The Grave Tattoo (19 page)

One version of his death on Pitcairn refers to him being shot in the shoulder

She stood back and surveyed what she had written. ‘It’s not much, I know, but we’re lucky in that it does give us some concrete physical evidence to go on.’

River turned back to the body. ‘Well, we know our body is male. We also know that its age is consistent with it being Mr Christian. And he does have long dark hair. That will have been darkened by exposure to the peat, but we can conduct tests to establish more clearly its original colour.’ She took a tape measure from her pocket and stretched it out alongside the body. ‘A hundred and seventy centimetres. Apparently five centimetres shorter than our man. Any comments?’

The female forensic anthropologist said, ‘We all lose height as we age. And we can’t be certain how accurate the initial measurement was. So it doesn’t exclude this being him.’

‘Correct,’ River said. ‘Sadly, we can’t make any estimate as to his weight because we don’t have any idea how much soft tissue has been leached away by the acid in the peat. We’ve got very little left and certainly not enough to make even a reasonable guess. He does look quite broad in the shoulder, however. So, again, we have nothing to contradict our wild hypothesis. The other disappointment because of the lack of soft tissue is that we’ve no way of knowing whether our cadaver suffered from any disorder of the sympathetic nervous system that would lead to hyperhidrosis. Now, let’s take a look at his leg bones. Anyone have anything to say?’

They crowded round the table. The director took the opportunity to rearrange his crew to capture a new angle. The same student spoke again. ‘The leg bones look pretty straight to me. I wouldn’t have thought he was bow-legged.’

‘I don’t agree,’ her opposite number said. ‘Look at the knees. The medial femoral-tibial joint is worn down on both legs. If he started out as mildly bow-legged, over the years that would have put stress on the inside of the knee joint and caused this kind of arthritic presentation. Especially if he led a physically active life.’

‘The arthritis could have nothing to do with being bow-legged,’ the female student protested. ‘It could be simple wear and tear, particularly if he was overweight.’

‘I don’t think there were many fat sailors around in the eighteenth century,’ the young man countered. ‘The food was crap and the work was hard. And besides, he’s pretty young at forty to have that level of joint degeneration.’

‘I’m inclined to agree with you,’ River said. ‘Again, we can’t exclude Mr Christian on the basis of our findings. At this point, then, all we can say is nothing we’ve seen with our eye contradicts the possibility. And we have one piece of non-invasive evidence that does give some weight to our idea.’ Reaching beneath the table, she pulled out the X-ray and CAT scan images of the cadaver’s shoulder. While she waited for the camera to set up on the portable light-box she’d had the students bring down from Carlisle, she ran through what she had already told Ewan Rigston about the injury to the shoulder blade. Then she ran through it twice more for the camera. By the end of that recital, she was beginning to feel bored with herself. Time to move swiftly on.

‘What we’re going to be doing for the rest of this session is taking samples. We’ll be taking teeth for stable isotope analysis to find out where he was living when they were formed. More teeth so we can age him more precisely. A bone sample from the femur for stable isotope analysis to see where he’d been in the last ten to fifteen years of his life. We’ll be analysing them back at the university with the mass spectrometer. We’ll also be taking hair and nail samples to check for toxicology and different food substances. And the contents of the gastro-intestinal tract so the palaeobotanists can have their fun. We’ll try to find enough soft muscle tissue to use for DNA and toxicology. And when we’ve done all that, we’ll have a much better idea of this man’s identity. Whether he’s Fletcher Christian or not, he can’t hide from us.’

River looked straight down the barrel of the camera. ‘And when we know more about who he is, maybe we’ll even have some idea of who killed him.’

19

DI Donna Blair dealt with the final allegedly urgent piece of paper on her desk and looked out across the incident room. ‘Kumar,’ she shouted.

The young PC who was supposed to be tracking down Jane Gresham looked up apprehensively. ‘Yes, ma’am?’

‘In here.’ Donna drummed her fingers on her desk as she waited for him to scramble into her office. ‘Have we got Jane Gresham yet?’

‘No, ma’am. I finally tracked down her workplace. She works at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, Queen Mary University of London, but the only address they’ve got for her is the Marshpool. The girl I spoke to says Gresham’s off somewhere on study leave, she thinks her boss might know where. So the boss is going to call me back.’

‘Christ. I’ve still got a bloody uniform on the door. This is costing money we haven’t got. You know how it works in an investigation like this–we’re not high profile, so we don’t get the budget.’

‘Surely the kid would have shown up by now if she was planning on hiding out there?’ PC Kumar was still fresh enough to the job to think he would earn Brownie points by making obvious suggestions to his boss.

Donna rolled her eyes. ‘And maybe she’s been hiding out somewhere else on the estate, waiting till the heat dies down and she can get to her safe house.’ She sighed. ‘Stick with it. Have you tried going through the phone book for the Lake District to see if there are any Greshams listed?’

‘I was going to, but then the woman at the university said study leave, so I thought maybe the neighbour got it wrong.’ As soon as the words were out of his mouth, PC Kumar knew his mistake.

‘I’m the one who’s paid to think,’ Donna said. ‘While you’re waiting for Jane Gresham’s boss to call you back, get started on the phone book. I expect there’s only a few dozen Greshams in the region. And before you get stuck in, get me the media centre, or whatever the press office is called this week. Now it’s beginning to look like she might have done a runner, it’s time to get the kid’s face out there.’ Kumar retreated and Donna scowled at his back. It wasn’t him she was pissed off with. What really pissed her off was being outsmarted by a thirteen-year-old. If anyone doubted Tenille Cole’s parentage, here was their answer.

She raked through her drawer till she found some nicotine gum. She didn’t want to talk to the Hammer, but she had a nasty feeling that it was going to come down to that. Not that the prospect frightened her; it was the thought of another pointless fencing match that would take the case no further forward that she dreaded. But there was no getting away from it. This was a murder inquiry and in these days of cold case squads, it could be professional suicide to leave any stone unturned, as several of her senior colleagues had been finding out lately.

Please let Kumar find Jane Gresham
, she thought.
And please let Jane Gresham know where we can find Tenille.

Matthew smiled at his pupils, a genuine smile that transformed the sulk his face had become in repose these days. It pointed up his resemblance to his sister, whose more optimistic take on life had given a sunnier cast to her features. It was a smile his son saw more than anyone else, and his pupils had learned to relax under its warmth. ‘You’ve all done really well,’ he said, the praise sincere. He’d been pleasantly surprised by how far everyone had managed to trace back their family trees and the detail they’d managed to acquire. The executions varied, admittedly. A couple were computer-generated, complete with scanned-in photographs; both produced by the children of incomers whose parents worked in IT. But even Jonathan Bramley, whose handwriting still made Matthew despair, had made a decent attempt at making his family tree look as it should.

‘This is going to make a very impressive centrepiece for our end-of-term display,’ Matthew continued. ‘So we’ve got plenty of time to see if we can go even further back into history. What we’re also going to be doing is looking in more detail at the sort of lives our ancestors led–what their living conditions were like, what sorts of jobs they did, what their family relationships were.’

He smiled again. ‘But before we get into that, I want Sam and Jonathan to come up here with their family trees.’

The two boys eyed each other as they walked to the front of the class. Sam looked wary, Jonathan surly. Sam’s project was beautifully laid out, clear and informative. Jonathan’s looked even more wanting alongside it, but it was clear enough for Matthew’s purposes. ‘Have you two looked at each other’s work?’ Matthew asked, squatting down so he was on a level with both boys.

Both shook their heads. ‘OK. Now, turn around to face the class and hold them up so we can all see them.’ Matthew paused while they did as they were asked. The first thing we notice with these two family trees is that both Sam and Jonathan can trace their descent back several generations. That’s because they both come from families that are local. It’s only been in the last thirty years or so that people have become so mobile. Before that, most people stayed pretty close to the place where they’d been born. If they moved more than twenty miles or so, it was generally because of the need to find work. My grandfather, for example, moved from Cornwall to Cumbria because he was a miner and the tin mines in Cornwall were closing. But he heard there was work here mining slate and so he left his home and his family and came to Cumbria. He married a local girl, and so he stayed.

‘Sam and Jonathan come from a long line of Cumbrians. And if we look back in time six generations,’ Matthew said, standing behind the boys and running his finger back up the branches, ‘we find something very interesting indeed. Here’s Sam’s great-great-great-great-grandfather, Arthur Clewlow. And here’s Jonathan’s great-great-great-grandmother May Bramley. And her name before she was married was May Clewlow. And then if we look one branch higher up the tree, we can see that Jonathan and Sam’s family come from a common root–the marriage between Arnold Clewlow and Dorcas Mayson in August 1851.’ He rumpled their hair.

‘So if the body in the bog is Sam Clewlow’s monkey ancestor, Jonathan, I guess he’s made a monkey of you too.’

Jane rubbed her eyes, but they felt just as gritty and tired when she opened them again. There was no question about it, parish registers had never been compiled with an eye to legibility. Crabbed scrawls vied with minuscule script, curlicues confused her and abbreviations puzzled her. Even with the aid of a magnifying glass, it was a struggle to make sense of the entries. She didn’t envy the poor sods charged with the data entry of the records that had already been made available online. It also made her wonder just how accurate those online records were. She was accustomed to reading old manuscripts, but there were some entries she’d had to give up on, others that were barely decipherable and yet more whose interpretation was debatable. Had a weaver in Ambleside in 1851 really called his son Endocrine? She thought not, but could imagine no other word that fitted the scribble.

The task Jane had set herself was wearisome and far less entertaining than her usual research. Generally when she was pursuing her scholarly interests, she would come across interesting little asides and byways that provided some leaven in the lump. But the County Records Office was all lump.

Jane sighed and turned back to another dusty volume. She sincerely hoped Dan was having more success than she was.

Jake sat cross-legged on the bed, his laptop open before him. The dial-up connection via the phone point was tediously slow compared to wireless access, but he wanted privacy for his piracy. He booted up Jane’s email program and was pleased to see that, as he’d suspected, she’d left her password stored on the dial-up screen. He hesitated for a moment. What he was planning was about as shabby as it got. And Jake didn’t like to think of himself as shabby. But he had his future to consider. Frankly, a little shabbiness was neither here nor there if that was all that stood between him and the literary find of the century.

That was all the argument he needed to overcome his scruples. Jane’s inbox contained a stack of emails that had been read and saved as new; Jake knew from experience that these were emails that she had either not yet answered or else was keeping close to hand for easy reference. There was only one unread message in the box, and as soon as Jake saw the sender’s name, his curiosity burned harder. If Anthony Catto was writing to Jane, it was most likely something to do with her research. But if he read it before Jane, she would realise someone had hacked her account. And nobody but he had her account details. That realisation would scupper any chance he had of getting her on his side.

The alternative was to open it and then delete it. If it was important, he could always fake an email from Jane to Anthony asking him to resend it. Before he could have second thoughts, he opened the email.

Dear Jane,

I’ve been in touch this morning with the document team at the British Library and they’ve agreed to examine the letters with a view to authentication and attribution. Well done you for finding them and for understanding their potential significance.

After our conversation yesterday, I remembered something that does loosely tie in to your hypothesis. WW wrote in 1841 re the Windermere area: ‘So much was this region considered out of the way until a late period that persons who had fled from justice used often to resort thither for concealment, and some were so bold as not infrequently to make excursions from the place of their retreat for the purpose of committing fresh offences.’ It seems a rather curious thing for him to say unless he had some personal knowledge, don’t you think?

Let me know how you fare with Dorcas.

Best Wishes

Anthony

‘Son of a bitch,’ Jake said softly. So she had found something after all. Something that gave support to her Fletcher Christian theory.

Eager now, he called up Jane’s sent mail. The last item in the box was addressed to Dan Seabourne. He remembered Dan–his smart repartee, his groomed good looks and his thinly-shrouded dislike of Jake. Dan had always been close to Jane. If she was going to confide in any of her colleagues, he would be the one. Impatiently, he opened the email and knew he’d struck gold. Jane referred to a letter from Mary Wordsworth about some mysterious material in William’s hand. She’d also included a copy of a letter from their son John. Supposedly to help Dan in searching for Dorcas Mason’s descendants at Family Records. Hastily, Jake copied both emails and forwarded them to his own mailbox. Then he composed a quick note to Anthony Catto, posing as Jane, claiming to have accidentally deleted Anthony’s message and asking him to send it again. His final act was to delete copies of what he’d sent. A computer expert would doubtless be able to recover what he’d done, but he didn’t imagine his laptop would ever attract the interest of one of those. He’d done enough to cover his tracks, he was convinced.

He closed down Jane’s account then opened his own email, checking the forwarded messages had arrived safely in his mailbox. Then he reached for his mobile and called Caroline. ‘I know what she’s got,’ he announced without preamble when she answered the phone.

‘She told you?’

‘Not exactly. I hacked into her email.’

‘So is it good?’

Jake ran through what he had uncovered. ‘There
was
definitely something,’ he concluded. ‘Whether it’s still around is a different story. But as long as I can get alongside her, we can let Jane do the legwork.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Caroline said slowly. ‘No reason why we shouldn’t try to steal a march on her. By all means, carry on with our original plan. It won’t hurt to know exactly where Jane is up to. But if we can get to Dorcas’s descendants ahead of Jane, so much the better.’