Sarah Rayne - What Lies Beneath

‘Ah. Well, that’s as we thought. And the one we found inside the lodge?’

‘A bit more complicated, sir. As you know, it was found seated at the desk in that upstairs room. We haven’t found conclusive proof, but there’re indications of chemical burns on the surface of some of the bones.’

‘That stuff they dropped on the village in the 1950s?’

‘That’s the conclusion. It’s our guess he was some sort of recluse and had no idea what was happening outside. If he was trapped in that room—’

‘Yes, I see. It’s a pity,’ said the inspector, ‘that those papers in the desk were so badly affected by the Geranos.’

‘We got the first sentence, sir. But it doesn’t tell us anything.’

‘What did it say?’

‘ “The time has come when I will have to do something.” That was all that was legible.’

‘What a pity,’ said the inspector. ‘It would have been interesting to know who that man was.’

England has many ‘lost’ villages – remote pockets that once were thriving communities, but that, for widely different reasons, now lie dead and silent, as if preserved beneath dusty amber glazes.

In the main, they were lost to the laws of enclosure, to coastal erosion or monastic depopulation. But there are also plague villages, wiped out by the Black Death, villages – sometimes entire towns – drowned by the creation of reservoirs, rural communities and hamlets abandoned for no known or discoverable reason. Sadly, the histories and even the names of many of these have been lost, and all that remain are earthworks and perhaps a lonely church.

But there are also places that have been the subject of strange, even macabre, experiments. Gruinard Island – the ‘anthrax isle’ in the Scottish Highlands – sealed off from the world for almost half a century. Places such as Porton Down and Sellafield whos sometimes-contentious, occasionally-mysterious, research has become uneasily etched onto the fabric of England’s lore.

Priors Bramley is fictional. But its counterpart can be found in more than one village in England.

Grateful thanks are due to Philip and Keith Cartwright, Organ Builders and Tuners of Slindon, Staffordshire, for their excellent help and practical demonstrations of the mechanics of church organs in the beautiful St Andrew’s Church, Weston; also to Rob Robinson who supplied invaluable technical details about light aircraft and their capabilities.

House of the Lost

Ghost Song

The Death Chamber

Spider Light

Roots of Evil

A Dark Dividing

Tower of Silence

Visit www.sarahrayne.co.uk

First published in the UK by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2011

A CBS Company

Copyright © Sarah Rayne, 2011

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

No reproduction without permission.

® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.

The right of Sarah Rayne to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-84737-334-2

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-84737-335-9

eBook ISBN: 978-0-85720-060-0

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

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