North wondered if he was imagining it at first. If it might be associated with the stale air and the sheer number of bones and skulls around them.
He wanted to think he had it wrong, that the smell was unfamiliar, but he’d smelled it too often and the memory wasn’t one that ever faded.
Plug paused in his digging, his face grim.
‘We don’t know when they change their guards,’ Plug said. ‘It could be any second.’
Plug was right. This was stupid. They were trapped underground in a secret charnel house accessed through another charnel house, which itself had been walled off in a crypt that someone had taken a great deal of effort to close off from all comers. And he was guessing they were too late to help whoever was down here with them. North kept digging.
‘We should at least get her out of this,’ Plug said, keeping his voice low as his eyes drifted in the direction of Fang, who stood at a distance. As he spoke, a cloud of flies appeared to materialize out of nowhere. ‘And that’s not good,’ Plug said as he batted them away.
Standing upright, North wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. Again, Plug was right, but Fang would refuse and the row would delay the inevitable. The priority had to be finding what – or who – Tobias had hidden down here. ‘We’re here now,’ he said, and thrust the blade of the spade back in among the bones. Plug swore, stripped off his shirt to bind it around his nose and mouth, and carried on. North did the same. It did something to counter the noxious smell of sweet putrefaction and faeces, but not enough.
‘Dear God,’ Plug said, his voice muffled by the cloth.
The hand was clawing its way out, its fingers curled over, dried blood and dirt under the torn fingernails, as if whoever was down there had tried to dig his way out.
North knelt alongside Plug as together they removed the ancient bones and dirt to reveal what he was guessing was once a face. Maggots oozed from what had once been eye sockets and nostrils. The skin was falling away from dark brown muscles and the lips and tongue were swollen with decay, pulled back over the teeth and crawling with flies.
Tobias’s secret was a corpse.
Plug hesitated, his eyes meeting North’s. ‘This is a crime scene and we could be messing everything up. We have to tell someone.’
That was the sensible course of action. Risk Hone’s wrath and fess up that he was still involved, and that there was a body buried underneath a London landmark. But North’s intransigence built. Hawke’s secret wasn’t his alone. Whoever else was involved in whatever this was had murdered and buried someone and gone to a great deal of trouble to hide the body. If they stopped digging before they knew the whole truth, what was to say the body wouldn’t disappear?
‘We have to get a closer look,’ he said. ‘The corpse might tell us something we need to know.’
‘Like what?’ Plug said. ‘That any second, we could end up just like them?’
Holding his breath against the stench, North took the legs and Plug the shoulders as they half lifted, half swung the decomposing body out from its grave among the ancient bones. Plug hunkered down, tucking his nose and mouth into the crook of his arm. He gestured at Fang to move the torch around before peering at the discoloured skin on the arm. The skin was breached and suppurating, but North could make out that the tattoo read ‘Mam’ within a rose-entwined heart. With his thumb and his forefinger, Plug reached for the remains of the T-shirt and lifted it away from the churned and shredded abdomen. The cotton material was full of holes.
‘What do you think?’
‘That he didn’t die of smallpox,’ North said.
‘Judging by the jeans and the size of the trainers, I’d say we’re looking at a man rather than a woman.’
‘Not a man,’ Fang said. ‘That’s a teenage boy. See!’ She bared her own lips to reveal her blue wired teeth, then pointed at the metal cage over the teeth of the corpse.
‘And judging by the state the hands are in, it’s a teenage boy who spent his last few minutes trying to scrabble his way out of this godforsaken pit,’ North said. ‘And I think that he suffocated or bled out, and that whoever did this is going to burn in hell, and that I’m going to send them there.’
‘I’ll tell you something else.’ Plug moved towards the bricks that had spilled out from the wall they’d broken down. ‘This is an awful lot of trouble to go to for one dead boy.’
*
It took three more hours of steady digging till they were convinced they had found them all. The corpses lay next to one another, stretched head to toe among the ancient bones. North examined each one as they emerged. After the first ten, Plug had asked again, Should we leave it? Time’s running on, mate, but he couldn’t leave them buried underneath the bones. They were just kids. Who killed a load of kids then buried them in the bleakest place they could think of? Some were little more than a rank and rotting heap of flesh scraps and body parts, as if they’d been blown apart. Lifting the T-shirt of the last one, which had been tucked in by the furthest wall in what North guessed was the coldest and driest spot, he examined the catastrophic wounds. Unlike the others, this corpse was almost dessicated, the skin the colour of pale ash. He reached for a bottle of mineral water Fang had salvaged from the soldier’s guard post and poured it over the remains. Under the dust and decay and the brown and dried blood, there were at least two dozen bullet holes.
‘How long would you say they’d been dead?’ he said, lowering his cloth mask.
Plug rubbed his jaw, and North could hear the rasp of stubble. He wrinkled his face, trying to do the calculations. ‘These are unusual conditions. And I’m guessing, but by the rate of decomposition, I’d say maybe three weeks, give or take.’
Three weeks, North thought. Give or take. When he was drunk and out of his head in Berlin, these young men were being slaughtered. Brushing the filth from his hands, he stood to survey the scene. A slow-burning anger sparked and built, filling him with its white-hot heat. He fought the urge to give it its head, to rant and to rage. To leave the charnel house and beat the still-unconscious soldier into a bloody unbreathing pulp. But what good would that do the dead? He drew a breath, attempted to calm his own heart rate, which he could feel pounding. He needed to keep his temper in check, because he needed to think.
Whoever had buried the bodies had cleared the original remains of the charnel house to one side and dug a shallow grave. They had laid the bodies top to toe, underneath a layer of dirt that hadn’t seen the light of day for centuries. Then they’d covered the disturbed earth over with the old bones of dead Londoners in a tomb no one knew existed.
‘A couple of years ago, this could have been you and me,’ he said to Plug. His friend frowned as he tried to understand what North was saying. ‘These boys are in some kind of uniform. I think they’re young offenders.’
Why would young offenders be butchered and buried together in a mass grave?
He moved along the lines of corpses. Chin had said the government wouldn’t want this getting out. Is this why Tobias ended up dead? Because it wasn’t just his secret?