The Empty Grave (Lockwood & Co. #5)(24)

It was a melancholy patch of ground, not particularly threatening. Equally, it was not an easy place in which to swing a sword. ‘What kind of Visitor is it?’ I asked.

A cool wind was coming along between the houses, and Lockwood’s coat fluttered at his back as we stood together on the wall. He didn’t seem to have heard me. ‘Getting down’s easy enough,’ he said softly. ‘The wall’s crumbling here. It’s almost like a staircase, as long as you don’t slip. Shall we go?’

‘Lockwood,’ I asked, easing myself after him, ‘how do you know about all this?’

‘I’ve been here before,’ he said. ‘And now,’ he added as I landed in a strip of grass with waist-high brambles all around, ‘we take this little path.’ He pointed to what looked like an animal trail running off between the stones.

I let him lead the way, keeping my head low to avoid the thorns arching above. The track wound among the gravestones and soon opened out into a small cleared space where the foliage had been crushed underfoot and the ivy chopped back with a sword.

Two headstones stood in the centre of the space. One of the last rays of sunlight was shining on them. They were made of grey stone: modern, sharp-edged and unsullied by wind or rain. Neither was ornate, but the one on the left was larger. It was crowned by a carving of a beautiful, sad-faced woman in a hooded cape. On the plinth below, in strong clear letters, was written:

CELIA LOCKWOOD

DONALD LOCKWOOD

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The second stone was just a simple slab, inscribed with only two words:

JESSICA LOCKWOOD



I opened my mouth to say something, but nothing came out. My heart was too full, my head awhirl. I gazed at the stones.

‘I sometimes ask myself what it’s all about, Luce,’ Lockwood said. ‘Why we do what we do. When we have nights like last night, for instance – why we put ourselves through all that. Or when twerps like Tufnell come bleating and blustering to our door, and we have to sit there humouring him. When I get that kind of thought, I sometimes pop in here.’

I looked at him. He stood beside me in the dusk, his face almost hidden behind the raised collar of his coat. I’d often wondered where they were, his family. But I’d never dared ask. And now he was sharing this most private of places with me. Amid my sorrow for him, I felt a kind of joy.

‘This is what the Problem means,’ he went on. ‘This is the effect it has. Lives lost, loved ones taken before their time. And then we hide our dead behind iron walls and leave them to the thorns and ivy. We lose them twice over, Lucy. Death’s not the worst of it. We turn our faces away.’

On the far edge of the tiny clearing an older headstone had toppled almost to the horizontal. Lockwood went over to it; he sat cross-legged on the stone, with brambles spun close about him. His dark clothes merged with the shadows; his smile floated palely in the half-light. ‘I usually perch on this,’ he said. ‘Belongs to someone called Derek Tompkins-Bond. He doesn’t seem to mind me being here. At least, he’s never showed up to tell me so.’ He patted the stone beside him. ‘Come and join me if you want. But watch out for that rail.’

Sure enough, I’d almost tripped on a black metal rod, no higher than my ankle, that ran through the grass at my feet. I knew what it was: an edge used to mark the boundary of a plot. I hadn’t noticed it before, but now I saw that the Lockwood headstones were set in their own railed-off family plot. And I noticed too that while Jessica’s stone was set in the centre of this space, and the parents’ stone was to the left, there was an empty area on the right-hand side.

I looked at this bare patch of grass. And when I did so, everything faded out – the beating of my heart, the whisperings of the wind as it worked its way through the holes and hollows of the ivy, the sound of distant night cabs on the Marylebone Road.

I gazed at it. At the unobtrusive patch of ground. At the empty, waiting grave.

It took me a moment to realize that Lockwood was still talking. ‘By the time my sister died they’d shut the cemetery for safety reasons,’ he said. ‘There was some controversy about putting her here. But when there are family plots, where it’s the clear intention that people should be buried together, it’s considered proper to honour the wishes of the dead.’

We both knew why. Keep the dead happy. Don’t give them a reason to come back.

I stepped over the rail, crossed the grass and sat on the stone beside him.

‘It’s nice, don’t you think,’ Lockwood said, ‘burying the family together? Anyway,’ he added after a pause, ‘I don’t want to be left out. I come here sometimes.’

I nodded. I was looking at the stamped, sliced foliage, chopped and broken and savagely hacked back. I found my voice at last. ‘Thanks for bringing me,’ I said.

‘That’s all right.’

We sat in silence for a time, pressed close together on the stone. At last I was emboldened. ‘You never told me how it happened.’

‘My parents?’ Lockwood paused for so long that I thought he was going to refuse to talk about it, like always. But when he spoke, his voice was soft; it carried no barbs or warning signs. ‘Funnily enough,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t far from here.’

‘What? In Marylebone?’

‘On the Euston Road. You know where that underpass is? There.’