they've been dumped elsewhere. Let's get a dog team out here too, see if Fido can dig them up. And when it gets light, get some people knocking on doors in all these houses overlooking the churchyard. Someone might have seen something.
'Where were the kids smoking?' he asked, looking around the small churchyard.
'Across the other side. I'll show you.'
They walked around the back of the churchyard.
Drinkwater pointed to a set of stone steps leading down towards a door.
'Down there, by the entrance to the undercroft.'
Foster looked at it for a few seconds. 'So they wouldn't have seen the body being dumped from here?' he asked rhetorically. 'Did they hear anything?'
Drinkwater shook his head. 'Too windy. That's how they found the body. They were after a bit more shelter to skin up, so they went round the other side out of the wind.'
Foster nodded slowly. He was pretty certain they hadn't done it. Most teenagers may be lawless, disrespectful scroats, he thought, but they rarely butcher and mutilate grown men and then walk coolly into a police station to report the crime.
'Just what is an undercroft anyway?'
'A crypt. At least, I think it is,' Drinkwater replied.
'Not any more,' Heather said. 'My mate used to come here for antenatal yoga classes; then a baby massage course after the baby was born.'
Foster turned and looked at her. Ordinarily he would have used this as an excuse to wind her up, but the scene had left him too enervated.
The three large crows cawed as they played, wheeling and tipping one after another, their coal-black feathers standing out against the watery-grey sky.
Nigel Barnes, his black duffel coat buttoned tightly to his neck, which was wrapped in a woollen scarf, and his battered brown satchel strapped across his shoulder and front so it sat on his right hip, watched them from behind his black-rimmed glasses, wondering how many crows constituted a murder. He thought it was more than three.
His attention wandered from the raucous crows to the sky. The sun, he felt sure, was trying to break through the canopy of cloud, the colour of dull aluminium. But, until it did, he was stymied, the small shaving mirror in his bag redundant. He sighed and brought his gaze back to eye level.
He looked at the gravestones in front of him. How many unfulfilled hopes and dreams lay in the soil?
Hundreds. Thousands, maybe. Away to his left was a glorious, tree-lined avenue of dramatic and gaudy mausoleums, a testament to the Victorian obsession with death and mourning, lurid monuments to the dead and now forgotten, where the great and the good of nineteenth-century London were laid to rest, many of them above ground rather than below.
Beyond, Nigel could see the gothic outline of the Anglican chapel, beneath which lay the catacombs.
He had been down there once and loved every ghoulish second, particularly the moment when the guide conspiratorially said that if the embalmer failed to do his job, then the bodies crammed in there often exploded, made combustible by the waste gases of their decomposition. The whole group had laughed nervously, and shuddered collectively.
Kensal Green Cemetery was a favourite spot of his, rivalled only by Highgate Cemetery for macabre splendour. The Victorians knew how to do death.
Unlike us, he thought; now we burn people and have little to do with the dusty aftermath. Genealogists won't have graves to go to in fifty or a hundred years when tracing future generations, no inscriptions to locate and decipher, just like they won't have letters to read and learn from, thanks to email. Nothing is permanent any more, for all time, he thought: it's all about now.
He looked around and through the trees bowing in the wind, the tangled bushes and endless tumble of overgrown, battered graves and statues. He could see no one else. Just him and thousands of dead. It was like entering a lost world. Only the faraway hum of traffic punctuated by the sound of sirens, London's incessant soundtrack, gave an indication of the century he was in. It felt good to be out in the open air, away from the exhaust fumes of the traffic-choked streets. There were few outdoor oases like this in central London, places of silent contemplation: the other cemeteries, of course, the odd residential square with its private gardens, and a few of the smaller parks, but that was it. Nigel knew that 150 years ago this cemetery was in open countryside. That was the whole idea. The teeming, crowded cemeteries in the middle of the city had begun spewing out their decomposing bounty, and the foul, fetid odour and miasma that resulted were the cause of disease, or so the belief was. So the newer cemeteries were built out of town -- the one in Brookwood had its own mode of transport to export the city's deceased, the Necropolis Railway. But soon London's voracious appetite had swallowed the ground in every direction.
Nigel checked his watch: ten thirty. From his coat pocket he pulled a crumpled piece of paper torn from the notebook. 'Lot 103', it read. The grave of Cornelius Tiplady, Architect, 1845-85. His quest was to find whether this Cornelius Tiplady was the greatgreat-grandfather of his client. He wanted to see if the inscription on the gravestone mentioned some names that might link him to some of the other relatives he had found, and so confirm he had the right man. A poetic inscription might be a nice garnish to offer alongside the dry genealogical info he had unearthed, and to confirm a job well done.
He needed to let people know he was back, working well. Rebuilding a business was not proving easy.
Lot 103 was off the beaten track and, as he suspected, in an unkempt part of the cemetery teeming with unruly grass, small trees and lichen, muddying his brogues as he ticked off the graves one by one. Few had escaped the ravages of the weather. He reached lot 103, took off his glasses and gave them a quick rub on the edge of his coat, put them back on and sank to his haunches.
The grave was unremarkable, standard for the time, a flat grey gravestone. No ostentation for the Tiplady family. But, as he feared, the words used to honour the deceased's two-score years had been rendered unreadable by time and decay. He could not even make out the name, bar the outline of a capital C, which did at least offer him the comfort that the burial records had been well kept and that somewhere beneath his feet lay Cornelius, or whatever was left of him. He ran his finger gently across some of the indentations, almost able to make out the other letters of the name, even if he could not see them. He noticed there was another jumble of letters below the name, though the inscription appeared brief. A family of few words, too, it seemed. Good.
Nigel removed his bag from his shoulder, unzipped it and pulled out his shaving mirror. He had bought it when he was a student, from a barber on Jermyn Street. He stood up, stepped to one side of the grave and, trying to avoid standing on the plot next to it, angled the mirror to the sky, turning it so that any reflection of light would be cast across the face of the gravestone. He had adopted this method before, to great effect, using the reflection of the sun to cast a shadow across the lettering and so create contrast. But then he had enjoyed the benefit of sunshine. Here he did not, and it was clear after only a few seconds that it was futile. He did not have a torch to magnify the effect of the light; that would require another person, and dragging people to graveyards on weekday mornings was a difficult sell. Luckily, he knew of another, less subtle method.
He put the mirror back in his bag and took a surreptitious glance around him. What he was about to do was not just frowned upon in genealogical circles, it was an offence right up there with defacing documents and licking your fingers before opening an aged manuscript. In the conservative, preservation-first world of family history it was tantamount to desecrating a grave, a subject of fevered debate in genealogical forums across the Internet.
Nigel ran his hand through his mane of black hair, pushing back the fringe that flopped over his brow.
There was still no one in sight. Bugger it, he thought, old Cornelius is not going to complain, and neither are any of his family. It crossed his mind that he was standing in almost the exact spot where Cornelius's grieving widow and children would have stood mourning his death, but he managed to cast the thought out once more. Acid rain, bird shit, lichen, they had all inflicted worse damage on the stone than the substance he was about to use. And he did not have the materials with which to make an impression of the inscription. Instead, from his bag he produced a tin of shaving foam and a squeegee.
He shook the tin and squirted several lines of foam across the face of the gravestone. With his right hand he then smeared the foam across the stone so that the entire area was covered with a thin layer.
Then he took the squeegee and wiped it gently across the stone from left to right, as if it was a window.
