Ashes to Ashes by Barbara Nadel

you find her.’
    And then he was swallowed by the gloom.
    Maybe I would have thought more about why Mr Andrews was suddenly so interested in the little missing girl no one but me seemed to want to find, but I was distracted by what sounded like an army of watchmen running on to the Whispering Gallery.
    ‘What happened?’ I heard one bloke say to the chap who had charge of the telephone up there.
    ‘I don’t know,’ the other one replied. ‘One minute he was up here, the next . . . It’s said he slipped on the water on the floor.’
    ‘He was looking for Harold Phillips. I heard him myself. He said he was looking for Harold.’
    My ears pricked up at this. Once again, Mr Phillips was being talked about. I still hadn’t seen him even though I’d been up to the Whispering Gallery once myself.
    ‘Well, he didn’t find Harold,’ the bloke on the telephone said. ‘Don’t know why he was looking for him at all.’
    ‘Why’s that?’ some other chap asked.
    ‘Because I’ve not seen Harold and if I haven’t, I can’t see how he can be up here,’ the telephone man said. ‘Harold, of everyone, is . . . well, Harold is distinctive, isn’t he?’
    There were some murmurs of agreement from the Whispering Gallery. Down below I wondered what they meant by ‘distinctive’. I stamped my feet a little to get some life back in them but then I realised that what I was actually doing was kicking blood up into the air and so I stopped.

Chapter Four
    A s well as the London Fire Brigade film unit, who went straight up to the Stone Gallery to film and record the events unfolding up there, more watchmen turned up over the next half-hour. Their faces blackened by what they described as the inferno outside, they talked of the fires that surrounded the cathedral as if they were living, intelligent things.
    ‘They’re getting closer all the time,’ one chap said. ‘Hitchcock Williams looks as if it could catch at any minute! Bloody fires! It’s as if they’re seeking buildings out to burn!’
    ‘The bombs are just feeding the flames, that’s what’s happening,’ another bloke said.
    Hitchcock, Williams and Co., the famous textile wholesaler, was very near to the cathedral, in St Paul’s Churchyard. If they were in danger from the fires, then we had to be in almost as much peril. I had no idea what the time was by then. It was one of those moments when it feels as if you’ve been in a place for ever and, at the same time, just for a few minutes.
    ‘You didn’t see anyone, er, o-outside?’ I asked a man whose clothes were so hot they were smoking.
    ‘Outside?’ he shook his head. ‘No. Poor bloody LFB engaged in battles with these endless fires is all I saw. There’re no civvies left out there – at least, I hope that there aren’t!’
    The little girl would have come back in to the cathedral. Whatever people might have said to her, the fires were now so fierce that she would have been left with no choice. Even inside a great cathedral made of thick stone, we were beginning to feel the heat. She was either somewhere in the building or she was probably already dead.
    ‘What’s that?’ one of the new watchmen asked me as he pointed towards Mr Ronson’s body. Now covered with a canvass tarpaulin, which Mr Andrews had found to cover him, Mr Ronson’s dead body was just a thing as opposed to a person in the middle of the cathedral.
    ‘He, er, he fell . . .’
    ‘It’s Sidney Ronson!’ I heard someone call down from up above.
    ‘Blimey!’
    ‘He’s dead!’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Dead. He’s dead.’
    The bloke in front of me, the one with the smoking clothes, made as if to go towards the canvass, but I stopped him.
    ‘It’s er, he’s very . . . unrecognisable,’ I said.
    ‘Is he? Is he just . . .’ He was holding what he felt inside, as we all do, or at least try to. Then, as if suddenly coming to himself and remembering where he was, he said, ‘Who are you? You’re not a watchman, are