Ancient Appetites

to be made of stronger stuff than this!'

'You have soil in your teeth, Aunt Eunice,' Nate said to her, and led Daisy straight past as the elderly woman dropped the bandages and hurriedly took out a compact mirror to examine her mouth.

'Don't pay her any mind,' he said quietly to Daisy.

'No.' Daisy stopped abruptly. 'She's right – I should be helping.'

She wiped the last of her tears away and took off Nathaniel's jacket, handing it to him.

'I'll be fine, thank you.'

Roberto, who had been supervising the cordon with Hennessy, spotted Daisy and started to hurry across the lawn towards them, concern written all over his face. Before he reached them, Edgar appeared with his black servants looming behind him.

'Miss Melancholy' He bowed his head to her. 'I trust your predicament was handled with sufficient propriety?'

'Yes, Father,' she answered, glancing sidelong at Nathaniel, who swallowed nervously.

But Daisy had no wish to embarrass him here and now. She fervently wished she could just escape the whole damned lot of them. She would get back at Nate in her own good time.

Nathaniel surveyed the chaotic scene around them. The damage would take weeks to repair. He shook his head in disbelief, flabbergasted by what had happened. Marcus's funeral had been bombed. The enormity of the situation was still sinking in. He found his entire body was shaking; his grief for his brother turning into a terrible rage.

'We have to find whoever did this,' he growled through clenched teeth. 'We have to find these rebels, these curs and… and… destroy them. There must be hell to pay for this.'

'The perpetrators will be dealt with,' Edgar told him in a matter-of-fact way. 'The situation is well in hand.'

The Patriarch turned to look round for a moment and Nate followed his gaze. Standing by the corner of the church was a broad-shouldered figure dressed in a suit and bowler hat. It was Slattery, the man Nate had met outside his father's office a few days before. He gave Nathaniel a friendly grin, showing off his gold teeth, and then disappeared round the corner.

'The situation is well in hand,' Edgar said again.

XIII

THE BOG BODIES

Four people had been killed in the funeral explosion. Dr Warburton said it could have been much worse. The rebels who had perpetrated the attack had set off some explosives in the old treasury. The money and valuables had been cleared out so that the space could be used to store the black powder the engineers used for blasting out the tunnels. The entire stock of powder had exploded. It was pure chance that more people had not been standing on the ground over the store when it was detonated.

Two days later, Nathaniel was prowling the corridors of Wildenstern Hall, his mind seething with frustrated rage. The rebels had gone too far this time. Over the last few years there had been the odd revolt – raids on food stores or bands of resistance organized against evictions – but they had never attempted anything like this before.

The nearest comparison anyone could draw was the famous gunpowder plot of 1605, when Guy Fawkes and some English dissidents had tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament. To Nate, killing the King and a gaggle of politicians had some kind of logic to it. At least, if you were of the revolutionary persuasion. But who in their right minds would attack a funeral? A funeral, for God's sake!

He kept turning the event over and over in his mind, striding relentlessly down one hallway after another. On top of everything else, he was still no closer to finding Babylon, in spite of numerous enquiries. And even if he did, Marcus's cryptic message had given him no clue as to how a childhood plaything would help catch his killer.

Tired and dispirited, he eventually found himself near Gerald's quarters. Nate knew what he needed to do to ease his mind and he decided to try and convince his cousin to come along.

Gerald was standing in his laboratory, in the light of the tall windows. He was wearing an apron over his clothes and was gazing up at the overcast sky, lost in thought. On the tables around him were the remains of the corpses disinterred by the explosion. They were in various states of decomposition. Even the skeletons varied in age, some a stark yellow-white, others turning a dirty brown. Nate wrinkled his nose at the smell of old decay.

Gerald did not notice him until he was halfway across the room.

'Welcome to my mortuary,' he said, turning round and blinking as if waking from a sleep.

'Enjoying the work?' Nate asked him.

'I am, actually,' his cousin replied, gesturing towards the nearest table. 'I was a bit irritated at having to put aside my work on engimal behaviour, but this is pretty fascinating stuff. Fitting the skeletons back together was easy, where the bones are intact. But piecing together the fragmented bones is proving a little more difficult. A bit like a jigsaw in three dimensions. And I'm not sure if you're supposed to use glue on mortal remains or not.'

'Probably sacrilege,' Nate commented. 'Still, you always did like puzzles.'

'Mm.' Gerald nodded. 'But there's an even bigger puzzle. All the graves in this cemetery have been recorded and marked down on a map. The family has always been diligent about its record-keeping – it's one of the reasons we're so rich. And as far back as records on this graveyard go, we can account for all the people buried here. The explosion unearthed the graves of eighteen people. We know this for certain.'

'So?' Nate asked.

'So why' Gerald continued, 'do we have twenty-two bodies?'

Nate shrugged.

'The records must be wrong, or someone chucked an extra few bodies into the graves without telling anybody. That's no great mystery'

'I don't think so,' Gerald said, shaking his head. 'Have a gander at this.'

He walked down to the end of the room, where two long tables were draped in sheets. Lifting off the covers, he folded them carefully and laid them aside. Stretched out on the tables were four cadavers. Nathaniel leaned over, studying each one.

They were different from the rest of the corpses. The others were little more than skeletons, if that. These four were remarkably intact. Each one was caked in mud, but still had flesh on its bones. The skin was dark brown, tough and wrinkled like old leather, the teeth bared as if in a grimace. The bodies had a flattened appearance, as if they had been crushed and even folded in places. Hair and fingernails and even eyelashes were still visible, and their clothes had not fully rotted. There was metal around their necks and wrists that looked like the remains of jewellery. Two of them were unmistakably women, the other two men.

'They're bog bodies,' Gerald told him. 'This whole area was peat bog once, before it was drained and converted into farmland. And then the church and the cemetery were built here. But these people were buried before that… and without coffins. I haven't had time to clean them properly yet; it's delicate work. Bogs can preserve corpses from decay for millennia; that's why they look the way they do.'

'Why are they flattened like that?' Nate asked.

'It's from the weight of the ground as it settled and built up around them,' Gerald told him. 'And the shifting over the centuries distorts their shapes too. Even so, I've never heard of a single body as well preserved as these – and to find four of them! We're looking at a piece of history here, Nate.'

'How do you know so much about these things?'

'I read,' Gerald replied.

He took out his cigarette case, drew one out and lit it up. His face was solemn as he regarded the leathery