‘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