eye.
‘And these things are actually sarcophagi, you say?’
‘Certainly.’
There were five of them, standing upright against a wall of the church, near the bell tower. Someone had arranged them in descending order, from six feet in length down to one the size of a small child. There were deep cracks in the stone and some of the corners had been sheered off. Pale green lichen had spread across the lower surfaces, like a shroud of cobwebs.
Cooper reached out a hand to touch the nearest one. He ran his fingers over the rough stone, and felt the chisel marks made by the mason. Despite the occasional bits of damage, the sarcophagi were remarkably intact for their age. Whatever their age was, exactly. They seemed to belong to that murky period of history beyond the medieval.
‘Roman?’ he said. ‘They’d be about two thousand years old, I suppose.’
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‘Oh, perhaps of that era,’ said the professor. ‘It’s impossible to date them with any accuracy. Their design never really changed. It was so simple and functional that there wasn’t much you could do to tinker with it.’
‘But they’re just stone coffins, aren’t they? Old churches often have them in their graveyards.’
Robertson shook his head. ‘Most people think of them as stone coffins. And I can understand how they might give that impression, at first glance.’
The sarcophagus nearest to Cooper was one of the bigger examples, its upper end at eye level against the church wall. It tapered towards the foot, and the mason had hacked a vaguely human shape out of the stone, including the outline of a head and shoulders.
‘There’s no mistaking that they’re designed to contain a body.’
‘Ah, but there are differences. For a start, these sarcophagi never possessed lids. They were always open to the air like this.’
For some reason, Cooper felt reluctant to examine the smallest sarcophagus, so he concentrated on the bigger ones instead.
‘Of course, the distinctive feature is the hole in the bottom. I wouldn’t expect that in my coffin.’
Robertson nodded encouragingly, as if to a student who was none too bright but was making an effort. ‘Exactly.’
Moving closer, Cooper tilted his head. The base had been shaped more carefully from the stone than at first appeared. Despite the crudeness of its construction, the surface showed a distinct dip towards the centre, where a hole a couple of inches across had been drilled through the stone.
‘The hole must be there for drainage. If these things didn’t possess lids, there had to be some way of letting the rain run out, or they’d be full of water.’
‘No, no,’ said Robertson. ‘Sarcophagi were kept under cover. They had to remain dry. It was essential to the process.’
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‘But…?’
‘Well, you’re partly right, DC Cooper. However, rainwater wasn’t involved. Yes, sarcophagi were designed to provide drainage - but it was the drainage of body fluids.’
‘Ah.’
The professor flapped his coat like the wings of a bird as he stood back and looked up at the church. Underneath the coat, he was still wearing the baggy pinstripe suit. ‘You see, the sarcophagus dates from a time before the practice of shutting up a corpse in a box and burying it. At that time, there was the charnel house and the sarcophagus. A chamel house was known as the “dead place”, or the “place of the dead”.’
Fry stirred for the first time at the mention of the phrase, and Robertson saw that he’d finally got her interest.
‘It was your mention of the dead place that put the idea of a sarcophagus into my mind,’ he explained. ‘But I wasn’t aware at the time of the significance. There could be other interpretations, of course.’
‘What happened in this dead place, Professor?’ asked Fry.
‘A corpse was left exposed to the air until decay had done its work, the flesh had dried and the bones were clean enough for disposal. Periodically, a priest would enter the charnel house to check if the corpse was ready.’
‘Ready?’
‘Our ancestors considered decomposition a perfectly natural stage of the body’s evolution,’ said Robertson. ‘It marked the passage from earth-bound spirit to a soul free to ascend to Heaven. They thought it was only the flesh that kept the soul trapped in the body. The soul had to be released to achieve real death. Looked at in that way, decomposition was a positive development. I imagine they might have wanted to observe this process taking place, much as we watch our children growing up.’
As they walked back down the flagged path through the churchyard, Cooper heard the professor muttering to himself.
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He caught the sound of a familiar phrase and realized the historian was quoting Shakespeare. Hamlet, if he wasn’t mistaken.
‘“Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew.”’
Robertson caught Cooper’s eye and smiled.
‘Appropriate, I think. More so than “dust to dust” and all that. Trust the Bard. He always had the right phrase for the occasion.’
‘But that word - sarcophagus,’ said Cooper. ‘Where does it come from?’
‘It’s derived from the Greek. A compound of two words sark and phagos. We doctors do so love our Latin and
