It smelt of smoke and melted metal out there, but I made myself stand and wait until I heard the tired footsteps of the men coming down as well as the more lively ones of those relieving them coming up. Pressed against the warm stone wall, so I didn’t get in the way of the passing human traffic, I waited until I saw Mr Smith come down and then I buttonholed him.

  ‘Where’s Mr Phillips?’ I asked.

  He laughed, which struck me as an odd thing to do. ‘He went down below ages ago,’ he said, ‘with Potter. Didn’t you see them?’

  ‘No.’ Nobody, as far as I could tell, had come down from the roof after Mr Smith and everyone else had gone up to relieve the Dean.

  ‘Went down early, they did,’ he said. ‘Potter felt a bit dodgy.’ His face dropped into an expression of sadness. ‘It’s nightmarish up there. Hot and… The London we know is going.’ His smoke-ringed eyes filled with tears and so I didn’t detain him any longer. I had no reason to embarrass him by watching him cry. I also knew how he felt. That was my city down there burning, too. But putting that all aside, Mr Smith wasn’t telling the truth. I didn’t know exactly how he wasn’t telling the truth, but he wasn’t, and Mr Potter, well, he was just not right, I felt. His presence, as another witness to the existence of Mr Phillips, was a bit too convenient, I felt.

  Mr Andrews would have seen Phillips and this Potter bloke pass by from his seat in the quire. I could, probably, have gone back to the Whispering Gallery, leaned over and called down to him. But even if you’re not religious, you don’t shout out in a church; it just isn’t done. And so although the thought of walking, even in a downward direction, on those bloody stairs again made me want to scream, I started to make my way back down them anyway, legs trembling as I did so. When I reached the quire, however, I did eventually, scream. Anyone would have done so in my position.

  I didn’t know how Mr Andrews had died. There was nothing to actually see about the body that could give me any clue. All I could make out was that there was blood. On the stall beside the body, it could have been leaking from Mr Andrews or there was a possibility it came from the body laying behind the chaplain, that of the unfortunate Mr Ronson. In spite of Mr Andrews’s belief that he had to guard Ronson’s body from some of his fellow Masons, it hadn’t been moved so far. It was still there, with, I noticed, one of Mr Andrews’s still warm as – I touched it – dead hands on its shoulder. He’d died very recently and, although blood was present, and in spite of the fears he’d talked to me about, I had to assume he’d done so naturally. He wasn’t young, he wasn’t right in the head, and a bloke he knew and trusted had died. We were all in the middle of a bloody furnace – his heart could very easily have given out. If I reckoned that the blood had come from Mr Ronson’s body, it all made sense. But something in me, that bit that lives in fear and suspicion of everything and everyone, niggled away. What if what Mr Andrews had said about his Masonic ‘brothers’ was true? After all, if they had killed him because of what he knew about Mr Ronson’s death, maybe they knew he’d been talking to me? Maybe I was next on their list for the ‘chop’?

  Although I was muttering to myself, telling myself it was bloody stupid what I was doing, I moved the body to have a better look at it. Mr Andrews looked as if he were at peace and so, in spite of all the things he’d told me earlier about the Masons, I couldn’t really believe he had been killed. I’d at least half convinced myself that he’d been an old man who was out of his mind.

  I put my hands around his chest and began to push him a little way along the quire stall, away from the blood. Of course I couldn’t see exactly what I was doing at that moment because I couldn’t stand up, push and hold my torch all at the same time. But when I’d finished, I took my torch out of my pocket and shone it down. Mr Andrews had toppled over to one side, so that his behind was sticking up. Cassocks as worn by priests and other divines are usually black and the one that Mr Andrews wore was no exception. He was a thin man and the cassock would, as it had done in life, have hung very loosely on him had it not been stuck to him by all the blood. There wasn’t just blood either; there were rips, great gashes in the cloth of the cassock, too. Strange though it was, given the almost peaceful look on his face, Mr Andrews appeared to have been violated, stabbed in his nether parts. Whether that had actually killed him, I couldn’t know. But the poor old sod had been attacked up his backside and I had to stifle a scream once I realised this.

  As soon as I was able, I ran towards the stairs down to the crypt – there wasn’t, after all, anyone else about in the cathedral whom I could see. But once I was in that crowded half-asleep basement I made myself slow down before I found someone to tell. After all, given what was going on outside, people had enough to worry about. I looked for the Dean, but not finding him, I went over to the bloke who was currently on the book.

  ‘I need somebody to help me,’ I said. ‘It’s Mr Andrews.’ I didn’t know how else to put it. ‘He’s had an accident.’

  The watchman, a short, very posh-sounding chap who was probably in his fifties, looked at me and then said, ‘An accident? What sort of accident?’

  He’d looked at me as if I was nothing. Some hysterical, wide-eyed brown bloke was probably what he saw.

  I leaned in close to him, which was obviously something he really didn’t like, because he tried in vain to pull away from me. I held his head and whispered, ‘He’s dead.’

  The bloke, a Mr Harris, I later discovered, looked across the top of his little round glasses and gave me a stare that told me he didn’t believe what I was saying.

  ‘I’m an undertaker by trade,’ I continued. ‘I know a dead body when I see one.’

  He gulped. ‘Well, then, we must deal with him, er…’ he said.

  ‘Yes, but quietly,’ I said. ‘These people down here…’

  ‘Oh, quite so! Quite so!’ He was white now, poor chap. ‘How did he… ?’

  ‘I don’t rightly know.’ I didn’t want to get into that. I can’t always be certain about everything I’ve seen and the nature of Mr Andrews’s wounds were so peculiar that I didn’t feel able to trust myself.

  Mr Harris said he’d tell people that it wasn’t safe to go into the cathedral for a little while and then he got two fellows to come with me. They’d been near to hand when I was telling the book man what had happened and they’d both volunteered to come.

  As we walked back up into the cathedral it struck me how quiet it was now. The Dean had, it was said, ordered all the doors to be shut because of the storm outside giving those of us in the cathedral no option but to wait it out. We weren’t locked in, but I did have a feeling of being trapped, and I was beginning to panic. By the time we entered the quire I had begun to shake.

  ‘So where are we looking?’ the taller of the two watchmen said.

  ‘On the left,’ I answered. ‘In the front row of stalls.’

  I heard him move over there and then stop.

  ‘Nothing here.’

  I’d had my torch pointed away from those stalls until now. I swung around and, standing next to the taller bloke, I looked and saw what he saw.

  ‘Nothing?’

  My heart began to pump hard now as I began to search through the stalls behind where I’d found Mr Andrews.

  ‘Mr Ronson was here, too,’ I muttered as I looked, amazed, at absolutely nothing human at all.

  The shorter of the two blokes, who had been looking on the other side of the quire, came over and said, ‘Nothing over there.’

  They both looked at me. ‘Are you sure that you saw Mr Andrews?’ the taller one said.

  I scraped my hand along the quire stalls in front of me and then held my bloodied fingers up for them to see. ‘Look!’

  ‘Blood,’ the shorter one said. He shrugged. ‘Someone could have tripped and hurt themselves. Things happen in the dark.’

  ‘There’s a lot of it,’ I said as I scraped even more up with my hands.

  ‘If Mr Ronson was, as you say, put over here…’

  ‘Yes, but where is he now?’ I said. ‘Where is he now?’

  These blokes didn’t believe me.

  But then had I seen Mr Andrews, or had he and his grisly, strange wound just been inside my head? Something bloody had been laid on these stalls at some point because there was blood everywhere. These two blokes had seen it, so that, at least, wasn’t my imagination. Mr Andrews could have been lying dead in the quire stalls and someone could have moved him. But why? Unless he hadn’t been dead. He’d still been warm when I touched him. And then I remembered that George the choir boy had been looking for Mr Andrews. George would, possibly, know what was what. If George was all right himself, of course…

  ‘Everyone who isn’t in the crypt is up on the roof,’ the taller bloke said. ‘With that wind out there fires can spread from one building to the next in a heartbeat. We’re still not out of the woods yet, not by a long chalk. The cathedral is completely surrounded.’

  ‘I didn’t see George down in the crypt,’ I said. ‘And he had been looking for Mr Andrews. He asked me about him. If we can find George, maybe…’

  ‘You’ll find that Mr Andrews was just asleep,’ the shorter man said. ‘As for Mr Ronson’s body? I expect the Dean’s had it moved. Mr Matthews wouldn’t want it left out in an undignified fashion. That’s what’s happened, sure as eggs are eggs.’ He smiled.

  He was, I felt, humouring me in that way people who know me are inclined to do. But this man didn’t know me! Was I so obviously round the twist to him?

  ‘Mr…’

  ‘Bolton,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not mad, you know,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t say that you were,’ Mr Bolton replied. ‘I wouldn’t say anything like that, especially not to a chap I didn’t know.’

  They were all so posh, these architects! But then anyone can do fire-watching duty and good on ’em for it. I knew I was becoming silly with it all now. I muttered that I was sorry.

  Mr Bolton’s taller mate, who was called Mr Arnold, said, ‘We’ll go down and tell Mr Harris that everything’s ticketyboo.’

  ‘Yes, but it isn’t,’ I began and then I stopped myself, my words fading into just a load of muttering.

  If nothing else we should get the coppers in to see to Mr Ronson! But then where his body was now, God alone only knew. All that stuff Mr Andrews had told me about the Masons had really unnerved me. It was Tommy Rot, of course, but with that howling wind moaning around the building whipping up flames that could kill us all in minutes outside, my nerves were stretched very tight. I kept telling myself this as the two blokes took me back down to the crypt once again.

  I looked in every corner I knew underneath the cathedral but I didn’t once find George, Mr Andrews, the Dean or even, as far as I could tell, Mr Phillips. I even asked around for the bloke with the mask, but no one seemed to have seen him except, of course, for Mr Smith and the Dean, who’d told me he’d seen him on the roof. Now joined by Mr Bolton and Mr Arnold, Mr Smith said, ‘You seem to have a knack of missing Mr Phillips, don’t you, Mr Hancock? Everyone else has seen him, everyone except you.’

  Everyone except me had also not seen Mr Andrews sitting up dead in the quire stalls. I began to question myself seriously in my head until yet again, thinking about Mr Phillips and what Mr Smith had said about him, made me stop.

  ‘Only you and the Dean have seen Mr Phillips,’ I said to him. ‘I haven’t come across anyone else who has actually—’

  ‘I’ve seen him several times myself,’ Mr Arnold cut in sharply. ‘As have you, I believe, haven’t you, Cyril?’

  Mr Bolton looked away when he agreed with what Mr Arnold had said. I didn’t believe him, he looked far too shifty to me. Not that I could prove anything by this, and I was still the only person, as far as I knew, who had seen Mr Andrews dead.

  ‘There you are,’ Mr Smith said to me with a shrug. ‘No mystery.’ Then he smiled. ‘The best of us get confused up there in the dark.’ He looked upwards to the ceiling of the crypt. ‘A lot of people say the cathedral is haunted, although I don’t actually hold with that myself. But the dark does play tricks and the dark combined with the fear everyone is feeling is a powerful thing.’

  I agreed with him because it was easy and I was exhausted. But I was very suspicious, as the dreams I had shortly afterwards when I lay down on the crypt floor for a kip made plain. I must have slept for about an hour. When I woke up with a gasp later on, there wasn’t much moving about in the crypt. Only outside in that furious firestorm was there real movement.

  Chapter Eight

  One of the cathedral ladies saw me move and came over with a cup of tea. As she put it in my hands she said, ‘You were making noises in your sleep. Are you all right?’

  I wasn’t, but I didn’t tell her that. She seemed like a nice middle-aged lady, what would she want to know about my dreams of death? There’d been no blood in my nightmare this time, just a feeling of desertion, as if everyone close to me had suddenly died. Although the bombing had stopped, I wondered how things were back home. It seemed, just as people were saying, as if Hitler had been targeting the actual Square Mile as opposed to the Docks or anywhere else. So maybe, for once, bombing down our way had been light. Having said that it’s well known that the Luftwaffe often drop what’s left of their loads just anywhere on their way back to the Channel. Bastards! And what of my old Auntie Annie up in Finsbury? Although not at the centre of the action as we were in St Paul’s, she must have seen a fair old bit where she was – and Annie, like me, was no lover of air-raid shelters. I tried to imagine her sitting in her chair in her scullery, all disapproving and covered in dust. But at moments I could also see her dead, too. It wasn’t a dream, it was just a picture in my head.

  I stood up and lit a fag. Once I’d smoked it, I planned to go up into the cathedral and see what was happening. Milly or no Milly, I’m too restless a soul to sit about doing nothing. And if the kid was about and I could get her to come down to safety in the crypt, then so much the better. Maybe I’d even get to see Mr Andrews, if I was lucky. I literally shuddered at the thought of that. Mr Andrews was dead! People could say what they liked about his having been asleep, but I’m an undertaker, I know what a dead person looks like and he was as dead as it’s possible to get when I found him. I looked over to where the women were and I saw Mrs Andrews, who managed a little smile in my direction. She obviously didn’t know. As soon as I’d finished my fag, I went up above where I found that the door to the left of the Great West Door was open and crowded with blokes. Over the tops of their tin hats all I could see was flames of red and yellow moving as if they had muscles. I walked towards them across a floor that was still wet with Mr Ronson’s blood. If he had, as Mr Andrews had claimed, been sacrificed in some way, then whatever he’d been sacrificed to had been given a lot of the red stuff to be getting on with.

  As I got closer to the door, someone I didn’t know turned and looked at me.

  ‘You from Hitchcock’s, are you?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘They’ve all come up to see what’s what,’ the bloke said. ‘Must be shocking to see your place of business burn to the ground.’

  Some people were on the steps outside, some of them women who were crying. The textile wholesalers Hitchcock, Williams and Co. had had it. The Dean had given instructions that nobody should be going outside because of the fierceness of the storm, but people – mainly Hitchcock employees – were ignoring this, and Revd Matthews was himself nowhere to be found. I recognised a couple of people from the crypt including the young lad, Ted, and his girl Mabel, who had been crying. Going to work every day was something a lot of people had begun to take for granted just before this war started. The last twenty years haven’t meant much in the way of money for ordinary working people, but just before the war things were, I felt, picking up. What must it be like to go to work and find that your company as well as your job just didn’t exist any more? My apprentice Arthur, Doris, our office girl, and my old bearer Walter walk to our place every day over broken glass but, so far, there’s always been a job at the end of it for them. There’s always a chance that one day there won’t be. There’s a big chance of that.

  ‘Do you know where the Dean is?’ I asked the bloke who’d spoken to me earlier. He was a watchman, but one that I hadn’t come across before.

  ‘Up on the roof, I think,’ he said. ‘I think he’s just about up there all the time now that things are so bad. But I don’t rightly know. When the All Clear went, some people thought that we were safe and sound and started out into the street. But as you can see…’ He moved his hand out in front of him in a half-circle.

  ‘The All Clear?’ I hadn’t heard it. I must have been asleep. ‘When?’

  He shrugged. ‘Half an hour ago? An hour? I don’t remember.’ His smoke-blackened face had just a tinge of copper on the cheeks now, courtesy of Hitchcock, Williams and Co. ‘It doesn’t mean anything, anyway, not to us.’

  I stared at him.

  ‘The water’s running out,’ he said. ‘Everything’s ablaze; the Guildhall, Barts Hospital, City churches whose names I don’t even know. The LFB can’t get to everyone and, anyway, what can they do even if they do? They’ve been told to save this place at all costs.’ And then he leaned in close to me and I could hear that his accent was almost exactly the same as mine. ‘But what can they do, really? We’re fucked,’ he whispered.

  Pulling back, I looked into eyes which were easily as dark as my own.

  ‘Where are you from?’ I asked.