryly, thinking of the lesson he was about to teach the top two classes. Genealogy and genetics, those twisted strands that wrapped around each other like the double helix of DNA, complete with the kinks that could have all kinds of unforeseen consequences. There was no doubting his relationship to his sister nor his parentage. Their father had the same corkscrew curls, as had his father before him.

The bell rang for afternoon classes and Matthew hurried out of the staffroom. As he approached the classroom, he heard a low murmur of conversation which stilled when the fifteen children saw him appear in the doorway. One of the benefits of small rural schools, Matthew thought. They still learned manners along with the National Curriculum. He didn’t envy the poor sods who had to teach the kids on the estate where Jane lived. ‘Good afternoon, children,’ he said, his long legs quickly covering the short distance to his desk.

‘Good afternoon, Mr Gresham,’ the class chorused raggedly.

He opened up his laptop and hit the key to take it out of slumber mode. Immediately the interactive whiteboard behind him showed a screen which read Family Trees. Matthew perched on the edge of his desk, from where he could easily reach the keyboard. ‘Today we’re beginning an important new project which will form part of the village Christmas celebrations. Now, one thing every one of us has is ancestors. Who can tell me what an ancestor is?’

A small boy with a thick mop of black hair and a face like a baby spider monkey shot a hand into the air. He bounced on his chair with eagerness.

‘Sam?’ Matthew said, trying not to sound weary. It was always Sam Clewlow.

‘It’s your family, sir. Not your family that’s alive now, but all the ones that came before. Like, your grandparents and their grandparents.’

‘That’s right. Our ancestors are the people who came before us. Who made us what we are. Every one of us is who we are and what we are because of the way our genes were combined down the ages. Now, does anyone know what a family tree is?’

Sam Clewlow’s hand rose again. The others looked on in indifference or satisfaction that Sam was doing all the work and saving them the bother. This time, he didn’t wait to be asked. ‘Sir, it’s like a map of your family history. It’s got everybody’s birthdays, and when they got married and who to, and when they had children and when they died and everything.’

‘You’ve got it, Sam. And what we’re going to do over the next few weeks is to try to map our own families. That’ll be easier for some of you than others–those of you whose families have lived locally for generations will be able to track them from parish records. It will be harder for those of you whose families are relative newcomers to the area. But one of the things we’ll be doing during this project is exploring the many different ways we can go about mapping our past. The thing about this project is that it’s one where you’ll have to work with the other members of your family, especially the older ones such as grandparents and great-aunts and–uncles.’ Again, Matthew felt grateful that he wasn’t stuck in some inner-city sink school. A project like this would be impossible to contemplate there, with its fragmented lives and alternative views of what constituted a family. But in Fellhead, either they’d lived in extended families for generations or else they were incomers from the sort of nice middle-class family where, even when they pretended to be New Age, marriage certificates were still the order of the day more often than not.

‘To show you the kind of thing we’ll be doing, I’m going to show you my own family tree.’ He clicked the mouse button and his name came up on the screen. Underneath it was his date of birth. He clicked again and this time his name was linked to Diane Brotherton with an ‘equals’ sign. ‘Can you guess what that sign means? Jonathan?’ he asked a chunky red-haired boy, ignoring Sam’s eager hand.

Jonathan Bramley looked faintly startled. He frowned in concentration. ‘Dunno,’ he finally conceded.

Trying not to show his exasperation, Matthew said patiently, ‘It means “married to”. Mrs Gresham was Diane Brotherton until she married me.’ He clicked again and a vertical line appeared, connecting them to Gabriel Stephen Gresham.

‘That’s your baby,’ one of the girls piped up unprompted.

‘That’s right, Kylie.’ Matthew clicked again. Now little thumbnail pictures appeared beside each of the names. ‘We can even add photos. That way, we can see how family resemblances move between generations. Now, we can all start our family trees with what we know already.’ He tapped the keyboard and brought up another screen. This showed his parents and his sister, complete with photos, places of birth and occupations.

‘But we’re going to do more than that. We’re going to delve into the past and trace our family trees as far as we can.’ This time, the family tree he displayed included his grandparents–one grandfather an incomer, a refugee from the Cornish tin mines who had come to the Lakes to mine slate, the other a Cumberland shepherd–and his aunts, uncles and cousins.

‘And one of the things we are going to learn about is the way a community like ours has grown through the years. We’ll find all sorts of connections between families that you might not even have known about yourselves. You may even discover common ancestors, and you’ll start to get a sense of how people’s lives have changed over the centuries.’ Matthew’s gift for sharing his enthusiasm was working on the children now. They were hanging on his words.

‘We’re going to begin with your immediate family. Look at my family tree on the board so you know how to lay it out on the page. And tonight, when you go home, you can ask the rest of the family to help you fill in the gaps. As we continue, we’ll explore different ways of discovering more information about your history and your ancestors. Now, find a fresh page in your workbooks and make a start.’

Matthew waited till they had all got going, then he sat down behind the desk. He pulled a pile of maths workbooks towards him and started marking the children’s work. His absorption was disturbed by a muttering and sniggering that ran round the room. When he looked up, Sam Clewlow was flushed, his eyes bright with unshed tears. Jonathan Bramley looked gleeful.

‘What’s going on?’ Matthew demanded, getting to his feet. Nobody met his eye. ‘Jonathan? What’s going on?’

Jonathan’s mouth compressed in a tight line. He didn’t know it yet, but he would spend the rest of his life being caught out by his own stupidity and the concomitant inability to dissemble. ‘Nothing,’ he muttered eventually.

‘You can tell me now or you can stay after school and tell me then,’ Matthew said, his voice hard. He’d never understood the complaints of teachers who claimed they couldn’t control the kids. You just had to show them who was boss, and keep on showing them.

‘I just said…’ Jonathan’s voice trailed off as he looked around desperately for support that was not forthcoming.

‘You just said what?’

‘I said we all knew who Sam’s ancestor was,’ he mumbled.

‘I’m fascinated to hear it,’ Matthew said. ‘And who exactly did you have in mind?’

Jonathan’s ears were scarlet and his eyes were fixed on the floor. ‘The Monkey Man up on the moor,’ he said in a voice barely above a whisper.

‘You mean the body in the bog?’ Matthew guessed. The grisly discovery had been the talk of the village for the past few days.

Jonathan nodded and gulped. ‘It was just a joke, like.’

‘Jokes are meant to be funny,’ Matthew said repressively. ‘Insults aren’t a joke. And it’s not appropriate to make jokes about the dead. When that man was alive, he had friends and family who loved him, just like you. Imagine how you’d feel if someone you loved died and some thoughtless person made a joke about it.’

‘But, sir, there’s nobody alive to care about the Monkey Man,’ the irrepressible Kylie said.

Matthew groaned inwardly. It was going to be one of those conversations, he knew it. He believed in his job, but sometimes he wished he hadn’t done quite such a good job of helping them develop enquiring minds. ‘Why do you call him the Monkey Man?’ he asked.

‘Coz that’s what they look like,’ a boy piped up. ‘There was a programme on the telly about that one they found down in Cheshire. He looked like an ape.’

‘So that’s why we call him the Monkey Man,’ another chipped in.

Sam Clewlow snorted. ‘That’s stupid,’ he said.

‘Why is it stupid, Sam?’ Matthew asked.

‘Because the man they found in the peat in Cheshire died back in the Stone Age. That’s why he looks the way he does. But the one on the fell isn’t that old. So he doesn’t look like a monkey, he looks like us,’ Sam said firmly.

Snorts of derision met his words. ‘He don’t look like me,’ Jonathan blurted out. ‘Our Jason said he looked like an old leather bag with a face. And he should know, he plays darts with Paul Lister that found the body.’ Jonathan leaned back in his seat, his earlier humiliation forgotten as he basked in their attention.

‘So maybe he is one of our ancestors,’ Sam chipped in.

‘Yeah,’ Kylie said enthusiastically. ‘Maybe he got murdered and buried on the fell.’

‘That’s right. Coz how else would he have ended up in the peat?’ another said.

‘He might simply have had an accident when he was out on the hill,’ Matthew said, trying to dampen down their ghoulish enthusiasm. ‘He might have gone out to tend his sheep, taken a tumble and died out on the fell.’

‘But then somebody would have gone looking for him and they’d have found his body,’ Sam pointed out reasonably. ‘The only way he could have ended up under the peat is if somebody buried him there because they didn’t want anybody to know what had happened to him. I think Kylie’s right. I think somebody murdered him.’

‘Well, until the scientists have done their tests, we won’t know anything for sure,’ Matthew said firmly.

‘It’ll be like Silent Witness,’ Kylie said. ‘The doctor will figure out how he died and then the police will have to find out what happened.’

Matthew couldn’t help grinning. ‘I don’t think it’ll be quite like that, Kylie. From what I hear, if the body in the bog was murdered, his killer will be long dead too. But until we have some facts, I suggest we all get back to what we do know about.’ He held up a hand to silence their chatter. ‘And who knows? Maybe one of you will discover an ancestor who went missing at the right time.’

Sam Clewlow gazed at him, open-mouthed. ‘That would be fantastic,’ he breathed.

I was engaged in my poetical labours upon the long Poem on my own life, pondering how best I might find apt illustration of those matters I hold dear when I saw a figure at the gate. At first glance, I took him to be one of those travelling or wandering men who from time to time arrive at our door in search of sustenance. My sister is accustomed to provide them with food & drink, before setting them on their way. On occasion, she has gleaned tales from them which have provided me with matter fit to be translated into poems & so I do not discourage her in this small charity. The man at the gate seemed to be one such, with travel-stained, clothes & a large-brimmed hat to shelter him from sun & rain alike. I was about to direct him to the kitchen door when he spoke. To my astonishment, he greeted me by my Christian name, addressing me with some warmth & familiarity. ‘William, I see you are hard at it. I was told, you had become the Poet of the, Age & now I see it for myself.’ I still had no notion of who the man was, but he opened the gate without further ado & walked across the garden towards me. His bow-legged gait had a nautical flavour to it, & as he drew closer an impossible suspicion grew large in my mind.

3

By three thirty, the Viking had almost returned to its default state of vacant tranquillity. A couple of the rear booths were still occupied by pairs of men talking business over their espressos. They’d already paid their bills; the staff were invisible to them now. Jane loaded the washer with the last of the glasses then hitched herself on to a stool at the end of the bar to give her aching feet some relief. Harry emerged from the kitchen carrying a plate of leftover sandwiches.

Jane reached for a sandwich as Harry pulled up a stool and sat down beside her. ‘Where did you put the paper?’ she asked.

‘I’ll get it.’ Harry jumped off his stool and went behind the bar. He pulled the paper out from one of the shelves and handed it over.

Jane went straight to the story she’d not had time to read properly before the lunchtime rush.

RIDDLE OF BODY IN LAKELAND BOG

The body of a man found in a peat bog in the Lake District may be hundreds of years old, police said yesterday.

At first, it was thought the remains might have lain undiscovered for thousands of years, like Stone Age corpses recovered from similar sites.

But initial forensic examination indicates that the body is far more recent. Detective Chief Inspector Ewan Rigston said, ‘We believe the body has been in the ground for a very long time, perhaps hundreds of years. But we don’t think it’s anything like as old as some of the remains unearthed in other places.

‘We will know more after the forensic specialists have done their work.’

When asked how the man had died, DCI Rigston said it was too early to tell.

The body was discovered by a local shepherd searching for a lost sheep. Police believe the heavy summer rain had eroded banking within the ancient peat deposits at Carts Moss near the village of Fellhead.

Paul Lister, 37, of Coniston Cottages, Fellhead, spoke last night of his gruesome discovery. ‘I was following my dog over Carts Moss, looking for a stray lamb. I slipped on the wet grass and fell down into one of the channels between the peat hags.

‘My hand slipped on something and I looked down. At first, I couldn’t figure out what I was looking at. I thought it was a cow hide or something. Then I realised it had a human face.

‘I couldn’t believe it. It was like something out of a horror movie.’

While he was waiting for the police to arrive, Mr Lister had the chance to look more closely at his grim find. ‘He had black hair, and it looked like he had black tattoos on his arms and his body. But I don’t know if that was just the effect of being in the peat for so long.’

Forensic anthropologist Dr River Wilde from the University of Northern England has been called in to work with local scientific experts in a bid to unlock the mystery of the body in the bog. DCI Rigston said, ‘Until Dr Wilde has completed her investigations, there is nothing more we can say.’

Jane almost choked on her sandwich. ‘Look at that, Harry,’ she said when she had recovered herself. She pointed to the penultimate paragraph.

Before Harry could respond, a hand landed on each of their shoulders. A shaved head insinuated itself between theirs. ‘What’s so fascinating?’ a familiar voice asked.

Jane swivelled round to kiss Dan Seabourne’s smooth cheek. ‘Dan! What a lovely surprise. Harry didn’t say you were coming.’

‘Harry didn’t know,’ Harry said, a trace of acid in his tone.

‘My three o’clock cancelled on me, so I thought I’d sneak away and pick you up,’ Dan said, ruffling his lover’s hair.

‘Checking up on Harry and the new Italian chef, more like,’ Jane teased. ‘I knew we’d never get rid of you once you’d seen Giaco in his chef’s whites.’

Dan pretended to clutch his heart in shock. ‘So insightful,’ he sighed. Then he reached round her and grabbed a stool. ‘Jane, I haven’t seen you in a week. Are you hiding from me?’

Jane groaned. ‘It’s the book. I’m supposed to have it finished by the end of the year and right now I think the only way I’m going to manage it is if Mephistopheles walks through the door with an offer I can’t refuse. When I signed the contract, I thought it would be a piece of piss to turn my thesis into a book.’ She snorted derisively. ‘How wrong can one woman be?’

‘Maybe you should get out of town for a while, get your head down and get it finished,’ Dan said. ‘I could cover your teaching for you.’

Jane grinned. She and Dan were both sailors in the same boat; post-doctoral researchers, scrabbling for any teaching that might lead to the elusive grail of a permanent lecturing job, desperate to make an impression on their professor and to make ends meet. They should have been rivals, but a friendship dating back to undergraduate days forestalled that. ‘And pick up my wages too? Nice try, Dan,’ she teased, digging him in the ribs with her elbow. ‘You have no scruples, you know that? You should be getting off your arse and writing a book of your own.’

Dan spread his hands, feigning innocence. ‘Hey, I’m just trying to help here. You could benefit from less distraction, right?’

Harry pulled the paper towards him. ‘From the looks of this, Fellhead’s got distractions of its own.’ He pointed to the article, passing it over to Dan. ‘Death stalks the fells.’

Harry and Jane carried on eating while Dan read the piece. ‘Well, at least you wouldn’t have to worry about a mad axeman on the loose,’ he said. ‘If this is a murder victim, his killer will have been in the ground almost as long.’

‘Never mind murder,’ Jane said, pointing to the penultimate paragraph. ‘I’m more interested in his tattoos.’

‘His tattoos?’ Dan asked.

‘Black tattoos. What does that say to you?’

Dan shrugged. ‘Apart from David Beckham, nothing at all.’

‘Eighteenth century, sailors, South Sea islands. Lots of them got native tattoos when they went there. Like Fletcher Christian.’

Dan grinned. ‘Your favourite rural legend.’

‘What are you two on about?’ Harry asked.

‘What do you know about the mutiny on the Bounty?’ Jane said.

Harry shrugged. ‘Mel Gibson. Very cute in those tight trousers.’

Jane groaned. ‘Good to see you were paying attention.’

‘Hey, I’m only joking. I’m not just a bimbo, Jane,’ Harry protested. ‘I remember the bit where Mel stages the mutiny and casts the evil Captain Bligh adrift in an open boat then sets sail for Tahiti.’

‘Very good, Harry. Except it wasn’t actually Mel Gibson, it was Fletcher Christian who led the mutiny. And what I’m interested in isn’t the mutiny as such, it’s the aftermath. After Bligh made his epic voyage to safety and finally got back to London, the navy was alerted to look out for the mutineers and to bring them back to London for court martial. Years later, a group of them were found on Tahiti and shipped back. But the fate of Fletcher and the other hard-core mutineers remained a mystery for a long time. They actually ended up on Pitcairn Island with some of the native women and men and settled down there.’

Harry nodded. ‘Pitcairn…They had that child sex scandal a couple of years ago, didn’t they?’

‘Right. Featuring direct descendants of some of the mutineers. But that wasn’t the first trouble in Paradise,’ Jane said. ‘Basically, there weren’t enough women to go round. The official version is that the mutineers had a falling-out with the natives and there was a massacre. Supposedly Fletcher Christian was the first white man killed. End of story.’

‘But…? I mean, there has to be a but, right? Otherwise you wouldn’t be getting excited about some dead body with a bunch of black tatts,’ Harry said.

‘This is Jane’s fantasy bit,’ Dan chipped in.

Jane looked faintly uncomfortable. ‘There’s always been a rumour in the Lake District that Fletcher Christian didn’t die on Pitcairn. That the massacre was just a cover-up. Somehow he managed to flee the island and make his way back to England, where he lived out the rest of his days hidden from justice by his family and friends. It was a pretty risky enterprise for everyone concerned. If Fletcher had been betrayed or discovered, he would definitely have been hanged for leading the mutiny. And so would anyone who had knowingly had contact with him without handing him over to the authorities.’

Harry’s expression shifted through surprise to incredulity. ‘You’re kidding, right? I mean, this is just gossip?’

‘Like I said, it’s Jane’s favourite rural legend,’ Dan said, lighting a cigarette.

Jane shook her head, her long curls catching the light. ‘It’s not just gossip. John Barrow’s book raises the question as far back as 1831.’

‘As conspiracy theories go, you have to admit it’s a goodie,’ Dan said. ‘Mr Christian staged a massacre and sailed off into the sunset. Oh no, wait a minute. How did he get away, Jane? They burned the ship, didn’t they?’

Jane leaned on the bar. ‘They did. But the Bounty had two ship’s jolly boats on board and they’ve never been satisfactorily accounted for. Also, there’s the matter of the missing log.’ She grinned. ‘That’s where you’re supposed to say, “What missing log?”’

Dan inclined his head and held up his hands in mock astonishment. ‘What missing log?’

‘Fletcher Christian was an officer of the watch. He was accustomed to keeping a log. It would have been second nature to him.’

‘Makes sense,’ Harry said.

‘It would be extraordinary if there was no record kept of how they settled Pitcairn. There was no shortage of paper and pens. They were still using them years later in the school they set up for their kids. But the only documentary account ever seen was written by one of the other mutineers, Edward Young. And it doesn’t start until after the massacre, which implies someone else was keeping notes until that point. Who else but Fletcher? If he’d died, it stands to reason that the journal would have survived him. But if he took to the sea…’ Jane’s voice trailed off.

‘He’d have taken it with him, right?’ Harry concluded. She could see he was interested too, in spite of his perpetual assumption of cool. ‘OK, I’ll grant you that that’s suggestive, if nothing else. But, as you say yourself, it’s all circumstantial.’

‘Not quite all of it. Let me tell you about Peter Heywood. He was one of the mutineers who came back. But unlike most of the others who were court-martialled, his family had the cash and connections to secure their blue-eyed boy a pardon. Instead of being hanged, he went on to have a glittering naval career. But the really interesting thing about Peter Heywood is that he was a distant cousin of Fletcher Christian. He grew up on the Isle of Man, where Fletcher spent a fair bit of his own youth. So, as well as sailing with him, Heywood was personally connected to Fletcher. He knew him well,’ Jane said. ‘And in 1809 or thereabouts, Peter Heywood saw Fletcher Christian in Plymouth.’

Harry frowned. ‘But Plymouth was a naval base, wasn’t it? Surely he’d have had to have been insane to walk around Plymouth in broad daylight? Here’s the most notorious mutineer in the history of the British navy. I mean, even somebody like me with no interest in history has heard of him. And according to you, here’s a man who went to extraordinary lengths to stay out of harm’s way after the mutiny, a man who’d be a cert for the hangman’s rope if he’d ever been caught. And yet here he is taking an afternoon stroll in a city that’s awash with naval officers and ratings. And who does he bump into but his old mucker Peter Heywood.’ Harry spread his hands in the manner of a man making an unanswerable case. ‘And even supposing it did happen, if Heywood and Christian were as close as you say, why would he admit to having seen Christian? It makes no sense.’

‘He didn’t admit it, Harry. Not publicly anyway. It never came out until after his death. And I can speculate,’ Jane said, her voice mild. ‘What if he’d arranged to meet Heywood then, at the last minute, Heywood couldn’t disentangle himself from one of his colleagues? And when Fletcher saw Heywood wasn’t alone, he took to his heels.’

Harry shook his head. ‘But why would Fletcher Christian leave Pitcairn in the first place? He was safe there, surely? Why throw that away?’

‘I’m not so sure that he felt safe,’ Jane said. ‘It’s clear there were deep divisions between the mutineers themselves as well as the problems with the native men. There’s also some evidence that the other mutineers resented his authority as the only officer left among them. And he was a decent man, remember? Maybe he wanted to make his peace, like the Ancient Mariner. Maybe he wanted to explain why he’d been driven to mutiny in the first place,’ Jane argued. ‘Only, when he got back, he discovered that Bligh had not only survived, he’d become a hero thanks to his amazing navigation of the Pacific. Not to mention the fact that he’d had plenty of time to get his version of the mutiny out there. Whatever Fletcher’s motives were for inciting the crew against Bligh, it was too late for him to make his case.’

‘But what case could he have made?’ Harry asked. ‘Mutiny’s mutiny, isn’t it?’

‘There was one defence to mutiny that Christian could have relied on,’ Dan said.

Harry’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Suddenly you’re the expert on naval law?’

‘No, but I do know something about the history of gay oppression, sweetheart,’ Dan said. ‘What if Christian alleged sodomy against Bligh? That was a hanging offence back then, wasn’t it? If he could demonstrate that Bligh had forced him to have sex against his will, wouldn’t that have mitigated the mutiny?’ He paused, his brows furrowed, teeth gnawing his lower lip. ‘Of course, he would have needed a third-party witness to make it stand up. Back then, because it was such an easy allegation to make and so hard to substantiate, the courts martial insisted on more than one man’s word against another. And Christian must have known that.’

‘Maybe there was a witness,’ Jane said slowly. ‘And maybe part of the reason Fletcher led the mutiny was to protect the witness…’ her voice trailed off and she stared dreamily across the empty bar.

‘What do you mean?’ Harry was still intrigued.

Jane held up a finger, giving herself a pause to consider her position. ‘Let’s go back to Peter Heywood,’ she said, her eyes focused inward as she searched through the knowledge she’d amassed over years of fascination. ‘Fletcher had sailed previously with Bligh and it’s on record that he was the captain’s favourite. Same story during the Bounty’s voyage as far as Tahiti. Then Fletcher spends six months ashore, takes himself a native concubine…’

‘Concubine, I love that word,’ Dan said, rolling it on his tongue.

‘Anyway,’ Jane said forcefully, ‘when the ship leaves Tahiti, Fletcher doesn’t want to go back to being Bligh’s…’

‘Catamite. That’s the word you’re looking for. Another lovely one,’ Dan interrupted.

‘Whatever. And Bligh starts treating him like shit. And Fletcher’s decision has also put him on the horns of a dilemma. He feels he owes a duty of care to young Peter Heywood, his kinsman. Because it was also well documented that Heywood was Bligh’s second-favourite after Fletcher. So Fletcher wants to protect Heywood, but not at the expense of submitting again to Bligh.’

‘And so he leads a mutiny, knowing he faces certain death if he’s ever caught? All to protect the honour of Peter Heywood?’ Harry sounded dubious.

‘Maybe he’s also protecting himself,’ Dan said. ‘If Bligh had made a move on Heywood too, then he was Christian’s witness. Then Christian could argue that mutiny was the only way to stop a sexual predator exploiting his crew far from their home port. Wouldn’t that work?’

‘It might, I suppose,’ Harry said grudgingly. ‘Man, you’ve changed your tune. You were the one calling this Jane’s fantasy. Now you’re defending her ideas and I’m the one not seeing evidence of anything except Jane’s imagination.’

Jane got to her feet and headed behind the bar to finish clearing up. ‘That’s my womanly powers of persuasion, Harry. And besides, you’re wrong. There is something a little more concrete. The mutineers who ended up being court-martialled were the ones who asked Christian to take them back to Tahiti, Peter Heywood among them. Those guys never made it as far as Pitcairn. When the two groups were parting company, Fletcher took Heywood to one side. And when Fletcher said his private farewell to Heywood, he asked him to pass some information to the Christian family back home. But Heywood never disclosed what Fletcher had said. Why would he keep shtum, unless the message was something that would have been viewed as shameful, presumably to himself as well as to Fletcher? That something might have been Fletcher’s underlying reason for the mutiny–Bligh’s sexual abuse of Christian and Heywood.’

Harry laughed out loud. ‘Jane, you should be writing fiction, not criticism. Is this what passes for intellectual rigour in the English Department?’ He joined her behind the bar, taking glasses from the dishwasher and replacing them on the shelves.

Jane leaned on the counter and grinned. ‘Maybe I should turn to fiction. And if I did, I’d start with William Wordsworth’s lost epic’

‘Wordsworth’s lost epic?’ Harry said, sounding bemused.

‘She’s kept the best till last, Harry,’ Dan said. ‘This is the “woo-woo” moment. You’re going to love this one.’

Jane carried on regardless. ‘“Innocence and Corruption; the True History of the Mutiny upon the ship the Bounty in the South Seas.” Or something similarly Wordsworthian.’

‘Huh?’ Harry said.

‘They were at school together, Harry. William Wordsworth, the Lakeland Laureate and head honcho of the Romantic poets, and Fletcher Christian, Bounty mutineer, were contemporaries at Hawkshead School. Fletcher’s brother Edward was their teacher. He went on to become Professor of Law at the same Cambridge college where Wordsworth took his degree. And he represented the Wordsworth family in an important lawsuit. So who else would Fletcher choose to tell his version of events to but his old schoolfriend? The friend of his family who went on to become a famous man of letters. And even if he knew he could never publish it because of the potentially dire consequences, Wordsworth couldn’t have ignored a story as big as that, could he?’

Although I offered him no response, he continued to approach me. The man seemed entirely at ease as he made himself at home on the bench that sits nearby my work table. He stretched his legs before him, crossing them at the ankles. ‘Do you not know me yet, William?’ he said, a note of amusement in his tone. As he spoke, he pushed his hat to the back of his head, allowing me to see his face fully for the first time. Many years had passed since I had last cast my gaze upon his countenance, but I knew him at once. The vicissitudes of time & experience had left their marks upon him, but they were not sufficient to blunt his essential characteristics. My suspicion turned to certainty & my heart leapt in my breast.

4

Tenille knew all about choices. She understood that although teachers loved to lay out their holier-than-thou shit about creating options for their pupils, deep down they believed that people like her didn’t have choices. Not really. Not like the teachers and their own middle-class brats. In their hearts, they thought kids like Tenille were stuck without hope in the life they already had. So whatever their mouths might say, the way they acted shouted something different. The way they acted said, ‘You’re going to do drugs, go shoplifting, get pregnant in your teens and have a shit life on a scummy council estate till you die a premature death from smoking or drinking or drugs or deprivation. So why am I bothering trying to teach you anything?’

But they were wrong. She did have choices, even though they weren’t as obvious or as wide-ranging as most thirteen-year-olds’. But Tenille was damn sure she had more going for her than any of the rest of the no-hopers from the Marshpool Farm Estate. That was why she didn’t hang out with the other truants. She wasn’t interested in dodging the Attendance Officers or the security guards in the shopping malls and the amusement arcades. Joining the gangs shoplifting tatty clothes and cheap make-up held no charms for her. Not that she was above nicking stuff. Just not the crap that interested them. She couldn’t imagine talking Aleesha Graham and her crew into raiding Waterstone’s for books of poetry. Apart from anything else, you put them in a bookshop and they’d stick out like a three-piece suit in the mosh pit at a hip-hop gig. Just the thought of it made her roll her eyes back in her head and curl her lips in a sneer. Nor did she have any desire to spend her days holed up in some shithole of a flat watching nicked DVDs with a bunch of losers who just wanted to get out of their heads on weed or extra-strong cider and alcopops.

It hadn’t been so bad when Sharon had been unattached and working down the café. With her aunt safely out the door by ten, Tenille would sneak back indoors, curl up under her lumpy duvet and read until school kicked out and she could colonise one of the computers in the library to get online and hang out in chat rooms. There she could find other weirdoes who read poetry and wanted to talk about it. If she got desperate for the sound of another human voice, she would sneak downstairs and check out Jane Gresham’s flat. If Jane was home, she’d usually let Tenille in to raid her bookshelves, and if she wasn’t too busy, they’d sometimes sit drinking coffee and talking. Except when Jane got one on her and decided to deliver her lecture about how Tenille shouldn’t be dogging it. Like anybody in that dumping ground called Marshpool Comprehensive was ever going to teach her anything that would make her life one single step easier.

It was Jane who had told her about the chat rooms, even letting Tenille use her computer occasionally when Jane was reading and not needing the machine herself. Now they’d become Tenille’s lifeline, providing her with a retreat where she could be the person she knew she was deep inside. By most people’s standards, it wasn’t much. But it was enough to allow a narrow chink of optimism into Tenille’s life.

But all that had gone to shit a few weeks before. It had started when Sharon had left the café to take a job in the works canteen of a local plastics factory. Instead of regular days, she was on shifts, so two weeks in three, Tenille lost a substantial chunk of her daytime sanctuary. That had been bad enough, though Tenille was resourceful and soon found ways around the problem. But then Sharon had found herself a new boyfriend.

In the seven years she’d been in the nominal care of her aunt, Tenille had grown accustomed to the steady stream of unsteady men who pitched up at the flat for indeterminate lengths of time. She’d learned early to stay out of the way when they were around. Sharon didn’t want her dead junkie sister’s bastard putting them off, and she’d made it clear that Tenille should be neither seen nor heard when she was entertaining. So Tenille shut herself in her room for hours on end, tuning out the animal noises that seeped through the walls and under the door, sneaking out when the coast was clear to raid the fridge and kitchen cupboards for whatever she could find to kill the hunger that gripped her. Sometimes she felt like the invisible child, a phantom who slipped into the cracks and corners nobody else wanted to occupy. It wasn’t a notion she enjoyed, but recently she’d begun to yearn for that invisibility.

Of course, it had occurred to her before the arrival of Geno Marley in her life that there were distinct advantages to slipping under other people’s radar. It made truanting and shoplifting so much easier. But as far as Sharon’s boyfriends were concerned, she’d believed the only benefit she gained from remaining unnoticed was to avoid Sharon’s wrath if she inadvertently got in the way of her aunt’s love life. Although she knew in theory about men who preyed on kids like her, she’d never experienced it first hand. The kind of men who had been attracted to the overripe charms of her aunt had thus far shown no inclinations in her direction. After all, there was nothing childish about Sharon, a tough mixed-race woman who exuded a mature and knowing sexuality that promised the delights of experience rather than the temptations of innocence. She wasn’t one of those women who fought a doomed rearguard action against time; Sharon accepted she was past the first flush of youth and understood that mutton can be a far tastier meat than lamb. And so her men tended to be those who wanted a woman who had a firm grasp of the pleasure principle.

If she’d confined her neediness to the sexual dimension, Sharon’s relationships would likely have lasted longer than they did. But so far she’d failed to find a man who could put up with the constant nagging demands of her insecurities for more than a few months. Tenille was accustomed to bearing the unreasonable blame for the departure of yet another browbeaten lover and, every time it happened, it reinforced her desire to stay out of the way next time.

She hadn’t been fast enough to avoid Geno Marley, mostly because she hadn’t been expecting him. Usually, she was already safely closeted in her room when a new man tumbled into Sharon’s bed for the first time. But Tenille hadn’t factored shift work into her calculations. Sharon had been due to finish her shift that day at two, so Tenille had cleared out in good time. She’d been unlucky at the library that afternoon; a quartet of wrinklies had commandeered the computers and a greasy-haired grandson was teaching them the basics of websurfing. Like they were going to be downloading MP3s and hanging out in chat rooms any time soon, Tenille thought scornfully. She hung around for a while, but it was clear that grey power wasn’t about to concede in the foreseeable future.

She’d been surprised to return to an empty flat. Sharon should have been home two hours ago. Tenille assumed her aunt had gone shopping. Hell, she hoped so, because there was fuck all to eat or drink in the place. She’d turned on the TV and slumped on the sofa, too pissed off and hungry to read. The sound of the front door opening barely registered, but the sound of muffled giggling and the deep rumble of a man’s voice set her senses on alert. She scrambled to her feet, ready for flight, but there was nowhere to run to.

The living-room door opened on Sharon weaving in an unsteady shimmy, a man’s arms locked around her waist, the silly smile of drink plastered on her face, her café-au-lait skin flushed scarlet. Seeing Tenille, a scowl wiped the cheerfulness from her face. ‘Whatchu doing here?’ she demanded.

‘I live here,’ Tenille muttered.

A face appeared over Sharon’s shoulder, the expression a mix of curiosity and impatience. ‘Who’s this?’ he said, a slur in his voice and the seeds of lechery in his smile.

‘My niece. I told you, remember?’ Sharon was pissed off, there was no mistaking it.

The man dropped his hands from Sharon’s waist and sidestepped her so he could fully enter the room. Tenille recognised an expression she’d seen directed at others but not so far at herself, probably because the anonymous clothes she chose for the street hid rather than flattered her recently developed figure. But here in the privacy of her own home, she was stripped down to T-shirt and hip-hugging jeans. And this man was drinking it in as deep as Sharon had obviously drunk in some afternoon shebeen. Tenille didn’t like it one little bit.

‘So, little niece, you got a name?’ He stepped closer, one hand carelessly draped on Sharon’s hip.

‘Tenille,’ she muttered reluctantly.

‘Pretty name for a pretty girl.’

‘What’s yours?’ Tenille demanded abruptly.

He grinned, revealing a gold canine. ‘I’m Geno,’ he said. ‘Like Geno Washington.’

Tenille wondered if she was supposed to be impressed by a name she’d never heard before. She raised her eyebrows in a faint gesture of contempt. ‘Who he, man?’

He faked astonishment. ‘You never heard of Geno? Girl, you know nothing. Geno was only the greatest soul singer this godforsaken country ever produced.’

Sharon, impatient at so much attention directed away from her, butted in. ‘Donchu got some shit of your own to be getting on with?’ she said petulantly.

Grateful for the chance to escape, Tenille edged nearer the door. But Geno wasn’t for moving. Tenille had to go round him, Sharon moving to one side and kissing her teeth in irritation. Then she was free, out in the hall and suddenly aware of the heightened rhythm of her breathing.

That had just been the start of it. Discomfort and unease attended Tenille whenever Geno was around and she couldn’t make a quick getaway. Generally she managed to keep out of his way, but that was getting harder and harder as the weeks passed and it became clear he wasn’t about to abandon Sharon any time soon. After three weeks, he had virtually moved in, always around when Sharon was there and sometimes hanging out even when she was at work. Tenille’s life came to be lived more and more outside the flat; at Jane’s when she could manage it, or on the windswept galleries and dank stairwells of the estate when she couldn’t. She pretended even to herself that her actions were the result of choice; it was better than naming the fear she didn’t want to acknowledge.

But she couldn’t kid herself for ever. Sharon had to do nights sooner or later, and when that week rolled around, Tenille felt no surprise when her aunt announced that Geno would be sleeping over to keep an eye on her. No surprise, just a hot spurt of fear in her stomach. ‘I never needed no minder when you did nights before,’ Tenille had protested.

‘You think it felt right, me leaving you on your own?’ Sharon challenged.

‘I’m not a baby, I don’t need no babysitter.’

‘You still not legal alone, girl. It make me feel happier knowing there’s somebody here with you.’ Sharon gathered her make-up, shovelling it into the fake Louis Vuitton bag Geno had presented her with. He’d preened like a peacock while Tenille had looked on with contempt, knowing he’d picked it up on some market stall for buttons.

‘It never bothered you before. You been leaving me shut up in here since I was eight year old.’

‘And I was wrong. Geno made me see that. He tol’ me about bad things happening lately to girls round here.’

Tenille shivered. ‘Nothin’ goan happen to me. I don’t need Geno to protect me. I don’t like Geno,’ she tried desperately, feeling somehow ashamed to articulate what really bothered her about him.

‘He’s a good man,’ Sharon said. ‘So donchu piss him off, you hear?’ There was an air of finality in her voice that Tenille knew better than to argue with. She swept her coat off the chair and made for the door. ‘He’ll be round later. Donchu mess with his head. You hear me, girl?’ she added, whirling round with a look of dark suspicious anger on her handsome face.

Tenille scowled. ‘I hear you,’ she mumbled. The door had scarcely closed behind her aunt before she was on her feet, pulling on her own coat, throwing her MP3 player and a couple of books into her backpack and heading out into the early evening gloom. She made straight for Jane’s flat, but the lights were out and her knock met with no response. Tenille thrust her hand in her pocket and fingered the uneven contours of the key. She’d ‘borrowed’ the spare from the kitchen drawer months before, had it copied and returned it before Jane even noticed its absence. But she was cautious about its use. It would only be an insurance policy for as long as Jane didn’t know she had it. When that useless wanker Jake had still been on the scene, she’d never dared to sneak in, unsure of his comings and goings. She’d only chanced it a couple of times since, both occasions when she’d seen Jane off on the bus and known for sure she’d be at the Viking for the next four hours. Tonight, she had no idea where Jane was or when she’d return. It was too risky.

With a sigh, Tenille turned away and trudged back to the stinking stairwell. A scatter of rain caught her in the face as she turned off the gallery and she swore under her breath. For once, she wished she didn’t despise everyone in her peer group. Tonight, the idea of watching some stupid DVD with Aleesha Graham and her crew almost made her wistful. Tenille turned out her pockets. Enough for a couple of regular Cokes. If she carried on past the local Burger King to the one a mile or so away, the chances were there would be nobody she knew inside. With luck, it would be quiet enough for them to let her skulk in a corner for a few hours, nose in a book.

Lost in Byron’s Childe Harold, the time raced away, and Tenille was surprised when the skinny, acned counter boy leaned on his brush opposite her table and said, ‘We’re closing.’ She grabbed her stuff and made for the door, checking her watch. Half past ten. And the rain had stopped, which meant she could dawdle home, hoodie pulled tight round her head against the wind.

It was quarter past eleven when Tenille inched her key into the lock and opened the front door without a sound. She slid into the darkened hall silent as a shadow, her senses sharpened by the prickle of fear. A cone of faint flickering light spilled into the hall from the half-open living-room door. She could hear the muted drawl of American accents from the TV. Her nose screwed up in a grimace, identifying the sweet of dope smoke and the sour of beer. She risked a quick peek round the door frame. Geno lay sprawled on the sofa, legs apart, one hand lying along the inside of his thigh, the other dangling towards the floor. His head lay back against the greasy mock velvet, his mouth open, a trickle of drool glistening at one corner. Pissed and passed out, she thought, relief and contempt mingling satisfactorily.

Tenille crept to her room and silently pulled her chest of drawers across the closed door. Without taking her clothes off, she slid under her lumpy duvet and eased herself to sleep with dark fantasies of a razor-sharp blade making a second red mouth in the invitingly exposed throat of Geno Marley.

‘I know you, sir,’ I said when I had overcome my surprise enough to speak. I told him that I had believed him either dead or else many hundreds of miles from these parts & that I had thought never to see him more. He said that he was as good as dead if any of His Majesty’s men should clap eyes upon him & that he hoped he could count himself safe in my mercy. I gave him assurance that the good offices of his brother had placed me in his family’s debt & that I would keep his confidences close in my own breast. He thanked me & shook. Me by the hand so that I could not fail to notice how yet he suffers the profound perspiration of the palms that so afflicted him as a boy & into his early manhood. Any-final doubts of mine were cast to the four winds at that pressing of the flesh.

5

Dr River Wilde tapped the end of her pen against the pad of paper on her desk. ‘Look, I appreciate you’re busy, but you’re not the only one. I’ve been shunted from pillar to post today. I doubt you have any idea how many people are employed to keep the likes of me from talking to a man in your position. All I’m asking for is a decision. How hard can that be?’

The voice on the other end of the phone sounded exasperated. ‘I’ve already explained. To get a network commission, we have to jump through a series of hoops. I don’t have the authority to make that sort of decision on the hoof.’

River made a wicked grimace at the phone. ‘Phil, you told me you’re Head of Factual Programming for Northern TV. Surely that means you have some say over what appears on our screens?’

‘I only have autonomy over a limited amount of regional programming. Anything else has to go through the process.’

River tried to control her desire to shout at the man. She was gradually coming to realise that the bureaucracy of television made university administrators look like amateurs. She stabbed her pen savagely into the paper. ‘But this won’t wait. I need to begin work on the cadaver as soon as possible. I’m not asking for a fortune. I already emailed you a rough breakdown of costs.’ He tried to interrupt but she bulldozed on regardless. ‘Look, this is cheap telly, Phil. Cheap as chips. All you need is a camera crew. You shadow my investigation into the body. Your team is present at all the initial work. Trust me, the ambience is fantastic. I’ve made arrangements with the local funeral parlour to do most of the work on the body there–it’s one of those wonderful old Victorian-style facilities, all mahogany and tiled walls, very Conan Doyle, very atmospheric, and a great contrast with all the modern stuff. You can film in the labs where the technical stuff gets done, no problem. You can film at the site where the body was buried. You get my expertise and top expertise from the other disciplines that we’ll be bringing to bear on this cadaver, all at bargain basement prices. Come on, Phil. You know your viewers love this kind of thing. Reality TV meets the History Channel. Bog bodies don’t turn up that often. And this one’s got some really unusual features–those tattoos are remarkable. I’m convinced we’re going to get some really fascinating stuff as we go along. This isn’t some drunken local who fell into a bog. This is something special. I think we could be talking the South Seas. Just think how much more interesting–and how much cheaper–it will be to shadow the course of a real forensic investigation rather than relying on reconstruction all the time.’ She squeezed as much reasonable persuasion into her voice as she could manage.

‘Dr Wilde, I agree that what you’re proposing would make gripping viewing. But there’s no way to short-circuit the commissioning process.’

River snorted. ‘What about those instant documentaries that get whipped out of the hat whenever there’s some major disaster or political scandal? You find a way of circumventing protocol then.’

Phil Toner sighed. ‘A body in a bog in the Lakes isn’t a matter of major national significance. Now, if you’d like to come in some time next week…’

‘Not good enough. Look, Phil, why don’t you go out on a limb and make the damn thing anyway? What’s the worst outcome? You end up with a riveting regional series that’s cost you next to nothing. And if it turns out as good as we both know it should, you can present the network with a great coup that cost peanuts. Come on, you know it makes sense.’ She sensed the hesitation on the other end of the line. ‘Phil, did I mention I’m bloody gorgeous? And that the camera loves me?’ she added, a bubble of laughter in her voice.

She was rewarded with a low rumble of mirth. ‘Not to mention that you’ve come up with a great title. Let me think about it,’ he finally said. ‘I’ll get back to you.’

‘When?’ River knew she had a reputation for bloody-mindedness; she preferred to think of it as tenacity.

‘Close of business today. I’ll have an answer for you.’

‘Thanks, Phil. I’ll look forward to your call.’ River put down the phone and punched the air. ‘Yes!’ She jumped to her feet and hurried out of the glorified cupboard the University of Northern England, in a rare display of wit, described as her office. Ten seconds later she was back through the door, grabbing a folder from her desk and almost running out again.

She found her head of department peering dubiously at a human jawbone. Donald Percival was a man given to doubt. He distrusted certainty unless it was backed up with impeccable scientific data. His small mouth was permanently pursed in disapproval and River would have been prepared to swear that every time she entered his presence, his knitted brows grew ever more tortured. When she bounced into the lab, his shoulders seemed to hunch protectively around his artefact and he made her wait impatiently for a full minute before he turned his watery blue gaze on her. ‘Good afternoon, Dr Wilde,’ he said.

‘Marvellous news, Professor,’ River said. ‘It looks as if I’ve got Northern TV on board to make a documentary of the investigation into the Fellhead cadaver. That means we’ll be able to go well beyond the basic work you’ve already granted me funding for.’

Percival frowned. ‘Television? Is that a good idea? Do we want the cameras looking over our shoulder as we work?’

River brushed the objection aside with a sweep of her hand. ‘They won’t get in the way.’

‘Is it sending the right message about this department to the wider world?’

‘I think it’s showing the wider world that we do this well. Which in turn means more outside projects coming to us, bringing money into the department,’ River said, shrewdly going for the Achilles heel of all contemporary academics. ‘More money means better equipment and more students,’ she added, never one to shrink from over-egging the pudding. ‘And as far as this project goes, it means we can afford full-body CAT scanning, stable isotope analysis, cemental annulation. The full bells and whistles. And we can get the palaeo-botanists and archaeological sciences people on board without them taking fright over their budgets. Just think of the benefit to the students of such cross-discipline teaching. Great practice for working in the field.’

Percival looked peevishly at the jawbone, turning it over in his gloved hands. ‘You’re here to teach and research, Dr Wilde, not to use this department as a springboard for personal aggrandisement.’

It was a low blow, but it told River that Percival couldn’t come up with a decent professional objection to her proposal. She grinned. ‘I’m not pitching to become the next telly don,’ she said. ‘What I care about is the work. And I’m willing to do whatever it takes to serve the work best.’

Percival gave a weary sigh. ‘I know that, Dr Wilde. That is why I chose to employ you here. Very well. You may proceed with this. But make no firm agreement with these people until I have seen the terms and conditions of the arrangement.’

‘Thank you, Professor,’ River said, resisting the urge to punch the air again. ‘You won’t regret it.’

He sighed again. ‘Let’s hope not. Now, before you rush off to make-up, perhaps you could cast your eyes over this.’ He held out the jawbone to her in what she recognised as a gesture of reconciliation. ‘I find myself somewhat puzzled by the nature of the wear on these molars.’

* * *

Her own work beyond her, Jane Gresham was attempting to bring her mind to bear on the undergraduate seminar she was supposed to be conducting the following week on the role of the pathetic fallacy in Romantic poetry. So devoid of inspiration had she been that she’d resorted to dredging the bound volumes of the Proceedings of the Modern Language Association for anything that might remotely help shape her session. She was engrossed in a particularly dull article about Coleridge’s early work when Dan’s head appeared over the top of her library carrel.

‘Thought I’d find you here,’ he said, sounding faintly smug.

‘It’s hardly rocket science,’ Jane said repressively. ‘Considering I always sit in the same carrel.’

He came round the side of the partition and pulled a face when he saw what she was doing. ‘My God. If PMLA comes, can despair be far behind?’

Jane pushed the book away. ‘It’s already here.’

‘So let me take you away from all of this and buy you a coffee.’

‘I shouldn’t, really. I need to prepare this seminar.’

Dan raised his eyebrows and pulled down the corners of his mouth. ‘Trust me, you’ll feel better about it after a swift injection of caffeine and half an hour in my company.’

Having put up the pretence of a fight, Jane stood up and pocketed her pen. ‘I’m leaving my notes here,’ she said, warning him that there were limits to the extent of her willingness to be distracted.

Without further negotiation they walked out of the building and round the corner to the Bear and Staff. The pub served decent coffee and, unlike the student refectory, still allowed smokers to indulge their vice. Jane perked up as soon as Dan returned to their corner booth with two large mochas topped with a pyramid of whipped cream. ‘You are such a bad man,’ she teased.

‘I don’t believe in half measures.’

‘I don’t know how you stay so slim,’ Jane complained, eyeing the washboard stomach beneath the white T-shirt.

‘Lots of exercise, darling. And cigarettes. They kill the appetite, you know.’

‘Not to mention those of us who have to put up with your smoke.’ Jane took an appreciative sip of her drink, savouring the contrast between the cool cream and the hot brew beneath. ‘Mmm. Just the ticket. So, Dan, why am I here?’

He feigned an expression of innocence. ‘Jane, I’m surprised at you. It’s not like I’ve never invited you out for coffee before.’

Jane rolled her eyes. ‘You’ve never gone to the trouble of tracking me down in the library and hauling me off to the pub before. I’ve got work to get back to, so don’t make me drag it out of you.’ With a shrug he spread his hands in a gesture she recognised. Small boy playing the cute innocent card, she thought. You’re getting too old for that one, Danny Boy.