Dead to Me (31 page)

As one girl had said she’d seen Ruby on the second floor just before the bombing, when the group reached that level Verity let them all go on up further, then made her way gingerly along the corridor towards the point where the bombs had created a void down through the hospital.

A cold wind was coming in off the sea, blowing loose plaster, odd sheets of paper and even small items of clothing around. At one point a blue hospital gown flew towards her, flapping in her face.

She wrestled herself clear of it. ‘Ruby!’ she called out. ‘If you can hear me, shout or bang something.’

She stood still and listened. She could hear the wind,
creaking timbers, and glass showering down somewhere, but no cry for help. She called again and again, each time edging nearer to the void.

When she was finally within a yard of it, she stopped short, suddenly aware how dangerous it was. From a distance the floorboards looked safe, but close up she could see they were merely held together by a couple of nails at her end; to step on to them would be like walking the plank. The walls of some wards were still intact, some with a patient’s notes still hanging on a hook above where the bed had been. Peering down, she saw a bed two floors below, the iron twisted and buckled like it had been crushed by a giant fist.

‘Ruby!’ she called out. ‘Ruby, if you can hear me, make some noise!’

Then suddenly she heard something, a faint sound that was almost like a mewing cat.

‘Ruby!’ she called again. ‘If that’s you, try to do better.’

Again the mewing sound, and in a flash of intuition she realized whoever was making it was just terrified and unable to really speak.

‘That’s better, I understand you are really scared, but keep making some kind of sound so I can work out where you are,’ she said, edging forward and keeping close to the corridor walls, as she thought the floor was probably safer there.

A step forward and the floorboard shifted under her feet, hanging down precariously. If she’d taken a bigger step, she saw she would have slid down to where the twisted bedstead lay two floors below.

But she could now see to the right of the void, into a room with its far wall blown away.

‘Ruby, or whoever you are!’ she called again. ‘I’m right on the edge of a huge hole. Try to say something, to help me find out where you are. I can’t move any further forward.’

‘Here … at back of hole,’ a faint but familiar voice called back. ‘Blown here by blast … trapped under heavy joist.’

‘Ruby, thank God you’re alive!’ Verity exclaimed. ‘Hold on, I’ll go and get the rescue team. Are you badly hurt?’

Again the mewing sound, and Verity realized it had taken all Ruby’s strength and willpower to say where she was. She was obviously badly hurt, or she would have cracked a joke.

‘Just be brave a little longer,’ she called back. ‘I’ll soon get you out.’

Verity retraced her steps and ran full tilt down the stairs and outside. She saw the big, dark-haired man who she’d been told was head of the rescue team, and went straight to him.

‘My friend, the receptionist, is trapped up on the second floor by the void the bomb made. She’s badly hurt. I can’t see her, but she said she was thrown by the blast and is trapped by a joist. Please save her?’

‘There are many people trapped,’ he said. ‘I’ll get to your friend as soon as I can.’

Verity caught hold of the sleeve of his overalls. ‘I don’t think she can hang on much longer. She’s a brave person, but she’s making this horrible mewing sound which I know is because she daren’t shout out in case everything comes down around her. So please, please go to her now!’

He looked down at her, and half smiled. ‘You put forward a good case for her. Okay. Second floor, you say?’

She went to follow him and another two men who went with him, but he ordered her back. ‘Stay there!’ he shouted. ‘And what’s her name?’

‘Ruby,’ she called back. ‘She’s got red hair.’

Verity went round to the part of the garden where she could see right into the destruction the bomb had caused. The ground at the bottom was a mound of still-smoking brick, plaster and timber debris. She craned her neck up to see if she could spot Ruby on the second floor, but she couldn’t. But she saw a glimpse of the big rescue man; he was standing where she had stood, and he appeared to be giving his companions instructions.

Then to her astonishment she saw him flipping over the edge of the floorboards. She gasped involuntarily, thinking he had fallen, but when he suddenly stopped in space, swaying in the wind, she realized he was tied to a rope and looking for Ruby.

There was so much noise all around her, she couldn’t hear what was going on up there, and not knowing was agony. She knew she ought to find a telephone and ring Wilby, who would be frantic by now, but she couldn’t bring herself to move away.

She could see the big man pointing to something at the back of the void, and then he was gesticulating as if giving instructions to his companions.

It looked as if a rescue was really in hand.

It was another two hours before they finally got Ruby out. It was three thirty by then. She was the last of the forty-five injured to be brought out, and there were nineteen dead.

Service casualties were taken to Melksham, but Ruby, being a civilian, was taken to Torquay’s general hospital,
where it was found she had a serious back injury, a broken leg and a broken arm, along with many lacerations all over her body from flying glass and masonry.

Wilby hugged Verity when she got back home at just after five. ‘How is Ruby now?’ she asked, her voice shaking with emotion.

‘Very poorly,’ Verity sighed. ‘But she’s alive, and we should be so grateful for that. Apparently, she was wedged against a wall just by a joist. If it had moved, she’d have dropped down on to the debris on the ground floor and almost certainly been killed. I wanted to stay at the hospital with her, but they wouldn’t let me.’

Verity had eventually telephoned Wilby while she was waiting for Ruby to be brought down by her rescuers. Wilby had walked down to the Palace to collect Verity’s bicycle, and Verity had gone with Ruby in the ambulance.

‘She drifted in and out of consciousness in the ambulance,’ Verity went on to say. ‘When she did come round, she said she was afraid she’d never dance with Luke again. I’m terrified she might never walk again.’

‘Did they say she might not?’ Wilby’s eyes widened in horror.

Verity nodded and began to cry. ‘They were taking her in for an operation as I left. They said it all depends on what they find.’

‘Don’t cry, sweetheart.’ Wilby pulled her into her arms, but she was crying too. ‘I can’t believe God could be cruel enough to take the use of her legs when he’s just fixed her up with the man of her dreams.’

‘We have to telephone Luke,’ Verity said, her voice muffled because her face was buried in Wilby’s chest.

Neither of them spoke again for some time. They just stood there in the kitchen, wrapped together crying. Both of them knew Ruby would never accept having to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. The chances were she’d drive Luke away too, because she’d never believe he was staying with her out of anything but a sense of duty.

A series of snapshot pictures kept running through Verity’s mind as she held on to Wilby. The hungry, ragged girl she’d met on the heath who seemed to know so much more about life than her. There was the fun-loving extrovert who dazzled her when she came to stay with her and Wilby. She didn’t think about the interlude when Ruby wouldn’t forgive her, but moved on to how it was Ruby who saved her life by getting her out of that Morrison shelter and to the hospital.

Then there were these last couple of years here together. They’d healed each other with laughter and love, and recently Ruby had allowed herself such big dreams for her future with Luke.

Surely fate couldn’t be savage enough to snatch that from her?

‘Just
one more go,’ Wilby urged Ruby. They were in the dining room, which Wilby had turned into a bedroom for Ruby when she came home from hospital a week before Christmas. They were unsure then if she would ever walk again, despite the best efforts of a Mr Ernest Clitheroe, a top surgeon and spinal injuries specialist.

Ruby wasn’t paralysed; she could move her legs when lying on the bed. And yet back in hospital, when she had tried to stand, her legs had just given way. Clitheroe was baffled. He hadn’t expected her to be able to walk immediately – her leg muscles had atrophied during her three-month stay in hospital – but he believed the exercises he had given her would strengthen them.

Wilby insisted on bringing her home for Christmas. She felt certain that most of the problem was in Ruby’s head. While in hospital she had grown very insecure and depressed, she didn’t believe she would ever walk again, and feared that Luke couldn’t possibly love a girl in a wheelchair.

It didn’t help that Luke was now stationed somewhere near Cambridge, and he’d only managed to get one thirty-six-hour pass to travel to see her, back in December. It was just too far and too complicated a journey to attempt on a twenty-four-hour pass. Yet there was absolutely no
evidence he was beginning to back away from Ruby; he wrote to her almost every day, and since she’d been back home he telephoned every night when he wasn’t on duty.

Wilby and Verity had made the dining room into an attractive bedroom, so Ruby could be wheeled easily into the kitchen, and outside the house once the weather improved. There was a downstairs lavatory too. But they had no intention of allowing Ruby to think she would stay in the wheelchair, or have to be helped into bed and on to the lavatory for ever. Wilby had got a pair of sturdy parallel bars made so that Ruby could practise walking.

This was what they were doing this morning. Wilby sat Ruby on the edge of the bed, and then lined the bars up in front of her. Supporting her weight on her hands, she had to take steps forward. She had managed just one step the first time, rising to three or four since, but today she had actually walked to the end of the bars. She couldn’t seem to turn to walk back, and she hauled herself back to the bed using her hands and arms.

‘I can’t do it again,’ Ruby insisted. ‘My legs just stopped working, and it hurts my hands and arms too much when they have to take my weight. But I’ll try again tomorrow.’

Wilby was disappointed. Once she’d got Ruby to take a couple of steps she’d expected that, within a few days, she’d be walking everywhere. But she couldn’t let the disappointment show.

‘You did marvellously. Luke is going to be so thrilled when you tell him.’

Ruby’s mouth drooped. ‘Wouldn’t it be kinder to let him go?’ she sighed. ‘I love him so much, but I’m no use to man nor beast.’

‘That is a really stupid thing to say,’ Wilby said briskly. ‘Luke loves you, and we all know you are going to walk again. You just have to believe that. Now I’ll just help you into the wheelchair, and we’ll do a few leg lift exercises.’

Wilby went to the kitchen after she’d finished helping Ruby. She left her sitting in her wheelchair by the window, just staring into space.

She was seriously worried about the girl. Brian and Colin were at school, Verity was at work, but when they were home Ruby seemed brighter and more positive. Wilby had realized now that this was an act, and she was very afraid Ruby was slipping into a state of complete apathy which she might never come out of.

It had been touch and go for her in the first couple of weeks after the bombing, and while under sedation for the pain she’d said some very odd things. The general gist seemed to be that she believed she had bad blood. She didn’t know her father, and her mother was a drunken prostitute who thought of no one but herself.

Wilby sensed that inside Ruby’s head a small voice was telling her she had no right to a happy future. She suspected this voice had always been with her, but after she rescued Verity and they were so happy to be back together again, the voice was silenced for a time. This terrible accident had brought the voice back, and to Ruby it must seem that being unable to walk was her punishment for daring to think she could ever escape the fate that had been planned for her.

This was, of course, all absolute hokum. But Wilby knew that when people got such ideas into their head, they were difficult to remove. She thought what was needed
was a distraction, to get Ruby thinking about something – or someone – other than herself and her predicament.

But what?

Verity appeared to be the most likely person, but she hadn’t got any problems that needed solving. Bevan was in Cambridgeshire too, and Verity was delighted when he telephoned. They exchanged letters almost as often as Ruby and Luke, and she looked forward to him getting leave and coming here. But she wasn’t in love with him, and no help or advice could make that happen, either.

Verity loved her job too. She was in her element climbing telegraph poles, she didn’t mind how cold or wet it was, she took a pride in keeping telephone lines working. Recently she’d taken up a real interest in wirelesses too, and she’d enrolled in an evening class to learn how they worked, and to repair them. She’d mentioned that once the war was over she might open an electrical goods shop and do wireless repairs on the side.

The only thing Wilby could think of which wasn’t quite right in Verity’s life, apart from her stepfather, was this chap Miller. She often spoke of him, always with affection, and from what she said it seemed entirely out of character for him to take up with another girl.

As for the stepfather, Wilby often thought there was more there than Verity had ever admitted to. She was terribly cautious with men, as if she’d experienced something really bad in the past. She had, of course, had all those beatings, but Wilby didn’t think it was that, she thought it went back much further, to when Verity was still a child.

As Wilby began making some pastry for a pie, she thought opening a discussion about Verity with Ruby
might be a smart move. Anything was better than seeing Ruby with that blank expression on her face, as if she felt there was no light left in her life.

Archie Wood picked up the poker and prodded the fire viciously to warm up the icy room. He was staying in a run-down boarding house in Ipswich, and he knew it was time to move on because Pearl Marlowe, the landlady, kept asking him more and more questions.

He wondered why women always had to know every last thing about a man once they’d slept with them, and claimed to be in love. When he’d just been her lodger, renting the back room on the first floor, she’d been bright and funny, happy to have a drink with him when he came in, laughed at his jokes, brought him up tea and toast in the mornings, and didn’t appear to want to know anything about him.

He’d been Stephen Lyle for months now; sometimes he even forgot it wasn’t his real name. He had his identity card, his ration book, and a few old photos of Stephen’s mother and father too to add weight to his new identity. He’d even got himself a job as concierge at Drury’s Hotel in Ipswich. At least he told people he was the concierge, as it sounded rather grand – in point of fact he was the only male help in the hotel, and so he opened doors, carried in coal and luggage, and did anything else the female staff found difficult. Dressed in a good suit and highly polished shoes, he created the impression that although the hotel was rather shabby, it had class.

The pay at the hotel was abysmal, but there were perks: a hot meal every day, amenable and attractive staff, and he
was in the warm. Furthermore, he often heard items of interest. One of the most useful was that a wealthy widow living alone about ten miles out of Ipswich had been taken into hospital for an emergency operation. The two people he overheard discussing it were concerned that the house might be broken into in her absence. She’d never had help in the house and so there would be no one popping in to keep an eye on things now.

He went out there the following morning, got in effortlessly through a side door which wasn’t even locked, and found nearly a hundred pounds in cash in her wardrobe and a beautiful sapphire ring amongst her costume jewellery.

There was a great deal more in that house that he could have taken, but it made him feel quite virtuous not to be greedy. Besides, fencing silver and jewellery was always a risk, the sort of people he dealt with were just as likely to grass him up.

It was the same night that he ended up in bed with Pearl his landlady too. He’d managed to get his hands on a black market bottle of brandy; they had a few drinks together, and one thing led to another.

He’d thought she was just another dumb blonde back then, amusing, sexy, warm and fun, but not very bright. She was, after all, almost an iconic seaside-postcard woman, with her bleached hair, big bust and low-cut, tight dresses. He liked her wide blue eyes and her mouth like a scarlet gash. She was his kind of woman, she would never answer him back or volunteer an opinion.

Before Christmas he’d done a few jobs that had brought in quite a bit of money. He’d gambled some of it, and while
on a winning streak he’d bought Pearl a fox-fur stole. She was delighted with it, but smilingly asked why – if he had enough money to buy her such an expensive gift – was he staying at her sorry little place?

He got himself out of that one by telling her he’d cashed in some shares he’d been holding on to for years. She appeared to believe that, but it wasn’t long before there were many more questions. Sometimes the questions came right after they’d been making love. Did he have any children? Was his wife dead? If so, what did she die of? The questions went on and on, it was as if she wanted his whole former life charted out in front of her.

At first he thought it was just plain jealousy, because she felt he’d had some kind of grand, privileged life. She had been married to a surly fisherman at seventeen, brought two sons up on next to nothing, only for them to join the navy as soon as they were old enough.

The fisherman husband had died in an accident at sea back in 1937, and she got just enough insurance money to furnish this rented house and let out rooms.

But as he got to know Pearl better, he realized he’d been wrong in thinking she was just a dumb, lonely widow reaching out for the love and security she’d never had. He’d seen flashes of sharp intellect now and then. Indeed, it was probable that she suspected he was on the run, perhaps he’d even let something slip when he’d been drinking, and that she intended to use it to her advantage.

Pearl wanted money, that much was plain, and she thought he had it but wasn’t sharing it with her. It was only a matter of time before she revealed her hand, and if he disappointed her there was no telling what she’d do. So
there was nothing for it but to leave. And that was a shame, because he liked it here, especially his job at the hotel.

He heard the key turn in the lock and sighed, because now he’d have to wait another day before going. Another day of telling her he loved her, that once the war was over he could claim his inheritance from his parents, and that together they could start a new life.

‘Why are you sitting there by the fire, Stephen?’ she asked as soon as she was through the door. ‘You said you’d paint the window frames in the back bedroom.’

He looked up at her. She was wearing a midnight-blue coat and a black beret-style hat perched on the side of her blonde curls. As always, she looked lovely; few would guess she was forty-five, she could pass for thirty.

‘I wasn’t feeling too good,’ he said. The truth was he’d forgotten, but he wasn’t going to admit that. ‘I thought paint fumes would make me feel worse. And besides, I’ve got a shift at Drury’s at four this afternoon.’

‘I find it funny that you only have spells of not feeling good when I’ve asked you to do something for me,’ she said waspishly. ‘I might start feeling poorly myself instead of making the tea, or washing and ironing your shirts.’

‘Don’t take that tone with me,’ he said, jumping to his feet, anger welling up inside him.

‘I’ll take whatever tone I like,’ she said, tossing her head defiantly. ‘This is my house and you already get far more privileges than any of the other guests.’

‘Sleeping with you? Is that a privilege? I’ve heard that you sleep with any of your guests who you think might have a few bob.’

The moment the words were out of his mouth he
regretted them. It might possibly be true, but it wasn’t wise to make her angry.

‘You’ve had the privilege of me not going down to the police station and asking them if you are on their wanted list,’ she fired back. Her blue eyes sparkled with malice, and the speed with which the implied threat had come out of her mouth suggested she’d had it on her mind for some time.

‘That’s a ridiculous thing to say,’ he blustered. ‘As if I’d take a job in a hotel if I was wanted!’

‘You could with a false identity. The police are too busy right now chasing up black marketeers, deserters and local criminals to check out the Londoner in the smart suit hiding away in their town.’

Archie sprang forward and caught her by the throat, pressing his thumbs on to her windpipe. ‘How dare you speak to me like that,’ he raged at her. ‘You’re just a cheap little tart, stuck in a dirty little town, even your sons don’t come back to visit you.’

She kicked his shin, and it hurt, but that made him squeeze her throat harder and harder. All at once her eyes were popping, her face turning purple, until her bucking body became still.

He let go of her and she slumped to the floor, her coat and dress riding up to show her stocking tops.

For a few moments he just stood there, panting and looking down at her, shocked that it had all blown up so quickly and that he’d lost his temper.

He didn’t feel remorse exactly. He was glad she was dead, because now she couldn’t talk to anyone. But he would have preferred to kill her away from this house, at
least make it look like it had been done by a random madman.

Pulling himself together, he closed the door through to the hall. He didn’t think there were any guests in upstairs, but someone could come back at any time. Then, opening the door which led down to the cellar, he lifted Pearl up, slung her over his shoulder and carried her down the cellar steps.