Professor Elliott sighed. ‘This can scarcely be news to you, Jane. You say you encountered this letter a year ago. Why did you not pursue it earlier? During the long vacation, say? Why wait till term has begun and you have a teaching load?’
Jane could feel anger rising and tried to keep her voice level. ‘Maggie, it may have escaped your notice, but I don’t earn enough from my teaching here to support myself. I spent a large part of the summer working behind a bar and the rest of it trying to turn my thesis into a book for which I have miraculously got a publishing contract. But even supposing I had had the time to follow this up, much of the Wordsworth archive has been inaccessible because of the renovations and building work. I couldn’t have done anything about it even if I had wanted to. Yes, the body does add urgency in my mind, but it’s far from the only consideration.’
Her department head smiled, this time without any air of patronage. ‘I do appreciate that, Jane. Believe me, if I could find a way to pay you and your fellow teaching assistants more, I would do it. I fully understand the negative impact it has on your research. And in spite of the conclusion you appear to have leapt to, I do not discount the potential significance of the bog body. If it proves to be that of Fletcher Christian, or indeed any other of the Bounty crewmen, it would increase exponentially the chances of there being a manuscript such as you posit.’ She pulled her computer keyboard towards her and flashed Jane a look over the top of her glasses. ‘Strange though it may seem to you, I do remember the excitement of academic discovery. It hasn’t been entirely subsumed by the weight of departmental administration.’ She clicked her mouse and studied the screen. ‘You’re teaching two seminars a week, and you’re supervising three students, is that right?’
‘That’s right. But–’
Professor Elliott raised a finger to demand silence as she navigated her way around the departmental timetable. ‘Let me see,’ she drawled.
‘Dan Seabourne has volunteered to take over my teaching load for a couple of weeks, provided we can rejig the timetable so the two seminars are on the same day.’ Jane risked interrupting the process.
Eyebrows raised across the desk. ‘Really? How unlike him to burden himself with more work.’
Jane grinned. ‘He’s not as lazy as he sometimes looks. It’s just that he hasn’t quite figured out where he’s going next, workwise.’
Professor Elliott harrumphed. ‘And you’re confident he has the expertise in your area to manage the work?’
‘I think so. They’re undergraduate seminars. It’s not that hard to stay one step ahead of the group. Not these days, with seminars the size lectures used to be,’ Jane added with a tang of acerbity.
‘Again, not something over which I have a deal of control,’ Professor Elliott said. She studied the screen again. ‘That should be manageable. Very well. Mr Seabourne it is. I’ll email him to make sure he knows when and where he is supposed to be. You have–’ she glanced at the timetable again–‘two weeks and three days before you need to present yourself for duty. I trust that will be long enough.’
Jane got to her feet. ‘If I’ve not started to make some headway by then, it’s not going to be susceptible to easy unravelling.’
‘And if you have?’
Jane reached for her bag. ‘Then I might be back here begging.’
Professor Elliott gave her a sharp look. ‘I do hope not. I don’t want your record looking like that of someone who is not committed to the department. One never knows when cuts will be demanded.’
It was, Jane thought as she walked down the dingy corridor, the nearest she was ever likely to get to a wholehearted endorsement from Maggie Elliott. It wasn’t exactly an enthusiastic encouragement to get cracking and find what she was looking for, but it was a damn sight better than nothing.
Dusk had already fallen over the towering fells and dark waters of the Lake District when the hearse pulled up at the discreet rear entrance of Keswick Memorial Hospital. The doors swung open to reveal a black body bag on a hospital trolley, a porter at one end. River Wilde supervised the loading of the precious cargo into the hearse then arranged to meet the undertaker’s men back at the funeral parlour.
We make a pretty strange cortege, she thought to herself as she eased the bulk of her Land Rover out of its car park space and into the wake of the hearse. Talk about the odd couple. A body with no one to mourn it and a forensic anthropologist who wants to steal all its secrets. A limo and a Landie. Hell, I could just have loaded the body in the back and not bothered the guys from Gibson’s.
It would have been much simpler to have left the body in situ at the hospital, but the administration had been adamant that their mortuary was for the use of the recently dead, not those who had been in the ground long before the hospital had even been dreamed of. She had reminded them that they had already agreed to rent her time on their equipment, which would mean bringing the body back, ‘like a large and inconvenient parcel,’ but they were not to be moved. Unlike Pirate Peat, as she had privately dubbed him. She wondered if that was the sort of human touch the TV team would appreciate.
She was feeling pretty pleased with herself. An hour before, Phil Toner had called to say he had decided to go ahead with the project. A researcher would be with her in the morning to discuss the schedule and arrange filming. Not only that, but they’d also accepted her figures at face value and agreed to the fee she’d suggested. She pulled a rueful face. ‘You sold yourself too cheap, girl,’ she muttered under her breath. But at least she would be able to afford all the techniques required to paint the fullest picture possible of her mystery man. It was an unusual luxury, since the practical side of her job normally involved the minimum required to identify human remains. Mostly, her work was about bringing closure to the living; the relatives of soldiers, of civilians lost in massacres, of victims of natural catastrophe, of climbers lost on mountains, of bodies buried in shallow graves. Identity was all. This, however, would be a different matter altogether. This was about unravelling one man’s story. Identification would be a bonus.
She followed the hearse into the car park behind the imposing Victorian villa that housed Gibson’s Funeral Services and waited patiently while the men shifted the body on to a trolley then wheeled it inside to the embalming room. According to Andrew Gibson, the thirty-something great-great-grandson of the first Gibson, it had been installed when the house had been built in 1884 and little had changed since except for the installation of more modern plumbing. The walls were white, brick-shaped tiles, the faint craquelure of age lending them warmth. The embalming tables were solid mahogany, their original ceramic liners replaced with stainless steel. The counter-tops and the cabinets were all of the same wood. Through their glass doors she could see beakers and measuring columns that could have dated from the same era. It wasn’t hard to imagine men in wing collars and frock coats going about their business with the dead inside these four walls. River had loved this place the minute she’d clapped eyes on it. She just knew the TV team were going to feel the same. It would, she hoped, feel like a Sherlock Holmes drama, only for real.
The men loaded their burden on to one of the tables. River slowly unzipped the bag and exposed the body to the air. She gazed down at the stained skin, the wizened limbs and the dark hair and tried to conjure up a picture of what he must have looked like in life. Once those legs had carried him over the tracks of the fells; once, she wouldn’t mind betting, they had held his balance on the pitching deck of a sailing ship. Those arms had raised sail, climbed rigging, spliced ropes. They had held other warm bodies. That mouth had kissed as well as eaten, spoken as well as drunk. He had been a living, breathing human, just like her. Now it was her job to make