Ashes to Ashes (13 page)

‘Mr Hancock?’

I didn’t recognise the voice. A figure in the middle of the nave was speaking to me. Small drips of water from the stirrup pumps up above pitter-pattered on to the top of my head.

‘Mr Hancock?’

Were it a ghost from the Great War it would have called me ‘Private’ or just ‘Hancock’, but it addressed me as ‘Mr’, and so it must have been real.

‘Yes?’ I answered. ‘What do you want?’

It began to move towards me. Quite tall, parts of it swished against the bloodied ground as it moved. It was literally trudging through Mr Ronson’s offal.

‘I don’t want anything,’ the voice said. ‘I’ve come to tell you something.’ And then, as if suddenly falling in as to what the problem was, he said, ‘It’s me, Mr Hancock, George.’

‘Oh, blimey!’

I felt a fool. Of course it was George, George the choir boy in a long flapping rain mackintosh.

‘Sorry, George,’ I said as he got closer. ‘I didn’t recognise you. It’s so dark in here and, I’ll be honest, son, it’s a little frightening, isn’t it?’

‘We could all die,’ the lad said simply. But he didn’t sound what you’d call upset until he said, ‘Not that any of that matters. The cathedral is in great peril and that is what we have to think about.’

He stopped then because he was crying. Even in the young, crying amongst men isn’t looked well upon and I knew that I should tell him to ‘buck up’ or something at this point. But I didn’t. It’s not my way. Men cried in the Great War and their officers said stupid, useless things to try and make them stop. They did, generally, then some of them went off and shot themselves. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I let George cry.

After about a minute, the lad appeared to pull himself together and he said, ‘Mr Phillips says that if you’d like to wait in the quire stalls, he’ll come and see you about that little girl.’

‘You’ve seen him? Mr Phillips?’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ George said. ‘As everybody’s told you, Mr Hancock, you keep missing him.’

‘So where is he?’

‘Up top,’ George said as he looked up into the black smokiness of the dome. ‘You don’t need to go up there again and he’ll be down in a minute, when his shift it over.’

He moved as if to go but, as he went to go past me, I grabbed hold of one of his arms. ‘George,’ I said, ‘have you seen Mr Andrews?’

‘Yes.’ I couldn’t see his face, not clearly, not through the thick, thick gloom. It had been George, I remembered, who had asked to see Mr Andrews shortly before I found what I knew deep down inside and, whatever others might say, was the chaplain’s dead body.

‘And the Dean?’

‘Reverend Matthews? He’s on the roof,’ George said.

The Dean, like Mr Phillips, and like Mr Andrews, was recently always somewhere that I was not. In spite of, apparently, being just about to meet Phillips, I was beginning to worry about the Dean. Was he really just ‘up top’ all this time, or had he, too, gone the way of his seemingly unfortunate chaplain?

George tried to pull himself out of my grasp, but I hung on tightly because I still had something else to ask him and also because I was becoming alarmed by the boy’s caginess.

‘George,’ I said, ‘do you know what has happened to Mr Ronson’s body?’

‘Mr Andrews moved it,’ he said.

‘Yes, to the quire. But now it’s gone.’

‘I don’t know anything about it.’ His voice was barely a whisper. Underneath my fingers, his mackintosh-clad arm squirmed and twisted. ‘I have to go.’

I didn’t tell George that I thought he was lying because, if he was, then he was doing so reluctantly; I could hear both the fear and the embarrassment in his voice. At heart he was a good boy and that is something that I believe to this day. But I knew as he broke free and left me, that he wasn’t telling me the truth. I also knew that there was no power on earth that was going to make me go and wait in those bloodied quire stalls for anyone.

I hid. I wanted to see whether anyone did, in fact, come to meet me in the quire, but I didn’t want them to know that I was there. I wasn’t thinking about Mr Andrews’s Masonic theories at the time. I didn’t know what was going on. But I was afraid. Crouching down at the end of the quire stalls nearest the high altar, I kept on looking around me to see if anyone was coming. I looked towards the door to the Whispering Gallery mostly. Time passes slowly like this and I was quite glad that I couldn’t see my watch, though I would have been able to if I had got out my torch. To be truthful, after doing this once, it was too much trouble for me to be bothered to do it again.

‘Up top’ in the Whispering Gallery and beyond, I could hear the voices of the watchmen still shouting to each other to go here, there and everywhere to fight the flames. I imagined that Mr Phillips, if indeed he was actually real, would be coming down after the fifteen- or twenty-minute stint most of them did. When the shift changed I’d know, because men would start gathering in the cathedral to go up while others would begin the long climb down. I wouldn’t be able to miss him easily.

Some blokes, some of the next shift, came up from the crypt and stood around the door to the top. I couldn’t hear everything that they were saying, but I did manage to catch Mr Ronson’s name a few times. The men seemed to be saying they were sorry he was dead but they didn’t sound upset about it. As a nation, we tend to hide our feelings but there was something else in the words of these blokes that was something like disappointment.

‘Mr Hancock, I am Harold Phillips; I understand you’ve been looking for me.’

Where he’d come from, I couldn’t imagine. What was certain, though, was that there was no way on earth he could have come from above. I’d been watching in that direction for some time and I’d heard and seen nothing. Mr Phillips, if Phillips he was, had come from the direction of the high altar. I stood up quickly, while he stepped backwards, and I shone my torch into his face.

The mask was easy to see. They generally are, even if they’ve been made for a person who can pay a lot for them. However skilled the artist, you can’t put back what isn’t there completely. This mask was very rough and ready. Even by the weak light of my torch I could see that it didn’t really fit. But because I didn’t want to take the risk of embarrassing the poor bloke by staring, I looked away.

‘I understand you brought a little girl in with you when you came on shift,’ I said. ‘Milly.’

‘I’ve no idea what the child’s name is,’ he said. ‘But yes, I came in with a child. She was outside, just wandering. I was afraid for her.’

His voice was muffled slightly but because I wouldn’t look up at his face I couldn’t see whether this was because of the mask or not.

‘Why?’

I would have thought that someone would’ve told him that Milly was missing by now, but obviously no one had. So I told him and he said, ‘Oh, well, I haven’t seen her since. We’ve been’ – he wiped one of his hands across his forehead as if to illustrate the smut and grime on his face and therefore his involvement with the fire – ‘run off our feet.’

I looked up just at the moment that the mask moved. What would have happened, had I not seen that, I really do not know. It came free from his face in a way I hadn’t expected. Mr Phillips, so Mr Steadman had told me, had lost his nose and much of his mouth in the Great War. Mr Phillips, or whoever he was, saw the look on my face and then looked down at what he now had in his hand. He punched me so hard in the face that I lost consciousness.

Chapter Nine

I
didn’t know where I was when I first came round. When darkness is complete there’s nothing to give you any clues. Sight was hopeless as a measure in this case and so it was, in a way, a good thing that some of my other senses started to take over. The fact that I felt wet was a starting point but it was the smell that really got to me. It was metallic and sadly very familiar. Either the blood was someone else’s or it was my own. But then Mr Phillips, or whoever that fresh-faced nutter had been who had hit me, had thumped me really hard and had probably broken my poor old conk. It certainly felt painful enough to be broken.

I didn’t even bother to look for my torch on the basis that he must have taken it off me. I wasn’t wrong. What he hadn’t taken, however, was my box of matches. After digging around in my jacket pocket for a bit I found first my fags and then my matches. I lit a match and looked around. I was in what seemed to be a cupboard and I wasn’t alone. Mr Andrews and what was left of Mr Ronson were in there with me. As the only one of us who could make any sort of sound, I let out what I hoped was a scream – who knew, maybe someone would come and rescue me – but what came out was a whimper. Christ, but my head hurt! The ‘Mr Phillips’ who had hit me and who was most certainly not that gentleman, had meant to do me some serious harm. In fact, why or how I was still alive I wasn’t to know until later on. All I did know then was that there was someone running around the cathedral impersonating Mr Phillips. This badly masked man, God knew where he’d got his mask from, had known both where Mr Ronson’s body was and the fact that Mr Andrews was really dead. My Swan Vesta went out just before it burnt my fingers and so I took out another match and lit it. As I moved my hand around to try and find out exactly where I was, I caught sight of poor old Mr Andrews’s face which now had the appearance of being battered; his head was also at what I knew was not a natural angle. He’d been shoved in what was a narrow, very tall cupboard, without too much ceremony. Poor old sod, he’d been a bit mad with all his barmy ideas about the Masons – if indeed his ideas had been barmy, I was now thinking – but there’d been no harm in him. He may even have been right about why Mr Ronson had died and who had killed him. These were frightening thoughts although in a way they were also comforting for me. If I was in company with real, stone-cold corpses, then what was and had been happening wasn’t just doing so in my head. I looked at the mess that was Mr Ronson and I thanked God that at least I was used to this sort of thing. On top of everything else that was happening to me, the last thing I needed was to be sick all over myself. After all, wherever I was now, I had to find some sort of way to get out.

My match went out and so I lit another and this time, instead of looking at the bodies flung in with me, I looked at the doors in front of me. About four feet up from where I was on the floor was a handle which was just above a keyhole. I’d have to stand up to get to it and so, once this next match had gone out, that was what I did. I had to push down on the floor and what I thought was a leg beside me to do so, but, as I’ve said before, squeamish is something I am not. Pushing up on knees that are quite stiff these days without climbing hundreds of stairs wasn’t much fun, though. As I creaked my way upwards, I found myself swearing under my breath as the pain cut into my kneecaps. There isn’t much, if anything really, to recommend getting old. Once I was up, I pushed down on the door handle which I knew before I even touched it wasn’t going to let me out because the door was going to be locked. It was and, what was more, I could hear footsteps outside it. Was this a friend or a foe coming towards me now? I held my breath and waited. When the voices started, they whispered and maybe because of that, I didn’t recognise either of them to begin with.

‘Why did you put him in there?’ one hissed. It sounded angry.

‘He wasn’t breathing,’ the other voice said. ‘He’s dead.’

‘Are you sure?’ the first one asked.

There was a pause. They mean me, I thought, they’re talking about me!

‘I hit him and he stopped breathing,’ the second man said. ‘That’s it.’

It had to be ‘Mr Phillips’ – he it had been who had hit me, after all. But that he’d hit me hard enough to stop my breathing was frightening to hear. He’d stopped it for so long, in fact, that he’d thought I was dead! Was I? I wanted to touch myself just to make sure that I wasn’t, but they were close by and I really didn’t dare do anything. If they found me alive, they probably would kill me.

‘Well, that’s it, then,’ the first man said in what sounded like a very determined sort of way.

‘What is?’

‘The wog makes three deaths . . .’

‘Four.’

There was silence and then the first man said, ‘Yes, of course, I forgot.’ It was spoken in a sad voice which, considering they were talking about at least one murder – my own death included – was strange to me. And who on earth was the
fourth
victim? ‘Isn’t that enough?’

‘Mr Phillips’ snapped. ‘You know that it isn’t!’ he said. ‘You know what still needs to be done! God Almighty, why did the bloody Jerries have to pick tonight!’

The first man sighed. ‘Maybe it wasn’t meant . . .’

‘Wasn’t meant?’ ‘Mr Phillips’ said, obviously outraged. ‘Wasn’t bloody meant! What kind of talk is that?’

Nothing more was said then and the next thing that I heard was the sound of their footsteps as the two men walked away from wherever I was. They left me with a lot to think about, that was for sure! People had died, been killed, and more were about to follow if that last remark was to be believed. Why? Was it, as Mr Andrews had said, to do with some strange Masonic sacrifice? Were these men killing people to save the cathedral in some sort of magical way? If that was the aim of all this, it wasn’t working very well. Maybe that was what the other fellow had meant about what they were doing not being ‘meant’? Last time I’d looked the fires were still threatening St Paul’s and, in the far, far distance I could, even in my cupboard, hear the sounds of desperate shouts from the watchmen in the galleries and on the roof. But then maybe that was why they, whoever they were, couldn’t stop killing, because it just wasn’t working. ‘Phillips’ had cursed the fact that the Jerries had come on this particular night. Their night of sacrifice? Who or what they were offering up these sacrifices to, I couldn’t imagine. The Masons, as far as I knew, were a bit like a club – albeit one I couldn’t join. Though they were a bit odd and concerned, so the Vatican had always maintained, with things of a supernatural kind, I’d never personally really believed that they involved themselves with devils. I didn’t and don’t believe that there are such things, not really. But what I’ve always known is that those who do believe can be dangerous. I wondered whether my old mate Revd Ernie Sutton was one of them. And anyway, what had ‘Mr Phillips’ meant about there having been four deaths? Who’s was the fourth body, and where was it?