Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered
looking at him, her face creased with sympathy. Martin put on his sheepskin coat, feeling in the pockets for his keys.
‘If … she telephones here,’ Audrey said carefully, ‘I’ll tell her what’s happened and where you’ve gone.’
‘I’ll ring in as soon as I can.’
He was ready now. He hugged the boys in turn, quickly. Benjy had stopped crying and was holding the corner of Audrey’s apron. Tom followed Martin to the door and reached out to him as it opened, the cold air blowing in around them.
‘Is … is Mum in that shop, the one on the TV?’
Martin’s throat felt as if it were closing on the words as he lied, ‘No, she isn’t. But if there are things like that going on today, I think she should come home. Don’t worry.’
He closed the door and left the three of them standing. He ran back over Audrey’s slipper-prints to the gate, and to the car parked in the roadway. Inside was the familiar litter of crumpled papers and discarded toys. Annie used the car mostly, for taking the boys to and fro. The thought came to him: What if she’s dead? and he leant forward over the steering wheel. He heard his own supplication – Please, let her be safe.
Then the engine roared and he swung the wheel sharply, heading the car towards the image of the store that he could see as clearly as he could see the road dipping ahead of him.
The police commander followed his opposite number from the fire brigade down the steps of the control van and across the few yards of pavement to the gaping, shattered windows. In the nearest one, on the corner, a tall Christmas tree made out of some green shiny stuff had been blown sideways. It lay amongst torn screens papered with scarlet satin ribbons. Broken glass lay everywhere, and the commander’s shoes crunched in it as he walked.
They came to what had once been the big doors, and looked upwards. The grey sky showed overhead through the torn ends of girders and ragged floors. Dust still whirled in the air and it blew up in choking gusts behind the firemen as they inched under the tangle of brick and metal.
A young policeman stepped forward and handed the commander a protective helmet. There were two other men waiting. One, a big man in a waterproof jacket, was the borough engineer. He had been called straight out of bed and, under his waterproofs and sweater, he was still in his pyjamas. The other man was grey-faced and his silver hair stood up in unbrushed wings at the sides of his head. He held a helmet in one hand, and as the senior officers approached he put it on with an awkward, unpractised movement. He was one of the directors of the store, and he had arrived ten minutes ago from his home in Hampstead.
‘Our main problem,’ the fire brigade officer was saying, and he gestured upwards as he spoke, ‘is that this portion of the frontage is almost entirely unsupported. There is a real danger that our work underneath will topple it this way.’ He held his arm up to illustrate, flat-handed as if he was directing traffic, and then swung it graphically downwards. Even as they stood there conferring the crooked edifice above them seemed to creak and sway.
‘It will take hours to bring it down from the top,’ the engineer said. ‘Erecting the scaffolding alone will take time. My works people can do it as quickly as is humanly possible, of course, but …’
The unspoken truth was that if there were any survivors underneath, they couldn’t wait that long.
‘Can you go on down as it is?’ the director asked, ‘whilst the work goes on to secure the frontage?’
The policeman and the fireman glanced at each other before the fireman said, ‘Yes. At some risk.’
There was another pause. The policeman waited, touching the corner of his small, clipped moustache with a fingertip. At length he said, ‘Is that the consensus, gentlemen? To continue the rescue operation and to work to make the façade safe, as far as possible, at the same time?’
The three men nodded. ‘Good,’ the policeman said quietly. ‘Thank you.’
They waited side by side, sheltered from the wind by the threatening frontage. A medical team stood a few yards away, huddled together, not speaking. Everyone was watching the black-coated backs of two firemen who were kneeling side by side to lift chunks of masonry away from the lip of a black hollow.
‘Heat camera pinpointed this one. They can see her now. It’s another young girl.’
The commander glanced across at the medical team.
‘Alive?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
The minutes passed. Overhead a crane was being manoeuvred into position to begin the painstaking process of dismantling the toppling store front, piece by piece. The rescue workers in their helmets passed to and fro underneath it, never looking up. The commander waited until the second body was recovered. The girl’s legs looked pitifully thin and white as they lifted her out and laid her on a stretcher. She followed her friend into an ambulance and then away through the cordons towards the hospital.
The commander ducked his head and walked back through the splinters of glass to the trailer. A preliminary report from the bomb squad was waiting for him. It had been a single bomb, sited on the third floor towards the back of the store, probably in a cloakroom. It appeared now that the possibility of another unexploded bomb hidden elsewhere in the store could be discounted.
‘Thank Christ for that, at least,’ the commander murmured. The explosives experts had been at work for an hour. One of them handed him a second report and he glanced quickly at it. Diagrams showed the probable direction of the blast waves following the explosion, and the sliding masses of rubble.
‘Almost exactly the same as at Brighton, sir,’ one of the officers murmured.
‘Except that by a rare stroke of good fortune the PM hadn’t slipped in there for her Christmas shopping.’
‘No, sir.’
According to the calculations, the most hopeful place for survivors in the centre of the store was the basement, sheltered from the falling wreckage by the reinforced thickness of the ground floor. The commander stared through the trailer window at the tangled mountain resting on top of that floor. He put his finger up to his moustache again.
‘Side access to the basement?’ he asked.
‘Almost entirely blocked, sir. They’re working to clear it from both sides now.’
The commander looked down at his watch. It was eleven fifty-five. If there were any survivors in the basement, they had been buried for two hours and thirteen minutes.
Eleven years ago.
Annie wasn’t cold any more. She felt almost comfortable, as if she was drifting in a small boat on a wide, dark lake. Steve’s hand was her anchor.
She was trying to remember what had happened eleven years ago. It was important for herself, but it was more important still because she wanted to tell Steve. She felt him close to her, listening. The sensation of drifting intensified. They were both of them afloat, a long way from the shore.
‘I chose the easy option,’ she said again.
‘And what was it?’ His voice was as warm as if his mouth was against her ear and his fingers tangled in her hair.
‘I chose what would be safe, and simple. Because it would be … wholesome.’ Annie laughed, a cracked note. ‘That’s a funny notion, isn’t it? As if you can turn your life into wholemeal bread.’
Her memory was clear now, the images as vivid as early-morning dreams.
The day she met Matthew was exactly eight weeks before her wedding day. She came up the stairs to the fifth floor of the mansion block where her friend Louise lived. The green-painted stairwell smelt of carbolic soap and metal polish, just as it always did. The lift was out of order, just as it always was and Annie was panting, the John Lewis carrier bag bumping against her leg, as she reached Louise’s door. She rang the bell and when Louise opened the