Ashes to Ashes (12 page)

‘Everyone who isn’t in the crypt is up on the roof,’ the taller bloke said. ‘With that wind out there fires can spread from one building to the next in a heartbeat. We’re still not out of the woods yet, not by a long chalk. The cathedral is completely surrounded.’

‘I didn’t see George down in the crypt,’ I said. ‘And he had been looking for Mr Andrews. He asked me about him. If we can find George, maybe . . .’

‘You’ll find that Mr Andrews was just asleep,’ the shorter man said. ‘As for Mr Ronson’s body? I expect the Dean’s had it moved. Mr Matthews wouldn’t want it left out in an undignified fashion. That’s what’s happened, sure as eggs are eggs.’ He smiled.

He was, I felt, humouring me in that way people who know me are inclined to do. But this man didn’t know me! Was I so obviously round the twist to him?

‘Mr . . .’

‘Bolton,’ he said.

‘I’m not mad, you know,’ I said.

‘I didn’t say that you were,’ Mr Bolton replied. ‘I wouldn’t say anything like that, especially not to a chap I didn’t know.’

They were all so posh, these architects! But then anyone can do fire-watching duty and good on ’em for it. I knew I was becoming silly with it all now. I muttered that I was sorry.

Mr Bolton’s taller mate, who was called Mr Arnold, said, ‘We’ll go down and tell Mr Harris that everything’s ticketyboo.’

‘Yes, but it isn’t,’ I began and then I stopped myself, my words fading into just a load of muttering.

If nothing else we should get the coppers in to see to Mr Ronson! But then where his body was now, God alone only knew. All that stuff Mr Andrews had told me about the Masons had really unnerved me. It was Tommy Rot, of course, but with that howling wind moaning around the building whipping up flames that could kill us all in minutes outside, my nerves were stretched very tight. I kept telling myself this as the two blokes took me back down to the crypt once again.

I looked in every corner I knew underneath the cathedral but I didn’t once find George, Mr Andrews, the Dean or even, as far as I could tell, Mr Phillips. I even asked around for the bloke with the mask, but no one seemed to have seen him except, of course, for Mr Smith and the Dean, who’d told me he’d seen him on the roof. Now joined by Mr Bolton and Mr Arnold, Mr Smith said, ‘You seem to have a knack of missing Mr Phillips, don’t you, Mr Hancock? Everyone else has seen him, everyone except you.’

Everyone except me had also
not
seen Mr Andrews sitting up dead in the quire stalls. I began to question myself seriously in my head until yet again, thinking about Mr Phillips and what Mr Smith had said about him, made me stop.

‘Only you and the Dean have seen Mr Phillips,’ I said to him. ‘I haven’t come across anyone else who has actually—’

‘I’ve seen him several times myself,’ Mr Arnold cut in sharply. ‘As have you, I believe, haven’t you, Cyril?’

Mr Bolton looked away when he agreed with what Mr Arnold had said. I didn’t believe him, he looked far too shifty to me. Not that I could prove anything by this, and I was still the only person, as far as I knew, who had seen Mr Andrews dead.

‘There you are,’ Mr Smith said to me with a shrug. ‘No mystery.’ Then he smiled. ‘The best of us get confused up there in the dark.’ He looked upwards to the ceiling of the crypt. ‘A lot of people say the cathedral is haunted, although I don’t actually hold with that myself. But the dark does play tricks and the dark combined with the fear everyone is feeling is a powerful thing.’

I agreed with him because it was easy and I was exhausted. But I was very suspicious, as the dreams I had shortly afterwards when I lay down on the crypt floor for a kip made plain. I must have slept for about an hour. When I woke up with a gasp later on, there wasn’t much moving about in the crypt. Only outside in that furious firestorm was there real movement.

Chapter Eight

O
ne of the cathedral ladies saw me move and came over with a cup of tea. As she put it in my hands she said, ‘You were making noises in your sleep. Are you all right?’

I wasn’t, but I didn’t tell her that. She seemed like a nice middle-aged lady, what would she want to know about my dreams of death? There’d been no blood in my nightmare this time, just a feeling of desertion, as if everyone close to me had suddenly died. Although the bombing had stopped, I wondered how things were back home. It seemed, just as people were saying, as if Hitler had been targeting the actual Square Mile as opposed to the Docks or anywhere else. So maybe, for once, bombing down our way had been light. Having said that it’s well known that the
Luftwaffe
often drop what’s left of their loads just anywhere on their way back to the Channel. Bastards! And what of my old Auntie Annie up in Finsbury? Although not at the centre of the action as we were in St Paul’s, she must have seen a fair old bit where she was – and Annie, like me, was no lover of air-raid shelters. I tried to imagine her sitting in her chair in her scullery, all disapproving and covered in dust. But at moments I could also see her dead, too. It wasn’t a dream, it was just a picture in my head.

I stood up and lit a fag. Once I’d smoked it, I planned to go up into the cathedral and see what was happening. Milly or no Milly, I’m too restless a soul to sit about doing nothing. And if the kid was about and I could get her to come down to safety in the crypt, then so much the better. Maybe I’d even get to see Mr Andrews, if I was lucky. I literally shuddered at the thought of that. Mr Andrews was dead! People could say what they liked about his having been asleep, but I’m an undertaker, I know what a dead person looks like and he was as dead as it’s possible to get when I found him. I looked over to where the women were and I saw Mrs Andrews, who managed a little smile in my direction. She obviously didn’t know. As soon as I’d finished my fag, I went up above where I found that the door to the left of the Great West Door was open and crowded with blokes. Over the tops of their tin hats all I could see was flames of red and yellow moving as if they had muscles. I walked towards them across a floor that was still wet with Mr Ronson’s blood. If he had, as Mr Andrews had claimed, been sacrificed in some way, then whatever he’d been sacrificed to had been given a lot of the red stuff to be getting on with.

As I got closer to the door, someone I didn’t know turned and looked at me.

‘You from Hitchcock’s, are you?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said.

‘They’ve all come up to see what’s what,’ the bloke said. ‘Must be shocking to see your place of business burn to the ground.’

Some people were on the steps outside, some of them women who were crying. The textile wholesalers Hitchcock, Williams and Co. had had it. The Dean had given instructions that nobody should be going outside because of the fierceness of the storm, but people – mainly Hitchcock employees – were ignoring this, and Revd Matthews was himself nowhere to be found. I recognised a couple of people from the crypt including the young lad, Ted, and his girl Mabel, who had been crying. Going to work every day was something a lot of people had begun to take for granted just before this war started. The last twenty years haven’t meant much in the way of money for ordinary working people, but just before the war things were, I felt, picking up. What must it be like to go to work and find that your company as well as your job just didn’t exist any more? My apprentice Arthur, Doris, our office girl, and my old bearer Walter walk to our place every day over broken glass but, so far, there’s always been a job at the end of it for them. There’s always a chance that one day there won’t be. There’s a big chance of that.

‘Do you know where the Dean is?’ I asked the bloke who’d spoken to me earlier. He was a watchman, but one that I hadn’t come across before.

‘Up on the roof, I think,’ he said. ‘I think he’s just about up there all the time now that things are so bad. But I don’t rightly know. When the All Clear went, some people thought that we were safe and sound and started out into the street. But as you can see . . .’ He moved his hand out in front of him in a half-circle.

‘The All Clear?’ I hadn’t heard it. I must have been asleep. ‘When?’

He shrugged. ‘Half an hour ago? An hour? I don’t remember.’ His smoke-blackened face had just a tinge of copper on the cheeks now, courtesy of Hitchcock, Williams and Co. ‘It doesn’t mean anything, anyway, not to us.’

I stared at him.

‘The water’s running out,’ he said. ‘Everything’s ablaze; the Guildhall, Barts Hospital, City churches whose names I don’t even know. The LFB can’t get to everyone and, anyway, what can they do even if they do? They’ve been told to save this place at all costs.’ And then he leaned in close to me and I could hear that his accent was almost exactly the same as mine. ‘But what can they do, really? We’re fucked,’ he whispered.

Pulling back, I looked into eyes which were easily as dark as my own.

‘Where are you from?’ I asked.

He smiled. ‘Your manor originally, or somewhere nearby.’

‘But you’re not—’

‘I’m an architect, my name’s Roger Garner and I live in Wood Green,’ he said. But then he leaned in towards me again and said, ‘But for them in the know, there’s a little group of Spaniards at the top of Brick Lane. The name I was born with was Roger Garcia. My dad changed it, after the Spanish war . . . We’re not Spaniards, well, a long time ago we . . .’ He looked down at the yellow of the flames reflected in the marble beneath his feet. ‘We were a long time ago, way back.’

I’d heard that there were Spaniards, from donkey’s years ago, living somewhere in the Shoreditch area, but I’d never knowingly met one before. There’d been some bitterness towards the Spanish after their civil war. A lot of East Enders, commies mainly, lost their lives fighting for socialism out there. Then when General Franco and the fascists won, many people felt as if it had all been for nothing. We know now that the weapons Franco had were German and that Hitler was using the Spaniards to test them out for him. Some people don’t like this too much. How Roger Garner knew I wasn’t one of those people, I couldn’t imagine. Maybe, seeing as how we had no water, it was by way of some sort of confession? After all, being a Spaniard, he would certainly be a Catholic and he’d made it very plain he felt we were doomed. But why he’d say such things to me, I didn’t know. All I can say now is that even when people don’t know what I do for a living they sometimes tell me personal things or secrets about themselves. There is something about an undertaker, even a barmy one, that almost draws such information out of people.

‘Have you seen Mr Andrews?’ I asked him after a reasonable amount of time had passed since his confession.

‘No,’ he said. ‘There was a rumour that he was dead, though, but it was a load of tosh. Mrs Andrews was very chipper when I last saw her.’

She’d been fine when I’d seen her too.

‘I think that all the cathedral staff must be up on the roof now,’ Mr Garner said.

‘Fighting the fires?’

‘As best they can,’ he answered. ‘Mind you, come to think of it, the Dean and the other clericals have been up there for a very long time now.’ He frowned. ‘Other chaps have come and gone up and down to the roof, but I haven’t seen Revd Matthews, Mr Andrews, or even that young choir boy, for probably the best part of an hour. Just the heat for that length of time could kill you!’

The stench from the fires was awful – a mixture of burning cloth, animal fat, wood smoke and tar. I started to cough, along with just about everyone else at that doorway. I went inside after a bit, unlike the rest of them. Out in the glare of the fires, they all continued to watch Hitchcock’s burn while I disappeared into the darkness and on to the bloodied floor of St Paul’s. If someone had indeed sacrificed Mr Ronson to something to save the cathedral, they hadn’t done a very good job. According to Mr Garner the stores of water we had had were running low and even with the LFB doing everything they could to save the cathedral, how did we know they would continue to have any water themselves? As well as meeting Mr Garner, my brief trip outside the cathedral had shown me enough for me to realise that all the streets around us were on fire. We could all burn, or boil alive inside our gilded marble prison. It was a possibility.

I told myself very firmly that I still had Milly to find. I also told myself, with good reason, that the fact that no one seemed to be worried about where Mr Ronson’s body had gone to was strange. It had completely disappeared and, whether anyone believed that Mr Andrews was alive or dead might be by the by, but that Mr Ronson had gone was a certainty and the fact that nobody seemed to care was frightening. Saying that the Dean had moved him ‘somewhere’ wasn’t good enough.

I’d just distracted myself beforehand, afraid as much as anything of my own damaged mind. Now I decided that if something was going on, I was going to find out what it was. Although I knew that I could be burnt to a crisp at any minute, I didn’t do what I did this time as a distraction. I did it because I, like Mr Garner, needed to find some sort of peace before I died.

I searched the quire stalls, the quire aisles and the north and south transepts. If someone had really hidden Mr Ronson’s body, then it was unlikely that they’d do it anywhere as obvious as those places, but if I was going to explore the whole cathedral, then I had to do so properly. In the dark and with only that weak little torch to guide me, I had to look carefully into all the corners and crannies of the great cathedral to make sure that I didn’t miss anything. Even then I couldn’t be certain that what I was looking at wasn’t anything sinister. Not that everything in that dark, threatening place wasn’t sinister. The great columns on each side of the nave looked as if they disappeared up into smoke. It gave them, to my mind, a look of the gates of Hell of the religious instruction of my youth. In the quire my little torch would sometimes catch the edge of a glittering mosaic; a pointy-beaked peacock, open-mouthed fish and, far away, heavenly people. I would have prayed too if I could, I was so afraid. My mother, God bless her, would have told me to force myself had she been with me. Something was coming, because all the hairs on the back of my head were standing on end.