#3 Where Monsters Lay

Chap. 4_arsonist landladies and rolling eyes?

"So this graveyard, yeah? It's filled with criminals?"

Sarah, Rob and Frank were back in the car. Frank was still in the front seat, laptop on his knee and panini in his right hand (he'd insisted they stop off for some food). His left hand was rapidly typing, getting as much information as possible.

Sarah was in the back, asking questions; and that left Rob driving.

"Yes. But the worst one's you could imagine. Convicted rapists, arsonists, murderers, serial killers. The lot. The monsters of society, I suppose."

Frank was trying to speak through mouthfuls of crusty bread, but even he had to shudder.

"I mean, I know they're dead," Sarah carried on in her questioning, "But it's a little unnerving having them all bunged into one place. How many are there in there? Me and Rob saw – what - it must have been hundreds."

"I'm trying to get into the registry records now," Frank responded. He threw the discarded sandwich wrapper onto the backseat and began furiously typing away.

Sarah picked off the wrapper which had delicately flown backwards at her, smearing her blouse with grease, and tossed it into a plastic bag.

"You know this bag's getting so full now?" she said, sparking up some conversation with so far muted Rob.

"Ah, leave it," he said, "It's been there so long that it's practically one of us now!"

"It already does more work than you!" Sarah quipped, and Rob laughed.

"Only you could say that and get away with it. I don't like that, missus!" Rob chortled away, reliably accompanied by the pitter-patter of Frank's finger to keyboard.

"You should name it," Frank butted in, "if it's got that much worth, Rob. How about Jeremy?"

"Why Jeremy?" Rob looked quizzically into the rear-view mirror. But he noticed Sarah already smiling.

"Jeremy," she said, holding in a fit of laughter, "Jeremy Car-bin!"

And she erupted. As did the rest of the vehicle. Frank's hande carried on tapping away, but the laughter didn't die away for some time. In fact, only when Frank spoke, all of a sudden, was the spoken silence broken.

"Now this is weird," he said, hands stopping, aching slightly. "Histon Road has been subject to grave-robbing."

"Well I'm sure everywhere has," Rob said, disregarding Frank's statement.

"No, you don't get it," Frank quickly retorted, "Not 19th Century body-snatching stuff. As in a couple months back, when the university wanted to have a look at an old body to do some research, they dug up the grave of the most unethical person they could find close. Not surprisingly, they brought one up from here. But the body wasn't there. Files from when they were buried are completely legitimate, look..."

He gestured to the screen.

"... signed by the leader of the Secret Service. But the body wasn't there when they dug up the grave. Meaning..."

"Meaning someone's stolen a body from Histon Road." Sarah finished, wiping the grease from her blouse as they pulled up outside the Den.

And as Rob pulled the keys out of the ignition and opened the door, he looked across to Frank and Sarah and asked them both what they were already thinking.

"But why?"

*****

"Gladys Hammond was a landlady. She'd been born into the aristocracy and took it upon herself to go into work. This was around the early 20th Century, so still quite rare for a woman, I daresay. Gladys owned a large set of the new private houses that had been built in the 20s and she rented them out of middle class men and woman who could afford such a thing. However when two woman rented one of her properties, she suspected something. Gladys was a firm anti-Sodomite, you see. She was a deeply religious lady and assumed something was going on between these two ladies. In fact, there was nothing going on and they were sisters, Jewish, in hiding from Eastern Europe. But Gladys took it upon herself to burn that house the ground. She razed it to the ground, Miss Sarah, for she thought the two ladies were in love. And that's how she ended up here. A monster, she was. Rightly deserved."