Ashes to Ashes (9 page)

‘But she died,’ Mr Webb said. ‘Five years ago. Some say it was George Chivers, her old man, what done her.’

I frowned.

‘Not actually, you understand,’ Webb said, ‘but ’cause she had to do what she done to keep him in drink! He’s a boozer, George Chivers. His missus, Milly’s mum – not a bad girl in spite of what the women say – she was always out getting money for him.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Would go with anyone, it was said. Then one night one of ’em, a bloke, like, beat her to death, poor cow – or so it’s said. It was rumoured that perhaps old George had done it. You say Milly is here, in the cathedral like?’

‘Y-yes.’ I said. ‘But now she’s missing and—’

‘Probably with someone, if you take my meaning,’ Mr Webb said.

I did. Ten she might be, but just Milly’s way of talking had made me think she had been making her living out of men. Hannah knows plenty of grown women on the game who started their trade as kids. It’s always gone on, and it always will, especially around and about hard drinkers.

‘B-but her father . . .’

‘George Chivers, so it’s said, had a good trade before the drink took him,’ Mr Webb continued. ‘Speaks nice, he does, educated. But he’s been on the drink for fifteen years to my knowledge. Come from out Stoke Newington way, people said. Moved in to our building because it was all he could afford.’ He smiled and shook his head grimly. ‘People think it’s all bowler hats and bookkeepers in the City, but there’re some right places, I can tell you! Rooms left over from when poor people lived in Rookeries, you know? Ain’t the Ritz where we live. It is a Rookery to be truthful. Only Mrs Herbert over there, the florist lady, only she’s got a proper flat on our street.’

If indeed this Milly was ‘my’ Milly, then her prostitute mother had died when the child was five. She had one older sister, who also worked the streets, five brothers and two younger sisters. All but one of the brothers had, apparently, left home years ago. Milly and her older sister, it seemed, kept the younger children and their alcoholic father with the sale of their bodies. Once apparently a man of some substance, Mr Chivers’s drinking had reduced his family to living in a bloody rookery, a collection of filth- and crime-ridden rooms that had been standard City accommodation for the poor in Victorian times. I had in my ignorance thought they’d all disappeared years ago. Thinking about what a grown man like Mr Phillips might have been doing with this girl from a rookery when the raid began and he brought her into the cathedral, made me feel a bit sick. But then maybe a man without a face does things that men with faces can’t understand. Speaking as a man without a mind, I can see that. Not that that’s an excuse for doing things with a child; there’s never any excuse for that in my opinion.

‘The Guildhall’s on fire! Took a hit!’ I turned away from Mr Webb and saw young George the chorister flop down beside me. ‘Looks like it’s had it!’ He coughed on the smoke from the hundreds of fags people were puffing as well as that from the fires that burned outside. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I later found out that getting water to put the fires out was becoming a problem all over the City. There just wasn’t enough of it and high tide on the Thames was still hours away. It wasn’t just the ancient Guildhall that was going to ‘have it’ this night. Monuments were, to me, the least of it, really. People’s homes and businesses were already in ruins, and although there wasn’t a lot of crying in the crypt that night, there were a lot of worried and just plain sad-looking faces.

Not that ordinary homes and businesses were on the mind of our Prime Minister, Mr Churchill, according to George. ‘Mr Churchill telephoned Mr Matthews our Dean,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Mr Churchill has told the LFB to save the cathedral at all costs. Nothing else matters, not even to Mr Churchill!’

‘Mr Churchill himself spoke to the Dean?’

‘On the telephone, yes!’

Mr Smith, who I hadn’t seen for some while and who looked as if he’d spent some considerable time fighting fires, had followed George in and now sat down beside him. His face was blackened and he gasped for breath over the top of his cocoa cup. ‘Mr Churchill . . . gives us a few more firemen . . .’ He sounded a bit contemptuous, but I said nothing. It wasn’t my place. ‘That little, er, the girl . . .’ he started to ask me.

‘I’m going to go and have another look around in a bit,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen her and we’ve spoken. She’s called Milly, but she’s not in here.’

‘Probably nicking the silver candlesticks!’ Mr Webb said. ‘If I know Milly! I’d forget her, if I was you, mate. She’ll be all right.’

Mr Smith gave me what I thought was a confused look.

I attempted to explain. ‘M-Mr Webb here lives near to a g-girl we think might be the same M-Milly as—’

‘I see,’ Mr Smith said cutting me off as a lot of people do when the stutter begins to get on their nerves. ‘Well, there’s every watchman here tonight from all points north, south, east and west. One of us is bound to find her eventually.’ He looked at me closely. ‘You look all done in.’

I told him I always do, which is the truth. I told him where I was from and Mr Smith frowned. ‘You East End boys have been taking it for a long time.’ He then looked first at Mr Webb and then at me again and said, ‘You should do as this chap says. Leave it. Rest up now. Who knows what we all may have to do in the next few hours? This church, believe me, is no easy lady to protect!’

I was exhausted – not that that was anything new. Young George had talked about how Hitler was targeting St Paul’s and all the time I was thinking about how he was battering the docks. Mr Churchill wasn’t apparently too worried about them at that moment. I could understand it. To destroy St Paul’s would wound the soul of every Londoner alive. But still, killing the docks cuts us off from the world and the food it still manages to give us. The docks are our legs, if you like; take them away and we can’t move. What Hitler was doing to the docks had kept me awake for months and, to be truthful, I was noticeably tired at this point. It wasn’t like me. Maybe it was being around so many people hunkering down on cots and on the floor for the night? In spite of myself, for the first time in a long time, I felt quite peaceful. Were I a religious man, I might say that it was something to do with being in a church. But I’m not religious and so there had to be some other cause. Whatever the reason I went, very briefly, to sleep. When I woke up it was to find George, Mr Webb and Mr Smith gone and Mr Andrews standing over me.

‘Mr Hancock, we have to talk,’ he said.

Chapter Six

M
r Andrews led me out of the crypt and back into the nave of the cathedral. I’ll be honest, I
was
done in. I hadn’t slept in any real sense for months and as usual with me, every little bit of sleep that I did get was so precious, my waking from it was always a shock. As I climbed back up the stairs, my heart pounding in my chest, I felt sick and really quite unwilling to hear Mr Andrews out. But he gave me no choice which, as it turned out, was just as well.

Once into the nave, we made our way through the darkness, underneath the dome to the place where Mr Ronson’s body had been. As I shone my torch at the pool of blood and offal that remained, Mr Andrews stopped and whispered, ‘I’ll explain in a moment. We’ll sit in the quire stalls.’

I was horrified. I’d told him, and he should have known, not to move Mr Ronson’s body until a copper could be found to take charge of it. If Mr Andrews suspected that Mr Ronson had been murdered, that was the right thing to do, even in very difficult conditions. The German raids are all too often used as cover for people wanting to knock off their relatives or rivals or both. It’s so easy to miss clues in all the stink and destruction of the bombing. Now the coppers would never be able to tell from where, exactly, Mr Ronson had fallen – if he’d fallen.

Mr Andrews brushed something off the first row of quire stalls and sat down. He motioned with his torch for me to join him, which I did.

‘M-Mr Andrews—’

‘Mr Hancock,’ he said, ‘my wife tells me that you are a follower of the Catholic faith. Is that true?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I t-told you. I was born and brought up in it and . . . but I don’t believe it any more, Mr Andrews. I’m afraid that me and God sort of parted from each other on the Somme.’

I expected to see an expression of disapproval, if not downright horror, on his skeleton face, but I didn’t. By the light of my torch I could see that he was grave and drawn, but he wasn’t disapproving in any way.

‘Yes, well, I was . . . I was there too.’ He swallowed hard. ‘I served my country in the Great War.’

He said nothing more, but I felt that what he had said was enough. If I read him right he understood, even if he didn’t approve, of my opinion about God. After all, I wasn’t the first to lose my faith in the First Lot and I doubt very much that I was the last.

Mr Andrews moved his head closer to mine and said, ‘Mr Hancock, whether you practise your Catholicism or not is of no interest to me. That you are a follower of Rome in any way, is.’

I frowned.

‘Mr Hancock, strange as this may sound, now that Mr Ronson is no longer with us, you are the only man apart from the Dean that I feel I can completely trust.’

I was so shocked that I stopped stuttering completely. Or rather, I thought at the time that was the reason.

‘Mr Andrews,’ I said, ‘you don’t know me from a hole in the road.’

‘Mr Hancock,’ he replied, ‘you have a friend, an Ernest Sutton, he is a vicar.’

Ernie Sutton was a bloke I’d been to school with. Vicar, Church of England of course, at our local church in Plaistow. We’ve stayed friends all these years, and we still share the odd pint from time to time.

‘Ernest is a friend, of sorts,’ Mr Andrews said. ‘He has talked of you and so I recognised your name as soon as you mentioned your profession. You have been tenacious in looking for this missing child. Revd Sutton says that you have a skill and compassion with the dead, an abhorrence for the killing of the living.’

I would hope that most people would have an abhorrence for killing! And anyway, what did he mean about Ernie being a friend ‘of sorts’? Did he perhaps mean that because they were both in the church they knew each other? Why didn’t he just say that? I was just beginning to get exasperated when Mr Andrews explained.

‘Mr Hancock, Revd Sutton, myself and an unspecified number of the men in the Watch are Freemasons.’ He paused, letting me absorb his words which were really no great news to me. I’d known Ernie was a Mason for years, I’d laughed at him for it! Like a lot of blokes, secret rituals and the wearing of funny aprons are not things I find myself attracted to. I found it, I must admit, a bit silly. Then when Mrs Andrews had just thrown the Masons into our conversation earlier I had thought, idly, that her husband was probably one of their number.

‘I say unspecified because our watchmen come from many different lodges,’ Mr Andrews said. ‘I do not know them all by any means. However, you must know that the Freemasons of England are wholly opposed to Hitler and all his works.’

‘I should hope so!’ I said.

Mr Andrews shook his head as if throwing my comment away from him. ‘But within the Brotherhood, opinions upon how this should be done, differ,’ he said. ‘The majority of us believe we must support Mr Churchill, his guns, his planes and the men who operate them. Tonight our leader has given us more firemen. We must also pray.’

The sound of boots and men’s voices up in the Whispering Gallery briefly took our attention, but then Mr Andrews said, ‘However, there are other brothers who believe that a more primitive solution is the way that we must pursue.’ He looked down and the light, such as it was, shining up into his face made him look as if he had a face without eyes. ‘There are brothers in the Craft who believe in dangerous things.’ He looked up suddenly and almost pleaded with me. ‘Not necessarily bad people, or, at least, I thought they were not until now . . . Mr Hancock, some of our brethren have been led to believe that the ways of our ancestors are our salvation. Alchemy, the science of the magician, is an element of their study. Also ancient rites created in former times by our predecessors . . . These were designed to appease . . . entities – devils, some would call them.’

For someone who had been brought up by Catholic parents, this was not news either. My old dad had always said that the Masons were rotten. Mum still didn’t know that my ‘nice friend Ernie’ was a Mason and I had no intention of telling her. But it was our old parish priest, Fr Burton, I’d heard call them all ‘Devil worshippers’ – not that I’d believed that was in any way the truth. Now here was Mr Andrews, himself a Mason, telling me that there were ‘some’ brothers who were ‘appeasing’ devils. I didn’t understand how this was anything to do with what we were all going through now and I told him so.

‘With respect,’ I said, ‘none of us could be here tomorrow! This cathedral could be dust!’

‘Which is precisely what these misguided brothers are trying to prevent!’ Mr Andrews said, lowering his voice as he did so. ‘This sorcery they practise is meant to save this place, don’t you understand?’

‘No.’ If the magic these ‘brothers’ were practising was meant to be for the good of the cathedral, how could that be a bad thing?

Mr Andrews looked back into the thick gloom behind him and then leaned towards me. ‘Mr Ronson went up on to the roof to help deal with the incendiary to which we initially called the fire service,’ he said. ‘On his way up, I met him and he said he had something to tell me. Mr Ronson was of the Brotherhood, but as a Jew, he was not sadly always approved of by everyone in it. Also he, like me, did not hold with what some of his brothers proposed even though he was initially privy to it. Some in the Craft are influenced by the Beast.’ He suddenly looked very, very frightened. ‘Maybe it was because as a Jew it wasn’t strictly in Mr Ronson’s tradition, although the Jews of course did practise it long ago . . .’