The boy looked as if he had opened his eyes wide in mock terror, perhaps trying to frighten some other children during a party game, but at the same time his mouth was gaping open in what might have been a yawn. The eyes were still bright, before the muscles relaxed into the dull and fixed stare of eternal repose, and the gaze of the child disconcerted Hawksmoor. He called for a roll of adhesive tape used in collecting evidence; bending over the corpse, he placed a piece of the tape against the neck: he could smell the body as he leaned towards it, and through the tape his fingers could touch it. Yet as he felt the neck he was compelled to look away and he stared up towards a stone tablet on which was inscribed, 'Founded In the Saxon Age and Last Rebuilt by Nicholas Dyer, 1714'. The passage of time had partly erased the letters, and in any case Hawksmoor made no effort to understand them. He got up quickly: his sweat might look like rain, he thought, as he handed the adhesive tape to the police officer. 'There is nothing on the neck,' he told him. Then he climbed up the last four steps and entered the silent church; it was in darkness still, and he realised that the windows only reflected the light, like a mirror. Glancing behind to make sure that no one could see him, he approached the baptismal font in a corner, cupped his hands in its stale water, and rubbed them over his face.
The young officer came up to him as he left the church and murmured, 'She found him. She stayed here until she saw a copper' he was nodding towards a red-headed woman who was sitting on an old stone just within the gates. Hawksmoor apparently paid no attention to her, and looked up at the side of the church facing King William Street: 'What is this scaffolding here for?'
'It's for the excavations, sir. They're excavating here.'
Hawksmoor said nothing. Then he turned back to face the officer: 'Have you made a note of the weather conditions?'
'It's raining, sir.'
'I know it's raining. But I want the precise temperature. I want to see how the body cools.' He looked up at the sky and the rain fell down upon him, over his cheeks and across his open eyes as he stared upwards.
The area had already been cordoned off at his instructions; large canvas screens had been placed around the gates and sides of the church to conceal the police operation from the gaze of those people who would inevitably congregate at the spot where a murder had been committed. Now that Hawksmoor was satisfied that he had staked out the right territory, with the body at its centre, he took charge of the operation in all of its aspects. More adhesive tape was used on the trousers, socks, sweater and shirt of the victim; soil was taken from his shoes, together with control specimens of the earth close at hand, and the shoes were then placed in a polythene bag. The body was now stripped under the arc-lights, so that it acquired a bright pallor, and each item of clothing put in a separate bag which Hawksmoor insisted on labelling himself and then handing to the exhibits officer. Nail-scrapings were taken, before the hands were bagged and then sealed with tape. At the same time, the ground was being searched for fibres, footprints or smears: anything of even remote interest to the investigating team was given a serial number, registered in a master-log, and then deposited in a padded transit box.
Throughout these activities Hawksmoor, still without his overcoat despite the steady light rain, kept up a low whispering; it would have appeared to anyone who knew nothing of police procedure that this man had gone entirely mad, and was talking to himself within two feet of a corpse, but in fact Hawksmoor was reciting his own observations into a small tape-recorder.
His last comment was, 'Nothing else here', when the pathologist arrived; he was a small, corpulent man who nevertheless conveyed a certain air of stateliness as he slowly climbed the steps of St Mary Woolnoth. He nodded to Hawksmoor and then, murmuring 'Yes, I see the body', he knelt down beside the corpse and opened a small brown bag. For a moment he paused, his fingers quivering.
'I'm sorry to get you up so early,' Hawksmoor was saying but he had already taken out his knife and with one rapid movement had cut through the abdomen; he now placed a thermometer beside the liver of the dead child and then leaned back to survey his handiwork. Then, whistling almost imperceptibly, he stood up in order to talk to Hawksmoor.
'You hardly need me to tell you, do you, superintendent?'
'I do, sir, thank you very much. Eventually I need you to tell me the time.'
'Ah well, time waits for no man.' He stepped back and looked at the broken pillars. 'It's a fine church, isn't it, superintendent? They don't build them like that any more…'His voice trailed off as his attention was once more drawn to the body.
'I don't know who "they" are, Sir.' But he was already down on his knees, blinking as the arc-lights were suddenly turned off. They were somehow embarrassed in each other's company and, as the pathologist waited to take a second reading of the temperature, Hawksmoor walked behind the canvas screens and across the street to Poultry. From the corner there, he could see the front of the church entire: he had passed it before but he had never looked at it, and now it seemed startlingly incongruous in its setting despite the fact that other buildings so pressed in upon it that it was almost concealed. He imagined that very few who passed its walls realised that they were the walls of a church and as a result the building, massive through it was, had managed to disappear from sight. And even for him it was only now, after this death, that it emerged with the clarity and definition which it must have possessed for those who looked upon it when it was first built. Hawksmoor had often noticed how, in the moments when he first came upon a corpse, all the objects around it wavered for an instant and became unreal -the trees which rose above a body hidden in woodland, the movement of the river which had washed a body onto its banks, the cars or hedges in a suburban street where a murderer had left a victim, all of these things seemed at such times to be suddenly drained of meaning like an hallucination. But this church had grown larger and more distinct in the face of death.
He walked back to the steps and the pathologist took him aside for a few moments; then he called the other officers over to him. The situation now is this,' he explained quietly as the sun rose above the buildings, That the body can be moved up to the mortuary where the professor will be carrying out the post-mortem. What we want to know now, of course, is what we have learned here which might be of interest to the professor.' He looked across at the corpse as one label was attached to each wrist and ankle. It was placed in a polythene bag which was sealed at both ends and then, wrapped within an opaque transit sheet, it was carried to a stretcher before being taken to a police van parked at the corner of Lombard Street. Some women cried out in grief or alarm as the stretcher was taken through the small crowd which had assembled; and when a young girl tried to touch the side of the plastic sheet, her arm was knocked roughly away by one of the policemen carrying it. Hawksmoor saw all this and smiled, before turning round to face the red-headed woman who had discovered the body.
He watched her now with some interest as she sat by the railings of the old church and, thinking herself unobserved among all this activity, took out a small pocket mirror from her handbag; she was patting her hair into shape, turning slightly to one side and then to the other as she did so. Then she stood up, and he noticed that the damp stone had left a large stain on the back of her dress. Hawksmoor was interested in her because he always studied the reactions of those who came across the corpses of the violently slain -although most of them simply ran from the sight, as if to protect themselves from the agony and corruption which a murdered body represents. It was his belief that even the finder of that body can become an accomplice in its fate and, by completing the process which leads to its dicovery, can also suffer guilt. But this woman had stayed. He walked over to the officer who had been interviewing her: 'Did you get what you could out of her?'