St Leonard's
What it is
A discreet brick chapel in a quiet close in Hampstead, with a graveyard at the rear, “each corner with its own tree, its own bench” (C03). The services on alternate Sundays seldom come to pass, and most of the people buried there have no obvious local connection. The Service uses it for funerals and calls it the Spooks’ Chapel; Diana Taverner observes that no editor would print the name, “not unless they want to find out what it’s like having their own mobiles monitored” (C05).
Inside, on the west wall, are plaques to officers who did not come home — a display “some called The Last Dead Letter Drop”, carrying names their owners were not born with (C03). It is the series’ clearest statement of what the Service does with its dead: a cover story in stone, and a wall of operational names.
The funeral staged here is David Cartwright’s. It is also the scene of the book’s first breach: River Cartwright sees Frank Harkness under a tree and vaults the grave after him (C03).
Book 6 — Joe Country
- C03 — The funeral: Isobel Dunstable arrives with a single lily for her mother’s stone, Taverner and Oliver Nash come in a limousine, Harkness watches from a car and then from the graveyard, and River goes over the grave after him.
- C05 — Taverner tells Oliver Nash that no editor will print what St Len’s is, because the Service can lean on the ones who try; the funeral stays “a minor brouhaha at a family event”.
Related
David Cartwright · River Cartwright · Frank Harkness · Skylarks · Regent’s Park