‘She must also have known it was suicidal, that she was on a one-way ticket,’ Costas murmured. ‘Maybe it unhinged her. Remember Apocalypse Now, Colonel Kurtz. A noble cause, unsound methods. Maybe Boudica got swallowed up in her own heart of darkness.’
‘Speaking of which, it’s time.’ Jeremy lurched to his feet. ‘The rector’s opened the crypt specially for us during the lunchtime concert in the church. Come on.’
A few minutes later they stood just inside the portico of the Guildhall Art Gallery, looking out over the yard with the elliptical line of the Roman amphitheatre arena marked across it. To their right was the medieval facade of the Guildhall itself, and to the left the solid, functional shape of St Lawrence Jewry, reconstructed after the Second World War to resemble as closely as possible the original design built by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of London in
1666.
‘This place seems pristine now, but it’s seen three circles of hell,’ Jack said quietly, peering out into the drizzle. ‘Boudica’s revolt in AD 60, the massacre, possibly human sacrifice. Then the Great Fire of 1666. Of the buildings here, only the Guildhall wasn’t completely destroyed, because its old oaks wouldn’t burn. An eyewitness said it looked like a bright shining coal, as if it had been a Palace of Gold or a great building of burnished brass. Then, almost three centuries later, the inferno visited again. This time from above.’
‘The twenty-ninth of December 1940,’ Jeremy said. ‘The Blitz.’
‘One night of many,’ Jack replied. ‘But that night the Luftwaffe targeted the square mile, the City of London. My grandmother was here, a despatch rider at the Air Ministry. She said the sound of dropping incendiaries was ominously gentle, like a rain shower, but the high-explosive bombs had been fitted with tubes so they screamed rather than whistled. Hundreds were killed and maimed, men, women, children. That famous picture of St Paul’s Cathedral, wreathed in flames but miraculously intact, comes from that night. St Lawrence Jewry wasn’t so lucky. It went up like a Roman candle, the flames leaping above the city. One of the men standing next to my grandmother on the roof of the Air Ministry watching the churches burn was Air Vice Marshal Arthur Harris, “Bomber” Harris. He said he saw total war that night. He was the architect of the British bomber offensive against Germany.’
‘Another circle of hell,’ Jeremy murmured.
‘My grandmother heard a terrible scream that night, like a banshee,’ Jack said quietly. ‘It haunted her for the rest of her life.’
‘Must have been a lot of horror,’ Costas said.
‘The scream came from the church,’ Jack continued. ‘The organ was on fire and the hot air rushing through the pipes made it shriek, as if the church was in a death agony.’
‘Shit.’
‘You couldn’t put that in a horror movie, could you? Nobody would believe you.’
‘I think I’m getting the jitters about this place, Jack.’
‘It’s all still there, under our feet,’ Jack said. ‘The Boudican destruction layer, charred earth and smashed pottery, human bone. Then masses of rubble from the old medieval church destroyed in 1666, cleared and buried to make way for Sir Christopher Wren’s new structures. And then another layer of destruction debris from the Blitz, with reconstruction work still going on.’
‘Any unexploded ordnance?’ Costas said hopefully. ‘That’d make me happy. You owe me one. That stuff you wouldn’t let me touch on the sea bed off Sicily.’
Jack gave Costas a look, and then walked briskly over Guildhall Yard. ‘Remember where we are, the lie of the amphitheatre,’ he said as he stepped over the curved line in the pavement. He pointed to the western wall of St Lawrence Jewry, about eight metres away. ‘And remember the proximity of the church.’ They reached the church entrance and went inside. The lunchtime concert was about to begin, and Jeremy led them quickly through the nave packed with seated people to a small wooden door off the west aisle. He opened it, ducked inside and beckoned. Costas followed him, then Jack. As Jack shut the door the music began. The concert was a selection of Bach’s reconstructed violin concertos, and Jack recognized the Concerto in D Minor for solo violin, strings and basso profundo. The music was bold, confident, joyous, the strident Baroque beat giving order to confusion, structure to chaos. Jack lingered, and for a moment he thought of slipping back and sitting anonymously in the audience. He had always loved the reconstructed concertos, the result of a kind of musical archaeology that seemed to mirror his own processes of discovery, small fragments of certainty put together by scholarship, by guesswork and intuition, suddenly fusing into an explosion of clarity, of euphoria. At the moment, he felt he needed the reassurance, uncertain whether the pieces they had found would meld, whether the trail they were following would lead to a conclusion that was greater than the sum of the parts.
‘Come on, Jack,’ Costas said from below. Jack followed him down the steps, into an undercroft beneath the level of the nave. The music was still there, but now just a background vibration. He saw an open door, and followed them down into another chamber, smaller and darker. It was old, much older than the masonry structure of Wren’s church, and looked as if it had been recently cleaned. A bare bulb hung from the brick vault. Once they were all inside, Jeremy closed and bolted the door at the bottom of the steps, then ran his hand along the masonry wall. ‘It’s a medieval burial chamber, a private crypt. It was found during the recent excavation work. This is as near as anyone’s got to the southern edge of the amphitheatre arena.’
‘This must be it,’ Jack said. ‘Jeremy?’
‘I agree. Absolutely.’
Costas eyed them. ‘Okay, Jack. I want a damn good explanation for what we’re doing here.’
Jack nodded, then squatted back against the wall, his khaki bag hanging from his left side. He was excited, and took a deep breath to steady himself. ‘Okay. When we worked out that riddle in Rome, when the location clicked, I immediately thought of Sir Christopher Wren and this church. When I was a boy I used to come here a lot, visit the old bomb sites and help with the excavations. My grandmother was a volunteer, drawn back to the place where she had watched helplessly decades before, trying to atone by helping with the reconstruction work. She took me along for my first excavation, and somehow her description of the inferno in 1940 brought the Boudican revolt to life for me, brought the true horror home, the colour of fire and blood and the terrible noises of human suffering. I’ve been fascinated by the Boudican revolt ever since, by all the attempts to find Boudica’s last place of refuge and her tomb. It became my grandmother’s passion too, and when she was dying it was the last thing we spoke about. I made her a promise I thought I’d never be able to fulfil. Later, as a student, having seen myself what the bombing and clearance had revealed of the Roman city, I became fascinated by the other great inferno, by what Wren might have come across in the prehistoric and Roman layers exposed after the Great Fire of 1666. That was before archaeology had begun as a discipline, when most artifacts were never even recognized, let alone recorded.’
‘With a few exceptions,’ Jeremy murmured.
Jack nodded. ‘Wren himself had an antiquarian interest, and mentioned finding Roman artefacts under St Paul’s. That’s what really fired me up. Then I discovered that the Church of St Lawrence Jewry had been owned by Balliol College, Oxford. One of my uncles was a Fellow of the College, and he arranged for me to visit the archive, to see whether there was any record of finds made here after 1666. That visit was years ago, when I was being drawn away by diving and shipwrecks, and I didn’t take detailed notes. That’s what I asked Jeremy to check out.’
‘And Jeremy came up trumps,’ Costas said.
‘Jack remembered it was just a scrap of loose paper in an old book, part of the master mason’s diary, but I found it,’ Jeremy replied, pulling a notepad out of his coat pocket. ‘It’s fantastic. It was when they were clearing the rubble and burned timbers after the fire, trying to find holes underground to bury the stuff away: disused wells, cesspits, old vaults. One of the workmen broke into a crypt which must be this chamber. The mason described going through into another crypt, then seeing a line of large pottery pipes with handles, upright in a row against the earth wall on one side. He thought they might be drainage pipes, possibly the lining of a well, so they left them intact. They stuffed as much debris as they could into a space off to one side and then bricked it up. They then came back out, and bricked up the entrance from the first crypt also.’ Jeremy gestured towards the crumbling wall on the far side of the chamber, opposite the side with the entrance door. ‘Over there. That must be it. The
