by Val McDermid
‘There’s a long and noble tradition of that, Matthew. Wordsworth and his friends were a part of it too. Do you despise them as well?’ There was an edge to Jane’s voice now. She knew it would be enough to make Matthew back down.
He threw his hands up in surrender. ‘You’ve always got an answer, Jane.’ He pushed his chair back, the feet screeching on the stone-flagged floor. ‘I better be getting back. I’ve got lessons to prepare. Nearest I’m likely to get to study leave.’ He stood up. ‘How long are you here for?’
‘A couple of weeks. When’s the best time to catch Diane on Saturday?’
Matthew shrugged. ‘Pretty much any time, if it’s raining. Which it looks like it’s set on for the next few days.’
‘Tell her I’ll drop in. I’m dying to see Gabriel.’
‘Sure you can spare the time to play aunties and nephews? I mean, you are supposed to be studying, right?’
‘Grow up, Matthew,’ Allan said wearily.
Matthew snorted. ‘I’m not the one playing hunt the metaphorical slipper, Dad. If anybody needs to catch the boat from Fantasy Island, it’s Jane. Wake up and smell the coffee, Sis. There’s no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Time to join the rest of us in the real world.’
Modifications were made to the Bounty before she set sail for the South Seas so that she could accommodate our cargo of breadfruit on our return voyage. On account of this, conditions were exceeding cramped for all on board, for officers as much as for the common seamen. Such close quarters always breed squabbling among the men, and it was impossible for we officers to hold ourselves aloof from the petty disputes that can fester on board ship. But that was as nothing compared to the tyranny of Bligh. He was a martinet with the men and no less so with the officers. For the most part, I was fortunate enough to be excluded from this general treatment. Bligh still seemed desirous of my good opinion and had me to dine in his cabin whenever I was not on watch. I confess I felt discomfort from the first at being singled out thus. I did not wish the men to think I was allied with Bligh. Nor was I easy in my mind as to the nature of his affection for me.
11
Damp mist held the heavy tang of the polluted city close to the ground. It clawed at throats, making smokers cough harder, and shrouded heads in streetlight haloes. The glow from windows was romanticised by the fog, but it was fooling no one. The pavements were quiet; it wasn’t the sort of evening to tempt people away from their own TVs.
Tenille stretched and checked the clock on the PC. Just after ten. It was time to make a move. Part of her wanted to stay here, snug in the cocoon of Jane’s flat, isolated in a place where she could pretend her life was different from its ungentle reality. But another part of her wanted to test the mettle of Jane and her alleged father. She gathered her stuff together and trudged towards the door. She took a last look around, checking the door key was still in her pocket, then stepped out into the night. After the warmth of the flat, the clammy cold made her shiver as she hurried along the gallery to the stairs. She had just begun to climb the two flights to her floor when she heard a low boom. The fog muffled it, making it impossible to divine its direction or identify its source. But unexplained noises were hardly an unusual event on Marshpool Farm, and it barely registered on her consciousness.
Heading towards the final turn of the stairs, Tenille realised there were footsteps coming down the steps towards her. The footsteps of someone big and confident, judging by the sound. Instinctively, she dodged to one side, making room for whoever it was to pass. Round here, making room could sometimes mean the difference between getting home in one piece or not.
She rounded the stairs and came face to face with John Hampton moving quickly down. A confusion of feelings hit her: apprehension, anxiety and curiosity. If he was surprised to see her, he didn’t show it. He didn’t even break step, merely glancing briefly at her, his face blank of expression. As he passed her, he said softly, ‘Not a good time to go home, Tenille.’
She stopped short and stared after him. A shoot of happiness blossomed inside her. He’d done it. He’d done it for her. Tenille grinned and ran up the few remaining steps, eager for the first time to see Geno. She didn’t think he’d be keen to hit on her any time soon.
The door to the flat was slightly ajar; she pushed it open and walked in. There was a strange smell, like fireworks. The hall was in darkness, except for a thin sliver of light outlining the living-room door. Tenille pushed it open, eager expectancy drawing a smile on her face.
The sight that confronted her was not what she had anticipated. Where she expected to see Geno curled in an agonised ball on the sofa, all that was recognisably his were his trousers.
The top half of his body was unrecognisable. Mangled meat jumbled with chewed-up fabric. Tatters of skin hung like macabre decorations from his head and neck. Blood, hair and flesh were spattered over the sofa and the wall behind it. Inside the room, the stink was different. Shit, gunpowder and something metallic bit at Tenille’s throat. She could feel her gorge rising but the gruesome remains on the sofa still held her with a terrible fascination. It was as if her mind had split in half. Part of her was rejoicing in the knowledge she was safe. The other part was wondering why she wasn’t screaming.
Tenille took a step forward, almost tripping over something lying on the worn carpet. In her shocked daze, she bent down and picked it up. The wooden butt of the sawn-off shotgun felt warm in her hand. Her other hand ran absently over the smooth metal of the barrels. This had been her friend. This had bought her salvation. This had been her father’s chosen tool.
The thought of John Hampton cracked the shell. The horror of what was spread before her hit like the slam of a door. She threw the gun from her, appalled and shaking. Her prints were on the gun now. Dimly she recognised from dozens of TV shows how this would look. She had to do something. It wasn’t enough to wipe the gun. She knew that, however clever her father might be, there would be microscopic traces. She’d watched enough episodes of Forensic Files to understand that neither she nor her father was safe.
Forcing her eyes away from Geno, Tenille tried to control herself, dragging a shuddering breath into her lungs. She had to do something. But what? She had to get out of the room so she could think straight.
Tenille stumbled back into the hall and squatted on her haunches, head in hands. There had to be something she could do to make sure her father was in the clear for this. He’d come to her rescue when she’d needed him. Now she felt the need for some comparable gesture. A recognition that she appreciated what he’d done for her.
She racked her brains, recalling the true crimes she’d watched unfold on late-night satellite TV. Every night, another death. Every death, another investigation. Tips and hints for those with the brains enough to grasp their significance and heads sufficiently cool to put them into practice.
Her face cleared. Fire, the great cleanser. It wouldn’t disguise the fact that Geno had been blown away by a sawn-off before the fire had started. But a good enough fire would clear up any traces that she or her father might have left at the scene of the crime. Tenille got to her feet. All she needed now was something to make sure the blaze caught a good hold. She wished she lived in one of those houses where they had a garden shed full of stuff that would go up like a Roman candle. Cans of petrol for the lawnmower. Gas bottles for the barbecue. That sort of thing.
Tenille went through to the kitchen and opened the cupboard under the sink. Bleach, fabric conditioner, all-purpose cleaner. Totally useless. She banged the door shut and went through to her aunt’s room. Perfume was alcohol, that would give off fumes that would help a fire, she thought. She grabbed the few bottles off Sharon’s dressing table, then noticed an economy-sized bottle of nail varnish remover. That would burn, she was sure of it. Tenille added it to her haul. She was about to return to the living room when she noticed a canister in a half-open drawer. She yanked it out and helped herself to a pressurised can of lighter fluid.
At the livin
g-room door, she closed her eyes momentarily, trying to steady herself. ‘Get a hold of yourself, girl,’ she said loudly, driving herself back into the room. This time, she tried not to look at Geno. She crossed to the sofa where she emptied out all of the bottles. The sweet sickly aromas rose around her, blotting out the smells of violent death. Then she pushed the nozzle of the lighter fluid can hard against the wooden arm of the sofa. The liquid gas emerged, spreading over the scarred veneer and soaking into the surrounding fabric as it evaporated. The harsh oily smell of the butane made Tenille wrinkle her nose and turn her face away. She let the whole contents of the canister escape before throwing it on the floor.
Now all she had to do was light the fucking thing. Where was the bastard’s cigarette lighter? Her earlier exultation had subsided now; she had started to grasp the finality of his death and the almost casual way it had been meted out. However grateful she was to her father, she couldn’t keep fooling herself that this was a good thing. She really didn’t want to look at Geno.
Tenille sidestepped the feet sticking out from the sofa, kicking the gun nearer as she did so. That sofa was going to go up like a torch. Sharon had bought it off some dodgy second-hand shop, there was no way it was going to be anything other than a fire-trap. She looked down at the cluttered end table next to Geno. The tumbler he’d been drinking from had been shattered by stray shot, and his cigarettes and lighter were covered in glass shards and rum. Tenille reached out for the lighter and grimaced as the sticky spirit coated her fingers. She backed towards the door and wondered what to do next. She didn’t want to be too close to the sofa when she lit the flame. But she had to be close enough to get the fire going.
‘Stop messing,’ she scolded herself. She took a step back towards the sofa and ignited the lighter. It seemed to burn with a higher flame than usual. At arm’s length, she reached out towards the soaked upholstery. She was still inches away when there was a sudden whoosh and a sheet of flame ran over the area she’d saturated. At once, the flames started to lick over the cushions towards Geno.
Tenille jumped back nervously, ready for flight. But she wanted to be sure this wasn’t just a flash in the pan, that it would really burn the way she needed it to. Within seconds, she had her answer. Tongues of flame spread quickly over the cheap synthetic material, melting it as they went, sending spirals of greasy black smoke upwards.
Time to get the fuck out, Tenille told herself, turning on her heel and making for the door. She slammed it shut behind her, then took off down the gallery towards the stairs. Thank Christ she had Jane’s door key. She could hole up there, wash her clothes in Jane’s machine and claim she’d never been near the flat all night. Jane would have to back her up, because she didn’t know about the key. As far as she knew, Tenille had no way of getting back in once she’d left.
Tenille reached the top of the stairs and turned for one last look. The only difference from usual was that the light showing through the curtains was more orange. She wondered if she should call the fire brigade. She didn’t want the fire to spread, to maybe claim other lives. That would be the worst thing that could happen. But if she made the call, it would put her in the frame; 999 calls were, she knew, recorded and saved.
The curtains stirred. Soon they’d go up too and somebody would see what was going on. They’d call the fire brigade. Tenille turned on her heel and set off down the stairs at a run. It would be all right. Somebody would see.
What she didn’t know was that somebody already had.
When I speak thus, it is not to assign impure motives to Bligh. He never attempted the crime of sodomy on my person, nor did I ever hear that he had such inclinations towards any other. No, it is rather that, having chosen me as his protégé, the man took my affection towards any other as a personal slight. One of my fellow officers on this voyage was a distant kinsman, Peter Heywood, whose family had shown mine kindness when we were forced to remove to the Isle of Man. It was my duty as well as my pleasure to take this young man under my care, and Bligh chastised me often for this. ‘Sirrah, the boy must find his own way,’ he was wont to say. He seemed not to comprehend that my care for Heywood was identical to his adoption of myself as his personal charge. His vanity could not countenance what he took to be my preference for the company of another. These matters came to a head in a most miserable fashion in Otaheite.
12
As she emerged from the farmyard on her mountain bike, Jane took a deep breath, savouring the aroma of the autumn morning. It was a glorious day, surprisingly mild for the time of year. The night’s rain had left a sparkle in the air, brightening the turning leaves and deepening the greys and greens of the landscape. The sun was climbing behind Helvellyn, casting a golden halo round the summit. She turned to look upwards at the great bluff of Langmere Fell, its craggy outcroppings dark against the sky. She could see her father’s sheep, pale grey and cream blurs against the bracken and scrubby grass of the high moorland where they grazed. A grin spread across her face and she shed the last of the city. This was where she belonged.
She turned the bike downhill and freewheeled into the village, a journey she had made more times than she could count. As always, the sudden opening out of the view caught at her heart, the light glinting on the tail of Thirlmere, the pikes and crags rising beyond in tight contours to the skyline. What must it have been like for Fletcher Christian, she wondered, coming home to this after the South Seas? Would his spirit have risen with joy and relief at being enclosed by his familiar mountains, their muted colours the palette of his youth? Or would he have yearned for the lush tropics with their improbable colours? Would the cold and damp have made his bones ache for that hotter southern sun? Would the women have seemed pallid and uninteresting after the exotic beauty who had given him a son? Would he have felt that he had come home, or would this have seemed merely a different kind of prison from Pitcairn?
Whatever his story, it couldn’t have failed to fire William Wordsworth’s imagination. In her mind’s eye, she conjured up a picture of the poet sitting in his garden at Dove Cottage, head bent over the intractable lines of The Prelude, that long narrative of his early life whose writing and rewriting occupied him for the best part of fifty years. So much elided, so much glossed over. While it had the appearance of candid revelation, the biographers had demonstrated that it was in fact a construct that stripped William’s early life of anything personally scandalous or politically questionable. That didn’t detract from its value as poetry, but it cast serious doubts on its worth as biography. Which, paradoxically, made Jane feel all the more strongly that there was merit to her theory. The absence of direct written evidence in William’s published work, given so much else that was absent, did not mean the events she pictured had not taken place.
Jane pedalled on down Langmere Fell, the busy water of the Lang Burn chattering on her left as it cascaded brimful towards Thirlmere. As she slowed down for the junction with the main road by Town Head, she wondered if, when they’d met again, William had recognised the prodigal immediately. Bligh’s description of the twenty-three-year-old at the beginning of the voyage stuck in her mind. He stood five feet nine inches tall, above average height for the time. He had a noticeably dark complexion, which would have been darkened further by years of exposure to the sea winds and the strong sun of the southern oceans. According to Bligh, he’d been ‘strong made’ though slightly bow-legged. She imagined him as a sort of Caravaggio figure, a chiaroscuro of light and shade at the captain’s table, his dark eyes glinting in candlelight. Striking, distinctive-looking. She didn’t think it would have taken the observant poet long to connect the apparent stranger with the spirited boy he’d known in his youth. It must have rocked him to his foundations. Just when he’d smoothed over his own slightly disreputable past and reinvented himself as the poet with moral authority, here was one of the most notorious figures in recent history standing before him, claiming the obligations of friendship. It was nothing if not dramatic. At least William would probab
ly have been spared a witness to his discomfiture; their reunion would certainly have been a private encounter, since Fletcher could hardly have hazarded anything else.
Jane passed the turning for Grasmere and rounded the curve in the road. Now she could see the signs for Dove Cottage and the Wordsworth Museum. At least it wouldn’t be too busy today, she thought. Not like high summer, when tourists crammed into the tiny rooms where the Wordsworth family had lived their cramped, sociable lives. William would have regarded it as nothing less than his due; he had never really doubted his genius, fretting only that the world was a little behind him in that respect.
Jane parked her bike then entered the pretty café with its pine chairs and tables. Anthony Catto was sitting in a corner reading the morning paper. He looked more like an ageing rocker than a museum curator, with his long silver hair pulled back in a ponytail and his oblong designer glasses perched on his nose. He was wearing what Jane had come to recognise as his working uniform–work boots, faded jeans, denim shirt and a brown leather waistcoat whose pockets were always bulging with the reminders he constantly scribbled for himself then promptly consigned to what he referred to as ‘the working files’. But in spite of his appearance, there was nobody alive who knew more about the life and work of William Wordsworth and his family. His adult life had been a quest for information about the poet and his world that bordered on the fanatical. More than that, there was none of the jealous guarding of his knowledge that Jane had found so depressingly prevalent in academic life. Anthony was generous to a fault with his erudition. Some might have said generous to the point of boredom; Jane would not have been one of them.