Rivers of London (Rivers of London #1)(61)

Predictably my headband torch had died, so Nightingale risked a werelight. Where the hole had been was now a shallow dish-shaped depression three metres across. The turf was completely destroyed, ground into a mix of dead grass and pulverised soil. Something round and dirty and white was resting near my foot. It was a skull. I picked it up.

‘Is that you, Nicholas?’ I asked.

‘Put that down, Peter,’ said Nightingale. ‘You don’t know where it’s been.’ He surveyed the mess we’d made of the garden. ‘The rector’s not going to be happy about this,’ he said.

I put the skull down, and as I did, I noticed something else embedded into the ground. It was a pewter badge depicting a dancing skeleton. I recognised it as the one Nicholas Wallpenny had ‘worn’. He must have been buried in it.

‘We did say we were hunting vandals,’ I said.

I picked up the badge and felt just the tiniest flash of tobacco smoke, beer and horses.

‘Perhaps,’ said Nightingale. ‘But I doubt he’s going to accept that as an explanation.’

‘A gas leak, maybe?’ I said.

‘There’s no gas main running under the church,’ said Nightingale. ‘He may become suspicious.’

‘Not if we tell him the gas leak story is a cover for digging up an unexploded bomb,’ I said.

‘A UXB?’ asked Nightingale. ‘Why make it that complicated?’

‘’Cause then we can bring in a digger and have a good rummage around,’ I said. ‘See if we can’t disinter this Henry Pyke and grind him up into grave dust.’

‘You’ve got a devious mind, Peter,’ said Nightingale.

‘Thank you, sir,’ I said. ‘I do my best.’

Besides a devious mind, I also had a bruise the size of a dinner plate on my back and a couple more beauties on my chest and legs. I told the doctor I saw in A&E that I’d had an argument with a tree. He gave me a funny look and refused to prescribe any painkillers stronger than Nurofen.

*

So we had a name – Henry Pyke. Nicholas had hinted that Pyke wasn’t buried at the Actors’ Church but we checked the records, just in case. Nightingale called the General Registry Office at Southport while I scoured for Pykes on Genepool, Familytrace and other online genealogy sites. Neither of us got very far except to establish that it was a common name and strangely popular in California, Michigan and New York State. We convened in the coach house so that I could continue to use the internet and Nightingale could watch the rugby.

‘Nicholas said he was an entertainer,’ I said. ‘He might even have been a Punch and Judy man, a “professor”. The Piccini script was published in 1827, but Nicholas said that Pyke was an older spirit so I’d guess late eighteenth, early nineteenth century. But records from that period are useless.’

Nightingale watched the All Blacks roll right over the Lions’ fullback to score, and judging by his long face the margin of victory was suitably dire. ‘If only you could speak to some keen theatregoers from that period,’ he said.

‘You want to summon more ghosts?’ I asked.

‘I was thinking of someone who was still alive,’ he said. ‘In a manner of speaking.’

‘Are you talking about Oxley?’ I asked.

‘And his darling common-law wife, Isis, also known as Anna Maria de Burgh Coppinger, Mistress of John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich and live-in lover of the famous Shakespearean scholar Henry Ireland. Departed this veil of tears 1802, presumably for the greener pastures of Chertsey.’

‘Chertsey?’

‘That’s where the Oxley river is,’ he said.


If I was going to see Oxley again then I figured I might as well kill two birds with one stone. I called Beverley on her waterproof mobile and asked her if she was up for a field trip. Just in case her mum’s prohibition was still in force, I was going to tell her that it was in aid of ‘dealing’ with Father Thames, but I never got the chance to say it.

‘Are we taking the Jag?’ she asked. ‘No offence, but your other car stinks.’

I told her yes, and she was buzzing on the entryphone fifteen minutes later. Obviously she’d been lurking about the West End already.

‘Mum’s got me sniffing around,’ she said as she climbed into the Jag. ‘Looking for your revenant.’ She was wearing a black embroidered bolero over a red roll-neck jumper and black leggings.

‘Would you know a revenant if you saw one?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘There’s a first time for everything.’

I wanted to watch her tuck her long legs under the dash, but I figured the temperature was high enough already. My dad once told me that the secret to a happy life was never to start something with a girl unless you were willing to follow wherever it led. It’s the best piece of advice he’s ever given me, and probably the reason I was born. I concentrated on getting the Jag out of the garage and setting a course for the South-West and the wrong side of the river again.

In AD 671, an abbey was founded on the high ground south of the River Thames in what is now Chertsey. It was your classic Anglo-Saxon establishment, half centre of learning, half economic power house and a refuge for those sons of the nobility who thought there was more to life than stabbing people with swords. Two hundred years later the Vikings, who never got tired of stabbing people with swords, sacked the abbey and burned it down. It was rebuilt, but the inhabitants must have done something to piss off King Edgar the Peaceable because in AD 964 he kicked them out and replaced them with some Benedictines. This order of monks believed in a life of contemplation, prayer and really big meals, and because they liked to eat this meant they never saw a stretch of arable land they didn’t want to improve. One of their improvements, sometime in the eleventh century, was to dig a separate channel for the Thames from the Penton Hook to the Chertsey Weir to provide water power for their grinding mills. I say the monk’s ‘dug’, but of course they drafted in some peasants for the hard labour. This artificial tributary of the Thames is marked on the maps as the Abbey River, but was once known as the Oxley Mills Stream.