Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered
pain.
‘No,’ she said, so loudly that he wondered whether somehow she had managed to bring her face closer to his. ‘I know you. I know that isn’t the truth.’
Out in the street the wind was bringing snow again, tiny flakes of it driven horizontally into the faces of the small groups of watchers. The wind tore at the orange tapes so that they strained and flapped and the policemen guarding them turned their backs into it and moved uneasily to and fro. Martin stood motionless, watching the store front. Along with everyone else, he had been moved so far back that the effort of staring into the distance made his eyes ache, and they watered with the cold blast of wind.
The crane had moved round once, very slowly, and was now stationary again. The fireman had brought their ladders forward in its place, fragile-looking metal probes reaching up against the buckled frontage. Martin could see the yellow helmets swaying at the ladder tips. Everything seemed to move so slowly. What were they doing? Please hurry up. The words beat in his head with the throb of blood. Why so long?
Through the tears that the wind scoured out of his eyes Martin saw a chunk of brick fall from the raw edge of the façade. It plummeted downwards in a shower of smaller fragments and he heard the sharp indrawn breaths of the people pressing around him. Amongst the wreckage the rescue workers scattered and, involuntarily, they turned their faces up to look at the sagging wall and the patch of sky seeming to press down on top of it. Then, when the dust had blown away, they bent to their work again. Painstakingly the chunks of concrete and splintered beams and broken shop fittings were still being lifted away. Part of what had been the ground floor was exposed now, its carpets whitened with thick dust. The tiny flakes of snow settled and vanished, and settled again unnoticed.
In the big control trailer that had joined the line of police vehicles, the police commander was watching the time. It was just after three o’clock, and the light was already fading. The power supply to the store had failed with the explosion, but generators had been brought in and the emergency lights had been hauled into place, ready to be switched on. The work would go on for many hours yet.
3.10 p.m. The commander moved abruptly to the trailer door and looked out at what the bomb had done. He knew with a degree of certainty now where the bomb had been planted, what type it was, how much explosive it had detonated and who had been responsible for it. He didn’t know whether there was a chance of reaching any survivors in time. They had been buried more than five hours.
‘Three,’ he said aloud, without turning away from the door.
The thermal imaging cameras had located three heat sources, human bodies. They were in the basement of the store, lying four storeys directly below the point where the bomb had exploded. Two of them were very close together and the third some yards away. They could have been in the basement at the time of the explosion, or they could have fallen into it as the store collapsed inwards on itself. The policeman put his finger to his moustache, the only sign of anxiety that he ever revealed. It should only be a matter of minutes, an hour at the most, to reach them now.
But the broken façade hung over them, unsupported. It had taken precious time to discover that it couldn’t be knocked outwards to fall harmlessly into the street. There was no time to erect scaffolding and bring it down piece by piece. The only hope was to work faster, to uncover the remaining three bodies before it fell, or the wind brought it down.
For the hundredth time since early morning the commander offered up thanks that the bomb had gone off almost as the store opened. Instead of hundreds of casualties in a store packed with Christmas shoppers, the total so far was eight deaths. In the last hour two people had been brought alive from the wreckage near the main doors. One of them was a store commissionaire and the other a teenage boy, both seriously injured. There were thirty or so further casualties, some of them passers-by who had only been cut by flying glass. And there were three more people, perhaps alive, to be recovered before the teams of rescuers could be pulled back and the frontage knocked down into the tangled mass already lying beneath it.
Unless, the commander thought, the wind does it first.
He went down the trailer steps, settling the protective helmet on his head, and felt the full force of the wind in his face. He walked quickly, with his head bent, past the ruined windows again. The bobbing yellow helmets and the orange fluorescent jackets of the police seemed to be the only spots of colour in a world that had been drained of it.
A screen of tarpaulins had been rigged up and the constables stood aside to let the commander through. Behind the store front, over the spot where they were digging into the basement, they had made a kind of shelter. Lengths of scaffolding had been roughly bolted together and roofed with planks, as makeshift as a child’s play house. Beneath the flimsy protection the rescuers went on burrowing downwards. One of them glanced upwards for an instant, his face coated with grime.
The commander crouched in the dirt and the chunks of debris were prised loose and handed backwards past him. When the bodies were recovered and the site was safe once more, every piece would be examined by the forensic teams.
The commander gestured that he wanted to move forwards and the firemen made way for him to inch forward under the planking. Looking down he could see a coloured edge of carpet in the store’s colours, and the thickness of floor beneath it sliced as neatly as cake. Below him two firemen were working like machines, hauling out the rubble. And beneath them, the commander knew, eight or ten feet down, were two of the three bodies.
The space the rescuers were working in, cramped as close as they could under the hopeful protective umbrella, was tiny. The commander delivered his brief word of praise and encouragement and squirmed backwards again to leave them to their task. His opposite number from the fire service was waiting inside the curtain of tarpaulins.
‘We should reach them within the hour, God willing,’ he said. The policeman nodded and they stood in silence watching the work, the mounting piles of debris as it was feverishly dug out and set aside.
‘From the look of all that …’ the commander murmured, and they both knew that he meant no one could survive under all that. The fire officer’s brief glance upwards revealed his anxiety for his men, working under threat of burial themselves to reach victims who were almost certainly dead. But neither of the senior men spoke again, and the slow process of cutting and lifting went on as the firemen fought their way downwards.
Steve heard it first.
It lasted only a few seconds but it was the unmistakable high whine of a power drill. It was cutting through the darkness. It meant that they really were coming for them, at last.
‘Annie. I can hear them. Listen.’
As if to prove it there was another noise at once, the sharp ring of metal on stone and then the whine of the drill again, dropping in pitch. Steve felt relief and gratitude numb the pain inside him like a powerful drug. When Annie didn’t answer he was furiously angry with her.
‘Can’t you hear?’ he demanded. The darkness swallowed his words and Annie listened for something else, longing to hear. What would rescue sound like, when she had longed for it so much?
Then it came, no more than a tiny metallic scraping, once and then silence, and then again, louder. It sounds like music, she thought wildly. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I hear it.’
‘Now we can shout,’ Steve exulted. ‘I’ll count three. Then scream as loud as you can.’
He counted, one, two, three, and they screamed together. It sounded so tiny, the only noise that they could make, eaten up by the hateful dark. Annie’s head fell back and she closed her eyes. It was no good. Of course it was no good.
Steve was thinking, a power drill of some kind. That means they’ve brought the power in, cables, floodlights, everything possible. He had an image of the black cables snaking over the rubble, the intent faces of the rescuers with the harsh shadows from the lights across them. There had been silence for so long, since the first wailing sirens, that he had been afraid he had imagined the other noises. He had begun to fear that there was no rescue at all. He had even wondered – he could confront