The Angel of Whitehall by Lewis Hastings

Author:Lewis Hastings [Hastings, Lewis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hobeck Books
Published: 2020-12-14T22:00:00+00:00

One down. A lot more to go.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Highgate East Cemetery, London

The varied family members of a fractured family, some serving soldiers, veterans, a few politicians, senior police officers, and a retired judge had braved the biting wind to attend the service of Brigadier Reddington.

Highgate is arguably the most famous cemetery on earth. Karl Marx lies there along with a string of personalities, scientists, activists, historians and military and civilian heroes. It had become so popular as a tourist attraction that the cemetery had started charging an admission fee to those folk who wanted to see the famous and the dead.

At Highgate fifty-three-thousand graves contain one-hundred-and-seventy-thousand people. Set on thirty-seven acres it is a curio, a living museum almost, a nod to the Victorian era and littered with the famous and the infamous. The West Cemetery is full and still attracts tours on a regular basis. The East is still open, a working cemetery that will eventually run out of space.

The gathered clans of the family Reddington, five of them to be precise, paid nothing to enter the place, but a king’s ransom to bury their relative.

And here he was. The powerful former leader of men. A mover and shaker from Whitehall. The man who had made a name for himself and a small fortune from the misery of others, lying in a pine box with polished handles and a small brass plaque, motionless in his uniform – the one without the medals.

The first of the official cars pulled into Highgate. It was what many termed a ‘bloody awful day’. This was meant as a reference to the weather which made the place look even more miserable. Long-forgotten graves and tombs littered the place, some still tended, others abandoned.

The cemetery staff kept the place beautifully, however, there was a sense that nature was just waiting in the wings to take over, as it had done in the nineteen seventies when the company declared bankruptcy.

Vines and trees and grass had slowly reclaimed the place until a famous film company began to use the location for its horror films. Within a year, the cemetery was once more a popular place to be – for both the living and the not so lucky.

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