“We do. Or else it’s cut a way in here and risk bringing the whole damn thing down with us.”
Wilderness understood the risk. The atrium looked shaky, flaking white paint and green moss—in all probability rotten in places.
“Still we’s’ll manage, eh son?”
Abner crossed first. Wilderness followed slowly, inclining his head and shoulders inward to offset the weight of the drill, which otherwise threatened to unbalance him in the direction of a four-storey drop.
Once across Wilderness slung the rope around a chimney, and his grandfather climbed down one floor and slid the catch on a sash window.
The safe was a Milner List 5. Tall and tough.
Abner surmised that it dated from circa 1900—knuckle hinges, three triple-stump fantail locks, and a sandwich door with a drill-resistant plate at its core.
The plate fell to Abner’s touch, to his touch and his Phillips Motor Hammer Impact drill.
Once or twice they stopped to listen to the dull thump of bombs falling. Wilderness wondered how close they were. It sounded as far off as Hackney, but the volume was rising and the bombs crossing London manors . . . Islington, Highbury, Holloway, closer. Abner pressed on. His shoulder against the back of the drill,
“Once the all clear sounds Gawd knows who’ll hear the fuckin’ racket we’re makin’.”
But they had the door open long before the raid was over.
Wilderness packed up the drill. Abner stuffed his bag with white fivers and chuckled to himself.
“Easy money, son. Easy money.”
Back on the roof, Abner handed the bag of money to Wilderness and took the drill off him.
“Let me. I’m younger than you, Grandad.”
“Younger don’t mean stronger. The day you can beat me in an arm wrestle . . .”
Wilderness walked the narrow parapet between the glass atrium and the drop like a man on the high wire. All but dancing. He wore the two handles of Abner’s old canvas bag like shoulder straps. The money and the hand tools centred in his back for balance. He reached the other side and turned to Abner.
It was the moment before the moment when a voice in Wilderness’s head would have said “home and dry.”
A voice that came from the roof of the neighbouring house said, “There they are.”
And the voice in Wilderness’s head said “Who? Me?”
Abner was crouched down, just hoisting the drill bag onto his shoulder. He turned. A London bobby, pointy hat and all, had appeared on the rooftop and behind him was a bloke in evening dress clutching a 12-bore shotgun.
“I told you I heard something. Thieves I say, thieves!”
Wilderness froze as the barrel of the gun levelled on him.
Abner stood up, the bag now dangling from his right shoulder.
“Leg it son, he won’t shoot.”
Wilderness did not move. The copper was saying something about staying where they were and being under arrest. None of it seemed to translate into meaning. It might have been Chinese for all Wilderness knew. All he could see was the gun, and all he could hear was the pulse pounding in his chest.
Abner set off along the parapet at the same dancing pace Wilderness had used. Younger was not stronger. It was nimbler. It was more agile. Abner’s natural gait, limping slightly, coming down hard on the right foot was nowhere near as light or balanced as Wilderness’s—and the weight of the drill on his shoulder threw him off kilter.
He was halfway across when the bag slipped to the crook of his elbow. Instinct overtook logic. Instead of letting the drill fall to earth he attempted to right it with a sudden jerk of his shoulder and the shift of weight swung the bag too far to the left, across his chest, his whole body following in a corkscrew twist with the slow inevitability of a pendulum—and tipped him through the glass roof.
His last word as he fell, roaring up through the sound of breaking glass, was “Scaaaaarper!”
Then the bang as his body hit the floor below, and the cascade of shattered glass and splintered timber as the atrium collapsed on top of him.
§16
Wilderness found a pair of wire cutters under the wad of money. At Gospel Oak Station he snipped the lock off a bike and cycled back in the direction of Stepney. He got off and walked for a while close to Highbury Corner. Most of one side of the street was in ruins. Air raid wardens, firemen, and Heavy Rescue swarmed across the rubble. No one paid the slightest bit of notice to him. Nor did they when he abandoned the bike by the London Hospital, where ambulances swept in and out every few seconds like bees at the hive.
§17
He lay awake, watching the night pale into day through the skylight. Around dawn it started to rain.
Abner was dead. He was certain Abner was dead. The old man would not have his identification card on him, but it would not take the police long to work out who he was.
It took till breakfast.
He sat at the kitchen table—a steel Morrison shelter to which Abner had bolted a wooden top—with a cup of tea.
Merle was asleep. He’d told her nothing. She had come in long after he had got home, another night on the game, and he’d told her nothing.
The copper at the door was not a local. He knew all of them by sight. This one was in civvies. A rain-spotted, belted macintosh and a trilby. The copper who stood behind him, buttoned to the chin, helmet clutched to his chest, was a manor face. One he knew from the streets without ever knowing his name.
“This is the home of Abner Riley?”
They knew damn well it was. As surely as they knew he was dead.
Wilderness strived for the appearance of innocence, to sound and look closer to thirteen than seventeen.
“Grandad ain’t up yet.”
The detective was torn between the certainty of duty, to investigate a crime, and the civility of duty, to report a death, and it seemed to Wilderness that the ambiguities of this were beyond the man. He wanted to explain and he wanted to accuse. His cheek twitched and he could not quite hold the tough-guy pose of looking him in the eye. And when he stepped in uninvited, he removed his hat.
“Anyone else at home, son?”
Wilderness had not heard Merle stir.
“What’s the matter?” Wilderness asked.
“Your grandad’s met with a . . .”
He was searching for a euphemism or perhaps just a small lie.
“An accident.”
Wilderness reached for an equivalent fib.
“You mean the air raid? You mean he’s dead?”
The detective looked at the bloke in uniform.
The bloke in uniform took the hint.
“’Fraid he is dead, but it wasn’t the raid. He died pulling a job.”
At last they had got to the point. It could only be a matter of a minute or so before they asked him where he had been last night.
“Would you mind telling me where you were round about ten o’clock last night, son?”
From behind him Wilderness heard Merle say, “He was home with me.”
She was propped in the doorway to her bedroom, a dressing gown pulled loosely round her, one hand holding it closed over her breasts, the other pressing a cigarette to her lips.
“Mrs. Riley?” asked the detective.
The uniform shook his head at this. Merle drew on her cigarette and didn’t bother to answer.
“You’re alibiing the boy?”
“Nah . . . I’d only be doing that if a crime had been committed wouldn’t I? You said an accident. What accident?”
“There has been a crime. Abner Riley died . . . accidentally . . . in the act of committing a burglary.”
“You don’t say? My Abner was a tom? Lord love a duck.”
The coppers looked at one another again. They knew.
“You’re saying the boy was with you all night?”
“Yep. Once a raid starts up. I just stay put. Ain’t been down a shelter since 1941. Who wants to die with strangers in a stinkin’ hole in the ground. Stay put, sit it out. That’s our way. Don’t even sit under the table no more. We had cup of char and a bit o’ toast an’ Bovril, listened to the bombers and went to bed. Tucked him in meself round about eleven, didn’t I, Johnnie?”
Wilderness hated the last line. It was a lie too far, a snook too cocked, but then his squirming at this could easily be read as the embarrassment of a sixteen-year-old in the presence of adults. At least she hadn’t said they’d listened to the wireless, only to have them ask her to name what programmes they’d listened to.
“Now, if you haven’t got any more questions, I’d appreciate being left in peace. I just lost me bloke. This is . . .” and here she paused. “A house in mourning.” Emphatically, her voice rising a fraction, “A house in mourning . . . so . . . be a mensch and just fuck off will you.”
They left. Wilderness had no doubts they knew, no doubts that they’d go away only to come back.
Merle lit up a second cigarette from the stub of the first, and poured herself a cup of tea. Silent tears at the corners of her eyes.
A long exhale, a cloud of smoke and a first sip. The tears suspended in time and space, ready to roll.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want to say the word.”
“What word?”
“Dead. That word.”
“And exactly how did Abner end up dead?”
Wilderness told her. She tilted back her head while she listened, as though it were a matter of pride that a tear should not roll.
“And where,” she said, still looking at the ceiling, “is the money?”
“On the roof.”
Now she looked at him, tears escaping her clutch to stream down her cheeks.
“What?” she said. “Out in the bleeding rain?”
§18
Merle took the money. Over two hundred pounds. For safekeeping, she told him. All Wilderness could hear was “keeping,” and keep it she did. She kept all of Abner’s loot, just as Abner had. Abner had bunged him a couple of quid every so often, but kept the bulk. It seemed to Wilderness that the old man must have built up quite a stash in his time—a successful thief, with only a fence to pay off. Rationing was a leveller, but it was clear they had lived well before the war. Well, but not high. A discreet level of consumption, attracting, whatever the rumours on the street, as little attention as possible. Abner had a decent suit, Merle some posh frocks—but the money was never flaunted. No “drinks for everybody” in the pub, no diamonds on her fingers.
All in all it seemed there must be a lot stashed away. The ill-gotten gains of all the jobs they’d pulled.
Wilderness never found it. Now it was Merle who bunged him a couple of quid every so often—and she saw he never went short, peeling notes off a roll in her handbag—but Wilderness never found the stash.
§19
The day after Wilderness was called to a police lineup at the Leman Street nick. The bloke in evening dress who’d stood on the roof pointing a shotgun at him failed to pick him out.
Toff diffidence saved him. The sense of fair play that would not have restrained most men restrained this one.
“One has to be sure, d’ye see? Couldn’t point the finger at a chap without being one hundred per cent sure. It wouldn’t be cricket,” he had said to the duty sergeant.
He could point a gun but not the finger?
Wilderness could not hear the sergeant’s muted reply, but it was bound to be along the lines of, “But he’s the old bloke’s grandson. Bound to be him. Stands to reason.”
And the toff had replied, audibly, “No it doesn’t.”
And after that all the sergeant could do was turn him loose with, “Don’t think you got away with it, son. Yer card’s marked.”
§20
On May Day 1945 the news broke that Hitler was dead. For weeks now “It’ll be all over soon” had been a rolling cliché on the streets of London.
Wilderness thought, “I’m free. They’ll never call me up now.”
He had watched his schoolmates vanish into the army over the last year and more—ever since D-Day. And ever since D-Day he had thought the odds on the army claiming him to be diminishing on a daily basis.
In the spring new weapons had crashed down on London, the noisy, puttering doodlebug, the silent, devastating V2. Enough V2s and there’d be nothing left of England—but there weren’t enough, it was Hitler’s last roll of the dice, and when the Allied Forces overran the launch pads the raids stopped. By the end of April even the blackout restrictions had been lifted.
The neighbours were cautious.
“Hard to believe, innit? I mean to say, the buggers could be back any minute.”
Merle had had none of this. She had ripped down the blackouts and thrown open the windows, clouds of dust cascading around her.
“Enough, enough of darkness and dirt. Enough of bombs. Enough of pompous little twats in tin hats. Enough is enough!”
It reminded Wilderness of scenes close to the end of
Great Expectations
. Ripping down the moth-eaten curtains that had shut out the light from Satis House for a generation.