‘The library?’ Adela asked, buckling up.
‘Ought we to collect Library Cat from Mitsy’s first?’ Joyce suggested, feeling her body start to relax once again, knowing the worst was over. For now.
But when they rounded the corner to Harrington Square, Adela slammed her foot on the brake. Nan juddered to a halt.
‘Oh,’ Joyce heard herself say.
Her hand moved to her mouth in shock. A red double-decker bus had been blown up, and its front end was now half embedded in Mitsy Bouvoir’s first floor. The house next door was missing completely. An avalanche of rubble and scorched bricks had been vomited halfway up the road. The entire road was sealed off and swarming with rescue, ARP, firemen and ambulance crew.
‘Mitsy!’ Joyce was out of the van almost before Adela had parked it. ‘Mitsy.’
She ran, dodging the arms of well-meaning personnel. ‘Oi, Miss, you can’t go there. It’s too dangerous. That house can come down at any minute.’
Tears blurred her eyes as she ran. The awful, bloody indignity for a woman as old as Mitsy. Surely, at the age of seventy-nine, she had earned the right to die peacefully in her own bed, not such a violent, destructive end as this.
Joyce took the stairs two at a time, ignoring the ominous creak and dripping of water as she ran. Pushing open the door to the bedroom, she finally stopped, gasping for breath. The front of the bus took up half the room. Not a stick of furniture remained. A stench of burnt rubber hung in the air, and Joyce fell to her knees. Where was the justice? Poor, sweet Mitsy, who just wanted to be left alone with her books and her memories. Maybe it was the sleepless night, witnessing the violent decapitation, or the fear of that awful night in the shelter, but her tears poured from the depths of her soul. She curled into a ball on the floor of Mitsy’s bedroom and sobbed.
‘Miss, Miss . . . I’ve got you.’
She felt arms scooping her up, and she looked up, bewildered.
The voice was deep and gravelly but oddly reassuring.
‘How about we go downstairs and get you a nice cup of tea?’
She didn’t register much about the man beyond a broken nose and square shoulders, but his words struck her as ridiculous.
‘A cup of tea? London’s on fire, and you want me to drink tea?’
‘Sometimes a nice cup of Rosie Lee’s the only answer,’ he replied, a hint of amusement in his voice.
‘Are you mocking me?’
‘I saw the way you took those stairs. I wouldn’t dare.’ He grinned. His silver eyes shone in the dim light of the bedroom. ‘Let’s get out of here, shall we?’
Somewhere at the back of the house, something collapsed. A shower of plaster dust shook loose over them.
‘I . . . I’m not sure I can.’
Suddenly, she was being lifted. The man held her close, picking his way through the rubble and out of the bedroom. Sheheard his heart hammering close to her ear but his voice was gentle.
‘Just ten steps, eight . . . seven . . . nearly there.’
Something crashed above them, and a chunk of the bedroom ceiling came down on top of the bus. Joyce screamed and closed her eyes.
‘We’re going to die, and it’s my fault,’ she whimpered.
‘No one’s dying on my watch,’ the man replied, unflappable as he kicked a piece of timber out the way and carried on walking down the stairs.
‘Do you like poetry?’
‘Poetry?’
‘Now the creeping nets of sleep,’ he started to recite, ‘Stretch about and gather nigh...’
The ceiling above her head bulged, and she cried out, burying her head in the man’s neck.
‘And the midnight dim and deep
