Ashes to Ashes (26 page)

I looked at it. ‘Tortured,’ I said. ‘It looks tortured.’

‘Yes.’

I didn’t look at her. I wasn’t sorry for her loss. ‘You and your husband tortured Milly Chivers and her sister, in a way,’ I said, not able to keep back what I wanted to say any longer. ‘Where does she live, Mrs Webb? Where is Milly now?’

There was a pause and she just managed to get out ‘I . . .’ before I said, ‘And don’t try to make anything up, Mrs Webb. If you do, I’ll just go out and get the coppers right now.’

It was difficult to know how bad the building on Garlick Hill where the Chivers family lived really was. Although described to me as a Rookery, it wasn’t the sort of place I’d envisaged such a crime-ridden relic of the past to look like. Rookeries to my way of thinking were great big wooden buildings, usually held up by rough timber piers, hanging over fathoms of thick London mud. I suppose that what I expected was something out of Dickens. What I found was a crumbling Edwardian building whose gutters had been blown off by the bombing and the pavements around which were covered with glass, plaster, broken stone and sewage. The smell was no worse than it was at home in the East End, although this being the City, and after the night of fire we’d all just had, smoke was uppermost amongst the terrible stinks that day. The spicy smell of burnt incense from all the churches, of fine old wood, polished and preserved by centuries of loving care, the dull crackly smell of paper and, of course, the overriding stench of cooked meat. As I went in to what was a dark, rubbish-covered hall, I found myself breathing very lightly in case I actually took in any ash from a burnt human body. I know that the Hindus cremate their dead and I understand all the arguments for it on the grounds of hygiene, but I can’t bear it. To me, a burning human body will always bring to mind the Great War, now this war too.

Mrs Webb had described this building as ‘flats’, but it was more a rooming house, really. The Webbs, probably because of their business ‘interests’ in Milly and her family, had two rooms on the first floor; the Chivers family had only had one. I stood outside it for a second, trying to listen for any noises inside before I knocked. At first no one answered and there was no sound from inside. I knocked again. I was determined not to speak or shout. I didn’t want Milly, should she be inside, to know it was me. If she knew that, she almost certainly wouldn’t come to the door. I decided on one final try and knocked again. It was after that third time that I heard a cough from right behind the door. It was followed by a short, frightened gasp.

I left it a few seconds to see what might happen and then I turned the door handle and pushed on the door with my shoulder. To my surprise it came open easily and let me in to a place that had a very different smell from that of the burning human body.

The room, which couldn’t have been any more than ten feet by fifteen feet, smelt of sour bodies and booze. Not a decent beer smell, or even something sweet and alcoholic like sherry; it was the stench of cheap gin. At first I couldn’t quite work out what I was looking at because of the rough piece of grey cloth that kept on flapping into my face. But then I saw that the room was divided in two by this thing. On one side was a single bed with a bloke laying flat out on top of it. He had a bottle in one hand and, strangely for a drunk, which he surely was, a book in the other. But then George Chivers had by all accounts been an educated man. He had been an architect. From the way his face looked, lined deeper than the bloody underground, that could have been fifteen, twenty or even more years ago. On the other side of the curtain was a rather tidier double bed with a washstand at the side of it. On the walls around the bed cigarette cards of film stars were pinned up in haphazard groups. A young girl in a dirty brassiere and knickers sat on this bed and beside her, much prettier than the girl and fully clothed, was Milly. She looked up at me with utter contempt on her face.

‘What do you want?’ she said. ‘How did you get here?’

I nodded towards the other girl and said, ‘Is that your sister? Is that—’

‘Never mind who that is!’ Milly said as she got off the bed and began to move towards me. ‘What do you want, Mr Hancock? Do you want a hand-job, do you?’

‘No! No!’ I said and saw the other girl smirk as I did so. ‘Milly, I . . . You can’t live like this!’

The man on the bed turned over and snorted like a pig. I looked at him for a moment and, now I regarded him more closely, I saw that his features were fine, that he was not at all a bad-looking man. Or at least he hadn’t been so once.

‘Milly, this has to stop,’ I said.

‘Does it?’ She gave me such a cynical look! But then I knew that I was not convinced I was right myself. People involved in that life, as I know only too well from Hannah, have rather different priorities. What they look upon as taking care of themselves, people like me see only as something wrong, something they should be saved from doing.

Although she was so much smaller than me, Milly hustled me out of that room and back into the hall with quite a bit of power behind her hands. As she shut the door behind me, she turned upon me angrily. ‘You think that because you and me was pals for a bit last night, you can tell me what to do, do you?’

‘Milly, those men . . .’

‘Those men bought me from Webb, but now he’s dead and the men are Gawd alone knows where!’

I bent down and I looked her in the eye. ‘Milly, you killed Webb,’ I said. ‘You killed him!’

‘So did you tell the coppers or didn’t you?’ she said as she faced me down, her arms folded defiantly over her chest.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t and wouldn’t ever tell the police about what Milly had done. Even if I’d wanted to, the girl’s very presence would give the lie to Mr Steadman’s story and that, as I knew, was not something that was going to be at all easily challenged.

Milly sighed and then leaned against the smutted wall and lit up a fag. ‘I don’t know who them men were last night, Mr Hancock,’ she said. ‘They used to work with me dad, but that was before I was born and that’s all I know. Dad, as far as I know, thought the blokes just wanted me for the usual. You know . . .’ She briefly looked away. ‘You can see how Dad is! He just sent them off to Webb and he arranged it all. As long as Dad’s got a bottle, well, he don’t care too much about who gives it to him or why.’ She then looked me in the eyes with a pleading expression on her thin, pale face. ‘But he’s not bad! Dad’s just, well . . . Dad would never have sold me to be murdered! I don’t believe it! Not like that fucking Webb! Webb deserved to die! Webb . . . I hated him, and his missus, I . . .’

Her words fizzled out into a fit of childlike sobbing. I wanted to put my arm around her shoulders, to offer her some sort of comfort. But I knew that Milly would only associate that with what was done to her in the course of her ‘business’. She could never, as Hannah always said of child prostitutes, have any sort of normal or even friendly relationship with a man. She was ruined.

‘Milly,’ I said after a short pause. ‘There are people who can help you. Even in wartime; you don’t have to live like this.’

I was thinking of people like the Barnardo’s organisation. I was even thinking that perhaps my own family could look after Milly – until I remembered how easy her killing of Webb had been. She was only a child, but how could I allow my mother and sisters to live with someone, even though a nipper, who could finish off a person as calmly as if she were wringing the neck of a chicken? I wondered whether Mr Webb had been Milly’s first and only victim.

Once the sobbing had stopped, Milly dried her eyes. ‘I couldn’t leave Dad,’ she said, ‘or Rita. Who’d look after them?’

‘You and Rita and all of your brothers and sisters could be taken care of . . .’

‘Yeah, without Dad,’ she said bitterly. And then she added, ‘No. No, I couldn’t do that. I could never leave him.’

‘Milly, your father sold you!’

‘My dad’s a drinker who don’t know what he’s doing!’ she replied. ‘He’s weak! He don’t mean no harm! He never meant no harm to Mum!’

Webb had said that, in his opinion, George Chivers, albeit indirectly, had killed Milly’s mother. The girl must have seen that flash through my mind.

‘Dad never killed Mum,’ she said sadly, as if she was so weary of answering that question. ‘She just got wore out and died.’

I lit a fag up too now and leaned against the wall beside Milly. ‘Don’t you worry, Milly, about getting worn out and dying like your mum?’

‘I dunno.’ She shrugged. ‘But without Webb about I stand more of a chance. More money for me and the others now anyway.’

‘And Mrs Webb?’

‘Rosina?’ Milly laughed. ‘On her own she’s about as frightening as a bowl of cherries. Me and Rita can handle Rosina.’ And then she frowned. ‘Does Rosina know I killed her old man?’ She didn’t look scared about this at all, just curious.

‘No one knows you killed Mr Webb except for Mr Rolls, who will eventually stand trial for Mr Phillips’s death,’ I said. ‘And me, but for lots of reasons, I’m not saying anything.’

A voice from one of the other rooms down the hall rang out, ‘Fuck off, you old bitch!’

Milly and I ignored it. Then she said, ‘The only thing that Dad ever said to me about Mr Rolls was that he was a Mason. He said they was honourable men, that he’d wanted to be one himself one day. But then the drink took him.’ She looked up at me. ‘My dad would have been very powerful if he’d been one of them, wouldn’t he? I’ll never hear from anyone about what really happened in the cathedral, will I?’

‘No.’

And then as the horror and the enormity of what had happened to both of us in St Paul’s hit her she suddenly clung to my arm and said, ‘Fucking hell, they wanted to kill us! They wanted to
kill
us! Why did they want to do that?’

I said that I didn’t know. There was no point trying to explain it all to Milly. Rolls would certainly not go into what had happened in the cathedral, even at his trial. Even if he wanted to talk, he wouldn’t be allowed to do so. Mr Steadman and probably many, many more men, would make certain of that.

I put my hand on Milly’s shoulder and said, ‘Who can know what horrible, twisted habits and desires men have?’

She looked up at me and I saw in her eyes that she had a fair idea about a few of those.

‘Milly,’ I said, ‘in your line of work you will meet blokes who want to do really bad things. You met some last night and I’ve no doubt that you’ll meet more in the years to come. I know you say you have to do this . . .’

‘When Dad needs drink he needs drink,’ she said. ‘He can’t wait for us to get paid at the end of the week for doing our nice typing jobs! Me and Rita, we can make money just like that.’ She clicked her fingers. ‘And anyway, I’ve a habit of my own too.’ She put her head down in what looked like shame.

Back in the cathedral she’d said she smoked opium. Rolls and Smith had given her some but not enough, apparently, to make her compliant with their wishes. Milly had to have a fairly big habit, I imagined. At that moment she looked very young for her age but with opium in her life, even without the odious Webb to feed it to her, she wouldn’t look young for long. Milly would, if she needed to, I knew, find her own opium supplier pretty sharpish now.

I wanted to help her, I even left her one of my cards and told her to call me if she was ever in trouble. But I know that she won’t. Milly loves her useless alcoholic father and she is herself addicted to a drug that will almost certainly kill her. I kissed her gently on the top of her head and then I left without once looking back at her. I heard her open the door back into her room and go inside. As she shut it behind her a bloke, her father, I imagine, said, ‘Have you been working, Milly dear? How much did you get paid?’

So strange to hear a voice like that, smooth and educated, in a building that stank of stale booze, sewage and violent sex.

Chapter Twenty

I
didn’t know what to expect when I got back to Annie’s place. I knew that where she was, just to the north in Finsbury, hadn’t been as badly hit as the City, but the old girl could still very easily have bought it. Even the outskirts of the Square Mile are only thinly populated – Hitler knew what he was doing when he ordered the raid for a Sunday night – and there hadn’t been many ordinary people, let alone any firemen, available for blazes outside the centre. All the firemen had had to work on the big things – or, to be more accurate, they’d had to concentrate their efforts on St Paul’s Cathedral. But as I turned into Wilmington Square I was very quickly reassured that Annie was all right. Sitting on an old kitchen chair on the pavement, Annie was at the centre of a group of women, drinking tea from a very delicate china cup.

‘Oh, there’s my nephew!’ I heard her call out. She waved a clawed, arthritic hand at me and I smiled and waved back at her. Two of the women with her turned round to look in my direction, one of them, wearing a tightly wrapped scarf around her head, puffed on what looked like a cigar. I later learned that it wasn’t a cigar at all. This woman was very hard up and had actually taken to smoking dried leaves.

Annie’s flat hadn’t taken any damage during the course of the night and so when she’d finished talking to her neighbours, she took me inside to her kitchen and put the kettle on the range.

‘Right firework display last night, wasn’t it?’ she said as she cleared a pile of tea towels from off her most comfortable chair and told me to sit down. She looked at me. ‘Gawd blimey, your face is a bit of a mess, Frank!’

I didn’t make any sort of comment.

Annie said, ‘I sat in here and, I’ll be honest with you, Frank, I prepared to meet my maker!’

Annie asked me what I’d done with myself all night long. I told her I’d been holed up in the cathedral crypt. I didn’t give her any details about what had happened to me while I was there, but I did tell her how wonderful the St Paul’s watchmen had been. Because they had. I was truly convinced by this time that the Dean had indeed had nothing to do with, or any knowledge of, Rolls and his sickening plans for the cathedral. Mr Matthews had simply led the watchmen magnificently, urging them and himself ever onwards to greater feats of endurance up in those hellish galleries on those awful burning rooftops. Mr Churchill, too, had played his part. The firemen had been told to save the cathedral on his orders and no one in their right mind ever disobeys Winnie.