‘But Smith and Phillips and some others went along with that anyway, didn’t they?’

  He shrugged. ‘Yes. Although Harold Phillips did quite clearly come to his senses in the end. Harold was a nice man, a very committed member of the Craft, and a very academic person. Theory and practice were very different animals to Harold. I also think he found it hard to oppose his Grand Master; he didn’t like conflict. His face, or rather what had happened to it, made him timid much of the time. Eric Rolls knew that.’ He frowned. ‘What he also knew after the very first time he mentioned the name Crowley at one of our meetings was that support for that man’s ideas was only shared by a few.’

  ‘Mr Andrews said he didn’t know how many people were involved,’ I said. ‘He didn’t trust anyone.’

  Mr Steadman shook his head helplessly. ‘Andrews trusted few people anyway, it was his nature! And yet he trusted George Watkins.’

  I suddenly felt very cold. I’d liked young George. He had tried to save Milly and myself and had died in the attempt.

  ‘George’s father died in a raid just after Rolls began talking about Crowley. Martin Watkins was of the opinion that it was all a load of rot. But when he died, and once Rolls knew that George was a chorister at St Paul’s, Rolls began to suck up to the boy, promised him his father’s place in the Lodge. He also convinced George that his father had been in favour of the sacrifice.’

  ‘It’s all very clubby, isn’t it?’ I said. My voice was bitter but I didn’t care. I wanted him to know how I felt.

  ‘You’ve never joined anything, have you, Mr Hancock?’ he said.

  I stopped myself from saying the obvious which was that no club I could think of would ever have me.

  ‘Part of the attraction of societies, secret or otherwise, is that one rarely has to go outside the society to get what one needs,’ Mr Steadman explained. ‘To have someone involved in the plot actually inside, as in part of the cathedral, like young George, could only be beneficial. Similarly with the victim. To go out and buy a child from strangers could possibly be dangerous. Poor Chivers’s situation was well known, we’d all worked with him and we’d all heard the rumours about what had become of him and his family. They turned out to be true.’

  ‘Except that Milly isn’t really as young as they thought she was,’ I said.

  ‘Wasn’t she?’

  ‘She’s sixteen.’

  Mr Steadman looked amazed. ‘Good Lord!’

  ‘Mr Webb, who was her pimp, said she was younger than she really was to attract more, er, more customers.’

  ‘George Chivers lost control of his entire life many years ago,’ Mr Steadman said. ‘We, his fellow architects, if no one else, should have cared for him. But when a fellow is given so totally to drink…’ He put his hand in his pocket, took out his watch and looked at it. ‘Mr Hancock, I will soon have to go.’

  He didn’t say where to and I didn’t ask.

  ‘So you’re covering up the deaths of young George, Webb, Mr Andrews and Mr Smith in order to save the Dean and the cathedral – and of course your “Craft”,’ I said. He didn’t answer. ‘But what about Rolls’s other followers,’ I said, ‘what about Bolton and Arnold and what about this Crowley bloke? Do they get away Scot-free?’

  Mr Steadman stood up. ‘If we are to protect the reputation of the cathedral and the Watch…’

  ‘And the Masons.’

  ‘Well,’ he put his head down for a moment, ‘yes. Arnold and Bolton were just followers. They’ll be frightened, miles away now. They didn’t actually kill anyone. Rolls pushed Ronson from the Whispering Gallery and Smith killed Andrews. That was particularly vicious but then maybe Andrews fought or something, maybe… As for Crowley? He’s a drug fiend, Mr Hancock. He is old and sick and he can never return to his beloved Abbey of Thelema in Sicily because Mussolini, as well as Hitler, abhors Masonry.’

  ‘I thought you said that he wasn’t a Mason now?’ I said.

  Mr Steadman smiled. ‘I said that he had been discredited. I never said that he had been thrown out.’

  ‘So once a Mason—’

  ‘Mr Hancock,’ he said as he walked towards the door of that bleak, cold room, ‘Fascism is doomed because it seeks to destroy us. It was laudable, in a way, of Rolls and the others to want to save the cathedral. But as far as the War itself is concerned they didn’t need, and don’t need, to worry. As I have said to you before, we run this country. We also run many others, too. Rolls, I think, chose to sacrifice that girl just as Crowley did in Sicily back in the twenties, because he wanted to. There have always been sadists in our midst.’

  ‘Mr Andrews was killed in a very sadistic way,’ I said, still shuddering even then at the way in which the old cleric had died from a stab wound in his poor old backside. ‘Is that part of Masonic ritual, a punishment?’

  ‘I think that possibly Mr Andrews and Mr Smith got into a fight, don’t you?’ Mr Steadman said. ‘How else could such an outrage happen?’

  And then he left me. I was in no doubt at all that anything I might want to say to the police would be treated as entirely irrelevant.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I began what I truly believed was my journey home, but troubling thoughts I knew I couldn’t really do anything about drew me back to the cathedral. It wasn’t that I wanted to see anyone in particular in the great church or even that I wanted to look at places where certain things had happened. I think in reality I just wanted to know that the place was still there. Meeting the Dean on the stairs up to the Great West door was a thing I didn’t either plan or expect. He walked over to me and, to my amazement, he remembered my name.

  ‘Mr Hancock,’ he said, ‘what a night you shared with us, eh?’

  I looked down for a moment before I answered him. Part of me at least didn’t really know quite what to say. The Dean, I had thought, had known, at least in part, what Mr Andrews had suspected. He had, after all, spoken to me about enemies both inside and outside the cathedral. ‘I’m sorry about Mr Andrews,’ I said.

  Mr Matthews shook his head sadly. ‘No one apart from the firemen were supposed to be fighting the flames outside the building,’ he said. ‘We lost more people than we should have, Mr Hancock, but thankfully fewer than we might have done. I understand from Mr Steadman that you found the little girl. That is a relief. I fully intended to put her into the care of someone responsible in the Watch myself. But you took care of her yourself, which is admirable.’

  Milly. Where was she, I wondered? And what, assuming that she had made it back home through the flaming streets of the City, was she thinking about now? One thing I knew was that she wouldn’t, in spite of having nearly been killed, go to the police. Mr Steadman and his cronies knew that they had Milly’s unquestioning silence, no matter what. Working girls don’t talk. Not usually. But then this wasn’t usual because this could involve her own father selling her for slaughter. Mr Webb had said that Milly’s father hadn’t known what had been going on or rather that was the impression he had given me. But I wondered. I also, for my own satisfaction, had to see Milly again myself.

  ‘Mr Matthews,’ I said, ‘one of the men who was killed with Mr Andrews was a Mr Webb. His wife—’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Dean Matthews frowned. ‘Poor woman. Our ladies are looking after Mrs Webb and her children in the crypt. She is really not strong enough to be left alone as yet.’

  ‘No.’ I really had to fight to hide my disgust. Webb’s wife had known all about Milly and her sisters and what they did for her husband. But then that was going to make what I was about to do all the easier. I am not by nature a cruel man. I don’t find it easy to make people cry.

  ‘Mr Matthews,’ I said, ‘do you think it would be all right for me to go and see Mrs Webb? Offer my condolences?’

  He smiled. ‘I imagine so,’ he said. ‘But do be careful as you go, won’t you?’ He looked around at the mud-dust- and rubble-caked steps and his face dropped once again. ‘We don’t want any more casualties, do we?’

  I began to walk towards the Great West door.

  Just before I drew level with him, Mr Matthews said, ‘But most of us didn’t succumb to either the enemy without or the enemy within, did we?’

  I moved myself closer to him very quickly now. Did he know? In spite of everything that Steadman had told me to the contrary, did the Dean really know what had happened on the night of 29 December 1940? Just the thought that he might, made me flush with anger. Could this man possibly be one of ‘them’? Well, my mate Ernie Sutton was a Mason…

  ‘The enemy within?’ I said. ‘What, with respect Mr Matthews, does that mean?’

  He blinked. No doubt somewhat taken aback by the violence of my tone, the straightness of my face.

  ‘Well, the structure of the cathedral, of course,’ he said. I looked and looked again at his face for any signs of untruth or dissembling, but I couldn’t find any. ‘As I think I said to you many hours ago, Mr Hancock, we fight both the Nazis, the enemy without, and the fragile and combustible structure of the cathedral, the enemy within. Sir Christopher Wren did not intend his great building to be attacked in this fashion.’

  I left a slightly offended Mr Matthews and went into the cathedral and down into the crypt. Of all the people I’d seen in the crypt the previous night, only the exhausted-looking Mrs Webb and her children remained. The kids, who were being given tea by the first-aid ladies, seemed calm enough but the woman, sitting on her own, over by what looked like a charred and headless torso, smoked with wildly shaking hands.

  As I sat down next to her, Mrs Webb tipped her head at the torso and said, ‘They say, these ladies here, that that was a statue from the old cathedral, the one what burnt down in the Great Fire of London. A saint, burnt and without its head.’

  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.’