Ashes to Ashes (15 page)

‘Where do you want me to go?’ I said.

Whatever was happening was happening ‘up top’, but then that had been, I imagined by then, inevitable. Just my luck. My lungs already felt bunged up and scorched, why shouldn’t they have to endure more climbing up in front of a geezer with a pistol? My poor legs, stiff as coffins the both of them, were so weak by this time that the bugger had the inconvenience of having to wait for me to move as he pushed me forward with his gun.

The noise at the top, in the Whispering Gallery, was enormous. Shouting, buckets clanging, the mechanical sound of stirrup pumps, water . . . men trying to save the cathedral from the fires.

‘Everyone’s trying to save the cathedral,’ I called back to Mr Smith. ‘I’d help myself if you’d take that gun away from my back. You could do worse than getting a bucket of water yourself.’

‘You don’t understand and shouldn’t try,’ Mr Smith said. ‘Not yet.’

I’d thought about running up the stairs and away from him but now I could hear that he wasn’t even out of breath I decided against it. My legs felt as heavy as granite and although my breathing wasn’t so bad, I knew it wasn’t going to stay that way. By the time we got to the Whispering Gallery I’d be speechless. Not that I’d probably ask any of the blokes up there to help me even if I could speak. Who in all of this great big cathedral could I trust? I didn’t know who were the villains and who were not. I didn’t know why Mr Smith felt the need to put a gun to my back.

I plodded onwards and upwards. Getting short of breath now, I said, ‘Mr Andrews . . . he, er, he . . . talked about a sacrifice. Mr Ronson—’

‘Ronson was going to go to Andrews with his suspicions. He couldn’t do that! Andrews was an enemy, a fool . . .’

‘So you killed him?’ I stopped and turned around to look at him. He was one step below me, his face shadowed by his tin hat and covered in darkness, I couldn’t see any of his features.

‘No,’ he said. ‘
I
didn’t.’ But he didn’t even start to explain and just pushed me. ‘Move along.’

‘What about young George?’ I said. I didn’t move. I had to catch my breath and I also had to decide whether I thought Mr Smith would really shoot me or not. If he did, were there enough like-minded watchmen who would cover up for him? How many deaths could be covered up even on a night like this? ‘What’s George got to do with all this?’

Mr Smith did not reply.

‘Mr Smith?’

‘Onwards and upwards, Mr Hancock,’ Mr Smith said as he moved up on to the step I was standing on. The gun went from being pointed towards the middle of my body to being aimed at my head. Whatever he was doing, he wasn’t joking, this character.

I thought about trying to get the gun off him. I
thought
about it. But seeing as much death as I do makes you cautious in the end. Before this war began I would have said that I was, if anything, careless about my own life. I’m not married, I’ve no little’uns, and certainly, ever since I came back to this country in 1918, my future has not seemed a bright one. Things would improve if Hannah were to do me the honour of being my wife, but that will never happen. That aside, though, for some reason lately, I want to live. What for, I cannot say. I’ve helped a few people, I suppose, in the past few months which, perhaps, has made me feel more useful. But maybe I’m just more frightened than ever before. Maybe the bits of bodies the Heavy Lifting boys and the coppers have dragged out of the London mud for me to bury have terrified me. I’d be even madder than I already am if that hadn’t happened. I walked ‘onwards and upwards’, getting ever closer to the voices in the Whispering Gallery.

When we got past the passageway and up to the top of the stairs and after Mr Smith had let me rest against the wall of the staircase for a bit, he told me we were to go on further, up beyond the Whispering Gallery. God, outside again to the bloody Stone Gallery!

‘What are you going to do?’ I said as I listened to my heart smash against the side of my ribs. ‘Throw me over the parapet?’

If a body fell through the flames from the Stone Gallery and into the burning streets below, who would know it wasn’t an accident? Just like Mr Ronson’s fall from the Whispering Gallery earlier, it was possible.

Again Mr Smith did not reply. I put my foot on the first of those crumbling stone steps up to the Stone Gallery.

There was nothing happening in the black winter skies over London. No
Luftwaffe
aircraft, no ack-ack guns, only search lights scanning through and across the tops of the flames The City was in such a state now, the
Luftwaffe
could come back and finish it off whenever they wanted. We came out, Mr Smith and me, into such smoke that we both choked and coughed until we could hardly breathe. All through this the pressure of his gun, in my back again now, didn’t slacken off once. I looked around me and saw several blokes I knew I’d seen before, but some looked away as soon as they caught my eye while others didn’t seem to even register the fact that I was there. At least some of them must have seen Mr Smith’s gun on account of his being far from secretive with it.

The Stone Gallery is another 119 stairs up from the Whispering Gallery, so I was exhausted. I’d been up and down to these galleries more times than I’d wanted to already; my knees were trembling, and my chest was literally on its last knockings. I couldn’t go another step. But Mr Smith, I now discovered, had another surprise in store for me. Another 152 stairs up to what’s called the Golden Gallery. This is also outside the cathedral, but much higher up underneath the ball and lantern. On this occasion the Golden Gallery was shrouded in thick smoke.

‘I’m not going up there,’ I gasped as Mr Smith pointed me towards the staircase that leads up into the Golden Gallery. ‘I’d rather die!’

I heard him take the safety catch off and saw him point the weapon at my head.

‘I don’t care,’ I said. ‘I’ll have a heart attack . . .’

‘Which will be much quieter than if I shoot you.’

‘Exactly,’ I said, ‘so bloody well just do it.’

But in spite of the fact that we were high up in the sky, there were still people about and I wasn’t sure that Mr Smith wanted to attract their attention. He lowered the gun.

‘Let me rest for a moment,’ I said. ‘Let me be.’

He gave me about five minutes, then we pushed on upwards.

Although the steps to the Golden Gallery are inside the cathedral, on that night it was like walking up into the clouds. To be honest I never really believed at that time that I’d ever be walking back down again – and in a way I was quite right in that.

Unlike on the Stone Gallery where there’d been a lot of people, there were only three Watchmen, apart from Mr Smith, up in the Golden Gallery. There was Mr Bolton, some other bloke I’d seen about but whose name I didn’t know, and the ‘Mr Phillips’ who’d busted my nose up earlier. As he walked towards me, smiling, he held up something that I soon came to see was Mr Phillips, or someone’s, face mask. Like a lot of those things it was made of metal and, as he placed it down on the gallery floor behind him, it made a heavy, clunking sound. He didn’t of course need it; he had, like everyone else up on the Golden Gallery, a perfectly normal face.

‘You’re not supposed to be here,’ he said to me. Behind him I could just make out some other figures, a man in civvies and a woman. ‘You stopped breathing. You were dead.’

I didn’t want to think about that and so I ignored it.

‘What’s going on here?’ I said. ‘Where’s Mr Phillips?’

Mr Smith put a hand on the so-called Mr Phillips’s shoulder. ‘Mr Phillips’ said, ‘Because of all these fires this has become far more complicated than it should. Took us by surprise, I can tell you. It’s also far more urgent.
You
shouldn’t be here at all,’ he said to me. ‘The cathedral should be quite free of people sheltering.’

‘The young lad George let me in to the cathedral,’ I said. ‘Blame him! He’s one of yours, whatever you are, isn’t he? Let me in against Mr Andrews’s wishes, George did. The late Mr Andrews knew something about young George, didn’t he?’

‘Mr Phillips’ looked at me steadily. ‘Maybe he did,’ he said. ‘He certainly knew about other things. But, Mr Hancock, the chaplain is dead and so we’ll never know now, will we?’

He was posh, like most of the watchmen. If he was a watchman. But if he was, why had he felt the need to impersonate another member of the company? Maybe I was thinking this through and maybe I wasn’t, but the next voice that I heard wasn’t posh and I recognised it.

‘Mr Webb?’

He was standing behind the watchmen with someone else; I thought it was a woman at first. But it wasn’t a woman, it was a girl, and she had long, blond hair right down to her waist.

‘Milly?’

She only opened her eyes a crack when I spoke to her. Leaning up against Webb, she was half asleep by the look of her, poor kid.

‘You’ve known where she was all the time!’ I said to Webb. He had a proper self-satisfied expression on his face. Not that he was looking at me at all.

‘She’ll do a lot more good this way, won’t she, Mr Rolls?’ Webb said to ‘Mr Phillips’ with a look of near worship on his mug. So that was his name, Mr Rolls. I’d heard it somewhere before but, at that moment, I couldn’t remember where.

‘Do more good in what way?’ I asked. All their faces and, presumably, mine, too, were lit up red by the sea of flame down below in the streets. I felt my breathing coming short as a terrible thought developed in my mind. ‘What are you doing to the poor kid?’

Men on the cathedral roofs below, real men, lifted buckets and fought with barely adequate hoses.

‘Oh do shut up!’ Mr Rolls exploded at me. Just like that. From being perfectly calm he went to completely berserk in a matter of seconds. Again he hit me, the swine, and again it was right on my poor old conk. I fell, as I had done the time before, but I didn’t black out. As I lay on the ground I watched Milly laugh in a way that reminded me of the faces that poor half-dead opium addicts pull. I’ve buried a few in my time; I know that they exist and what they look like. This kid put me in the mind of such unfortunate folk. Now I remembered who Mr Rolls was.

‘You work with Mr Phillips, don’t you?’ I said as I held a hand up to my nose. I was just covered with blood by this time. ‘The real Mr Phillips.’

Mr Rolls raised one perfectly undamaged eyebrow and smiled. From where I lay on the ground I could see the great dome sweep down towards the street below. Both the dome and the City it rose above glowed red.

‘We’re saving the cathedral,’ Mr Rolls said.

‘Then why aren’t you fighting the fires with the rest of the blokes!’ I replied. ‘What are you doing up here with a young kid full of drugs? What kind of men are you?’

Mr Webb leaned down and pulled me roughly to my feet. ‘It’s only a transaction, is all it is, mate,’ he said. ‘I told you the kid was no good. Her own father knows she’s no good. It won’t be no loss or nothing.’

No loss? What the bloody hell did that mean? But part of me did know. Part of me was coming to a truly horrifying conclusion.

Mr Rolls called over to Mr Bolton and the bloke I didn’t recognise, ‘Go down and make sure no one else comes up. When we’re ready I’ll call you to come and assist.’

They walked towards the stairs that lead down to the Stone Gallery and then disappeared below. This left Mr Rolls, Mr Smith, Mr Webb, Milly and myself. I still had that blessed gun at my back, courtesy of Mr Smith. I wondered how many more weapons were going to come out during this shift of the St Paul’s Fire Watch. Not that these men could possibly be what I would consider proper watchmen. Webb wasn’t a watchman at all and it was doubtful that Mr Rolls was. If he had been a real watchman, why would he have disguised himself as Mr Phillips? How, I wondered briefly and with terror gripping my mind, had he got hold of what could only be Mr Phillips’s face mask? Mr Andrews’s mad words about the Freemasons came back to haunt me. I knew what they were about to do to Milly. She was, after all, only a child, and Mr Andrews had told me that when churches were built in the old days, the gift of a child to . . . whatever, was preferable to that of an adult He’d told me to look after her for a very good reason.

‘If you’ve already sacrificed Mr Ronson and Mr Andrews to whatever you sacrifice to . . . the Beast—’ I began. I was cut off by the sound of Mr Rolls’s laughter. ‘You’re Masons, aren’t you, you—’

‘The Beast? What Beast, Mr Hancock? Do you even know what you’re talking about?’

They all looked at me as if I’d gone mad.

Suddenly even breathing the word sacrifice sounded stupid. Mr Andrews had been a strange old man with some barmy ideas, why had I listened to him? Of course they hadn’t brought the kid up to the Golden Gallery to kill or ‘sacrifice’ her, that was ridiculous! Mr Ronson had fallen from the Whispering Gallery in a very regrettable accident and Mr Andrews I couldn’t exactly account for, but this could all just be about child prostitution, couldn’t it? Horrible as that whole subject is, I tried at that moment to convince myself that was indeed the truth of the matter.

‘George Chivers, Milly’s dad, and me have been mates for years,’ Mr Webb’s cracked, coarse voice cut across my thoughts. ‘Architect, he used to be, just like these nice gentlemen here.’

‘He sold his own daughter to be used by these men!’ I said. ‘All of them!’

‘George Chivers?’ Mr Webb smiled, his false teeth clacking apart as he did so. ‘Nah! George C is far too pissed to think of anything except his booze and his bed. His liver’s gone. George ain’t moved from his place for years. It’s me what keeps George going, me what teaches his kids what they need to know out on the streets, with blokes.’

I looked down into his face and saw something that was evil. I’ve seen it many times before, I know what it looks like. He was a pimp! He had sex with his mates’ poor little kids, put them out on the streets to do what they did with other men, and he had to take his cut of the money gained from that too, oh yes indeed he did! His poor, tired but honest wife probably didn’t know anything about it – or rather, I hoped that she didn’t. Not that I thought that much about her now, because I was so angry that all I wanted to do was hit her husband.