Children of the Archbishop (16 page)

To make doubly sure that he was not observed, Ginger went down as low as if he had been playing Indians. He thrust his arms out in front of him and kept his stomach pressed flat against the catwalk. It was a gutter really, that catwalk. And his jersey soaked up the water like blotting-paper. But he didn't let that worry him. It only showed that he was crawling properly.

From the far end of the wash-house roof there was a ten-foot drop. But that was easy because there was a drainpipe running down the angle of the wall. Ginger had climbed that pipe before. He knew exactly where the footholds were. It was as simple as going down a builder's ladder. And as quick. Less than a minute after he had passed Mr. Dawlish's room, he was standing upright on the ground with the blank wall of the wash-house sheltering him.

This, however, was where he had to be careful. The windows of the Cranmer Block looked straight out on to the playground. And there were lights in three of them. Broad shining trackways, like flat searchlights, stretched out across the wet asphalt of the playground. Because of them, Ginger had to keep up close to the wall, fairly sliding along beside the brickwork. And to get where he was going he had to pass right alongside Mr. Rushgrove's room. This wasn't so good because Mr. Rushgrove wasn't a bit like Mr. Dawlish. He hadn't got spots on his waistcoat and a wet dribbly place on his chin even when his pipe wasn't in his mouth. Mr. Rushgrove didn't smoke at all, in fact. He looked after the games and went three times round the playground in running shorts
every morning before breakfast. In fact, Mr. Rushgrove was just the sort of person that Ginger most wanted to avoid. It would be like having a mastiff on his heels.

And there was one nasty moment. A thoroughly nasty one, a moment when Ginger really thought that he had been copped. He had left the Cranmer Block safely behind him and was about to slip along the narrow alley between the Ridley Block and the end of the Juniors' lavatory when he heard Mr. Rushgrove's door opening. And, at the same moment he heard the sound of footsteps approaching. This was the worst possible place for such a thing to happen. It was nothing less than a trap, this alleyway. The walls ran up a blank twenty feet on either side of him—it was a chasm, in fact—and behind him lay the open front door of the Cranmer Block with Mr. Rushgrove's room just inside. The nearest thing to a hiding-place was a wooden box about three feet high that projected some nine inches from the wall. It was where the stop-cock of the lavatories was housed. And behind the box Ginger crouched down. He gathered his legs up under him like a cat and turned his head to the wall so that his face shouldn't show up white in the darkness. Then he waited.

The footsteps came nearer. And the voice. But it was only one voice. The voice of Mr. Prevarius talking to himself.

“Shouldn't be long now,” he was saying. “Not so long as it has been. Not by a long chalk. Then to hell with Dr. Trump and the whole bloody lot of them. To red-hot …”

Unless Ginger got away now that the alley was clear he might just as well have stayed in bed. He was within thirty feet of the girls' wall by now. He could see it jet-black against the dark sky, stretching as far as the eye could reach, the Great Wall of Putney, with a crest of broken glass mounted on the top. It was the sort of wall that would make a cat think twice before attempting it.

But there was one place Ginger knew about where a plane tree grew close up alongside the wall. It was a shabby elderly specimen of a plane tree, with its skin coming off in slabs and patches, and its lower boughs lopped back unmercifully. The poor thing just stood there, maimed and mutilated, waiting for kites and paper darts to get caught in its branches. To Ginger's eyes, however, it was more than a plane tree: it was a staircase. There was a piece of rope hanging down from the stump of one of the lower limbs. The boys used it for swinging and Ginger knew that if he swung
himself hard enough he could get himself right up into the tree. Then the rest was just plain climbing.

At the third attempt he was successful. He got one leg firmly over a branch and then moved on up the tree like a racoon. The wall seemed higher than he remembered it. He had to go on scrambling upwards before he could see over the top. And even then there was an unpleasant blank-looking gap between the farthest branch and the brickwork. It was about four feet of nothingness that Ginger had to get over somehow. Just slippery, peeling bark on one side and broken bottle-tops on the other.

“Cor lumme,” Ginger said to himself as he surveyed it.

But, as there was nothing else for it, he went on, wriggling himself cautiously along the branch from notch to notch. He wasn't actually afraid, just a bit dubious about whether he was going to get over or not. And, in the end, it wasn't Ginger who decided it. It was the branch. While he was still thinking quietly about things, the branch slowly began to sag. It was only a small branch. But, even so, it didn't give way all at once. Instead, it dropped in a series of little jerks as though it were vainly trying to recover itself. And, as it sagged, it creaked. Every few seconds it emitted a sharp cracking sound. Then, just as the whole thing began to fold over like a lily, Ginger jumped. He landed square on the broken glass. And, relieved of his weight, the branch sprang up into the darkness.

“Got there,” said Ginger.

Then he broke off suddenly. He had just put his hand down to his leg and found that it was wet. The serrated edge of a bottle had slit him right along the calf and the blood was running down on to Spud's gym shoes. Ginger could feel it like a warm, crawling caterpillar.

“Wish I'd brought a bit of rag,” Ginger began thinking. “Wish I'd thought of it.”

But there was more than this one cut to worry about. Now that he came to take stock of things he found that both his hands were bleeding. And, suddenly for no particular reason, he wanted to cry. It wasn't the cut on his leg, or the way his hands were bleeding, or the height or the blackness of the night that depressed him. It was the sheer unfriendliness of that wilderness of broken glass, that narrow graveyard of Bass and Batey and Schweppes and Guinness and the rest of them.

So far as he could make out, the girls' playground was simply bare asphalt like the boys'. This surprised him because for some
reason or other he had always imagined that on the girls' side of the wall it would be grass. Smooth mown grass. But he was wrong. There was nothing soft to land on anywhere. And it was out of the question trying to wriggle along the wall. The points of the glass dug and jabbed at him every time he moved. So, because he had no intention of being sawn to pieces, he decided to jump. Jump straight down into the darkness.

To cut down the height of the drop he worked over to the edge and took a grip on one bottle stump more firmly embedded than the rest. Then twisting himself round he dangled there for a moment and let go.

“Now I really done it,” the thought came to him as he was falling. “Now I'm for it if I can't get back.”

Then the hard playground rushed up to meet him, and he landed. He was now in forbidden territory where no boy of the Archbishop Bodkin Hospital had ever been before. And, once he was on the ground, the night seemed thicker ebony than ever. He could only grope along, scooping a way through it with his outstretched hands. Unless he actually trod on the arrow, felt it right under the sole of his foot, there would be no chance of finding it in this black asphalt pit.

“Better start looking all the same, I s'pose,” he said to himself. “Silly going back again wivout even having looked for me arrer.”

And hesitatingly, peeringly, without any real plan or purpose, and with a tingle of sheer excitement in the tips of his fingers, he set off across the lake of puddles looking for his piece of wood.

It was then that the trouble started. And it was the moon that set things off. Up to this moment, unseen and skulking, the moon suddenly appeared brightly shining, in a ragged window of cloud high up in the heavens over Hammersmith. The whole playground was lit up as though gas-lamps had been turned on. The outline of the Nightingale Block and the Victoria Wing appeared from nowhere, erected magically out of cardboard. Ginger could see every detail, even the toy fire-escape that zig-zagged downwards from the Junior Girls to the entrance of the Infants' Recreation Room.

But what was more important was that anyone looking into
the playground could see Ginger. And, at that moment, Nurse Stedge was standing at the window, her long giraffe-neck craning out. She had said her prayers and was twisting up her thin tail of grey hair in readiness to pop a hair-net over it when she thought that she observed a movement. Something black among the shadows. A man!

The plait slipped from her fingers and began to uncoil itself. But Nurse Stedge was past noticing or caring. All her life she had been dreading this. In a flash she saw herself gagged and bound with her nightdress torn and dishevelled while an armed thug callously rifled everything that she possessed, her handbag, her corals, her snap-shot album, her writing-case. And how could she be sure that fettered and defenceless as she was, the brute would stop short at material treasure? To preserve her honour before consciousness ebbed away, she snatched up her camel-hair dressing-gown and rushed along to Mrs. Gurnett.

Mrs. Gurnett was already asleep. Lying flat on her back with her hands folded like a Crusader's upon the prominent projection of her bosom, she was dreaming about Ramsgate. But at the piercing words of “Matron! There's a man in the grounds!” the pier, the kiosks, the pavilion, the little cafés, all vanished and Mrs. Gurnett was out of bed with a bound.

Alongside Mrs. Gurnett's stockiness, Nurse Stedge felt safer. But only for a moment. For Mrs. Gurnett's orders were callous and terrible.

“Then go and tell Sergeant Chiswick,” was all she said.

“Go?” Nurse Stedge faltered. “Across … across the playground with
him
there?”

“Then go round the back way,” Mrs. Gurnett replied tersely. “And if you see anything, scream. I'll be here.”

“Yes, Matron,” Nurse Stedge replied meekly.

As she stood there, she was desperately working out in her mind the most roundabout route to the Sergeant's lodge. On her own calculation it would take at least five minutes.

“Well, hurry up,” Mrs. Gurnett told her heartlessly. “He may be dangerous.”

As soon as Nurse Stedge was gone, Mrs. Gurnett went over to the window to keep watch. The moon meanwhile had gone in again. Beneath her, Mrs. Gurnett could see nothing but inky blackness in which a whole regiment of men could have lurked without being detected. Then, out of the darkness, came a scream. Nurse Stedge's scream. It rose shrill and cutting, like a band saw, out
of the still night air. And Mrs. Gurnett's heart gave a sudden bump as she realised that she had sent this faithful, frightened woman to her death.

Heaving up the big sash window in front of her—she had forearms like a lumberjack's—she yelled: “Murder!”

Ginger had heard both the scream and Mrs. Gurnett's agonising cry. And he was frightened. Really frightened this time. He didn't know what was happening. Didn't even know that it was connected in any way with him. What he did know was that the police would be on the scene in no time. There would be flash-lamps, truncheons, trampling feet, pursuits, cordons, scuffles, handcuffs.

“I'm going back,” he said. “I want to be in bed. I want to be next to Spud.”

But the scream. What was it that had so alarmed Nurse Stedge? As it happened, it was Mr. Prevarius. His evening stroll over, he was on his way back to his room when he saw Nurse Stedge coming towards him, one hand outstretched for protection against unseen assailants, the other tightly gripping the neckband of her dressing-gown. Admittedly, in the darkness, Mr. Prevarius could not tell that it was Nurse Stedge. Could not even see that it was a lady in fact. But he should have been more careful, more considerate of other people's night-time jumpiness. He should definitely not have stepped out suddenly from a doorway and said: “Boo!” In the result, he had a fainting woman on his hands.

And it was not only Mrs. Gurnett who had heard the scream. Mr. Rushgrove had heard it. He was just finishing his trunk-bending exercises at the time. And, grabbing hold of a rounders' bat, he tore off just as he was in vest and singlet ready to beat up all-comers.

Nor was Mr. Rushgrove alone in his intervention. Dr. Trump himself had been roused. He was not in bed: he was still finishing a sermon. He had just started the last page and had taken his shoe off to scratch his foot when he
thought
he heard a scream. Then, because Mrs. Gurnett's window was just opposite his own, he was nearly knocked out of his chair by the cry of murder. Scuffling into his shoe again and pressing his glasses more firmly into place, he set off down the stairs unarmed except for a police whistle. This was no time for
him
to think about weapons. He felt simply that he owed it to Dame Eleanor to be the first on the spot to calm, to assert authority, even if necessary to effect arrest.

All the same he had the forethought on the way to summon Sergeant Chiswick. The first that Sergeant Chiswick, who was naturally a heavy sleeper, knew about it all was when Dr. Trump hammered on his window with the mouthpiece of the police whistle and shouted: “Show a leg, man. There's violence.”

By now, Nurse Stedge had recovered sufficiently to be able to speak. But only to Mr. Rushgrove. It was significant that she could still not bring herself to utter a word to Mr. Prevarius. But, encouraged by the sight of the rounders' bat and Mr. Rushgrove's huge biceps, she told everything. Above all, she urged him to hurry. She was terrified lest the intruder, the burglar, the sex-maniac should already be loose among the innocents, pilfering, slaughtering, slashing to right and left among the cradles.

And by now it was a powerful enough sort of posse that had assembled. Mr. Rushgrove led, only because no one else could keep up with him. Then came Dr. Trump, his bare fists clenched in readiness and his police whistle firmly clenched between his teeth. Next, Sergeant Chiswick swinging a truncheon. And finally Mr. Prevarius, sauntering, nonchalant, incredulous.