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 The three of us had crammed into it, Stern semi-conscious and moaning softly, Cissie through with weeping, but withdrawn and silent, and I’d driven past the old Billingsgate fish market – the worst of its foul stench had long since faded, but it was still bad enough to wrinkle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 single window looked out onto the street. In one corner, close to the deep enamel sink with shelves overhead, cups and pans hanging from them, stood a cast-iron gas stove and, instead of a fireplace, in the wall opposite the window there was a huge black range built into the chimney breast, with ovens at the sides and a fire grate in the middle; an oversized kettle, more saucepans, along with a small camp cooker I’d brought here myself, cluttered its flat surface. Next to it was a lumpy armchair with frayed armrests, a flower-patterned sofa, where I’d dumped some of my clothes, taking up most of the wall on that side of the room; sitting on a veneered hardboard sideboard under the window was a Bush wireless set and a stoneware vase filled with shrivelled flowers I’d never bothered to throw out. Just behind the door to the corridor was a plyboard kitchen cabinet, its pull-down work-top closed, and nestled between this and the gas stove stood a tall lampstand with a tasselled shade, an arrangement imposed by jumble rather than design.
The wall here was nothing more than a wooden floor-to-ceiling partition separating the room from the corridor, painted cream and brown like the door, window frame and sill, and the mantelshelf (these days loaded with cigarette cartons) over the range. Deep brown, patterned linoleum covered the floor, almost worn through in places, and at the room’s centre, with barely enough space between it and the surrounding furniture, was a steel Morrison shelter substituting for a table, the wooden chairs around it pushed tight against the wire mesh sides. All I’d found on it when I’d first entered No 26 were a half-empty jar of furry lemon curd, a split packet of dried Weston Biscuits, a can of Keating’s bug, beetle and flea powder, and a yellowed copy of the Daily Sketch dated 24th March 1945, the very day the Blood Death rockets had fallen.
Mercifully, the house had been empty of corpses and it hadn’t taken long to collect those on the cobblestones outside and transport them to the stadium; as Tyne Street was to become an occasional home I figured this was the least I could do for its dead residents. After that I’d moved in with my own comforts and weaponry (the bedroom above was stashed with canned food and guns, as well as a few hand grenades I’d picked up from a depot not too many miles from there, just south of the river). I didn’t mind that this place didn’t have the comforts of my other refuges; fact is, its shabbiness made it less of a target for the Blackshirts – they’d never expect me to hole up in a shack like this – and I’d always felt pretty secure here.
I kept the front-door key on the inside sill of the ground-floor window, the window itself left open a couple of inches, so while Cissie propped Stern up by the door I went and got it. She didn’t make a sound as I pushed the long key into the lock, but I knew she was all in; even in the moonlight her face looked haggard, her eyes full of skittish nervousness and concern for the injured German.
Pushing open the heavy front door, I took Stern over my shoulder again and carried him straight to the end of the short corridor. The bare wooden stairs creaked and groaned under our weight, the sounds exaggerated in the close confines of the tall house. The bedroom door was open and moonlight streaming through the two windows helped me work my way through the boxes and stacked cans towards the bed. I laid him down carefully and even before I’d drawn the curtains and lit the oil lamp on the mantelpiece with matches lying next to it Cissie had removed Stern’s jacket and was unbuttoning his shirt.
‘I’m gonna boil some water,’ I said to her. ‘Use something to try and check the bleeding.’
She stopped me as I reached the bedroom door. ‘Hoke. The bullet…’
I tried not to think about it. ‘Yeah. It’ll have to come out. That’s why we need lots of hot water.’
‘You’ll do it?’
That’s what I hadn’t wanted to think about. ‘Unless you want to volunteer.’
She didn’t reply and I shrugged. ‘I’ll do what I can.’
I hurried downstairs and lit the camp cooker on top of the range. I’d never risked lighting a fire here, nor anywhere else unless out in the open, because chimney smoke could attract the wrong kind of attention, and I wasn’t going to light one tonight. After adjusting the circle of flames, I worked my way round the Morrison shelter and pulled the curtains tight together, then lit the lantern on the makeshift tabletop. The room brightened, but the shadows became more intense. I drew the pistol and laid it next to the lantern.
Pipes clanked before water gushed in spurts from the tap over the sink and I had to wait for a steady flow before filling a saucepan; the pressure was weaker than the last time I was here and it took a couple of minutes to fill the container to the brim. Once the saucepan was on the burner I washed my hands with a rock of carbolic soap from the sink’s drainer, repeating the process when I was done, and shaking them rather than use the stiffened rag passing itself off as a kitchen towel on a hook nearby. I needed a cigarette badly, but decided to wait
Cissie’s call came from over my head, followed by a loud thump on the ceiling.
Holding my hands close to my chest to keep them clean, I made my way back upstairs, glancing out the window opposite the tiny landing as I went by. There wasn’t much to see through the weather-stained glass, save for shadows and the odd shapes of stalls and trestles down in the bigger yard, but I was confident that no one had followed us here. As I turned away I stumbled on the last step to the landing and my shoulder bumped the opposite wall; like the partition downstairs, it was made of wood and the cracking sound that came from it was like a gunshot. Through the open doorway I saw Cissie react sharply and I mumbled an apology as I approached the bed.
‘Please help me with him,’ she pleaded, the lamplight catching the glistening of tears on her cheeks.
Stern was almost on the other side of the double bed, pushing himself away as if to escape her caring hands. She knelt on the mattress and tried to pull him onto his back, but her efforts were too cautious, too gentle. The German shouted something in his own language and his hand thrashed out, striking Cissie on the shoulder. I quickly joined her and, forgetting about dirtying my hands, grabbed his arm and turned him. I winced when I saw the sheets were drenched with his blood.
‘Take it easy,’ I told him uselessly as I pinned him to the bed with as little force as possible. But he twisted again and for the first time I clearly saw the blood bubbling from the wound in the back of his neck. It ran through puckered skin and livid burn scars that spread downwards from his hairline, across his shoulders and towards the halfway point of his spine. These were old markings though, and my attention returned to the fresh wound: I thought I noticed something embedded there, a slight, blackish protrusion under the slick coat of discharging blood. I touched my hand to it to confirm my suspicion and felt a hard lump that I knew wasn’t bone.
‘The bullet’s almost worked its way out,’ I said, more to myself than the girl. ‘At least it’ll make things easier.’
Next I examined the wound in his arm, close to the shoulder, and grunted when I realized there were two punctures, front and back. The bullet had passed clean through, taking tissue and muscle with it but, s’far as I could make out, without touching bone. Straightening up, I noticed the blood-soaked rag Cissie was holding in one hand.
‘His shirt,’ she said.
‘Christ. Okay, I’ll find you something else.’ I remembered the mildewed towels and sheets in a cupboard across the room; they weren’t ideal, but they’d have to do. ‘Keep him on his side, as he is. We’ll deal with the arm wound first, try to stop the bleeding, then I’ll get the bullet out of his neck.’
‘The pain’s too much. Don’t you have anything to give him?’
‘Pills’d be no good, even if he could swallow them. Tomorrow I’ll get to a hospital, find some morphine.’
It was something I should have done a long while ago, in case of accidents to myself, but I guess I’d been afraid of having easy access to any powerful opiates; heck, booze was a big enough problem for me. There was something else, also: I hated those kind of places – hospitals and churches – because they were nothing more than huge burial vaults, crammed with the bodies of Blood Death victims who’d fled to them to be saved, either by medics or the Lord Himself. No, I stayed clear of those kind of charnel houses.
‘I’ll get some proper dressings and bandages as well as the morphine, but tonight we’ll have to use what we got.’
‘We need something to soak up the blood now, then something to keep pressed against the wound.’
‘Gimme a minute. Just hold on to him, okay?’
I went to the cupboard set into the opposite wall and the musty smell was strong when I opened its creaking door (although the coppery reek of fresh blood coming from the direction of the bed was stronger). Reaching in, I pulled out all the linen and cloth towels I could find – not many, at that – then took a thin pile of bedsheets from a higher shelf. I carried them back to the bed.
‘Do what you can with these while I get the water,’ I said, already heading for the door again.
The water was just beginning to come to the boil so I took time to rummage in the kitchen cabinet for a suitable instrument for some on-the-hoof surgery. The best I could find was a long, thin-bladed carving knife; it was a little big for the job, but the only one with a point strong and sharp enough to dig into flesh. Taking it over to the range, I lifted the saucepan and put the knife’s blade into the small but fierce flames, slowly turning it over so that both sides and edges were sterilized without becoming blackened. I kept it in the heat for about two minutes, then replaced the saucepan with the knife’s blade inside so that the water quickly came to the boil again.
I filled another saucepan and exchanged it for the one on the gas cooker and then, leaving the blade in the bubbling water, I carried the first saucepan upstairs.
Stern held out for some time before he started screaming. I’d had to probe deeper than I’d thought to get the knife’s tip beneath the lump of lead, Cissie holding the lamp as close as she could while endeavouring to keep the German down with her other hand. Once, he rolled out of her grasp onto his back and I had to withdraw the blade quickly. When we got him on his side again, I went to work more ruthlessly, ignoring his screams and sliding the blade down through spurting blood and along hard metal while Cissie used her whole weight to pin him there. Twisting the knife and levering sharply and forcefully, I felt the bullet move. Stern’s scream filled the room and probably echoed up the street as the bloodied lump fell out onto the stained bedsheet. I went limp thinking I’d killed him until I saw his chest still rising and falling. I saw there was blood on his lips.
Cissie finished up, cleaning and dressing both wounds while I went back downstairs to fetch more hot water. I brought it up and helped her change the bedsheets for new, if not fresh, ones, rolling the unconscious German to one side and covering the blood-sodden mattress with double layers of towels. I left her there to watch over him, wearily treading downstairs again to the jumbled front room, my bloody hands shaking so much it was impossible to light the cigarette I took from one of the cartons I kept on the mantelshelf; in the end I had to lean close to the camp cooker and light it from the blue flame. I sank into the armchair, rusted springs groaning under my weight, and rested my head back. I closed my eyes and filled my throat and lungs with smoke.
There was whisky in the kitchen cabinet, but I was too dog-tired to get it.
It was still dark when moans from over my head awoke me. I sat there and listened to Stern’s agony, feeling pity, anger and helplessness. The pity was for Stern, something I never thought I’d feel for a German; the anger was against those bastards who’d done this to him; and the helplessness was because there was nothing more Cissie and I could do.
There were footsteps on the stairs – the whole house warned of any movement inside its walls with creaks and grumbles and even sighs – and then dread took a slow dive into the pit of my stomach when the shadowy form of Cissie appeared in the open doorway. I already knew what she was gonna ask me to do.
‘Hoke, he needs medication now, something to kill the pain. Antiseptic, too, and fresh dressings and bandages to keep the wound clean. He won’t last the night otherwise.’
Oh shit, I thought. Goddamn bloody shit. I hauled myself out of the armchair.
The enormous, Gothic-grim hospital was a mile or so away, along Whitechapel, its edifice forbiddingly bleak in the moonlight. I’d taken time only to wash away some of the blood and to pull on a grey sweatshirt, its sleeves cut away at the elbows, to protect me from the slight chill that had come with the early hours. Taking the pistol – I noted for the first time it was a Browning.22 – from the table, I tucked it back into the waistband of my pants and left the house. I ducked into the pitch-black alleyway, a hand running along the rough brick wall for guidance, and returned to the Austin open-top that had brought us here. The drive hadn’t taken long, but I stayed in the car on the ramp outside the hospital’s main entrance for a while, steeling myself to go inside. Only the thought that Wilhelm Stern had saved my life twice and the more I delayed the worse it was for him made me open the car door and mount the steps to the open entrance (those doors were open because old bones had jammed them that way).
Holding the lantern I’d brought with me shoulder-high, I went inside.
I still hate thinking about those wards and corridors packed with human debris, some of the corpses piled on top of each other as if their last moments had been spent struggling, fighting for attention maybe; now they were locked together in eternal strife, or at least until their bones collapsed. There were smaller forms among them, the deteriorated bodies of children, but I refused to look at their little withered faces, treading through them carefully, my eyes averted, looking directly ahead. They were everywhere, those mouldering things that were once living, breathing people, in every space, every corner, as I’d known they would be, and I shuddered each time my foot brushed against something brittle and crumbly. The sour smell was everywhere too and I clamped my hand over my mouth and nose to mask the worst of it.
It took almost an hour to find the room I was looking for and still I hadn’t toughened myself against the carnage around me: I was scared to my boots, and nausea was only a heave away. Even as I broke into locked glass cabinets and examined vials and jars, looked through cupboards for gauze and surgical dressings, then into drawers for pills and syringes, I kept looking over my shoulder, expecting to see something I really didn’t want to see. I gathered up anything that might be useful, including sedatives, forcing myself to be calm, to take my time and collect essentials and maybe not-so essentials, loading scissors and safety pins, antiseptic creams and boxes of Elastoplast, anything that came to hand, into a laundry bag I’d taken from a storage closet. Only when I was sure I was done did I run from that place.
It was growing light behind the distant rooftops as I drove along the broad Whitechapel High Street and weariness was making my eyelids heavy and my hands like lumps of lead on the steering wheel. It didn’t take long to find my way back to Old Castle Street, and I was soon hurrying through the alleyway, my legs hardly able to support me, then pushing open the door to No 26.
Cissie was sitting on the stairs at the end of the short corridor, dawn light pressing itself through the begrimed window overhead to flush her hair and shoulders with its grey mantle. From her muffled sobs I knew I was too late. Stern was already dead.