Jack Read online

  “Was it the gas that killed them?” I asked, even though he was already pulling out a packet of cigarettes.

  “No,” he said, shaking a cigarette out and taking it between his teeth. He patted the front of his coverall, leaving red stains.

  “How long have they been dead?” I asked.

  He found his matches, struck one, and lit the cigarette. “Shortly after we last heard them, I should say,” he said, and I thought, but they were already dead by then. And Jack knew it. “They’ve been dead at least two hours.”

  I looked at my watch. I read a little past six. “But the mine didn’t kill them?”

  He took the cigarette between his fingers and blew a long puff of smoke. When he put the cigarette back in his mouth there was a red smear on it. “Loss of blood.”

  The next night the Luftwaffe was early. I hadn’t got much sleep after the incident. Morris had fretted about his son the whole day and Swales had teased Renfrew mercilessly. “Goering’s found out about your spying,” he said, “And now he’s sent his Stukas after you.”

  I finally went up to the third floor and tried to sleep in the spotter’s chair, but it was too light. The afternoon was cloudy, and the fires burning in the East End gave the sky a nasty reddish cast.

  Someone had left a copy of Twickenham’s Twitterings on the floor. I read the article on the walking dead again, and then, still unable to sleep, the rest of the news-sheet. There was an account of Hitler’s invasion of Transylvania, and a recipe for butterless strawberry tart, and the account of the crime rate. “London is currently the perfect place for the criminal element,” Nelson was quoted as saying. “We must constantly be on the lookout for wrong-doing.”

  Below the recipe was a story about a Scottish terrier named Bonny Charlie who had barked and scrabbled wildly at the ruins of a collapsed house till wardens heeded his cries, dug down, and discovered two unharmed children.

  I must have fallen asleep reading that because the next thing I knew Morris was shaking me and telling me the sirens had gone. It was only five o’clock.

  At half past we had an HE in our sector. It was just three blocks from the post, and the walls shook and plaster rained down on Twickenham’s typewriter and on Renfrew, lying awake in his cot.

  “Frivolities, my foot,” Mrs Lucy muttered as we dived for our tin hats. “We need those reinforcing beams.”

  The part-timers hadn’t come on duty yet. Mrs Lucy left Renfrew to send them on. We knew exactly where the incident was—Morris had been looking in that direction when it went— but we still had difficulty finding it. It was still evening, but by the time we had gone half a block, it was pitch black.

  The first time that had happened, I thought it was some sort of after-blindness from the blast, but it’s only the brick and plaster dust from the collapsed buildings. It rises up in a haze that’s darker than any blackout curtain, obscuring everything. When Mrs Lucy set up shop on a stretch of pavement and switched on the blue incident light it glowed spectrally in the man-made fog.

  “Only two families still in the street,” she said, holding the register up to the light. “The Kirkcuddy family and the Hodgsons.”

  “Are they an old couple?” Morris asked, appearing suddenly out of the fog.

  She peered at the register. “Yes. Pensioners.”

  “I found them,” he said in that flat voice that meant they were dead. “Blast.”

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “The Kirkcuddys are a mother and two children. They’ve an Anderson shelter.” She held the register closer to the blue light. “Everyone else has been using the tube shelter.” She unfolded a map and showed us where the Kirkcuddys’ backyard had been, but it was no help. We spent the next hour wandering blindly over the mounds, listening for sounds that were impossible to hear over the Luftwaffe’s comments and the ack-ack’s replies.

  Petersby showed up a little past eight and Jack a few minutes later, and Mrs Lucy set them to wandering in the fog, too.

  “Over here,” Jack shouted almost immediately, and my heart gave an odd jerk.

  “Oh, good, he’s heard them,” Mrs Lucy said. “Jack, go and find him.”

  “Over here,” he called again, and I started off in the direction of his voice, almost afraid of what I would find, but I hadn’t gone ten steps before I could hear it, too. A baby crying, and a hollow, echoing sound like someone banging a fist against tin.

  “Don’t stop,” Vi shouted. She was kneeling next to Jack in a shallow crater. “Keep making noise. We’re coming.” She looked up at me. “Tell Mrs Lucy to ring the rescue squad.”

  I blundered my way back to Mrs Lucy through the darkness. She had already rung up the rescue squad. She sent me to Sloane Square to make sure the rest of the inhabitants of the block were safely there.

  The dust had lifted a little but not enough for me to see where I was going. I pitched off a kerb into the street and tripped over a pile of debris and then a body. When I shone my torch on it, I saw it was the girl I had walked to the shelter two nights before.

  She was sitting against the tiled entrance to the station, still holding a dress on a hanger in her limp hand. The old stewpot at John Lewis’s never let her off even a minute before closing, and the Luftwaffe had been early. She had been killed by blast, or by flying glass. Her face and neck and hands were covered with tiny cuts, and glass crunched underfoot when I moved her legs together.

  I went back to the incident and waited for the mortuary van and went with them to the shelter. It took me three hours to find the families on my list. By the time I got back to the incident, the rescue squad was five feet down.

  “They’re nearly there,” Vi said, dumping a basket on the far side of the crater. “All that’s coming up now is dirt and the occasional rose bush.”

  “Where’s Jack?” I said.

  “He went for a saw.” She took the basket back and handed it to one of the rescue squad, who had to put his cigarette into his mouth to free his hands before he could take it. “There was a board, but they dug past it.”

  I leaned over the hole. I could hear the sound of banging but not the baby. “Are they still alive?”

  She shook her head. “We haven’t heard the baby for an hour or so. We keep calling, but there’s no answer. We’re afraid the banging may be something mechanical.”

  I wondered if they were dead and Jack, knowing it, had not gone for a saw at all but off to that day job of his.

  Swales came up. “Guess who’s in hospital?” he said.

  “Who?” Vi said.

  “Olmwood. Nelson had his wardens out walking patrols during a raid, and he caught a piece of shrapnel from one of the ack-acks in the leg. Nearly took it off.”

  The rescue worker with the cigarette handed a heaping basket to Vi. She took it, staggering a little under the weight, and carried it off.

  “You’d better not let Nelson see you working like that,” Swales called after her, “or he’ll have you transferred to his sector. Where’s Morris?” he said and went off, presumably to tell him and whoever else he could find about Olmwood.

  Jack came up, carrying the saw.

  “They don’t need it,” the rescue worker said, the cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth. “Mobile’s here,” he said and went off for a cup of tea.

  Jack knelt and handed the saw down the hole.

  “Are they still alive?” I asked.

  Jack leaned over the hole, his hands clutching the edges. The banging was incredibly loud. It must have been deafening inside the Anderson. Jack stared into the hole as if he heard neither the banging nor my voice.

  He stood up, still looking into the hole. “They’re further to the left,” he said.

  How can they be further to the left? I thought. We can hear them. They’re directly under us. “Are they alive?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  Swales came back. “He’s a spy, that’s what he is,” he said. “Hitler sent him here to kill off our best men one by one. I told you his name
was Adolf von Nelson.”

  The Kirkcuddys were further to the left. The rescue squad had to widen the tunnel, cut the top of the Anderson open and pry it back, like opening a can of tomatoes. It took till nine o’clock in the morning, but they were all alive.

  Jack left some time before it got light. I didn’t see him go. Swales was telling me about Olmwood’s injury, and when I turned around, Jack was gone.

  “Has Jack told you where this job of his is that he has to leave so early for?” I asked Vi when I got back to the post.

  She had propped a mirror against one of the gas masks and was putting her hair up in pincurls. “No,” she said, dipping a comb in a glass of water and wetting a lock of her hair. “Jack, could you reach me my bobby pins? I’ve a date this afternoon, and I want to look my best.”

  I pushed the pins across to her. “What sort of job is it? Did Jack say?”

  “No. Some sort of war work, I should think.” She wound a lock of hair around her finger. “He’s had ten kills. Four Stukas and six 109s.”

  I sat down next to Twickenham, who was typing up the incident report. “Have you interviewed Jack yet?”

  “When would I have had time?” Twickenham asked. “We haven’t had a quiet night since he came.”

  Renfrew shuffled in from the other room. He had a blanket wrapped round him Indian-style and a bedspread over his shoulders. He looked terrible, pale and drawn as a ghost.

  “Would you like some breakfast?” Vi asked, prying a pin open with her teeth.

  He shook his head. “Did Nelson approve the reinforcements?”

  “No,” Twickenham said in spite of Vi’s signalling him not to.

  “You must tell Nelson it’s an emergency,” he said, hugging the blanket to him as if he were cold. “I know why they’re after me. It was before the war. When Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia. I wrote a letter to The Times.”

  I was grateful Swales wasn’t there. A letter to The Times.

  “Come, now, why don’t you go and lie down for a bit?” Vi said, securing a curl with a bobby pin as she stood up. “You’re tired, that’s all, and that’s what’s getting you so worried. They don’t even get The Times over there.”

  She took his arm, and he went docilely with her into the other room. I heard him say, “I called him a lowland bully. In the letter.” The person suffering from severe sleep loss, hearing voices, seeing visions, or believing fantastical things.

  “Has he mentioned what sort of day job he has?” I asked Twickenham.

  “Who?” he asked, still typing.

  “Jack.”

  “No, but whatever it is, let’s hope he’s as good at it as he is at finding bodies.” He stopped and peered at what he’d just typed. “This makes five, doesn’t it?”

  Vi came back. “And we’d best not let von Nelson find out about it,” she said. She sat down and dipped the comb into the glass of water. “He’d take him like he took Olmwood, and we’re already short-handed, with Renfrew the way he is.”

  Mrs Lucy came in carrying the incident light, disappeared into the pantry with it, and came out again carrying an application form. “Might I use the typewriter, Mr Twickenham?” she asked.

  He pulled his sheet of paper out of the typewriter and stood up. Mrs Lucy sat down, rolled in the form, and began typing. “I’ve decided to apply directly to Civil Defence for reinforcements,” she said.

  “What sort of day job does Jack have?” I asked her.

  “War work,” she said. She pulled the application out, turned it over, rolled it back in. “Jack, would you mind taking this over to headquarters?”

  “Works days,” Vi said, making a pincurl on the back of her head. “Raids every night. When does he sleep?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “He’d best be careful,” she said. “Or he’ll turn into one of the walking dead, like Renfrew.”

  Mrs Lucy signed the application form, folded it in half, and gave it to me. I took it to Civil Defence headquarters and spent half a day trying to find the right office to give it to.

  “It’s not the correct form,” the sixth girl said. “She needs to file an A-114, Exterior Improvements.”

  “It’s not exterior,” I said. “The post is applying for reinforcing beams for the cellar.”

  “Reinforcements are classified as exterior improvements,” she said. She handed me the form, which looked identical to the one Mrs Lucy had already filled out, and I left.

  On the way out, Nelson stopped me. I thought he was going to tell me my uniform was a disgrace again, but instead he pointed to my tin hat and demanded, “Why aren’t you wearing a regulation helmet, warden? ‘All ARP wardens shall wear a helmet with the letter W in red on the front,’ ” he quoted.

  I took my hat off and looked at it. The red W had partly chipped away so that it looked like a V.

  “What post are you?” he barked.

  “Forty-eight. Chelsea,” I said and wondered if he expected me to salute.

  “Mrs Lucy is your warden,” he said disgustedly, and I expected his next question to be what I was doing at Civil Defence, but instead he said, “I heard about Colonel God-aiming. Your post has been having good luck locating casualties these last few raids.”

  “Yes, sir,” was obviously the wrong answer, and “no, sir,” would make him suspicious. “We found three people in an Anderson last night,” I said. “One of the children had the wits to bang on the roof with a pair of pliers.”

  “I’ve heard that the person finding them is a new man, Settle.” He sounded friendly, almost jovial. Like Hitler at Munich.

  “Settle?” I said blankly. “Mrs Lucy was the one who found the Anderson.”

  Morris’s son Quincy’s surprise was the Victoria Cross. “A medal,” he said over and over. “Who’d have thought it, my Quincy with a medal? Fifteen planes he shot down.”

  It had been presented at a special ceremony at Quincy’s commanding officer’s headquarters, and the Duchess of York herself had been there. Morris had pinned the medal on himself.

  “I wore my suit,” he told us for the hundredth time. “In case he was in trouble I wanted to make a good impression, and a good thing, too. What would the Duchess of York have thought if I’d gone looking like this?”

  He looked pretty bad. We all did. We’d had two breadbaskets of incendiaries, one right after the other, and Vi had been on watch. We had had to save the butcher’s again, and a baker’s two blocks further down, and a thirteenth-century crucifix.

  “I told him it went through the altar roof,” Vi had said disgustedly when she and I finally got it out. “Your friend Jack couldn’t find an incendiary if it fell on him.”

  “You told Jack the incendiary came down on the church?” I said, looking up at the carved wooden figure. The bottom of the cross was blackened, and Christ’s nailed feet, as if he had been burned at the stake instead of crucified.

  “Yes,” she said. “I even told him it was the altar.” She looked back up the nave. “And he could have seen it as soon as he came into the church.”

  “What did he say? That it wasn’t there?”

  Vi was looking speculatively up at the roof. “It could have been caught in the rafters and come down after. It hardly matters, does it? We put it out. Come on, let’s get back to the post,” she said, shivering. “I’m freezing.”

  I was freezing, too. We were both sopping wet. The AFS had stormed up after we had the fire under control and sprayed everything in sight with icy water.

  “Pinned it on myself, I did,” Morris said. “The Duchess of York kissed him on both cheeks and said he was the pride of England.” He had brought a bottle of wine to celebrate the cross. He got Renfrew up and brought him to the table, draped in his blankets, and ordered Twickenham to put his typewriter away. Petersby brought in extra chairs, and Mrs Lucy went upstairs to get her crystal.

  “Only eight, I’m afraid,” she said, coming down with the stemmed goblets in her blackened hands. “The Germans have broken
the rest. Who’s willing to make do with the tooth glass?”

  “I don’t care for any, thank you,” Jack said. “I don’t drink.”

  “What’s that?” Morris said jovially. He had taken off his tin helmet, and below the white line it left he looked like he was wearing blackface in a music-hall show. “You’ve got to toast my boy at least. Just imagine. My Quincy with a medal.”

  Mrs Lucy rinsed out the porcelain tooth glass and handed it to Vi, who was pouring out the wine. They passed the goblets round. Jack took the tooth glass.

  “To my son Quincy, the best pilot in the RAF!” Morris said, raising his goblet.

  “May he shoot down the entire Luftwaffe,” Swales shouted, “and put an end to this bloody war!”

  “So a man can get a decent night’s sleep!” Renfrew said, and everyone laughed.

  We drank. Jack raised his glass with the others but when Vi took the bottle round again, he put his hand over the mouth of it.

  “Just think of it,” Morris said. “My son Quincy with a medal. He had his troubles in school, in with a bad lot, problems with the police. I worried about him, I did, wondered what he’d come to, and then this war comes along and here he is a hero.”

  “To heroes!” Petersby said.

  We drank again, and Vi dribbled out the last of the wine into Morris’s glass. “That’s the lot, I’m afraid.” She brightened. “I’ve a bottle of cherry cordial Charlie gave me.”

  Mrs Lucy made a face. “Just a minute,” she said, disappeared into the pantry, and came back with two cobwebbed bottles of port, which she poured out generously and a little sloppily.

  “The presence of intoxicating beverages on post is strictly forbidden,” she said. “A fine of five shillings will be imposed for a first offence, one pound for subsequent offences.” She took out a pound note and laid it on the table. “I wonder what Nelson was before the war?”

  “A monster,” Vi said.

  I looked across at Jack. He still had his hand over his glass.

  “A headmaster,” Swales said. “No, I’ve got it. An Inland Revenue collector!”