David Dickinson - Death and the Jubilee

Lord Francis Powerscourt was surrounded by angels, angels with broken wings, angels with no arms, angels with no heads, angels in stone, angels in marble. He was waiting for Johnny Fitzgerald at three o’clock in the afternoon in Kilburn Cemetery in the north-west of the capital.

Knox’s depleted forces had been remarkably speedy in their negotiations with the keepers of the records. Three coffins had indeed been sent from Dublin to London in the preceding month. Their destinations had been three different firms of undertakers, who had reluctantly told Powerscourt and Fitzgerald their final destination. Henry Joseph McLachlan, aged fifty-four, had been buried here with these angels.

Sections of the cemetery were overgrown. Weeds and brambles covered the bottom of the graves and giant creepers had entwined themselves round the statuary. Rooks and crows circled above the trees, protesting at the arrival of living humans. Through the foliage occasional crosses could be discerned, almost hidden from view. The other area was not very large, only a couple of hundred souls waiting here for the last trump.

Powerscourt began making his way round the graves, looking for McLachlan. He was wearing a pair of old trousers and the fisherman’s jersey Chief Inspector Tait had found for him in Brighton. The grave would be clean and fresh, the passing seasons yet to leave their slow marks of creeping decay. Johnny Fitzgerald materialized, in his Mystic Merlin clothes, a spade in his hand, a large bag of tools on his back. He had been very cheerful since Brighton, drinking only the finest wines to compensate for his brief period of abstinence.

‘What’s this bugger called, Francis?’ said Fitzgerald.

‘McLachlan,’ said Powerscourt, ‘Henry Joseph McLachlan. The earth won’t have settled long enough for him to get a proper tombstone yet. There’ll be a small cross or a stone with his name on it for now.’

‘Wouldn’t it be grand,’ Fitzgerald was looking down at a bunch of dead flowers, ‘if people actually said what they meant on these bloody tombs.’

‘What do you mean, Johnny?’ asked Powerscourt.

’Delighted he’s gone,’ said Fitzgerald cheerfully, ‘Thank you, God, for taking the old bastard away. Gone but not remembered. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, not a moment too soon. May her life be as miserable where she’s gone as she made mine here on earth, that sort of thing.’

‘You’re a bad person, Johnny,’ Powerscourt laughed. ‘They’ll get their own back on you, all these people here. I expect they’ll leave a message with St Peter that you’re not to be let in. You’re blackballed from heaven, Johnny. Hard luck.’

Powerscourt stopped. The afternoon sun lit up a row of graves not ten feet from where they were standing. One of them was new, very new with a small cross at the head.

‘Here he is, Johnny. Henry Joseph McLachlan. Gone to his Father in Heaven, May 1897.’

‘Do we open it up now, Francis,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘or do we wait till it’s dark? That’ll be bloody hours away.’

‘We’ve got to do it now,’ said Powerscourt, glancing uneasily round the cemetery. There were no gardeners on duty. No relatives had come for a late afternoon communion with their dead. They were alone.

Powerscourt borrowed a spade from an open grave nearby, the preparations apparently left half-finished. In a couple of minutes they had removed the earth on top of the coffin. Something moved behind them. Powerscourt and Fitzgerald turned quickly, hands going automatically into trouser pockets. A squirrel eyed them coldly and vanished up a tree.

‘I think, Francis, we can open the coffin without taking it out of the grave. Give me that big screwdriver. You keep your eyes open up top.’

Fitzgerald lay down beside the grave. He began undoing the four great screws that held the lid in position.

‘I don’t suppose,’ he said, panting slightly with the exertion, ‘that you would recognize the coffin we’re looking for? That would be too much to hope for.’

‘It was very dark,’ said Powerscourt, his eyes fixed on the main entrance to Kilburn Cemetery, ‘all I could tell was that they were coffins.’

He was hoping more than anything that this would be the right coffin, if there was a right coffin. He remembered that night in Greystones, following the coffins on their journey from the sea. He wondered if the man with the pipe had been Michael Byrne. Maybe all three were full of dead bodies, not deadly rifles. Maybe he had got it all wrong. Maybe the deadly coffin had been sent to Guildford or Reading, not to London at all.

‘Three screws out, one to go,’ Fitzgerald reported. ‘I think I could do with a drink.’ Powerscourt thought of the other corpses he had met in the course of his investigation, Old Mr Harrison with no head and no arms, floating by London Bridge, Mr Frederick Harrison, burnt to death on the top floor of his mansion. Ordeal by Water. Ordeal by Fire.

‘Give me a hand here, Francis. We can just take a peep inside.’

Fitzgerald made the sign of the cross. Powerscourt lay down beside him. Together they tried to lift the lid. It was stiff. It didn’t want to move.

‘Bugger it,’ said Fitzgerald, ‘is there another bloody screw somewhere?’ Anger seemed to give him extra strength. Slowly, with a faint creak, the lid of the coffin came up.

There were no rifles. Only a white face that looked surprised to be dead, the eyes closed, the hair carefully brushed across the forehead, the hands folded in pious expectation of the second coming.

‘Sorry, Mr McLachlan,’ said Fitzgerald quietly, ‘very sorry. We’ll put you back where you belong in no time.’ He replaced the lid and the screws, lying on the ground beside the grave. Powerscourt was whispering to himself. ‘Lord now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word.’ Johnny Fitzgerald was hurling the earth back on top of the coffin as fast as he could.

‘For mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all people.’

Fitzgerald had moved on to the turf now, laying it out in neat rows. He stamped on it to make it flat once more.

Powerscourt was still whispering. ‘To be a light to lighten the Gentiles and to the glory of thy people Israel.’

Johnny Fitzgerald jumped off the grave of Henry Joseph McLachlan. He brushed the earth off his clothes. ‘Where now, Francis? I don’t suppose you passed the Gravediggers Arms on your way in here? The Last Trump perhaps? That would be a good name for a pub.’

Powerscourt was looking at a piece of paper. ‘We’ve got a choice here, Johnny. There are two coffins left. One is in the North London Cemetery somewhere near Islington. The other is the West London Cemetery near the river in Mortlake. Do you have any aesthetic preferences for either of these locations?’

‘To hell with Islington,’ said Fitzgerald firmly. ‘There are lots of good pubs near the river in Mortlake. Mortlake gets my vote. I presume your carriage is still waiting near the entrance, Francis? We must be the only grave robbers in Britain to have their very own carriage to carry them round their targets. To horse! To horse!’

The streets were very busy. Every cab, carriage and brougham of the capital seemed to be full of visitors, inspecting the sights of London before they watched the Jubilee Parade. Powerscourt looked at his watch. It was now twenty minutes past four. He had noticed a sign at Kilburn that said the cemetery shut at five o’clock. If they arrived too late at Mortlake they would have to wait for a quiet moment to climb over the wall. It didn’t look as if there would be any quiet moments in London this evening.

They made it with fifteen minutes to spare. They picked up their spades and Johnny’s bag. Powerscourt took out two huge fisherman’s bags and hid them inside the entrance.