Ashes to Ashes (17 page)

She started to stand up.

‘How did you know that something was wrong?’ I asked. Prostitutes live in such strange and at times very fanciful, as well as a brutal worlds that I find it hard to know how they separate the lies that they’re always told by blokes from reality.

Milly looked down at me with an almost pitying eye. ‘Same as when you fell in, I should think,’ she said. ‘When they started killing people. Mr Rolls hadn’t seen my dad for years and years. He ain’t got no idea how old I really am. I saw him push that bloke off the Whispering Gallery. I knew that weren’t no joke, whatever silly old childish cobblers they told me about it. By the time they dressed me up as a bloke so they could get me up in the Galleries without no one knowing, I was bloody terrified, I can tell you.’ She pulled a face. ‘Called me “Mr Potter” they did! Bloody hell!’

I’d felt in some way that ‘Potter’ wasn’t right. Now I knew why. I was just rising to my feet myself when a voice boomed up from way down below. ‘Mr Rolls!’ it said. ‘Mr Rolls, are you ready yet?’

For a couple of seconds, Milly and I just looked at each other. I shrugged, not knowing what to do while she waved her hands at me as if urging me to say something. I knew I didn’t sound a bit like Mr Rolls, but in the end I just called down anyway. ‘Not yet!’

There was a very short pause before the reply came, ‘Okey dokey!’

I looked at Milly and she at me and neither of us knew what to do next. Milly seemed to think that the majority of the watchmen were decent blokes not involved in any of this sacrifice nonsense. But Mr Andrews had trusted no one, apart from Mr Ronson and, later on, me. There was of course the Dean, too, if we could just get to him. But how we were going to do that and who we may or may not be able to trust, I didn’t know. There was also the danger that remained, that the whole place could burn to the ground any moment, too. I said to Milly, ‘We’re just going to have to go down there and see what we find. We don’t have a choice.’

She didn’t say anything, but began walking down the stairs. I followed. My legs were so stiff now it was like walking on stilts. But that really wasn’t the worst of it. What was really bad was what was going on in my head. The ghosts from the past were being joined by the ghosts from the present, the ones from this night of fire and wind and terrible strange death. I had come to the cathedral to shelter from the terror in the streets and yet what I had found inside had been almost worse. As both the Dean and Mr Andrews had said, the enemy didn’t have just one form on this terrible night, it had two – one without and one within. And now Milly, the girl I’d set about to ‘save’ in some way, had in all probability killed a man. Could I have stopped her from doing that? I wondered.

When we got to the bottom of the staircase there was not a soul to be seen. There were no bombs, incendiary or otherwise, falling any more but the flames from the streets down below were still threatening the cathedral. The wind, if not as high as it had been, was still up and, besides, we’d both heard someone call up to Mr Rolls only moments before. I couldn’t believe that the Stone Gallery could be deserted and as I felt a hand fall on to my shoulder, I knew that it wasn’t.

Mr Bolton said, ‘What are you doing down here?’

I still had Mr Smith’s gun in my pocket. I put my hand on it before I turned to Mr Bolton and said, ‘There’s been a bit of a change of plan.’

‘Oh.’ He was so intent upon looking at Milly that he didn’t see me take the gun out and point it at him for a couple of seconds. When he did see it, however, he immediately put his hands up to his shoulders as his mouth dropped open in shock.

‘Milly and myself are leaving,’ I said.

The girl, looking around nervously, said to him, ‘You alone?’

‘Yes . . .’

‘You had some other fella with you earlier,’ I said. ‘Where’s he gone?’

‘Down.’ He pointed towards the floor.

‘If you’re lying . . .’

‘I swear . . .’ He waved his upheld hands wildly. He was very scared and could be telling the truth even though I doubted it at the time. I pushed him against the side of the cathedral wall.

‘Mr Hancock!’

I had the gun at his throat and so I couldn’t turn around easily. ‘Milly?’

‘Mr Hancock, some other geezer!’

Still I couldn’t turn. But when I heard the voice of the ‘other geezer’ I thought that maybe everything was going to be all right after all.

‘Mr Hancock?’ It was Mr Steadman. Although he was Mr Rolls’s business partner, my earlier conversation with him had given me the impression that he was probably not part of this plot to ‘save’ the cathedral.

‘What’s going on?’ Mr Steadman asked. ‘Why have you got a gun?’

None of us, except perhaps Mr Bolton, saw the other chap arrive. He must have come on tip-toe. Up behind Mr Steadman, he hit him so hard on the back of the head, I could have sworn that I heard his skull crack. Keeping the gun as close to Bolton’s head as I could, I turned, and as I did so, Milly ran towards me and clung on to my side. The ‘other bloke’, the one who had been with Mr Bolton earlier, stood before us. He had a truncheon, like a coppers, in his hand. He held it high, threateningly, as he stepped over Mr Steadman’s body. I didn’t know at the time whether the poor bloke was alive or dead.

‘Give me the gun!’ the bloke said. ‘Give me the girl and the gun and you can just walk out of here!’

‘I’ll go with the girl
and
the gun, if it’s all the same to you,’ I said. ‘Mr Bolton can come along with us too.’

‘No!’ Bolton was so afraid he was almost weeping.

‘How did you get away from Rolls and Smith?’ the bloke continued. And then suddenly losing control he shouted, ‘God Almighty, do you know what you’ve done!’

I couldn’t actually see where the entrance to the staircase down to the Whispering Gallery was, but I knew that if I just kept on moving around the circular core of the cathedral I’d get to it eventually.

Mr Bolton, trembling as I moved him along with me, said, ‘Fred, don’t bother about me, please! Just go up to Mr Rolls and—’

‘The cathedral is going to die because of you!’ Fred spat vindictively out at me. ‘If not today then sometime soon!’

Shuffling along the wall with Bolton under one arm and Milly clinging to the other, I said, ‘You know something, Fred? Blood doesn’t do anything. Spilling it only makes whoever does it a beast. I know.’

‘Do you? You’re not one of the Brotherhood, so what do you know? The great architects of the past, Wren included, always consecrated their buildings with the sacrifice, a child . . .’

‘I don’t believe that,’ I said. ‘Christopher Wren was a genius, a modern man, so I’ve always been told. He would never have done something so primitive.’ Mrs Andrews had made a point of saying that Wren was a good man. ‘Never!’

‘Blood will purify! Blood will purify!’ The bloke looked mad, all the veins on the side of his neck were standing out. ‘Hitler will destroy us unless we make a gesture, a sacrifice!’

How had this group of men come to this conclusion? I wasn’t to find out for a while. What I had to do at that time was to get Milly and myself to someone not involved in all this who would believe us.

‘Mr Hancock!’ Milly nudged me and then tilted her head towards the left. ‘Stairs!’

So now we had to go down. Stiff legs or no stiff legs, I had to take Bolton with us, and I had to keep him, if I could, for as long as it took to find someone I could trust. But I wasn’t going to take Fred. I didn’t want him to follow us, either.

I paused just before the stairwell. ‘Fred,’ I said, ‘Mr Smith and Mr Rolls could probably do with some attention.’

‘Don’t tell him that!’ Milly said. ‘Don’t tell him anything!’

I didn’t mention Webb. I assumed he had to be dead by that time. As we disappeared down the stairs towards the Whispering Gallery, Fred ran off in the opposite direction, towards the staircase going further up. I jammed the pistol into Mr Bolton’s back and then whispered to Milly, ‘Now we’ve got to run for it.’ I pushed Bolton and urged him to move as fast as he could. Behind us the night sky was drowning in smoke and breathing was hard and tasted of death. As I thundered down the stairs after Mr Bolton I screamed just a little at every painful step. I wasn’t walking down those stairs, I was flying.

Chapter Twelve

W
e made it down to the cathedral floor without any further incident. Men were going about their business on the Whispering Gallery, but no one I recognised, and consequently no one I felt I could trust. I needed to find the Dean or Mrs Andrews or, now I came to think about it, Mr Garner. If he was a Catholic, then he couldn’t be a Mason, good or bad. But the church was empty and Milly and myself had only a sobbing Mr Bolton and the lamp underneath the dome for company. Those moments standing at the bottom of the Whispering Gallery stairs in silence, watching the smoke from the fires outside leak into the cathedral and swirl around the quire stalls, were amongst the most terrifying of my entire life. It was so desolate, so old and dark, so much the house of a doomed but jealous God. As superstitious thoughts began to crowd out my reason I began to wonder whether these renegade Masons might have something after all. Not that I wanted to hurt anyone. I just felt that something in that place was reaching out, needing something . . .

But fortunately I didn’t have too much time to consider such barmy notions because now I could clearly hear angry voices on the stairs behind us.

‘They’re coming,’ Milly said. ‘They must’ve untied Rolls. Because
you
told them!’

Ignoring her criticism I said, ‘We need to get down to the crypt. At the very least Mr Andrews’s wife is down there.’

Holding tight on to Bolton, I ran with Milly at my back in the direction of the stairs down to the crypt. We were just running around the edge of the quire stalls when Bolton said, ‘There are brothers down there too, you know! In the crypt! How will you know whom to trust?’

But I ignored him. If we didn’t go down to the crypt, what were we to do? It wasn’t as if we could exactly go outside. And then the noises that had come from the Whispering Gallery stairs burst out into the body of the cathedral.

‘Where the hell are they?’

Milly said, ‘We’ve got to get out of here!’

‘Don’t be stupid!’ I replied. Yes, there were people outside the cathedral but most of them were either hanging on for dear life to fire hoses or they were screaming. I could hear them. As the sound of feet running across marble began I looked up to see whether there was anyone in the Whispering Gallery. There were a lot of blokes up there now but they were all doing something other than looking downwards. Those men were really saving the cathedral.

‘You’ve had it!’ Bolton smirked.

Whether I’d have hit him if he hadn’t said what he did, I don’t know. But I gave him such a clump across the top of his bonce that I knocked him out cold. I feared I may have killed him. Not that even that made me stop at the time. As Bolton fell I took hold of Milly’s hand and said, ‘Run!’

‘Where to?’

Dark figures were hurling themselves across the marble floor at us. There was only one realistic direction to go. ‘Out!’ I said.

Running, Milly answered, ‘I told you that!’

The nearest way out was the smaller door to the south of the Great West door. It’s almost impossible to describe the pain in my legs by this time, but suffice it to say that if we hadn’t been being pursued by men who wanted us dead, I would have sat down, rolled myself a fag, and probably would never have shifted again. In fact, I was running so fast that when we did get to the door, I slammed straight into it with my shoulder.

‘Ow! Bloody—’

‘Get it open!’ Milly said as I turned the handle backwards and forwards, all to no avail.

‘It’s stuck!’ I said. ‘Or locked or . . .’

At some time during the night the Dean had ordered everyone to keep away from the doors. Maybe he’d actually had some of them locked. The sound of running feet behind us was getting louder.

‘It’s locked!’ I cried, sweating now with the effort of trying to move the thing. ‘Christ!’

I saw Milly’s head turn this way and that through the gloom and then suddenly she took hold of my arm and said, ‘This way!’

I couldn’t see where she was taking me, only that it was back into the cathedral. Pulling me towards the right she said, ‘Here!’

Stumbling after her through the smoked-filled gloom, I felt her push against something and pull me across what I quickly saw was a threshold. Together we both ran to push the huge wooden door we’d just stumbled through closed behind us. Even as we did this we felt the dull thud of at least one body that wanted to follow us smash against the door. But how were we going to keep the blessed thing closed?

‘Does this have a lock or . . .’ I was looking but I couldn’t see anything.

‘Push it! Harder!’ Milly screamed.

There was grunting and groaning from outside and I struggled to push my weight against it.

‘Push!’

‘I am!’ I shouted.

Milly was between me and the door, which seemed like a rather awkward and silly place to be until I saw what she was doing.

‘Push harder!’

There was a bolt, a huge great black metal thing, and Milly was trying to push it home. I knew I couldn’t press myself any harder against that door and so after telling Milly what I was about to do, I took my shoulder away from the door for just a second and then threw myself back at it with all of my strength. For one breathless split second, our pursuers were half inside but then, as I smashed myself back, they fell away from the door and Milly pushed the bolt home in one easy movement. As soon as this was done, we both dropped to the floor behind the door and, dripping with sweat, listened to the low moans of fury from the men outside.

Where we were was in a hallway. I don’t know what I’d thought the place the door led to was going to be like, but I’m pretty certain I hadn’t reckoned it was a hallway, especially not one with a staircase. I could have been forgiven for having a little moan about yet another bloody staircase, especially another spiral one, but this was very different from those others I’d staggered up and down before. Even in the semi-darkness I could see that it was beautiful. Although it was a spiral, this staircase was wide, and it hugged the walls of some sort of cylinder. A tower, lined with pale stone stairs, winding up to high above our heads, each graceful step balanced as if almost by magic just lightly on the back of the one below. There was a rail, too, a delicate iron affair that could just occasionally be seen in detail as it passed below one of the windows right up high in what I could only think had to be the southern-most of the two towers at the front of the building. It was, I knew, square from the outside, so this curving interior was a surprise.