But I ignored him. If we didn’t go down to the crypt, what were we to do? It wasn’t as if we could exactly go outside. And then the noises that had come from the Whispering Gallery stairs burst out into the body of the cathedral.

  ‘Where the hell are they?’

  Milly said, ‘We’ve got to get out of here!’

  ‘Don’t be stupid!’ I replied. Yes, there were people outside the cathedral but most of them were either hanging on for dear life to fire hoses or they were screaming. I could hear them. As the sound of feet running across marble began I looked up to see whether there was anyone in the Whispering Gallery. There were a lot of blokes up there now but they were all doing something other than looking downwards. Those men were really saving the cathedral.

  ‘You’ve had it!’ Bolton smirked.

  Whether I’d have hit him if he hadn’t said what he did, I don’t know. But I gave him such a clump across the top of his bonce that I knocked him out cold. I feared I may have killed him. Not that even that made me stop at the time. As Bolton fell I took hold of Milly’s hand and said, ‘Run!’

  ‘Where to?’

  Dark figures were hurling themselves across the marble floor at us. There was only one realistic direction to go. ‘Out!’ I said.

  Running, Milly answered, ‘I told you that!’

  The nearest way out was the smaller door to the south of the Great West door. It’s almost impossible to describe the pain in my legs by this time, but suffice it to say that if we hadn’t been being pursued by men who wanted us dead, I would have sat down, rolled myself a fag, and probably would never have shifted again. In fact, I was running so fast that when we did get to the door, I slammed straight into it with my shoulder.

  ‘Ow! Bloody—’

  ‘Get it open!’ Milly said as I turned the handle backwards and forwards, all to no avail.

  ‘It’s stuck!’ I said. ‘Or locked or…’

  At some time during the night the Dean had ordered everyone to keep away from the doors. Maybe he’d actually had some of them locked. The sound of running feet behind us was getting louder.

  ‘It’s locked!’ I cried, sweating now with the effort of trying to move the thing. ‘Christ!’

  I saw Milly’s head turn this way and that through the gloom and then suddenly she took hold of my arm and said, ‘This way!’

  I couldn’t see where she was taking me, only that it was back into the cathedral. Pulling me towards the right she said, ‘Here!’

  Stumbling after her through the smoked-filled gloom, I felt her push against something and pull me across what I quickly saw was a threshold. Together we both ran to push the huge wooden door we’d just stumbled through closed behind us. Even as we did this we felt the dull thud of at least one body that wanted to follow us smash against the door. But how were we going to keep the blessed thing closed?

  ‘Does this have a lock or…’ I was looking but I couldn’t see anything.

  ‘Push it! Harder!’ Milly screamed.

  There was grunting and groaning from outside and I struggled to push my weight against it.

  ‘Push!’

  ‘I am!’ I shouted.

  Milly was between me and the door, which seemed like a rather awkward and silly place to be until I saw what she was doing.

  ‘Push harder!’

  There was a bolt, a huge great black metal thing, and Milly was trying to push it home. I knew I couldn’t press myself any harder against that door and so after telling Milly what I was about to do, I took my shoulder away from the door for just a second and then threw myself back at it with all of my strength. For one breathless split second, our pursuers were half inside but then, as I smashed myself back, they fell away from the door and Milly pushed the bolt home in one easy movement. As soon as this was done, we both dropped to the floor behind the door and, dripping with sweat, listened to the low moans of fury from the men outside.

  Where we were was in a hallway. I don’t know what I’d thought the place the door led to was going to be like, but I’m pretty certain I hadn’t reckoned it was a hallway, especially not one with a staircase. I could have been forgiven for having a little moan about yet another bloody staircase, especially another spiral one, but this was very different from those others I’d staggered up and down before. Even in the semi-darkness I could see that it was beautiful. Although it was a spiral, this staircase was wide, and it hugged the walls of some sort of cylinder. A tower, lined with pale stone stairs, winding up to high above our heads, each graceful step balanced as if almost by magic just lightly on the back of the one below. There was a rail, too, a delicate iron affair that could just occasionally be seen in detail as it passed below one of the windows right up high in what I could only think had to be the southern-most of the two towers at the front of the building. It was, I knew, square from the outside, so this curving interior was a surprise.

  Milly got to her feet before I did and flashed her small torch around to illuminate the place. As well as going up, the staircase also went down for a few steps. These led to a door which Milly tried to open and when she failed, she said, ‘Locked.’

  ‘Shine your torch up,’ I said to the girl. Milly did as I asked and we saw, not right at the top of the tower, but a fair way up where the staircase ended, another, much larger door. Painfully, I got to my feet. ‘We’d better see where that goes.’

  ‘But where are we?’ Milly asked.

  ‘I think we’re in one of the towers,’ I said.

  ‘So we don’t know where that door leads to, do we?’

  ‘No.’ I began to walk slowly upwards. Not that these stairs were anything like as difficult as those leading up to the galleries. Shallow and smooth, these were a doddle.

  Milly behind me said, ‘Mr Hancock, these stairs could lead us in to trouble!’

  I stopped, turned and looked down at her. She was so bloody tiny, no wonder it was so easy to believe she was only ten years old. ‘Milly,’ I said because now I had to say something, ‘you have just, I think, killed a bloke. We’re in trouble whatever way we look at it!’

  I could see her face go red, even in the semi-darkness. ‘That were self defence, that!’ Milly said. ‘They was gonna kill me!’

  ‘I know that Mr Webb was coming towards you, but,’ I replied as calmly as I could. If I hadn’t been so sure that the men up in the Golden Gallery were set on killing Milly and probably me too, I would have handed the girl over to someone. She hadn’t shown a shred of pity or remorse since she’d stabbed Webb, not one. ‘But you didn’t need to actually kill…’

  ‘They was gonna throw me over the side!’ Milly said as she stepped up on to the same stair as me and looked hard into my eyes. ‘You know that? Some fucking ceremony that included them cutting my throat and then throwing me into the fires in the street! Webb would’ve watched! Call that doing nothing, do you? What was I supposed to do?’

  ‘Milly, you’re not in the least bit upset, as far as I can tell,’ I said.

  ‘Your face hurt, does it?’ If she thought that changing the subject like this was going to make me blind to how she was behaving, then Milly Chivers was very much mistaken!

  ‘We’re not talking about my face,’ I said. ‘Now…’

  ‘Cause I bet that it ain’t,’ Milly said. ‘You’ve had your nose busted right up and a cheek bone, by the looks of it, too, but I don’t s’ppose you can feel a thing.’

  I made myself ready to protest, to say that what she was talking about was quite untrue. But it wasn’t.

  I sighed. ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I can’t feel anything. In situations like this, in danger, your body doesn’t let you feel too much. There isn’t time.’

  I knew men in the trenches who managed to stagger about on broken legs, they were that pumped up with fear and trembling. It’s a well-known thing.

  ‘But—’

  ‘Well, it’s the same with me,’ Milly said. ‘I’m in danger, so I can’t feel.’ And then I saw, or thought that I saw, just the tiniest bit of dampness in the corner of one of Milly’s eyes. ‘Can’t afford to feel.’

  ‘Milly…’

  She shoved me with her tiny fingers just below my chest. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘we need to find out where these stairs go to.’

  I turned and we trudged on upwards. As we got closer to the door, the well in the centre of the staircase became darker and more menacing. Just before we got to the top, we heard the sound of voices down below as, I imagined, our pursuers tried the door we’d bolted once again.

  The door at the top of the staircase was actually a double one surrounded by a huge and ornate wooden frame. Curved like the wall they were set into, these doors were panelled and made of the same heavy, dark wood as their frame. I took hold of the handle on the left-hand side, but neither it nor the door moved. I looked down at Milly who was now chewing nervously on her bottom lip. There were definitely people down below trying to get in to wherever it was we were. Both Milly and myself knew it. We also knew that neither of us had a clue as to where this new door was going to lead. I pushed on the right-hand door with my shoulder, not knowing whether I’d find people or fire or even the outside of the cathedral beyond it. It gave underneath my weight and Milly smiled. I put my head around the door and for a moment I saw absolutely nothing. I could hear voices, a way away admittedly, but I couldn’t see anything. For a moment I thought about just shutting the door and not even bothering to move forward, but then I looked down at Milly’s hopeful face and I said, ‘I don’t know where this is, I can’t see anything.’

  Impatient with me, she put her torch in my hand and said, ‘Use this!’

  I put the torch on and saw what looked like another corridor with various doors leading out from it. To our left, on what had to be the western end of the cathedral, was something large, a window, covered over completely with blackout curtains. So dark and funereal was it that for a moment it quite put me in mind of my shop back home in West Ham. Maybe it was this familiarity that made me move forward and pull Milly after me into wherever it was we were.

  Public buildings, like hospitals, town halls and churches, always have hidden areas that the public do not ever actually see. Places like store cupboards, cellars and dumb waiters are kept out of view. For someone in my job, however, that isn’t always the case. In fact, more often than not, the hidden places are areas with which we have a lot of contact. After all, when a person goes and sees his doctor at the hospital, the last thing he wants to be confronted with is said physician’s dead body being stretchered down the main staircase towards him. No. While a kindly nurse tells the patient that Dr So and So isn’t on duty today and so he’s seeing Dr Such and Such instead, I’m carrying So and So down some hidden back stairs, past a laundry chute and into the cellar. This place, wherever Milly and I were now, was just one of those areas.

  ‘What’s this all used for?’ Milly said as she followed where I was shining the torch with her eyes.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  The corridor we were on continued down some steps in front of us and then up another small flight. To my right, on the same wall as the entrance door, was another small door which could, I reckoned, possibly lead up to whatever was in the top of the tower; bells or a clock. Also to my right, but on the opposite wall, was a doorway almost exactly the same in appearance as the one we’d just come through. The corridor between the two large doorways led off to the right into some shadowy place that my little torch could only very barely make out.

  Almost before I’d noticed, Milly ran down the steps in front of me and then up the other little flight opposite. I could hear thumping noises from the stairwell behind me. They sounded ominously like Mr Rolls and his mates trying to get in to find us. I followed Milly without speaking, first down and then up the few stairs that led to where she was standing. Looking right as I got to the top of the steps I saw first blackness then, as my eyes adjusted to the conditions in the cathedral, I saw the little splash of red light from the lamp directly underneath the dome.

  ‘Blimey!’

  We were on a balcony at the far western end of the cathedral directly, as far as I could tell, over the Great West Door. I felt a bit sick at the thought of where we were until I found the wrought-iron fence in front of us and put both my hands on it. Milly, watching the blokes moving around on the Whispering Gallery way, way in front, if not that far above us, stood in silence. I was I admit, impressed myself. But then I began to hear other noises, from directly down beneath where I was standing. Familiar voices.

  ‘Get it open!’ I heard Mr Rolls says angrily.

  ‘It’s bolted from the inside!’ I think it was Mr Smith who replied.

  I leaned very carefully and quietly over the fence and made out, if not actual features, the movement of bodies down near to where we’d entered the tower. I thought I was at least very hard to see, but I’d not taken into account the fact that Mr Rolls and all his blokes had torches too. Suddenly a light was shining right into my face and there was a shout of what sounded like triumph from below.

  ‘What’s up?’ It was one of the blokes up in the Whispering Gallery.

  From down below, Mr Smith answered his question. ‘Murderer!’ he yelled. ‘Up in the Triforium! A murderous girl and a madman!’

  From the Whispering Gallery came, ‘Murder?’

  ‘Yes!’ The voice of Rolls was loud, clear and very distinctive. ‘Gentlemen, we have traitors in our midst!’ he said. ‘It’s Phillips here. A madman and a girl who seek to destroy our beloved cathedral are trying to get away. One poor man has already met his maker because of them and in front of my eyes, too! Stabbed!’

  ‘Oi!’ I put a hand over Milly’s mouth and then whispered for her to be quiet. Yes, they knew where we were, but I wanted to hear what else they were saying. I also wanted to know when they were coming.

  It was then that, unwittingly, Mr Smith said something to the men in the Whispering Gallery that gave me some hope. ‘And they killed Mr Ronson!’ he said. ‘Pushed him to his death on the cathedral floor!’

  ‘Crikey!’ came a voice from the Whispering Gallery, followed by ‘Good Lord!’, ‘What say?’ and ‘Bloody hell!’ Other voices joined in too, all shocked and horrified at what had apparently been done by Milly and myself. They couldn’t all, I reckoned, be putting on a show for Mr Rolls and his mates. If I was right then, unlike poor old Mr Andrews, I reckoned on very few of the actual watchmen being involved in this murderous attempt to save St Paul’s. We could actually be up against a very few, maybe even only five or six men at the most.

  I yelled out, ‘That’s not Mr Phillips! That’s a man called Rolls who isn’t even a watchman at all!’

  ‘Don’t listen to him!’ Mr Smith shouted. ‘Just… Anyone who can get down here, please help us get this door open!’

  ‘They’ll kill again!’ Rolls said.

  I didn’t even get a chance to draw breath before the sound of men running to get off the Whispering Gallery thundered in my ears. Below I saw one of the dark shapes by the door break away from the others and move away somewhere I couldn’t see in the darkness. I suspected it was Mr Rolls. I didn’t know whether he’d picked Mr Phillips’s mask up from the Golden Gallery floor and put it back on again or not. But if he hadn’t, then that could explain why, if the figure was Rolls, he was hiding himself away from all the other blokes now. All I could do was tell them, yell out and hope they might believe me. I took a deep breath.

  ‘Mr Hancock, don’t say a word!’ a familiar voice said to me. ‘Run!’

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘George?’ I thought he’d left the building.

  But he was standing behind Milly and myself and, as the girl held her torch up towards his face, I could see that he had been crying.

  ‘The men won’t believe you,’ George said. ‘You’ve got to get away from here! You’ve got to run!’

  ‘Run? Where?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ George pulled his fingers through his hair and began to cry. ‘I thought it would be all right! I thought… Mr Smith and Mr Bolton said that Mr Andrews was stupid!’

  From way down below came the sound of men hammering on the door to the tower.

  ‘You, George,’ I said, ‘you were part of this…’

  ‘I didn’t think that anyone would die!’ George sobbed. ‘But then there was Mr Ronson and Mr Andrews. Mr Andrews died trying to stop them taking Mr Ronson’s body. He died! I saw! It was terrible! And then, then you almost died, Mr Hancock…’

  I felt my anger flare up inside me like a bomb blast. ‘And Milly!’ I added. ‘Milly here!’ I tipped my head at her and then I looked at his face.

  Nothing.

  He was looking at her as I spoke and yet there was nothing at all that spoke to me of any compassion for her on his fresh young face. He was one of those people who thinks that women and girls like Milly are scum. I hated such people.

  ‘You knew, didn’t you?’ I said as I moved in closer to the boy. ‘You knew that Mr Rolls and his mates were going to kill this little girl!’

  ‘No! No! Yes!’ he whimpered. I looked down below again at the men still gathering to try and open the thick ancient door. George, still crying, was now bent almost double in front of me.

  I looked at him again and said, ‘What happened to Mr Phillips, George? The real Mr Phillips?’

  He shook his head as if just by doing that he could sufficiently answer my question.

  ‘Answer me!’ I said. ‘What happened…’

  ‘Mr Phillips pulled out of this! Mr Rolls took his place tonight!’

  ‘How do you know all of this, George?’

  There was a pause, just a short one. But George stopped crying then. ‘My father was a Mason,’ he said. ‘He died.’ He didn’t say how or when, but then he looked up at me. ‘Mr Rolls was his friend. He said that I could join the Craft and save the cathedral. He said my father would have done so. He said that was what my father had wanted!’