Mr Andrews gestured towards the space underneath the dome and said, ‘I believe Mr Ronson was sacrificed. He was pushed.’

  ‘But you said that you didn’t see…’

  ‘I didn’t see who did it, but I saw a watchman push him!’ He wiped a thin, pale hand across his mouth and then said, ‘There were only watchmen up there! I was down here, waiting for Ronson to come and tell me this thing he said was so important. Since November, when he first came to me with his fears, when we began discussing our brothers’ association with the Beast, we had been conversing thus. I think he was about to tell me it was tonight. That tonight was to be the night of sacrifice. Something had alerted him and he was afraid, so afraid! Now—’

  ‘Get the coppers!’ I said. Why was he telling me? What the blazes could I do?

  ‘The police are brothers, too, what will they do?’ he said. ‘And besides, you’ve seen how it is outside! You know what’s happening to the City! Everyone is fighting fires, the police included. There is just fire now, just that!’

  It was only then that I realised that something was missing. Sitting there in that hideous darkness, talking without stuttering in, I thought, some sort of shocked state I hadn’t ever felt before, I hadn’t noticed what had gone. But unless I looked outside, listened without great slabs of marble in the way, I would never know. I got up and, using my little torch to light me past the lake of blood underneath the dome, I headed towards the Great West Door.

  Mr Andrews, hot on my heels said anxiously, ‘What are you doing? Mr—’

  I found the small door to the left-hand side of the great ceremonial entrance and I flung it open. The heat, the glare, the smell and the noise of Ludgate Hill melting into the stones of London flung me back into Mr Andrews’s bony arms.

  ‘Christ!’

  ‘For the love of God, man!’ Mr Andrews said. ‘What do you think you’re doing? Shut the door!’

  ‘No! Not until I’m sure!’

  ‘Sure? Sure of what?’

  God it was hot! I could feel the skin burning on my face just as certainly as if I’d been blasted by flames from a forge. The noise of wood and plaster breaking down in the blinding flames was deafening. There were human voices too – the sound of firemen and coppers and wardens all calling out to each other, warning of the imminent collapse of buildings, of the danger from gas pipes, electric cables and deep, lethal cellars. There was a lot of noise, but none of it was anything like the drone of hundreds of Luftwaffe bombers overhead. No wonder I’d been able to speak like a normal human being!

  ‘Sure that they’ve gone!’ I said to Mr Andrews. Almost laughing now with the relief of it. ‘The Jerries, they’ve gone!’

  He looked at me with an expression that I just couldn’t fathom on his face. I think that for a moment he might have felt that I believed that what he’d told me had been done to Mr Ronson had worked in some kind of magical way. I didn’t. At that point I didn’t believe anything except what I couldn’t mercifully hear with my own ears. The bombers had gone!

  ‘I don’t know who it was that pushed Mr Ronson to his death,’ Mr Andrews said. ‘All I know is that it was a member of the Watch. I am sure of that.’

  I looked at him again. He made me shudder and yet the fact that the bombers had gone was filling me with something that just might have been hope.

  I’m not what you’d call an educated bloke. I went to the local grammar school, so I was never any sort of dunce. I did well at my English, Latin and history learning, but science wasn’t something I paid too much heed to. So I was surprised when my happiness at the absence of Jerry bombers overhead was cut so very short. Now I know, of course, that with so many fires raging through the City, Hitler didn’t need to send any more of his Luftwaffe boys to possibly get shot down by our ack-ack. The firestorm that was just gathering its strength as I stood at that wide, open door was going to finish the job for him. I felt it as a swirling sensation around my feet. Mr Andrews, feeling it at exactly the same moment, screamed, ‘Shut the door!’

  I’m sure that, hot though my skin felt at that moment, I was white. I felt the blood drain at the same time as my feet began to lift up of their own accord.

  ‘Bloody hell!’

  It took both of us and all of our strength to get that door shut. Up above in the Whispering Gallery one of the watchmen called down and said, ‘What’s going on out there?’

  Once he had managed to catch his breath, Mr Andrews called back up, ‘It’s a firestorm! So much is burning, it’s created a firestorm!’

  I didn’t hear what the watchman said in reply, but he ran towards the doorway that led to the stairs up top.

  Mr Andrews turned to me and said, ‘Listen, there isn’t much time. Mr Ronson was aware that he was being watched by his brothers and that they knew he had passed certain details on to me. He had something more to tell, but whether they know if he had passed that on to me yet or not, I do not know.’

  ‘The City’s burning!’ I said. ‘Bloody hell, Mr Andrews, the City’s burning and you’re talking about bloody magic and alchemy and all sorts of rubbish!’

  ‘Listen to me!’ He grabbed me hard by the collar with his fierce, skeleton’s hands and hissed into my face. ‘You don’t believe me? They will kill again in order to protect themselves because they know that I know something! It is tonight! It’s the night! They will kill me!’

  I gasped, catching my breath like a codfish yet again.

  ‘Not that I am important!’ Mr Andrews continued. ‘But the cathedral must be protected, my wife must be protected, as must the Dean. I have Mr Ronson’s body. It is behind the quire stalls, where we were sitting. They must not have that either!’

  ‘What?’

  He’d moved a body he thought was a victim of murder to a place the coppers, should they ever be free, able and interested in anything apart from this fire ever again, would know was not where it was meant to be! Under the dome there was just that great pool of blood and offal. Mr Andrews couldn’t be right in the head!

  Mr Andrews whispered, saliva dripping into my ear from his mouth, ‘They will defile it! It is what the acolytes of the Beast do!’ I cringed, trying to pull back from this madman. ‘There is a firestorm, the cathedral is not safe, their sorcery has not worked! More flesh, more blood will be required. I will die, I know that I will! They will not stop!’

  ‘But Mr Churchill’s told the fire service to save the cathedral! It’ll be all right it—’

  ‘They don’t care about Mr Churchill! Their beliefs are driving them onwards! Tonight! I believe now they chose tonight! They will not stop!’

  He pushed me away then and, crouching now beside me, he began to weep. The poor fellow was quite obviously deranged. There was of course some truth in what he was saying as there nearly always is with people whose minds have gone. None of the blokes who lost it in the trenches did so because they believed that something that was unreal was happening. They were in danger and it was an evil, reeking hell. Mr Andrews was obviously exhausted from his fears for the cathedral and that had made him like he was. Probably, I thought, he had some sort of problem with some of the watchmen. Like him, most of them were educated people and, being architects, they possibly had ideas about how the building should be protected which he didn’t agree with. In my head I talked myself into this way of thinking and as Mr Andrews slunk away from me into the darkness of the quire, I felt very sorry for him indeed. Freemasons were a bit odd and it was probably not a good thing that so many of them were in the police – them always being on the side of their own, as it were – but they weren’t wicked. To think that a group of them might kill to gain protection from something far from Christian, the Devil – or the Beast as he would have it – was ridiculous.

  But I didn’t want Mr Andrews to think that I was ignoring him. ‘I’m going to have a look for the little girl, Milly, Mr Andrews,’ I said into the solid darkness of the quire.

  ‘You do as you wish,’ the bony man’s voice replied bitterly. I had rejected his ideas and now he hated me. ‘I will be here, you know who I will be with.’

  Mr Ronson’s poor dead body. I thought about going to get Mr Andrews’s wife. I thought about telling her he’d lost his poor, battered mind. But then I remembered that she had gone on about all that Masonic stuff too when I’d spoken to her. Neither of them were right, poor souls.

  ‘Oh, and when you find the child, make her safe, won’t you?’ Mr Andrews said. ‘Children are especially valuable to the Beast.’

  ‘Mr Andrews…’ I was about to protest, but then my voice was literally drowned out by sound.

  A noise like the hollow howl of an animal ran around the outside of the cathedral with the speed of a sprint runner. I spun as if trying to catch it, knowing that I couldn’t. No one could. The winds of the firestorm were gathering strength.

  Chapter Seven

  Even though I’d met her, I didn’t want to find Milly out of any sort of heroism on my part. I was sorry for her, especially in view of what Mr Webb had told me about her family. But I didn’t care about her as such. I was still distracting myself from what was happening around me, and I was not thinking about Mr Andrews and his Beast, or whatever, at all. But calling ‘Milly!’ into the darkness of a building surrounded by a firestorm and possibly being laughed at and told to ‘fuck off’ as a result of that, was better than doing nothing. Milly was useful to me as a distraction.

  ‘Have you seen Mr Andrews?’

  It was George, the young choir boy. I was on the stairs going up to the Whispering Gallery yet again. Not knowing the cathedral, I couldn’t think of anywhere except ‘up top’ or on the stairs that the child could be. God knows I didn’t want to go, although aside from the pains in my legs, I had to admit that the climbing was getting easier. I was still gasping for air, but by that time some of the panic over the smallness and darkness of the staircase had eased. I’m not what I used to be physically. Back in the old days, in my youth, I could run up flights of stairs and have breath left in my body at the top. Now I go up five steps and I feel as if I’m about to collapse. It’s been like that for many years.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Hancock,’ George said as he watched my feeble struggles to talk. ‘I’ll let you catch your breath, shall I?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve found that little girl yet, have you?’

  Stupid boy had only just said he’d let me catch my breath! Christ! ‘No…’ I gasped.

  We stood there, the boy and I, torches in our hands, almost nose to nose on that narrow staircase, until I’d recovered sufficiently to speak. I was a hundred and four steps up; I’d counted every one as I looked into every nook and cranny with my torch. Milly, given her obvious character and mischievousness, could, after all, be anywhere. I had been thinking that looking for her was not unlike how it must be chasing some little demon, when the thought of Mr Andrews and his barminess made me turn my mind away from all that and got me counting stairs again instead.

  ‘I last saw Mr Andrews in the cathedral,’ I said once my heart had stopped pounding so hard in my throat. I didn’t tell him where exactly. If he was as I suspected, back in the quire with Mr Ronson’s body, it wasn’t something a youngster like George needed to see. But could I tell the boy I thought that the chaplain had gone mad? Would George believe me? I doubted it. ‘Why do you want Mr Andrews, George?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘But the Dean’s still up top and’ – he looked down at his hands – ‘he told me to go down. There’s a storm now…’ He looked up suddenly. ‘The Dean told me to go down and send Mr Andrews up. He, the Dean, said it isn’t safe for me out there, on the roof any more.’ He looked as if he was about to cry.

  ‘The Dean’s right, George,’ I said. ‘The wind’s right up now and it’s whipping the flames really high. Where Mr Andrews is now, I don’t know. But I’d get yourself straight down to the crypt if I were you, son. Let the ladies down there make you a nice cuppa.’

  He smiled.

  ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘You’re a good boy, you’ve been all over the place tonight, looking out for people. Your mum and dad’ll be proud of you when you go home.’

  George looked at me strangely for a few seconds and then he flew down that staircase. But then he was only a youngster and he was familiar with the place. I, on the other hand, was so stiff from all the climbing that I felt almost broken. Still breathless, I could feel every second of my forty-eight years. I looked into corners of those stairs as if I were looking for rats or mice, peering into the tiniest crevices. I don’t know why Mr Andrews’s talk about the Beast and demons had got under my skin. I certainly wasn’t going to find Milly, small as she was, in any of those places.

  The Whispering Gallery, just like the crypt, has always got a watchman on the ‘book’ or recording the incidences of bombing, fires, etc. So I was expecting to see at least one bloke up there. But there didn’t appear to be anyone about. I shone my weak little torch all around what I could see of the gallery, but I saw no one and nothing. There was just that great space beyond the precarious wooden floorboards and over the flimsy-looking railings. Down, down on to the cathedral floor below – where Mr Ronson had met his death – at the end of a fall I dared not even imagine.

  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.