Ashes to Ashes (21 page)

The struggle, from a distance, looked small and insignificant, like two blokes just simply pushing and joshing one another. You see servicemen doing this to each other sometimes when they meet on the street. It is, or can be, a form of affection amongst young men. But Mr Rolls and Mr Steadman were neither in the services nor young, and the weapon that was somewhere between them was very far from being a joke. I was, I admit, still consumed by what had just happened to Mr Smith and so although I watched what began to unfold over on the balcony my mind was not really there. I did see that the men with Mr Steadman began to move away from him, but I didn’t, as Milly obviously did, sense that I was in any danger myself.

‘Get back, Mr Hancock!’ I heard her say as she pulled hard on the sleeve of my shirt.

‘What?’

She yanked me away from the rail and backwards towards the rear of the chamber. ‘You don’t want to get shot, do you?’

I didn’t know! I’d killed again! After all those many years following the Great War, I had done it yet again! I stood against that back wall panting while Milly very tentatively strained around me to see what was happening on the balcony. I didn’t look. I was lost inside my own head. I could have saved Mr Smith! He would have gladly killed me given the chance, but that wasn’t the point! I had known how dangerous his situation was and I had done nothing. Nothing!

The sound of one single gunshot was what finally brought me back to myself.

‘God Almighty!’ I heard someone say.

‘Gordon! Gordon, are you—’

‘I’m all right,’ I heard Mr Steadman say.

This time I moved forward to look of my own volition. Mr Steadman and Mr Rolls were both still standing. Mr Steadman, however, was now the one who had the gun.

‘It really is over, Eric,’ he said.

Mr Rolls said nothing. He just put his head down and I think that he began to cry. Where the bullet had gone I couldn’t see, but it hadn’t hurt anybody. Down below in the cathedral I heard footsteps. It was one of Mr Steadman’s men going to look at Mr Smith. It was more than I could do. I just stood sideways on, my eyes fixed on the two figures of Mr Rolls and Mr Steadman as well as the crumpled heap that had been young George. How could so many people have died for something I was still completely failing to understand? And what was I going to do about Milly? She smiled at me and I smiled back but I knew just as well as she did, that Milly had killed. She’d done it defending herself it was true, but she’d also done it with a cold precision that made me shudder. ‘How are we going to get down from here?’ Milly asked.

I didn’t have a clue. I couldn’t see any obvious way down apart from the very precarious way we’d come up. And now, with all the lights on in the cathedral, that route looked even more frightening than it had done in the dark.

‘Well?’ Milly asked again, impatiently.

‘We’ll just have to wait and see what happens,’ I said. ‘Mr Steadman and his men know we’re here. We’ll just have to wait for them to come and help us.’

But Milly was obviously very agitated. I wondered uncharitably whether this was because she wanted to get away and disappear. But then she said, ‘I’m frightened up here.’ And that made me feel rotten. The poor kid had been through so much, not just in the cathedral, but all through her life. Besides, if she did want to get away, wasn’t that understandable?

We watched as Rolls and his men went meekly now down with Mr Steadman and his blokes. The fight, or so it seemed, had gone out of them all.

‘We’ll come and get you and the girl in a minute, Mr Hancock,’ Mr Steadman said as he pushed Rolls through the little door into the triforium.

Only three or four minutes passed at the very most. At the time, I don’t remember hearing or seeing anything more until Mr Rolls and two of his blokes appeared down in the cathedral in front of the Great West door.

‘Oi!’ the chap who had been first looking at, and then covering up, Mr Smith’s body shouted at them. ‘Oi, you!’

But when he saw what Mr Rolls had in his hand, he hit the deck smartish. Somehow, Rolls had managed to get the gun from Mr Steadman and he and his men were disappearing through the Great Door and into what remained of that frightening flame-coloured night.

I turned to Milly and said, ‘If Mr Rolls and his men are out and about, I have to find out what’s happened to Mr Steadman!’

As I swung one very shaky leg over the side of the railings and back on to the top of that blasted archway again I told Milly to stay put. ‘I’ll get someone to you,’ I said as I began to shuffle very slowly and nervously down the slope. I didn’t want to be swinging about above the marble cathedral floor. But then I found something that meant it wasn’t half as bad as I thought it was going to be. I discovered that if I hung on to the railings as I went down, when they eventually ran out, I could hang on to the marble lip from the floor of the chamber. It hung out from the wall just far enough for me to firstly get hold of it and then hang on to it as I lowered myself back on to the balcony. Had I been a short man, that wouldn’t have been possible. But luckily I’m tall and so, for once, I was actually all right with being up high.

I was running along the balcony back to the door to the triforium when I heard a shuffling sound behind me. I turned and saw that Milly had one leg over the side of the railings.

‘Milly!’ I said. ‘You stay put! I’ll—’

‘I’m frightened!’ she shouted.

I walked back a little way towards her and said, ‘Now look, you get back behind those railings, Milly. You’ll fall!’

‘Well, come and get me then!’ she demanded.

Milly didn’t need to be in the trouble she was in and could very easily get herself out of it. She was safe enough where she was. I really had other things to do. Mr Steadman and his men could be injured or worse. I turned on my heel, yelling back at her as I went, ‘No! Rolls has got away and anything could be happening! Get back behind those bloody railings . . .’

‘No!’

I lost control. ‘Well, bleeding well drop, then!’ I yelled. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about Milly – I’d almost bloody died because of her – but I couldn’t let her put me off doing this, I just couldn’t. And besides, if I knew Milly at all, I had a good idea that she’d do pretty much anything to preserve herself.

‘Mr Hancock! Please!’

I ran on until I came to the door and I ducked down and went through it. At first I saw no one and then I heard a groan. There was an open door opposite me which led into some sort of storeroom. The groan had come from there. At the same time as I went in, the bloke who Mr Rolls had threatened to shoot downstairs arrived.

‘What’s going on?’ he said as he came panting up behind me.

‘I don’t know,’ I replied.

‘Oh, Lord!’ The words were thick and sounded painful and they came from behind a very large wooden crate. The other bloke, a Mr Caldwell, and myself went to have a look. Mr Steadman was laying on the floor, holding on to the side of his head, wincing.

I bent down to take a look at him and, to be honest, I couldn’t see that much was wrong. Or rather I couldn’t see that his head was any more damaged than it had been before. ‘What happened?’ I asked him.

‘I don’t rightly know,’ Mr Steadman said. ‘We, Mr Neeson and Mr Harris . . . Where . . .’

‘Over here, Mr Steadman,’ another voice said from way over the other side of the room, underneath a window. Mr Caldwell went running over to the two men there.

I sat with Mr Steadman for a while, waiting for him to come back to himself as it were. From what he, Mr Neeson and Mr Harris had to say, it seemed that Mr Rolls and his men had jumped them, even though Mr Steadman had been in possession of the only gun in the place, as far as I knew. But I had my doubts. It had taken me quite a while to get to Mr Steadman and his compatriots after I’d left Milly. If none of them were badly hurt, which they weren’t, why had they lain around for so long? Why had they, as I saw it, waited for me to come and find them?

‘Someone should go after Mr Rolls and his men,’ I said after a while.

Mr Steadman smiled weakly. ‘Yes, but out into the—’ He stopped, his eyes apparently, caught by something out in the triforium. ‘Something moved!’

I looked over my shoulder but I didn’t see anything. I thought he was making it up for some reason. I was getting the impression that Mr Steadman was not everything he wanted me to think that he was. I was both right and wrong about that, and about what he had just seen as well.

‘When I saw the cathedral door open and Mr Rolls go out, I got the impression that the fires outside had died down a bit,’ Mr Caldwell said. ‘We could go out and try to follow them.’

‘We could.’

But no one moved. I looked around the space between the packing crates at the groggy men on the floor and I made up my own mind. I stood up. ‘Well, I’m going to have a butchers outside anyway,’ I said. I then added, forcefully, ‘Rolls shouldn’t get away, Mr Steadman. He killed George and he tried to kill a lot of other people too, including a young girl. It isn’t right that he should be able to walk away from that!’

Mr Steadman lowered his head. I thought he might try to stop me, but he let me go. I had it in mind that because all of these men were Masons they exercised some sort of protection over each other. Again, I was both right and wrong about this.

I walked out of the storeroom and made a brief detour back on to the balcony once again. If I were to go gallivanting about looking for Rolls and company I’d have to at the very least tell Milly what I was doing.

As I walked out on to the balcony I saw a large group of men walk on to the Whispering Gallery. Smoke-smutted and, in some cases, soaked in water, they had to have just come down from the rooftops above. Clearly exhausted, they nevertheless looked cheerful, even from a distance. As they sat down and lit fags for each other, some of them even smiled. I heard the word ‘control’ from someone which I hoped meant that the fires might be being beaten back from the cathedral at long last. But any good humour that I might have been put into was soon to end as I looked into the chamber where I’d been not so many minutes before and found that it was empty. Milly was nowhere to be seen.

Very few things in this life are clear-cut. I’m a grown man, and I know that there are shades of right and wrong. That said, I like to know who my enemy is. I like to feel some sort of certainty about how many people I might be up against in any situation. In the First Lot it was everyone except my own mates. But here . . . Here there were killers on all sides, none of whom I came close to even partly understanding.

‘Mr Hancock?’ Mr Steadman had come on to the balcony and was standing beside me.

I turned to him and said, ‘Milly’s gone.’

‘Has she?’

‘Bloody kid! She must have climbed down all on her own!’

‘How enterprising of her!’

He was so calm and I was so bloody agitated. God knows I’d come to at least respect the girl, but the fact remained that she had killed Mr Webb up on the Golden Gallery. She had done that and I had seen her do it.

‘Perhaps it is for the best,’ Mr Steadman said quietly. ‘Maybe the fact that Rolls has gone is for the best too!’

I looked at him and then down at the body of poor young George the chorister which lay at the far end of the balcony, dripping blood on to the marble floor below.

‘For the best?’ I said. ‘How can the fact that someone who’s murdered others being loose on the streets be for the best?’

Mr Steadman didn’t answer me and for probably the best part of ten minutes, we stood together silently side by side on that balcony. From the Whispering Gallery the sounds of relief and even a little bit of joy, increased as we stood there. I hardly even registered the moment when Mr Steadman finally left.

‘The Dean’s just come down,’ I remember him saying later. ‘I’d better go and tell him something.’

Tell him what? I thought afterwards. Tell him
what
?

But he told him something, because when a group of coppers turned up later, Revd Matthews, amongst others, spoke to them. That was quite a bit later, however, and when I finally came down from the roof.

When I found out that Milly had gone and I’d had that short and to me frightening little conversation with Mr Steadman, I took off. I never thought that I would willingly go up into those high galleries of the cathedral again, but I did. Slowly this time, I climbed the stairs first to the Whispering Gallery and then up the even narrower flight to the Stone Gallery. I could have gone further and perhaps been even more private than I was, but the voices of the blokes from the LFB who were still filming up there were somehow comforting. I didn’t go near them and they didn’t go near me, but together we watched the fires burn and we watched the fires recede. Even before the first pale wash of daylight began to push its way almost painfully through the smoke, it was obvious that the fires were slowly coming under control. We were safe. But at what a cost. I walked around that gallery as many as half a dozen times; I looked and I listened to what people said and I felt nothing but desolation.

At first sight, what was out there was unrecognisable. Like a bonfire with bits of wood and old crates and half-burnt Guys sticking out of it. But then as dawn crept slowly up, I swear even the light was frightened to move too quickly that morning, for what had happened became horribly revealed. Someone in the film crew gasped. I heard someone else say, ‘Christ, look at St Bride’s!’ He pointed to something still burning with a frightening ferocity. And yet in spite of the fact that the nave was indeed on fire, the spire was still standing. I later learned that St Bride’s spire was the tallest that Wren ever built. That it stands still is testimony to the resilience of this city. Not that I felt that at the time. Up on the Stone Gallery watching dawn break, all I could see or feel were the skeletons that surrounded me. Skeletons of the Guildhall, London Bridge Station, Ludgate Hill, Paternoster Row, Fleet Street. I also felt the press of ghosts upon me, too, even out in the smoke-soaked air as I was then. Mr Andrews, Mr Ronson, young George, Mr Smith – even the horrible Mr Webb. I’d have had every one of them back, however awful. But they were gone and they weren’t coming back, and at the time I didn’t have any sort of idea what justice their families might be able to expect. Mr Steadman was organising some sort of cover up. I knew it. He’d let Rolls and his men go, just like that! Well, he was a Mason, too, even if he did disagree with Mr Rolls and his followers. There was, I was sure, some sort of rule in Masonry that meant you couldn’t tell on another brother Mason. If
I
spoke, alone, who would listen? And what about Mr Phillips, the real Mr Phillips, what had happened to him?