Ashes to Ashes (14 page)

But I didn’t have a chance to think about that any more because someone was putting a key into the lock in front of my face. I had thought the two men had gone away!

‘You’ve got to go!’

It was George, the young choir boy, and he was pulling me out of that cupboard whether I wanted to come or not. He must have seen Mr Ronson and Mr Andrews in there with me and, in fact, I had seen him actually look down at them at one point, but he seemed neither upset by it nor surprised. He knew.

‘George . . .’

He closed the door behind me and then leaned on it while he turned the key in the lock.

‘Leave, Mr Hancock,’ he said as he finished securing the door, ‘leave right now!’

‘What?’ I was still pretty shaken up and my shoes were covered in someone else’s blood.

‘Leave the cathedral.’ George put a hand on my shoulder. ‘You’ve seen—’

‘I’ve seen what, George?’ I said. ‘Dead bodies? You’ve seen them too, George, you . . . Bloody hell, you must have lied to me about seeing Mr Phillips! George . . .’

He let go of my shoulder as if it were on fire. ‘Leave!’

‘But the City’s ablaze!’ I said as I watched him disappear into the gloom.

‘You’re safer out there than you are in here,’ he answered. ‘Please go!’

I would have gone after him if I could have seen where he was going. But I couldn’t. I was, it seemed, in that area behind the quire known as the quire aisle. The cupboard I’d been shoved into was not, I could see now, a permanent part of the cathedral. It was like a very large wardrobe and what it was supposed to be for, I didn’t know. There’d been no robes or cassocks, or whatever, in there. Not that I could really know that for sure, I hadn’t exactly looked beyond the dead bodies and I certainly wasn’t going to try and have another butchers in there, that was for sure!

Shadows of the flames outside, maybe by now even touching the side of the building, made weird patterns on the columns up to the ceiling. I couldn’t go out there! Just the thought of it made my heart jump in my chest. I’d come into the cathedral to get away from the fire but now, by looking for Milly, I’d become part of something I couldn’t even begin to understand. For the first time since I’d been hit I put a hand up to my nose and found a broken, bloodied mess. The bastard had snapped it! I’ve a big, what some would call a Roman, nose and so I suppose it had made a decent target. That I’d stopped breathing when he hit me would have been worrying had I not been thinking about young George by that time. What exactly did he know about all this business and why was he in the cathedral anyway? Most kids of his age were evacuated and it was well known that the choir school of St Paul’s had been temporarily moved down to somewhere in the West Country. I looked around for him again, but God knows where he’d gone. For now I had to think about what I was going to do next. If I took heed of George I’d take my chances out amongst the flames. If I stayed, however, I couldn’t imagine that I’d be in any sort of danger if I was with other people. For a little while I was right.

‘You have to keep your chin up, don’t you?’ Mr Webb said with a chuckle to his wife.

Poor but honest, she just smiled and then looked down at her painful-looking dry hands. My sister Nancy’s are the same. Soap powder is so hard to come by now, women have taken to using Borax or even ammonia in order to get a lather going in the weekly wash.

‘Course you do,’ he said, answering his own question, as I imagined he often did. ‘Can’t let the Jerries get us down, can we?’

From over in one of the darker corners of the crypt, I heard the distinct sound of kissing; wet and long and, in its way, quite as patriotic as Mr Webb’s sentiments. After all, if the nation is to carry on and have a future, people need to keep having kids.

The posh woman I’d seen when I had first come into the cathedral, plus the older Jewish woman, were laying side by side on blankets on the floor. They both looked at me, frowning, staring mostly at my nose, but neither of them said anything. Only the bloke on the book in the crypt had actually asked me what had happened. I’d gone up to him fully with the intention of telling him about Mr Andrews and Mr Ronson. But I couldn’t, and when he asked about my poor old conk I mumbled something about having fallen over in the dark. Young George could be having a game with me about how much danger I was in in this place, but I doubted if that was the case. He had looked at me very seriously and, besides, how, if he didn’t know what was happening, had he found me in that cupboard? How had he known that I was going to be there? Thinking about young George was, I now noticed, beginning to make me shiver. He’d set me up with that meeting with ‘Phillips’. Had he known that violence towards me was possible even then? Had he only later got cold feet about that?

The kissing in the corner sounded as if it was getting even more passionate. In spite of myself I looked to where the sound was coming from and saw the briefest flash of a long, pale leg. At the top of the leg was a large, dark hand. Lucky blighter! I’d have given anything to have my Hannah with me at that moment. I took my eyes off the couple in the corner and began looking around the crypt at my fellow shelterers again. There were a lot more than there had been even since the last time I’d been down there. Not many people may live in the City but a lot of them do fire watching on the roofs of the businesses, churches and monuments. With the City on fire we were packed out. No ‘Mr Phillips’ and his mate, whoever he was, as yet, though. It would have to be someone, I felt, who had claimed to have seen Phillips earlier on. To anyone with half a brain the bloke with the dodgy mask could not in any way be Mr Phillips. But Mr Smith, Mr Bolton, Mr Arnold, young George and the Dean had seen him, or claimed to have done so. Surely the Dean couldn’t be part of this . . . whatever it was, too? Surely if he had seen Mr Phillips, he couldn’t have seen ‘him’ properly?

‘What the hell are you doing here?’

I looked up to find George standing above me, his face red with what looked like anger.

‘I told you to go!’ he said as he first looked around and then dropped down beside me.

‘I decided to stay,’ I said calmly.

‘They tried to kill you!’ he whispered.

‘Who did?’ I said. ‘Who tried to kill me? You know, don’t you, George? You know exactly what’s going on here.’

George looked away. ‘You can’t stay here . . .’

‘Why not? Why can’t I stay here?’ I said angrily now.

‘Because they’re here!’ he said.

I followed where he was looking, but I couldn’t see anyone I recognised as having anything to do with ‘Mr Phillips’.

‘Who’s here?’ I asked. ‘What—’

‘Any one of them!’ George leaned in towards me and whispered. ‘It’s not your fault, but you saw and heard things that you shouldn’t have.’

‘Things that I shouldn’t have?’

‘They’re here!’ he repeated as he looked around the crypt once again. But the place was full and so I couldn’t possibly know who he meant.

‘Where?’ I asked him. ‘Where are—’

‘Everywhere!’ He looked back at me, his eyes full of tears. ‘If you’re lucky, the fact that there are so many people here will save you,’ he said. ‘They have to get rid of you, they have no choice! You should be dead anyway. I saved you! You should have gone when I told you to! Now if you stay they’ll kill you and if you go, well . . . If you try to leave now they will try to kill you.’

I attempted to grab hold of him to ask him more, but the boy was too quick for me, and as he stood up and moved away he just said, ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to . . . It’s all for the best, you know it is.’ He shook his head. ‘Sorry.’

I was frightened. Who wouldn’t have been? Someone had tried to kill me and now, apparently, a lot more people had the idea I might be better off dead too. And if George was right I was well and truly trapped now. I’d thought about who might be after me before, but now the idea that maybe even more people were involved than I had at first thought crossed my mind. After all, if not all watchmen were Masons, then the opposite applied to those people not in the Watch. Some of them could be in the Brotherhood – if indeed it was the Brotherhood that was behind these deaths anyway. After all, Mr Andrews had been a Mason himself and he had not only been against this ‘sacrifice’, he had died, not of natural causes, himself.

‘’Ere, mate, got a fag, have you?’

A tap on my shoulder shocked me so much that it sent me flying across the floor like some sort of barmy scalded cat.

‘Er . . .’

‘Blimey,’ the tin-hatted watchman said, ‘I only asked!’

Chapter Ten

I
moved quickly and quietly in and out of the sleeping and sometimes groaning bodies on the floor. I’d seen George leave and I’d decided to follow him. I couldn’t stay in there, not with the kind of fear that bloody boy had left me with! I can’t stand people looking at me at the best of times, but under these circumstances it was proving to be impossible. Not knowing who, if anyone, was going to murder me, was not something I could bear.

‘George!’

I could see his long body with its long mac and cassock underneath swishing against the floor as I ran to try and get close to him. But as I began to run, he, first looking behind to see where I was, began to run too.

‘George! Why are you running away?’ I said as I puffed and panted after him. And then I said, hoping against hope that it might actually shock him, ‘What have you done?’

This made him stop. There were other blokes about but it was suddenly as if, to George at least, the two of us were all alone. His face, by the dim light from the little lamp underneath the dome, looked much older than his years. He said, ‘I’m so, so sorry. I believed, still believe, it is for the best. But . . .’ He paused, weeping a little now. ‘I didn’t even try to stop it. I didn’t even try!’

‘Stop what?’

He turned immediately and then ran full pelt for the door beside the Great West entrance. It was open and he shot through it like a rocket. I didn’t even attempt to follow. He was outside, God knew where, and, besides, the world was melting out there. Whether I stayed or left made little difference as far as I could see. Whatever was going on in the cathedral, I had the feeling, at that moment, that soon none of it would matter. I might feel trapped but at least I wasn’t burning – yet. It was the end and, although I fear death and the nothingness I can’t help but feel that it will bring, I knew in those seconds that followed that I wouldn’t be going into it on my own. Not if the fires took me and my whole world away with them – and they were the most powerful thing I could see then. Outside the door that George had shot through everything was as hot and red as a blast furnace. It took me a while to realise that there was a hand on my shoulder.

‘Everything’s not as it seems,’ Mr Smith said.

He smiled, this bloke who was one of those who claimed to have seen Mr Phillips. I cringed away from him. ‘Somebody tried to kill me!’ I said. ‘I don’t care much about how it looks, Mr Smith. An explanation would be nice, if you have one!’

Whether he knew about ‘Mr Phillips’ and my brief sojourn into that cupboard with two corpses, I couldn’t be sure. But he did seem to have some knowledge about what was going on. He said, ‘If you come with me, I’ll show you what’s happening and I’ll tell you why.’

‘Mr Ronson is dead, as is Mr Andrews,’ I said. ‘Don’t try to tell me otherwise, I’ve seen them. Some kind of ritual . . .’

‘No, no, you’re quite wrong there,’ Mr Smith said. ‘Quite wrong. Mr Ronson and Mr Andrews were accidents. No ritual was involved in their deaths, none at all.’

He said it all so calmly that for a moment I was too shocked to breathe.

‘Accidents?’ I murmured huskily. I moved closer to him now, my fear suddenly receding, and quickly, too, as my anger went on the increase. ‘Accidents! Mr Andrews was stabbed! In his . . . up . . .’ In spite of my lack of religion I couldn’t bring myself to say either ‘bum’ or ‘backside’ in a church. ‘. . . his bottom,’ I said. ‘Mr Smith, watchmen are dying here, watchmen who are trying to defend this cathedral!’

People standing at the western doors were beginning to look and so Mr Smith took hold of my arm and pulled me to one side, into the gloom. There his manner changed completely and my fear began to return.

‘Andrews and Ronson were enemies of the cathedral!’ Mr Smith spat into my face. ‘Enemies!’

They hadn’t come across to me as enemies. Mr Andrews had been strange and maybe even a bit mad, but that he cared about the cathedral was something I had never doubted.

In spite of my rising fear, I said, ‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Not everything is as it seems, as I’ve told you before,’ he replied.

‘Then why not tell Mr Andrews’s wife, at least, that he’s copped it? Why is it a secret? Why deny—’

‘We have to get through this night!’ he said. ‘None of us reckoned on all this!’ he swept a hand around and out towards the fires. ‘It was not meant to be like this! But it is a fact, and we have to deal with it. Now, are you interested in saving this cathedral or not?’

‘Of course I am!’ I said. ‘But I’m also interested in why someone I believe was pretending to be your Mr Phillips tried to kill me!’

He opened his mouth as if he were about to say something, but then he closed it again. For several seconds he looked up at me and then he said, ‘I can’t tell you about that. You just have to come with me and—’

‘No.’ I shook my head, I was furious. Who the hell did this bloke think he was, ordering me about? ‘Forget it, mate. I’ve been told things by a lot of people and I don’t know whom to believe. All I do know is that someone who calls himself Phillips tried to kill me. I’m not going along with anyone I don’t trust and that includes you.’

Mr Smith put his hand into the pocket of his jacket and said, ‘I mean you no harm, Mr Hancock. Not personally. All will, I promise, become clear.’

He had a gun in his hand now and it was pointed at my stomach. I sighed. I wasn’t exactly afraid at that moment, and I don’t say that because I want to seem heroic. I was so confused and tired by that time – not to mention sore around my nose, too – that I honestly couldn’t even begin to care by then.