The Grave Tattoo (17 page)

‘You can date it that precisely?’ Rigston looked impressed.

‘The skeleton rebuilds itself. Bones regenerate. Different bones take different lengths of time to heal. Ribs are quick, the femur takes longer, the skull even more time. A wound like this in a flat plane of bone like the scapula will take years and will never heal completely because of the extent of the damage. It probably ached in the winter. I’d say he took this bullet ten to fifteen years before he died.’

‘You seem pretty sure about it being a gunshot wound.’

River grinned. ‘Elementary, my dear Rigston.’ She pointed to a couple of flecks on the X-ray round the edge of the damaged bone. ‘Metal fragments. Back then, bullets were made of lead and its alloys. Soft metal, snagged on the bone as it went through.’ He smiled and she felt inordinately pleased with herself.

‘Impressive,’ he said. ‘What else?’

She spread her hands. ‘That’s it for now. But there’s a lot more to come.’

‘Like what?’

She flashed him a suspicious look. ‘You really want to know? Or are you just humouring me?’

Rigston shook his head, amusement crinkling the skin round his pale blue eyes. ‘I’m interested. I know what happens at a post mortem, but I’ve got next to no idea about what you actually do. And I’m not a man who enjoys ignorance.’

River gave him a shrewd look of assessment. Her first instinct was that his interest was genuine intellectual curiosity, not prurience. She decided to trust herself. ‘Well, we’ll be doing a post mortem, but not the sort you’re accustomed to seeing, with the big Y-incision. What I’ll be aiming for is minimal invasion. So most of the internal investigation will be done by camera–like with a laparoscopy. I’ll take tissue core samples from anything that’s left of the major organs, like a keyhole biopsy.’

‘Why do you do it that way?’

‘It preserves the integrity of the body. Something like this will probably end up in a museum or a university. It helps if I don’t completely trash it in the process of finding out what it can tell us.’ She tipped her glass towards him. ‘In a few years’ time, your Home Office pathologists will be doing more work like this. They’ve already done the first virtual post mortem at Leicester. Apart from anything else, it helps assuage the religious sensibilities of Jews and Muslims.’

Rigston grinned. ‘Not to mention the sensibilities of the coppers who have to attend post mortems. No more picking the rookies off the floor when the smell hits them.’

River acknowledged this with a nod. ‘Did you know that how we smell when we’re dead depends on what we eat? Humans and pigs smell sweet, dogs are rancid and horses are sour. It’s all to do with the levels of nitrogen.’

He pulled a face. ‘I don’t know that I’d call it sweet.’

‘But poets do. They talk about the sweet smell of decay.’

‘I don’t read much poetry,’ Rigston said. ‘I don’t think many cops do. It’s not got much to do with the nitty gritty of what we do.’

‘Or with what I do. There’s nothing poetic about sucking out the contents of a stomach or a bowel.’

‘You have to do that?’ Rigston seemed intrigued rather than disgusted. River was glad her instincts seemed to have been on the money so far.

‘We do. Especially in a case like this, where the stomach contents will probably be well preserved. And the lower part of the gastro-intestinal tract could well contain seeds and vegetable fibre that will tell us even more about his diet. One of my colleagues once found a whole Brussels sprout on its way out.’

Rigston did look disgusted this time. ‘Now that’s too much information,’ he said, squirming in his seat. ‘Can we get back to the scientific stuff?’

‘Wimp,’ River said lightly. ‘OK. We’ll hope and pray there’s enough soft tissue left for us to take muscle samples and maybe even brain tissue samples to do toxicology and DNA testing. And then we get to the really interesting stuff. The teeth will tell us where he was living when they were formed. We’ll know if he was UK born, and if so, which part of the UK. The bone will tell us if he’s been living elsewhere in the world in the previous ten to fifteen years.’ She grinned triumphantly.

He cracked a huge smile, revealing his own regular white teeth. ‘That’s bloody amazing,’ he said. ‘And you can tell what diseases he’s had?’

She shrugged. ‘Some. Not as many as we would like. I can tell you already that he didn’t have syphilis. No pitting of the bones. So our sailor was either astonishingly clean living or lucky.’

Rigston took a long drink. ‘I envy you,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘What you do, it’s real detection. Most of what I do is just a case of figuring out which of the local villains is most likely to have committed whatever stupid bloody crime has landed on my desk. Contrary to all the books and TV shows, I almost never get to pull together all the different elements of a case to make a complete jigsaw. When I joined up, I thought I’d get to use my brain.’ He sighed. ‘Trouble is, most villains haven’t got the brains God gave a Herdwick.’

‘That must be depressing.’

‘It is. So let’s not talk about it any more.’ He drained his pint and pushed back in his chair. She felt a moment’s disappointment. Was this it? The first man in months who hadn’t wondered why a nice girl like her was messing around with old cadavers, and he wasn’t even sticking around for a second drink? ‘Are you in a hurry to get back to Carlisle, or do you fancy a curry?’ Rigston asked.

River’s stomach fluttered in a way that had nothing to do with food. ‘Only if we don’t talk shop. Yours or mine.’

He grinned. ‘It’s a deal.’

17

A darker shape within the shadow of a stairwell stirred. Night kept its secrets remarkably well on the Marshpool Farm Estate, mostly because half of the streetlamps were out of action. Some had burned out naturally; more had been disabled because, unlike legitimate merchants, the retailers of the Marshpool preferred the cover of darkness for their transactions. It didn’t matter whether they were selling drugs, smuggled booze and fags, stolen DVD players or their bodies; the process was helped along by an absence of light. There was no denying it made life easier for Tenille that evening. If anyone noticed her flitting from one end of the estate to the other, they didn’t let on, either to her or to the police.

Tenille cautiously made her way to the far end of the Marshpool, where a decrepit row of lock-up garages marked the boundary between the estate and the rest of the world. A low parapet shielded the flat roofs from anyone in the car park below. She crossed behind the garages and squeezed into a narrow gap between their back walls and the high wooden fences of the private houses beyond. About fifty yards along, she came to a section of fence that was sturdier than its neighbours. One of the more enterprising of the estate’s burglars had screwed small blocks of wood to the fence, creating a rudimentary set of footholds. It was an easy way into a suburban garden, which in turn led to its fellows and beyond.

But Tenille had discovered some time ago it was also a possible route to the roofs of the lock-ups. She liked to sit on the roof on sunny days, basking in the warmth as she read in peace. The roof was fragile, though; she had learned to be careful to make sure there was a joist underfoot as she crossed roofing felt that had grown brittle with age. Tonight, she planned to turn that to her advantage.

It was pitch black in the gap and Tenille had to find her way by touch. When she reached the section she was looking for, she leaned in to the fence, gripping the higher wood blocks with her fingers as she launched herself upwards. A short scramble and she was sitting astride the top of the fence, nine feet above the path. Gingerly, she manoeuvred herself into a crouch, one hand on the fence to keep her from falling. With infinite slowness, she inched the other hand towards the roof of the garage. As soon as she felt the rough roof covering, she pushed herself upright, allowing herself to fall towards the roof. Both hands on the roof, she kicked off with all her strength from the fence and pulled herself up and across the gap, twisting so she landed lying along the edge of the roof.

Tenille exhaled noisily. She’d made it so far. Now for the hard part. From up here, there was nothing visible to mark where one garage ended and another began. But she knew there were ten of them. The one she wanted was third from the end where she’d entered the gap. It was hard to be certain, but she thought she needed to be about another six feet to her left to be sure she was in the right place. Tenille inched along the edge of the roof, not caring about damaging her clothes. She wouldn’t be needing them much longer. When she judged she was in the right place, she eased her backpack off and took out the hammer.

One blow cracked the elderly felt; the second smashed through it. Tenille used the claw of the hammer to pull back enough of the brittle material to allow her to hammer a hole in the plasterboard of the ceiling. She shone the torch through the gap she’d made and allowed herself a snort of relief. She’d guessed right. She was directly above the lock-up where Junior B and his brother kept their stash. She could see cardboard boxes stacked along the walls, some of them already opened, the torch beam gleaming on the plastic bags that contained the stock for Junior B’s market stall.

It didn’t take long to make the hole big enough for her to get through, though Tenille was careful to keep it as quiet as possible. Even though most people on the Marshpool had made a career of seeing and hearing no evil, there were still certain unexpected noises that might provoke further investigation. Once she was sure she could get through and back out again, Tenille dropped her backpack through the hole. It landed on a stack of boxes a few feet below her. It was, she thought, safe to go.

Within ten minutes, she had kitted herself out in baggy trousers, a polo shirt, a baggy overshirt, a waterproof jacket and a baseball cap, all covered with the right logos to make her pass for a cool dude. All of them fake, of course. She had also grabbed a change of trousers and a couple of T-shirts and stuffed them into her backpack. Sorted. All she had to do now was get out of there.

Stacking the boxes into a high enough pile was harder than she had bargained for. It seemed to take ages, and it was heavy work. By the time she’d constructed a pyramid she could climb up, she was breathing heavily and sweating. All that kept her going was the desperate desire not to be caught.

Finally, almost an hour after she’d entered the lockup, she was back on the roof. She lowered herself down as far as she could and dropped the remaining six feet to the ground, every bone in her body juddering as she hit the unforgiving cement. She pulled her bus schedule out of her pocket. She had to get to Victoria in time for the last bus to Oxford. A piece of piss, she thought, changing her walk to a swagger as she stepped out into the night. She was on her way.

Barbara Field’s cottage was a monument to the flora of the English countryside. Roses rampaged over her three-piece suite, clematis climbed and curled over her curtains and the wallpaper boasted more bunches of wildflowers than the average Mothering Sunday could muster. Dried flower arrangements were everywhere and the walls displayed framed cross-stitch samplers of cottage gardens. Jane thought there should probably be an Observer Field Guide to Barbara’s living room. Barbara had greeted her with, ‘We’ll just have a cup of tea and you can tell me what you’re looking for. Then we’ll go through to the office and see what we can dig out.’ Predictably, the cup had been floral too–a hedgerow scene of primroses and cowslips.

Barbara had listened attentively as Jane had explained what she hoped to find, nodding occasionally in an exaggerated way that made Jane feel very young and very stupid. But then, Bossy Barbara, as Jane had dubbed her in early childhood, had always made her feel very young and very stupid. There was something about the perfection of a hairstyle that looked as solid as a motorbike helmet and a permanently starched white blouse that never seemed to accumulate stains from gravy, ink or garden, which felt deliberately calculated to leave everyone else on the back foot, Jane thought. ‘Well, that all sounds perfectly straightforward to me,’ Barbara said briskly at the end of the recital. ‘Let’s go and see what the magic box of tricks has to show us,’ she added, reminding Jane of her habit of dubbing everything with absurd circumlocutions. She shooed Jane out of the room and down the hall to what Jane vaguely remembered had been referred to as ‘the family room’ in her youth. It had always baffled her, since Barbara and Brian Field were themselves childless. It was, she supposed, as odd as Barbara’s fascination with genealogy, given that her own genes would perish with her.

The room had been transformed into a surprisingly plain office. It contained a desk with a computer, a worktable with three chairs and a portable TV on a small trolley. Instead of the samplers, the walls here were covered with family trees, elaborately drawn in fine calligraphy. ‘My inner sanctum,’ Barbara said with satisfaction. ‘Brian has his potting shed, I have my little shrine to our ancestors.’ She drew one of the worktable chairs across to the desk and settled it at an angle to her own office chair. ‘Now, let’s see what the information superhighway has to tell us about Dorcas Mason.’

Her fingers ran across the keys with an agility that surprised Jane, more accustomed to her mother’s two-fingered forays into the farm accounts. ‘You’re very good at this,’ Jane said.

Barbara smirked. ‘I like to think I’ve always made the best of everything I’ve turned my hand to. You young people write us all off as soon as we collect our bus passes, but there’s many a fine tune played on an old fiddle.’

Jane gritted her teeth and smiled. ‘I wouldn’t be so daft as to underestimate you, Mrs Field.’

Barbara went straight to her ‘Favourites’ menu and clicked on ‘County Records’. As she clicked and typed, she talked Jane through it. ‘When I started building our family trees, it meant trailing round parish churches and looking through the records. But now most of the parish records are held centrally at county records offices, and you can access them for a small fee. Census records are online, and so are wills from 1858, when the Court of Probate was established. And of course, there are the Mormons.’

‘The Mormons?’ Jane tried to sound polite rather than baffled by what seemed a complete non sequitur.

‘They’ve got a vast genealogical database. I think the idea is to baptise the dead…’ Barbara’s voice trailed off, distracted by the commands she was typing into a search engine. ‘Now, Dorcas Mason, you said?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Do we have any idea when she was born?’

‘She was working as a maid for the Wordsworth family in 1847, so she must have been at least fourteen by then. So, sometime before 1833.’

‘Let’s start searching at 1800, then,’ Barbara said, typing in the dates and clicking the mouse with a flourish. Seconds passed, then a message appeared on the screen:
1 matches found. Please enter your password to access.

Barbara looked pointedly at Jane. It took her a moment to realise she was supposed to turn away while Barbara entered her personal password. When she looked back at the screen, it showed details extracted from the parish records. Dorcas Mason had been born on 5th April 1831 at Sheepfold Cottage, Cockermouth, in the parish of Brigham to Thomas and Jean Mason. Her father had been described as a farrier, and she had been baptised three weeks later. Barbara turned a triumphant smile on Jane. ‘The miracle of modern technology,’ she announced, as if it were entirely her invention. ‘I’ll print it out for you.’

‘That’s terrific,’ Jane said, her spirits rising at this first official trace of the woman who had carried off William’s mysterious manuscript. ‘And it’s very helpful. But I’m actually more interested in what happened to her later. She supposedly left the Wordsworth household in 1851 to get married. Will there be records of any marriage and children? Of her death?’

‘Of course, my dear.’ Barbara turned back to the screen and entered the search requirements. This time, the wait was slightly longer. And the message less satisfying:
0 matches found.
Jane’s heart sank. It felt as if Dorcas had been within reach, only to have been snatched away again.

‘How very annoying,’ Barbara said.

‘Surely she can’t just have disappeared?’

‘Well, no. By this point in time, society was quite well regulated. People didn’t get married and give birth without records of it. Either she was married and had her family in a parish whose records aren’t on the online database–which does happen more often than I would like.’ Barbara made it sound as if this oversight was a personal slight. ‘Or else she married outside the county and moved away.’

‘How would I find out which it was?’

Barbara sucked air over her teeth. ‘Well, you see, the way you’re going about this is rather unusual. Normally, people are working backwards. They know roughly where they’re going because each document provides them with clues for where to look next. Working forward is a different thing altogether, because we have no idea where to start. If she didn’t marry a local man, your Dorcas could have ended up anywhere in the country. Even in Scotland.’ Barbara pronounced the word as if she were speaking of the distant reaches of the galaxy.

‘So what’s my next step?’ Jane tried to keep the impatience from her voice.

‘I’d suggest the County Records Office in Carlisle. They’ve got the hard copies of all the registers. If Dorcas has slipped through the net online, the certificates will still be there. Failing that, you’re going to have to start trawling through the records of births, marriages and deaths at the Family Records Centre, down in Islington in London. You can get professional researchers to do that for you. It doesn’t come cheap, but they are very efficient.’

‘I’ve got that in hand already. One of my colleagues is going to make the searches in London. What about her will? Would that be online?’

‘It depends when she died. Before 1870, women had no entitlement to own property so they couldn’t make a will. After that, only married women could make wills, and even then they could only leave property settled on them for their separate and personal use.’ Barbara patted her on the arm. ‘And I don’t think a serving maid would be in that position, do you, Jane?’