Ashes to Ashes (24 page)

‘Who’s that?’ he said as he spotted my head at the top of the stairs. ‘Is that the dark fellow, that cockney you have with you?’

I climbed the rest of the stairs and showed myself. Rolls said to Steadman, ‘He’s not one of the Brotherhood. What’s he doing here?’

‘He’s the only one, apart from Milly Chivers, who really knows now,’ Mr Steadman said. ‘What do you think he’s doing here?’

‘Well, I imagine,’ Mr Rolls replied, ‘that wanting to keep all of this quiet as you do, you plan to kill him.’

I took in a sharp breath and Mr Steadman said nothing to contradict Mr Rolls after that.

‘Eric,’ he said, ‘you have to pay for what you’ve done here.’

‘And you’ve got to redeem yourself as a brother and help your Grand Master,’ Mr Rolls replied. He then looked at Mr Harris and Mr Neeson. ‘And you two,’ he said. ‘The Craft comes before everything.’

Mr Steadman held the gun up and flicked off the safety catch. ‘Eric . . .’

‘You won’t shoot Violet, will you, Gordon?’ Rolls pulled the girl’s neck upwards and pushed his knife into the flesh beneath her jaw.

‘Don’t kill me, Mr Rolls!’ she said. ‘Please don’t!’

Mr Rolls laughed. ‘Hey, Mr whatever your name is, on the stairs,’ he said to me, ‘move aside, will you? Violet and myself are coming down.’

Nobody said that I shouldn’t and so I climbed out over the top step and on to the roof. Mr Rolls, with the terrified Violet in his grasp, was already moving. Maybe because the other men didn’t say anything I thought that they weren’t going to do anything either. So, if for no other reason than to save another girl from this madman, I decided to do something to him myself. I didn’t know what. As he shuffled and pushed the girl towards the stairs my breathing became heavy as I made myself ready for him.

Rolls was careful, I’ll give him that. As he started to descend he turned so that the girl Violet was facing outwards towards Mr Steadman and the others. It would have been very difficult and very risky to try and shoot him. But there wasn’t anything he could do about me. That stairwell was open on all four sides and although he watched me all the time as he went down, when his head was only just above the top of the hole I moved very quickly around to the back of his head. I saw Mr Neeson gasp and Mr Steadman begin to run forward. But I had my right leg back by this time and before anyone could do anything, I laid into Rolls’s head with my steel-capped boot. I did it with all of my strength and with such violence that Rolls’s hands jerked away from Violet’s neck as if they’d had a current of electric run through them. The girl screamed because Rolls fell like a stone and she began to fall after him. As with so many things in life, I’d failed to think through what I did and so if Mr Steadman hadn’t been there to catch her, Violet would have fallen down the stairs too. But, unlike myself, who just flailed around trying to grab the girl, Mr Steadman pulled her firmly towards himself and then hugged her to his chest. I looked down the stairwell to where Mr Rolls lay motionless on the landing. I feared he was dead, that I had killed him, and so I was immediately sick over the side of the building. Mr Neeson and Mr Harris thundered down the stairs to check on him.

‘Well, he’s still breathing, amazingly,’ I heard one of them say eventually.

‘I’ll come down,’ Mr Steadman replied. I then saw him pat the girl on the head and say, ‘All right here for a bit, Violet?’

Her chubby cheeks wobbled with barely suppressed sobs. ‘Y-yes, Mr S-Steadman.’

‘Brave girl,’ he said. And then as he walked towards the stairwell he looked into my grey, sick-splattered face and smiled. ‘That was bloody brilliant, Hancock.’

I didn’t say anything. I was shaking by that time and it was a bad bout. The stuttering when the bombs fall I’m used to, but the shaking only takes me over when the fear has actually passed and my body goes into a kind of shock. When I used to come home on leave during the First Lot, sometimes I’d shake the whole time until I went back to the front. When I finally came home for good it went on for months. It comes back sometimes now and this time I was grateful for help from Violet when we were told we could come down the stairs. Mr Neeson had got the copper from over by Holborn underground station and he was taking down particulars.

‘You’re trembling like a leaf!’ the girl said as she held on to my arm. ‘You poor man!’

All I could do was smile.

The copper, once we were all back inside the building, said, ‘You’ll all have to come down the station, you know. Once I’ve called an ambulance for this fellow.’

We all looked down at Mr Rolls who was now making groaning noises. In spite of everything he’d done, I was glad he was alive.

Chapter Eighteen

I
thought that Violet and myself would be questioned. We were taken with the other men down to Snow Hill Police Station. We walked, as I remember, through all the rubble and the mud and dust. Soot and paper flew about and got caught in our eyelashes and eyebrows. Sometimes even a tiny piece of paper could have a number or a word on it that hinted at where it might have come from. Maybe from a book-keeper’s office, or from a receipt book of one of the jewellers at Hatton Garden. All of this debris irritated Violet, who was very careful about her make-up now that she’d recovered from her recent ordeal.

‘Get away, filthy thing!’ she said as she batted a puff of dust and a fragment of paper away from her face. Still shaking, I didn’t care. The bloody
Atlas of the World
could stick to my face and it wouldn’t bother me.

Snow Hill had been bombed earlier in the year and so the place was in a bit of a state. Violet and I sat out in a grim and filthy corridor while Mr Steadman and the other two men went into a room with two coppers. Later on those two coppers came out and two blokes in plain clothes went in. No one spoke to us or even seemed to take any notice of the fact that we were there. After what had to be almost an hour, Violet said to me, ‘You’d think they’d offer us a cup of tea, wouldn’t you? After what we’ve been through!’

And then she began to cry. I put one of my hands on hers and then, when she’d recovered herself a little, I gave her a fag.

‘Blimey, you’re still shaking!’ she said as she took it from me.

‘Yes.’

‘But what a shock!’ Violet said, her big made-up eyes staring wildly. ‘Mr Rolls killing Mr Phillips! I thought Mr Rolls was a nice man! Was he a friend of yours, Mr . . . ?’

‘Hancock. No,’ I said. ‘I, er, I met Mr Steadman—’

‘Oh, in the cathedral, wasn’t it?’ Violet said. ‘Mr Phillips always went on Watch duty in St Paul’s. He liked it. I wonder why he wasn’t there last night? I wonder why Mr Rolls killed him?’ She began to cry again. ‘Why did Mr Rolls kill Mr Phillips?’

I patted her hand again and said, ‘I don’t know. But I expect it had something to do with money. Most things do.’

‘Oh, what with the safe being open and—’

‘I imagine so, yes,’ I said.

What else could I say? Violet, as far as I could tell, knew nothing about what had happened up at the cathedral. From what I could gather, if we hadn’t turned up when we did, Rolls would have just taken the money from the safe, said ta-ta to Violet and gone on his way with the girl none the wiser. But Violet was no fool. She dragged on her cigarette and said, ‘What were they all talking about on the roof of the office? About blood and that?’

I said that I didn’t know. Of course I knew more than Violet, but I still had a lot of questions that I was determined to ask Mr Steadman before the day was through. I, after all, knew all about what had happened inside the cathedral that previous, terrible night. If he was going to stop me from opening my mouth then he’d have to give me some answers and pretty quickly, too.

Not that I had any expectations that the police would disbelieve whatever Steadman, Neeson and Harris were telling them. I imagined that everyone inside that room was a member of the Brotherhood.

Violet was taken home to her parents’ house in Streatham in a police car. I was offered a lift back to Plaistow myself but I swapped that for the use of the only telephone in the place for a moment and a cup of tea with Mr Steadman.

‘If you want me to keep to your version of last night’s story,’ I said to him as we went into the room with the telephone, ‘you’ll have to tell me what exactly that is. Who is Crowley, for instance?’

Mr Steadman told me to make my call and then we’d talk. I just had to hope that our telephone at home was still working. I asked to be put through not really expecting anything to happen, who does these days? But then, as if by a miracle, I heard our office girl, Doris, on the line.

‘Hancock—’

‘Doris!’ I cut in quickly before the line went. ‘It’s me, Mr Hancock!’

‘Mr Hancock? Oh, God,’ Doris said, ‘we’ve all been going mad here! Mrs H has been in tears over you!’

‘I’m fine, Doris,’ I said. ‘I’m in the City—’

‘Mr H, the City’s still burning!’ Doris said. ‘Here, Miss Nancy wants a word . . .’

‘Doris . . .’ I didn’t want to get into any sort of long conversation, especially not with either of my sisters. They can be a bit on the hysterical side at the best of times!

‘Frank?’

‘Nan,’ I said. ‘Look, Nan, I’m all right. Tell the Duchess to stop crying. I’m still in the City but I’ll be home as soon as I can.’

I heard my sister draw her breath in sharply as if in disapproval. ‘You’ll get here as fast as your legs will carry you!’ Nancy said sternly. ‘Mum’ll have a conniption if she thinks you’re still running around amongst the fires. You with Auntie Annie still, are you?’

‘No, Nan, I left and then I had to do things and—’

‘Do things?’ I heard her splutter with disbelief. ‘Blimey, do what?’

‘Are the horses all right?’ I asked.

‘The horses? God help us, Frank!’

‘Nan, without the horses we don’t have a business!’

She sighed. ‘The horses are fine, Frank. Now—’

‘Nan—’

‘Oh, just get home, Frank!’ Nan said impatiently. ‘Make sure that Annie’s all right and then get home.’

And then she put the telephone down on me. My family were all right, and so was my business. That, at least, was a relief. Mr Steadman, smoking on the other side of the plain, grey room, didn’t make any sort of comment. I sat where I was and continued to shake. After about five minutes a middle-aged copper with a huge walrus moustache came in and gave us both cups of tea in thick, white, cracked china. I stuck my face straight into my cup and found that thankfully, the tea was full of sugar or something very sweet at the very least.

Mr Steadman put his cup beside him for a bit to allow the tea to cool and then he said, ‘Rolls, once the doctors patch him up, will be arrested for the murder of Mr Phillips. Last night he was interrupted whilst stealing money from our safe by Mr Phillips. Rolls killed Mr Phillips, and then took his place in the cathedral so that Mr Phillips wouldn’t be missed. This morning, fearing that maybe someone might go in to our offices and find Mr Phillips’s body, he decided it might be best to go back and conceal it himself. But Mr Norris, Mr Harris, you and myself were a bit worried about how strangely Mr ‘Phillips’ was behaving on Watch last night and so we followed him. We caught him on the roof with our typist. The police have no need to speak to Violet, she’s been through enough.’

I put my tea down and lit up a fag. ‘That’s the story you’ve agreed on, is it?’ I said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Mr Steadman,’ I said. ‘I know that you want to protect St Paul’s Cathedral. I know you don’t want the most important place in London to be associated with anything bad . . .’

‘I think you’ll find that Mr Churchill is of that opinion too,’ Mr Steadman said as he fixed me with a gaze that told me I was on very dangerous ground. Had he, I wondered, or those plain clothes coppers he’d been with, actually spoken to Winnie himself? I knew that Churchill had given orders that the cathedral was to be saved at ANY cost. I knew that but still I had to press on. I had to!

‘Mr Steadman,’ I said, ‘I know it’s not just the cathedral you and all these coppers are protecting. Coppers are in your brotherhood . . .’

‘Mr Webb, George the chorister and Mr Andrews died, as I have said before, fighting the fires outside the cathedral.’

‘Yes, their bodies are charred and—’

‘Ronson, unfortunately, fell from the Whispering Gallery and poor Mr Smith perished whilst trying to reach what he thought might be a small fire on the balcony underneath the Whispering Gallery,’ Steadman said. ‘Given the ferocity of last night’s attack our losses have been slight. Only Mr Rolls’s crime is unnatural. He let his personal fear of what is happening to our city and his greed overwhelm him. He was never a watchman, nor showed any inclination to assist his fellow Londoners. When he thought that he had been caught out in the cathedral he even tried to create panic by shouting up to the watchmen in the Whispering Gallery that a murder had been committed by you, Mr Hancock. That did not, as we know, succeed. So then he wanted to get out of the city and he took money that wasn’t his in order to do that.’

‘Mr Rolls will say that he was trying to protect St Paul’s, he will talk about blood . . .’

‘Mr Rolls has gone mad,’ Mr Steadman said. ‘I imagine that his association with, amongst others, Aleister Crowley, has turned his mind.’

I still didn’t know who this fellow Crowley was but I left it a few moments before I said, ‘I want to know. All of it.’

Steadman breathed in slowly. ‘Mr Hancock—’

‘The truth!’ I said angrily. ‘Tell the “wog” the truth and then he’ll never speak or even think of it again! I mean,’ I added tightly, ‘as you said yourself back at the cathedral, it isn’t as if I could tell anyone, is it? Who would believe me?’

He said nothing and so I waited. Outside in the street I heard what sounded like a lot of stones tumbling down to the ground. This was followed by a great deal of shouting and the smell of brick dust in the air. I carried on waiting. Mr Steadman got his cigarettes out of his pocket and lit up.