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Vera woke to a free day and an unexpected longing for exercise. The impulse must have come from the shard of winter sun that forced itself through her grubby bedroom window and from a week of being shut in the cupboard they called her office. She drove inland to Hadrian’s Wall and walked for a mile or so along the Whin Sill ridge, feeling virtuous and exhilarated, the world, at least her world at her feet. The land spread each side below her: to the south, bare heather moorland running towards the Tyne Valley and the river that would flow through the city of Newcastle and on to the coast, to the north the forests of Keilder and Harwood and beyond them the Scottish border. This was her patch and she loved it.
Standing with her back to old stones, she imagined squads of legionnaires marching, fancied she could feel the ground shake with the rhythm of their feet. They must have policed the region then, so she saw them as her forbears, as kindred spirits, and felt a connection across the centuries. As a woman of course, she would never have been allowed any kind of responsibility, but she had a fleeting image of herself in a tunic and cloak, marching alongside them, bringing justice and order to this wild and lawless place. Then she threw back her head and laughed. She supposed the Romans would have had women to wait on them and provide them with comfort, but she’d be thought too old, too ugly and far too gobby even for that role.
Now the desire for fresh air and exercise had already passed. The connection had been broken. A craving for tea and cake had taken over. Vera walked back to her car and headed for the small town of Corbridge.
She parked in the square and found a cafe that smelled of strong coffee and fresh baking; here at least the reality lived up to the dream. Back in the street, replete and not ready to go home to the washing and cleaning that she’d planned for the day, she wandered across to a bookshop. Forum Books. The name took her back again to the wall and the Romans. They would surely stock a title that would satisfy her curiosity about the soldiers who lived in the camps on the border. There might even be something about the place of women along Hadrian’s Wall.
The place had once been a chapel. The ceiling was high and light shone through the arched windows onto pale wood shelves, filled with books. No stained glass and no elaborate carving. This had never been a place for show or pomp. By the entrance a table piled with books and a notice: Helen’s Picks. Ahead of her the wooden pulpit remained, plain as a teacher’s desk, on a small platform. Written on the wall above it: Read on … There was the smell of paint and wood shaving. This was a new conversion. The building that had once been a built to the glory of God, now celebrated the story in all its forms.
Just in front of the pulpit, it seemed the renovation work was continuing. A patch of flooring, the length of the platform, had been lifted and underneath there was wooden lid, a ring and a rope. Vera wandered over to look. The woman she took to be Helen had been supervising and she turned and grinned.
‘Don’t mind us. It’s curiosity. We were told there was a baptismal font underneath, big enough for full adult immersion, and we wanted to see what was there. We thought we might make a feature of it.’
A skinny young man, who must work in the shop, started yanking on the rope and the huge hinged lid lifted slowly. At last it was raised far enough for him to grab one end and lower it back onto the floor to one side. A smell of damp and decay came with it. They looked down into a space that was much bigger and deeper than a grave. Rough stone steps led down to the void. And lying on the floor of the font was a skeleton. There were tatters of clothing, boots still intact, and where once the wrist had been, a bracelet of plaited leather. It seemed to take a while for the owner of the shop and her assistant to realize what they were looking at, but Vera knew straight away.
‘Please step away,’ she said. ‘And make sure no customers come through the door. I’m a police officer, a detective. We have to act as if this is a crime scene.’
Because she thought that even if the crime hadn’t been committed here, the figure in the font was a victim of murder. Vera recognized the plaited bracelet. She’d never seen it, but she’d seen photos. This was Jenny Summerskill. She’d been fourteen when she’d gone missing, when she’d disappeared one beautiful summer’s day on her way home from a school trip to Vindolanda, wearing her own customized version of the uniform, blue streaks in her hair and Doc Marten boots. And a bracelet made of plaited red leather. She’d haunted Vera since then.
That night Vera gathered her team around her in her house, the house where she’d grown up with Hector, her father. She’d been working on her day off
