The stone walls were thick and the air dry in the crypt. The lights were on.
North was less and less happy. If St Bride’s was a diversion and Chin was wasting his time, he wanted them in and out as quickly and as quietly as possible. If this was a legitimate shutdown of an archaeological site, he might even have to fess up to Hone and the three of them go into quarantine. He shuddered at the thought of more needles.
He stalled in the narrow corridor and jerked his thumb back at Fang, speaking in a whisper. ‘Go back and wait for us upstairs.’
‘Like that’s happening,’ she said. She pointed through the exhibition space they were in, Roman pavements reflected in mirrors on the wall behind a simple altar. ‘This way.’
It would help if they knew what they were looking for.
They passed through a heavy door, picking their way over bare planks and stone walkways, past the detritus of church life, Christmas ornaments, poppy wreaths, crusted plastic buckets that had once contained lime mortar, and piles of folded hessian. Through a medieval chapel and past ancient gravestones and a metal coffin. The further they went, the less clue he had as to what secret had brought Hawke down here. And what the government was so keen to hide.
North opened the door marked ‘Ossuary’ into a room lined with cardboard boxes. If Hone had hidden something, would he have hidden it in plain sight? He flipped the lid off the nearest box and jumped back – gingerly, he extracted a brown skull with a tuft of hair still attached.
‘The Victorians sealed up the crypts after a cholera epidemic in 1854,’ Plug said. ‘My grandad said when they were rebuilding after the war, they discovered a couple of hundred coffins down here. This must be what was in them.’
They pulled out box after box from the shelves – there was nothing but ancient bones and fragmenting yellow skulls.
Biting back a heavy sigh, North gestured them out of the ossuary.
They’d wasted too much time already. Maybe that was Chin’s intention? But he didn’t like it – the crypt was a warren, and if someone found them down here, they were caught like rats in a trap.
‘Down there.’ Fang pointed along the darkest, twistiest corridor to what looked like yellow-and-black tape criss-crossing the entrance. A massive swag of plastic curtain blocked the corridor next to the ‘Contamination’ and ‘Strictly no entry without a K567 pass and a hazardous materials suit’ warnings.
The hair rose on the back of his neck.
He ducked under the yellow-and-black tape, before stepping through the split plastic. At first, he thought it must be the rustle of moving air against the sheeting, but after a second or two’s pause he realized the noise was coming from some place ahead of them rather than from behind. Plug and Fang followed him through and he pointed to a break in the wall ahead – the tinny electronic buzz fizzing and crackling around him now – as a sudden surge of adrenaline pumped its way through his system.
In silence, North gestured to Plug to stay back and protect Fang.
Keeping to the wall, North edged forward. He kept his breathing slow and steady. Were there voices ahead of him? If so, how many, and where were they coming from? He was concentrating so hard, he almost leapt out of his skin as he felt Fang’s light touch on his arm. He glared at Plug as the teenage girl slotted herself in next to him, and the big man shrugged. It wasn’t as if she’d given Plug a choice in the matter.
Craning his neck, North leant forward to peer around the corner.
A New Army soldier sat slumped on a broken-down ecclesiastical chair staring at an iPad he’d balanced against a couple of bricks and an unlit lantern. His SA80 assault rifle was propped up next to him, while huge noise-cancelling headphones sat over his ears, and his hands clutched a controller.
It didn’t make sense. Official contamination warnings that had shut off the entire church. A single soldier without protective clothing. And no signs of any ongoing biohazard or scientific work.
North stepped out of the darkness and took a step towards the soldier, the dry earth and tiny stones crunching under his shoe. Two. Three. Four. The tinny buzz getting louder with each step as the soldier slaughtered his virtual enemies. But as North walked, the stale air must have moved around him, because the player made to stand, dropping the controller and reaching for the assault rifle.
He could have played it differently, North admitted to himself afterwards, but he didn’t. Maybe it was the darkness and the fact they were trapped together in a confined space? Or the memory of Tobias’s blood spread across the floor of the museum? Or the need to protect Fang? But, reaching with his left hand, North seized the nearest shovel and in the same movement swung the handle hard against the soldier’s head. The soldier went down without a sound, his avatar mown down in the same instant.
Fang broke free of Plug’s grip to run across to the unconscious soldier. She applied her fingers to the guy’s throat. ‘Completely OTT. You don’t have to incapacitate every single person you meet.’ Her face in the light looked ferocious and disapproving, but then Fang’s face often looked ferocious and disapproving. He examined himself for remorse but there was none. This was a brutal business, and incapacitated was better than dead.
The soldier’s eyes remained closed, his breathing laboured, as North used some handy rope to hog-tie him.
Then again, perhaps he should have disarmed him, keeping him conscious and able to answer questions. Questions like: why did anyone need a shovel in a smallpox site? Not just one. Six shovels were stacked against the walls, along with a couple of pickaxes, some coils of rope and folded tarpaulin sheets. North bent down and picked up the shovel he’d used against the guard. He had used the wooden handle because he hadn’t wanted to kill the soldier, but it was the blade he was fixed on now – the blade covered with dirt. The kind you turn up if you closet yourself under one of London’s oldest churches to bury a secret.
North hunkered down, running his fingertips over the earth. It was hard packed and, aside from this-way-and-that boot prints, seemed undisturbed.
There was a shout from the wall.
‘This should be an entrance here with a door,’ Fang said. North thought back to the plastic buckets, to the piles of hessian they’d passed, to the bricks propping up the soldier’s iPad. Someone had sealed the entrance.
Plug used a pickaxe to lever out the first brick, and a breath of cold and dusty air escaped. North peered in. It was completely dark. Plug moved Fang to one side, took hold of the bricks either side of the space he’d created, and pulled. The mortar was fresh and the bricks gave without much fightback. He eased in the end of a spade and slammed his full weight against it, levering out a massive chunk of brickwork. North did the same on the other side. Slabs of mortared bricks came out in pieces till, with a loud crash, an entire section of the wall came down.
Plug held up the soldier’s lantern he’d lit and, beside him, North heard Fang take in a horrified breath.
Skulls and bones stretched the length and breadth of the space. In the furthest corner, a huge heap of what looked like thigh bones was piled against the bricks. Close by, a row of ancient brown skulls stood guard over a trench stiff with more bones. As he stepped over the ragged bricks, North felt his foot sink into the long bones, snapping some of them under his weight.
‘What is this place?’ North said.
‘A charnel house,’ Plug said. ‘When churchyards ran out of space, they’d dig up the inhabitants. But they’d had a Christian burial, so the remains had to go somewhere.’
‘Please tell me they died of old age,’ North said, lifting up a skull, ‘and not the plague. Or the pox.’
‘This room is mapped. You wouldn’t hide anything in here, because even bricked up, there’s a risk in a few years someone might find whatever it is.’ Fang pointed to the wall on the left. ‘According to the map there’s nothing behind that wall, but I think there is. I think they’ve knocked through to next door.’
Plug lifted the lantern. Fang was right. The bricks were blackened with dirt and the grime of centuries, but the mortar was clean – the wall had been taken down and built back up again.
It took less than fifteen minutes to break through. The charnel house beyond was three times the size of the first, and the bones lay at ten times the depth. If he had to hazard a guess, North would have said it was centuries older. And it was empty of anything but skulls and bones. Shadows from the lantern clambered up the darkened brick walls and across the vaulted ceiling as Plug attempted to light the furthest reaches.
There was nothing.
‘I shouldn’t have listened to Chin,’ North said. ‘I’m sorry.’
He had brought Plug and Fang down into this hellhole for no good reason and the Lord only knew what they’d been breathing in. Dust? Disease? The microscopic remains of ancient Londoners? Even his mouth tasted of the dead. Worse than that, they were no nearer to finding Syd and they had allowed Chin to waste time they didn’t have. Maybe the wall between the charnel houses had been there for seven hundred years and they had seen exactly what they wanted to see? Maybe the soldier hadn’t been wearing protective clothing because he had a brick wall between him and the dead? Or because he was plain dumb? And maybe there were no scientists down here because the place was disgusting and dangerous and they knew better?
Fang’s glittering boots barely rested on the stacked bones as she moved across the room. She seemed unfazed by the dead surrounding them, or indeed the fact she might join them sooner than she ought to. Using the torch on her phone, she moved the light like a brush over the bones. Then stopped and stared. As North and Plug crossed over to her, bones breaking and snapping under them, Plug lifted the lantern higher so they didn’t lose her in the shadows.
At Fang’s feet were crushed fragments of skulls, a whole heap of long bones, and a cigarette end.
None of them spoke. They started digging.
They were three metres down and what hit them first was the smell.