Ashes to Ashes (16 page)

‘You . . .’

‘George Chivers’s old mates, Mr Rolls and Mr Bolton and all of them, at first contacted him, of course, but then when he told me about it, I took it over for him,’ Mr Webb continued. ‘George couldn’t work it out properly, didn’t understand. He thought it was just the usual with the kiddie. But it’s such a big idea this. Most people don’t really get it, do they, Mr Rolls? A very special job. So I did it, for a commission of course.’

‘A rather large fee as I recall,’ Mr Rolls said. ‘Mr Smith, you and I must change now for the ceremony. Mr Webb, if you would kindly cover this Israelite with Mr Smith’s revolver. We will deal with him in due course.’

Deal with me? I imagined this was a terminal thing of some sort. They had, after all, tried to kill me before. Why they didn’t do it at that moment I still don’t know. Maybe the ceremony they had planned included the presence of some poor schmuck from outside?

‘Certainly chief,’ Mr Webb said. ‘You get changed.’

Changed? Changed into what? And what was this ‘ceremony’ Rolls talked about? I couldn’t see that these men had anything like bags full of robes or whatever such people wore with them. And now I was a Jew to these people, was I? He’d said it with such contempt, the word ‘Israelite’, I wondered if these men were less Masons and more Nazis! Mr Rolls turned around to pick up a box I’d not noticed before which was behind him on the floor. At the same moment, Mr Smith began to pass the revolver across, behind my back, to Mr Webb. Milly, slumped against the railings looking out across the burning city, was on Mr Smith’s other side. If I was going to try and do anything, now was probably the only time I’d have the opportunity of doing so. The moment when Smith’s hand let go and Webb’s hand took control of the weapon was possibly the only chance I was ever going to get. As I felt Smith’s arm stretch behind me, I pushed myself away from Webb and twisted round quickly. I didn’t get the gun. It fell on to the floor with a metallic clatter and I lost sight of it.

‘Bloody hell!’

I was hit again, although whether it was by Smith or Webb, I couldn’t tell. The three of us, all bent to the floor now, pushed and clawed at each other, looking for the weapon that would give either them or me control over the situation. What was going on or about to happen on the Golden Gallery was no longer my concern. I just wanted to get away from there, preferably with young Milly, her foul mouth and all, in tow.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ I heard Mr Rolls yell. ‘Grab hold of him, for God’s sake!’

I pushed Mr Webb away from me with my left shoulder. I heard him grunt as he slammed into the railings around the gallery. A fist, Mr Smith’s, it must have been, came up from low down and punched me yet again in the face. This time, however, it wasn’t my nose that caught it, but my cheekbone. I was, I imagined, going to end up looking like an old boxer after all this punishment. If, that was, I ended up anywhere.

‘I’ll have you over the fucking side, you ugly wog!’ I heard Webb mutter through breathless gasps. I saved my own insults in order to hang on to my breath. I wasn’t strong. I’d been up so many stairs in the past few hours the muscles in my legs were strained to breaking point. As for my breath, well, that was coming hard again now, very hard. Where the hell was that blasted revolver?

‘This what you’re looking for?’

We all stopped at once, Webb, Smith and me, as soon as we heard her voice. I looked over my shoulder and saw Milly, smiling, standing beside Mr Rolls. She had the pistol we’d all been looking for aimed at his head.

Chapter Eleven

W
ebb was the first one to speak.

‘Milly, doll, don’t—’

‘Don’t what, Charlie?’ she said with a laugh in her voice. She put one of her small fingers on the trigger.

Mr Rolls, whose handsome face was now visibly pale even through the red and gold lights from the fires down below, looked across at us and said, ‘Smith, I thought you drugged the bloody child!’

‘I did!’ Mr Smith replied. ‘As God is my witness! A pipe of opium, as I told you, a—’

‘Why don’t you tell them, Charlie?’ the girl said to Webb. There was a look in her eyes I hadn’t seen just minutes earlier. It was the kind of sobriety a person doesn’t associate with people who use drugs like opium. Webb, I noticed, couldn’t meet this new, sober gaze.

Still looking at Webb, Milly said, ‘Cat got your tongue, Charlie?’ She laughed. ‘As Charlie well knows, one pipe ain’t going to do for me,’ she said. ‘Been smoking four years now. He’s been giving it to me! I can sober up from it just like that, these days!’ She snapped her fingers up at Mr Rolls’s face. ‘I’m a clever girl, I am!’

‘Mil—’

‘And thank you for it, Charlie! Thank you for that opium!’ Milly said. ‘Because if I hadn’t had it, I’d’ve not been able to do the blokes what I’ve done and that includes you too, Charlie! But now—’

‘Put the gun down, Milly love; I swear we’ll just go on home now and—’

‘I thought I just come here for the usual. Do a few blokes and get a few bob,’ Milly said. ‘It was a laugh when I first got here. I ran about having a right old time! Doing it in a church? What a hoot!’ The wind was whipping through her hair now as tendrils of air from the storm around the cathedral reached up towards the golden ball and cross at its apex. Small she may have been, but Milly Chivers’s face was as old and as hard as stone. ‘But Charlie, this time nobody wanted to fuck me, did they?’

Webb didn’t answer, neither did anyone else. Maybe Mr Andrews hadn’t been wrong after all. Webb had implied that Milly had been sold to Rolls and the others. But if she wasn’t sold for sex, then what these blokes purchased the girl for had to be what I had feared the most.

‘I knew you and these blokes were going to do me in,’ Milly said.

‘Milly!’

‘You,’ she looked directly at me as she spoke, ‘get over here.’

In order to emphasise her point and probably to stop Smith or Webb from trying to block my path, she pressed the pistol hard against Mr Rolls’s neck. I stumbled forwards.

‘Mr . . .’

‘Hancock,’ I said as I stood beside her panting from the fear, the wind and the heat all around me. On the floor behind Mr Rolls I could now see what was in the box he had only just opened. It was a jacket with some ribbons laid across it. If this was what he had planned to wear for some sort of devilish ceremony, then I wasn’t very impressed. They were so very ordinary.

‘Mr Hancock, I think I’m right in thinking that you ain’t with this lot,’ Milly said.

‘Yes. Milly, I tried to help you, earlier.’

She completely ignored this. ‘You know what to do with a gun?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Take it,’ she said as she pulled me towards her. ‘Hold it on him.’ She pushed it still further into Mr Rolls’s neck as she slipped her small hand from under mine. ‘We’re getting out of here, Mr Hancock.’

She sounded so confident and also so much older than any ten-year-old I’d ever met before, that for a while, I was lost in admiration for her. I didn’t ask her how we were going to get out and maybe I should have, but then even if I’d done so, I doubt whether I could have prevented what happened next.

‘If either of you move, Mr Hancock’ll kill your mate,’ she said to Webb and Smith as they stood seemingly quite calmly in front of her. Mr Smith did as he was told. Mr Webb did not.

Moving towards her, he said, ‘Babe—’

‘Don’t you “babe” me!’

I thought she just punched him. She was small, and so what she did didn’t look all that much to me. It was only when Webb first gasped and then folded over under her blow that I knew something had to be wrong. His hands flew to his guts and he made a sort of gurgling sound in his throat.

Smith, who was now attempting to hold up the falling Webb, said, ‘She’s stabbed him!’

I felt Mr Rolls’s body flinch and tense up underneath the pistol and I said to him, ‘Don’t do anything! Don’t do
anything
!’

Now I was truly lost. I’d come to save a little girl from something horrible, and now she’d stabbed a man. Not a nice man, admittedly, but a man she was standing over and smiling at now, as he bled down his trousers and on to the ancient stone floor.

‘He’s dying!’ Mr Smith was down on the floor with Webb, now looking up at the girl with absolute terror on his face. ‘What—’

‘You always told me and Rita to carry blades, didn’t you, Charlie?’ Milly said, ignoring Smith completely. ‘To protect ourselves? Well, now I have protected myself, so there!’

‘Milly,’ I said.

‘The only way we’re going to get out of here is to get rid of all of these,’ she said as she looked around at the three men who had been our captors. Then before I could answer her or plead with her to stop what she was doing, she took hold of the box of clothes on the ground and smacked Mr Smith around the side of the head with it. With a grunt, he fell unconscious across Webb’s now gasping body. Milly was terrifying me.

‘I am not killing this bloke!’ I said as I nevertheless still held the gun up to Mr Rolls’s head. I had killed far too many people in the First Lot. One is too many, and I had stabbed, shot and beat far more than just one to death back then. Their faces, as well as their blood and guts, are very central to my waking and sleeping nightmares. I wasn’t killing again, not that night, not ever.

Milly shrugged. She looked down at Smith and said, ‘I haven’t killed him. He’ll be all right in an hour or two.’ Then she pointed to Rolls. ‘He tried to kill you,’ she said. ‘He’d kill you now if he could.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘But I’m not killing him, I’m—’

‘Milly! Love . . .’ Webb was coughing up blood now and, although I knew that he was a goner, I had to say something about getting him to a doctor.

The girl looked at me with both coldness and what looked like pity. ‘He’s dying,’ she said simply. ‘He’s got TB anyway. There ain’t no point.’

For the first time in a long while, Mr Rolls spoke, ‘She’s a demon! Hancock, for God’s sake, you have the gun! Shoot her for—’

‘If you shoot me, you’ll be doing exactly what he and them other nuts have wanted all the time!’ Milly said. I was breathing hard now and couldn’t speak but she must have been able to tell from the look on my face that I wasn’t going to do her any harm.

Milly put something, I imagine the knife she’d stabbed Webb with, in her pocket and began to rummage through Mr Rolls’s clothes box. She nodded her head towards Rolls and then said to me, ‘There’s some stuff in here we can tie him up with.’

At the bottom of the stairs up to the Stone Gallery, there were men both Milly and I knew, waiting for some sort of signal from Mr Rolls. I didn’t know exactly what that was about. I had an idea based largely upon what Mr Andrews had told me earlier. But Milly, so she claimed, knew.

About halfway down from the Golden Gallery to the Stone Gallery, I tapped Milly on the shoulder and said that she and I needed to talk. It was pitch-black on that staircase, with only the light from a little torch Milly had with her to light our way. She sat down on one stair and I followed suit, a few steps above her. As I looked down at her face, I was struck by how old she looked for her age, and it wasn’t just her behaviour that made her seem like an adult.

‘Mr Rolls worked with my dad, years ago before I was born,’ Milly said. ‘Mr Phillips did too, but he ain’t here. I think he’s part of this, what’s going on here, but I ain’t seen him tonight.’

‘What is going on here?’

I was in a stairwell with a child who had hit one man hard enough to knock him out and all but killed another!

‘You have to know drinkers and drug takers to understand it all,’ Milly said. ‘But the short of it is that Mr Rolls knew my dad had fell on hard times and he knew that he had little ’uns. He asked my dad if he could buy one of us. Dad must’ve thought it was for the usual reason, I know I did. So he told Mr Rolls to speak to Charlie. Charlie’s looked after business for Dad for years, just like he did with Mum.’

‘Charlie was your mum’s pimp?’

‘Charlie and that sad thing of a wife. Yes, they pimped for Mum and for me and me sister Rita, too.’

The Webbs had to have money. Men pay more than the going rate for youngsters. And yet the Webbs and their kids had looked so poor!

‘As I say, I thought this job was just the same as usual,’ Milly said with that cringe-making adult knowingness in her voice. ‘I thought it was funny Mr Rolls should be pretending to be Mr Phillips; men do all sorts to make themselves excited and so I didn’t think anything about it. I did think it was funny being brought into the cathedral. I had a right good game of it at first as you know, running about. Truth was the size of the raid took them all by surprise. They had duties to do and couldn’t deal with me as they’d wanted straight away. I thought it was peculiar but I didn’t think that the Watch blokes were like . . . you know, bad blokes . . .’ She looked down at her hands. ‘But then they’re not. Mr Rolls ain’t in the Watch at all and them as are with him are, I think, only in it for what they want to do tonight.’

‘Which is what?’

‘To kill me,’ Milly said simply. ‘They’ve got some sort of idea that killing me will save the cathedral.’ Of course she, a child, had been the sacrifice all along. Her eyes filled with tears now and suddenly she looked a lot younger. ‘Charlie sold me to them so that they could kill me! He told them I was ten. I tells all the blokes I go with I’m ten; I thought nothing of it. I run around the cathedral for a laugh, yes, but also so that by playing like a kid they’d be bound to believe his story!’

‘You’re not ten?’

She looked at me as if I was mad. ‘I may be small, but I don’t think you’re daft enough to think that I’m ten, Mr Hancock!’

I had at first, but now that I’d actually been with her for a while, I knew that she just couldn’t possibly be that young.

‘I’m sixteen,’ Milly said. And then, seeing that I wanted to ask her something else, she added, ‘And yes, I do take opium sometimes, but it does knock me out and so I didn’t smoke it tonight. I knew something was wrong. I tapped the opium pipe they give me out on the floor of one of them other galleries.’