Читать книгу The Grave Tattoo - Val McDermid - Страница 17

Jane closed the front door behind her and paused, taking a deep breath. She was probably mad to do this. Whatever the unwritten rules were, she was almost certainly breaking an unconscionable number of them by turning up unannounced on the Hammer’s doorstep to tell him it was time to take care of his unacknowledged daughter. But Tenille didn’t have anyone else to look out for her. There was so much promise there, Jane knew she couldn’t just walk away and leave the child to sink or swim.

She turned up her collar against the wind and made her way across the estate to D Block, the tallest of the eight L-shaped buildings that comprised Marshpool Farm. It stood at the north side of the estate, a couple of storeys higher than the other blocks. To her surprise, the far entrance lobby was free from rubbish and graffiti. There was even the faint smell of pine disinfectant. She thought she’d chance the lift since she was going to the eighth floor. Not only did it arrive when summoned, but its interior could not have been cleaner if it had been in one of the towering office blocks at Canary Wharf. If she needed evidence of the power of John Hampton, it was here before her eyes.

Flat 87 was opposite the lift. The door was painted a deep burgundy, in sharp contrast to the scruffy grey-blue of the other doors on the landing. Vertical blinds on the windows obscured the interior. Jane squared her shoulders and pressed the doorbell. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then the door swung open, revealing a massive mixed-race man in his early twenties dressed only in a pair of jogging pants. His broad torso could have served as a living diagram in an anatomy class, the muscles large and well defined. He glared down at her. ‘Wassup?’ he demanded in a mid-Atlantic drawl.

‘I need to see John Hampton,’ she said, her voice half an octave higher than normal, her accent scarily middle-class even to her ears.

The man looked amused. ‘He’s not expecting you.’ He began to close the door.

Jane put out a hand to stop him, knowing she didn’t have a cat in hell’s chance against the power of his shoulders but making the gesture anyway. ‘I do need to see him,’ she said. ‘It’s a family matter.’

He gave her a disbelieving look. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Please, just tell him Jane Gresham needs to see him about a family matter. I’ll wait.’

‘You might be here for a long time, Jane Gresham.’ He pushed gently against the door and she dropped her hand. She was banking on the woman at the bus stop having told the truth when she said the Hammer kept an eye on Tenille. If that were true, he could not fail to know about Jane’s place in her life. It might be enough to gain her admission.

She paced to and fro between the door and the lift for what felt like a very long time but was probably only a couple of minutes. When she heard the door open, she whirled around to find the same young man beckoning her. ‘Your lucky day,’ he said. ‘Mr Hampton’s a very busy man, but he can give you five minutes.’

‘That’s all I’ll need.’ She followed him into the flat, whose interior was unlike any other she’d seen on Marshpool Farm. The thick carpet in the hall matched the burgundy of the front door, and the pale walls were decorated with framed photographs of performance cars. The man gestured to her to enter the living room, then closed the door behind her. The room smelt faintly of sandalwood. Sitting opposite her on a cream leather sofa beneath a huge gilt-framed reproduction of one of Jack Vettriano’s film noir paintings was a short, square black man wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt. His head was as bald as a bowling ball, his brown eyes deep-set like finger holes. Jane had never been this close to John Hampton, but she’d seen him in the distance. It didn’t prepare her for his charisma. Afterwards, she couldn’t have described the room; his presence dominated her consciousness. She understood at once how John Hampton had come to wield the power he did.

‘Dr Jane Gresham,’ he said, his voice a bass rumble. ‘What brings an English teacher to my door speaking of family?’

‘I want to talk to you about Tenille,’ she said, trying not to show how unnerved she felt. ‘May I sit down?’

He waved towards a matching armchair in the corner. ‘Be my guest. Tenille?’ he said, making a show of racking his brains. ‘One of the kids on the estate, right?’

‘People say she’s your daughter.’

‘People say a lot of things, Dr Gresham. A lot of them are bullshit.’ His face was impassive, his body still.

‘It’s true she doesn’t take after you in looks,’ Jane said. ‘But I suspect she’s inherited your ambition. And your toughness. And your intelligence.’

‘Flattery won’t get you child support, if that’s what you’re after.’

‘There’s more than one kind of child support, Mr Hampton. And right now, Tenille needs something from you.’ She couldn’t quite believe her nerve.

He sighed and rotated his head, as if loosening a stiffness in his neck. ‘You’re bold, I’ll give you that. But you’re confusing me with someone who gives a shit.’

Jane pressed on regardless. While she was still in the room, she had a fighting chance to break through his apparent indifference. ‘Her aunt has a boyfriend called Geno Marley. He’s been sniffing around Tenille. And last night he tried to rape her.’ Now she sensed she had his full attention, though she could not have said quite what had changed.

‘I don’t understand why you’re telling me this, Dr Gresham. This Marley character isn’t one of my people.’

‘Tenille is, though. And a word from you would take him out of her life.’

‘And why should I do that?’

Jane shrugged. ‘If she’s your daughter, the answer’s obvious. And if she’s not, well, it would be the right thing to do anyway, wouldn’t it?’

‘You think I’m some kind of social worker? Here to solve people’s problems?’

She sensed he was playing with her, but she didn’t know how to enter his game. She got to her feet. There was nothing to be gained by staying. ‘You must do what you think best,’ she said. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have things to do.’

He nodded. ‘I’ll have a word, Dr Gresham. I don’t like scumbags who molest young girls any more than you do. You can tell Tenille she’ll be safe.’

‘Thank you.’ She turned to go, then paused, her hand on the door. ‘Whoever Tenille’s father is, he should be proud of her. She’s remarkable.’

‘Goodbye, Dr Gresham. I don’t expect we’ll meet again,’ he said. He sounded so much like a Bond villain that the spell broke.

Jane grinned. ‘You never know,’ she said.

When she emerged from the flat, she felt elated. In spite of the Hammer’s feigned indifference, she was certain that she had achieved what she’d set out to. She could leave for Fellhead with a clear conscience, secure in the knowledge that nothing bad was going to happen to Tenille.

One of the best things about living and working in Carlisle was the stunning scenery on her doorstep, River thought. She’d discovered it was hard to drive for long in any direction without finding herself in a landscape of breathtaking beauty, whether it was the bleak rolling uplands of Northumberland, with Hadrian’s Wall the crossbeam to the Pennine spine, or the grandeur of the Lake District National Park with its fells, forests and moody waters. She’d grown up near Cambridge in a landscape of unrelenting flatness that exhibited a limited range of variety. Up here in the north, the changing seasons were somehow nearer the surface, with every day bringing some subtle alteration to the world around her. It was, she thought, a landscape as susceptible to analysis for its history as the human body itself. Recently, she’d joined a group of university staff who went hill-walking every Sunday, and only the previous week she’d been brought up short by a casual comment from one of her fellow walkers. As they’d made their way up the eastern side of Great Gable, he’d remarked that if Wordsworth were to return to England now, he’d find more changes in his native Lakes than he would in the quadrangles of his Cambridge college.

‘We think of the landscape as unchanging, but we’re wrong,’ he’d said. ‘Here, everywhere we look we see the hand–or rather, the foot of man. Look at the erosion on these paths. Look at the roads,’ he added, waving his hand in the general direction of Buttermere and Derwent Water where the sun could be seen glinting on the metal roofs of cars. ‘Choked with traffic every decent summer’s day. In Wordsworth’s time, there were meandering drover’s tracks, not roads carved out of hillsides like chunks cut off a cheese. And they were mostly empty. This landscape tells the history of the last two hundred years more clearly than any urban sprawl.’

‘Not to mention the history of the tearoom,’ another colleague had commented darkly. ‘I’m surprised there isn’t one waiting for us on the top of Great Gable.’

River had tucked the initial idea away for further consideration and this morning, as she drove out of Carlisle on the old Roman road towards Bothel, she reflected on it again. Nearly two thousand years had passed since this road had been built by legionaries miles from their home, forced to eat unfamiliar food and accustom themselves to the often hellish winters of the northernmost part of the empire. She wondered how much of what she was seeing now would have awakened memories in their ghosts. Perhaps the skyline, perhaps the colours. But not much else.

She loved the place names too, with their echoes of another wave of invaders. The Vikings had left their mark on the places they occupied with suffixes–Ireby, Branthwaite, Whitrigg. And there were other wonderful names whose origins she knew nothing of–Blennerhasset, Dubwath and Bewaldeth. Driving from Carlisle to Keswick wasn’t just pretty, it was poetry in motion.

She turned left on to the winding road that led between the forested massif of Skiddaw and the long finger of Bassenthwaite. All around her, the trees were changing colour. On the hills, the bracken was turning brown against rough upland grass that the summer rains had left a more vivid green than usual. The lake spangled dark sapphire in the autumn sun and River felt lucky not only to be alive but to be moving through nature at her most glamorous.

She wondered how it had been for Pirate Peat on his last journey on the hill above Coniston Water. With luck, the palaeobotanists might be able to tell her what time of year he had died. But what none of them would ever know was whether he had made that final trip by day or night, in sunlight, rain or mist. Had he been alive to the beauty that surrounded him, or was he one of those who seem unmoved by their surroundings? Was this his home, or was he merely passing through? That at least was something she would probably be able to answer eventually. And once they had established how old the body was, she would be able to track down contemporary drawings and paintings that might reveal something of what her cadaver had seen when he had walked these hills. All of this would only enrich the TV programme, as well as satisfying her own urge for knowledge.

Her speculations dissipated into the ether once she hit the outskirts of Keswick and had to concentrate on getting where she was going. She pulled into the visitors’ slot in the police station car park and hurried inside, composing herself in her professional demeanour for her meeting with DCI Rigston. She was almost sorry that they wouldn’t be working together; she’d liked him when he’d first briefed her, something which hadn’t happened too often in her encounters with police officers.

The civilian on the front desk directed her to the canteen, where she found Rigston tucking into a bacon roll. He got to his feet immediately and shook hands, wiping his fingers with a paper napkin first. ‘Can I get you something to eat? Early call-out, I missed breakfast,’ he said, gesturing apologetically at his plate.

‘Don’t mind me, I’m fine,’ River said, sliding into the seat opposite him. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt your meal, but this won’t take long. I thought you’d like to know that my preliminary investigations lead me to believe this body is well outside your remit.’

Rigston grinned, showing a row of even white teeth. ‘Thought as much,’ he said. ‘But I’m glad to have it formally confirmed all the same. Do you know how long he’s been in there?’

‘Hard to be precise at this stage. But, ballpark, I’d say somewhere between 1785 and 1815. That’s a very rough guesstimate,’ she added hastily. ‘Don’t hold me to it. I’ll have a better answer once we’ve completed the work-up.’

‘You’re giving him the full monte, then?’ Rigston looked mildly surprised.

‘All the bells and whistles. And the best of it is, I’ve got someone else to pay for it.’ As she spoke, she watched him eat. You could tell a lot about someone by the way they ate. Ewan Rigston took small bites, chewing carefully with his mouth closed before he swallowed. He paused between mouthfuls, considering his next point of attack. So, not the kind of man who charged at things like a bull at a gate. Measured, thoughtful, and maybe a little bit repressed, she thought.

‘How did you manage that?’

‘Northern TV’s going to film the whole process. They’re making a documentary series about my Pirate Peat.’

‘Good for you. Maybe I could get them to sponsor my armed robbery investigation,’ he added wryly. ‘But what’s with the “Pirate Peat”?’

‘They like a nice catchy tag. We found him in a bog, hence the “Peat” part. And his tattoos are typical of a sailor, so I let my fancy run away with me. Besides, it sounds better than Seaman Peat.’

‘You’re right about that. Good luck with it.’

‘Thanks. Would you like me to keep you posted?’

He nodded. ‘That would be great. In fact…’ He hesitated briefly, then said very quickly, ‘I don’t suppose you’d fancy meeting up for a drink?’

It wasn’t an idea that had so much as crossed River’s mind until that moment. But the more she thought about it, the more she liked it. She smiled. ‘Yes, actually, I think I would. And you can give me the benefit of your expertise.’

‘How so?’

‘Well…’ And she broke off with an embarrassed laugh. ‘I just realised I don’t know your first name.’

He laughed with her. ‘It’s Ewan. So does that mean I get to ask you where your name comes from?’

River winced. ‘Hippie parents.’

‘Must be hard to be taken seriously with a name like that. I have to admit I thought somebody was taking the piss.’

‘No kidding.’ She flashed him a smile that didn’t make it as far as her eyes. ‘But hey, it breaks the ice.’ The smile was gone. ‘And I do expect to be taken seriously.’

Her determination not to be discounted prompted the image of his daughter, the twelve-year-old Rigston saw less and less frequently as her own concerns had become more pressing than the need to see a father who hadn’t lived under the same roof for five years. Like Marnie, River Wilde had the air of someone with something to prove and an absolute determination to succeed. He reminded himself this woman wasn’t a child, no matter how young she seemed. She was accustomed to sights he hoped his daughter would never have to negotiate. ‘Naturally,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t dream of doing otherwise.’ His expression was friendly and open. River felt herself relax again. ‘So why do you need the benefit of my expertise?’ he continued.

‘Because if he hadn’t been dead for such a long time, I think he definitely would be one for you. I won’t know for sure till we’ve done the full body X-ray and CAT scan, but, at this point, I’m inclined to think our Pirate Peat did not die from natural causes. I think somebody caved his head in.’

For Tenille, being left alone in Jane’s flat was almost worth the reason for the boon. Jane had come back cheerful from her meeting with the Hammer, but had said little about it except that she was convinced Tenille would have no more trouble with Geno. ‘Huh,’ Tenille snorted.

‘I understand why you might feel dubious,’ Jane had said. ‘But my gut feeling is that the Hammer doesn’t say things he doesn’t mean. Now, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go, Tenille. I’ve got a train to catch. I’m going to be away for a couple of weeks. You can hang out here for the rest of the day if you want, just close the door behind you when you leave, OK?’

‘Yeah, OK. Can I use your computer?’

Jane pondered for a second or two then nodded agreement. ‘But you have to go home tonight. I don’t want you holing up here indefinitely. Promise?’

Tenille had made a pretence of sulkiness, but she’d promised. She would check out the flat later and, if Geno was there, she’d simply come back to Jane’s. She had the key, and knowing Jane was gone, she had the freedom to treat the place as her own for a fortnight. One way or another, things would be sorted out by then, she told herself. No matter what Jane thought, she had no conviction that the Hammer would deal with Geno. He wasn’t the sort to take orders from any woman, never mind a middle-class white one.

Tenille waited patiently while Jane packed a bag with clothes and books, then as soon as she left, she headed into the study. She sat down and her finger hovered over the power switch. She felt too weird and too wired to go online. She’d taught herself over the past few years to think of herself as alone in the world, a single particle spinning through the constellations of other people’s lives. Since her mum had died, she hadn’t allowed herself to feel like she belonged anywhere. Sharon didn’t want her, she knew that. Her aunt was acting out of obligation, not love. Without her mum, Tenille was disconnected from the world, unstrung and free. She’d tried to make herself believe that was the best way to be, and mostly she succeeded. When first she’d been told that the Hammer was her real father, that self-contained part of herself had not wanted to believe it. She couldn’t have put words round it at the time, but it was something to do with not wanting that kind of connection with anyone because to be connected was somehow to render herself vulnerable.

What had made her feel almost comfortable with the idea was the recognition that, even if he was her father, the Hammer wanted nothing to do with her. He had never acknowledged her existence, far less any relationship between them. He had never done any of the things that even the most hopeless of absent fathers occasionally managed. Never turned up on Christmas Eve with an armful of badly wrapped, expensive but inappropriate presents. Never slipped in to the back row of a school nativity play. Never taken her to a movie or McDonald’s. The long and short of it was that he’d never shown the slightest interest in her.

And that made it all the more unlikely that he’d do anything to defend her from Geno. After all, what would it say about him if he did? It would be as good as shouting from the top of D Block that she was his daughter. He might suddenly decide he wanted to start doing the rest of the things that a father was supposed to do, like making sure she went to school and all that shit. Tenille really didn’t think she wanted that pressure in her life.

On the other hand, she sure as hell didn’t want Geno in her life either. And if the Hammer didn’t do something about it, she wasn’t sure how she was going to manage that. It wasn’t like she knew anybody who would weigh in against Geno, and she couldn’t afford to hire any of the local thugs to sort him out. She swore under her breath and turned on the computer, determined not to think any more about it.

I set this down as it was told to me, in the words of my friend:

I had sailed with Lieutenant Bligh before I signed on the Bounty and found him a man whose moods were impossible to predict. When all was going well with the voyage, he would be charm itself. I had reason to know this more than most, for on that first voyage he kept me close, often inviting me to dine with him in his cabin. But if anything chanced to go wrong on board ship, he was choleric and intemperate, always seeking around to cast the blame on another. Never was any occasion of blame laid at his own door. He was also jealous of his position, demanding as of right that respect which a captain needs must earn. Bligh squandered his opportunities to command the good opinion of the men by reason of his vitriol. Sailors are not known for their nicety of expression, but even below decks in the most vile conditions I have never heard language so foul as Bligh would pour out in his expressions of scorn and rage. But he was a fine navigator, and I knew that I could learn much at his side, and so I was willing to forgo my misgivings & to accompany him again, most particularly on such a long voyage.