Strangers (12 page)

A screen of tarpaulins had been rigged up and the constables stood aside to let the commander through. Behind the store front, over the spot where they were digging into the basement, they had made a kind of shelter. Lengths of scaffolding had been roughly bolted together and roofed with planks, as makeshift as a child’s play house. Beneath the flimsy protection the rescuers went on burrowing downwards. One of them glanced upwards for an instant, his face coated with grime.

The commander crouched in the dirt and the chunks of debris were prised loose and handed backwards past him. When the bodies were recovered and the site was safe once more, every piece would be examined by the forensic teams.

The commander gestured that he wanted to move forwards and the firemen made way for him to inch forward under the planking. Looking down he could see a coloured edge of carpet in the store’s colours, and the thickness of floor beneath it sliced as neatly as cake. Below him two firemen were working like machines, hauling out the rubble. And beneath them, the commander knew, eight or ten feet down, were two of the three bodies.

The space the rescuers were working in, cramped as close as they could under the hopeful protective umbrella, was tiny. The commander delivered his brief word of praise and encouragement and squirmed backwards again to leave them to their task. His opposite number from the fire service was waiting inside the curtain of tarpaulins.

‘We should reach them within the hour, God willing,’ he said. The policeman nodded and they stood in silence watching the work, the mounting piles of debris as it was feverishly dug out and set aside.

‘From the look of all that …’ the commander murmured, and they both knew that he meant
no one could survive under all that
. The fire officer’s brief glance upwards revealed his anxiety for his men, working under threat of burial themselves to reach victims who were almost certainly dead. But neither of the senior men spoke again, and the slow process of cutting and lifting went on as the firemen fought their way downwards.

Steve heard it first.

It lasted only a few seconds but it was the unmistakable high whine of a power drill. It was cutting through the darkness. It meant that they really were coming for them, at last.

‘Annie. I can hear them. Listen.’

As if to prove it there was another noise at once, the sharp ring of metal on stone and then the whine of the drill again, dropping in pitch. Steve felt relief and gratitude numb the pain inside him like a powerful drug. When Annie didn’t answer he was furiously angry with her.

‘Can’t you hear?’ he demanded. The darkness swallowed his words and Annie listened for something else, longing to hear. What would rescue sound like, when she had longed for it so much?

Then it came, no more than a tiny metallic scraping, once and then silence, and then again, louder.
It sounds like music
, she thought wildly. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I hear it.’

‘
Now
we can shout,’ Steve exulted. ‘I’ll count three. Then scream as loud as you can.’

He counted, one, two, three, and they screamed together. It sounded so tiny, the only noise that they could make, eaten up by the hateful dark. Annie’s head fell back and she closed her eyes. It was no good. Of course it was no good.

Steve was thinking, a power drill of some kind. That means they’ve brought the power in, cables, floodlights, everything possible. He had an image of the black cables snaking over the rubble, the intent faces of the rescuers with the harsh shadows from the lights across them. There had been silence for so long, since the first wailing sirens, that he had been afraid he had imagined the other noises. He had begun to fear that there was no rescue at all. He had even wondered – he could confront that terror now, now that he knew it was unfounded – whether it had been a different kind of bomb, and there was no one left outside to come to their rescue. Horror prickled at his spine until the sounds started up again.

‘They’re right overhead, Annie. Do you know what that means?’ Still she didn’t answer and he shouted at her, ‘Don’t you know?’

‘Tell me,’ she said. He heard her exhaustion, and knew that she was near to giving up, now, after so long.

‘Annie,’ he begged her. ‘Hold on for just a little while longer. They’re right overhead. It means they must have found where we are. They’ve used heat-seeking cameras, and they can come straight to us. I’d forgotten that’s what they’d do.’ Steve shook his head, weakly surprised by his own stupidity. ‘We must make them hear us,’ he said. ‘I’ll count again. Shout, Annie.’

Again, the thin sound rising and evaporating into the limitless dark.

‘It isn’t any use,’ she whispered, but Steve’s fingers dug into her hand like a claw.

‘Again,’ he commanded, and then, ‘Again.’

One of the firemen held up his hand. He lifted his head to listen and the others froze into stillness. The silence seeped from the torn hole that held them and spread outwards. The next time it came they all heard it. It was a cry, very faint, but a human cry. They stood still for another moment, then heard it once more.

‘Someone’s alive down there.’

The word was carried backwards like a torch. It reached the senior officers waiting inside the tarpaulin screen, and the medical team waiting with the ambulances.

The commander stepped quickly forward and looked down at the filthy faces ringing the hole. ‘As fast as you can,’ he said quietly, and they stooped to work again.

Martin was chilled to the bone and his face was stiff with being turned into the wind, watching the unchanging scene in the distance. Abruptly he turned his back on it, but the sight of it was still clear in his mind’s eye. He knew that he would never forget the distorted shape of the store against the cold sky. He began to walk northwards, his feet painfully numb in his thin indoor shoes. The nearest tube station was closed, he had seen that when he passed it on the way back from his interview with the police. He would have to walk on to the next one. There would be a telephone there.

He felt a little warmer as he walked, but his feet stung as the circulation started up again. He began to walk faster and faster, imagining how he would pick up the receiver and dial the number. Perhaps Annie would answer it. Perhaps she had come home long ago. He was almost running now, wondering how he could have stood stupidly for so long without telephoning. Perhaps she was waiting for him to call, sitting with the boys and Audrey, comfortable in the warm room.

The blue and red tube station sign drew him on and he ran the last hundred yards, panting and slithering on the greasy pavement. In the ticket hall there were two payphones in malodorous wooden cubicles. He snatched up the receiver in the nearest booth and listened between his gasps for breath to the thick silence of a dead line. In the same instant a fat man wedged himself into the next booth and began leisurely dialling. Martin planted himself in the middle of the man’s field of vision and held up his coin, but the man turned his back and settled himself to talk.

Martin stood counting the seconds off, thinking what he would say to her.
Annie? You’re safe? Thank God
…

The fat man hung up abruptly and eased himself out of the cubicle. Martin cradled the warm receiver and dialled.

‘Hello?’

It was Audrey’s voice. The pips cut into it and Martin pushed in the coin, but he already knew. Annie hadn’t come home.

‘No,’ Audrey said. ‘There’s been nothing. But she could still be shopping …’

Martin looked out of the square mouth of the tube station entrance. It was getting dark. He could hear music somewhere, a jazzed-up carol. He thought it must be buskers playing at the foot of the escalators. Annie wasn’t still shopping. He knew where she was.

He said, ‘They’ve brought two people out alive so far. Both men. I asked one of the policemen on the cordons. I don’t know anything else. But they’re still working there, dozens of them. They’re still expecting to bring people out.’ Martin looked at the scribbled graffiti over the cubicle walls, names and telephone numbers,
phone Susie … Kim & Viv woz ’ere
. Millions of people, filling the sprawl of London, moving to and fro. Why should it be Annie, there, today?

‘I don’t know anything else,’ he said again, helplessly. ‘I’ll stay here until they stop looking.’

Audrey’s voice was quiet. He knew that she didn’t want the boys to hear what she was saying.

‘I haven’t had the TV on, Martin, in case they saw … something. But I heard on the kitchen radio. They think there are still three buried.’

‘Alive?’

‘They said it was a possibility. I think it was only the reporter, you know, guessing. There’s been eight killed.’

He knew that, too. He had pushed his way as close as he could get to the control trailer and asked. The officer had been sympathetic, like the ones at the station, but uninformative. Eight bodies had been recovered and identified. None of them was Annie. But he wouldn’t say whether the rescuers were still expecting to find anyone else, however hard Martin had pressed him. The radio reporter, whoever he was, had done rather better, he thought dully.

‘I’ll go back and wait then,’ he said. ‘Can you stay, Audrey?’

‘Of course I can.’

Martin noticed that she didn’t try to say that Annie would be back soon.

He hung up and pushed through the stream of people pressing into the station with their loaded carrier bags. Most of them looked over their shoulders as they plunged into the lighted space. He felt how their buzz of shocked fascination overcame their irritation at being diverted to a different station, and it made him angry. He went out into the icy street and began to walk back. The shape of the store, sideways on against the sky, looked mockingly almost as it always had done.

Martin was pulling his coat around him and wishing that he had wellington boots on his feet when the noise came. It was a vicious gust of wind first, making him duck his head into his collar. He heard the full blast of it funnelling past him down the long street. But then the wind dropped a little, and the noise should have subsided with it.

Instead it was augmented by a different sound, unplaceable at first, but it made the hairs prick at the nape of his neck. It was a low rumble like thunder, but much closer to earth than thunder. After the first crash it became the distant roar of surf breaking and, drowning in the sound of it, Martin heard people shouting. In a terrifying split-second he thought,
Another bomb
. He was waiting for the blast to hurl him sideways but it never came and he stood, frozen, staring into the sleet-thickened darkness. Surely it was
there
, before the noise, that the blue and white lights had been reflected under the store front? He couldn’t see them now. A pall of thick, coiling dust hid everything.

Martin began to run.

There had been no warning.

The police commander had been standing with a group of bomb squad officers close to the trailer. He felt the gust of wind and looked up in alarm. As he watched, the broken edge of the façade trembled and swayed inwards. He opened his mouth to shout a command and heard the sharp rain of falling chunks of brick.

‘Back,’ he yelled. ‘Get back.’

There was a scrambling rush of men, scattering away over the pavement to the shelter of the vehicles. He glimpsed a fireman rooted to the spot, and from the tilt of his helmet knew that he was staring upwards.

And then there was a deafening roar as the height of the façade crumpled inwards, seeming to hang unsupported in mid-air for an instant, and then fell into the wrecked centre of the store. The dust billowed outwards, thick with the acrid smell of pulverized brick. Choking, with his hands up to cover his nose and mouth, the commander stared into the clouds of it.

The blue tarpaulins had been torn down. The shelter of planks and scaffolding was buried, and half in and half out of what had once been one of the festive display windows a fireman was lying face-down, his legs twisted beneath him.

In the darkness the noise was another explosion, the first terror renewing itself. It took hold of them, eating them up as it swelled louder so that their bodies shook with the vibration and their lungs filled with the smell of it.

‘
Steve
.’

He heard Annie scream his name, just once, and then the scream was extinguished and the roaring went on. The sensation was like falling again, but it was more terrible because there was nowhere to fall to. Instead, everything else was falling. Steve turned his head until his neck wrenched, hunching his shoulder as if that could shelter him. There was a pounding rain of red-hot rocks all around him and he knew that he would drown in this solid sea of noise and grinding stone.

There was no pain then, except the agony of terror. On and on.

Still the noise, but muffled now. An angry, diminished roar.

The solid rain was still falling, but it was finer now. It had washed away all the air.

The air
.

Steve choked as the filth swept into his lungs. Gasps for breath convulsed his body and he writhed until the pain in his leg swept back again. He would have screamed but there was no breath. There was no breath to cough, no air to breathe.

The blackness grew heavier, pressing its pain all around him.

Steve closed his eyes and then there was nothing, oblivion as sweet and comfortable as a child’s sleep.

He didn’t want them to come back again, the pain and the smell and the air that lay like a mask over his face. But they came anyway, dragging him back into consciousness. Each breath tore his chest and yet wouldn’t fill his lungs.

He lay in the silence, moaning. The silence. The noise was over now. The thing, whatever it was, had come and gone and left him alone again. Then something else pecked at his unwelcome consciousness. He groped after it in the fog of agony and remembered,
not alone
. He made his mind work outwards, to the limits of his body. His shoulder and arm were still part of him, his arm outstretched. His fingers were still there, and he was still holding the girl’s hand.