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.
“I think he smells ’em,” the woman said. “That’s why they call ’em body-sniffers.”
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.”
She looked at a pencilled and crossed-over roster. “I don’t show an admission by that name.”
“I’m certain she was brought here,” I said, twisting my head round to read the list. “There isn’t another St George’s, is there?”
She shook her head and lifted up the roster to look at a second sheet.
“Here she is,” she said, and I had heard the rescue squads use that tone of voice often enough to know what it meant, but that was impossible. She had been under that headboard. The blood on her nightgown hadn’t even been hers.
“I’m so sorry,” the sister said.
“When did she die?” I said.
“This morning,” she said, checking the second list, which was much longer than the first.
“Did anyone else come to see her?”
“I don’t know. I’ve just been on since eleven.”
“What did she die of?”
She looked at me as if I were insane.
“What was the listed cause of death?” I said.
She had to find Mina’s name on the roster again. “Shock due to loss of blood,” she said, and I thanked her and went to find Jack.
He found me. I had gone back to the post and waited till everyone was asleep and Mrs Lucy had gone upstairs and then sneaked into the pantry to look up Jack’s address in Mrs Lucy’s files. It had not been there, as I had known it wouldn’t. And if there had been an address, what would it have turned out to be when I went to find it? A gutted house? A mound of rubble?
I had gone to Sloane Square Station, knowing he wouldn’t be there, but having no other place to look. He could have been anywhere. London was full of empty houses, bombed-out cellars, secret places to hide until it got dark. That was why he had come here.
“If I was a bad’un, I’d come straight to London,” Swales had said. But the criminal element weren’t the only ones who had come, drawn by the blackout and the easy pickings and the bodies. Drawn by the blood.
I stood there until it started to get dark, watching two boys scrabble in the gutter for candy that had been blown out of a confectioner’s front window, and then walked back to a doorway down the street from the post, where I could see the door, and waited. The sirens went. Swales left on patrol. Petersby went in. Morris came out, stopping to peer at the sky as if he were looking for his son Quincy. Mrs Lucy must not have managed to talk Nelson out of the patrols.
It got dark. The searchlights began to criss-cross the sky, catching the silver of the barrage balloons. The planes started coming in from the east, a low hum. Vi hurried in, wearing high heels and carrying a box tied with string. Petersby and Twickenham left on patrol. Vi came out, fastening her helmet strap under her chin and eating something.
“I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” Jack said.
I turned around. He had driven up in a lorry marked ATS. He had left the door open and the motor running. “I’ve got the beams,” he said. “For reinforcing the post. The incident we were on last night, all these beams were lying on top, and I asked the owner of the house if I could buy them from him.”
He gestured to the back of the lorry, where jagged ends of wood were sticking out. “Come along then, we can get them up tonight if we hurry.” He started towards the truck. “Where were you? I’ve looked everywhere for you.”
“I went to St George’s Hospital,” I said.
He stopped, his hand on the open door of the truck.
“Mina’s dead,” I said, “but you knew that, didn’t you?”
He didn’t say anything.
“The nurse said she died of loss of blood,” I said. A flare drifted down, lighting his face with a deadly whiteness. “I know what you are.”
“If we hurry, we can get the reinforcements up before the raid starts,” he said. He started to pull the door to.