'We'll need lumber for bracing,' the man in the balaclava said to Jack, and I expected him to tell him it was no use, but he went off immediately and came back dragging a white-painted bookcase.
It still had three books in it. I helped Jack and the balaclava knock the shelves out of the case and then took the books down to the store of 'valuables'. The guard was sitting on the pavement going through the beaded evening bag.
'Taking inventory,' he said, scrambling up hastily. He jammed a lipstick and a handkerchief into the bag. 'So's to make certain nothing gets stolen.'
'I've brought you something to read,' I said, and laid the books next to the teapot. ' Crime and Punishment .'
I toiled back up the hill and helped Jack lover the bookshelves down the shaft and after a few minutes buckets began coming up again. We reformed our scraggly bucket brigade, the balaclava at the head of it and me and then Jack at its end.
The all-clear went. As soon as it wound down, the foreman took another sounding. This time we didn't hear anything, and when the buckets started again I handed them to Jack without looking at him.
It began to get light in the east, a slow greying of the hills above us. Two of them, several storeys high, stood where the row of houses that had escaped the night before had been, and we were still in their shadow, though I could see the shaft now, with the end of one of the white bookshelves sticking up from it like a gravestone.
The buckets began to come more slowly.
'Put out your cigarettes!' the foreman called up, and we all stopped, trying to catch the smell of gas. If they were dead, as Jack had said, it was most likely gas leaking in from the broken mains that had killed them, and not internal injuries. The week before we had brought up a boy and his dog, not a scratch on them. The dog had barked and whimpered almost up to when we found them, and the ambulance driver said she thought they'd only been dead a few minutes.
I couldn't smell any gas and after a minute the foreman said excitedly, 'I see them!'
The balaclava leaned over the shaft, his hands on his knees. 'Are they alive?'
'Yes! Fetch an ambulance!'
The balaclava went leaping down the hill, skidding on broken bricks that skittered down in a minor avalanche.
I knelt over the shaft. 'Will they need a stretcher?' I called down.
'No,' the foreman said, and I knew by the sound of his voice they were dead.
'Both of them?' I said.
'Yes.'
I stood up. 'How did you know they were dead?' I said, turning to look at Jack. 'How did'
He wasn't there. I looked down the hill. The balaclava was nearly to the bottom grabbing at a broken window sash to stop his headlong descent, his wake a smoky cloud of brick dust — but Jack was nowhere to be seen.
It was nearly dawn. I could see the grey hills and at the far end of them the warden and his 'valuables'. There was another rescue party on the third hill over, still digging. I could see Swales handing down a bucket.
'Give a hand here,' the foreman said impatiently and hoisted the jack up to me. I hauled it over to the side and then came back and helped the foreman out of the shaft. His hands were filthy, covered in reddish-brown mud.
'Was it the gas that killed them?' I asked, even though he was already pulling out a packet of cigarettes.
'No,' he said, shaking a cigarette out and taking it between his teeth. He patted the front of his coverall, leaving red stains.
'How long have they been dead?' I asked.
He found his matches, struck one, and lit the cigarette. 'Shortly after we last heard them, I should say,' he said, and I thought, but they were already dead by then. And Jack knew it. 'They've been dead at least two hours.'
I looked at my watch. I read a little past six. 'But the mine didn't kill them?'
He took the cigarette between his fingers and blew a long puff of smoke. When he put the cigarette back in his mouth there was a red smear on it. 'Loss of blood.'
The next night the Luftwaffe was early. I hadn't got much sleep after the incident. Morris had fretted about his son the whole day and Swales had teased Renfrew mercilessly. 'Goering's found out about your spying,' he said, 'And now he's sent his Stukas after you.'
I finally went up to the third floor and tried to sleep in the spotter's chair, but it was too light. The afternoon was cloudy, and the fires burning in the East End gave the sky a nasty reddish cast.
Someone had left a copy of Twickenham's Twitterings on the floor. I read the article on the walking dead again, and then, still unable to sleep, the rest of the news-sheet. There was an account of Hitler's invasion of Transylvania, and a recipe for butterless strawberry tart, and the account of the crime rate. 'London is currently the perfect place for the criminal element,' Nelson was quoted as saying. 'We must constantly be on the lookout for wrong-doing.'
Below the recipe was a story about a Scottish terrier named Bonny Charlie who had barked and scrabbled wildly at the ruins of a collapsed house till wardens heeded his cries, dug down, and discovered two unharmed children.
I must have fallen asleep reading that because the next thing I knew Morris was shaking me and telling me the sirens had gone. It was only five o'clock.
At half past we had an HE in our sector. It was just three blocks from the post, and the walls shook and plaster rained down on Twickenham's typewriter and on Renfrew, lying awake in his cot.
