It would have been strange in peace time to see a dead body lying, as this one was, alone, either inside or outside a building. Although people might not want to touch a corpse there is often a feeling of not being comfortable leaving the dead alone. But war takes even that away. There are so many of them, the shattered dead, how can it be otherwise? They lie and wait for us to ‘deal’ with them, and no one gives them so much as a second look. The dead have, after all, gone.
Mr Ronson had fallen on to his front, narrowly missing the red lamp underneath the dome. Wetness covered the floor. In the gloom, fortunately, it wasn’t possible to make out what it was even though I knew only too well. The impact of a body on a hard floor from that sort of height would cause the body to burst, which was what had happened here. The stomach, well it splits apart and throws everything inside, out. There are no ‘good’ ways to die but falling forwards from a great height is particularly ugly. There’s a smell of undigested food, of the last evacuation from the bowels.
Although we could both hear the sounds and voices of the blokes both overhead in the dome and down below us in the crypt, there was no one actually about and so I told Mr Andrews what I’d heard. I had to know if that sentence he’d spoken to his wife was real or not. I said, ‘I heard you say that Mr Ronson was murdered. You told your wife.’
Mr Andrews didn’t even flinch. ‘We’ll have to do something with him,’ he said. ‘We can’t leave him here like this. I’ll have to get our biggest watchman, Mr Bartholomew, Welsh, a rugby player in his youth, to—’
‘Mr Andrews, if you think that Mr Ronson has been murdered . . .’
He looked up at me with a steady, inscrutable gaze. ‘Mr . . . whatever your name is . . .’
‘Hancock. F-Francis H-Hancock,’ I said as the nervous stuttering came upon me once again.
‘Mr Hancock, if you think that you can help, that is in your professional capacity . . .’
‘Y-you said m-murder . . .’
His face changed not a bit but he moved in close and then pulled my head down roughly, and suddenly, in front of his face. ‘Forget what I said,’ he hissed. ‘It was nothing! I saw nothing, nobody did! It was an expression of fear only. Not something for you to be worrying about, not something for you to be listening to!’
He then let me go as quickly and as sharply as he had grabbed me. As he moved away I saw that there were tears in his eyes; whether they were tears for Mr Ronson or just a result of his own frustration, I didn’t know. But what I was certain of now was that what I’d heard wasn’t just the madness in my head. Mr Andrews had said he believed that Mr Ronson had been murdered. In one way it was a relief, but in another way it wasn’t. If Mr Andrews believed that Mr Ronson had been murdered that meant we had to have a killer in the cathedral. And even to me, that was much more frightening than anything that might or might not be going on in my head.
‘C-cover him,’ I said as soon as I could speak again.
‘No, we have to get him out of the way! We—’
This time I pulled his face close up to mine. ‘I – if he was, er, if he was killed, w-we must leave him,’ I said. ‘F-for the – the coppers.’
He gave me that furious, blank look I was beginning to know so well. Mr Andrews hadn’t liked me from the start. I’d been a nuisance, an inconvenient ‘refugee’, unwelcome in his cathedral. Time passed and then he said, ‘The police won’t come, not with all this going on! But . . .’ He knew that what I was saying about the coppers was true. He knew also, and more significantly to me, that they would need to view Mr Ronson’s body at some time. I had not misheard what he had said to his wife and I was not about to forget that whatever he might think. ‘I’ll find some canvass or something to cover him with.’
‘Yes, that will, er, that . . .’
‘I’ll do it,’ he said as he headed off up towards the altar. ‘I don’t need an undertaker to advise me about that.’ And then as soon as he was almost invisible to me he turned and said, ‘Are you really a papist? I thought you were a Jew. You have the look of a Jew.’
‘I-I am a Catholic,’ I said. ‘I d-don’t follow it though.’
‘But you are one, a born one, I understand, and maybe . . .’ He didn’t finish that sentence but instead he said, ‘You were looking for that little girl, weren’t you?’ Before I could reply he continued, ‘I suggest you find her.’
And then he was swallowed by the gloom.
Maybe I would have thought more about why Mr Andrews was suddenly so interested in the little missing girl no one but me seemed to want to find, but I was distracted by what sounded like an army of watchmen running on to the Whispering Gallery.
‘What happened?’ I heard one bloke say to the chap who had charge of the telephone up there.
‘I don’t know,’ the other one replied. ‘One minute he was up here, the next . . . It’s said he slipped on the water on the floor.’
‘He was looking for Harold Phillips. I heard him myself. He said he was looking for Harold.’
My ears pricked up at this. Once again, Mr Phillips was being talked about. I still hadn’t seen him even though I’d been up to the Whispering Gallery once myself.
‘Well, he didn’t find Harold,’ the bloke on the telephone said. ‘Don’t know why he was looking for him at all.’
‘Why’s that?’ some other chap asked.
‘Because I’ve not seen Harold and if I haven’t, I can’t see how he can be up here,’ the telephone man said. ‘Harold, of everyone, is . . . well, Harold is distinctive, isn’t he?’
There were some murmurs of agreement from the Whispering Gallery. Down below I wondered what they meant by ‘distinctive’. I stamped my feet a little to get some life back in them but then I realised that what I was actually doing was kicking blood up into the air and so I stopped.
Chapter Four
A
s well as the London Fire Brigade film unit, who went straight up to the Stone Gallery to film and record the events unfolding up there, more watchmen turned up over the next half-hour. Their faces blackened by what they described as the inferno outside, they talked of the fires that surrounded the cathedral as if they were living, intelligent things.
‘They’re getting closer all the time,’ one chap said. ‘Hitchcock Williams looks as if it could catch at any minute! Bloody fires! It’s as if they’re seeking buildings out to burn!’
‘The bombs are just feeding the flames, that’s what’s happening,’ another bloke said.
Hitchcock, Williams and Co., the famous textile wholesaler, was very near to the cathedral, in St Paul’s Churchyard. If they were in danger from the fires, then we had to be in almost as much peril. I had no idea what the time was by then. It was one of those moments when it feels as if you’ve been in a place for ever and, at the same time, just for a few minutes.
‘You didn’t see anyone, er, o-outside?’ I asked a man whose clothes were so hot they were smoking.
‘Outside?’ he shook his head. ‘No. Poor bloody LFB engaged in battles with these endless fires is all I saw. There’re no civvies left out there – at least, I hope that there aren’t!’
The little girl would have come back in to the cathedral. Whatever people might have said to her, the fires were now so fierce that she would have been left with no choice. Even inside a great cathedral made of thick stone, we were beginning to feel the heat. She was either somewhere in the building or she was probably already dead.
‘What’s that?’ one of the new watchmen asked me as he pointed towards Mr Ronson’s body. Now covered with a canvass tarpaulin, which Mr Andrews had found to cover him, Mr Ronson’s dead body was just a thing as opposed to a person in the middle of the cathedral.
‘He, er, he fell . . .’
‘It’s Sidney Ronson!’ I heard someone call down from up above.
‘Blimey!’
‘He’s dead!’
‘What?’
‘Dead. He’s dead.’
The bloke in front of me, the one with the smoking clothes, made as if to go towards the canvass, but I stopped him.
‘It’s er, he’s very . . . unrecognisable,’ I said.
‘Is he? Is he just . . .’ He was holding what he felt inside, as we all do, or at least try to. Then, as if suddenly coming to himself and remembering where he was, he said, ‘Who are you? You’re not a watchman, are you?’
I told him, faltering as usual as I did so, but he stood patiently listening to my story until I’d finished. ‘So this little kid . . .’
‘Is not your concern, Mr Steadman.’ Mr Andrews was once again at my elbow. The man was like bloody Dracula! ‘Mr Hancock is looking for the child. It’s better that way.’
Mr Steadman, whose name I recognised as being the same as that of one of the partners in Phillips, Steadman and Rolls, looked as confused as I felt. What could possibly be ‘better’ about a man like me, as opposed to anyone else, looking for the child, I did not know.
‘M-Mr Steadman,’ I said, ‘you, you work with Mr Harold Phillips?’
‘Yes, I do.’ Mr Steadman pushed his tin hat back a bit on his head. His fire-smutted face was thin and, although it was impossible to tell his age accurately underneath all that, I reckoned that he was about fifty. ‘We’re partners, Mr Phillips, Mr Rolls and myself. Poor Mr Ronson, he – well, he worked with us for a number of years. He was a good lad.’ He swallowed hard, pushing his feelings right down deep into his body. ‘Very conscientious. A good man.’
‘Mr Ronson was going to see Mr Phillips for me when he, um, he fell,’ I said.
‘He fell.’
‘He fell,’ Mr Andrews moved just slightly in front of me. ‘The floor up in the gallery was wet.’
‘Did Harold, er, Mr Phillips, did he see it happen?’ Mr Steadman asked. ‘God, Harold’s always on watch he’ll be, he’ll . . . He always had a lot of time for Sidney Ronson. A lot of time – in the past, you know.’
‘We don’t really know precisely what happened,’ Mr Andrews said as he effectively ignored Mr Steadman’s thinly disguised grief. ‘No one saw it happen. He went to another emergency “up top” and also, as Mr Hancock here has said, to see Mr Phillips too.’
‘Harold is here?’ Mr Steadman asked.
‘He is believed to be.’
They looked at each other for a while, Mr Steadman and Mr Andrews. God alone knew what was going through their heads, but then Mr Steadman upped and headed off towards the stairs to the Whispering Gallery. I had meant to ask him, he being a fellow worker, so to speak, what was so very ‘distinctive’ about Mr Phillips. But then he was gone and once again I was left with Mr Andrews. We were not, however, alone. As well as a couple more soot-stained watchmen who were catching their breath before they went about their business, young George the chorister had reappeared.
‘Have you found that little girl yet?’ he said to me.
‘No, he hasn’t,’ Mr Andrews answered for me.
I hadn’t moved from Mr Ronson’s side. I hadn’t known where to start. St Paul’s is huge and it’s difficult enough in the daylight to get into all its nooks and crannies, but in the dark, as I well knew from my little adventure up in the Whispering Gallery, it’s terrifying as well as huge.
‘Everywhere is open to you, Mr Hancock,’ Mr Andrews said. ‘Every room in the building. Do you have a torch?’
‘N-no.’
‘George, give Mr Hancock yours and then get another one from my office,’ Mr Andrews said.
The boy passed his torch over to me without a word. Now with a light in my hand I just stood there, until Mr Andrews said to me, ‘Then go about your business.’
Unlike Mr Smith, who had been of the opinion that a child would have to know its way around the cathedral in order to hide, Mr Andrews obviously felt that anything was possible. But then so did I. What Mr Smith had said was nonsense and I couldn’t at the time make out either why he’d said it or why I’d bothered to listen. But Mr Andrews was waving me away now and so I began to move eastwards towards the high altar. I had wanted to ask him not only where I might begin my search but how I might recognise Mr Phillips, should I come upon him, too. But my voice wasn’t really working at all now and I could see something thick and black dripping down the walls of the great building. Blood from the First Lot, blood of my comrades. I stopped and closed my eyes and listened as Mr Andrews and young George argued about something behind me. I didn’t know what it was, but George sounded very upset. The ack-ack barrage had intensified over the course of the last hour and that, combined with the pictures in my head and in front of my eyes, was beginning to drive me out of my mind. I would never save or even find the little girl, if she even existed. I wasn’t even going to be able to save myself. But then suddenly, as I stood in the middle of what was an even darker, more blood-covered part of the building, the guns suddenly stopped.
I wasn’t expecting to fall over. I was using my torch and, once the ack-ack had stopped and my mind had a few seconds to actually sort itself out, I came back to the real world again and knew where I was. The quire is where the choristers sit in normal, sane times. It’s made up of dark wooden pews on either side of the nave, just in front of the high altar. Like the rest of the cathedral it was undamaged so far, or so I thought. My foot went in to some sort of hole that shouldn’t have been there and I ended up hitting the deck and landing on my back. It wasn’t what could have been called a proper accident, but it was unexpected, it hurt, and it caused me to swear. Not that anyone except God and the angels heard me. George and Mr Andrews had gone and I was a long way away from all the other blokes now. I picked up my torch and looked at the floor which was in a very sorry way indeed. There was a lot of damage in actual fact and I was just beginning to wonder what might have happened when a sound started that froze my marrow. Machine-gun fire! Christ, the bloody
Luftwaffe
were shooting at people on the ground! God Almighty, when were they going to stop?
Were
they going to stop?
‘What you doin’ down on the floor, mister? You have an accident, did you?’