Ashes to Ashes (11 page)

There’s a bench that runs around the inside walls of the Whispering Gallery and so because I was exhausted, I sat down on it. Panting and sweating, I rested my head back against the wall and it passed through my mind that I might hear some sort of whispering from somewhere, but I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t hear anything for about a minute, which was strange, given what was happening in the galleries and on the roofs above where I was. And even when the smallest noise that can be imagined, a slight scraping or brushing of the gallery floor, broke the silence I felt it rather than actually heard it. In fact, even that is not quite true because even before I felt it, I had that sensation of all the hairs standing up on the back of my neck. My eyes flew open and, just for a second, I thought I saw something, or some things, move over by the door to the stairs. Not that
I
could move to go over and have a butchers. As well as being physically shattered, I was losing control again! I know the signs. Soon the blood of the battlefield would be pouring down the walls and then I’d be no use to anyone, least of all myself. My heart pounded and I began to sweat really heavily. Then I heard the things over by the door to the stairs breathe, huskily and with throats that rasped. Oh, God! Oh, Christ!

And just as the silence had been shocking, so was the noise that followed it. From there being no watchmen, there were now hundreds of them in less than a minute. Every trace of the fear I had felt only moments before, left, and I even managed a smile as a line of tired and blackened faces passed before me. Even the Dean had come in and, on seeing me, he sat down for a moment and asked me how I was.

‘Can’t be up there any longer,’ he said as he took his tin hat off and then rubbed his forehead with the back of his soot-stained hand. ‘Leave it to the other chaps for a bit. Any news about the little girl?’

‘No.’

The Dean shook his head sadly and then, suddenly remembering something he said, ‘Oh, Mr Phillips is on the roof now! We’re all on about fifteen minutes at the moment, so if you stay here you should see him in a bit.’

‘Mr Phillips came to relieve you?’ I asked – just to be sure.

‘Yes, but only just,’ Dean Matthews laughed as he said it. It was as if suddenly all of his earlier tension had left him. Maybe actually seeing Mr Phillips alive had helped to put his mind at rest. After all, Phillips was one of his watchmen, a person for whom he had some responsibility. ‘Mr Phillips, Mr Smith and, I think, a new chap, a Mr Potter, I believe he’s called, came in late. I’ll be honest, I don’t always know chaps’ names unless I know people very well. But anyway, they’d run all the way up from the ground and were a bit puffed, I can tell you!’

Maybe it had been them I had heard over by the stairs, breathing heavily? Mr Phillips, Mr Smith and Mr Potter! But then, if that was the case, Mr Smith, at least, knew me and Mr Phillips had to know by this time that some foreign-looking bloke was searching for him. Why, if they were on the gallery at the same time as I was, hadn’t they spoken up? Sometimes I get taken by this fear that people are trying to make me even more mad than I already am. Mr Andrews and his stories about the Masons had struck me like that. Not that I thought that he had been doing it deliberately. I just sometimes get the feeling that being around other mad people is bad for me and that had been one of those times. If things in my head had been different, I would have told the Dean about Mr Andrews’s fears regarding the watchmen then. But I didn’t. Instead, I watched the Dean and all the blokes with him go back down on to the ground once again and I waited for Mr Phillips, Mr Smith and Mr Potter.

The Dean had said that Phillips, Smith and Potter had run all the way up from the ground to help relieve the others on the roof, but I couldn’t remember hearing any feet on the stairs breaking that silence I’d found myself in on the Whispering Gallery. How could anyone apart from a child run up such a flight? There’d just been some scraping then breathing, but not of a running or laboured kind. Now I thought about it, it was more like a suppressed laugh.

I sat by the stairs, out of the way of the bloke on the book and the few others who were now on the gallery with him. From time to time they looked over at me and I thought I saw a couple of them exchange knowing looks. I’m used to this. I know that much of the time I come over as an odd character. I know I’m not right and especially when I’m frightened, as I always am on these bomb-filled nights, I have everything that a madman in an asylum has. I hear things, see things, and I don’t behave as a man who is in control of himself should. But then I thought that maybe the blokes in the gallery were looking at me because of my colour. I’d lost my cap out amongst the fires hours before and I know that without any sort of hat I look about as oriental as it’s possible to be. As an old teacher of mine used to say years ago, ‘There’s more than just a touch of the tar-brush about you, Hancock!’ Yes, there’s my Indian mother, and one of my sisters who is so dark she hardly leaves the house . . . Not that I’ve ever felt the colour thing badly myself and, in truth, I did feel that the men in the gallery had to be looking at me because I was odd rather than because I was foreign. I suddenly realised that I was muttering to myself. I stopped doing it immediately and then went out on to the stairs to wait for the blokes coming back down from the roof.

It smelt of smoke and melted metal out there, but I made myself stand and wait until I heard the tired footsteps of the men coming down as well as the more lively ones of those relieving them coming up. Pressed against the warm stone wall, so I didn’t get in the way of the passing human traffic, I waited until I saw Mr Smith come down and then I buttonholed him.

‘Where’s Mr Phillips?’ I asked.

He laughed, which struck me as an odd thing to do. ‘He went down below ages ago,’ he said, ‘with Potter. Didn’t you see them?’

‘No.’ Nobody, as far as I could tell, had come down from the roof after Mr Smith and everyone else had gone up to relieve the Dean.

‘Went down early, they did,’ he said. ‘Potter felt a bit dodgy.’ His face dropped into an expression of sadness. ‘It’s nightmarish up there. Hot and . . . The London we know is going.’ His smoke-ringed eyes filled with tears and so I didn’t detain him any longer. I had no reason to embarrass him by watching him cry. I also knew how he felt. That was my city down there burning, too. But putting that all aside, Mr Smith wasn’t telling the truth. I didn’t know exactly how he wasn’t telling the truth, but he wasn’t, and Mr Potter, well, he was just not right, I felt. His presence, as another witness to the existence of Mr Phillips, was a bit too
convenient
, I felt.

Mr Andrews would have seen Phillips and this Potter bloke pass by from his seat in the quire. I could, probably, have gone back to the Whispering Gallery, leaned over and called down to him. But even if you’re not religious, you don’t shout out in a church; it just isn’t done. And so although the thought of walking, even in a downward direction, on those bloody stairs again made me want to scream, I started to make my way back down them anyway, legs trembling as I did so. When I reached the quire, however, I did eventually, scream. Anyone would have done so in my position.

I didn’t know how Mr Andrews had died. There was nothing to actually see about the body that could give me any clue. All I could make out was that there was blood. On the stall beside the body, it could have been leaking from Mr Andrews or there was a possibility it came from the body laying behind the chaplain, that of the unfortunate Mr Ronson. In spite of Mr Andrews’s belief that he had to guard Ronson’s body from some of his fellow Masons, it hadn’t been moved so far. It was still there, with, I noticed, one of Mr Andrews’s still warm as – I touched it – dead hands on its shoulder. He’d died very recently and, although blood was present, and in spite of the fears he’d talked to me about, I had to assume he’d done so naturally. He wasn’t young, he wasn’t right in the head, and a bloke he knew and trusted had died. We were all in the middle of a bloody furnace – his heart could very easily have given out. If I reckoned that the blood had come from Mr Ronson’s body, it all made sense. But something in me, that bit that lives in fear and suspicion of everything and everyone, niggled away. What if what Mr Andrews had said about his Masonic ‘brothers’ was true? After all, if they had killed him because of what he knew about Mr Ronson’s death, maybe they knew he’d been talking to me? Maybe I was next on their list for the ‘chop’?

Although I was muttering to myself, telling myself it was bloody stupid what I was doing, I moved the body to have a better look at it. Mr Andrews looked as if he were at peace and so, in spite of all the things he’d told me earlier about the Masons, I couldn’t really believe he had been killed. I’d at least half convinced myself that he’d been an old man who was out of his mind.

I put my hands around his chest and began to push him a little way along the quire stall, away from the blood. Of course I couldn’t see exactly what I was doing at that moment because I couldn’t stand up, push and hold my torch all at the same time. But when I’d finished, I took my torch out of my pocket and shone it down. Mr Andrews had toppled over to one side, so that his behind was sticking up. Cassocks as worn by priests and other divines are usually black and the one that Mr Andrews wore was no exception. He was a thin man and the cassock would, as it had done in life, have hung very loosely on him had it not been stuck to him by all the blood. There wasn’t just blood either; there were rips, great gashes in the cloth of the cassock, too. Strange though it was, given the almost peaceful look on his face, Mr Andrews appeared to have been violated, stabbed in his nether parts. Whether that had actually killed him, I couldn’t know. But the poor old sod had been attacked up his backside and I had to stifle a scream once I realised this.

As soon as I was able, I ran towards the stairs down to the crypt – there wasn’t, after all, anyone else about in the cathedral whom I could see. But once I was in that crowded half-asleep basement I made myself slow down before I found someone to tell. After all, given what was going on outside, people had enough to worry about. I looked for the Dean, but not finding him, I went over to the bloke who was currently on the book.

‘I need somebody to help me,’ I said. ‘It’s Mr Andrews.’ I didn’t know how else to put it. ‘He’s had an accident.’

The watchman, a short, very posh-sounding chap who was probably in his fifties, looked at me and then said, ‘An accident? What sort of accident?’

He’d looked at me as if I was nothing. Some hysterical, wide-eyed brown bloke was probably what he saw.

I leaned in close to him, which was obviously something he really didn’t like, because he tried in vain to pull away from me. I held his head and whispered, ‘He’s dead.’

The bloke, a Mr Harris, I later discovered, looked across the top of his little round glasses and gave me a stare that told me he didn’t believe what I was saying.

‘I’m an undertaker by trade,’ I continued. ‘I know a dead body when I see one.’

He gulped. ‘Well, then, we must deal with him, er . . .’ he said.

‘Yes, but quietly,’ I said. ‘These people down here . . .’

‘Oh, quite so! Quite so!’ He was white now, poor chap. ‘How did he . . . ?’

‘I don’t rightly know.’ I didn’t want to get into that. I can’t always be certain about everything I’ve seen and the nature of Mr Andrews’s wounds were so peculiar that I didn’t feel able to trust myself.

Mr Harris said he’d tell people that it wasn’t safe to go into the cathedral for a little while and then he got two fellows to come with me. They’d been near to hand when I was telling the book man what had happened and they’d both volunteered to come.

As we walked back up into the cathedral it struck me how quiet it was now. The Dean had, it was said, ordered all the doors to be shut because of the storm outside giving those of us in the cathedral no option but to wait it out. We weren’t locked in, but I did have a feeling of being trapped, and I was beginning to panic. By the time we entered the quire I had begun to shake.

‘So where are we looking?’ the taller of the two watchmen said.

‘On the left,’ I answered. ‘In the front row of stalls.’

I heard him move over there and then stop.

‘Nothing here.’

I’d had my torch pointed away from those stalls until now. I swung around and, standing next to the taller bloke, I looked and saw what he saw.

‘Nothing?’

My heart began to pump hard now as I began to search through the stalls behind where I’d found Mr Andrews.

‘Mr Ronson was here, too,’ I muttered as I looked, amazed, at absolutely nothing human at all.

The shorter of the two blokes, who had been looking on the other side of the quire, came over and said, ‘Nothing over there.’

They both looked at me. ‘Are you sure that you saw Mr Andrews?’ the taller one said.

I scraped my hand along the quire stalls in front of me and then held my bloodied fingers up for them to see. ‘Look!’

‘Blood,’ the shorter one said. He shrugged. ‘Someone could have tripped and hurt themselves. Things happen in the dark.’

‘There’s a lot of it,’ I said as I scraped even more up with my hands.

‘If Mr Ronson was, as you say, put over here . . .’

‘Yes, but where is he now?’ I said. ‘Where is he now?’

These blokes didn’t believe me.

But then had I seen Mr Andrews, or had he and his grisly, strange wound just been inside my head? Something bloody had been laid on these stalls at some point because there was blood everywhere. These two blokes had seen it, so that, at least, wasn’t my imagination. Mr Andrews could have been lying dead in the quire stalls and someone could have moved him. But why? Unless he hadn’t been dead. He’d still been warm when I touched him. And then I remembered that George the choir boy had been looking for Mr Andrews. George would, possibly, know what was what. If George was all right himself, of course . . .