I finally found it, a square of unbroken pavement in front of a blown-out bakery, with the "valuables" neatly lined up against it: a radio, a boot, two serving spoons like the one Colonel Godalming had threatened me with, a lady's beaded evening bag. A rescue worker was standing guard next to them.
"Halt!" he said, stepping in front of them as I came up, holding a pocket torch or a gun. "No one's allowed inside the incident perimeter."
"I'm ARP," I said hastily. "Jack Harker. Chelsea." I held up the teapot. "They sent me down with this."
It was a torch. He flicked it on and off, an eyeblink. "Sorry," he said. "We've had a good deal of looting recently." He took the teapot and placed it at the end of the line next to the evening bag. "Caught a man last week going through the pockets of the bodies laid out in the street waiting for the mortuary van. Terrible how some people will take advantage of something like this."
I went back up to where the rescue workers were digging. Jack was at the mouth of the shaft, hauling buckets up and handing them back. I got in line behind him.
"Have they found them yet?" I asked him as soon as there was a lull in the bombing.
"Quiet!" a voice shouted from the hole, and the man in the balaclava repeated, "Quiet, everyone! We must have absolute quiet!"
Everyone stopped working and listened. Jack had handed me a bucket full of bricks, and the handle cut into my hands. For a second there was absolute silence, and then the drone of a plane and the distant swish and crump of an HE.
"Don't worry," the voice from the hole shouted, "we're nearly there." The buckets began coming up out of the hole again.
I hadn't heard anything, but apparently down in the shaft they had, a voice or the sound of tapping, and I felt relieved, both that one of them at least was still alive, and that the diggers were on course. I'd been on an incident in October where we'd had to stop halfway down and sink a new shaft because the rubble kept distorting and displacing the sound. Even if the shaft was directly above the victim, it tended to go crooked in working past obstacles, and the only way to keep it straight was with frequent soundings. I thought of Jack digging for Colonel Godalming with the banister. He hadn't taken any soundings at all. He had seemed to know exactly where he was going.
The men in the shaft called for the jack again, and Jack and I lowered it down to them. As the man below it reached up to take it, Jack stopped. He raised his head, as if he were listening.
"What is it?" I said. I couldn't hear anything but the ack-ack guns in Hyde Park. "Did you hear someone calling?"
"Where's the bloody jack?" the foreman shouted.
"It's too late," Jack said to me. "They're dead."
"Come along, get it down here," the foreman shouted. "We haven't got all day."
He handed the jack down.
"Quiet," the foreman shouted, and above us, like a ghostly echo, we could hear the balaclava call, "Quiet, please, everyone."
A church clock began to chime and I could hear the balaclava say irritatedly, "We must have absolute quiet."
The clock chimed four and stopped, and there was a skittering sound of dirt falling on metal. Then silence, and a faint sound.
"Quiet!" the foreman called again, and there was another silence, and the sound again. A whimper. Or a moan. "We hear you," he shouted. "Don't be afraid."
"One of them's still alive," I said.
Jack didn't say anything.
"We just heard them," I said angrily.
Jack shook his head.
"We'll need lumber for bracing," the man in the balaclava said to Jack, and I expected him to tell him it was no use, but he went off immediately and came back dragging a white-painted bookcase.
It still had three books in it. I helped Jack and the balaclava knock the shelves out of the case and then took the books down to the store of "valuables". The guard was sitting on the pavement going through the beaded evening bag.
"Taking inventory," he said, scrambling up hastily. He jammed a lipstick and a handkerchief into the bag. "So's to make certain nothing gets stolen."
"I've brought you something to read," I said, and laid the books next to the teapot. " Crime and Punishment ."
I toiled back up the hill and helped Jack lover the bookshelves down the shaft and after a few minutes buckets began coming up again. We reformed our scraggly bucket brigade, the balaclava at the head of it and me and then Jack at its end.
The all-clear went. As soon as it wound down, the foreman took another sounding. This time we didn't hear anything, and when the buckets started again I handed them to Jack without looking at him.
It began to get light in the east, a slow greying of the hills above us. Two of them, several storeys high, stood where the row of houses that had escaped the night before had been, and we were still in their shadow, though I could see the shaft now, with the end of one of the white bookshelves sticking up from it like a gravestone.
The buckets began to come more slowly.
"Put out your cigarettes!" the foreman called up, and we all stopped, trying to catch the smell of gas. If they were dead, as Jack had said, it was most likely gas leaking in from the broken mains that had killed them, and not internal injuries. The week before we had brought up a boy and his dog, not a scratch on them. The dog had barked and whimpered almost up to when we found them, and the ambulance driver said she thought they'd only been dead a few minutes.
I couldn't smell any gas and after a minute the foreman said excitedly, "I see them!"
The balaclava leaned over the shaft, his hands on his knees. "Are they alive?"
"Yes! Fetch an ambulance!"
The balaclava went leaping down the hill, skidding on broken bricks that skittered down in a minor avalanche.
I knelt over the shaft. "Will they need a stretcher?" I called down.
"No," the foreman said, and I knew by the sound of his voice they were dead.
"Both of them?" I said.
"Yes."
I stood up. "How did you know they were dead?" I said, turning to look at Jack. "How did"
He wasn't there. I looked down the hill. The balaclava was nearly to the bottom grabbing at a broken window sash to stop his headlong descent, his wake a smoky cloud of brick dust — but Jack was nowhere to be seen.
It was nearly dawn. I could see the grey hills and at the far end of them the warden and his "valuables". There was another rescue party on the third hill over, still digging. I could see Swales handing down a bucket.
"Give a hand here," the foreman said impatiently and hoisted the jack up to me. I hauled it over to the side and then came back and helped the foreman out of the shaft. His hands were filthy, covered in reddish-brown mud.
"Was it the gas that killed them?" I asked, even though he was already pulling out a packet of cigarettes.
"No," he said, shaking a cigarette out and taking it between his teeth. He patted the front of his coverall, leaving red stains.
"How long have they been dead?" I asked.
He found his matches, struck one, and lit the cigarette. "Shortly after we last heard them, I should say," he said, and I thought, but they were already dead by then. And Jack knew it. "They've been dead at least two hours."
I looked at my watch. I read a little past six. "But the mine didn't kill them?"
He took the cigarette between his fingers and blew a long puff of smoke. When he put the cigarette back in his mouth there was a red smear on it. "Loss of blood."
The next night the Luftwaffe was early. I hadn't got much sleep after the incident. Morris had fretted about his son the whole day and Swales had teased Renfrew mercilessly. "Goering's found out about your spying," he said, "And now he's sent his Stukas after you."
I finally went up to the third floor and tried to sleep in the spotter's chair, but it was too light. The afternoon was cloudy, and the fires burning in the East End gave the sky a nasty reddish cast.