Very soon after Tess died, Lesley and Alastair Gavey left Swaffham Tilney.
Before any official announcement had been made, news of her death was leaked by a pseudonymous TikTok account belonging to Corinne’s son, Niall, who by that point was staying at Ismys House to keep an eye on things in the village while Corinne looked after Mum and Champ at the Many Frogs Hotel. (Dad,Ree, and Tobes had already gone back to Swaffham Tilney at this point.)
Almost immediately after the fire—by which I mean within the hour—the main topic of online Tess-related debate changed. Champ’s innocence or guilt was no longer a talking point. Insofar as he was mentioned at all, it was in passing and with the presumption that of course he didn’t bite that lying dead bitch and we all knew it from the start. Astonishingly (though I shouldn’t have been in the least bit surprised, knowing what I know about human shamelessness), this was said by many thousands of people who had not seemed to know it even as recently as a day earlier.
Now the central question under discussion was: Did or didn’t Tess Gavey deserve to die for what she’d tried to do? If she did, was it nevertheless crass to say so all over the internet? And/or was it hypocritical to express regret for her death if one had loathed her while she was alive?
Mum made a dignified statement some weeks later—not on social media or in public but to our family and Corinne only. She gave us the answers we had all (except perhaps Dad) been eagerly awaiting. Would she still have sent Ree the recording and instructions to release it if she’d known Tess would be dead less than a fortnight later? Yes—because in Mum’s opinion there was no connection between those two happenings. The policy of never speaking ill of the dead cannot fairly be applied to still-alive people who are going to die in the future, she argued, because that would rule out everybody. And that, Mum said, was the last thing she would ever say on the subject of the Gaveys; she was looking forward to never thinking about them again.
Ree and Tobes spent a lot of time on social media in the weeks following Tess’s death, saying not a word about Tess or her family and focusing solely on Champ: how thrilled the Lamberts were that he’d been vindicated, how wonderful it was to be able to return to their home and give up the fugitive lifestyle. “It wasn’t difficult, though,” said Mum. “I suppose we had the one interrupted night at the boarding kennels, but our room there was beautiful. And before that we were at Corinne’s Lake District mansion, and afterward at a five-star hotel.”
“It was incredibly difficult emotionally,” Ree told her, fingers tapping away at the keyboard of the new MacBook Air that Corinne had bought her and Tobes, on which they had already started to design Champ’s website. Tobes kept announcing that it was going to “change the world and make big bucks,” while Ree patiently explained to Dad why it was vital that Champ’s hundreds of thousands of fans should have a way of keeping in touch with him now that his troubles were over. On Corinne’s advice, Tobes had written an email to the Sound Sleep Donut Dog Bed people to see if they might offer sponsorship in exchange for Champ promoting their bed as his top favorite sleep accessory, which it genuinely was.
Back to Tess Gavey’s death of natural causes, then. The medical findings were surprising. All her life, Tess had suffered from an allergy to fish, and it was a serious one. Here’s a limerick I wrote about it:
If she ate just the tiniest flake
Of a haddock, a pollock, a hake
And then died in a flash,
That obtuse piece of trash
Still would never admit her mistake.
I was so proud of this poem, I considered sneaking it onto Champ’s website somewhere (perhaps a hidden page, not linked to from the main menu), but I resisted the urge to tamper with my non-furry siblings’ project because, unlike Tess, I have the ability to distinguish between my best and worst impulses and to let the former carry the day. (Almost always.)
I’m delighted to report that there’s a page on Champ’s website that’s devoted solely to me. (That’s where my Tess limerick could go, if it went anywhere.) Ree, bless her heart, said very early on that there had to be a special Furbert page as part of Champ’s online operation, commemorating Champy’s late furry brother, and Toby said he’d contact the Chuckit! balls people and ask if they wanted to be sponsors too, like the Sound Sleep Donut Bed team were. Such a great idea!
God, I love those orange Chuckit! balls. Mum and Dad left one in Shukes’s garden when they moved, and Henry Christensen, the new owner, never found it. I often used to nip round there to play with it when Henry was out: I’d throw it for myself, then run after it. Sometimes I buried it deep in the earth, so that I could dig it out again. I loved doing that, especially with a treasured possession. The joy of finding it all over again!
Back to Tess Gavey’s death. There’s no point me being coy about it, since I’ve decided to tell you the truth. Here’s the part that everyone thinks is a medical mystery: When her cadaver was inspected by the relevant experts, they found all the symptoms of a severeallergic reaction to fish, but none of the fish. Indeed, they were able to prove to their own satisfaction that no fish or fish-adjacent substances were present in Tess’s system—nothing that even hinted in the direction of creatures aquatic, anamniotic, and gill-bearing. In due course, those following the Dead Tess saga found out about this oddity and started to wonder whether perhaps the allergic reaction her body was accustomed to producing might on this occasion have been triggered by something else: specifically, by knowing that thousands of strangers all over the world were busy calling her a depraved liar and having a whale (a mammal, not a fish) of a time doing so.
It was a decent theory, I suppose. And it’s well known that severe psychological distress can produce all kinds of physical symptoms. But those pushing that hypothesis—and many still are, even now—are barking beneath the wrong letterbox. (How often, by comparison, do you see dogs bark up trees? Exactly.)
In fact, what killed Tess was exactly what her symptoms suggested: fish. Yes, even though none was found in her body.
Here is how her death happened: She was lying on her bed, not sure if she was awake or asleep. It was after midnight. Lesley and Alastair, her parents, had said good night and disappeared into their respective bedrooms more than an hour earlier. All was dark and quiet at the Stables and on Bussow Court.
Tess, lying with her duvet half on and half off her, found that she couldn’t move. She thought to herself,This is probably one of those dreams where you’re paralyzed.She was further persuaded that she must have been dreaming by the presence of a Welsh terrier in her room. This dog looked almost exactly like Champ Lambert fromthe Hayloft, though he was smaller. So she must have been dreaming, right? Becauseas ifshe’d let a gross, smelly beast like that sit on her bed. Yuck, and also, fuck him and fuck Ree Lambert, who thought she was so much better than Tess.
Then the Welshie stood up on his two hind legs, opened his mouth, and started to speak in Mum’s voice. (My mum, Sally Lambert—not Tess’s mum.) He recited some verse, sounding female and maternal, about a fish who liked to tell stories. The lines came from the wonderfulTiddlerby Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, but Tess Gavey didn’t know that because her mother had never made an effort to read her the best that children’s literature had to offer.
Tess wanted to say to the Welshie in her dream, “Stop listing different kinds of fish. It’s making me feel panicky,” but she found she couldn’t speak.
“Hearing the names of a few fish won’t kill you,” said the Dream Welshie, this time in his own voice. “That’s not how allergies work, is it? It’s all the fish inside you that you need to worry about.”
“What fish inside me?” asked Tess. “There isn’t any, you stupid, smelly, overgrown rat. I never eat fish. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You don’t need to eat fish for it to be inside you,” said the dog. “I’m not talking about anchovies, smoked salmon, rollmop herrings—”
“Shut up!” Tess snapped.
“—tequila splitfins, diamond darters, Sakhalin sturgeons, kissing loaches—”
“SHUT UP!”
“I’m talking about your essence,” the Dream Welshie went on. “Your ‘Tessence,’ if you like, which is selfishness. Pure selfishness—it’s your entire personality. You are one hundred percent selfish, Tess. And since ‘fish’ is more than fifty percent of ‘selfish’… Well, the way I see it, that means more than half of you is fish.”
