“Are you acquainted with some of the illustrious residents in our little churchyard?” he asked.
“Do introduce me,” Bryant suggested, offering up a frightening smile.
“Well, Sir John Soane, the architect of the Bank of England, has his tomb here. Charles Dickens makes reference to it in A Tale of Two Cities. The shape of the tomb inspired Scott’s design for the traditional red telephone kiosk. And I’m sure you know that Mary Shelley was wooed by Percy Bysshe Shelley in the churchyard. It used to be much bigger, but the Midland Railway cut away a great chunk for its sidings. Mary Shelley used to come here because her mother had been laid to rest in these grounds. The family lived nearby, but then the Midland Railway destroyed their house, too. The couple romanced each other on the gravestones, not my idea of an appropriate venue for a date, but I suppose tastes change. Have you seen the Hardy Tree?”
“No,” Bryant lied. In fact he had sat under it when he was a child, before railings had been placed around it. The old ash tree was beset by great grey gravestones, laid end on end against the trunk like a rising tide of stone, so that the wood had grown over them, nature engulfing the remains of man. Hardy was forever linked with Wessex, and it was odd to think of him here in town, fighting with locals over land the railway had usurped.
“Most of the graves – some eight thousand of them – were relocated to Highgate and Kensal Green,” Barton told them. “The young Thomas Hardy helped to clear them, and spent many hours in this churchyard. I’m just brewing up. Would you like a cup of tea?”
“Good idea, Rev, I’m spitting feathers.”
Barton led the way to the vestry, where a brown china teapot stood warming on an electric ring. Potterton joined them unasked and squeezed himself into a wicker chair, ready to be served.
“Apparently Thomas Hardy was very upset about the lack of respect shown to the graves when they were moved,” Potterton explained. “It sounds like many of the bodies were simply shoved in together.”
“We found this in the sacristy.” The vicar clearly did not like Potterton usurping his position as parish historian, but was not the sort to complain, at least within earshot. Barton detached a yellowed scrap of lined paper from the stack of documents on his desk and carefully unfurled it. “Hardy wrote a little poem which he called ‘The Levelled Churchyard.”
“We late-lamented, resting here,
Are mixed to human jam,
And each to each exclaims in fear,
‘I know not which I am!’”
“Mary Shelley predates Hardy by quite a bit, doesn’t she?” asked Bryant. “When she walked with her lover through the churchyard it would still have been its original size.”
“Quite so. She often popped in to put flowers on her mother’s grave.”
“You don’t suppose she first caught a glimmer of the idea that would become Frankenstein here?”
“No, she wrote that while summering on Lake Geneva,” Potterton reminded Bryant.
“But imagine how the churchyard would have looked in those days, wild and overgrown. The bodies weren’t always buried properly, you know. The trees uprooted coffins, thrusting them to the surface. Human remains, bones and skulls would have been found all over the site. The church had a much more cavalier attitude to death in those days. What a ghoulishly picturesque place for inspiration! Of course the story goes that Shelley wrote the story in Switzerland, but ideas take a long time to come bubbling up through the soul, and this was her spiritual home, after all.”
“Oh, you just like to imagine her sitting under a London plane tree creating monsters.”
“I suppose so. Austin, you usually know about these things. Is there any history of strange sightings in the area?”
“Are you being funny?”
“No, why?”
“Arthur, I thought you would know more than anyone. The entire area is rife with them. It’s long been associated with pagan hauntings. There’s a pre-Christian barrow around here somewhere.”
The vicar harrumphed childishly at the mention of paganism.
“I know a little about the hauntings,” Bryant admitted.
“This area was also known as the Brill, the site of Caesar’s camp. The Romans had a colony at nearby Horsfall. They supposedly fought Boudicca, the Queen of the Iceni, and her army of Britons right here – their encampment was literally opposite the church – and most died on this spot, which as a result became known as Battle Bridge. The bridge itself used to cross the river Fleet. The spirits of the dead armies were seen here for centuries after.”
“No, no, no.” Bryant raised a protesting hand. “That story turned out to be a hoax. Queen Victoria transformed Boudicca into a heroine of Albion because she wanted to be seen as sharing the same qualities. Lewis Spence’s book immortalised the legend and wrongly sited Boudicca’s death at Battlebridge. It’s just an urban myth that she was buried under a platform at King’s Cross station.”
“I know that,” said Potterton, nettled, “but the general public doesn’t. The power of any preacher can only be created by his believers, after all.”
The Reverend Charles Barton appeared discomfited by this turn in the conversation, and went off to annoy the grave digger.
“This must be one of the most underrated sites of theological importance in the whole of Great Britain,” Potterton continued. “Not only did the Emperor Constantine found the oldest church in London here; it was the last place in the country where Catholic Mass was spoken before the Reformation.”
“So you have a tangle of paganism, Catholicism and Christianity leaving a trail of spectral figures through the forest, and even though you cut down all the trees and erect factories and office buildings, the ghosts of the past continue to resurface,” said Bryant, pleased at the thought.
“Oh, the diocese is very aware of its religious heritage. That’s why the place has been cleaned up. A couple of months ago they employed an archivist to supervise a dig in the vault – Dr Leonid Kareshi, he consults at the Hermitage in St Petersburg and is very highly thought of. Would you like to see what he’s found?”
The church was dark, and smelled of damp and disuse. The greenish light gave it the impression of being underwater, but the calm was spoiled by a wonky recording of a choir singing ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’ slightly too loudly from speakers above the pews. At the rear of the building, a stairwell led underneath the floor to a small domed area that was formerly part of the crypt. Bryant followed Potterton, carefully picking his way between dislodged piles of bricks. He arrived at a ragged hole in the end wall, around which a rickety trio of arc lights had been erected. A broad-bodied man was bent over a trestle table, and turned to face them. He looked more like a Russian gangster than an archivist. Leonid Kareshi was not a man you’d pick a fight with.
“I am happy to make your acquaintance.” Kareshi made no attempt to shake Bryant’s proffered hand. He had a thick Slavic accent.
“Mr Bryant knows a lot about London,” Potterton explained. “Perhaps he can help you.”
“You have good knowledge of this city?” Kareshi raised a thick eyebrow.
“Oh, he’s been here since it was founded,” Potterton joked, but Kareshi did not laugh.
“I have been trying to discover more about the sacred sites of King’s Cross and Pentonville, but there is very little reliable reading material available on the subject. These names – Brill, Somers Town, Euston, Agar Town, Pentonville, so many names for one tiny area – it is confusing,” the archivist said.
“Well, Pentonville was founded in the mid-1770s on the estate of a Member of Parliament called Henry Penton,” said Bryant. “It’s as simple as that.”
“Not so simple, I think. His name has a meaning, no? Mr Potterton tells me that the Penton was at the – how you say – peak? – of Pentonville Road, but nobody knows exactly what it was.”
“Actually, I can help you there.” Bryant was pleased to be able to put his arcane knowledge to use. “A penton was a hea
d. I mean, a kind of round hill in the shape of a human head, probably designed to point to the sunrise. At least, that’s the theory.”
“A sacred stone.”
“That’s right. Pen is a Celtic word meaning high point. We get the word pinnacle from it, and penny, so named because the coin has a head on it.”
“Then you should see this,” said Potterton. “Mr Kareshi uncovered it a few days ago, and the diocese is in a bit of a quandary about reporting the find. I think our reverend feels very uncomfortable about the building’s pagan origins. The building is on the heritage register and can’t be disassembled, but there’s clearly something of major historical importance under here. If it predates the Christian site, it’s been buried for more than two thousand years.” Potterton stepped back from the excavation, allowing the lamplight in.
Bryant peered into the hole. He found himself looking at an elongated chunk of pockmarked grey granite. “What is this?” he asked.
“I know it’s difficult to see clearly. Let me adjust the lights.” Kareshi moved the tripods closer. “How is that?”
The elderly detective could just make out a pair of eye sockets, an aquiline nose, the partial line of a jaw.
“There is no more of him. I mean, we have not found it attached to a body,” said Kareshi.
“This part was just inside the wall?”
“Yes, but there is another, from the main chamber. Come and see.” Kareshi led the way through panels of dusty plastic sheeting, into a wider hole of fractured brickwork. “There was a spa here that connected to the well behind the church. Such places were constructed like temples. You can see the remains of a main circular chamber with a domed roof. This is why the crypt was built in the same shape.”
A narrow alley of damp brick had been lined with lamps. It opened out into a circular stone room just over three metres high. On the opposite wall was the faint painted outline of a robed woman in a crown. She was holding chains attached to a pair of dogs.
“The spa was opened to the public in 1760 – we have this from parish records – but the wells had already been popular for more than half a century by then. It is recorded as being a fashionable meeting place, with pump rooms and a House of Entertainment, which means skittles and bowling, the drinking of beers and teas. And there was a garden with – how you say? Exotic animals.”
“Funny, isn’t it?” said Potterton, “the church being stuck between the Adam and Eve tavern and the pleasure gardens. The spa had royal patronage but eventually fell into disrepute, although it took forty years to do so. Prostitutes and gangsters moved in, and stayed right up until recent times. Nell Gwynne’s house is still clearly marked, you know. There’s a stone inscription set into the wall of number sixty-three, King’s Cross Road.”
Bryant stared at the greenish-brown spa walls and breathed in the wet air, lost in thought. “Tell me, Austin, do you believe in evil spirits?”
“Odd question. No, I suppose not. Why?”
“The word Pentonville can be interpreted as Hill of the Head. Many Celts believed that the soul resided behind the eyes. That statue of yours hasn’t been broken off from a larger icon. You can just make out the scrollwork on the base. The carving was clearly intended to appear as a severed head.”
“Why would that be?” asked Potterton.
“It’s the sign of a sacrificial site. This was intended as a warning to the curious. What else have they found?”
“Some small iron symbols, very degraded, but they seem to match up to other markings in the undercroft. A face shaped by tree branches, typically Hellenic in appearance.”
“The horned king of the hilltop,” muttered Bryant. “The great god Pan is back. Perhaps he never really went away. Of course. I’m beginning to see now.”
“See what?” asked Potterton, curious.
“A connection between gods and mortals,” replied Bryant mysteriously. “Well, I mustn’t detain you any longer; I have work to do. But I’ll be back, Austin.” He nodded to both, and took his leave.
He wasn’t quite ready to return to the temporary residence of the PCU. Bryant stopped outside, looking up at the back of St Pancras station. He tried to find the statue of Boudicca that supposedly looked down on the street, but misty rain was now falling too heavily to see.
He turned his mind to a piece of history so distant that no fact could be verified, and myths that were considered ancient a millennium ago. Boudicca, the Queen of the Iceni, had inherited the kingdom after the death of her husband, King Prasutagus. But the Romans, under Suitonius Paulinus, had pillaged their own protectorate, slaughtering over 80,000 and defeating the Warrior Queen in battle. Brutalised, defeated, her daughters raped, Boudicca had committed suicide in despair. Some said she had been transformed into a hare, to flee into the thick woodlands surrounding the site of her final battle. But, as Bryant knew, the grimmer historical reality had not survived the burnishing of her legend.
Could such mythologies really maintain their grip on the present? There were those who believed they did. This is the world of London before history, he told himself. It doesn’t matter if such things really happened, only that somebody out there still believes in them.
∨ Bryant & May on the Loose ∧
24
The Two Delaneys
Rosa Lysandrou slowly opened the door of the Camley Street Coroner’s Office like Mrs Danvers beckoning a visitor into Manderley. She examined the man standing before her with a glum stare that could have brought a corpse out in a sweat.
“Is Giles in?” asked Dan Banbury, in the manner of a schoolboy asking if a friend could come out to play.
“Can I ask who is calling?”
“I’m Dan. We work together.”
“He already has one visitor. I’ll have to see.” Rosa’s grey eyes narrowed in faint disapproval. The door closed again. Banbury took a look around. Rain was mizzling lightly against the grassy banks on either side of the entrance. The only sound came from the wind in the reeds that grew beside the canal. It really was the most forlorn, depressing – the door opened again.
“Dan! Hullo! Sorry about that – Rosa is insisting on screening my callers. Come in.” Kershaw clapped a hand on the Crime Scene Manager’s broad back and drew him into the gloomy corridor. “Apparently that’s what she always did for the professor, her previous boss. He came here from the Hospital for Tropical Diseases just up the road. Have you heard, some absolute doombrain wants to make the place a containment area for unknown serious infections? The press has been speculating about what would happen if it became a terrorist target. Can you imagine the disaster scenario we’d have on our hands? At present such things are dealt with up near Mill Hill. They have PCs from Haringey and Barnet guarding the place. Anyway, the Disease Centre moved out of that weird old Gothic building you can see from the road in 1999, and the professor came here. By all accounts Rosa was dedicated to him, but there seems to be some kind of mystery about how and why he left that she won’t talk about; disgrace, a nervous breakdown, it’s all very – Ah, here we are.”
Bryant was standing in the main room, having just arrived from the church next door. He grinned. “What do you think of this, then, Dan?”
“What an extraordinary place,” Dan marvelled. He tended to admire buildings from an engineering perspective. A modern extension had added nothing of architectural interest, but the slender vaulted morgue ran deep under the road, cutting through ground that had once been filled with coffins from St Pancras Old Church. It reminded Banbury of a post-war railway station, mainly because of the row of green tin lights hanging low over the pair of dissection tables that occupied the main space in the room. The floor vibrated faintly as a subway train passed. Glassware pinged in a cabinet.
“Rather atmospheric, isn’t it?” Kershaw loved having visitors to whom he could show his new domain. “It could do with more light, but it’s surprisingly big.”
“It would have needed to be when it was built,” said Bryant. “The parish churc
h was pretty busy, and I imagine there were plenty of violent deaths to deal with. You can blame both the reformers and the property speculators for that.”
“Why so?”
“The fields of Somers Town and Holloway were dug up to build wealthy villas, suburban homes and houses for the Irish who came here for the Copenhagen Street cattle market. People were pouring in to work on the new railways. Some houses quickly degenerated into slums, but the land was so valuable that it would change hands five times in as many years, leaving the rich butted up beside the poor. London in microcosm, and a classic recipe for trouble.”
“Yeah, well, shoving the lower-waged into council estates doesn’t work, either,” said Banbury, who, like Meera, had been raised on one of the rougher London housing developments.
“No, so now they’re planning to mix households with different incomes within individual land plots, to break down social barriers. An old idea whose time has come again. Whatever the result, I’m sure it’ll keep Giles busy.”
“How are you getting on, Dan?” asked Kershaw.
“You mean apart from having no officially recognised existence? Mr Bryant has found us a temporary home of sorts, but we’re so far off the grid that I can’t get access to any data. At the moment I’m using the wife’s on-line account to get into systems.”
“Did you get anything more out of our corpses?” Bryant asked.
“See for yourself,” answered Kershaw, “although I warn you, they’re not pretty. Here you go, body number one.” He rolled out a green steel drawer and unveiled its contents. Without its identifying features, the remaining grey flesh bore little resemblance to anything human.
“There seems to be some confusion here. From the contents of the stomach and the condition of his skin, I’ve set the time of death for the cadaver that was found in the shop a little earlier than the body found on the building compound – ”
“He wasn’t killed on the premises,” Banbury interrupted. “But I think he was beheaded in the shop. Any blood that fell landed on plastic sheeting that was then removed; there are drag marks in the dust consistent with that.”
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