‘Such a thought was bad enough. But when the lurker finally confronted me, it turned out I was as far away from the truth as I could be. It was in the evening after I entrusted Arthur’s bones to you, Giuseppe. And lucky that I did so, because that is what the man wanted, and he was prepared to kill to get them. He slid into my chamber out of the darkness like some dark-skinned, slippery eel out of the Fleet. The first I knew was the vice-like grip I felt on my neck. I was terrified, I can tell you, and I waved my arms about trying to escape. That must have been when I knocked the inkwell over and sent my precious books flying. But I could not escape his grip, and he hissed a warning into my ear. “Keep still, you little worm, or I will snap your neck right now,” he said. I stopped my struggle, and he released me. He demanded to know where the bones were, and I prevaricated – until he drew a sharp knife from under his coachman’s coat. I’m afraid I told him you had them, Giuseppe. But even then I kept my presence of mind. I pointed at the old wooden box in the corner, which I had dug up at Trevenna. “The coffin is there,” I cried. And when he bent over to lift the lid, I ran for my life. And have been running until this very night, when I could stand the cold and degradation no more. So I came in secret to my old friend’s door.’
Malinferno leaned forward into the light and patted the old man’s hand.
‘I am glad you did, Augustus. But if only you had told me where you found the bones, I might have known earlier what this was all about. Trevenna meant nothing to me.’
Augustus gurgled with delight.
‘I had to put you off the track. If I had told you straight away the church was half a mile from Tintagel Castle, you would have guessed the connection immediately.’
Malinferno smiled ruefully.
‘And I might not have got into so much trouble. Never mind. We shall have a resolution to your dilemma very soon.’
Malinferno had a good reason to draw the evening out, as he was now expecting a visitor. That is, if his guesswork was correct. If it wasn’t, the bones would be lost and Kitten’s murderer would remain undiscovered. Though Bromhead was unaware of his friend’s intense look, deep in his cups as he was, Malinferno noticed that Doll was eyeing him closely.
‘Something on your mind, Miss Pocket?’
Doll narrowed her eyes and frowned. ‘It’s not me, Signor Malinferno, who looks like they got something to hide. Want to tell us what you’re up to?’
Malinferno laughed. ‘You are very perspicacious, Doll. I am hoping matters will resolve themselves pretty soon, actually. However, it will involve a little play-acting from you. But seeing as how you told me recently that such a profession was an aspiration of yours, you will not mind, I am sure.’
‘I don’t know who this Percy Caysius feller is, but tell me what you want, and I will oblige.’
‘I am expecting a caller, but he will not come if you are still here. I suggest that, now Augustus has finished his meal and told us his story, you appear to take the remains of the repast back to the chophouse. Leaving me on my own.’
Bromhead belched gently and asked the obvious question. ‘What of me, Giuseppe? Do I leave too?’
Malinferno put a restraining arm on Bromhead’s. ‘That will not be necessary, Gus. Our caller does not know you are here, I think. And I could do with your assistance when he arrives. All I suggest is that you place yourself behind the door here when I turn out this lamp, and retire to my bedroom.’
Bromhead shuddered at the possibility of a physical encounter, but he nodded his head in acquiescence.
‘And what am I to do, Joe?’ This retort was from Doll. ‘Run away like some weak female?’
‘You can run, Doll Pocket, but I suggest that when you have returned the dirty crockery, you run in the direction of the nearest magistrate, and bring him here forthwith.’
Doll gave him an angry look full of storm clouds and thunder. But she collected the empty plates and ale-jug and made her way down the stairs. When Malinferno heard the front door close, he took the oil-lamp and turned the wick low. Crossing the landing, he went into his bedroom, making sure that the lamp stood in the window there. Then he turned the lamp out. Anyone observing from the street would assume that Malinferno had retired for the night and that he was now alone.
Almost half an hour passed, and Malinferno began to doubt his own convictions. After the fiasco of incarcerating the government spy and then discovering he was not the man seeking the bones, he had been in a quandary. Then he remembered something Doll had said earlier on. When he tried to put the evidence together, she had said his story was full of holes. In fact it had been Doll who had said there was no proof Augustus was dead. She had been correct about that. It had set him to finding other holes, and he had seen it as they had been walking back to Creechurch Lane. Casteix had said it first. The man who sawed his leg in half had resembled a Breton peasant. Swarthy, he had said, and no doubt stocky. Dale had suggested the family interested in guarding Arthur’s bones was Welsh, and Crouch had said the same. Bromhead had virtually confirmed that with his reference to a dark-skinned eel of a man. That he had not exactly said he was short was not surprising, taking into account Bromhead’s own lack of stature. The only conclusion Malinferno could come to was that two men had been following him all this time. And the one who had killed Kitten was still on the streets of London searching for the bones.
Suddenly he heard a scuffling sound on the stairs, and the slightest of creaks. He knew exactly where the man now mounting the stairs had stepped. He had trodden there himself once when he had been sneaking a willing young girl to his room. It had alerted Mrs Stanhope, and he had never made the same mistake again. The intruder, unfamiliar with the stairs, had stepped on the middle step on the half-landing. Malinferno poked his nose out of his door, but could not see the pale face of Augustus staring back at him across the landing. He was afraid the old man had perhaps fallen asleep and that he was on his own. His heart raced, and he tucked himself in behind his bedroom door. After a few more seconds the door began to swing silently open.
How he then came to be disposing of a dead body was something of a mystery to Joe Malinferno. When he sat down with Augustus and Doll later, he reasoned that the man, who was clearly Merrick, had been a step ahead of him. He had felt the prick of a blade through the crack in the door on the side where the hinges were. Merrick had guessed he was hiding behind the door somehow, and attacked. He had stumbled forward, blood pulsing from the wound in his back. A wound that Doll had now expertly bound with a torn section of her muslin dress, so that she now revealed a satisfying expanse of white thigh to Malinferno’s hungry gaze. Matters had from the point of being stabbed got quite confused for him. When Merrick fell on him, he had feared for his life. But a saviour had arrived in the form of Doll Pocket. It seemed she had spurned the idea of calling out the Runners on the grounds that they would not take too kindly to the requests of a common bawd. Besides, Malinferno hadn’t expected them to come. He had only asked it of her to get her out of danger. But Doll had other ideas than being typecast as the weak and fainting female.
‘I left the dirty dishes at the door of St Mary Axe church and sneaked back,’ she explained. ‘The man wasn’t all that hard to spot, once you knew where he was hiding. I’ve hung around in plenty of doorways myself, making sure the charleys or the Runners don’t notice me. When he entered the house, I followed him. And just as well for you it was, Joe Malinferno. For I pulled him off your back just in time.’
The man in question nodded sagely and glanced across at where Augustus Bromhead sat. The little antiquarian was ashen-faced and deep in thought, and Malinferno was unsure how to break into his reverie. It was Doll who spoke up boldly.
‘And we must both thank Gus for his bravery. That sly little bastard Merrick was as slippery as Gus said, and he would have done for us both if he hadn’t come in when he did.’
Bromhead gave a despairing cry. ‘But I killed him.’
Doll walked swiftly over to him and buried his hea
d in her ample bosom. Malinferno looked on with envy. ‘No. It was an accident. You tried to wrest the knife off him, and his arm got twisted around. He fell on his own blade, if you ask me.’
Bromhead’s sobs subsided, but he kept his head between Doll’s breasts longer than Joe thought necessary.
The disposal of the body had been relatively easy. It had merely required calling on the services of Ben Crouch, who with a free ‘large one’ on offer ended up bearing them no more ill will. He even made light of Doll’s assault on his jewels.
‘I do like a good tussle before the main event. It perks up the spirit, don’t it?’
But he was quick to exit with his body, when Doll offered to reacquaint him with the force of her grip. Merrick, the killer of Kitten, was soon fated to decorate the autopsy slab at St Bartholomew’s, where he would be drawn and quartered in the most modern of ways. Justice of a sharp and rough kind, but justice all the same.
‘But we still don’t know what happened to Arthur’s bones apart from this one,’ moaned Bromhead, swinging the thigh-bone they had retrieved from Merrick’s coat pocket. ‘If Merrick didn’t have them, then where have they gone?’
It was Mrs Stanhope who solved the mystery, by entering the room at that very moment with a familiar canvas sack over her shoulder.
‘Mr M, if you don’t want these old bones I hid away for you before the Runners came round, I will throw them on the local tip.’
Malinferno strode across the room and gave his startled landlady a long and lingering kiss.
The final act of the three conspirators was to agree to hide King Arthur’s bones away securely so that a future generation may call on them in a time of real need. It was Bromhead who had voiced all their fears about the bones.
‘They have been nothing but a curse since I uncovered them. We should put them somewhere secure where they will not be found for a very long time.’
They had called on the services of Thomas Dale, who provided them with a newfangled wrought-iron coffin, inside of which was placed the bones, along with the battered and scarred remains of the ancient wooden chest that had once housed them. From Bromhead’s house at dead of night, they had solemnly processed to the rundown building across the yard that was ironically called Pope’s Mansion. The cellars beneath it were the original undercroft area of medieval Bermondsey Abbey, and it seemed a fitting place for Arthur to rest a while longer. With the aid of four of Dale’s men, sworn to secrecy with a plentiful supply of ale, they secreted the heavy coffin behind an old, crumbling wall, which they patched up after them. Malinferno silently prayed it would be a considerable time before the bones saw the light of day again.
EPILOGUE
London, August 2004
The rescue dig at Bermondsey Abbey was coming to an end, as the contractors for the huge development project, which would bury the ancient foundations for ever, were itching to send in their piledrivers. Only two archaeologists remained, sitting in their Portacabin over mugs of instant coffee, while their solitary student volunteer was somewhere outside, grubbing through the basements with his metal detector.
‘Never gives up, does he!’ muttered Edward Asprey. ‘The last day and he still hopes to find a pot of gold with that thing.’
Gwen Arnold jumped to the defence of Philip Grainger, as she knew that Asprey, the rather depressive team leader, disliked the student, probably because he was unfailingly cheerful. ‘Come on, he’s harmless enough. And he has found a few coins and bits and pieces with that gadget of his.’
Gwen was a physical anthropologist on secondment from Cardiff University, an earnest woman of thirty drafted in to advise on the human remains found when they excavated the abbey cemetery, though some unexpected finds had been unearthed elsewhere in the dig.
Edward Asprey grunted and looked despondently around the cabin at the piles of papers, books and assorted debris that would have to be packed up and removed this weekend. He was a small man, with a wispy beard and a mop of black hair. ‘It’ll seem odd to be back in my office after months in this place,’ he observed. ‘Are you going straight back to Wales?’
‘No, I need to write up this project first. Then I must get back before term starts, as I’ve got to get my lectures sorted.’
She had plain but pleasant features, with rather lank brown hair pulled straight back and secured with an elastic band.
Abruptly the door was thrown open and Philip’s amiable face appeared around it. He had a pair of headphones pushed down around his neck and seemed excited, but he was always one to be enthusiastic about everything.
‘You’d best come and have a look at this, folks!’ he chanted, waving a gadget that looked like a walking stick with a black dinner plate stuck on the end.
‘Oh, God, not that bloody thing again?’ whined Asprey, but Gwen was more sympathetic. ‘What have you found this time, Phil?’ she asked.
‘Not actually found anything yet,’ he answered, rather crestfallen. ‘But I’ve had the strongest signal I’ve ever had with this.’ He waved the detector again. ‘Almost burst my eardrums. There must be a huge piece of ferrous metal there.’
‘And where’s that?’ asked Asprey wearily.
‘In the cellarer’s undercroft, against the north wall.’
The senior scientist groaned. ‘Not that bloody place again. It’s cursed!’
They had had several misfortunes there during the dig. It was the site of the storage vaults beneath the cellarer’s building of the original eleventh-century priory. First, a volunteer had fallen into the excavation and broken a leg, then a new JCB had crashed over the edge – and finally lightning had struck a bizarre discovery behind a false wall.10
The more sympathetic Gwen went out with Philip and followed him as he almost danced across to the ladder that went down into the long excavation. It was criss-crossed with the remains of walls from haphazard building over almost a millennium.
At the bottom he led her over to a ruinous patch of masonry about six feet high, which showed stones, bricks and crumbling mortar from many different periods. Philip brandished his detector again and fiddled with some of the control knobs.
‘I’ll put it on the speaker, rather than the headphones, so you can hear,’ he offered excitedly. Raising the dinner-plate end towards the wall, he moved it slowly along, just above ground level. The steady whine suddenly erupted into a rising shriek, which persisted for about six feet as he closely traversed the stonework. ‘Something big in there, Gwen!’ he said gleefully.
Next afternoon the three of them stood in a cluttered preparation room next to a laboratory in the Archaeology Department, just off Gower Street. A badly rusted metal coffin sat on the floor, its lid propped against a nearby wall, the corroded holding bolts cut off with an angle-grinder.
A spreading pool of rusty fluid seeped across the floor, even though a large volume of water had been drained out at the excavation site.
‘No doubt about it being early nineteenth century,’ said Edward Asprey. ‘It was from the time when there was this real fear of grave robbers – the “resurrection men” and all that.’
‘Stealing bodies to sell to anatomists, you mean?’ asked Philip. He was still on a high from being the finder of this strange contraption. When a section of the decayed wall had been pulled down, the iron coffin had been found under pile of waterlogged rubble and had to be hauled back to the laboratory before it could be opened by their technicians.
‘But what was left of that box inside certainly wasn’t nineteenth century,’ objected Gwen. ‘Nor are those bones, though God knows how old they are.’
They moved to a metal table against the wall, where at one end a pile of mouldering wood had been separated from a collection of fragmented bones at the other.
‘So what are you saying about these?’ asked Edward, pointing at the remains of a fragile, brownish skeleton. Gwen carefully picked up a length of thigh-bone, with the round knob of the hip joint at the top. ‘It’s a partial skeleton, very badly decay
ed – the bone is sodden and porous. Probably the last two centuries in that leaking metal box did it more damage that it suffered in all its previous history.’
‘Which is how long?’ demanded Edward Asprey.
The anthropologist shrugged. ‘Impossible to tell! Environment affects the appearance of bone far more than time itself. Without carbon dating, it would be sheer guesswork.’
‘What about the remains of the box?’ asked Philip. ‘Those bits of wood lying all around the heap of bones must be what’s left of some sort of container.’
Asprey claimed this as his expertise. ‘Again, impossible to date it, given the rotten state of the timber. It looks like oak and there seem to be some bits of rusty iron left, which were probably bands or hinges.’
‘What can you tell from the bones themselves?’ persisted the student. ‘Even I can tell that the remains of that skull are male.’
Gwen Arnold hefted the partial thigh-bone in her hand. ‘It’s a man, all right – and a big fellow too, judging by the diameter of this femoral head. But I’ll need some time to look at all this stuff properly.’
‘What about carbon dating?’ asked Asprey. ‘Can we afford it from what’s left of our budget?’
‘Probably, but if there’s a shortfall I’ll wangle it from the Cardiff grant. As soon as these have dried a bit, I’ll drill some samples and send them off to Oxford, together with some from the wood.’
‘When you write this up for publication, can you mention my name?’ asked Philip wistfully.
Three weeks later they met again in Asprey’s office, which was even smaller than the Portakabin he had had at Bermondsey.
Gwen Arnold held a few sheets of paper in her hands, the results of the tests carried out by the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit.
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