Knox shifted his weight, leaning against the wall. The old bricks crumbled under him and sent him skidding down into the hole in the earth. He grabbed at the wet dirt but couldn’t stop from crashing into the waterlogged, pitted floor of the crater. He pulled himself up, wiping his hands on his trousers and feeling filthy liquid pooling in his shoes and soaking his feet. For a brief, hysterical moment he stood in the centre of the void, daring his imaginary tail, or anyone else, to show themselves and take a shot at him, but there was only silence and darkness. After a few seconds he came to his senses and hauled himself back up out of the crater.
He thought about walking back to Soho, but decided to head in the opposite direction instead, to the one part of London he knew even better.
The night gave him one final stroke of luck when he was back on London Wall – a taxi to flag down. The driver had just dropped someone off at Liverpool Street station and was heading back into town to pick up some more late-night custom. He had no desire to go east again, but Knox persuaded him by offering double his fare.
Twenty minutes later the cab dropped Knox off on Roman Road, which, as its name suggested, was the old straight-arrow Roman route out of the city. He walked north towards Victoria Park. The park, as its name also suggested, was a gift from Queen Victoria to the people of the East End, a space where they could escape the drudgery of life for a few hours. It was a kind gesture, but it assumed that the people it had been created for could afford to take time off from working all hours every day to make ends meet to promenade through the park and smell its roses.
Twenty years after the Blitz, Bethnal Green also still wore its scars. Knox passed rows of old terraced houses, condemned but showing signs of occupation, collapsed buildings waiting to be cleared, and several low-rise blocks that had emerged from the wreckage of the war over the last decade. It was quiet now, but Knox remembered nights filled with people doubled over fires in the middle of streets and children with filthy faces tempting rats into traps so they could turn them into pets or a meal.
The war had been equal parts blessing and curse for Bethnal Green. The poverty of the years before the war had been grinding. It had killed countless people here. It had killed Knox’s parents. After the war there was no way life could go back to how it had been. The East End had become too much of a symbol of London’s tenacity and resilience to be left to fester and ruin. So, slowly but surely a new Bethnal Green was growing through its cracks and wounds.
The buildings might be changing, but the streets were still the same. He walked up Globe Road, then cut right onto Cyprus Street, one of the few old streets of terraced cottages that looked like it hadn’t been touched by the twentieth century at all. It was a long straight street, uninterrupted on one side and with a small turning off it halfway along the other – the perfect place for Knox to reassure himself one last time that no one was shadowing him.
Knox was still running on adrenaline but after ten minutes watching the silent, empty street it finally started to wear off. He needed to find somewhere to spend the rest of the night, but before he did he walked the short distance to Sewardstone Road, where his grandmother’s house had stood until it was knocked down five years ago.
Sewardstone Road had been a dirty, narrow street of tenement houses pressed up against the stagnant, filthy water of Regent’s Canal. He could still smell the canal now, but the tightly packed old houses were gone, replaced by modern blocks of flats. Knox stopped for a moment outside the flat that now stood where he’d once lived in a tiny, two-room house with his grandmother. He remembered all the early mornings when he’d creep back in after a night’s wandering the city, and the few times his grandmother had caught him before he’d reached his bed and spent hours screaming at him, out of anger, love, and fear of losing him like she’d lost his mother. Then he thought about how he’d now also lost the only two places he’d ever really called home.
He headed south back towards Roman Road. Next to Bethnal Green tube station he found the grandly and wholly inaccurately named City View Hotel. It was an old Victorian dosshouse that had been turned into the kind of place that rented rooms by the hour as well as by the night.
Knox woke up the night clerk, who was not happy about being disturbed, paid for a room until morning, and had the stairs pointed out to him. His room was at the very top of the building, and he might have been able to see the city through his high attic window, if the walls of a raised train track hadn’t blocked the view.
He locked the door and wedged the back of the chair that served as a bedside table under the handle. Then he pulled off his jacket and trousers, balled the jacket up with the papers and passports under the bed, splashed his face, trousers and socks in the small sink, and lay down on the thin mattress. Even the sound of a freight train passing within ten feet of him, rattling the window and shaking the bed, didn’t stop him from falling asleep almost instantly.
CHAPTER 43
Valera stood in the middle of Mikhailovsky Garden. In front of her the Moyka flowed lazily across the northern side of the park, feeding into the Neva, the great river that split Leningrad in half. To her right, the faded copper roof of Saint Michael’s Castle was just visible above the trees that edged the park. To her left, the domes of the Church of the Saviour on the Spilled Blood rose high above her. It was late summer, and the air was pungent with the smell of city life and anticipation.
Valera remembered this day well. It was the day the German army had finally surrounded the city and the siege of Leningrad began.
She heard a droning noise in the distance, getting louder and closer. It wasn’t a barge – there hadn’t been any traffic on the river for days. It was the first wave of Luftwaffe arriving to bomb the city. Valera started running towards the Saviour on the Spilled Blood, hoping the band of trees between the church and the park would offer her some protection from the assault that was about to be unleashed.
But when she reached the trees she was suddenly no longer in Leningrad. She was in Povenets B, running towards the power plant and watching it explode in front of her. She saw the blast rip through the side of the plant and the school. She felt the first shockwave ripple past her, smashing windows and showering her with glass. Then a second, more powerful one smacked her in the chest like a hammer, throwing her backwards off her feet.
But instead of hitting the ground and feeling rubble stab her in the back, she found herself in a dark room, tied to a chair and gasping for breath. Her wrists were sore from the rope holding her in place, her head felt heavy, and her whole body was cramped, as if she’d been in the same position for hours. She didn’t know what was real, what was memory, and what was neither. And she had no idea how many times she’d gone through this horrific cycle of torture.
Sometimes her mother was with her in Leningrad, sometimes it was the depths of winter and she was foraging Mikhailovsky Garden for food. Sometimes she could see Ledjo through his classroom window as she ran towards him, sometimes his lifeless body lay in the middle of the destroyed school, bruised, bloodied, and covered in dust. Sometimes she was alone in the dark room. Sometimes the figures in masks shouted at her in Russian and English. And sometimes they stayed in the shadows, throwing their words and ice-cold buckets of water at her.