‘Feel like it too. Look, I’m sorry about Jenny’s house. I…’
‘I didn’t come here to get an apology. I came here to make one. I’m sorry I was so bloody rude to you at Edith’s wake. I should have known a Fellhead Gresham wouldn’t be out to cheat my family. If I’d listened to you then, we might have saved a few lives.’
Jane shook her head. ‘I’ve been over this in my head so many times. Dan was set on his course. I don’t think anything would have stopped him till he got his hands on that manuscript. There’s no point in either of us beating ourselves up.’
‘Not that that will stop us,’ Alice said drily. ‘Anyway, I’m sorry for what I said.’
‘It’s OK, Alice.’ Jane managed a weak smile. ‘And I should apologise for introducing Dan to Jimmy.’
Alice snorted. ‘He’s always had appalling taste in men.’ She took a drink of tea.
‘Can I ask you something, Alice?’
Alice looked slightly wary. ‘Sure.’
‘How did Jenny end up with the manuscript?’
Alice looked relieved. ‘That’s easy. It passed down from Dorcas to her eldest, Arthur, and he entrusted it to his eldest, Beattie. And Jenny was Beattie’s favourite. So she got the family heirloom with strict injunctions to keep the Wordsworth family skeleton firmly locked away in the closet. It was only when she understood people were dying for it that she realised she had to give it up.’
‘That makes sense,’ Jane said.
Alice fiddled with the handle of her mug. ‘Jane, I didn’t just come here to apologise to you. I came because I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news for you.’
‘Oh Christ,’ Jane said. ‘I don’t know if I can take any more bad news. This has been the worst week of my life.’ She pushed her hair back from her face. ‘Better let me have the bad news first. Then at least I have something to look forward to.’
‘Jenny wasn’t totally frank with you,’ Alice said, her manner halting and awkward. ‘She’s cautious by nature, is Jenny. So she let you have the notes, to see how you behaved. Like, could you keep a confidence? Would you try to talk her into selling them? Would you treat them with respect, or would you just try to make a name for yourself off the back of them. It was a kind of test…’
Jane suddenly felt cold. ‘Oh God, Alice. Oh please, no…’
Alice blinked hard. ‘I’m afraid so. She had the poem too, Jane. About sixty pages long, loosely bound between leather covers. Handwritten. She kept them separate in case she was ever burgled. So that, if she lost one, she’d have the other as a sort of insurance policy. She kept the poem stuffed inside a pillow in her bedroom.’ She took a deep breath. ‘So, yes. There was a poem. But now there isn’t.’
Tears spilled from Jane’s eyes. ‘Oh God, no,’ she wailed. ‘This is a disaster.’
‘The thing is,’ Alice continued, ‘it’s a disaster nobody’s going to know about. Nobody blames you. The family’s talked about this and we’re all agreed, nobody’s going to say a word about what’s been lost. Your reputation’s not going to suffer.’
‘To hell with my reputation,’ Jane stuttered. ‘The poem’s lost forever. And it’s all my fault. If I hadn’t got so het up about it, it would still be safe. Your relatives would still be alive and so would bloody Dan.’ She sniffed. ‘How am I going to live with myself after this?’
Alice got up and put an arm round Jane’s shaking shoulders. ‘Stop it, now,’ she said, her low voice genuinely comforting. ‘That kind of talk is pointless. What’s done is done. You couldn’t have known any of this would happen. I meant it when I said nobody blames you, and we’re the ones with the right to dish out the blame. And here’s the good news. Jenny wants you to have first crack at the notes. You can still make something marvellous out of all this mess. Please, don’t get eaten up with guilt.’
‘I can’t help it,’ Jane snivelled. ‘I feel so bad about all of this.’
Alice pulled up a chair so she could hold Jane against her shoulder. ‘There’s something else I have to tell you that might help you look on the bright side. I took Jenny out to her place yesterday afternoon. And half a dozen cats came out of the undergrowth as if by magic, rubbing themselves against her legs. And you know what she said? She said, “I always hated that house, Alice. Bloody miserable place. But it had been in the family for generations, it wasn’t my right to walk away from it. Now I can have a nice little bungalow with big windows so I can see the view. I can see out my days in comfort.” So you see, it’s truly not all bad.’
The burden of my friends story contains all the elements necessary to compose a thrilling yet moral narrative of mans vanity & fallibility. I cannot but feel it is the ideal subject for a-Poet with my gifts, & I f eel it singing in my veins even now. The tragedy is that I will not enjoy its praise in my lifetime, for to publish it would bring calumny upon me & my family. Yet after my death, it may please the world to learn the truth of the matter that so exercised the public prints at the time of Bligh’s return. I vouchsafe that any man who reads my words will not fail to be moved by the tragic case of Mr Fletcher Christian, a man more sinned against than sinning.
Post Scriptum: After that last day in the garden at •Dove Cottage, I never saw my friend more. His brother reports that he has sunk, beneath the horizon of his family’s awareness. Whether he be alive or dead, none can say. Thus does Fletcher Christian leave us with yet one more mystery that has no easy resolution.
44
January 2006
The Viking was in its customary state of somnolence ahead of the lunchtime rush. Instead of serving behind the bar, for once Jane was sitting at a corner table. She’d quit the Viking to spend more time working on the Wordsworth manuscript. Now that Jane was the custodian of the Bounty narrative, Professor Elliott had miraculously found enough money in her budget to retain her in a full-time position.
Jane glanced at her watch. She was ten minutes early, no need to fret yet. Harry brought her glass of white wine and sat down opposite her. ‘It’s not the same without you here,’ he said. ‘I’m thinking of looking for somewhere else.’
To Jane’s surprise, since Dan’s death and the exposure of the full extent of his crimes, Harry seemed to crave her company. She’d expected him to blame her, to hold her responsible for seducing his partner from the straight and narrow, and ultimately for his death. But the opposite had happened. Harry cleaved to her because she was the only other person, he claimed, who really understood Dan in all his complexity. She had loved him enough to be his friend, but nobody knew better than her now how perfidious he could also be. ‘You should think carefully about that,’ Jane said. ‘Anywhere else, you might actually have to work the hours they pay you for. No more leaning on the bar reading while you wait for customers.’
‘Yeah, right. So, any news?’ he asked.
‘Jenny’s new bungalow’s nearly done. She can’t wait to get moved in. She’s having the place decked out like a palace with all mod cons. She’s even building a cat house for the felines. “Bugger the grandkids,” she says. She’s planning on spending the lot. And I spoke to Anthony yesterday. He thinks they’re going to be able to raise the money to match the auction price and keep the manuscript in this country.’
‘That’s good, I hate to think of it ending up in some millionaire’s collection in the States.’
‘Oh, and Anthony passed on a juicy bit of gossip he picked up on the grapevine. Apparently Caroline has ditched Jake. Both professionally and personally.’
‘Couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke,’ he said, looking cheerful for the first time that day. ‘And how’s Tenille?’
Jane grinned. ‘All very unofficial, but we’re doing OK. It’s a bit cramped, but I don’t really mind giving up my study now that I’ve got a proper office at work. And she spends a couple of nights a week with her dad, so I do get time off for good behaviour. The best news is that she’s actually going to school. Her dad’s talking about trying to get her into a private school, and I thi
nk that might be the best answer. At least then she won’t get the piss ripped out of her every time she hands in her homework.’
‘And she’s proved she’s tough enough to handle anything those posh totties can hand out.’
As he spoke, River Wilde dropped her satchel on the floor, put her glass of wine on the table and sat down. ‘Nice to see you again, Jane.’
‘You too. And this is my friend Harry,’ Jane said, wondering anxiously whether River knew where Harry fitted in the jigsaw of the past months.
‘Pleased to meet you, Dr Wilde,’ Harry said courteously, extending his hand. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to work.’
‘Is that…?’ River asked as he walked away.
‘Yes,’ Jane said.
‘Right. Just so’s I know.’ She leaned down and took a folder from her satchel. ‘Pirate Peat. The mystery man.’ She opened the folder and took out a bundle of papers.
‘The question: is the body in the bog Fletcher Christian, Bounty mutineer.’ She glanced up at Jane. ‘This has been bloody fascinating,’ she said. ‘Thank you for putting it my way. Now, the first thing I had to do was to gather as much information as I could about your man Fletcher and then compare it to what I had on the table. Did you get the tape I sent you?’ she asked Jane, referring to a videotape of the session where River had outlined the first points of comparison for the camera.
‘Yes, it was really exciting to watch. I’m very much looking forward to seeing the final version.’
River pulled a face. ‘I look like such a moron,’ she said. ‘I had no idea how much time I spend with my mouth hanging open when I’m working. Anyway, you’ll remember that from those early examinations there was nothing to contradict the possibility of this being Fletcher and quite a bit of supporting evidence. What I’ve got now are the results of the tests from the big boys’ toys.’ She pulled out a single sheet. ‘The teeth. According to the cement annulation, our guy is the right sort of age. And the stable isotope analysis of the teeth tells us that he lived in Cumbria at the time his teeth were formed. So, like Fletcher, he was living here when he was around six, seven years old.’
‘You can tell all that from teeth?’
‘Yes. It’s called science,’ River said, her grin taking the sting out of her words. ‘And then,’ she continued, fishing out another sheet of paper, ‘more stable isotope analysis, this time on the femur. And I can tell you that in the last fifteen years of his life, he had lived in the South Pacific’ She grinned. ‘Pretty cool, huh?’
‘This is amazing. What about the DNA?’
‘Patience, patience. I’m coming to that. Now, he had long hair, which is pretty useful for telling us about diet. And his hair indicates periods where he was eating a good, well-balanced diet rich in vitamins and minerals interspersed with a much less healthy diet. So, maybe a sailor who had some long spells on land where he was eating well, followed by long voyages with nothing much in the way of fruit or vegetables. Again, very suggestive.
‘Then there’s that wound on the chest where the star tattoo would have been if it was your Fletcher. Remember I said when I did that first superficial examination that I thought the flesh and skin had been ripped out by an animal? Well, when I took a closer look, I realised I’d been mistaken. The skin had been hacked away by a serrated knife. So yes, we could be looking at a primitive version of permanent tattoo removal.’
She put the papers to one side and steepled her fingers. ‘There’s not one piece of evidence that contradicts the theory that the man who was murdered in Carts Moss was Fletcher Christian. Balance of probabilities? Well, there were a lot of sailors around then. We’d just fought a war and also trade routes had opened up hugely in the eighteenth century. But if I was a betting woman, I would have put a few bob on Pirate Peat and Fletcher being one and the same. Apart from that inconvenient little thing about him being murdered on Pitcairn.’
‘Which, according to the Bounty manuscript, was absolutely not what happened,’ Jane said.
‘Quite. Which leaves the DNA.’ River stopped to take a sip of her wine. ‘I really did have high hopes of this. So much so that I arranged right from the off to have some comparison samples from Fletcher’s direct descendants sent from Pitcairn and New Zealand. Now, there’s a big problem with bog bodies. The DNA in any bog body will be badly denatured because of its environment. The bog is acidic–that’s why the bones tend to “melt” and the skin is essentially tanned. The acid in the peat denatures the double helix of the DNA strand and effectively strips the base pairs away. So DNA detector kits can see that DNA is there because they see the phosphate backbone, but it is no longer replicable because the base pairs have gone. And it is replication of the DNA through PCR–that’s polymerase chain reaction to you and me–that allows sufficient quantity to be duplicated to allow fingerprinting and therefore comparison. So although, if you’re very lucky, you can get bits of DNA, you generally can’t get enough to sequence it. And that makes comparison impossible. But I was hopeful with this body, I really was. We used every available technique. I even pulled some strings with a lab in Switzerland who are doing some stuff with DNA that is way out there.’ River shook her head.
‘I’m really sorry, Jane. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t harvest enough DNA to make a comparison.’
‘So we’ll never know for sure?’ Jane looked stricken.
River nodded. ‘We’ll never know for sure.’
Bibliography
I consulted many works of reference in the preparation of this book. Notable among them were:
The Bounty, Caroline Alexander (HarperCollins, 2003)
Wordsworth, A Life in Letters, Juliet Barker (Viking Penguin, 2002)
Captain Bligh: The Man and his Mutinies, Gavin Kennedy (Duckworth, 1989)
Life and Death in Eden, Trevor Lummis (Phoenix, 2000)
The Way of a Ship, Derek Lundy (Jonathan Cape, 2002)
The Bounty Trilogy, Charles Nordoff & James Norman Hall (Back Bay Books, 1985)
The Wake of the Bounty, C.S. Wilkinson (Cassell, 1953)
The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals, Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Pamela Woof (Oxford University Press, 2002)
William Wordsworth: The Major Works, William Wordsworth (Oxford Paperbacks, 2000)
Acknowledgements
The seed for this book came from a talk Alan Hankinson gave some years ago to the Northern Chapter of the Crime Writers’ Association. I am indebted to Reginald Hill for organising it and to Robert Barnard for filling in some of the gaps in the immediate aftermath. I was encouraged to continue by Wordsworth expert Juliet Barker. The late Robert Woof, Director of the Wordsworth Trust, gave generously of his time and encyclopaedic knowledge. Professor Sue Black provided invaluable information about the work of a forensic anthropologist and on the forensic details in the text. Any inaccuracies are entirely my responsibility. Thanks too to Cherry Cappel who steered me towards a title when I was becalmed. The book would never have been completed without the wholehearted support of my editor Julia Wisdom, my agent Jane Gregory and Anne O’Brien, the Jedi master of copy-editing. Finally, I want to thank Kelly Smith who made the dark places light.
About the Author
Val McDermid grew up in a Scottish mining community then read English at Oxford. She was a journalist for sixteen years, spending the last three years as Northern Bureau Chief of a national Sunday tabloid. Now a full-time writer, she divides her time between Cheshire and Northumberland.
Her novels have won international acclaim and a number of prestigious awards, including the Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year, the Anthony Award for best novel, and the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year Award. Her thriller series featuring Dr Tony Hill, criminal profiler, has now been adapted for television under the generic title Wire in the Blood and stars Robson Green.
For the latest news, visit www.valmcdermid.co.uk
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Acclaim for The Grave Tattoo
‘Absorbing modern mystery…McDermid’s mix of historical and literary clues with modern detection is handled with panache’
The Times
‘One of the world’s leading mystery writers, combining acuity of perception about the pathological mind with a rare talent for blindsiding the reader and graphic descriptive powers. Thomas Harris crossed with Agatha Christie, if you will…The Grave Tattoo is a great read. England’s heritage history has never been so chilling’
Observer
‘McDermid has lion-hearted courage as a writer…the complex plot is handled with [her] usual narrative confidence’