sound of movement behind her forced her to choose. She dashed down the stairs, taking them two at a time, somehow managing to stay on her feet, until she reached the hallway at the bottom.
She stopped. She had to. She was doubled over, hanging on to a pillar in the semi-darkness. It was the only way she could stay upright. Her heart was beating like a hammer in her chest and her legs felt like lead. There had been no sound of pursuit on the stairs, but now to her horror she could hear the elevator cage descending from above. He was coming. She knew he was. For a moment she was unable to move, caught like a rabbit in the headlights, staring at the elevator door. But then she forced herself to look away. There was still time. Clutching her aching side, she pulled open the heavy front door of the building and went stumbling onto the steps.
She put out a hand to steady herself but found no support, and losing her balance, she fell forward onto the pavement. She lay still, unable to get up. Someone was leaning over her, taking hold of her arm. She wanted to resist, but she had nothing left, only surrender.
‘Are you all right, miss?’ asked a voice. ‘That looked like a nasty fall.’
She opened her eyes and saw a kindly-looking old man staring down at her. She wondered who he was for a moment, until her eyes focused on the ARP letters on his tin hat and she realized that her rescuer was an air-raid warden doing his rounds.
He helped her to her feet. Leaning on his shoulder, she looked back through the door of the apartment building and saw nothing — an empty shadowy hallway; no sign of Seaforth at all. It was as if nothing had happened.
‘Here, put this on,’ said the warden, taking off his coat and wrapping it around her shoulders. ‘You’d better come with me. I’m on my way back to my control centre anyway. They can check you over there, see that you’re okay. And then you’ll need to take shelter. That last siren was a false alarm, but word is there’s a big raid coming our way tonight.’
CHAPTER 6
Ava sat on the top floor of the double-decker bus, looking at the war-torn city as it went slowly by outside the mesh-covered windows. It was just past nine on the morning following her ordeal. The shops were beginning to open and the sun was shining down out of a clear blue sky. It was hard to believe that this same sky had been filled with hundreds of bomb-laden enemy planes only a few hours before. It had been one of the worst nights of the Blitz so far, and there was bomb damage everywhere, making for slow progress. But Ava didn’t mind; she was too busy taking in the sights. Grimy, excited children were out in force, playing in the ruins, looking for incendiary bomb tails and nose caps and other interesting pieces of shrapnel. Shopkeepers swept away broken glass and rubble from outside their shop fronts or were posting defiant signs in their windows: business as usual and more open than usual. Milk and coal carts drawn by hard-working shire horses picked their way through the debris; rag-and-bone men cried out their wares; women in headscarves talked to each other over their garden walls … Everywhere Londoners were going to work and getting on with their lives, contributing to the war effort in thousands of different ways. ‘We can take it,’ was their message. ‘That Hitler won’t stop us doing our jobs.’ It was inspiring.
Ava had felt their defiance even more the night before in the public shelter on the King’s Road to which the kindly ARP warden had taken her after rescuing her outside Seaforth’s apartment. She’d sat on an upturned packing crate in the candlelight, wrapped in the ill-fitting but warm greatcoat that he’d given her, as she drank tea from a plastic cup and joined in with renditions of innumerable hymns and patriotic songs. A large, determined lady from the WVS, the Women’s Voluntary Service, had stood on a dais and conducted the singing with a walking stick, ensuring that the shelterers kept up a spirited response to the noise of the explosions going on outside. Ava had never been more alone in the world and yet she’d never felt closer to her fellow human beings.
She was still shaken and shocked by her experience with Seaforth. The change in him that she’d witnessed when he had found her reading the diary had been so violent that she felt sure the charming, sensitive person she’d encountered at previous meetings had been an act put on for her benefit. The real Seaforth was closer to the howling creature in the terrifying picture above the mantelpiece in his apartment. Perhaps he had it up there as a reminder of who he really was.
She thought again of the accusations Alec Thorn had made against Seaforth in her flat on the day of Bertram’s arrest. Had Quaid been right to dismiss them so lightly? Could Seaforth have killed her father? Could Bertram be innocent of the crime? She didn’t have answers, but she knew that she needed to keep looking for the truth, and the inspiration she’d taken from her escape and the night in the shelter had made her more determined than ever not to give up the search. This bus journey to Bow Street Magistrates Court was another step along that road. Today was the first proper hearing in Bertram’s case, and she had no intention of missing the occasion. She needed to reassess her opinion of whether the police had got the right man, and she thought that seeing him would help, even across a crowded courtroom.
She got off the bus at Covent Garden and walked up Floral Street to the sandbagged courthouse, past the Royal Opera House, which had been converted to use as a Mecca Dance Hall since the start of the war. She was dog-tired after her sleepless night in the shelter, and there had been no chance to rest when she went back to her flat in Battersea to wash and change her clothes. Pure adrenaline was keeping her on her feet.
Inside, a huge crowd of people from all walks of life were milling about in the lobby outside the courtroom: down-at-heel crooks looking wistfully towards the exit doors; impoverished young journalists hoping for a hot story to please their editors; journeymen lawyers in threadbare suits conferring with their clients or waiting for their cases to be called on; stolid-looking police officers in blue serge uniforms waiting to give evidence. And coming towards her where she stood just inside the entrance was another policeman, but one wearing plain clothes instead of a uniform. It was Detective Trave, whom she had last seen watching her across the crowded restaurant in Coventry Street.
‘How have you been?’ he asked, shaking her hand.
‘All right,’ she lied. The truth was too complicated, and she didn’t want to talk about her troubles. Even the thought of such a discussion made her feel exhausted.
‘I’m glad you’re here,’ he said. ‘I was going to pay you a visit.’
‘Why?’ she asked, surprised. She’d thought the police would have finished with her now that they’d charged Bertram with the murder.
‘Well, it’s not good news, I’m afraid,’ he said awkwardly. ‘It’s your father’s flat.’
‘What about it?’
‘There was a bomb last night, a land mine. It destroyed the entire block. I think quite a lot of your father’s neighbours were killed. They were sheltering down in the basement.’
‘How do you know all this?’ asked Ava, sounding shocked.
‘I was there, with someone you know. With Alec Thorn. He was hurt in the blast too.’
‘Is he going to be all right?’
‘I think so. I rang the hospital this morning and he’s still quite concussed. But the injuries aren’t as bad as I thought they would be, judging from how he looked last night. He was in a bad way and there was a lot of blood. He’s dislocated his shoulder but not broken it, apparently, and the shrapnel injuries around his right eye don’t seem to have affected the eye itself. He’s a lucky man — I thought it was going to be a lot worse.’
‘What hospital’s he in?’
‘St Stephen’s in Fulham. I’m sorry about the flat. Insurance companies don’t cover destruction by bombing, but you probably know that. You can put a claim in to the government, but they won’t pay out until the end of the war, whenever that’s going to be.’
Ava nodded. She couldn’t really absorb the news about the flat and what had happened to Alec Thorn. There were too many other things she was trying to deal with. And she sensed there was something else the policeman hadn’t told her yet. ‘What’s happening with Bertram?’ she asked. ‘That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, although it’s more for form’s sake, really. The magistrate’s not likely to need to hear from me. The charge is too serious for bail and so he’ll just set a date for the committal hearing — probably in about a month, when they’ll go through the evidence and see if there’s a case to answer. Which there is, of course, given that your husband’s confessed-’
‘But you’re not so sure,’ Ava interrupted, picking up on an uncertainty in Trave’s voice which was at odds with
