It was easy to see because of the fire, and fairly easy to dig, but halfway down we struck the massive headboard of a bed.
'We'll have to go in from the side,' Jack said.
'The hell with that,' the man who'd told me about the body-sniffer said. 'How do you know somebody's down there? I don't hear anything.'
Jack didn't answer him. He moved down the slope and began digging into its side.
'They've been in there two days,' the man said. 'They're dead and I'm not getting overtime.' He flung down the pickaxe and stalked off to the mobile canteen. Jack didn't even notice he was gone. He handed me baskets, and I emptied them, and occasionally Jack said, 'Saw,' or 'Tin-snips,' and I handed them to him. I was off getting the stretcher when he brought her out.
She was perhaps thirteen. She was wearing a white nightgown, or perhaps it only looked white because of the plaster dust. Jack's face was ghastly with it. He had picked her up in his arms, and she had fastened her arms about his neck and buried her face against his shoulder. They were both outlined by the fire.
I brought the stretcher up, and Jack knelt down and tried to lay her on it, but she would not let go of his neck. 'It's all right,' he said gently. 'You're safe now.'
He unclasped her hands and folded them on her chest. Her nightgown was streaked with dried blood, but it didn't seem to be hers. I wondered who else had been in there with her. 'What's your name?' Jack said.
'Mina,' she said. It was no more than a whisper.
'My name's Jack,' he said. He nodded at me. 'So's his. We're going to carry you down to the ambulance now. Don't be afraid. You're safe now.'
The ambulance wasn't there yet. We laid the stretcher on the pavement, and I went over to the incident officer to see if it was on its way. Before I could get back, somebody shouted, 'Here's another,' and I went and helped dig out a hand that the foreman had found, and then the body all the blood had come from. When I looked down the hill the girl was still lying there on the stretcher, and Jack was bending over it.
I went out to Whitechapel to see the body-sniffer the next day. He wasn't there. 'He's a part-timer,' the post warden told me, clearing off a chair so I could sit down. The post was a mess, dirty clothes and dishes everywhere.
An old woman in a print wrapper was frying up kidneys in a skillet. 'Works days in munitions out to Dorking,' she said.
'How exactly is he able to locate the bodies?' I asked. 'I heard'
'That he reads their minds?' the woman said. She scraped the kidneys on to a plate and handed it to the post warden. 'He's heard it, too, more's the pity, and it's gone straight to his head. 'I can feel them under here,' he says to the rescue squads, like he was Houdini or something, and points to where they're supposed to start digging.'
'Then how does he find them?'
'Luck,' the warden said.
'
The warden snorted. 'Over the stink the jerries put in the bombs and the gas and all the rest of it?'
'If he were a' I said and didn't finish it. 'If he had an acute sense of smell, perhaps he could smell the blood.'
'You can't even smell the bodies when they've been dead a week,' the warden said, his mouth full of kidneys. 'He hears them screaming, same as us.'
'He's got better hearing than us,' the woman said, switching happily to his theory. 'Most of us are half deaf from the guns, and he isn't.'
I hadn't been able to hear the fat woman in the pink hairnet, although she'd said she had called for help. But Jack, just down from Yorkshire, where they hadn't been deafened by antiaircraft guns for weeks, could. There was nothing sinister about it. Some people had better hearing than others.
'We pulled an army colonel out last week who claimed he didn't cry out,' I said.
'He's lying,' the warden said, sawing at a kidney. 'We had a nanny, two days ago, prim and proper as you please, swore the whole time we was getting her out, words to make a sailor blush, and then claimed she didn't. 'Unclean words have never crossed my lips and never will,' she says to me.' He brandished his fork at me. 'Your colonel cried out, all right. He just won't admit it.'
'I didn't make a sound,' Colonel Godalming had said, brandishing his serving spoon. 'Knew it wouldn't do any good.' And perhaps the warden was right, and it was only bluster. But he hadn't wanted his wife to know he was in London, to find out about the dancer at the Windmill. He had had good reason to keep silent, to try to dig himself out.
I went home and rang up a girl I knew in the ambulance service and asked her to find out where they had taken Mina. She rang me back with the answer in a few minutes, and I took the tube over to St George's Hospital. The others had all cried out, or banged on the roof of the Anderson, except Mina. She had been so frightened when Jack got her out she couldn't speak above a whisper, but that didn't mean she hadn't cried or whimpered.
'When you were buried last night, did you call for help?' I would ask her, and she would answer me in her mouse voice, 'I called and called between prayers. Why?' And I would say, 'It's nothing, an odd fixation brought on by lack of sleep. Jack spends his days in Dorking, at a munitions plant, and has exceptionally acute hearing.' And there is no more truth to my theory than to Renfrew's belief that the raids were brought on by a letter to The Times .
St George's had an entrance marked 'Casualty Clearing Station'. I asked the nursing sister behind the desk if I could see Mina.
'She was brought in last night. The James Street incident.'
