Cooper removed a pair of glasses from the chair and placed them on the table. ‘Are you writing a book or something?’ he said.

‘How did you guess?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. It just looks like a writer’s room. What is the book about?’

‘It’s just a little memoir,’ said Latham, waving a hand in a self-deprecating gesture. ‘The difficulty I have is that my memory isn’t as good as it used to be. It’s requiring rather a lot of research to get the facts right. Dates and names and so on. I suppose it’s my age.’

Latham perched himself on another chair and gazed vaguely at Cooper.

‘Are you hoping to get it published?’ asked Cooper, failing to keep a faint note of incredulity from his voice.

‘I’m told it’s very easy to publish a book yourself these days,’ said Latham. ‘Modern technology has opened up all kinds of doors. There are things called ebooks now.’

‘Yes.’ Cooper eyed the piles of paper. ‘Where’s your computer?’

‘My what?’

‘You have a laptop, at least?’

Latham shook his head. ‘I do have a typewriter somewhere. I haven’t used it for a while. There was a problem getting new ribbons.’

Cooper didn’t know what else to say. If he went any further into the subject, he might end up volunteering to do the work himself. And that was beyond the call of duty.

‘I was at Bowden yesterday,’ said Cooper. ‘You know, the estate village for Knowle Abbey?’

‘Oh, the Bowden burial ground?’ said Latham. ‘Surely you know all about that?’

‘No, I don’t,’ said Cooper.

Latham raised an eyebrow at him and Cooper realised his tone had been a bit too sharp.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t know anything about the burial ground.’

One of the cats stirred uneasily and dragged itself off the sofa. As it strolled out of the room, Cooper could see that it was beautifully groomed, but obese.

‘I’m afraid there’s nothing anyone can do about it,’ Latham was saying. ‘It’s all perfectly within the rules and regulations.’

‘What is?’

But now he’d set Latham off on a train of thought, the old man wasn’t going to be steered by someone else’s questions. ‘When a church or burial ground has been consecrated, it comes under the jurisdiction of the bishop,’ he said. ‘In the case of a churchyard, the legal effects of consecration can only be removed by an Act of Parliament or the General Synod. But if the land or building isn’t vested in an ecclesiastical body, then the bishop has the power of deconsecration.’

‘So?’

Latham nodded at him. ‘That’s the case at Bowden, you see. The church was built by a previous Earl Manby and it belongs to the estate. So the bishop of this diocese has agreed to deconsecrate. There was no reason for him to refuse. The church itself isn’t used any more, you know. It’s the burial ground that has been most at issue.’

‘Are you telling me the present Earl Manby is planning to sell off the church and burial ground at Bowden?’

‘Well, of course.’

‘For what purpose?’

‘That I can’t tell you.’

‘He must have some scheme in mind for the land. But can he really do that to a graveyard?’

‘By law, any graves more than seventy-five years old can be removed, though the removal and destruction of gravestones is subject to controls under the Cemeteries Act.’ Latham looked at his chaotic table. ‘I could quote you the specific section, if I can find the reference.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Then there would be the Disused Burial Grounds Act,’ said Latham. ‘That dates from the 1880s, but I’m sure it still applies. The prohibition against building on a churchyard can be overridden if the church is declared redundant. Then the land can be deconsecrated and disposed of for any type of development, I think. Remains can be relocated but, if not, you’re obliged to allow access to relatives.’

‘There must have been objections from families with relatives buried there,’ said Cooper.

‘Indeed. But there are no plans to build on the actual burial ground, as I understand it. You’d have to consult the plans for more information, I suppose.’

Cooper watched the cat return, casually stalking past his legs as if he were just another pile of discarded paper.

‘I wonder what the earl has in mind,’ he said. ‘It’s bound to be something he can make money from. A residential development, perhaps.’

The Reverend Latham gazed at the returning cat and his expression became dreamy. He reached for a pen and an exercise book from the table and began to scribble in it.

‘That reminds me,’ he said. ‘Thank you, Ben. It will make an interesting chapter for my ebook.’

‘What?’

‘Well, we had another example in this diocese,’ said Latham. ‘St Martin’s Church. It was deconsecrated back in the 1980s. But it stood derelict for almost twenty years before a young couple bought it. I heard that they invested nearly three times the purchase price and it was very interesting what they did. They kept the stained glass and many of the fixtures intact, added skylights in the roof, installed under-floor heating and constructed a rather dramatic staircase up to a galleried library. They even used the wood from the pews to build kitchen counters and a dining room table. The project took them six years to complete, as I recall.’

‘I remember that too,’ said Cooper. ‘When they finished the conversion, they listed the property for sale for about six hundred thousand pounds.’

‘Ah, yes.’ Latham wrote down the figure. ‘Six hundred thousand pounds. It sounded like an awful lot of money to me. But it was a very unusual property. They let me see inside it once. It had an enormous living area. It incorporated the chancel and nave, and the ceiling must have been about thirty-five feet high. Just imagine what you could do with that.’

Cooper was imagining a vast cathedral-like space filled with stacks of paper and cardboard boxes, but Latham hadn’t finished.

‘Well, the really interesting thing,’ he said, ‘is that St Martin’s had a small graveyard. Over the years graves had been dug deep and coffins stacked on top of each other to make maximum use of the available space. When the church was deconsecrated, the coffins were exhumed and moved to other graveyards. Rumour has it that some of them were never located and might still be buried under the grounds today.’

‘Really?’

Latham laughed gently. ‘Well, if it’s true, there’s a jacuzzi and a barbecue patio over the top of them now. Fortunately, those deepest graves would be very old burials. The forgotten ones.’

Cooper thought of Bowden village and Knowle Abbey, and some of the people he’d spoken to during the last few days.

‘I don’t think there are any forgotten ones in this case,’ he said.

Half an hour later Cooper was walking along the ragged lines of headstones in the burial ground at Bowden and looking at the names inscribed on them. Several familiar surnames appeared. Shaw, Beresford, Kilner, Mellor, Blair.

The church was still locked, even though it was Sunday. But then, it wasn’t just closed. It had been declared redundant. It would never be opened again, not as a place of worship at least. The bulldozer waiting behind the church took on a new meaning now. He could see it had nothing to do with the bonfire.

Mrs Mellor must have seen him from the window of the cottage and recognised him. She came across the green and walked through the graveyard to see what he was looking at.

‘Yes, some of my family are here too,’ she said, touching one of the gravestones.

‘So I see.’

‘I take it you know what’s going to happen to this? To the church and the graveyard?’

‘Yes, I know. But there have been objections from the families, haven’t there?’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘But there are no plans to build over the burial ground itself. The church will be converted, probably for residential use. Then the burials that can be found will be removed and the graveyard will be landscaped. That’s what the plans say.’