Fitzgerald made the sign of the cross. Powerscourt lay down beside him. Together they tried to lift the lid. It was stiff. It didn’t want to move.
‘Bugger it,’ said Fitzgerald, ‘is there another bloody screw somewhere?’ Anger seemed to give him extra strength. Slowly, with a faint creak, the lid of the coffin came up.
There were no rifles. Only a white face that looked surprised to be dead, the eyes closed, the hair carefully brushed across the forehead, the hands folded in pious expectation of the second coming.
‘Sorry, Mr McLachlan,’ said Fitzgerald quietly, ‘very sorry. We’ll put you back where you belong in no time.’ He replaced the lid and the screws, lying on the ground beside the grave. Powerscourt was whispering to himself. ‘Lord now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word.’ Johnny Fitzgerald was hurling the earth back on top of the coffin as fast as he could.
‘For mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all people.’
Fitzgerald had moved on to the turf now, laying it out in neat rows. He stamped on it to make it flat once more.
Powerscourt was still whispering. ‘To be a light to lighten the Gentiles and to the glory of thy people Israel.’
Johnny Fitzgerald jumped off the grave of Henry Joseph McLachlan. He brushed the earth off his clothes. ‘Where now, Francis? I don’t suppose you passed the Gravediggers Arms on your way in here? The Last Trump perhaps? That would be a good name for a pub.’
Powerscourt was looking at a piece of paper. ‘We’ve got a choice here, Johnny. There are two coffins left. One is in the North London Cemetery somewhere near Islington. The other is the West London Cemetery near the river in Mortlake. Do you have any aesthetic preferences for either of these locations?’
‘To hell with Islington,’ said Fitzgerald firmly. ‘There are lots of good pubs near the river in Mortlake. Mortlake gets my vote. I presume your carriage is still waiting near the entrance, Francis? We must be the only grave robbers in Britain to have their very own carriage to carry them round their targets. To horse! To horse!’
The streets were very busy. Every cab, carriage and brougham of the capital seemed to be full of visitors, inspecting the sights of London before they watched the Jubilee Parade. Powerscourt looked at his watch. It was now twenty minutes past four. He had noticed a sign at Kilburn that said the cemetery shut at five o’clock. If they arrived too late at Mortlake they would have to wait for a quiet moment to climb over the wall. It didn’t look as if there would be any quiet moments in London this evening.
They made it with fifteen minutes to spare. They picked up their spades and Johnny’s bag. Powerscourt took out two huge fisherman’s bags and hid them inside the entrance.
‘One blast on this whistle,’ he said to Wilson his coachman, ‘means come to the entrance as fast as you can. Two blasts means Help.’
Chief Inspector Tait had given Powerscourt some police whistles as a memento of the night in the King George the Fourth. Powerscourt had asked for three more for the children and regretted it deeply within twenty-four hours. Robert said it would be very useful for refereeing football matches with his friends in the park. Thomas and Olivia blew theirs once to universal delight. But they didn’t stop blowing them. Powerscourt thought their lungs must collapse under the weight of blowing, from the top of the stairs, in the drawing room, in the garden. They crept into the kitchen and blew them right behind the cook and her assistant, causing panic and near mutiny below stairs. They dashed out into the street and frightened little old ladies taking a quiet afternoon walk in Markham Square. Lady Lucy only separated Thomas and Olivia from the whistles by pointing out that she and Francis wanted to play with them as well. Even then Powerscourt had to invent a whole new vocabulary of police whistles. One blast on the whistle meant Go and get into the bath. Two blasts meant Get into bed. Three blasts meant Go to sleep.
‘Look at this place, Francis, would you just look at it.’ Johnny Fitzgerald was leaning on his spade, for all the world like a workman taking a well-earned rest, and looking at the vast expanse of cemetery. Well-ordered rows stretched almost as far as the eye could see. North towards the river, west towards Kew, the West London Cemetery was enormous. Thousands, if not tens of thousands of dead must be interred here.
‘My God!’ said Powerscourt, horrified at the prospect of searching for one grave among so many. ‘It looks to be about the same size as Hyde Park, Johnny.’
To their left was the Belgravia of this country of the dead. Avenues of great stone catafalques, temples to the departed, stretched out towards the rear wall of the cemetery. Even in death, Powerscourt thought, the rich had to be better housed than the poor. If you had money in this life, then you had to show it when you were gone, neoclassical temples with shelves and closed chambers to contain the dynasties of the wealthy. Iron grilles barred the entrance to these last resting places of London’s better postal districts. Inside spiders wove their webs very thickly. The air was musty. Bats no doubt came out at night to guard the money and the dead.
Powerscourt pointed this necropolis out to Johnny Fitzgerald. ‘In here, Johnny. We can wait till the place closes up. Nobody would find us in here.’
Crouching down beside the catafalque of the Williams family of Chester Square, five of them interred in their five star luxury, Powerscourt and Fitzgerald waited in silence until they knew the cemetery was closed. Powerscourt felt claustrophobic, choked. Fitzgerald was drawing something with his finger on the dust of the side wall. Powerscourt thought it was a wine bottle. At last they heard the bolts being pulled and the keys turning in the great locks of the main entrance. Until the morning they were alone. Alone with thousands of the dead, one of whose coffins might not contain a corpse.
‘We’d better have a plan, Johnny,’ said Powerscourt as they emerged from the dank air of Belgravia. ‘Should we start at the middle and work out, or begin round the edges and make our way into the centre?’
‘Maybe there’s one section where they put all the new arrivals, Francis. Like new boys at school. What’s this bugger called anyway?’ Johnny Fitzgerald pointed his spade into the middle distance as if the newest graves were there.
‘This bugger is called Freely,’ said Powerscourt, checking his piece of paper again, ‘Dermot Sebastian Freely.’
The sky was mostly blue. Small clouds drifted overhead. The tombstones were warm from the late afternoon sun. ‘Let’s begin round the edges,’ said Powerscourt, ‘and work our way in towards the centre.’
‘All right,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘Dermot Sebastian Freely,’ he muttered to himself, ‘where the hell are you?’
By seven o’clock, after an hour and a half of searching, they had found nothing. Powerscourt reckoned they had covered less than a tenth of the territory. He began to worry that they might not find Dermot Sebastian Freely before it was dark.
The whole century is enclosed here, in this enormous cemetery, he thought. He passed the grave of a man born in the year of Trafalgar, 1805, when England was saved from invasion. He passed the grave of a woman born in 1837, the year of Victoria’s accession to the throne. He passed an ornate headstone commemorating a man who had been born in the year of the Great Reform Bill in 1832 and passed away in the year of the Second Reform Act of 1867. He passed the last resting place of men who had been soldiers, who had fought in the Crimea or in Africa or in India, servants of the Queen who had turned into an Empress and whose dominions now stretched across the globe. He doubted if they had been heroes, these bodies sleeping peacefully in the evening sun, but as it said so frequently on the tombstones, they had fought the good fight, remembered most often by the loving tributes of husbands and wives, sons and daughters. Powerscourt thought of the ending of Middlemarch, Lady Lucy’s favourite noveclass="underline" ‘for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts: and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’