Free Ashes to Ashes by Barbara Nadel

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Chapter Five
    I don’t know now whether I took my next trip up into the dome because I wanted to find Mr Phillips, or whether Mr Steadman’s words about blokes only being able to stand twenty minutes up there made me feel guilty. Not that I was about to ‘do my bit’; I knew that wasn’t my place. But I went. And given the state of my legs, it wasn’t lightly done. It hurt, and the claustrophobic feeling I got when I did it was as bad as the first time I climbed up there. But if Mr Steadman could do it with his bad leg, then I had no excuse. In fact, I could go on further than I ever had before. First to the Whispering Gallery and then up a further 119 steps, which brought me outside, to the Stone Gallery. I took it slowly, very slowly. But I did it and I was, I admit, a little proud of myself for it. I was just about ready to die, but I arrived in one piece, which was good enough for me.
    From the Stone Gallery you can see the whole city and if the smog’s not settled over London, even the fields of Middlesex and Essex beyond. As I came out into the burning air, I didn’t even know whether there were any other blokes out there with me the air was so thick. Everything was being incinerated – wood, cloth, and, I’ve no doubt, people. The smell, though slightly sweet, it has to be said, was enough to make you heave. The drone of the bombers up above rattled and reverberated in my chest like a dickey ticker. Down below, everything was on fire. Everything: churches, warehouses, shops, graveyards. I couldn’t see one patch of ground that wasn’t burning and the smoke notwithstanding, my eyes wept tears. Bloody hell, this was my home they were destroying here! My mind had gone a long time ago and now my city was going with it!
    I just stood and looked and looked and said, ‘Christ!’
    Back in the trenches, blokes used to call where we were ‘hell’ – as in endless torment – just like the place the priest had said we’d all go to if we were bad, when I was a kid. But what I was looking at from the Stone Gallery as my city burned below my feet, that was real bible-bashing hell. The Devil himself could be ranging around in such huge red and golden flames. In fact, atheist as I am, I felt that if I just reached a hand out into the conflagration, maybe I could touch his evil, pointed chin. Maybe it was just lack of oxygen to my brain, who knows, but that image was very real to me at that moment.
    ‘Excuse me, but who are you?’ A posh voice I had heard before said. ‘Are you with the LFB film unit?’
    The group of firemen I’d seen earlier were filming all of this for posterity. I turned away from them and looked at my interrogator.
    ‘N-No. I’m um, er, F-Francis H-Hancock.’
    With the flames hurtling up into the sky from the burning buildings below it was all too easy to see the bombers overhead – great black masses of them. My stomach lurched and I was grateful, not for the first time, that I hadn’t eaten and that the ruddy thing was empty.
    ‘I’m the Dean,’ the posh man, the Very Reverend W. R. Matthews, said.
    ‘Yes, I er . . .’
    ‘That chap’s all right. I saw him advising Mr Andrews about Mr Ronson, Dean,’ a man I recognised as being one of those who had come in with Mr Steadman said. ‘He’s looking for that young girl Mr Phillips is supposed to have brought in with him.’
    ‘Oh?’ Revd Matthews put his head on one side, making the left-hand part of his face disappear into an eerie darkness.
    A blithering idiot as usual, I just stared. Luckily the other chap was much more chatty. ‘I heard you found the kid and then you lost her again,’ he said.
    ‘Y-yes,’ I said. ‘S-she’s called M-M-Milly.’
    ‘Milly,’ Revd Matthews frowned. ‘We will all keep an eye out for Milly then, Mr Hancock. People other than cathedral staff watchmen, and the fire service shouldn’t be anywhere outside the crypt. It’s far too dangerous. However . . .’ He moved his head and