The Safest Place in London (14 page)

Nancy fled, tripping and falling in her haste to escape, throwing out her hands to break her fall; a woman tried to help her up but Nancy pushed her away. She needed to run but she could not, the ocean of bodies in every direction was too great. She scrambled down off the platform's edge, falling again onto her hands and knees, pulling herself up and finding herself at the tunnel entrance. She paused to catch her breath. She had come too far down the platform, was at the wrong end of the station from where Emily waited for her. She looked down at her hands,
which were dirt-encrusted and cut and beginning to sting. Her stockings were torn. She needed to catch her breath.

Milly's hatred swam around her, it cut into her as the tiny pieces of grit cut into her hands. You loved him once, thought Nancy. You loved Joe. But the journey from love to hate, it turned out, was a short one, and one that was rarely, if ever, made in reverse.

She could not catch her breath. People were watching her, curious, wondering. For there were families sheltering here, right inside the tunnel. She made herself stop, straighten up, stand quite still, at the mouth of the tunnel. It drew her gaze, pulled her in. It emitted a strange musty, damp, electrical smell. A wind whistling distantly blew the scarf about her head, whipped the strands of hair into her eyes. The very last family sheltering the deepest inside the tunnel were wrapped up like Arctic explorers, only their eyes showing, huddling like people on a mountain top or on the edge of a precipice. And beyond the last family was darkness. If you went inside, if you walked far enough, you would reach Liverpool Street. It was perhaps a mile, which was no distance at all on the surface but underground in the darkness would be an eternity. She had never been afraid of the dark—for why be scared of something you could not see?—but this darkness, it leaped like a flame, touching something quite primeval within her, and she shivered. When she peered into the darkness after just a few yards there was nothing. A void. Probably sound itself was obliterated, though she heard the wind again. Anything might go on inside there and no one would know. A girl had been raped a few months back, down here during a raid, and no one had heard a thing. You could bring someone down here and
finish them off, do away with them, and no one would ever know. You could put your hands around someone's neck and strangle them or slip a knife between their ribs—if you had a knife—and no one would know.

She thought of Milly Fenwick and her two little boys who would go to the police station just the minute they got out of here.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

If she had not had Abigail with her perhaps Diana would have gone to help him. As it was, she fled, her child clutched tightly in her arms.

She ran and she did not stop, pushing past everyone who got in her way, jumping over bodies and stumbling and almost falling and getting up again and setting off once more. She did not look back. She did not look into any of the faces that appeared before her, rearing into view and vanishing again. She did not think about the face she had just seen on the floor of the latrines, crumpled and hovering on the very edge of existence; she did not think of the blank, empty faces of the three men who had surrounded Lance and who may or may not have noticed her and her child. She leaped from the platform and fell, plunging to the ground and landing on the blue travelling case, which was untouched and unharmed exactly where she had left it and which broke her fall though it badly bruised her knee.

‘Mummy, you're hurting me!'

Aghast, Diana righted herself and carefully placed Abigail on the ground, smoothing down her hair, trying with shaking fingers to locate the hairband which had come off in their mad dash and was now around Abigail's neck. ‘There, that's better, isn't it? I'm sorry, darling. Mummy's sorry.' Her voice sounded high, unnatural. Her fingers would not stop shaking.

‘Mummy, why did we run away from Uncle Lance?'

Lance staring with empty eyes, staring into the face of death. She had done nothing to help him. She had not lifted a finger.

‘Sshh, darling.' She stroked her child's hair. Forced herself to stop. Made herself clench her fingers tightly to make them stop shaking. But what could she have done? Her own safety, hers and Abigail's, was paramount. He would not have expected her to do anything, any more than he would have gone to her assistance. He had said it himself: he knew the risks. He had brought it on himself.

‘But
why
, Mummy? Why did we run away?'

All the same, she had not tried to find a policeman. She had not alerted any of the wardens. She did not even know for certain he was dead.

‘It's a game. We're just playing a silly game. Now, sit still. Mummy's . . . a little out of breath, that's all.'

Someone would call the police. But perhaps, by then, they would all be out of here; perhaps the raid would be over? It would be best, she realised, if they had left by the time the police were called. It would be best if Lance—

‘Everything is going to be just fine, you'll see. We'll be going home soon and then we can have a lovely breakfast together, can't we?'

For the night could not last much longer and the little blue travelling case was still here, safe and sound and stuffed full of Carnation milk and tinned peaches and American coffee and bars of chocolate and pilchards and sugar and dried milk and tea. Diana pulled it to her and held on to it. She closed her eyes. She no longer thought about Lance Beckwith, who had once been John's friend. That part of her life was over.

Diana had not tried to find a policeman. But a policeman was trying to find her.

He made no sound, or none that she could hear above the now-constant rumble and distant booms above and the ebb and flow of voices all around, but still something made her look up. At first all she saw was a solitary figure picking a path through the chaos and her eyes went to him and passed on, not stopping, barely registering. Then they slid back for no other reason than that this was a man not in a uniform but in a worn mackintosh, hands deep in pockets, a hat pulled low and a shadow at his chin that suggested he had not shaved in many hours. Dressed like a gangster but not a gangster. Somehow she knew instantly—horribly—that he was a policeman, a fact that was confirmed by the presence of a uniformed constable a step behind him.

They were making their way steadfastly, unwaveringly, towards her, and her body went cold with terror.

She did not run—there was no question of that. Instead, Diana closed her eyes, buried her head in Abigail's hair, tried to catch her breath. They had found him then. And he was dead. But if he was not dead? For an injured man could speak, a dead man could not.

‘My, don't you look pretty?' she said to Abigail, holding on to her child because her whole body was shaking and if she looked into her daughter's face nothing bad could happen. But she could not see Abigail's face. She saw through a very long tunnel herself, a tiny figure, from the moment that she had first run into Lance outside Boots that morning before Christmas and she saw every moment since, herself hurtling, unstoppably, towards this point.

‘Madam? Is this case yours?'

Slowly she turned to look at him. The policeman was standing before her and she saw an exhausted face caught in the moment where youth slides uneasily and perhaps prematurely into middle age, his voice dull, eyes circled by dark smudges but still searching her, still taking in every part of her, everything that was Diana Meadows, all that she had done and not done, from her smallest lapse in judgement to her involvement in wholescale organised criminal activity. Behind him an ageing constable with watery eyes and broken veins on his nose waited patiently, shifting his weight from one foot to another.

‘Madam?' A note of impatience now. A man used to asking questions of strangers, used to interfering in other people's business, and Diana's stomach plummeted down, down, so far down it seemed to pin her to the floor. Her hand, the one that was holding on so tightly to the small blue travelling case was burning. If she released her grip she knew the palm would be branded with its mark forever.

Forever. She had destroyed forever. Her future was now a police station, an interview room, charges, a formal arrest, the shameful telephone call to their family solicitor (a man who had come to their wedding and whose shocked gaze she would not be able to bear),
a court appearance, newspapermen and smug reports in the local paper pored over gleefully by everyone she had ever known. And prison. For there was every possibility the magistrate—sickened and outraged by the constant stream of petty and not-so-petty thefts coming before him—would decide to make an example of a well-to-do middle-class housewife who ought to have known better and hand down not a hefty fine but a prison sentence.

And there was Gerald. She would kill herself, she realised, before she let it come to that.

But . . .

Diana peered at the policeman, her heart thumping, the blood surging in her ears. ‘I'm sorry. What did you ask me?'

The policeman sighed. ‘I said, is this child yours?' And he pointed not at the little blue travelling case with its damning cargo of contraband, but at a child, that woman's child, the thin little lank-haired thing with the ugly red woollen hat who had been abandoned a while ago by its mother and was lying wrapped tightly in a blanket mutely watching them.

‘Oh!' Diana gasped and the policeman and the ageing sore-footed constable and the people all around them and the platform itself wavered in and out of focus, in and out of existence for a moment as everything shifted once more.

She started laughing. Could not help herself. It was a dreadful sound and there was no humour in it. The policeman and the constable and even Abigail all watched her. She made herself stop. ‘No!' she gasped, and another little laugh escaped. ‘Not mine. Certainly not.'

‘Do you know where its mother is?' He did not ask the child itself, who was awake and was regarding him, regarding them all,
malevolently, some inbuilt reflex telling it to distrust any policeman, to distrust anyone.

(‘Mummy, I can't find Teddy,' said Abigail, but no one seemed to hear her.)

‘Yes, yes, I saw her. She is up there, with a family,' said Diana, for she had seen the woman, just for a moment, as she and Abigail had emerged from the latrines, and she pointed now to the spot where she had seen the woman, getting to her feet in her eagerness to show the policeman where, to describe the people, the place, in detail.

The policeman and the constable left and for a long time—it felt like a long time but perhaps was not so very long at all—she was elated, her elation gradually softening to a sort of lightheaded calmness. A near miss, she told herself, she told Abigail, who did not appear to really understand nor fully appreciate their narrow escape.

And when the station rumbled and shook and dust began to stream from the ceiling and cracks to appear in the walls, and as all around them heads lifted and muffled screams and shouts rippled the length of the platform, Diana did not gaze up, Diana did not scream. Far away bells could be heard and sirens, though they were surely too far underground to hear such things so perhaps she imagined that. This thought—of being safe so far underground and at the same time of being trapped beneath the ground—had worried her a few hours ago, had induced a paralysing and breathless sense of vertigo and claustrophobia all at the same time. But not now. Not now they had survived the near miss.

She did not think of Lance Beckwith at all.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Nancy had believed, absolutely, in Joe's escape, in his nocturnal flight across the city, his clandestine meeting with a man who could get him the right papers, his flight across the country and finally across the sea. She had believed, unquestioningly, in Joe's eventual and ultimate success. But Milly Fenwick had vowed to denounce him—the man she had once agreed to marry—and all at once Joe's escape seemed perilous, his eventual success no longer assured, his capture and incarceration a distinct possibility.

She must think. For she wasn't helpless, she could help Joe. There were things she could do, actions she could take. She must think.

But in the meantime it was foolish to be blundering about the station on her own, leaving Emily alone and unprotected. This thought struck her horribly and Nancy began to make her way back, hurrying, though her way was blocked at every turn and she slipped and stumbled and her panic rose again just when she had got it under control. She had left Emily on her own. She often
left Emily on her own and nothing bad ever happened, of course it didn't, she was always good as gold, but now all the certainties, all the risks she took daily and without a thought, seemed breathtakingly foolish and a thousand horrific consequences crowded into her head.

She craned her neck to locate Emily through the sea of bodies, but identifying one small child amid so many proved impossible when surely a mum ought to be able to pick out her own kid in a crowd at once. But she was too far away, her line of sight was blocked by a dozen, two dozen people.

The bombers were back. She was aware of an increase in her heart rate, a flutter against her ribs that made her breathless, and the need to reach Emily became urgent, for a terrible, almost unthinkable dismay had descended on her:
what if Emily had been taken?
There was no logical reason to think this, yet you heard about such things: kids being snatched, babies taken from their prams right outside their own front doors and never heard of again. A girl had been raped in the tunnels just a few months ago. If something happened to Emily she would never forgive herself. And she would never be able to face Joe, who had done everything, risked everything, for them both. She would kill herself if anything happened to their little girl.

But nothing had happened, for there she was! Safe and sound and sitting up with the blanket wrapped about her skinny shoulders, looking for her mother with a frightened, anxious face, and Nancy laughed aloud in her relief, and the need to hurl herself beneath the wheels of a train rather than face her husband's grief and recriminations vanished. She had allowed her fears to get the
better of her. She was in control: she would protect Emily and she would protect Joe, too, if she had to.