On the outskirts of Leamington Spa, Robin followed the sign to All Saints church, which she knew from her research was the only possible candidate for the place where Charlie Ramage had seen Margot. Janice had mentioned a “big church”; All Saints was a tourist attraction due to its size. None of the other churches in Leamington Spa had graveyards attached to them. Moreover, All Saints was situated directly on the route of anyone traveling north from London. Although Robin found it hard to understand why Margot would have been browsing headstones in Leamington Spa, while her husband begged for information of her whereabouts in the national press and her Leamington-born lover remained in London, she had a strange feeling that seeing the church for herself would give her a better idea as to whether Margot had ever been there. The missing doctor was becoming very real to Robin.
She managed to secure a parking space in Priory Terrace, right beside the church, and set off on foot around the perimeter, marveling at the sheer scale of the place. It was a staggering size for a relatively small town; in fact, it looked more like a cathedral, with its long, arched windows. Turning right into Church Street, she noted the further coincidence of the street name being so similar to Margot’s home address. On the right, a low wall topped with railings provided an ideal spot for a motorbike rider to park, and enjoy a cup of tea from his Thermos, looking at the graveyard.
Except that there was no graveyard. Robin came to an abrupt standstill. She could only see two tombs, raised stone caskets whose inscriptions had been eroded. Otherwise, there was simply a wide stretch of grass intersected with two footpaths.
“Bomb fell on it.”
A cheery-looking mother was walking toward Robin, pushing a double pushchair containing sleeping boy twins. She’d correctly interpreted Robin’s sudden halt.
“Really?” said Robin.
“Yeah, in 1940,” said the woman, slowing down. “Luftwaffe.”
“Wow. Awful,” said Robin, imagining the smashed earth, the broken tombstones and, perhaps, fragments of coffin and bone.
“Yeah—but they missed them two,” said the woman, pointing at the aged tombs standing in the shadow of a yew tree. One of the twin toddlers gave a little stretch in his sleep and his eyelids flickered. With a comical grimace at Robin, the mother took off again at a brisk walk.
Robin walked into the enclosed area that had once been a graveyard, looking around and wondering what to make of Ramage’s story, now. There hadn’t been a graveyard here in 1974, when he claimed to have seen Margot browsing among tombstones. Or had an intact cemetery been assumed by Janice Beattie, when she heard that Margot was looking at graves? Robin turned to look at the two surviving tombs. Certainly, if Margot had been examining these, she’d have been brought within feet of a motorcyclist parked beside the church.
Robin placed her hands on the cold black bars that kept the curious from actually touching the old tombs, and examined them. What could have drawn Margot to them? The inscriptions etched on the mossy stone were almost illegible. Robin tilted her head, trying to make them out.
Was she seeing things? Did one of the words say “Virgo,” or had she spent too much time dwelling on Talbot’s horoscope notes? Yet the more she studied it, the more like “Virgo” the name looked.
Robin associated that star sign with two people, these days: her estranged husband, Matthew, and Dorothy Oakden, the widowed practice secretary at Margot’s old place of work. Robin had become so adept at reading Talbot’s horoscope notes, that she routinely heard “Dorothy” in her head when looking at the glyph for Virgo. Now she took out her phone, looked up the tomb and felt mildly reassured to discover that she wasn’t seeing things: this was the last resting place of one James Virgo Dunn.
But why should it have been of interest to Margot? Robin scrolled down a genealogy page for the Virgos and the Dunns and learned that the man whose bones now lay in dust a few feet from her had been born in Jamaica, where he’d been the owner of forty-six slaves.
“No need to feel sorry for you, then,” Robin muttered, returning her phone to her pocket, and she walked on around the perimeter to the front of the church, until she reached the great oak and iron double front doors. As she headed up the stone steps toward them, she heard the low hum of a hymn. Of course: it was Sunday morning.
After a moment’s hesitation, Robin opened the door as quietly as possible and peered inside. An immense, somber space was revealed: chilly parabolas of gray stone, a hundred feet of cold air between congregation and ceiling. Doubtless a church of this gigantic size had been deemed necessary back in Regency times, when people had flocked to the spa town to drink its waters, but
