48

started to run away, the rest cowered or sank to the ground.

'Cissie, come on!'

Reluctantly she began to follow and when shots were fired from the goons near the corner, she caught up fast. There were more figures loitering in this stretch of road and we tried to convince them that it was in their best interest to get away, but, like the others, they seemed too bewildered to move. Maybe they thought we were the villains, that those uniformed people were the only law the city had left; or maybe they thought they'd be shot if they did try to escape. I didn't know, and right then I couldn't help 'em: I was too busy saving my own and Stern's skin, and I guessed that Cissie was now of the same mind -

she'd caught up with us and was taking some of the injured German's weight. We couldn't help them if they didn't want to be helped; we could only offer some hurried advice. And we did. Even with bullets whistling over our heads, we yelled and tugged at those closest to us as we made our way to the park gate; but it was no good, they just crouched low to the ground to avoid being hit. Of course, it was really the strangers who were helping us, because not only were the Blackshirts afraid of harming any part of this precious new consignment of healthy blood, but our rarity value had depreciated considerably.

Dodging through the space between two kerbside cars, we were soon at the park's entrance and I took one last look at the scene behind us. Blackshirts were already rounding up the onlookers, with only three of them chasing after us. Still supporting Stern with one shoulder, I took careful aim and brought down two as they ran. They both screamed, the first dropping to his knees, clutching at his chest, the second spinning across the hood of a car and slowly sliding to the ground. It was enough to discourage the third.

He skidded to a halt, the metal toecaps of his boots scraping sparks off the roadway, and shouted something after us. He remained where he was though, neither retreating nor advancing, just loitering there, shaking a fist and cursing. I took a bead on him, but Stern placed an unsteady hand on my arm.

'Better that we just leave,' he said, his words tight, as if squeezed through a constricted throat.

I spat on the kerb, knowing he was right, that there really was nothing we could do for these other people. Reluctantly we turned and I led the way through the thick shadows of the neglected park.

18

I TOOK THEM DOWN to the Embankment where the old river ran pure silver under the uncloaked moon, its waters free of human detritus, driftwood and loose craft the only blight. A short flight of stone steps over the river wall led us to a wooden jetty where I kept a small motor launch, tanked up and regularly serviced like all my escape vehicles. Soon we were heading downstream, the quiet throbbing of the boat's engine and the distant, fading drone of the Dornier, one contented Kraut bomber on his way home, the only sounds. We'd heard more gunfire behind us as we'd made our way to the jetty, but now it'd ceased, leaving us to wonder about those poor souls we'd found waiting outside the Savoy. How many had been shot or beaten for resisting the Blackshirts? How many of those suffering the Slow Death had been killed where they stood, eliminated because their blood was useless to Hubbe and his parasites? And how many more of those pilgrims had arrived at the front of the hotel, at the shattered main entrance, attracted by the lights blazing through the night sky? Had they been captured too?

While Cissie cradled Stern in her arms and did her best to stanch his bleeding, I steered the motor launch close to the riverbank, keeping us under the cover of buildings and walls, checking over my shoulder to see if we were being followed, watching the grand old hotel burn. Its electric lights, sirens to the survivors, a beacon to the Dormer's pilot, were finally doused, but by then the flames had taken over, more than compensating for their loss. It was nothing new to me, this kind of senseless vandalism, but still it was a tragic sight and a heaviness weighed upon me. The Savoy had served as a resolute symbol of London's unbreakable spirit during the Blitz; by tomorrow it would be a gutted shell, maybe even reduced to rubble. It had survived the war almost intact and three years later it'd taken just one man, guided by a company of fools, to destroy it.

Cissie was quietly weeping, but there wasn't much I could do to comfort her. Nor could I help the wounded German -all my efforts had to go into getting us away from there. Rumpled barrage balloons drooped like small grey clouds over the blackened city, testimony to mankind's inventiveness and absurdity, and the river stretched ahead like a broad, metallic highway, taking us to a quieter part of the graveyard.

We journeyed into the concealing darkness of the river bends.

19

NO 26 TYNE STREET was at the very end of a long and narrow cobbled turning that looked like a cul-de-sac, but wasn't, just off Whitechapel High Street, Jack the Ripper territory, and we approached it through a covered alleyway that had a thin, waist-high post at one end - an ancient cannon barrel rooted upright in concrete, an iron cannonball fixed firmly into its muzzle - and a tall gas lamppost outside the other. Less than twenty minutes earlier we'd left the motor launch moored to a set of mossy stone steps that climbed from the river to a wharfside passageway. Between us, we'd carried the wounded German to the roadway where I soon found an open-top Austin Tourer in reasonable working condition and with enough juice left in its tank (gasoline had completely evaporated in many of these stranded vehicles) for the next phase of the journey. The three of us had crammed into it, Stern semi-conscious and moaning softly, Cissie through with weeping, but withdrawn and silent, and I'd driven past the old Billingsgate fish market - the worst of its foul stench had long since faded, but it was still bad enough to wrinkle your nose

- and then carefully through the canyon streets of the City, once London's thriving financial sector, where the roads, sidewalks and doorways were littered with dark shapes, unrecognizable bundles that had once been the life-pulse of this glittering square mile. A glance at Cissie told me she didn't like it here - her eyes shifted uneasily, her head kept jerking as if she'd seen something in the road ahead, or in one of the doorways - and I remembered her nervousness when I'd first shown her the Abe Lincoln Room at the Savoy. She was perceptive to ghostly things, I guess, and the events of the evening hadn't helped her nerves any. Hell, I had to grip the steering wheel tight to stop my own hands trembling, and I was relieved when we were through the area. A few minutes later we'd reached our destination.

I'd parked the Austin outside a wash-house in Old Castle Street, a road that ran parallel to Tyne Street, then carried Stern over my shoulder through the little alleyway that connected the two streets. No 26 was three doors away from the alley and tucked into a corner facing up the cobbled street. Like the turning it was in, the house itself was narrow, with three floors squeezed on top of one another and a cellar, and it was in a strategic position (a prime reason for choosing it as a refuge) because nobody could enter from the high street without being observed from one of its five front windows. The dwellings at the top end of Tyne Street were gutted shells, bomb-wrecked, but in the middle it opened out to a tiny square before continuing towards No 26 with two-storey houses on one side and bigger, three-storey houses on the other, all of them joined and with defunct gaslights mounted at intervals along their walls. The London Docks were not far away and the Luftwaffe might have done Tyne Street's residents a favour by demolishing the rest of the houses during one of their hit-and-miss raids on dockland (as long as those residents weren't inside), because these places were slums and had been for a long time.

Behind No 26 and its neighbours were tiny, concrete back yards filled with mangles, bicycles, tin baths -

all rusted now - piles of coal and outside lavatories, the yards themselves backing onto a bigger compound where some of the traders from the big bustling street market called Petticoat Lane kept their stalls and barrows. Sally had brought me here one Sunday morning, not ashamed of showing me a rougher part of her town, and I'd remembered Tyne Street and the usefully positioned No 26 after my first run-in with the Blackshirts when I was looking for safe havens. Sure, I had my pick of thousands of such places, but all my eventual choices had something to do with Sally.

The back windows of No 26 - and oddly, there were only two, both over the house's creaky wooden staircase that twisted up from the end of the short, ground-floor corridor to the bedrooms at the top -

overlooked the yards, the lower one providing a handy exit should the enemy come pounding on the front door.

Most of the family furniture was packed into the ground floor's only room, making it the parlour/kitchen/dining room and (because it had the only sink in the whole place) bathroom. It was about sixteen feet square and its