The Grave Tattoo by Val McDermid Page A

got work to get back to, so don’t make me drag it out of you.’ With a shrug he spread his hands in a gesture she recognised. Small boy playing the cute innocent card , she thought. You’re getting too old for that one, Danny Boy.
‘What can I say? You nailed me, babe. Yes, I do have an ulterior motive.’
‘Well, you better tell me what it is, because I don’t have time to play twenty questions. Spill.’
Dan smoothed his eyebrow in a gesture she found familiar from watching him in seminar groups. It was his way of buying time. ‘What we were talking about the other day–Christian and Wordsworth? It’s been kind of bugging me,’ he said.
‘Bugging you how?’
‘We’ve been friends for a long time now, Jane. I think I know you pretty well.’ He nodded to himself for emphasis. ‘I don’t think I realised until the other day how much weight you place on the Fletcher Christian story. And I’d say, of all the people I work with, you are the least likely to be taken in by a baseless rumour.’
Jane felt a sudden tension in her neck. ‘Very flattering, Dan. But we’ve all got our blind spots. Arthur Conan Doyle believed in fairies. Hugh Trevor-Roper believed in the Hitler Diaries. I believe in Wordsworth’s lost epic. It’s really not worth losing sleep over.’
‘Good try, Jane, but no cigar. I don’t believe you. I think there’s more to this than you told me. And I want to help you.’
Jane stared into her cup. She’d held this secret to herself for so long, there had been times when she had wondered if she had dreamed it. She’d told no one, not even Jake, in spite of the fact that she loved him and, if anyone could authenticate what she’d seen, he was the one. Or at least, he would know someone who could. And having denied it to Jake, how could she offer it to Dan? Though it was hard to deny that he might be helpful to her. His own postgraduate work on the linguistic congruences among the Lakeland Romantics could well help to verify anything she found as being typically Wordsworthian in its use of words and grammatical structures. Still, her reluctance held out. ‘Please, Dan. Take my word for it.’
‘Jane, look at me,’ he said, his voice concerned and serious. She lifted her head. ‘Dreams are for chasing. How are you going to feel if there is something to be found and somebody else finds it?’
The question she had asked herself so many times. She pushed her curls back from her face and made a decision. ‘How well do you know the Dove Cottage archive?’
Dan looked surprised. Whatever he’d been expecting, she thought, that hadn’t been it. ‘I’ve done some research there, when I was doing the linguistic comparisons between De Quincey’s early work and Wordsworth’s prose. It’s a vast archive. More than fifty thousand items, or something like that.’
‘So many that it’s never really been definitively catalogued. Anyway, they’re about to open a new library and study centre, so a lot of the material has been boxed up waiting for the move. More or less inaccessible to anyone needing to study it.’ Jane paused, shaking off the last traces of doubt.
‘So,’ she continued, ‘I wanted to look over some family letters and, typically, what I needed was packed away. But I’ve known Anthony Catto, the centre director, since I was at school. I worked there a couple of summers when I was an undergraduate. So I persuaded Anthony to let me go foraging. And in among all the stuff that I expected to find, I came across something that I’d never seen referred to anywhere in the literature.’
‘Dramatic pause,’ Dan said drily. ‘Come on, Jane, you’re killing me here.’
‘It had been tucked into the wrong envelope, along with the letter that should have been there. I don’t expect anyone had even noticed it. The letter it was with is of no particular significance, you see. It probably hadn’t been touched for years.’
‘Jane,’ Dan said loudly.
She closed her eyes for a