The Coffin Trail

Chapter Twenty

The morning after his talk with Hannah Scarlett, Daniel overslept by an hour, but as Eddie wasn’t due to turn up until ten, it didn’t matter. When Miranda opened the blinds, sun flooded the kitchen and as they munched croissants, she chatted about her plans to turn the barn into their office. It was as if they’d never exchanged a cross word.

In the course of a cold and invigorating shower, Daniel had resolved to stop worrying about Jean Allardyce and Barrie Gilpin. Hannah was right: he could do no more for them than he could for poor Aimee. If Jean had disappeared, no-one would try harder than Hannah to find her. Another decision was not to think too much about Hannah, either. Each time he remembered the way she’d put her hand on his, he felt like a schoolboy fantasising over a girl who is out of reach. Dangerous territory; better not to stray into it.

As she filled the cafetiere, Miranda announced that she was itching to write again. She fancied producing a series of features about downshifting for a lifestyle magazine and she meant to ring every editor in London until she found a taker for it. After all, they’d have to start earning a bit of money soon. The house proceeds wouldn’t last forever.

‘How are you getting on with your article about corpse roads?’

‘Let’s just say it’s making appropriately funereal progress.’

She laughed and said, ‘I’m feeling guilty that I haven’t walked the coffin trail myself yet.’

‘You should. It fascinated me, imagining that I was treading in the footsteps of the villagers of three hundred years ago.’ He mimicked the sombre tone of a fellow historian who presented on television. ‘“Trekking over the fell through rain and mud, bearing their melancholy burden.”’

‘Weird.’ She shivered pleasurably. ‘I was thinking, maybe I might take Tash up on her invitation to pop round for a coffee one morning. I could leave the car at the farm and walk up the fell from there.’

‘It’s a long haul if you go all the way to Whitmell and you won’t find a bus to bring you back.’

‘I wasn’t planning to cover the whole route, just the easy bit. It isn’t far from Brack Hall Farm to the top of the fell and it looks like an easy climb. I could stroll along the top and take a look at the Sacrifice Stone from close quarters.’

‘Just as long as you don’t climb up and sit on top of it.’

When he told her about the warning words of the woman he’d met and the legend, she giggled and exclaimed, ‘So you’re doomed?’

‘’Fraid so.’

‘Well, better be practical. Did I ask if you’d made a will?’

‘You inherit my books.’

‘Such generosity.’

Wobbling dangerously on her stool, she kissed him on the cheek. One thing led to another and a couple of minutes later she was leading him back upstairs. When she slipped off the last of her clothes and clambered on top of him, he found that sleep had washed away the tensions of the night before.

They were dressed again with five minutes to spare before they heard Eddie’s truck pulling up at the end of the track. Daniel reminded himself that if he had any discipline, he’d have made use of the time to work on his article. But what was so admirable about having discipline? That was the whole point about moving out to the sticks. No more deadlines; they could please themselves.

While Eddie set to work, Daniel retreated to his computer and tapped out a few paragraphs about the coffin trail. For the first time since the move, his prose was racing. Walking the trail for himself had unshackled his imagination; until now he’d needed to hack out every sentence, like a labourer using a pickaxe on granite. After he’d completed the second limb of the route as it zigzagged down into Whitmell Vale, he would turn his attention to other corpse roads. Rydal to Grasmere was an obvious choice, but he liked the sound of the more remote corpse way across the rugged western reaches of the Lake District, from Wasdale Head to Boot.

When the phone rang, for a moment he wondered if Hannah was calling him again. On hearing Theo’s voice on the other end of the line, he felt a wrench of disappointment coupled with surprise.

‘How did you get this number?’

‘Unlike a good historian, a good detective never reveals his sources,’ Theo said smugly. ‘That said, of course I would not claim to be any sort of detective, good or otherwise. Perish the thought. So I will admit to you that I spoke to Prittipaul and he let me in on the secret.’

Prittipaul was the editor of Contemporary Historian. Of course it had been naive to imagine that he could stay out of reach of the past for long. Few institutions are as ruthless in tracking down their alumni as Oxford colleges, even if only so that old members can be urged to give generously to the Master’s latest pet project. Prittipaul was by nature tight-lipped, but Theo had probably called in some favour. Or indulged in a little blackmail, for the chairman of the company that published the journal was a member of his coterie.

‘My coming here wasn’t a secret.’

‘Even though your old mobile number has been disconnected and you left no exact forwarding address? You’ve even closed your email account.’ Theo’s tone was more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger. ‘Such a pity that you wish to cut yourself off from your friends and colleagues.’

‘So what can I do for you?’

‘I just wondered how you were getting on in your leafy retreat.’

‘I’m looking out through the window right now. I just saw a heron diving into the tarn.’

‘So your infatuation has not run its course as yet?’

‘No,’ Daniel said. ‘It’s only just begun.’

In the pause that followed, he realised with a start that he’d been thinking of his love affair with the Lakes, not with Miranda. But in a way they amounted to the same thing, surely.

‘As it happens,’ Theo said at length, ‘a group of us in the University have been talking about starting a new historical journal. The editorial board meets for the first time in a couple of weeks. But we are a little thin on the ground so far as your specialisms are concerned. I wondered if you might care to join us? Nothing too formal. In fact we’ll be combining a little business with a spot of gastronomic pleasure. The meeting’s being held in a rather splendid new bistro up in Summertown. You might like to bring along your, ahem, lady friend. Make a long weekend of it.’

‘Thanks for the kind invitation,’ Daniel said. ‘And I’d be glad to offer the occasional article, if it helps. But I don’t think I’ll be coming back to Oxford yet awhile.’

‘Your social calendar is already crammed?’

‘What I like about this place is that I don’t have a social calendar any more.’

‘It’ll end in tears,’ Theo murmured. ‘You do realise that, don’t you? The world treats escapists roughly, Daniel. They learn that in truth, they cannot escape themselves.’

‘Thanks for the warning, Theo. It’s good to talk.’

The Master made a noise halfway between a snort and a yelp and slammed down the phone. For another hour, Daniel tried to recapture the rhythm of his writing, but it was no good. The spell had been broken. He went downstairs and told Miranda about the call and to his astonishment, she said that it might have been nice to go back to Oxford. Just for a weekend.

‘But we agreed…’

‘It wouldn’t hurt, would it? I mean, it’s not as if a few days make any difference. The cottage is bought. We’d come straight back.’

‘I’ve left the college behind me.’

‘Well, it’s up to you. But it would have given us a break.’ He blinked. ‘Do we need a break?’

‘Don’t tell me you’re not sick of the smell of sawdust. I feel like a case study for an ENT specialist. I don’t believe my sinuses will ever be clear again.’

‘Temporary inconvenience, nothing more. Remember what we agreed? No pain, no gain?’

‘I just never thought you’d take it all so seriously.’

‘Don’t you take it seriously?’

‘Yes, but…oh, it doesn’t matter. Forget I ever uttered a word.’

In the afternoon, he offered to fetch supplies from Tasker’s while Miranda cold-called the editorial desks of some of the magazines she’d never written for. The sky was blue, the sun high and it was an easy decision to walk. This is the life, he reminded himself as he left Tarn Fold and strolled along the lane towards the village. When talking to Theo, he’d felt no tug from the past, no harking back to Oxford and the career he had abandoned. He missed none of it: not the SCR politicking, not the interminable meetings to debate the latest financial crisis, not the city’s petrol fumes, not the crowded buses, not the bicycle thieves. Walking the lanes of Brackdale, the biggest threat to your well-being came when a tractor lumbered past and you had to press yourself into the hedgerow’s prickly embrace.

As the lane meandered, he eavesdropped on the conversation of the sheep and inhaled the smells of earth and grass. Lifting his eyes beyond the walled-off fields of Underfell, he gazed towards the Sacrifice Stone: sullen and hostile as ever, as though it resented the valley’s loveliness and wished it nothing but harm. After staring down over Brackdale in grim silence for so many centuries, he thought, the Stone would never yield its secrets.

Who had killed Gabrielle Anders and laid her body out upon it? He needed to know everything. It was no longer enough to merely establish that Barrie was innocent of the crime. An act of wickedness had destroyed the young woman whose only crime was to visit the Lakes and look up an old friend. She’d survived the sleazy joints of downtown Vegas, only to be brutalised and killed in an area that even aesthetically challenged bureaucrats recognised as possessing outstanding natural beauty.

Would Hannah find the culprit? He ought to leave the investigation to her, it was absurd to suppose that he had inherited some genetic instinct for detection. Yet he wanted to do more than rely on such crumbs of information as she deigned to pass to him. He felt pangs of hunger for knowledge that a police officer, trammelled by rules and procedures, could never satisfy. At college, he’d craved information about the past like a junkie yearns for one more high. This urge wasn’t such a different sensation, except that this time he sought to understand who had destroyed a fellow human being. And why.

Rounding a bend, he realised that he was within half a mile of the village. The stone houses of Brack came into sight at the same instant as a siren punctured his reverie. It was a wail that haunted him. He could never hear the sound without being propelled back to the Cornmarket and the sickening presentiment that his lover was dead, that he hadn’t reached her in time to talk her out of destroying herself. The siren howled again and his stomach knotted.

Within moments he could see them thundering along the road. An ambulance, followed by a police car. Even as he watched, they skidded to the right and raced up the lane towards Brack Hall Farm.