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.