The Grave Tattoo (35 page)

After a short, strenuous climb, the path emerged from the woods on to a small limestone pavement, its irregular cracks and fissures giving the appearance of giant crazy paving. As was her habit, Jane walked right up to the edge and carefully sat down with her legs dangling over the lip of the rock shelf, just as she’d done since the first time Matthew had dared her to as a child. The rock formed a shallow U-shape round the waterfall that roared amber and white to her left, and her vantage point provided a breathtaking view of the cascade and the tarn below. Jane couldn’t remember a time when Langmere Force hadn’t mesmerised her, taking her out of whatever ailed her and making her feel healed. That afternoon was no different. Things slowly slid into perspective and she began to feel the pressure lifting.

The great advantage of an area with few roads was that it made tailing someone very easy. You could hang well back, knowing there were no turn-offs, then narrow the gap when the rare junctions approached. But he hadn’t needed to be even that sophisticated as he tailed Jane that afternoon. She’d driven up the hill towards Langmere Stile, an easy follow. And as he’d climbed in her wake, he’d spotted her car in the Langmere Force car park. It would have been hard to miss, really, sitting in splendid isolation near the start of the path.

She was already out of sight by the time he pulled in. Nevertheless, he was careful to park his car in the furthest corner, more or less hidden from sight of the road. He took a deep breath, wiping his hands on his trousers. Killing anonymous old people was one thing. What he was planning now was a different thing altogether–if you could call this flying by the seat of the pants planning. Still, he’d done all right so far. No living witnesses to date. He had to make sure it stayed that way. Eliminate Jane, clear the path to the manuscript.

He got out of the car, shivering as the chill air hit him. He glanced at the information board at the start of the path, understanding that the waterfall might give him the perfect opportunity. If he caught up with her there, the roar of the water would cover the sound of his approach. And it would be the perfect place to dump the body afterwards. He needed a weapon, though. As he climbed through the trees, he scanned the ground on either side of the steep path, looking for something suitable. At last, he saw what he needed. A fallen limb had been cut into sections, presumably by one of the park rangers, and stacked alongside the track. He chose a section that was about three feet long and six or seven inches in diameter. He put one end on the ground and leaned into it, testing its strength. It wouldn’t do to attempt murder with a rotten piece of wood.

He carried on upwards, his chest tightening with anxiety as well as the climb. He didn’t want to do it, but it had to be done. As the trees thinned out, he slowed, not wanting to come upon Jane unawares. He’d been right about the water; its rushing filled the air, covering the stealthy sound of his feet on leaves and twigs. When he caught sight of Jane, his heart jumped. The gods were playing right into his hands. She was perched on the edge of the limestone pavement, all her attention focused on the water below her.

He crept forward, holding the wood like an unwieldy baseball bat. His soft footfalls were swallowed by the water’s rush. A fine mist fell on his hair and face, making him blink. He gripped the wood tightly, battening down any qualms about what he was about to do. It had to be done. He inhaled deeply, raising the wood above his shoulder as he turned sideways on to Jane.

When the branch crashed down on her head, it came entirely without warning. So sudden she had no possibility of grabbing anything to hinder her fall, the blow stunned her. Before she had even registered it, she was in mid-air, falling through water, drenched, deafened and dizzy. She tumbled through water, treacherous rock on all sides, too stunned to offer any defence.

The plummet into the tarn took the breath from her lungs. Bubbles trailed from her nose and mouth as she sank under the power of the waterfall. The blood pounded in her ears, a red film obscured her sight. A flicker of consciousness told her to strike out for the surface but the message didn’t make it through to her limbs.

The distance between life and death was shrinking by the second.

Tenille was almost beginning to enjoy herself, though she would have died before she’d have admitted it to anyone. OK, it was frustrating not to be able to go out in daylight, but she had books to read, music to listen to, food to eat and it was warm enough tucked up in the sleeping bag. She’d never had a problem with her own company, and Jane came by often enough to save her from feeling completely cast adrift.

Jane had brought good news earlier that day. She’d seemed kind of remote, like she was trapped in her own head and it was too much like hard work to get out. But she’d been clear enough about her conversation with the Hammer. Now he knew Tenille wasn’t going to grass him up. And Jane had told him Tenille didn’t want him making pointless gestures, taking the blame on himself to get her off the hook. Tenille didn’t have a clue what her father had planned, but she trusted him. Though he’d kept out of her life for thirteen years, he’d proved his devotion when it mattered. She had no doubt that he would stick by her now. He would come up with some plan that would put them both in the clear. In a few days’ time, she’d be able to come out of hiding and get back to her old life.

She wondered where Sharon was staying now the flat was burned out. Would the council have rehoused her in one of the empty flats on the Marshpool? Or would she be camping out with one of her mates, drowning her losses in booze and weed? Tenille didn’t mind the idea of going back to live with Sharon. Her aunt had mostly left her to her own devices. They’d evolved a way of life that more or less suited them both. But maybe her dad would step into the frame now. She didn’t think he’d want her living with him–she knew enough about the kind of life he led to realise he wouldn’t want his daughter in the thick of it. But maybe he’d keep an eye on her, make sure Sharon didn’t bring home any more deadbeat pervs like Geno.

And maybe, with her dad in the picture, she could let herself have the dreams she’d always pushed away because they were beyond impossible. Dreams of study, of university, of maybe even writing her own poetry one day. If she knew there was a real point, then she could make herself go to school, play the game and follow the path Jane had shown her. She could make her dad see that tossing a few quid in the pot wouldn’t be money wasted. She could make him proud.

But that was for the future. Right now, she was focused on paying Jane back for the way she’d stuck her neck out for her. It didn’t matter that she’d made a promise; in her world, promises were flexible. You kept them when they made sense, you broke them when they didn’t. Jane was too soft to see that you couldn’t take people at their word. That was why she was getting nowhere with those old people. Nobody volunteered anything to anyone, whether information or possessions, unless there was something in it for them.

Tenille waited for midnight, then set off. She’d meant to go to Letitia Brownrigg’s house the night before, but finding Eddie Fairfield dead in his chair had left her more shaken than she’d admitted. She couldn’t face doing Mrs Brownrigg’s place after that.

She found the address on Chestnut Hill easily enough, though it took her a few moments to figure out that 12A was the low extension that thrust out from the left-hand side of the big stone house numbered 12. She hid her bike behind some shrubs by the entrance to the drive and walked softly up the grass verge. A couple of windows in the main house showed the gleam of a light, but otherwise it was in darkness. Tenille guessed at a landing light left on for children who might wake up needing to go to the toilet. She wondered what it must be like to live somewhere big enough for there to be any chance of missing your way from bedroom to bathroom. She kind of liked the idea and wondered if maybe one day she would live somewhere like that.

The door was round the side, a rustic construction of sturdy wooden planks with square iron nail heads. But the handle and the mortise lock just below it were modern. Tenille gently depressed the handle and pushed, to check if there were internal bolts as well as the lock. To her astonishment, the door opened and she almost tumbled inside. So it really was true that, out in the country, people still left their doors unlocked. How mad was that? Her heart pounding, she slipped inside, leaving the door ajar behind her.

She moved stealthily down the hall towards the first closed door. Again, she took infinite pains not to make a noise as she opened the door. What she saw made her gasp out loud. A man was standing by a bureau, rifling through papers by the narrow beam of a torch held in his mouth. Hearing Tenille’s strangled, ‘Fuck,’ he started and swung round, the light bouncing over her. Tenille backed out of the room and hurtled down the hall, yanking the door open and slamming it behind her to buy a few precious seconds.

She sprinted down the drive, dragging the bike from the bushes and into the road. She threw her leg across the bike and set off down the hill as fast as she could pedal. Through the rush of wind in her ears, she listened in panic for the sound of a car in pursuit. If he had wheels, she’d have to abandon the bike and leg it through the gardens that flanked the road. But luck was on her side. No car loomed behind her, though she still didn’t stop till she made it back to Fellhead, sweating and exhausted. She replaced the bike and ran back to the slaughterhouse, making sure she locked the door behind her.

Panting, she leaned against the door and tried to calm herself. He couldn’t have seen her properly, not with the baseball cap pulled down over her brow and her jacket zipped right up to cover the lower part of her face. Even if he had seen her, he couldn’t have known who she was or where she was staying. He obviously had no more right to be there than she had. So it wasn’t like he could go to the cops and tell them about seeing a young black burglar. Just as well. If the local cops were smart enough, they’d soon be putting two and two together and coming up with Tenille Cole and Gresham’s Farm. She was safe. She really was safe.

She wasn’t so sure about Letitia Brownrigg, though. If somebody else was after Jane’s manuscript, then maybe there really was something funny going on with all these old people dying.

Tenille felt her chest constrict. What if she’d come face to face with a murderer? If he knew about the manuscript, chances were he knew Jane. And if he knew Jane, he might know about Tenille. And if he knew about Tenille, he might be able to work out where she was hiding. Was he really going to leave her alive to tell the tale?

Maybe she wasn’t quite as safe as she’d thought.

35

That Thursday displayed the sort of weather that Jane yearned for when she was in London: high blue skies raked with fragments of thin cloud; leaves green, gold, russet, chestnut and oxblood; skylines etched clear and rugged; birdsong and the smell of autumn on the air. She could hardly believe she was still alive to see it. She was bruised and stiff, there was a long gash down one arm and a lump on the back of her head. But, that apart, she seemed to have survived her ordeal with remarkably little physical damage.

The real injuries were internal, she suspected. Jane had never been the victim of violence, never known the visceral fear that comes with knowing that someone is out to harm you–and having no sense of who her attacker was made it even harder to deal with the fear.

She owed her life to a shepherd and his dog, a man like her father who knew the lines of the fell as well as his jaw under the razor. He’d been walking back to his Land Rover with the dog when he’d seen Jane fall into the tarn. Man and dog had raced across the hillside and he had sent the animal into the water. She had no recollection of the dog seizing her collar in his teeth. She remembered breaking the surface in a panic, convinced the dog was her attacker, struggling to free herself from his grip. Only when the shepherd waded in did she stop struggling and allow herself to be towed to shore. She was groggy but conscious enough to make it back to the Land Rover, her arm slung round a man she vaguely remembered from sheep sales and summer barbecues.

Her mother had risen to the crisis with customary calm. Judy’s fretting was always in the abstract; faced with concrete calamity, she simply got on with what had to be done. Jane was stripped, inserted into a hot bath, supplied with sweet milky tea. Her wounds were cleaned and she was wrapped in a warm towel before being put to bed in a pair of flannel pyjamas she had never seen in her life. Only then did her mother pause to ask what had happened.

‘I don’t know,’ Jane had prevaricated. ‘I must have slipped.’ Now the practicalities were over, she didn’t want to tell her mother the truth. It would terrify Judy, but it would terrify her even more to relive the moments after the blow struck, moments when she’d plummeted downwards half-stunned, her mouth and nose full of water, no sense of which way was up as she tumbled through the column of water. But when Dan had shown up in response to her phone call, she had told him the moment they were alone.

‘Do you have any sense of who it was?’ he demanded, his hands clenched into fists.

‘I’ve no idea. I told you I felt like I was being followed, but I can’t think who’d do a thing like this. Not Jake, not Matthew.’

‘Whoever did this was serious,’ Dan said. ‘You should tell the police.’

‘But why would anyone want me dead? I haven’t got the manuscript.’

Dan reached for her hand. ‘Maybe they want to eliminate the competition.’

‘In that case, they could be coming after you too.’

His face froze in shock. ‘Christ, I never thought of that.’ He exhaled loudly. ‘Well, from now on, no more solo interviews. No more wandering around on your own. We stick together, right?’

Jane nodded, weary of thinking and puzzling. ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe I should talk to Rigston.’

‘Sleep on it,’ he advised. ‘We’ll talk again in the morning.’

Now morning was here and her concerns still plagued her. It seemed as if every area of her life was in turmoil. Judy had tried to cheer her up over breakfast, but Jane’s secrets weighed too heavy. Dan’s arrival felt like the cavalry.

Judy tried to dissuade Jane from going out, but she was adamant. She and Dan were heading for Coniston and Jenny Wright, younger sister of Letty Brownrigg, née Fairfield. It was a relief to be out of the house, out from under her mother’s smothering concern.

‘How are you feeling?’ Dan asked as he drove out of the yard. ‘Really feeling, I mean.’

‘Like shit,’ Jane said. ‘I’m aching all over. But I’ve no intention of giving up.’

‘What about talking to Rigston? Have you thought any more about it?’

‘I don’t know, what if he doesn’t believe me?’
Or worse, what if he does believe me, and suggests staking out
the farm or offering me protection? There’d be no hiding place for Tenille then.

‘Why wouldn’t he?’

Jane sighed. ‘If there is something odd about these deaths, he must be thinking of me as a possible suspect. He might think I made up the attack to divert suspicion away from myself.’

Dan threw her a quick glance. ‘You have a very devious mind,’ he said.

‘So do coppers,’ Jane said drily.

They drove for a while in silence, skirting Ambleside and heading out through Clappergate and Skelwith Bridge, the looming bulk of the Old Man of Coniston rising before them. Jane had always liked Coniston village. There was something plain and unselfconscious about it. It felt like what it was–a post-industrial village with few pretensions. It had sprung up because of the seams of copper ore in the mountain behind, and most of the grey stone houses were small and unassuming. Somehow Coniston had resisted the prettification of tourism rather better than most villages in the area; it still seemed a place where local people lived and worked.

Jane directed Dan off the main road on to the narrow track that led to Coppermines Valley. She almost wished they’d brought her father’s Land Rover as Dan’s Volkswagen Golf bounced and groaned its way up the valley and over Miner’s Bridge. Ahead was a terrace of tiny cottages which had originally been built to house the miners and their families. Irish Row had been abandoned and left derelict once the mining had ended, but then modern roads and disposable incomes made the Lake District achievably desirable for weekends and holidays. Property in the area became valuable again and the stone terrace had been gutted and turned into sought-after weekend and holiday cottages that no local labourer could imagine being able to afford. Jane remembered coming up here in her childhood for days out, exploring the remains of the old mine workings under the watchful eye of her father. She couldn’t remember Irish Row at all, but she did remember the cottage a hundred yards further on where Jenny Wright lived.

The memory had not persisted for aesthetic reasons. Copperhead Cottage was a tall, narrow building, its natural stone covered with battleship grey rendering. It sat sinister as a toad in the landscape, the square panes of its blind windows shrouded in net curtains. The first time they’d come up there, she and Matthew had run on ahead of their parents. As they’d rounded the bend, Matthew had grabbed her arm and stopped her in her tracks. ‘That’s where the witch lives,’ he whispered. ‘She likes to eat little girls. If you wander off on your own, she’ll come up to you disguised as a sheep and she’ll gobble you up.’

As far as she could remember, Jane had only been about five, and Matthew’s words had been all too convincing. So the edge of her pleasure had always been blunted whenever their family outings had brought them to Coniston. So in spite of the glorious weather and her adult sensibility, Jane still felt a faint sense of trepidation as she walked ahead of Dan up the path of Copperhead Cottage.

When the door eventually opened to her knock, Jane felt an ancient tremor of fear. The woman who stood on the threshold bore an eerie resemblance to that childhood image of witchery. Her grey hair was an untidy nest, her eyes dark and sunken on either side of a hooked nose which curved towards a strong chin. One shoulder was higher than the other and she leaned on a knobbly stick. As if to complete the picture, a grey cat rubbed against her ankles. ‘This is a private house,’ she announced. ‘No bed and breakfast, no cream teas. And I don’t allow people to use my lavatory.’

‘Mrs Wright?’ Jane asked, spirits sinking.

The woman peered at her through her little round glasses. ‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Jane Gresham. I’m a friend of Jimmy Clewlow–David and Edith’s grandson,’ Jane said, instinctively going for the family connection. Anyone this unwelcoming of strangers wasn’t going to be moved by her credentials. ‘And this is my friend Dan Seabourne.’

‘Also a friend of Jimmy’s, ma’am,’ Dan said, ingratiating smile at the ready.

‘You’re a day early if you’ve come to take me to the funeral,’ she said ungraciously.

‘That’s not why we’re here. Jimmy thought you might be able to help us with a research project. Jane and I work together at a university in London,’ Dan cut in, his charm to the fore.

Jenny Wright frowned. ‘What sort of research project brings you up here?’

‘I come from up here. I grew up in Fellhead,’ Jane said, trotting out the rest of her credentials.

‘More fool you for leaving. So what’s this project that Jimmy Clewlow thinks I might be able to help you with?’

‘Maybe we could come in and tell you, rather than keep you standing on the doorstep in the cold?’ Dan suggested.

The old woman shook her head. ‘Dropping a name or two won’t get you across my door. How do I know you’re who you say you are? How do I know you’re not here to rob an old woman?’

Dan hid his exasperation well. ‘You could always phone Jimmy and ask him.’

Jenny snorted derision. ‘I don’t have his number.’

‘I do.’

‘And how would I know it was him? Nay, you can state your business well enough out here.’

‘Whatever you prefer,’ Jane said politely. ‘I specialise in the works of William Wordsworth. I understand one of your ancestors, Dorcas Mason, once worked for the Wordsworth family at Dove Cottage. And I believe she may have acquired some of his papers.’

‘Are you saying she stole them?’ The woman sounded even more hostile.

‘Not at all. We think she was given them for safekeeping.’

‘Well, if she was, she would have kept them safe. We understand about duty in our family.’ She pursed her lips and nodded with self-satisfaction.

‘That’s what we’re hoping. We’re trying to find out if the papers survived and, if possible, to have a look at them.’

‘What’s your interest?’

Jane smiled. ‘If I’m right, this is an undiscovered poem by Wordsworth. A long poem. I would like to be the first person to read it. And I would like to have the opportunity to study it. To write about it.’ She tried to make her tone even more placatory. ‘It would be a very valuable manuscript. Whoever owns it could become rich as a result.’

‘See? I said you were out to rob me. Well, I’ve nothing worth stealing, young woman. No manuscripts. No jewellery. No money, neither. You and your young man are wasting your time here. I’ve nothing for you.’ The door began to close, then it opened again. ‘And tell Jimmy Clewlow to make sure somebody comes for me tomorrow. I don’t want to miss Edith’s funeral because somebody forgot I exist.’ This time, the door closed completely, leaving them staring at an expanse of black paint.

‘And a very good day to you too,’ Jane muttered, turning on her heel. She felt as if the windows of the house were staring at her as she walked away. Another wasted journey. At this rate, she’d be back in London with nothing to show for her two weeks of study leave. Nothing apart from a throbbing lump on the back of her head, assorted cuts and bruises and nerves shredded to tatters.

After Dan dropped her at the farm, Jane seized the chance to go and check on Tenille. She found her curled in a corner, wide-eyed and twitchy. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, settling down beside the girl and putting an arm round her shoulders.

‘Bad shit,’ Tenille muttered.

‘Are you freaking out, stuck in here?’

Tenille leaned into her. ‘You know you made me promise I’d stay in?’

Jane could hardly bear the thought of more trouble. The attack had left too many nerve endings exposed. ‘What happened?’