Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant, #7)(40)

What had been stolen, according to MOLA’s records, was a thousand kilograms of assorted bits of masonry and approximately three hundred clay pipes excavated from a site off New Change.

‘Right next to St Paul’s,’ I said.

‘You’d better talk to the archaeologist involved,’ said Nightingale. ‘Sahra and I will split the interviews with the staff here between us. Carey can join us when he comes on shift.’



Upstairs, MOLA’s offices had the same open-plan cubicle based workspace that has been the delight of code monkeys and low-level paper pushers since one time and motion consultant said to another, ‘Hey, you know, I don’t think we’ve really dehumanised these white collar drones enough’.

The big difference is that in the average office you don’t walk into a cubicle area and find someone reconstructing a skeleton.

‘Who’s this?’ I asked the tiny white woman with grey hair and pince-nez, who was holding a small bone fragment like someone with a bit of sky from a jigsaw puzzle.

‘Not sure,’ she said without looking up – she had an accent like a well-bred pirate. ‘Found him last month.’

‘Where was he?’

‘Downstairs in storage,’ she said distractedly. ‘Mislabelled.’ She straightened suddenly. ‘Aha!’ she cried. ‘This doesn’t belong to you at all.’ Then she looked at me properly. ‘Can I help you?’

I told her I was looking for Robert Skene.

‘He should be about somewhere,’ she said. ‘Are you with the police?’

I said I was, and asked what she was up to.

‘It wasn’t me, guv,’ she said. ‘He was dead when I found him – honest.’

I gave the joke the consideration it deserved.

‘There’s been some very good results recently extracting DNA from teeth,’ she said, as she carefully placed the bone fragment down on a clean sheet of paper. ‘So we’ve been hunting out any skulls that might have been mislaid to see what we can find.’ She looked down at her nearly complete skeleton. ‘I’m afraid I got a little bit distracted.’

I asked how old the body was.

‘We’re still waiting on the C-14 results,’ she said. ‘But my money’s on Roman – possibly related to that lot over there.’ She gestured at a row of brown cardboard boxes on a nearby work surface – each carefully labelled ‘Human Skull’.

‘That’s a lot of heads,’ I said.

‘Oh, Crossrail can’t sink an access shaft these days without finding skulls. We’re trying to work out what these ones were doing in the Walbrook.’

‘Any theories?’ I asked, which got a laugh.

Apparently there were almost as many theories as skulls, but it was just possible they were victims of the Boudiccan sack of Londinium in ad 60, or possibly 61.

‘Given the numbers reported killed in Tacitus,’ she said, ‘the bodies must have gone somewhere.’

There was a problem with that theory, in that the skulls were mostly missing their related spines and hips, arms and legs – not to mention jawbones – which did rather suggest that they’d washed down the river from further upstream. Skulls being famous for surviving trips down rivers where lesser bones do not.

I was actually getting a bit interested, but then Robert Skene arrived and it was back to work.

He was a white guy in his early thirties who spoke with a vaguely East Anglian accent, and while he was dressed office casual in jeans and a check shirt, he definitely gave the impression that big mud-encrusted boots and army surplus jackets were a plausible option. I thought, he’s going to be a big fan of obscure heavy metal bands or folk music, or possibly both at the same time.

I asked about the dig where the stolen material had come from.

‘St Paul’s Cathedral School,’ he said. ‘Stage two of the One New Change development. It looked like demolition rubble, we did some test pits and some geophysics but we didn’t find any structures or useful stratification and the only proper dating evidence was the clay pipes.’ He shrugged. ‘Our best guess is that it was rubble from the medieval phase of the cathedral that was dumped during the construction of the Wren. The pipes might have belonged to the workers.’

‘That’s a lot of pipes,’ I said.

‘Clay pipes were totally disposable in those days,’ said Robert. ‘They used to sell a pipe with a single charge of tobacco – smoke it and throw it.’

‘So builder’s rubble and fag ends?’ I said.

‘Pretty much.’



So I was thinking about the power of faith while I was writing up my notes.

The exact role that faith plays in imbuing supernatural entities with power has been hotly debated since Newton’s day. Its importance has risen and fallen with the Folly’s intellectual fashions, from the Deism of the Enlightenment to the muscular Christianity of the late Victorians, to the disillusionment and despair in the aftermath of the First World War. But not in the way you might think.

The deists, believing in a creator that had set the world in motion and then stood back to admire its work, thought faith and worship might have an impact on lesser supernatural creatures in much the same way as the wealth of nations was affected by trade. They were certain that, with the application of enough reason, the principles behind these transactions could be understood.