Necropolis

St. Meredith's.
    Scarlett had allowed her thoughts to wander, and she'd missed half of what the teacher had said. "It wasn't destroyed, but it was badly damaged. Bring your sketchbooks with you and we can work in there.
    We have permission and you can go anywhere you like. See if you can feel the atmosphere. Imagine what it was like, being there with the bombs going off all around."
    Miss Chaplin flicked off the microphone and sat down again, next to the driver.
    Scarlett was a few rows behind her, sitting next to a girl named Amanda, who was one of her closest friends and lived on the same road as her. She noticed that Amanda was frowning.
    "What is it?" she asked.
    "St. Meredith's," Amanda said.
    "What about it?"
    It took Amanda a few moments to remember. "There was a murder there. About six months ago."
    "You're not being serious."
    "I am."

    If it had been anyone else, Scarlett might not have believed her. But she knew that Amanda had a special interest in murder. She loved reading Agatha Christie and she was always watching whodunnits on TV.
    "So who got murdered?" she asked.
    "I can't remember," Amanda said. "It was some guy. A librarian, I think. He was stabbed."
    Scarlett wasn't sure it sounded very likely, and when the coach stopped off at St. Paul's, she went over to Miss Chaplin. To her surprise, the teacher didn't even hesitate. "Oh yes," she said cheerfully. "There was an incident there this summer. A man was attacked by a homeless person. I'm not sure the police ever caught anyone, but it all happened a long time ago. It doesn't bother you, does it, Scarlett?"
    "No," Scarlett said. "Of course not."
    But that wasn't quite true. It did secretly worry her, even if she wasn't sure why. She had a sense of foreboding that only grew worse as they got closer to the church.
    The art teacher had chosen this part of London for a reason. It was a patchwork of old and new, with great gaps where whole buildings and perhaps even streets had been taken out by the Germans. Most of the shops were shabby and depressing, with plastic signs and dirty windows full of products that people might need but which they couldn't possibly want: vacuum cleaners, dog food, one hundred items at less than a pound. There was an ugly parking garage towering high over the buildings, but it was hard to imagine anyone stopping here. The traffic rumbled past in four lanes, anxious to be on its way.
    But even so, there were a few clues as to what the area might once have been like. A cobbled alleyway, a gas lamp, a red telephone box, a house with pillars and iron railings. The London of seventy years ago.
    That was what Miss Chaplin had brought them all to find.
    They turned onto Moore Street. It was a dead end, narrow and full of puddles and potholes. A pub stood on one side, opposite a launderette that had shut down. St. Meredith's was at the bottom, a solid, redbrick church that looked far too big to have been built in this part of town. The war damage was obvious at once. The steeple had been added quite recently. It wasn't even the same color as the rest of the building and didn't quite match the huge oak doors or the windows with their heavy stone frames.
    Scarlett felt even more uneasy once they were inside. She jumped as the door boomed shut behind her, cutting out the London traffic, much of the light — indeed, any sense that they were in a modern city at all. The interior of the church stretched into the distance to the silver cross high up on the altar, caught in a single shaft of dusty light. Otherwise, the stained-glass windows held the sun back, the different colors blurring together. Hundreds of candles flickered uselessly in iron holders. She could make out little side-chapels, built into the walls. Even without her remembering the murder that had happened there, St. Meredith's didn't strike her as a particularly holy place. It was simply creepy.

    But nobody else seemed to share her feelings. The other girls had taken out their sketchbooks and were sitting in the pews, chatting to each other and drawing what they had seen outside. Miss Chaplin was examining the pulpit — a carving of an eagle. Presumably, most Londoners chose not to pray at two o'clock in the afternoon. They had the place to themselves.
    Scarlett looked for Amanda, but her friend was talking to another girl on the other side of the transept, so she sat down on her own and opened her pad. She needed to put the murder out of her mind. Instead, she thought