Read Online Ashes to Ashes by Barbara Nadel - Free Book Online Page B

honest and respectable tradespeople live in the City, as do the offspring of clergymen, caretakers of firms of brokers, and bookkeepers’ kids. Milly, if I was right about her, was little more than a beggar. This Mr Phillips people kept talking about, the architect who was supposed to have brought Milly in, must have found her outside the cathedral somewhere and taken pity on her. But until I got to speak to Mr Phillips, I couldn’t know what Milly had been about. He seemed to be very elusive. And so it was lucky, I felt, when shortly afterwards I came across his partner, Mr Steadman, sitting on one of the quire pews. He’d just come down from Watch duty up on the roof and was taking a break to rest what he called his ‘gammy’ leg.
    ‘Got shot in the damn thing,’ he told me as he lifted his bad leg to cross it over the good one. ‘Gallipoli.’
    ‘I w-was in Flanders,’ I said. ‘Gallipoli was—’
    ‘Madness,’ Mr Steadman said. ‘Running up beaches into the Turkish guns! I was only a lad at the time.’ He looked at me. ‘Much as I suppose you must have been.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Leg’s never been quite right since. Gets tired,’ Mr Steadman said. I could’ve said the same for my mind, but I didn’t. People don’t want to know about things like that, with good reason. Given the problem with his leg it was marvellous to me that Mr Steadman made the terrible trip up to the Whispering Gallery and maybe even beyond so willingly. My legs were as stiff as boards from my one trip ‘up top’.
    I asked him about Mr Phillips who, I discovered, was about the same age as Mr Steadman and myself. ‘I think Harold, Mr Phillips, was in Flanders,’ Mr Steadman said. ‘Lost his face.’
    For a moment I thought I’d misheard him, then Mr Steadman, seeing my confusion said, ‘You were in the trenches, Mr Hancock, you must have seen what happened to chaps who put their heads above the parapet?’
    I had, and usually they died. If they didn’t, the mess a bullet or a piece of shrapnel made of their faces generally meant that they wished that they had bought it. I’ve a mate like that myself. He only goes out at night or when the smog’s really thick over the city.
    ‘Harold Phillips lost his nose and most of his mouth,’ Mr Steadman said. ‘Not that you’d necessarily know. Mr Phillips wouldn’t mind my telling you that he wears a mask. A very good one, made by an artist. Very good it is. All you can see is a slight lopsidedness to his face, but apart from that there’s nothing.’
    I’d heard of such things, although I’d never actually seen one. I imagined, maybe stupidly, that those masks were only available for the rich. The fact that Mr Phillips, an architect, had one of them, and my mate, who is unemployed, didn’t, seemed to bear this out. This had to be what people meant when they said that Mr Phillips was ‘distinctive’ in looks.
    ‘D-did you see M-Mr Phillips up in the Whispering Gallery?’ I asked.
    ‘No.’ Mr Steadman shook his head. ‘But then it’s chaos up there. No one can do more than twenty minutes on dome watch. Swinging about up there, running across rooftops and such like, it’s so dangerous it makes your head spin.’
    Nobody had told me that before. No one had mentioned how disorientated a person could become that high up in the dark. I knew that it happened to me, but I wasn’t normal. Apparently others, who were sane, could feel that way too.
    ‘But I understand people have seen Harold and so I’ve no doubt he’s somewhere about,’ Mr Steadman continued. ‘He’s the most enthusiastic watchman I think there is. He’s always here.’
    And yet, so far as I was concerned, he was always somewhere else. If only briefly, I’d seen little Milly, but Phillips was still a mystery. And that bothered me. I didn’t know why at the time. Maybe like my search for Milly, my search for Phillips was just an example of my mind wanting to have something to distract itself