Impossible Things (52 page)

He unclasped her hands and folded them on her chest. Her nightgown was streaked with dried blood, but it didn’t seem to be hers. I wondered who else had been in there with her. “What’s your name?” Jack said.

“Mina,” she said. It was no more than a whisper.

“My name’s Jack,” he said. He nodded at me. “So’s his. We’re going to carry you down to the ambulance now. Don’t be afraid. You’re safe now”

The ambulance wasn’t there yet. We laid the stretcher on the sidewalk, and I went over to the incident officer to see if it was on its way. Before I could get back, somebody shouted, “Here’s another,” and I went and helped dig out a hand that the foreman had found, and then the body all
the blood had come from. When I looked down the hill, the girl was still lying there on the stretcher, and Jack was bending over it.

I went out to Whitechapel to see the bodysniffer the next day. He wasn’t there. “He’s a part-time,” the post warden told me, clearing off a chair so I could sit down. The post was a mess, dirty clothes and dishes everywhere.

An old woman in a print wrapper was frying up kidneys in a skillet. “Works days in munitions out to Dorking,” she said.

“How exactly is he able to locate the bodies?” I asked. “I heard—”

“That he reads their minds?” the woman said. She scraped the kidneys onto a plate and handed it to the post warden. “He’s heard it, too, more’s the pity, and it’s gone straight to his head. ‘I can feel them under here,’ he says to the rescue squads, like he was Houdini or something, and points to where they’re supposed to start digging.”

“Then how does he find them?”

“Luck,” the warden said.

“
I
think he smells ’em,” the woman said. “That’s why they call ’em bodysniffers.”

The warden snorted. “Over the stink the jerries put in the bombs and the gas and all the rest of it?”

“If he were a—” I said, and didn’t finish it. “If he had an acute sense of smell, perhaps he could smell the blood.”

“You can’t even smell the bodies when they’ve been dead a week,” the warden said, his mouth full of kidneys. “He hears them screaming, same as us.”

“He’s got better hearing than us,” the woman said, switching happily to his theory. “Most of us are half-deaf from the guns, and he isn’t.”

I hadn’t been able to hear the fat woman in the pink hair net, although she’d said she had called for help. But Jack, just down from Yorkshire, where they hadn’t been
deafened by antiaircraft guns for weeks, could. There was nothing sinister about it. Some people had better hearing than others.

“We pulled an army colonel out last week who claimed he didn’t cry out,” I said.

“He’s lying,” the warden said, sawing at a kidney. “We had a nanny, two days ago, prim and proper as you please, swore the whole time we was getting her out, words to make a sailor blush, and then claimed she didn’t. ‘Unclean words have
never
crossed my lips and never will,’ she says to me.” He brandished his fork at me. “Your colonel cried out, all right. He just won’t admit it.”

“I didn’t make a sound,” Colonel Godalming had said, brandishing his serving spoon. “Knew it wouldn’t do any good,” and perhaps the warden was right, and it was only bluster. But he hadn’t wanted his wife to know he was in London, to find out about the dancer at the Windmill. He had had good reason to keep silent, to try to dig himself out.

I went home and rang up a girl I knew in the ambulance service and asked her to find out where they had taken Mina. She rang me back in a few minutes with the answer, and I took the tube over to St. George’s Hospital. The others had all cried out, or banged on the roof of the Anderson, except Mina. She had been so frightened when Jack got her out, she couldn’t speak above a whisper, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t cried or whimpered.

“When you were buried last night, did you call for help?” I would ask her, and she would answer me in her mouse voice, “I called and called between prayers. Why?” And I would say, “It’s nothing, an odd fixation brought on by lack of sleep. Jack spends his days in Dorking, at a munitions plant, and has exceptionally acute hearing.” And there is no more truth to my theory than to Renfrew’s belief that the raids were brought on by his letter to the
Times
.

St. George’s had an entrance marked “Casualty
Clearing Station.” I asked the nursing sister behind the desk if I could see Mina.

“She was brought in last night. The James Street incident.”

She looked at a penciled and crossed-over roster. “I don’t show an admission by that name.”

“I’m certain she was brought here,” I said, twisting my head round to read the list. “There isn’t another St. George’s, is there?”

She shook her head and lifted up the roster to look at a second sheet.

“Here she is,” she said, and I had heard the rescue squads use that tone of voice often enough to know what it meant, but that was impossible. She had been under that headboard. The blood on her nightgown hadn’t even been hers.

“I’m so sorry,” the sister said.

“When did she die?” I said.

“This morning,” she said, checking the second list, which was much longer than the first.

“Did anyone else come to see her?”

“I don’t know. I’ve just been on since eleven.”

“What did she die of?”

She looked at me as if I were insane.

“What was the listed cause of death?” I said.

She had to find Mina’s name on the roster again. “Shock due to loss of blood,” she said, and I thanked her and went to find Jack.

He found me. I had gone back to the post and waited till everyone was asleep and Mrs. Lucy had gone upstairs and then sneaked into the pantry to look up Jack’s address in Mrs. Lucy’s files. It had not been there, as I had known it wouldn’t. And if there had been an address, what would it have turned out to be when I went to find it? A gutted house? A mound of rubble?

I had gone to Sloane Square Station, knowing he
wouldn’t be there, but having no other place to look. He could have been anywhere. London was full of empty houses, bombed-out cellars, secret places to hide until it got dark. That was why he had come here.

“If I was a bad’un, I’d head straight for London,” Swales had said. But the criminal element weren’t the only ones who had come, drawn by the blackout and the easy pickings and the bodies. Drawn by the blood.

I stood there until it started to get dark, watching two boys scrabble in the gutter for sweets that had been blown out of a confectioner’s front window, and then walked back to a doorway down the street from the post, where I could see the door, and waited. The sirens went. Swales left on patrol. Petersby went in. Morris came out, stopping to peer at the sky as if he were looking for his son Quincy’s plane. Mrs. Lucy must not have managed to talk Nelson out of the patrols.

It got dark. The searchlights began to crisscross the sky, catching the silver of the barrage balloons. The planes started coming in from the east, a low hum. Vi hurried in, wearing high heels and carrying a box tied with string. Petersby and Twickenham left on patrol. Vi came out, fastening her helmet strap under her chin and eating something.

“I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” Jack said.

I turned around. He had driven up in a lorry marked ATS. He had left the door open and the motor running. “I’ve got the beams,” he said. “For reinforcing the post. The incident we were on last night, all these beams were lying on top, and I asked the owner of the house if I could buy them from him.”

He gestured to the back of the lorry, where jagged ends of wood were sticking out. “Come along, then, we can get them up tonight if we hurry.” He started toward the truck. “Where were you? I’ve looked everywhere for you.”

“I went to St. George’s Hospital,” I said.

He stopped, his hand on the open door of the truck. “Mina’s dead,” I said, “but you knew that, didn’t you?”

He didn’t say anything.

“The nurse said she died of loss of blood,” I said. A flare drifted down, lighting his face with a deadly whiteness. “I know what you are.”

“If we hurry, we can get the reinforcements up before the raid starts,” he said. He started to pull the door to.

I put my hand on it to keep him from closing it. “War work,” I said bitterly. “What do you do, make sure you’re alone in the tunnel with them or go to see them in hospital afterward?”

He let go of the door.

“Brilliant stroke, volunteering for the ARP,” I said. “Nobody’s going to suspect the noble air-raid warden, especially when he’s so good at locating casualties. And if some of those casualties die later, if somebody’s found dead on the street after a raid, well, it’s only to be expected. There’s a war on.”

The drone overhead got suddenly louder, and a whole shower of flares came down. The searchlights wheeled, trying to find the planes. Jack took hold of my arm.

“Get down,” he said, and tired to drag me into the doorway.

I shook his arm off. “I’d kill you if I could,” I said. “But I can’t, can I?” I waved my hand at the sky. “And neither can they. Your sort don’t die, do they?”

There was a long swish, and the rising scream. “I
will
kill you, though,” I shouted over it. “If you touch Vi or Mrs. Lucy.”

“Mrs. Lucy,” he said, and I couldn’t tell if he said it with astonishment or contempt.

“Or Vi or any of the rest of them. I’ll drive a stake through your heart or whatever it takes,” I said, and the air fell apart.

There was a long sound like an enormous monster growling. It seemed to go on and on. I tried to put my hands over my ears, but I had to hang on to the road to keep from falling. The roar became a scream, and the sidewalk shook itself sharply, and I fell off.

“Are you all right?” Jack said.

I was sitting next to the lorry, which was on its side. The beams had spilled out the back. “Were we hit?” I said.

“No,” he said, but I already knew that, and before he had finished pulling me to my feet, I was running toward the post that we couldn’t see for the dust.

Mrs. Lucy had told Nelson having everyone out on patrol would mean no one could be found in an emergency, but that was not true. They were all there within minutes, Swales and Morris and Violet, clattering up in her high heels, and Petersby. They ran up, one after the other, and then stopped and looked stupidly at the space that had been Mrs. Lucy’s house, as if they couldn’t make out what it was.

“Where’s Renfrew?” Jack said.

“In Birmingham,” Vi said.

“He wasn’t here,” I explained. “He’s on sick leave.” I peered through the smoke and dust, trying to see their faces. “Where’s Twickenham?”

“Here,” he said.

“Where’s Mrs. Lucy?” I said.

“Over here,” Jack said, and pointed down into the rubble.

We dug all night. Two different rescue squads came to help. They called down every half hour, but there was no answer. Vi borrowed a light from somewhere, draped a blue head scarf over it, and set up as incident officer. An ambulance came, sat awhile, left to go to another incident, came back. Nelson took over as incident officer, and Vi came back up to help. “Is she alive?” she asked.

“She’d better be,” I said, looking at Jack.

It began to mist. The planes came over again, dropping flares and incendiaries, but no one stopped work. Twickenham’s typewriter came up in the baskets, and one of Mrs. Lucy’s wineglasses.

At around three Morris thought he heard something, and we stopped and called down, but there was no answer. The mist turned into a drizzle. At half past four I shouted to Mrs. Lucy, and she called back, from far underground, “I’m here.”

“Are you all right?” I shouted.

“My leg’s hurt. I think it’s broken,” she shouted, her voice calm. “I seem to be under the table.”

“Don’t worry,” I shouted. “We’re nearly there.”

The drizzle turned the plaster dust into a slippery, disgusting mess. We had to brace the tunnel repeatedly and cover it with a tarpaulin, and then it was too dark to see to dig. Swales lay above us, holding a pocket torch over our heads so we could see. The all clear went.

“Jack!” Mrs. Lucy called up.

“Yes!” I shouted.

“Was that the all clear?”

“Yes,” I shouted. “Don’t worry. We’ll have you out soon now.”

“What time is it?”

It was too dark in the tunnel to see my watch. I made a guess. “A little after five.

“Is Jack there?”

“Yes.”

“He mustn’t stay,” she said. “Tell him to go home.”

The rain stopped, and it began to get light. Jack glanced vaguely up at the sky.

“Don’t even think about it,” I said. “You’re not going anywhere.” We ran into one and then another of the oak beams that had reinforced the landing on the fourth floor and had to saw through them. Swales reported that
Morris had called Nelson “a bloody murderer.” Vi brought us paper cups of tea.

We called down to Mrs. Lucy, but there wasn’t any answer. “She’s probably dozed off,” Twickenham said, and the others nodded as if they believed him.

We could smell the gas long before we got to her, but Jack kept on digging, and like the others, I told myself that she was all right, that we would get to her in time.

She was not under the table after all, but under part of the pantry door. We had to call for a jack to get it off her. It took Morris a long time to come back with it, but it didn’t matter. She was lying perfectly straight, her arms folded across her chest and her eyes closed as if she were asleep. Her left leg had been taken off at the knee. Jack knelt beside her and cradled her head.

“Keep your hands off her,” I said.

I made Swales come down and help get her out. Vi and Twickenham put her on the stretcher. Petersby went for the ambulance. “She was never a horrid person, you know,” Morris said. “Never.”

It began to rain again, the sky so dark, it was impossible to tell whether the sun had come up yet or not. Swales brought a tarp to cover Mrs. Lucy.

Petersby came back. “The ambulance has gone off again,” he said. “I’ve sent for the mortuary van, but they said they doubt they can be here before half past eight.”

I looked at Jack. He was standing over the tarp, his hands slackly at his sides. He looked worse then Renfrew ever had, impossibly tired, his face gray with wet plaster dust. “We’ll wait,” I said.