House of Shadows

EPILOGUE

June 2004

Faces peered down from the upper decks of the red buses that ran along Tower Bridge Road, beyond the wooden hoardings that shielded the excavations from the common gaze. At one point they looked almost straight down into a large hole, the passengers unaware that they were just crossing the cloister and frater of the old priory and abbey. Around the rectangular pit, a brace of archaeologists were moodily contemplating the damage done to their earlier meticulous excavation of the vault that must have been beneath the original cellarer’s building.

Edward Asprey pushed back his safety helmet and wiped the sweat from his forehead. He was a short man with a mop of black hair and a wispy beard. The summer sky was filling with ominous thunderclouds, and the oppressive afternoon was becoming too hot for comfort.

‘Bloody JCB!’ he muttered to his blonde assistant, Julia Masters. ‘The damned place is cursed! I suppose now we’ll have those officious sods from Health and Safety crawling all over us.’

She had to agree that this area of the rescue dig seemed to have a hoodoo on it. Three weeks ago, one of their student volunteers had slipped into the cellar excavation and broken a leg – and two days ago, an almost new mechanical digger had crashed into it when the end wall had unexpectedly given way. It was a miracle that the driver escaped serious injury, but all work had been halted until this morning, when a mobile crane arrived to hoist the damaged machine out.

They looked around the rest of the site, where low walls of dark stone stood exposed below ground level, like stumps of rotten teeth jutting from the brown earth and grey rubble. Built over repeatedly for almost a thousand years, the area was a confused mass of foundations from a score of previous ‘developments’, and only the painstaking work of the archaeologists had separated the many and varied eras of construction. Soon, a huge complex of offices, shops and apartments would rear into the sky above the remains of Bermondsey Abbey, but underneath it all would be preserved the roots of the monastic settlement that was an important part of England’s heritage. But time was pressing and the cement-mixers and pile-drivers were champing impatiently, eager to put another new silhouette on London’s skyline.

‘Better get down there and see how much damage that digger has done,’ sighed Asprey. He waved to two other assistants and a couple of graduate students from University College, who were on the other side of the hole. They all went gingerly down the laddered scaffolding and gathered on the floor which they had so laboriously cleaned of infill before the toppled machine brought down more stones and rubble. Walking to the far end they contemplated the collapsed wall, where it abutted on the side of the former chamber. Julia Masters looked dubiously at the ancient masonry.

‘That looks really unsafe, now that the top courses of stone have fallen in,’ she said.

‘It was a lousy bit of masonry to start with,’ agreed Edward Asprey.

‘Must have been yet another later alteration, as the other walls have much better stonework.’

The cellar was due to be filled in level with the original ground surface before construction work began, though all the other exposed walls were to be carefully preserved underneath the huge buildings that were to be built above. Even the piles needed to support the new edifice were to be placed where they would not damage the old foundations.

The small group went closer to the place where the JCB had fallen in and picked their way through the old stones and mortar that were strewn about the floor. Julia Masters looked up at the wall and saw that most of the top half had been thrown down over a length of about five yards, leaving a large bite-like defect that came down to chin level. She made her way close to the wall, wishing the liner of her yellow helmet was not so tight, as sweat was sticking it to her head.

‘Watch those stones; they look loose,’ warned one of the students, pointing to the upper row of the remaining masonry. Julia carefully clambered up on to the debris at the foot of the wall, interested to see how thick it was. ‘That’s odd, Edward,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘There seems to be another wall just behind it.’

He stumbled up to where she was perched and raised himself on tiptoe to look over the edge. ‘A twelfth-century cavity wall! We’ll be finding polystyrene insulation here next!’

His attempt at levity was ignored as Julia, almost a head taller, peered over the upper line of stones. ‘There’s a good eighteen-inch space here, running right across the width of the vault,’ she announced. ‘Anyone got a light?’

As one of the students was dispatched to their site cabin to fetch a torch, there was a rumble of thunder and a few large spots of rain plopped down, but after a few moments it ceased, though the sky was now heavy with purple-grey clouds. When the torch arrived, Asprey handed it to Julia, who craned her head over the shattered stonework as she shone the light downwards.

‘We’d better get the rest of this wall down straight away, Edward,’ she said sombrely.

An hour later a mini-digger had pulled away the remaining lower courses of masonry, and the archaeologists were crowding around what was revealed at the bottom of the cavity. The group was augmented by Mary McGowan, a burly middle-aged anthropologist who had been examining the bones from burials in the adjacent cemetery.

‘One male, probably under twenty-eight by the look of the inner ends of his collar bones and the edges of his pelvis,’ she announced as she squatted alongside a heap of rusted metal and brittle, brown stick-like objects. ‘And a young woman, almost certainly late teens.’

‘What about the skulls?’ asked Asprey, shaken in spite of many previous finds of skeletal remains.

‘Nothing wrong with the chap’s head,’ said Mary. ‘But the poor girl has what looks like a massive head injury.’ She pointed to the skull, which lay upside down, in colour and shape like an old coconut. ‘Deep depressed fracture high up above the left ear.’

‘Could it not be damage that occurred long after death?’ objected Julia. ‘We’ve all seen those due to rock falls or even just a stone resting against it for years.’

Another rumble of thunder failed to drown out Mary McGowan’s emphatic denial. ‘Not this one, love! See that crack passing right across the base? That’s a sure giveaway for a whack on the head!’

‘What about those chains?’ asked Asprey, pointing to the rusty links.

‘That’s your department, not mine, Eddie! I’d get ’em photographed straight away, before you try to move them. They’ll disintegrate at a touch.’

She pointed with a pencil towards the corroded iron. ‘Extraordinary! There are shackles around the lower ends of both forearm bones of the fellow, but her ribs are inside his arms…and that other, longer chain passed under the lumbar vertebrae and pelves of both of them.’

‘What does that mean, Dr McGowan?’ asked one of the students respectfully.

The anthropologist rocked back on the heels of her sensible shoes.

‘The bloke’s wrists were chained together around the girl’s back – and another chain must have gone around their waists, so that they were clamped together, face to face. She must already have been dead, with a massive skull fracture like that – but there’s no reason to think he wasn’t still alive!’

There was a shocked silence, broken only by a clap of thunder.

‘Bloody hell!’ whispered Edward. ‘Walled up alive, chained to a corpse!’

Mary McGowan shrugged. ‘This has to be hundreds of years old, by the state of the bones. Those loose rosary beads and that silver cross suggest it goes back at least until before the Dissolution of the Monasteries.’

‘We’ll have to tell the police, surely?’ said Julia.

‘I doubt they’ll be interested in a centuries-old homicide!’ snorted Mary. ‘Neither will the coroner, if he considers it to be older than sixty or seventy years.’

Edward Asprey climbed to his feet. ‘I’ll have to tell our director straight away and see what he says. The press will be all over this when they find out.’

Large spots of rain began to fall and there was a loud clap of thunder and a flash of lightning over towards the river.

‘Let’s get back to the hut and use a phone,’ suggested Julia, and as the rain began to come down in torrents they hurriedly ran for shelter.

Just as they reached their Portakabin, there was a tremendous sizzling flash of lightning that almost blinded them and an almost simultaneous crash of thunder that sounded like the end of the world, as a strike lanced down into the excavation site. A smell of burning assailed them, and a wreath of smoke rose from the cellar pit, as the rain stopped as abruptly as it had begun.

When the sky cleared and they hesitantly returned to the large hole in the ground, they found that the two skeletons had been vaporized and the rusted chains were now blobs of fused, magnetized metal. All that was recognizable at the foot of the ancient wall was a scatter of amber rosary beads.