“Body? But surely if the other man had been dead for decades, he’d be reduced to a skeleton by now?”
A shadow of revulsion crossed the magistrate’s pinched features. “Unfortunately, no. I understand it has something to do with the composition of the soil and perhaps the lime in the mortar. If there’s no intrusion of water, the corpses in a crypt can essentially mummify, rather than decay.”
Sebastian became aware of the putrefying stench of death wafting up from below. “I remember seeing something similar in Italy. In Palermo.”
“Then you’ll know what to expect,” said the magistrate, turning toward the entrance to the crypt. Tightening his grip on the lantern’s short handle, he stooped through the thin, broken remnant of the brick wall and started down the stairs. After a moment’s hesitation, Sebastian followed.
Worn and cracked by time, the steps descended through a narrow stone stair vault, the light from the lantern playing over an arched roof plastered with limestone. The air was cold and dank, with an unpleasant, almost greasy quality that seemed to wrap itself around them as they reached the base of the steps.
They found themselves in an ancient central aisle, its low vaulted ceiling supported by thick spiral columns topped with crude pillow capitals. Dating back to Anglo-Saxon times, the crypt was larger than Sebastian had expected, with rows of bays opening to either side. Yet the bays seemed oddly dark. As his eyes quickly grew accustomed to the gloom, Sebastian realized the bays were dark because they were full of coffins. Hundreds and hundreds of wooden coffins, some left bare, some painted, but most upholstered in moldering woolen cloth or draped in tattered velvet. Stacked row upon row, floor to ceiling, and curtained with massive sheets of cobwebs, they reached as far as he could see in all directions.
“Good God,” he whispered.
“The Bishop was found near the back end,” said Lovejoy, his voice quavering as they walked between the towering walls of coffins. In the older sections of the crypt, the coffins at the bottom had begun to warp and split, their contents spilling out as the weight of the burials above slowly crushed the ancient wood below. Sebastian could see some bare bones, stained an odd brown. But most of the visble bodies were horribly whole, their skin shriveled and discolored but intact, their winding sheets and shrouds glowing white from the murky depths of the vaults.
“Here,” said Lovejoy, his hand trembling as he paused to hold the lantern aloft. “Bishop Prescott was found here, just beside this last column. I’ve already sent the bodies to be autop sied, but everything else is exactly as it was.”
Sebastian stared down at the long, rusty red stain of blood that had soaked into the uneven limestone paving blocks. “Where did you send them?”
“To Gibson.”
Sebastian nodded with satisfaction. An Army doctor who’d lost the lower part of one leg to a French cannonball, Paul Gibson now kept a small surgery near Tower Hill. No one in London knew more about death and the human body than Paul Gibson. “I’ll go see him as soon as I get back to London.”
“Fortunately, the local magistrate had enough sense not to disturb anything,” said Lovejoy. “I gather he took one look, posted guards at the entrance to the stairs, and sent for Bow Street.”
Sebastian hunkered down to study the stained stones. There must have been a lot of blood. But then, there would have been, if the Bishop had been hit on the head. In Sebastian’s experience, head wounds bled prodigiously.
Looking up, he studied the worn stone base of the nearby column. “Any chance he might simply have fainted and bashed in his own skull?”
Lovejoy shook his head. “We found an iron bar—possibly one of the tools left by the workmen—lying beside the body and covered in gore. I’ve sent it to Gibson along with the body, so he can make comparisons. But I’ve no doubt he’ll agree it was the murder weapon.”
Sebastian’s gaze shifted to where the nearby paving stones showed a large, man-sized area of brown discoloration. “The other body was there?”
Lovejoy made an odd, strangled sound. “That’s right. He must have been lying here in the shadows when the crypt was bricked up. They probably didn’t even see him. The only reason Earnshaw spotted the Bishop was because Prescott had brought a lantern with him. It was still sitting on the floor beside him, lit.”
Sebastian glanced over at the piles of cobweb-draped coffins stuffed into the nearest bay. The wood of one of the caskets had split, giving a grisly view of its desiccated contents, the corpse’s head thrown back, its mouth wide-open as if in an endless, soundless scream. But the weight of the burials above kept the cadaver pinned down. Sebastian had thought at first, seeing the way some of the coffins had shifted and smashed, that the velvet-dressed body might simply have fallen out of one of the collapsed vaults and rolled here. Now he realized that was unlikely. Apart from which, who would bury a murder victim with the knife still in his back?
Sebastian pushed to his feet. “Any idea who the other man might have been?”
“None whatsoever. I’ll be surprised if we ever know.”
Sebastian studied the surrounding bays, each with its own towering, moldering cargo of splintered caskets and spilling contents. His eyes had completely adjusted to the gloom by now. There were times when he wished he were as blind in the dark as other men. “Could there be another way in here?”
Lovejoy nodded toward the far end of the crypt. “There’s a second flight of steps that once led up to the apse and was originally closed off with just an iron gate. Both entrances were walled off at the same time. No one’s been down here for decades.” The magistrate shivered, and by mutual consent the two men turned toward the stairwell.
“Sir James thinks the Bishop must have surprised a thief,” said Lovejoy. “Someone who’d heard the crypt was open and seized the opportunity to sneak down here and look for jewelry or other valuables to steal from the dead.”
“I suppose that’s one explanation.”
Something in his tone caused Lovejoy to pause at the base of the steps and turn to stare back at him. “Surely you don’t think there’s some connection between the two murders? How could there be? With decades between them?”
Sebastian had no explanation, of course, although he found it difficult to believe that two men could be murdered in almost exactly the same spot without there being some connection between them—even if their murders did take place decades apart. “It does seem unlikely,” he agreed.
Lovejoy started up the steps, the crypt plunging into darkness again as the lantern light quivered over the old whitewashed stones of the stair vault. “Alternatively, someone could have been following the Bishop, intending to do him harm. He seized the opportunity offered by the Bishop’s descent alone into the crypt, and killed him.”
“You’re aware that Prescott was a serious contender to be named the next Archbishop of Canterbury?” said Sebastian, following him.
Reaching the top of the stairs, the magistrate scrambled through the broken wall. “The Archbishop did mention it, yes. Although I received the impression that he was inclined to agree with Sir James’s assessment—that the Bishop simply fell victim to a chance-met thief.”
Sebastian followed him out of the rank chill of the stairwell into the clean, wholesome warmth of the sunny June day. “I suspect the Archbishop was being diplomatic.”
Lovejoy snuffed out his lantern. “What makes you say that?”