He had said he had a job and the girl couldn't find his work permit, but it took the Civil Defence six weeks to process a request for a few beams. It would probably take them till the end of the war to file the work permits. Or perhaps his had been in the file, and the girl had missed it. Loss of sleep can result in mistakes on the job. And odd fixations.
I walked to Sloane Square Station. There was no sign of where the young woman had been. They had even swept the glass up. Her stewpot of a boss at John Lewis's never let her go till closing time, even if the sirens had gone, even if it was dark. She had had to hurry through the blacked-out streets all alone, carrying her dress for the next day on a hanger, listening to the guns and trying to make out how far off the planes were. If someone had been stalking her, she would never have heard him, never have seen him in the darkness. Whoever found her would think she had been killed by flying glass.
He doesn't eat, I would say to Mrs Lucy. He didn't put out an incendiary in a church. He always leaves the incidents before dawn, even when we don't have the casualties up. The Luftwaffe is trying to kill me. It was a letter I wrote to The Times . The walking dead may hallucinate, hearing voices, seeing visions, or believing fantastical things.
The sirens went. I must have been standing there for hours, staring at the pavement. I went back to the post. Mrs Lucy was there. "You look dreadful, Jack. How long's it been since you've slept?"
"I don't know," I said. "Where's Jack?"
"On watch," Mrs Lucy said.
"You'd best be careful," Vi said, setting chocolates on a plate. "Or you'll turn into one of the walking dead. Would you like a sweet? Eddie gave them to me."
The telephone pipped. Mrs Lucy answered it, spoke a minute, hung up. "Slaney needs help on an incident," she said. "They've asked for Jack."
She sent both of us. We found the incident without any trouble. There was no dust cloud, no smell except from a fire burning off to one side. "This didn't just happen," I said. "It's a day old at least."
I was wrong. It was two days old. The rescue squads had been working straight through, and there were still at least thirty people unaccounted for. Some of the rescue squad were digging half-heartedly halfway up a mound, but most of them were standing about, smoking and looking like they were casualties themselves. Jack went up to where the men were digging, shook his head, and set off across the mound.
"Heard you had a body-sniffer," one of the smokers said to me. "They've got one in Whitechapel, too. Crawls round the incident on his hands and knees, sniffing like a bloodhound. Yours do that?"
"No," I said.
"Over here," Jack said.
"Says he can read their minds, the one in Whitechapel does," he said, putting out his cigarette and taking up a pickaxe. He clambered up the slope to where Jack was already digging.
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.
" 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.