The Grave Tattoo (44 page)

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 think 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

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

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’

Independent

‘[A] cleverly plotted thriller…lost manuscripts, 200-year-old enigmas, an isolated Lake District village mystery and oodles of atmosphere: McDermid concocts a fascinating brew which is miles away from her customary bloody excursions into the realms of the perverse. It should gain her a crowd of new fans’

Guardian

‘One of our most accomplished crime writers…compelling’

Glasgow Herald

‘Cunning…gripping…so adroit in her pulling together of various items of historical conjecture and marrying them up to a murderous plot that has as many twists and turns as one of her Tony Hills…a substantially entertaining novel which grips the reader’s interest from the first page until the final deeply satisfying sentence’

Daily Express

‘Bodies pile up–one with bizarre tattoos–and trying to solve a 200-year-old mystery becomes increasingly lethal and readable’

Daily Mirror

‘Safe for the squeamish…one of her best’

Literary Review

‘An irresistible combination of contemporary psychological thriller and historical mystery filled with the moody atmosphere of the Lake District. And in Wordsworth scholar Jane Gresham, McDermid has created a character whose keen intellect matches her generous heart’

Tess Gerritsen