Nightingale grabbed my collar and pulled me away as cherry blossom and clods of earth rained down around us. A big chunk landed on my head and shattered, sending dirt trickling down the back of my neck.
Then there was silence; nothing but the sound of distant traffic and a nearby car alarm going off. We waited half a minute to catch our breath, just in case something else was going to happen.
‘Guess what,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a name.’
‘You’re damned lucky still to have a head,’ said Nightingale. ‘What’s the name?’
‘Henry Pyke,’ I said. ‘Never heard of him,’ said Nightingale.
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.