As she pushed her bike, Iris fell into the rhythm of the noise of the pedals turning, the bumping of the tyres on the rough path. Her thoughts meandered from their usual concerns of patients needing help, forms to be filled in, notes to be sent to the various doctors, local organisations and voluntary organisations, all of whom had a role in the wider welfare of her charges. You could spend twenty-four hours a day at the task and still not complete everything, which sometimes preyed on her mind. It was good to let her thoughts wander, as Olive and Kenny walked a little way ahead, checking off the streets on their section.
The last time she’d had the chance to do such a thing had been during that journey back from the Cotswolds. She felt her face flush at the memory. She had not had any contact with Dr Leeson since, but that did not mean she hadn’t thought of him. Really, she didn’t know why, she told herself crossly. Nearly every time she’d met the man, he’d been difficult to say the least.
Iris hadn’t told Ruby about the events of the return journey after all. Perhaps ‘events’ was too grand a term; not much had happened, she insisted to herself. She’d exchanged some pleasanter-than-usual words with the anaesthetist and there’d been a moment where she’d been thrown against him as the car swerved.
Yet she sensed that something fundamental had changed and she could not quite work out what. His face kept flashing before her eyes, the hard, uncaring one she had endured on all previous encounters and the one he’d shown her at the end of the trip, totally different. She gave a small shiver. Which was the real one? Was she seeing something that wasn’t there? Had she been mistaken and misread the situation?
‘Careful of that bramble!’ Olive called, and Iris’s reverie was broken. She ducked out of the way of the prickly branch, emerging from an empty shell of a house looking as if it had been damaged beyond repair some years ago. The houses on either side clung on, managing to stay upright. If Gladys had been here, she’d have tried to use that space to grow food, Iris thought.
The sound of running footsteps made her turn around, careful not to knock her bike over. A young man in a policeman’s uniform rushed towards them. Iris was about to ask if she could help when she realised that the wardens knew him already.
‘Fancy seeing you again so soon!’ Olive called cheerfully. ‘Well, you won’t have to worry about keep fit classes after this evening. They’ve got you running all over tonight!’
The policeman gasped for breath, bending forwards, his arms braced against his knees.
‘What’s the trouble?’ asked Kenny.
‘Sorry.’ The young man gulped in air, trying to get his message out. ‘We need your help again. Something a bit more serious than a chip-pan fire this time.’ He wheezed painfully, and Iris wondered if he’d tried to join up and not passed the medical.
‘All right. Better tell us where,’ Kenny suggested.
The policeman hauled himself back up to his full height. ‘It’s that pub along the canal path. You might know it. We aren’t sure what’s happened, but you can see the smoke from here.’ He pointed in the direction of the waterway. ‘Maybe it’s their empty barrels, or whatever they keep out the back – it’s gone up in a right old blaze. We don’t know who’s inside.’
Kenny and Olive looked at one another and then at Iris. ‘The Boatman’s,’ Kenny groaned. ‘Might have known it.’
Olive gripped her tin hat. ‘We should hurry, then.’
Iris cleared her throat. ‘I’d better come too. You never know when you’ll need a nurse.’ She tried to sound cheerful but her heart sank. According to everything she’d heard, that pub drew trouble like moths to a flame.
Mary finally put down the lid of the piano. ‘That’s enough,’ she said reluctantly. ‘I don’t think I can play another note. Still, we got through most of these.’ She shuffled the sheets of music into a neater pile and glanced around for somewhere to leave them. ‘Oh, look. Iris has forgotten her knitting.’
‘So she has.’ Ruby reached for the needles and wool, which seemed to be the beginnings of a cardigan in deep purple, almost blackcurrant in shade. ‘This is nice – it hasn’t been unravelled from something else, that’s for sure.’
Mary raised her eyebrows. ‘Makes a change.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Do you think Iris took that job this evening to avoid us, Ruby? I never know with her. I still don’t feel that she’s one of us, somehow.’
Ruby shook her head at once. ‘No, no I don’t. I think she stepped forward because she could see you were enjoying yourself and she knew I wouldn’t want a late night so I could make the most of my day off.’
‘Oh.’ Mary was slightly taken aback by her colleague’s vehemence. ‘But she’s never been very friendly, has she? Keeps herself to herself most of the time. I do try not to be offended, but all the same …’
Ruby set down the knitting once more. ‘You got to give her a chance,’ she said, feeling slightly daring even now to be challenging one of the senior nurses. ‘You got to remember, she was working on her own for ages. She’s not used to being part of a team, ’specially not one that’s been together for a long time. It wasn’t her fault that she was brought in to replace Ellen. Nobody could do that, be exactly like her.’
‘Well, that’s certainly true.’ Mary’s voice revealed she was uneasy about being taken to task.
‘And she’s a bit older than most of us and her interests are different as well. Doesn’t make her a bad person,’ Ruby said stoutly.
Mary retreated a little. ‘No, well, I never thought that …’
‘Of course not.’ Ruby gave her some ground.
Mary sank down onto one of the battered but comfortable easy chairs. ‘I’m just not used to somebody like that, perhaps that’s all. I’ll have to make more of an effort, that’s what you’re trying to say. I trust your judgement, Ruby. And after all she did endure an entire day with that grim Dr Leeson – I tell you, my blood ran cold at the thought of it.’
Ruby nodded. ‘I wouldn’t have wanted to do that. It had to be her, though, ’cos the patient didn’t trust anyone else. Poor Iris, stuck with that miserable old so-and-so.’ Although she wondered if he’d spent the whole day thinking about a similar journey at the beginning of the war, when his wife and child had fled to so-called safely and been killed on the way. Had he been ruder than ever and taken it out on Iris? Iris hadn’t said anything about it, but that was just the sort of thing she would have kept to herself, accustomed to absorbing all the slings and arrows that came her way. If it had gone badly, she probably would have clammed up so as not to hurt Ruby, guessing that Ruby would have blamed herself for saying something in the first place.
‘Surely she should have been back by now?’ she said.
Mary shrugged. ‘She’s probably gone off for a ride on that old bike, missing the moors like she does.’ Clearly she wasn’t prepared to start making an effort just yet, then.
‘Oh, crikey!’ Olive stared at the scene before them, the flames rising high into the air, showing bright gold against the fading sky at dusk. The smell had grown stronger the closer they had come and now they could see why. The Boatman’s Arms was caught in a conflagration.
‘Do you know who might be inside, Kenny?’ Iris asked, aware that they were standing near the very spot where she’d waited for him to rescue little Larry, all those months ago.
‘I haven’t been down here for ages, or not what you might call socially,’ he replied, pushing his glasses up his nose. ‘Not since I started walking out with Ruby, in fact. It’s not a proper place to bring someone like her. I heard the landlord’s brother had shown his face again, the one what had to do a runner a while back when he got in trouble with the police. But I don’t know if it’s true, or if he’d be there every night anyhow.’
The policeman squinted in the dim light, trying to write it all down in his notebook.
‘Thing is, with the Boatman’s,’ Kenny went on, ‘it used to be busy right after most folk finished work, when they’d drop in for a pint before their tea. Then it would get busy again after dark. Around this sort of time there wouldn’t be many customers.’
Iris nodded. That made sense.
‘It’s not to say there won’t be any,’ he went on, ‘but it’s less likely. Also, I know for a fact there’s more than one way in and out of there. We’d best go and check, but I don’t imagine there’ll be a crowd of people stuck inside.’
‘Good,’ said the young policeman, sounding very out of his depth.
Iris shot him a glance. ‘All the same, like the warden says, we’d better go and check,’ she prompted.
The young man cleared his throat and squared his shoulders. ‘Of course. Ah, yes, we should do that.’ His reluctance was palpable.
‘Very well, I’ll go.’ Olive could wait no longer and strode out, swiftly followed by Kenny. Iris waited for a moment, knowing that it was their job to do this, not hers. She’d only come along for a quiet walk. But the policeman didn’t look to be much use in a crisis. She couldn’t blame him – he still had spots, for goodness’ sake. He was probably used to running messages, nothing much more than that. She couldn’t stand by and watch, doing nothing.
‘Take my bike,’ she said firmly, lifting her bag from the front basket. ‘Ride it as fast as you can and bring help from the fire brigade and your superiors. Then bring it back – I’ll be in deep trouble if it goes missing. And watch the back brake, it’s a devil. Right, off you go.’ If he wasn’t going to help on the scene, the least he could do was find reinforcements.
‘Tell us what’s what around here, Kenny.’ Olive’s eyes were streaming in the smoke. ‘It’s hard to see.’
Kenny cast his eyes around the building in which he’d spent more hours than he cared to admit. It had been the place to come to in his wayward youth, especially once he’d started on the docks and begun to earn a wage packet. You could while away the time very nicely if you didn’t have high standards, with no questions asked.
‘The main entrance is over there, facing the canal path,’ he explained, pointing. ‘Looks like that’s no good to us now. It takes you into the bar. Then around the side you got a storage area. You can get to it from the back door of the bar and it’s got an exit on the other side as well. Some of the storage place is kind of under cover, like in a big lean-to, and some of it is just a yard, but they always kept all manner of stuff there. It has high walls so nobody passing by can look in. I don’t even want to guess what’s been there, over the years.’
Olive studied the place as well as she could. ‘Right, so we don’t even try to go in the front. We’d better go around to the back – looks as if we can get there down the side. Iris, you’d better stay here just in case anyone comes out of the front, or we need to bring anybody to you. You’ll be all right on your own, won’t you?’
‘Of course I shall,’ Iris said promptly. That was the least of her worries. She reached into her pocket for a cotton handkerchief to press against her nose and mouth, to help her breathe.
Kenny was relieved to find that the direction of the wind was guiding the worst of the flames away from the side of the building that led to the yard. They would be able to edge carefully along the little alley and approach in relative safety. It was hot, but he could just about bear it. He’d been in worse spots, he told himself. He found comfort in the knowledge that Olive was right behind him. He could rely on her. She wouldn’t flinch away at the first sign of danger.
Here was the outside wall to the lean-to section of the back yard. He groaned. No, here was where the wall should have been. It had collapsed, or at least much of it had. He couldn’t see why, but that wasn’t his concern right now. Olive exclaimed aloud. ‘What’s happened here? Was it always like this?’
Kenny coughed as he inhaled a mouthful of smuts. ‘No, it must have just happened. Perhaps the heat done it.’ He felt cautiously along what was left of the wall. ‘It’ll make it harder for us to give it the once-over though.’
Olive stopped in her tracks. ‘Can you hear anything? I thought I caught something then.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. Never mind.’ Olive urged him forward.
Kenny stepped over the wall at a point where it was now below waist height. ‘This’ll do as a way in,’ he muttered. ‘Mind your feet, Olive, it’s all rubble and whatnot. Don’t want you ricking your ankle.’
‘No, that wouldn’t do,’ she agreed, her figure outlined in the strange light. ‘There it is again – are you sure you didn’t hear it?’
Kenny shook his head. ‘Maybe me hat’s too far over me ears,’ he suggested. ‘Do you want to go and see if you can find what it is, while I check out the old storage shed? It’s not too bad round here, is it? We’ll manage somehow.’
Olive stood up straighter. ‘Of course we will. Yes, if you don’t mind, I think it’s coming from over there – would that be the back way into the pub proper? It might be nothing, or it could be a trapped animal. It didn’t sound quite human but you can’t be certain.’
‘You best go and look,’ Kenny said, though he felt a sudden reluctance to lose her by his side. Still, he was the senior here; he had better buck his ideas up. He cautiously crept around what he thought would have been the border of the lean-to, but the collapsed wall had brought down its roof, which blocked the way into the far corners of the yard. Then again, he reasoned, if anybody had been in the open half of the yard they would have got out into the back lane. He knew of several characters on the run from the law who’d made their escape that way.
No, the only place that anybody could be trapped was under this pile of rubble and roof. It wasn’t likely. He was just considering whether he would be more use going to help Olive, or even returning to the front path to confer with Iris, when he saw something.
His heart hammering, he edged closer. A boot, shining in the blaze-bright light. Now bile rose in his mouth. The boot was not lying on its own. Its owner was still wearing it. Closer still, he could make out that here was a pair of legs, the rest of the body buried in the rubble, the remaining wall looming above. It was his worst nightmare come true.
He had to try to rescue whoever it was. They might be crushed to death already but he mustn’t assume that. If there was a life to be saved, it was up to him to do it – but that wall might fall. ‘Remember your training,’ he muttered, pulling his tin hat still further down on his head. ‘You’ve done this before. You did it then and you can do it now.’
He hoped he wasn’t going to be sick. He’d never liked enclosed spaces. He hadn’t liked it that time when he’d searched for Larry in the upstairs rooms of his house, having to poke his head into the dark little cupboard and under the beds. He took a deep breath. This was outside, though. The fire was mostly on the other side of the pub. He’d be able to breathe as long as he didn’t panic.
Slowly, bit by bit, he began to lift the rubble out of the way, trying not to dislodge any more of it. He didn’t want the rest of the wall to fall in on him. ‘Then you’d be a goner for sure, and what would Ruby do then?’ he murmured. When he got out of here, he was going to have a proper think about their future, he decided. Being in a spot like this made you consider what mattered and Ruby would top any list, he knew that. First, though, he had to make sure he had a future, and that meant avoiding any dodgy bricks. Several had crumbled from the loose sections where the roof should have been. One hit his hand and he cried out.
His other hand came into contact with the trouser leg of the prone body. Strange … it felt familiar. Kenny tried not to think about what it meant as it was hardly a priority in the rescue mission, but it nagged away at him as he doggedly lifted away lump after lump of wall. He groaned when he realised. It was serge – it was a uniform. Perhaps a warden’s uniform just like his own.
Faster now, he scrabbled to free the body, to reach the head. It was bad enough to think that this was a stranger, but what if it was someone he knew? He had to find out. He teased away the stones that had jammed around the upper torso, the neck, an outstretched arm and finally the face.
In the frenzy of shadow and flame Kenny found himself looking into the open, staring eyes of Henry Spencer.
‘Oh no.’ Kenny rocked back on his heels, aghast at the sight. He couldn’t think straight. How had this happened – what was his high-and-mighty superior doing in such a place? Had he come here to investigate criminal behaviour, perhaps? He couldn’t leave him here – but he couldn’t move him either, not without help of some kind. Slowly he backed away, out of the tunnel of rubble he had excavated. ‘Olive!’ he shouted. ‘Iris!’
Now he was far enough along to stand up and he shouted again as he did so. Before he could turn to look for either of the women there was a grating, rushing sound and the rest of the wall gave way, covering the body once more, leaving just the arm and the legs visible. Kenny had to stop himself exclaiming in fright. He’d got out just in time. A few seconds later, and he’d have been—
‘Kenny, what’s happened?’ It was Iris, running at his call, now coming to a dead halt in front of the heap of stones and brick.
Kenny explained, gulping back the bile that rose in his gullet, his voice shaking now that the immediate danger had passed. Iris took in the dire situation and approached the mound of debris, squatting next to the arm. She reached down and placed her hands around the wrist, shaking her head as Kenny came closer. ‘One moment.’ She set the wrist back down again. ‘Stand back, Kenny, you can’t do any more. He’s gone. Been gone for a while, I should say.’
‘Really? Are you sure? Shouldn’t we try … try …’ He tailed off, the enormity of it all hitting him. Fair enough, he hadn’t liked Spencer, but he wouldn’t have wished this on him.
‘No point,’ said Iris briskly. ‘I realise that only a doctor can declare death, but believe me, Kenny, that poor man has breathed his last. You can’t help him. Let the fire brigade get him out of there when it’s safe to do so. We’d better concentrate on the living. Where’s Olive?’
Kenny remembered with a shudder that Olive had set off on her own, towards the flames. ‘She went to investigate a noise. She thought an animal might have been trapped.’
Iris looked at him. ‘An animal?’
‘Or – or maybe not. Maybe nothing. But we’d better find out.’
Iris set off in the direction in which he’d pointed and Kenny followed, filled with new dread at what fresh horrors the blazing Boatman’s might have in store.