16
A n hour later, Jack and Costas crouched again inside the small chamber of the crypt, this time behind the glare of two portable tungsten lights. An IMU De Havilland Dash-8 aircraft had freighted all the equipment they needed from the Cornwall campus to London City airport, including a fresh pair of e-suits to replace those they had left with Massimo in Rome. Jeremy had obtained immediate permission from the church authorities for an exploratory reconnaissance beyond the bricked-up wall in the side of the chamber. In a huddled conversation with a cleric in the crypt they had agreed on the need for absolute secrecy, and their equipment had been brought in from a borrowed television van in the guise of a film crew. Above them, the lunchtime concert had ended and they could hear Gregorian chant wafting down from choristers practising in the nave, a sound Jack found strangely reassuring as they contemplated another dark passage into the unknown.
‘Okay. It’s done. There’s definitely a space behind there, but I can’t see much without getting in.’ Jeremy had been creating a hole in the wall, pulling out the bricks and stacking them to either side. The wall turned out to have been poorly constructed with mortar which had not properly set, allowing him to remove the bricks with ease.
‘Good,’ Jack said. ‘Your job now is to hold the fort.’ Jeremy nodded, walked over to check the bolt on the door into the crypt and then sat back against the wall, watching them kit up.
‘We could be going below the water table.’ Costas was staring at an image on a laptop computer as he checked the neck seal on his suit. ‘We’re about three metres below the present level of the Guildhall Yard, about two metres above the Roman layers. Below that, there’s a tributary of the Walbrook stream somewhere just in front of us. With all this rain it’s likely to be pretty wet.’
‘We’re going to need the suits anyway,’ Jack said. ‘Could be pretty toxic down there.’
Costas groaned. ‘Gas leaks?’
Jack gestured around the burial chamber. ‘Two thousand years of human occupation, Costas. I’m not going to spell it out for you.’
‘Don’t.’ Costas leaned over and flipped down Jack’s visor, then adjusted the regulator on the side of his helmet to verify the oxygen flow. He quickly did the same to his own helmet. Suddenly they were sealed off from the outside world, only able to hear each other through their intercom. ‘The oxygen rebreathers should give us four, maybe four and a half hours,’ he said.
‘We could be back here in ten minutes,’ Jack said. ‘It could be a dead end.’
‘If only I had our remote-sensing equipment from Seaquest II, then we could snake in a camera and see what’s behind that wall.’
‘Nothing beats the human eye,’ Jack said. ‘Come on.’ He nodded back at Jeremy, who had taken a laptop out of his bag and spread out his notebooks. Jack crouched down on all fours and made his way through the hole in the brickwork, his headlamp illuminating the darkness in front of him. Once he was through, Costas came alongside. They were perched on a stone landing, and in front of them a dozen steps led down to another entranceway, a low arched doorway about four feet high. Jack squatted on his haunches and began to sidle down the steps, playing the torch in his hand across the stone steps in front of him.
‘Let’s hope the ceiling doesn’t give way,’ Costas muttered.
Jack glanced up. ‘It’s corbelled stone, about as strong as you could hope for. The masonry looks identical to the old part of the burial crypt we’ve just come through. Fourteenth century, maybe earlier. I can see reused Roman tile and ragstone, probably taken from the ruins of the amphitheatre.’ He carried on down the steps, reached the bottom and stood up, his back stooped awkwardly over. In front of him the arched stone entrance was blocked by the partly rotted remains of a wooden door, with a grilled window about ten inches wide directly in front of him. Jack shone his headlamp through as Costas came alongside.
‘Looks like a prison cell,’ Costas said.
‘It’s a crypt,’ Jack murmured. ‘Another burial crypt. Exactly as Sir Christopher Wren’s mason described in his diary. And it looks undisturbed.’
‘What do you mean, undisturbed? I thought Wren’s guys got in here.’
‘I mean it looks full. No parking space.’
‘Oh no.’
Jack pushed cautiously at the door, and it gave way slightly. ‘It’s still solid,’ he said. ‘Damp conditions, ideal for organic survival. We could find some pretty amazing preservation down here.’
‘Oh good,’ Costas said weakly.
Jack pushed again with both hands, and the door came completely ajar. They peered into the space ahead of them. It was a single vaulted chamber, similar in dimensions to the burial crypt they had just come through but about three times as large. Ranged along either side were stone cavities, some of them crudely bricked over, others open and brimming with old wooden coffins, some intact and lidded, others crumbled and decayed. Dark shapeless forms were just visible within. Jack took a few steps forward, while Costas remained glued to the spot, staring straight ahead. ‘This is my worst nightmare, Jack.’
‘Come on,’ Jack said. ‘It’s all part of life’s rich tapestry.’
Costas edged forward, paused, then resolutely stepped over and peered closely at one of the erupted coffins, clearly having decided that scientific inspection was the best therapy. ‘Interesting,’ he murmured, clearing his throat. ‘There’s a pottery pipe emerging from the top of this coffin, blackened at one end. I never realized people made libations in Christian burials.’
‘Nice try, but wrong,’ Jack said. ‘You brought it up, so I’m telling you. Those pipes were for letting off steam.’
‘What?’
‘You see them in Victorian catacombs,’ Jack said. ‘The trouble with a lead-lined coffin is that it can explode, especially if the body’s sealed in it too soon after death. It’s the first stage of decomposition, you know. Off-gassing.’
‘Off-gassing.’ Costas swayed slightly, but remained fixated on the coffin.
‘The pipes were lit to burn it off,’ Jack said. ‘That’s where the blackening comes from.’
Costas swayed backwards, then slipped on the floor, catching himself just in time on the edge of an open niche on the opposite wall. He pulled himself upright again, then lifted his foot from a sticky pool that extended under one of the niches near the entrance. ‘We must be closer to the water level than I thought,’ he murmured. ‘There’s too much here for it just to be condensation.’
‘I’ve got more bad news for you, I’m afraid.’
Costas stared at the pool, then at the dark stain running down the stonework towards it from the burial niche above. ‘Oh no,’ he whispered.
‘Saponification,’ Jack said cheerfully. ‘There’s a wonderful account by Sir Thomas Browne, a kind of seventeenth-century Pliny. He loved digging up old graves. Hiebermeyer and I did a course on mummification with the Home Office forensics people, and I can remember it word for word. “We met with a fat concretion, when the nitre of the Earth, and the soft and lixivious liqueur of the body, had coagulated large lumps of fat, like the consistency of the hardest candle soap; whereof part remaineth with us.”’
‘Body liqueur,’ Costas whispered, frantically wiping his foot on a fallen brick. ‘Get me out of here, Jack.’
‘Mortuary wax,’ Jack replied. ‘The slow hydrolysis of fats into adipocere. Especially likely in alkaline conditions, where the bodies are sealed off from bacteria, and where it’s damp. Like I said, we’re going to find amazing preservational conditions here.’
‘It couldn’t get any worse than this.’
‘Don’t count on it.’ Jack squatted down to peer at the inscribed stone blocks he could now see in front of each intact niche, built into the centre of the brick facings. He moved along, from one to the next. ‘Fascinating,’ he murmured. ‘Normally, crypts in London churches were used for a few decades, maybe a century or so, stuffed full and then sealed up. But this one’s very strange. The formula on each of these inscriptions is virtually identical, but they range over a huge time span. Each of them has a chi-rho symbol, followed by a Latin name. Look, here. Maria de Kirkpatrick. And there, Bronwyn ap Llewellyn. They’re mostly Latin renditions of British names. And they’ve got dates, in Roman numerals. The one nearest to you, on the lower shelf by the door, is the latest, from 1664, just a few years before the Great Fire of 1666 destroyed the medieval church.’