‘Who else?’
‘Ruby. My sister. She was going to get married, but her chap got called up. She was upset but we all reckoned it was for the best. She could have done better.’
Cook smiled, listening to the boy parroting what were presumably opinions he’d picked up from his mum.
‘That it?’
‘All the regulars.’
‘I’m sure they’ll all be excited to see you,’ Cook said.
Frankie shrugged.
‘They won’t be there to see me,’ he said. ‘They’ll be there to get drunk and talk about the good old days.’
5
The driver tried to calm himself, but his breath came out ragged, like he’d been running. He’d have to be careful. It wouldn’t do to have an accident now.
His gloved hands rested on the steering-wheel in their customary three o’clock and nine o’clock position. He concentrated on smooth gear changes and soft braking. A kind of self-hypnosis. Imagine a pint of beer on the dashboard, his instructor had always said. Drive like you don’t want to spill a drop. It was harder, of course, with all the fuss about the raids. Cars and buses stopped without notice. People hurried across the roads, aiming for the nearest shelter. But none of it seemed real.
He’d done it again. The thing that had been dominating his waking hours for months. How long had it been since the last time? It had been just after war had broken out. The blackout and all that.
He always worried, and this time was no different. He’d have left a clue. All the detective novels were clear on that point. There’s always a mistake. Always a clue. The dogged investigator will pull that thread until the whole enterprise unravels. But so far he’d been lucky. Got away with it.
This time, though, there’d be no detective. No unravelling thread. It was too good to be true. A delicious gift. Everyone would think she’d been on the bus. A tragedy, of course. But a gift to him, nonetheless. The bomber had given him a way oftaking the girl he never could have dreamt of. A girl who was undoubtedly dead. Killed by Hitler. There’d be a mass burial for all the victims. Paperwork rushed through for those who couldn’t be identified. Sorrowful headlines in the papers. A public inquiry into the safety of buses in wartime.
But no investigations.
She was all his.
Free to do with as he wished. No one to slap his hand and tell him to keep his dirty thoughts to himself.
He calmed his breathing. Not out of the woods yet. Get her to the shelter – safely underground. Out of sight, out of mind.
As he waited at a traffic light, he allowed himself a quick look. She was asleep. As beautiful as ever. If anything, she’d grown more beautiful as the years went by, growing into womanhood, as he’d always known she would.
A shaft of late-afternoon sunlight rested on her face. A shame, he thought.
The last time she’d feel the sun on her face.
6
‘Get out of it!’ the bridge keeper shouted at Frankie, who was waiting halfway across the drawbridge, but the boy knew what was he was doing. The keeper couldn’t raise the bridge while he stood there. Cook hurried after him, hopping over the gap between the two sides of the bridge as the keeper started the diesel engine that worked the mechanism.
‘There’s only two bridges,’ Frankie explained as they stepped off the metal roadway. ‘The bridge keepers have to keep the ships moving, in and out all day. If they decide they don’t want you to cross, you can wait all day.’ Cook turned and watched as the section of roadway clanked into its upright position. There was a finality in the sound, like a prison door slamming shut.
‘This is the island,’ Frankie said, grinning.
It was an illusion, of course, but now they were on the island, Cook really could smell the sea more strongly. There wasn’t any white sand. No palm trees. But Cook could see how the place had got its name. A bend in the river half a mile long, cut off from the city proper by an interlinked series of docks and canals, wide and deep enough to take ocean-going cargo ships from all corners of the world.
‘This is the high street,’ Frankie said. A narrow canyon-like street led away from them, high walls on either side. It wasunlike any high street Cook had ever seen. Rather than the usual collection of shops, the right-hand side was towering warehouses. The other side was tenement buildings, reaching up five storeys, and yet more warehouses. Metal gangways crossed the road at great height, presumably to ease the transport of goods from one side to the other. The road itself was choked with horse-drawn traffic and children playing. A group of young boys had tied a rope to the top of a streetlight and were swinging around it. Further down, girls were chasing after a pedlar, pushing a cart of ice chips. He turned back on them and they screamed, running away in mock terror.
To Cook’s left, a large metal gate guarded the entrance to a dock – Hermitage Basin according to a weathered sign. Through the gate, a vast rectangle of water about the size of Cook’s largest field. All around the edge of the water, freighters were docked next to huge warehouses. Some of the ships were being unloaded manually – men streaming from ship to shore, carrying tea chests. A larger ship was being unloaded by a crane on a massive shelf on the outside of the warehouse, sticking out over the water. The busiest port in the world, Frankie had told him, raw materials and finished goods from every part of the empire. Part of the torrent of information the boy had produced on the train journey up from Uckfield.
A strange place to live, Cook thought, as Frankie did his disappearing act yet again, this time down a narrow passage between two warehouses. Cook followed. After twenty yards the passage opened up somewhat to become an alley – low houses on either side and, at the far end, a pub nestled alongside a larger building belching black smoke. A painted sign on the brickwork answered the question before Cook asked it – the source of the smell – Empire Fast-Stick Glues, Established 1892.
Cook recognised the name of the pub from the correspondence he’d had with Frankie’s mum. The King’s Stairs. A reference to an ancient right of access to the nearby shorefront, Frankie had said, dating all the way back to when all this had been marshes. The pub was narrow, not much more than a low door and a grimy window. Cook had pictured a thriving tavern, Frankie’s mum a wizened landlady leading rounds of ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ around the piano. If this place was thriving, it was doing a good job of hiding that fact. If Cook hadn’t known better, he would have assumed the place was derelict.
