Ashes to Ashes (25 page)

He dragged on his fag several times before he eventually spoke. ‘Mr Rolls,’ he said, ‘like a lot of Great War veterans, came home from the trenches to a world he could not understand. He didn’t know how those around him could be so disinterested in his ghastly remembrances while the British public, or so he felt, preferred that he remain quiet about his terrible experiences on the Somme.’

I knew that this was true – it had been the same for me – and so I said nothing.

‘Rolls, like his father before him, trained to be an architect and was proposed for membership of the Brotherhood. Until this morning I didn’t know myself that Rolls had actually come into contact with Aleister Crowley. I knew that he espoused some of his ideas, it was what first caused myself and others to watch him. Apparently Rolls and Crowley met in Cefalu in Sicily. Crowley lived there in the early twenties and I know that Eric Rolls went on some sort of architectural tour of Italy at that time and so I suppose they must have met then. Maybe he was with Crowley when—’ He just broke off, just like that.

‘Who is Aleister Crowley?’ I said.

The answer when it came would have been funny if what had happened with Mr Rolls hadn’t been so serious.

‘The Wickedest Man in the World and the Beast are just two of the names Crowley delights in,’ Mr Steadman said. ‘He’s a Satanist. He’s also a Freemason, or rather he was.’

So that was what Mr Andrews had meant by ‘the Beast’. Not the Devil at all, but this person, Crowley.

‘What, did the Brotherhood throw him out?’

‘Crowley is entirely discredited as a Mason,’ Mr Steadman said. ‘I told Rolls that he was a madman, but he wouldn’t listen! People will clutch at anything they think might save them in time of war and Rolls had already been convinced of Crowley’s authenticity years ago. They all started to whisper!’ He pulled a disgusted face.

‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘Who?’

‘Rolls, Phillips, and then sometimes Smith, would come to the office, and that awful Bolton, too. In Smith’s defence, he was a dedicated watchman and I think that the notion of saving the cathedral at any cost was something that he was completely sincere about. But, with the exception of Harold Phillips, they were a group of misfits, really.’

‘Mr Rolls was your Grand Master,’ I said.

‘Mr Rolls is
still
our Grand Master for the moment,’ Steadman said. He then paused for a second. ‘Mr Hancock, sometimes bad people get themselves into positions of power before you know what their true natures are. Mr Rolls has been our Grand Master for nearly ten years. It has only been since the bombing began back in August that he’s been talking about Crowley. Maybe the bombing was what he’d been waiting for since he had that encounter with Crowley? Maybe he saw the benefit that Crowley’s sacrifice brought? Perhaps it made his life back then in the twenties make some sort of sense? We live in a world in ruins, what do I or anyone else know?’

There was another pause but I said nothing and just waited for him to continue.

‘Aleister Crowley performed a human sacrifice at what he called his Abbey of Thelema in Sicily sometime in the early twenties,’ Mr Steadman said. ‘This was documented at the time and Crowley was subsequently expelled from the country. Why he was not prosecuted, I do not know. There is a tradition, in this country and many others, of human sacrifice. It is not such an
outré
idea as some people may believe.’

‘Mr Andrews told me it was something to do with protecting buildings,’ I said. ‘In the old days. He said sometimes it would even be done to protect a church. But not St Paul’s. Christopher Wren hadn’t done that.’

‘It is thought that some of the earlier members of the Brotherhood, my architectural ancestors, may have used blood in this way,’ he said sadly. ‘But not Wren. He was a true son of the Enlightenment. Crowley would have us all back in the Dark Ages! But then when people are in a lot of trouble and they try to find solutions to their problems, sometimes what they come across is evil. I’ve no doubt that Eric Rolls felt that what he was doing by following Crowley’s path was for the best. I don’t know, as yet, whether he was an actual disciple of the Wickedest Man in the World.’

‘But Smith and Phillips and some others went along with that anyway, didn’t they?’

He shrugged. ‘Yes. Although Harold Phillips did quite clearly come to his senses in the end. Harold was a nice man, a very committed member of the Craft, and a very academic person. Theory and practice were very different animals to Harold. I also think he found it hard to oppose his Grand Master; he didn’t like conflict. His face, or rather what had happened to it, made him timid much of the time. Eric Rolls knew that.’ He frowned. ‘What he also knew after the very first time he mentioned the name Crowley at one of our meetings was that support for that man’s ideas was only shared by a few.’

‘Mr Andrews said he didn’t know how many people were involved,’ I said. ‘He didn’t trust anyone.’

Mr Steadman shook his head helplessly. ‘Andrews trusted few people anyway, it was his nature! And yet he trusted George Watkins.’

I suddenly felt very cold. I’d liked young George. He had tried to save Milly and myself and had died in the attempt.

‘George’s father died in a raid just after Rolls began talking about Crowley. Martin Watkins was of the opinion that it was all a load of rot. But when he died, and once Rolls knew that George was a chorister at St Paul’s, Rolls began to suck up to the boy, promised him his father’s place in the Lodge. He also convinced George that his father had been in favour of the sacrifice.’

‘It’s all very clubby, isn’t it?’ I said. My voice was bitter but I didn’t care. I wanted him to know how I felt.

‘You’ve never joined anything, have you, Mr Hancock?’ he said.

I stopped myself from saying the obvious which was that no club I could think of would ever have me.

‘Part of the attraction of societies, secret or otherwise, is that one rarely has to go outside the society to get what one needs,’ Mr Steadman explained. ‘To have someone involved in the plot actually inside, as in part of the cathedral, like young George, could only be beneficial. Similarly with the victim. To go out and buy a child from strangers could possibly be dangerous. Poor Chivers’s situation was well known, we’d all worked with him and we’d all heard the rumours about what had become of him and his family. They turned out to be true.’

‘Except that Milly isn’t really as young as they thought she was,’ I said.

‘Wasn’t she?’

‘She’s sixteen.’

Mr Steadman looked amazed. ‘Good Lord!’

‘Mr Webb, who was her pimp, said she was younger than she really was to attract more, er, more customers.’

‘George Chivers lost control of his entire life many years ago,’ Mr Steadman said. ‘We, his fellow architects, if no one else, should have cared for him. But when a fellow is given so totally to drink . . .’ He put his hand in his pocket, took out his watch and looked at it. ‘Mr Hancock, I will soon have to go.’

He didn’t say where to and I didn’t ask.

‘So you’re covering up the deaths of young George, Webb, Mr Andrews and Mr Smith in order to save the Dean and the cathedral – and of course your “Craft”,’ I said. He didn’t answer. ‘But what about Rolls’s other followers,’ I said, ‘what about Bolton and Arnold and what about this Crowley bloke? Do they get away Scot-free?’

Mr Steadman stood up. ‘If we are to protect the reputation of the cathedral and the Watch . . .’

‘And the Masons.’

‘Well,’ he put his head down for a moment, ‘yes. Arnold and Bolton were just followers. They’ll be frightened, miles away now. They didn’t actually kill anyone. Rolls pushed Ronson from the Whispering Gallery and Smith killed Andrews. That was particularly vicious but then maybe Andrews fought or something, maybe . . . As for Crowley? He’s a drug fiend, Mr Hancock. He is old and sick and he can never return to his beloved Abbey of Thelema in Sicily because Mussolini, as well as Hitler, abhors Masonry.’

‘I thought you said that he wasn’t a Mason now?’ I said.

Mr Steadman smiled. ‘I said that he had been discredited. I never said that he had been thrown out.’

‘So once a Mason—’

‘Mr Hancock,’ he said as he walked towards the door of that bleak, cold room, ‘Fascism is doomed because it seeks to destroy us. It was laudable, in a way, of Rolls and the others to want to save the cathedral. But as far as the War itself is concerned they didn’t need, and don’t need, to worry. As I have said to you before,
we
run this country. We also run many others, too. Rolls, I think, chose to sacrifice that girl just as Crowley did in Sicily back in the twenties, because he wanted to. There have always been sadists in our midst.’

‘Mr Andrews was killed in a very sadistic way,’ I said, still shuddering even then at the way in which the old cleric had died from a stab wound in his poor old backside. ‘Is that part of Masonic ritual, a punishment?’

‘I think that possibly Mr Andrews and Mr Smith got into a fight, don’t you?’ Mr Steadman said. ‘How else could such an outrage happen?’

And then he left me. I was in no doubt at all that anything I might want to say to the police would be treated as entirely irrelevant.

Chapter Nineteen

I
began what I truly believed was my journey home, but troubling thoughts I knew I couldn’t really do anything about drew me back to the cathedral. It wasn’t that I wanted to see anyone in particular in the great church or even that I wanted to look at places where certain things had happened. I think in reality I just wanted to know that the place was still there. Meeting the Dean on the stairs up to the Great West door was a thing I didn’t either plan or expect. He walked over to me and, to my amazement, he remembered my name.

‘Mr Hancock,’ he said, ‘what a night you shared with us, eh?’

I looked down for a moment before I answered him. Part of me at least didn’t really know quite what to say. The Dean, I had thought, had known, at least in part, what Mr Andrews had suspected. He had, after all, spoken to me about enemies both inside and outside the cathedral. ‘I’m sorry about Mr Andrews,’ I said.

Mr Matthews shook his head sadly. ‘No one apart from the firemen were supposed to be fighting the flames outside the building,’ he said. ‘We lost more people than we should have, Mr Hancock, but thankfully fewer than we might have done. I understand from Mr Steadman that you found the little girl. That is a relief. I fully intended to put her into the care of someone responsible in the Watch myself. But you took care of her yourself, which is admirable.’

Milly. Where was she, I wondered? And what, assuming that she had made it back home through the flaming streets of the City, was she thinking about now? One thing I knew was that she wouldn’t, in spite of having nearly been killed, go to the police. Mr Steadman and his cronies knew that they had Milly’s unquestioning silence, no matter what. Working girls don’t talk. Not usually. But then this wasn’t usual because this could involve her own father selling her for slaughter. Mr Webb had said that Milly’s father hadn’t known what had been going on or rather that was the impression he had given me. But I wondered. I also, for my own satisfaction, had to see Milly again myself.

‘Mr Matthews,’ I said, ‘one of the men who was killed with Mr Andrews was a Mr Webb. His wife—’

‘Oh, yes.’ Dean Matthews frowned. ‘Poor woman. Our ladies are looking after Mrs Webb and her children in the crypt. She is really not strong enough to be left alone as yet.’

‘No.’ I really had to fight to hide my disgust. Webb’s wife had known all about Milly and her sisters and what they did for her husband. But then that was going to make what I was about to do all the easier. I am not by nature a cruel man. I don’t find it easy to make people cry.

‘Mr Matthews,’ I said, ‘do you think it would be all right for me to go and see Mrs Webb? Offer my condolences?’

He smiled. ‘I imagine so,’ he said. ‘But do be careful as you go, won’t you?’ He looked around at the mud-dust- and rubble-caked steps and his face dropped once again. ‘We don’t want any more casualties, do we?’

I began to walk towards the Great West door.

Just before I drew level with him, Mr Matthews said, ‘But most of us didn’t succumb to either the enemy without or the enemy within, did we?’

I moved myself closer to him very quickly now. Did he know? In spite of everything that Steadman had told me to the contrary, did the Dean really know what had happened on the night of 29 December 1940? Just the thought that he might, made me flush with anger. Could this man possibly be one of ‘them’? Well, my mate Ernie Sutton was a Mason . . .

‘The enemy within?’ I said. ‘What, with respect Mr Matthews, does that mean?’

He blinked. No doubt somewhat taken aback by the violence of my tone, the straightness of my face.

‘Well, the structure of the cathedral, of course,’ he said. I looked and looked again at his face for any signs of untruth or dissembling, but I couldn’t find any. ‘As I think I said to you many hours ago, Mr Hancock, we fight both the Nazis, the enemy without, and the fragile and combustible structure of the cathedral, the enemy within. Sir Christopher Wren did not intend his great building to be attacked in this fashion.’

I left a slightly offended Mr Matthews and went into the cathedral and down into the crypt. Of all the people I’d seen in the crypt the previous night, only the exhausted-looking Mrs Webb and her children remained. The kids, who were being given tea by the first-aid ladies, seemed calm enough but the woman, sitting on her own, over by what looked like a charred and headless torso, smoked with wildly shaking hands.

As I sat down next to her, Mrs Webb tipped her head at the torso and said, ‘They say, these ladies here, that that was a statue from the old cathedral, the one what burnt down in the Great Fire of London. A saint, burnt and without its head.’