Forthcoming Atrocities

7. Clues

Part One – The Skulls of St Olaves

I cleared the desk and placed the blow-up copies of the chapter heads from Wars that will Come After on its surface. I fired up the laptop and started studying the graphic for the first chapter, 'Of Sickness'.

Tabitha came in with a bowl of crisps for me and studied the illustration with me. 'What is it, Roman?'

'I wish I knew, Tabs. They're pictures from a book I'm researching for my work. I thought there might be clues in the illustrations, but I haven't found any yet.'

'Clues to what; treasure?'

'That's the problem. I don't know what I'm looking for.'

She disappeared and returned a moment later with two magnifying glasses. She handed one to me, pulled up a stool, knelt on it and started pouring over the artwork.

'Who's Uri?' she pointed at one of the crosses in the church graveyard behind the plague doctor.

Under the magnification it was possible to make out a name scrawled on the cross: 'Diminuto Uri.'

'That's a good spot, Tabs. Diminuto means small. I think Uri must be the name of a little boy who was killed by the plague.' I wrote it on the edge of the copy. 'That's my first clue. Let's make a list of anything else like that we see.'

'Hey, there are some squiggles on this gravestone,' she pointed.

'I think those are just squiggles.'

'An inscription on this cross,' the studied it under magnification before shaking her head, 'in French I think.'

'It's Spanish, we can translate it later.'

'And a date here on this cross,' she peered into her glass. '31 Aug 1665; is that a clue?'

'The plague was worst in Britain in the year 1665, so that...' I stalled. My eye kept stumbling over three skulls that could be made out on a tomb and Tabitha's reference to the date had just jogged something in my head.

I woke the laptop screen and typed: 'St Olaves skulls' into Google Images. A moment later the screen was filled with pictures of the same three skulls.

'They're the same,' Tabitha gripped my extended finger and gave me a grin. 'How did you know?'

'A man lived through the last plague in London and a great fire. He kept a diary and wrote it all down in there. His name was Samuel Pepys and St Olaves was his local church, at the end of his street. It survived the fire. When you said the date out loud it reminded me of Pepys and the church's skulls.'

The church was well known for having an inscription about Pepys worshipping there and a statue of him, but I remembered the skulls from an association with another London writer, Charles Dickens. The macabre entrance to the church beneath the three skulls and an arch of ferocious spikes led Dickens to nickname it: 'St Ghastly Grim'.

Charlie Fox's words came back to me: 'You have such unique knowledge. You're trained to focus on small details others would overlook.' It felt as if she had designed these graphics to create a set of clues that few people outside of my field of expertise could follow. If so, to what?

'But what does it mean, Roman?' Tabitha had arrived at the question at the same time I had.

'It means that my hunch about clues in these pictures was right. The date and the skulls in this image led us to Samuel Pepys. This man...' I entered Pepys's name was the screen flicked up the most well-known portrait of the diarist, John Hayls's 1666 oil study from the National Portrait Gallery. I showed it to Tabitha. 'It means we should keep looking.'