Ashes to Ashes (20 page)

‘Your poor dead father would be ashamed of you, George Watkins!’ Mr Smith said. ‘He knew what had to be done! He was a brother, unafraid of the dark, willing to protect what is good, whatever the cost!’

‘He was a real man,’ another new and yet familiar voice agreed.

Milly managed to lift one small hand off the top of the archway while I strained to reach down towards her.

‘Love!’ I hissed. ‘Just a little bit further!’

‘George?’ It was Mr Rolls. I didn’t know exactly where he was but I knew he had to be behind us.

I took hold of Milly’s wrist with the tips of my fingers.

‘George, unlike Mr Smith, I think you should stop worrying about what your father might have thought about you,’ Mr Rolls said. ‘That ghastly old skeleton, Andrews, was obviously closer to your heart than your dear papa. I was wrong about you, George and I apologise.’

And then there was a cracking sound followed by a low, painful-sounding groan.

‘Get the girl, Mr Smith,’ I heard Mr Rolls say. ‘Don’t worry about the man. There’s still time to save this place if we’re quick.’

I heard George scream out, ‘I’m dying!’ And I looked around. The boy, who Mr Rolls had shot, was just a pile of dark agony at the other end of the balcony. The bastard had to have picked up the gun I’d kicked over the side!

Mr Smith made a grab for Milly’s legs and, as she pulled them towards her body and out of his grasp, I felt her slip.

‘Mr Hancock!’

I had the flimsiest grasp on her wrist but somehow I managed to dig my fingers into her flesh. As her legs swung out into space I heard her scream. My arm jolted with the weight of her and my shoulder swivelled and ground in its socket. Christ, it hurt!

I had to look down so that I could lean over and try to grab her wrist with both of my hands. She was so precarious. Just hanging out into nothing, her face turned up towards mine, its eyes pleading with me to save her. I worked my free hand down the arm that already had her and when I found her fingers once again I pulled.

‘To blazes with this!’ I heard Rolls say and then there was another gunshot.

One of the other blokes said, ‘Mr Rolls! The ceremony!’

‘To blazes with that too!’ he said and then he shot again. At Milly.

I didn’t feel her go limp, but she was completely still and silent when, with one huge last effort, I pulled her up and then over the railings. At that point I couldn’t be certain whether she was alive or dead.

When I placed her down on the floor and she didn’t fall over, I knew that Milly was alive. Killer she might be, but she was also a little girl to me and when I saw that she was all right I hugged her to my chest and kissed her hair as if she were my own dear daughter. Shaking now with shock, Milly began to shiver and so I took off my jacket, placed it around her shoulders and then sat her at the back of the chamber. High up in the vaulted ceiling behind us I could see a window which was not covered by any blackout curtains. It was completely red with flames. A horrible blood-curdling groan rippled along the balcony towards us as that poor lad George began to die.

‘You bastards!’ I yelled as I ran back towards the railings once again. God, it was hot up there, as if we were cooking in a great dark stove – which in a way we were. ‘Hasn’t your God or whatever it is you think you’re killing for, got enough blood yet?’

Just below, on the top of the archway, I could see Mr Smith pulling himself up against the railings. I could push him off to his death without too much effort and I knew that I really should do so. But I also knew that I really didn’t want to. I pleaded with him, ‘Mr Smith,’ I said, ‘you’re a watchman first and foremost, aren’t you? You’re a man of honour! The Watch
is
honourable! Don’t do what Mr Rolls wants you to do! It’s wrong!’

‘In Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, the floors were red with the blood of sacrifice . . .’

‘Of animals, yes!’ I said, hoping to goodness that my recollection of the little bit of Old Testament knowledge I had was correct. ‘Not people!’

I looked into Mr Smith’s eyes and I think that he was about to reply in some way. I hoped that maybe something I’d said might have made him think twice about what he was doing. I don’t think he was a wholly bad man. He was a proper watchman after all. But what happened next came from outside our little drama up on that balcony.

‘Rolls!’ The voice came from the floor of the cathedral.

I could see a couple of blokes down below us, but I couldn’t make out who they were. I did get the name of one, however, when I heard Mr Smith murmur, ‘Steadman.’

Suddenly I felt some hope! ‘Mr Steadman!’ I shouted. ‘It’s Hancock! Are you all right?’

A torch beam hit me square in the face and made me blink. ‘Hancock, thank God! I’ve a pretty sore head, but I’m alive!’ Mr Steadman said. ‘Are
you
all right? And the girl?’

‘We—’

‘Gordon, this doesn’t concern you,’ I heard Mr Rolls say with contempt in his voice.

‘I’m in the Craft too, Eric,’ Mr Steadman responded. ‘I won’t have what I love perverted by you!’

‘I will save St Paul’s Cathedral,’ Mr Rolls said.

‘Why?’ Mr Steadman replied. I heard the sound of men’s feet running across the marble below. ‘You’ve never cared about the place! You never came on watch with Harold Phillips or me! You just have this, this interest in sacrifice! You just want to kill and then be thanked for it! No, you just want to kill, don’t you? Like your idol, the Beast. Sidney Ronson never trusted you, he knew which way you were going!’

‘We’ve locked the door, Gordon,’ I heard Mr Rolls say slowly. ‘The men you’ve sent to stop us, can’t get in.’

‘But the tower door is open,’ I said. I called down to Mr Steadman, ‘Rolls had to break the door in to get to us!’

Rolls laughed. ‘We locked the door at the top of the stairs,’ he said. ‘Even if you do manage to push Mr Smith to his death, others, including me, will come to take his place, Mr Hancock. I will have that girl and I will kill her in the way prescribed in ancient rite.’

‘You’ll never get out of here alive, Rolls!’ Mr Steadman said.

‘You can’t kill me!’ I heard Rolls say. ‘None of you can kill me! The whole nation, the Empire itself, will thank me! Hitler will never ever tangle with the Brotherhood again, not when he sees our power!’

One of the worst things in the world is a man with a mission. Anyone who thinks he’s special, that his ideas are better than anyone else’s, is dangerous. Just look at Hitler. Too many people had already died this night because of this bloke’s obsession with offering blood in exchange for the safety of the cathedral. Not that Mr Rolls’s ‘mission’ was about that really at all. As he’d said himself, he wanted glory both personally and for the ‘brotherhood’ or, rather, his version of it.

‘Eric, the real heroes are up on the roof!’ Mr Steadman said. ‘The Dean and the other chaps, the watchmen who come here night in and night out are beating back the flames. We’re not out of the woods yet, but as long as the bombers don’t come back and as long as the LFB continue to protect the cathedral, I think we’ll survive. The cathedral doesn’t need blood, Eric! The cathedral doesn’t need you at all!’

If what he was saying was true then maybe those of us who remained weren’t all going to roast to death!

‘Eric,’ Mr Steadman said, ‘you need to stop this now. It’s wrong.’

I looked down at Mr Smith and I know that I saw desperation in his eyes. I said, ‘Look, mate, whatever you blokes think you’re going to do here tonight, it’s not going to happen. People know. It’s not just poor old Mr Andrews’s ramblings any more. And George is dead! A young lad . . .’

‘We planned it for months!’ Mr Smith said. He sobbed. ‘Why such a big raid tonight! Why not a normal, quiet Sunday . . .’

I felt like saying something about how even Hitler was against such a bunch of lunatics, but I didn’t. He’d completely ignored what I’d said about George. Like Rolls, he just cared about this big plan they all had for the ‘good’ of the cathedral. Something very cold entered my mind then. It was a small, icy voice which told me I should just push Mr Smith off the archway and have done with it. He would have done that to me had he been in my position, I was pretty sure. And besides, if I killed him, maybe Bolton and the other blokes with Rolls would be too frightened to volunteer to take his place. Voices and faces from the First Lot jockeyed for position in my mind. I didn’t know any of them. I don’t usually. There’s just mud and guts and faces are incidental, because out there in the trenches you always tried not to look anyone else in the face. At the end we were all too ashamed to do that. If you look at someone, then they can see you too. I looked away from Mr Smith. Then the lights all came on and for just a moment I thought I’d gone blind.

We all live in darkness these days. Our eyes are so unused to light that when we do see it, it hurts and makes us squint. Londoners have become moles.

‘I can see you now, Eric,’ I heard Mr Steadman say.

‘I can see you too,’ Mr Rolls replied. ‘And I have a gun.’

Mr Steadman, or one of the few watchmen with him, had put on all the lights in the cathedral nave. Huge chandeliers fitted with electric bulbs. I had crawled around in the gloom for so long that I felt it was almost as if someone had just let the sun in. I heard someone say, ‘The blackout! What about the blackout?’

But no one answered that question. The blackout for the time being was irrelevant. What was important was that what had become a sort of a battle up in the ceiling of the cathedral, finished. But in order to join battle, we all needed light.

Milly, who had been at the back of the chamber, came forward to stand next to me. ‘Gold!’ she said as she took one of my arms in hers. ‘Look!’

The gold leaf on the mosaics and statues in the nave and around the dome can’t be seen until the lights are switched on. A cathedral, even a great one, could be almost anywhere in the dark. But with the lights on everything changes. Halos of saints glowed with a pale yellow light, the Madonna and her Son re-enacted the agony of the crucifixion against a gilded mosaic sky. Up in the ceiling Latin words snaked around the curves of archways, and even these were made of gold. This was London’s treasure house. Not the King’s, not even the church’s, but all of ours, us Londoners, for us to see any time that we liked. St Paul’s wasn’t going to fall, I remember thinking then, because it just couldn’t. Hitler wasn’t going to finish it off, and neither were Mr Rolls and his twisted band of followers. I looked along the balcony to where Rolls was standing and I saw a large dark heap at his feet. George. God Almighty what had that poor boy done? Whatever it was, he’d paid for it with his life. Now there was just Rolls, his men and that gun. I heard and saw him take the safety catch off the weapon as a couple of men of the St Paul’s Watch stepped on to the balcony and began to move towards him.

‘You think you’re the only one who can get through a door, Eric?’ Mr Steadman shouted up from the cathedral floor. Now that I could see him properly I could see the damage one of Rolls’s blokes had done when he hit him. Mr Steadman had a great big shiner round his right eye. ‘Some of those same good watchmen you persuaded to break a door down for you, destroyed a lock for me once I told them the truth. Only your pitiful men really believe you now. Give up. It’s over. You can’t hope to get away now.’

Mr Bolton, Mr Arnold and the others on the balcony around the dome looked at each other and then, as a body, they seemed to slump. I suppose it is in the nature of followers to give up without a fight when the odds are overwhelming. They can, after all, always find someone else to follow, given time. But leaders are different. Leaders don’t have anywhere left to go.

Mr Rolls put the pistol up to his own right temple.

Chapter Fifteen

‘
I
f I wasn’t a Christian man, I’d tell you to pull that trigger,’ Mr Steadman said into the silence that had now enveloped the inside of the cathedral. Outside, where the voices of the men fighting the fires were coming from, I fancied that perhaps the sky was not quite so red any more.

‘I will pull it unless you come up here and face me, Gordon!’

I looked down at Mr Steadman and for a moment I wondered whether he would do this or not. He wasn’t armed as far as I could tell. Unless I was very much mistaken there was only one gun in the building and that was the one that Mr Rolls was holding up to his own head. Mr Steadman began to walk towards the south tower stairs. Everyone waited for him to appear on the balcony. Only Mr Smith, who was now shivering on top of the archway below, didn’t look in Mr Rolls’s direction. Mr Smith looked up at me.

‘I think my legs are going to sleep,’ he said. ‘I’m freezing! I don’t know if I can stand like this any more.’

I heard Milly say, ‘Well, that’s hard Cheddar, ain’t it!’

‘Hancock, pull me in with you!’ Mr Smith said. I heard a door open and close back along the balcony and I watched to see what Mr Rolls would do.

‘I’m going to fall!’ Smith said. ‘My back, it . . .’

I ignored him. I did so deliberately. I didn’t want him anywhere near Milly and myself because he was one of ‘them’, one of Rolls’s men, and I couldn’t trust him. I didn’t want to.

‘Mr Hancock!’

But we were all looking at Rolls and Steadman now.

‘Give me the gun, Eric,’ Mr Steadman said.

‘You know that my brothers here will continue the work to protect this place,’ Rolls said. But the blokes on the balcony in the dome looked even more downcast now. ‘Without the protection of the ancient rites, London is dead!’

‘Mr Hancock, I am, I was a watchman . . .’ It was honest and true and for the first time I felt actual sympathy for him. I looked down at Mr Smith.

I don’t know for sure whether I tried to catch him as he fell towards the cathedral floor. I like to think that I did, but the reality is probably that by ignoring him earlier I had condemned Mr Smith to death. His legs went, then his back, and finally his cold, clawed fingers gave way and he flew with a speed I hope I never have to see again towards the marble floor below. The only good thing about it was that for a moment, Mr Smith’s fall distracted Mr Rolls. As he looked over his shoulder he lowered his arm and, in that moment, Mr Steadman reached forward to grab the gun in his hand.