‘Mr…’

  ‘Hancock,’ I said as I stood beside her panting from the fear, the wind and the heat all around me. On the floor behind Mr Rolls I could now see what was in the box he had only just opened. It was a jacket with some ribbons laid across it. If this was what he had planned to wear for some sort of devilish ceremony, then I wasn’t very impressed. They were so very ordinary.

  ‘Mr Hancock, I think I’m right in thinking that you ain’t with this lot,’ Milly said.

  ‘Yes. Milly, I tried to help you, earlier.’

  She completely ignored this. ‘You know what to do with a gun?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Take it,’ she said as she pulled me towards her. ‘Hold it on him.’ She pushed it still further into Mr Rolls’s neck as she slipped her small hand from under mine. ‘We’re getting out of here, Mr Hancock.’

  She sounded so confident and also so much older than any ten-year-old I’d ever met before, that for a while, I was lost in admiration for her. I didn’t ask her how we were going to get out and maybe I should have, but then even if I’d done so, I doubt whether I could have prevented what happened next.

  ‘If either of you move, Mr Hancock’ll kill your mate,’ she said to Webb and Smith as they stood seemingly quite calmly in front of her. Mr Smith did as he was told. Mr Webb did not.

  Moving towards her, he said, ‘Babe—’

  ‘Don’t you “babe” me!’

  I thought she just punched him. She was small, and so what she did didn’t look all that much to me. It was only when Webb first gasped and then folded over under her blow that I knew something had to be wrong. His hands flew to his guts and he made a sort of gurgling sound in his throat.

  Smith, who was now attempting to hold up the falling Webb, said, ‘She’s stabbed him!’

  I felt Mr Rolls’s body flinch and tense up underneath the pistol and I said to him, ‘Don’t do anything! Don’t do anything!’

  Now I was truly lost. I’d come to save a little girl from something horrible, and now she’d stabbed a man. Not a nice man, admittedly, but a man she was standing over and smiling at now, as he bled down his trousers and on to the ancient stone floor.

  ‘He’s dying!’ Mr Smith was down on the floor with Webb, now looking up at the girl with absolute terror on his face. ‘What—’

  ‘You always told me and Rita to carry blades, didn’t you, Charlie?’ Milly said, ignoring Smith completely. ‘To protect ourselves? Well, now I have protected myself, so there!’

  ‘Milly,’ I said.

  ‘The only way we’re going to get out of here is to get rid of all of these,’ she said as she looked around at the three men who had been our captors. Then before I could answer her or plead with her to stop what she was doing, she took hold of the box of clothes on the ground and smacked Mr Smith around the side of the head with it. With a grunt, he fell unconscious across Webb’s now gasping body. Milly was terrifying me.

  ‘I am not killing this bloke!’ I said as I nevertheless still held the gun up to Mr Rolls’s head. I had killed far too many people in the First Lot. One is too many, and I had stabbed, shot and beat far more than just one to death back then. Their faces, as well as their blood and guts, are very central to my waking and sleeping nightmares. I wasn’t killing again, not that night, not ever.

  Milly shrugged. She looked down at Smith and said, ‘I haven’t killed him. He’ll be all right in an hour or two.’ Then she pointed to Rolls. ‘He tried to kill you,’ she said. ‘He’d kill you now if he could.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘But I’m not killing him, I’m—’

  ‘Milly! Love…’ Webb was coughing up blood now and, although I knew that he was a goner, I had to say something about getting him to a doctor.

  The girl looked at me with both coldness and what looked like pity. ‘He’s dying,’ she said simply. ‘He’s got TB anyway. There ain’t no point.’

  For the first time in a long while, Mr Rolls spoke, ‘She’s a demon! Hancock, for God’s sake, you have the gun! Shoot her for—’

  ‘If you shoot me, you’ll be doing exactly what he and them other nuts have wanted all the time!’ Milly said. I was breathing hard now and couldn’t speak but she must have been able to tell from the look on my face that I wasn’t going to do her any harm.

  Milly put something, I imagine the knife she’d stabbed Webb with, in her pocket and began to rummage through Mr Rolls’s clothes box. She nodded her head towards Rolls and then said to me, ‘There’s some stuff in here we can tie him up with.’

  At the bottom of the stairs up to the Stone Gallery, there were men both Milly and I knew, waiting for some sort of signal from Mr Rolls. I didn’t know exactly what that was about. I had an idea based largely upon what Mr Andrews had told me earlier. But Milly, so she claimed, knew.

  About halfway down from the Golden Gallery to the Stone Gallery, I tapped Milly on the shoulder and said that she and I needed to talk. It was pitch-black on that staircase, with only the light from a little torch Milly had with her to light our way. She sat down on one stair and I followed suit, a few steps above her. As I looked down at her face, I was struck by how old she looked for her age, and it wasn’t just her behaviour that made her seem like an adult.

  ‘Mr Rolls worked with my dad, years ago before I was born,’ Milly said. ‘Mr Phillips did too, but he ain’t here. I think he’s part of this, what’s going on here, but I ain’t seen him tonight.’

  ‘What is going on here?’

  I was in a stairwell with a child who had hit one man hard enough to knock him out and all but killed another!

  ‘You have to know drinkers and drug takers to understand it all,’ Milly said. ‘But the short of it is that Mr Rolls knew my dad had fell on hard times and he knew that he had little ’uns. He asked my dad if he could buy one of us. Dad must’ve thought it was for the usual reason, I know I did. So he told Mr Rolls to speak to Charlie. Charlie’s looked after business for Dad for years, just like he did with Mum.’

  ‘Charlie was your mum’s pimp?’

  ‘Charlie and that sad thing of a wife. Yes, they pimped for Mum and for me and me sister Rita, too.’

  The Webbs had to have money. Men pay more than the going rate for youngsters. And yet the Webbs and their kids had looked so poor!

  ‘As I say, I thought this job was just the same as usual,’ Milly said with that cringe-making adult knowingness in her voice. ‘I thought it was funny Mr Rolls should be pretending to be Mr Phillips; men do all sorts to make themselves excited and so I didn’t think anything about it. I did think it was funny being brought into the cathedral. I had a right good game of it at first as you know, running about. Truth was the size of the raid took them all by surprise. They had duties to do and couldn’t deal with me as they’d wanted straight away. I thought it was peculiar but I didn’t think that the Watch blokes were like… you know, bad blokes…’ She looked down at her hands. ‘But then they’re not. Mr Rolls ain’t in the Watch at all and them as are with him are, I think, only in it for what they want to do tonight.’

  ‘Which is what?’

  ‘To kill me,’ Milly said simply. ‘They’ve got some sort of idea that killing me will save the cathedral.’ Of course she, a child, had been the sacrifice all along. Her eyes filled with tears now and suddenly she looked a lot younger. ‘Charlie sold me to them so that they could kill me! He told them I was ten. I tells all the blokes I go with I’m ten; I thought nothing of it. I run around the cathedral for a laugh, yes, but also so that by playing like a kid they’d be bound to believe his story!’

  ‘You’re not ten?’

  She looked at me as if I was mad. ‘I may be small, but I don’t think you’re daft enough to think that I’m ten, Mr Hancock!’

  I had at first, but now that I’d actually been with her for a while, I knew that she just couldn’t possibly be that young.

  ‘I’m sixteen,’ Milly said. And then, seeing that I wanted to ask her something else, she added, ‘And yes, I do take opium sometimes, but it does knock me out and so I didn’t smoke it tonight. I knew something was wrong. I tapped the opium pipe they give me out on the floor of one of them other galleries.’

  She started to stand up.

  ‘How did you know that something was wrong?’ I asked. Prostitutes live in such strange and at times very fanciful, as well as a brutal worlds that I find it hard to know how they separate the lies that they’re always told by blokes from reality.

  Milly looked down at me with an almost pitying eye. ‘Same as when you fell in, I should think,’ she said. ‘When they started killing people. Mr Rolls hadn’t seen my dad for years and years. He ain’t got no idea how old I really am. I saw him push that bloke off the Whispering Gallery. I knew that weren’t no joke, whatever silly old childish cobblers they told me about it. By the time they dressed me up as a bloke so they could get me up in the Galleries without no one knowing, I was bloody terrified, I can tell you.’ She pulled a face. ‘Called me “Mr Potter” they did! Bloody hell!’

  I’d felt in some way that ‘Potter’ wasn’t right. Now I knew why. I was just rising to my feet myself when a voice boomed up from way down below. ‘Mr Rolls!’ it said. ‘Mr Rolls, are you ready yet?’

  For a couple of seconds, Milly and I just looked at each other. I shrugged, not knowing what to do while she waved her hands at me as if urging me to say something. I knew I didn’t sound a bit like Mr Rolls, but in the end I just called down anyway. ‘Not yet!’

  There was a very short pause before the reply came, ‘Okey dokey!’

  I looked at Milly and she at me and neither of us knew what to do next. Milly seemed to think that the majority of the watchmen were decent blokes not involved in any of this sacrifice nonsense. But Mr Andrews had trusted no one, apart from Mr Ronson and, later on, me. There was of course the Dean, too, if we could just get to him. But how we were going to do that and who we may or may not be able to trust, I didn’t know. There was also the danger that remained, that the whole place could burn to the ground any moment, too. I said to Milly, ‘We’re just going to have to go down there and see what we find. We don’t have a choice.’

  She didn’t say anything, but began walking down the stairs. I followed. My legs were so stiff now it was like walking on stilts. But that really wasn’t the worst of it. What was really bad was what was going on in my head. The ghosts from the past were being joined by the ghosts from the present, the ones from this night of fire and wind and terrible strange death. I had come to the cathedral to shelter from the terror in the streets and yet what I had found inside had been almost worse. As both the Dean and Mr Andrews had said, the enemy didn’t have just one form on this terrible night, it had two – one without and one within. And now Milly, the girl I’d set about to ‘save’ in some way, had in all probability killed a man. Could I have stopped her from doing that? I wondered.

  When we got to the bottom of the staircase there was not a soul to be seen. There were no bombs, incendiary or otherwise, falling any more but the flames from the streets down below were still threatening the cathedral. The wind, if not as high as it had been, was still up and, besides, we’d both heard someone call up to Mr Rolls only moments before. I couldn’t believe that the Stone Gallery could be deserted and as I felt a hand fall on to my shoulder, I knew that it wasn’t.

  Mr Bolton said, ‘What are you doing down here?’

  I still had Mr Smith’s gun in my pocket. I put my hand on it before I turned to Mr Bolton and said, ‘There’s been a bit of a change of plan.’

  ‘Oh.’ He was so intent upon looking at Milly that he didn’t see me take the gun out and point it at him for a couple of seconds. When he did see it, however, he immediately put his hands up to his shoulders as his mouth dropped open in shock.

  ‘Milly and myself are leaving,’ I said.

  The girl, looking around nervously, said to him, ‘You alone?’

  ‘Yes…’

  ‘You had some other fella with you earlier,’ I said. ‘Where’s he gone?’

  ‘Down.’ He pointed towards the floor.

  ‘If you’re lying…’

  ‘I swear…’ He waved his upheld hands wildly. He was very scared and could be telling the truth even though I doubted it at the time. I pushed him against the side of the cathedral wall.

  ‘Mr Hancock!’

  I had the gun at his throat and so I couldn’t turn around easily. ‘Milly?’

  ‘Mr Hancock, some other geezer!’

  Still I couldn’t turn. But when I heard the voice of the ‘other geezer’ I thought that maybe everything was going to be all right after all.

  ‘Mr Hancock?’ It was Mr Steadman. Although he was Mr Rolls’s business partner, my earlier conversation with him had given me the impression that he was probably not part of this plot to ‘save’ the cathedral.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Mr Steadman asked. ‘Why have you got a gun?’

  None of us, except perhaps Mr Bolton, saw the other chap arrive. He must have come on tip-toe. Up behind Mr Steadman, he hit him so hard on the back of the head, I could have sworn that I heard his skull crack. Keeping the gun as close to Bolton’s head as I could, I turned, and as I did so, Milly ran towards me and clung on to my side. The ‘other bloke’, the one who had been with Mr Bolton earlier, stood before us. He had a truncheon, like a coppers, in his hand. He held it high, threateningly, as he stepped over Mr Steadman’s body. I didn’t know at the time whether the poor bloke was alive or dead.

  ‘Give me the gun!’ the bloke said. ‘Give me the girl and the gun and you can just walk out of here!’

  ‘I’ll go with the girl and the gun, if it’s all the same to you,’ I said. ‘Mr Bolton can come along with us too.’

  ‘No!’ Bolton was so afraid he was almost weeping.

  ‘How did you get away from Rolls and Smith?’ the bloke continued. And then suddenly losing control he shouted, ‘God Almighty, do you know what you’ve done!’

  I couldn’t actually see where the entrance to the staircase down to the Whispering Gallery was, but I knew that if I just kept on moving around the circular core of the cathedral I’d get to it eventually.

  Mr Bolton, trembling as I moved him along with me, said, ‘Fred, don’t bother about me, please! Just go up to Mr Rolls and—’

  ‘The cathedral is going to die because of you!’ Fred spat vindictively out at me. ‘If not today then sometime soon!’

  Shuffling along the wall with Bolton under one arm and Milly clinging to the other, I said, ‘You know something, Fred? Blood doesn’t do anything. Spilling it only makes whoever does it a beast. I know.’

  ‘Do you? You’re not one of the Brotherhood, so what do you know? The great architects of the past, Wren included, always consecrated their buildings with the sacrifice, a child…’

  ‘I don’t believe that,’ I said. ‘Christopher Wren was a genius, a modern man, so I’ve always been told. He would never have done something so primitive.’ Mrs Andrews had made a point of saying that Wren was a good man. ‘Never!’

  ‘Blood will purify! Blood will purify!’ The bloke looked mad, all the veins on the side of his neck were standing out. ‘Hitler will destroy us unless we make a gesture, a sacrifice!’

  How had this group of men come to this conclusion? I wasn’t to find out for a while. What I had to do at that time was to get Milly and myself to someone not involved in all this who would believe us.

  ‘Mr Hancock!’ Milly nudged me and then tilted her head towards the left. ‘Stairs!’

  So now we had to go down. Stiff legs or no stiff legs, I had to take Bolton with us, and I had to keep him, if I could, for as long as it took to find someone I could trust. But I wasn’t going to take Fred. I didn’t want him to follow us, either.

  I paused just before the stairwell. ‘Fred,’ I said, ‘Mr Smith and Mr Rolls could probably do with some attention.’

  ‘Don’t tell him that!’ Milly said. ‘Don’t tell him anything!’

  I didn’t mention Webb. I assumed he had to be dead by that time. As we disappeared down the stairs towards the Whispering Gallery, Fred ran off in the opposite direction, towards the staircase going further up. I jammed the pistol into Mr Bolton’s back and then whispered to Milly, ‘Now we’ve got to run for it.’ I pushed Bolton and urged him to move as fast as he could. Behind us the night sky was drowning in smoke and breathing was hard and tasted of death. As I thundered down the stairs after Mr Bolton I screamed just a little at every painful step. I wasn’t walking down those stairs, I was flying.

  Chapter Twelve

  We made it down to the cathedral floor without any further incident. Men were going about their business on the Whispering Gallery, but no one I recognised, and consequently no one I felt I could trust. I needed to find the Dean or Mrs Andrews or, now I came to think about it, Mr Garner. If he was a Catholic, then he couldn’t be a Mason, good or bad. But the church was empty and Milly and myself had only a sobbing Mr Bolton and the lamp underneath the dome for company. Those moments standing at the bottom of the Whispering Gallery stairs in silence, watching the smoke from the fires outside leak into the cathedral and swirl around the quire stalls, were amongst the most terrifying of my entire life. It was so desolate, so old and dark, so much the house of a doomed but jealous God. As superstitious thoughts began to crowd out my reason I began to wonder whether these renegade Masons might have something after all. Not that I wanted to hurt anyone. I just felt that something in that place was reaching out, needing something…

  But fortunately I didn’t have too much time to consider such barmy notions because now I could clearly hear angry voices on the stairs behind us.

  ‘They’re coming,’ Milly said. ‘They must’ve untied Rolls. Because you told them!’

  Ignoring her criticism I said, ‘We need to get down to the crypt. At the very least Mr Andrews’s wife is down there.’

  Holding tight on to Bolton, I ran with Milly at my back in the direction of the stairs down to the crypt. We were just running around the edge of the quire stalls when Bolton said, ‘There are brothers down there too, you know! In the crypt! How will you know whom to trust?’