‘Here – let me.’ Connie saw that Pamela was in deep shock as she eased Reggie’s fingers from around her friend’s wrist. She unscrewed the top of her water bottle and put it to Reggie’s lips. ‘Drink this,’ she told him.
Pamela stared blankly into the dark distance, paralysed by a thought that had struck her like a bolt from the blue. Leave him to rot.
‘Lie still.’ Connie spoke calmly to Nolan as she took over from Pamela. ‘A stretcher will be on its way shortly.’
Reggie suffered a short coughing spasm then shot her a desperate question. ‘Why can’t I move my legs?’
Connie ignored Pamela’s shuddering intake of breath. ‘I don’t know – the doctors will find out,’ she promised the man whose fate lay in their hands. Your dancing days are done, she concluded as she shone her torch along Reggie’s twisted body. Dark saliva trickled from the man’s mouth and his trousers were soaked in blood.
I wished him dead! Pamela sank to her knees and buried her head in her hands. How could I? What kind of person does that make me?
‘Run and tell Lizzie we need her help,’ Connie urged. Reggie’s breathing had grown shallow and his eyes had flickered shut. ‘Do you hear me? We need a first-aider – fast!’
‘Don’t leave me!’ Reggie begged.
‘I won’t – I’ll stay here,’ Connie promised.
With a huge effort, Pamela raised herself from the ground. Of course she wouldn’t let a man die; even one like Reggie. She would carry out her duty.
‘Good girl.’ Connie sensed rather than saw that her friend was rallying, which left her free to concentrate on the injured man. She offered him more liquid and was dismayed to see that he was unable to swallow – he gagged and the water trickled down his chin. ‘He’s losing consciousness,’ she muttered. ‘Reggie, stay awake. For God’s sake, Pamela – fetch Lizzie!’
Pamela was on her feet but her head was swimming. He mustn’t die. If he did, she would never forgive herself for willing it to happen. No, Reggie must live! She shone her torch erratically across rough moorland. Which direction? At last she located a group of vehicles and teams hard at work with hoses and spades, and she set off towards them, stumbling, pressing on through the darkness until she reached them.
Bill, Lizzie, Sam and Sally dug feverishly. Drenched by the firefighters’ hoses, they worked non-stop, stooping to clear bricks with their bare hands then digging afresh into the sodden heap of mortar, crumpled metal and dirt. Sally and Lizzie freed a sheet of corrugated iron that had formed part of the shelter’s roof. It was still warm to the touch as they flung it to one side. The digging continued.
‘Lizzie!’ Pamela ran blindly towards the rescue team. ‘We’ve found Reggie Nolan up there on the ridge – he’s badly hurt.’
Without a word, Bill and Lizzie threw down their spades. They sprinted to the ambulance for a stretcher and first-aid kits while Sally comforted Pamela. She led her away from the action and found a bench that had been upended by one of the blasts. Sally set it on its legs and sat her friend down. ‘Take your time,’ she soothed. ‘Let the others take over from here.’
Lizzie and Bill set off with their equipment. The situation sounded serious, but Pamela hadn’t given them much information to go on – the victim could be badly burned, for all they knew. Plus, there was the possibility of major blood loss. Either way, their job was to get him to the Queen Alexandra as soon as humanly possible.
Meanwhile, Sam took charge of the two remaining volunteers – a pair of civilians who had turned up out of the blue to offer their services. ‘Careful,’ he warned as they tugged at a second sheet of corrugated iron. Their action dislodged several bricks, which collapsed inwards. ‘There’s a gap under there,’ he decided. ‘It looks like the shelter has been dug into the hillside.’ If so, there was hope for the trapped family.
Flinging aside their spades, the men began to lift the bricks one at a time. Sure enough, there was a cavity. Sam reached in and his fingers came into contact with a smooth, flat surface. ‘A door!’ he guessed. ‘Still upright and in one piece, by the feel of it.’ They lifted more bricks from the heap; a part of the green shelter door was exposed. Hands scraped away wet mortar and brick fragments until a muffled voice could be heard.
‘Take it easy,’ Bernard Majors warned from deep within the shelter. ‘Don’t bring the roof down on us.’
A voice – a miracle. ‘How many are you?’ Sam raised his hand to order the others to stop clawing at the heap.
‘Six.’
‘Anyone hurt?’
‘No. Thank God.’
‘All right – hang on while we open this door.’
A lorry had been driven close to the shelter entrance and its driver was ordered to redirect its headlights, allowing Sam’s team to see what they were doing.
‘We’re soaking wet in here,’ Lily Majors complained. ‘Can’t you get those idiots to turn off their hoses?’
‘Blimey, is that all the thanks we get?’ Sam’s muttered remark brought smiles to the weary rescuers’ lips. The whole of the door was visible and the last of the rubble cleared away. Sam took hold of its metal handle and pulled with all his might. It opened with a loud scrape and muddy water gushed out.
Doughty Lily was the first to emerge, wading ankle deep through the flood and carrying the youngest of the children. Her mother came next, shivering but smiling triumphantly and holding the hands of the older girls, both in sopping-wet dressing-gowns and slippers. Bernard brought up the rear. ‘You took your time,’ the head of the household grumbled to Sam. ‘That water’s freezing cold – if you’d left us much longer we’d have caught our deaths.’
‘But you didn’t.’ Sam smiled as he offered them blankets from the WVS van that had just arrived.
‘Jammy beggars,’ one of the helpers added.
‘Hot tea is available,’ the WVS woman announced in a hoity-toity voice. ‘This way, if you please.’
Back on the ridge, Bill and Lizzie reached the base of the exploded blimp, where they found Connie talking urgently to a semi-conscious Reggie.
‘Listen to me.’ Connie patted his cheek in an effort to keep him awake. ‘You can’t give up – you have to hang on. The stretcher’s here now and the ambulance is waiting.’
She stepped aside to allow Lizzie and Bill to unroll their stretcher. They worked quickly and smoothly, ignoring Reggie’s groans as they moved him gently on to the stretcher.
‘Burns to the upper torso,’ Lizzie commented. ‘Most likely smoke inhalation too. That’s the real danger.’
‘Multiple fractures,’ Bill added. ‘Ready? Let’s go.’
They carried Reggie away, leaving Connie to check on the body she’d spotted close by. As she’d suspected, there was no sign of life in the poor soul. His clothes were mostly burned away, his features unrecognizable. Connie covered her nose and mouth to block out the stench, then backed away from the horrifying sight. Her first thought was that this was the Junkers pilot who had been flung from his aircraft as it crashed. Her second was that it might be Reggie’s junior erk, Howard Enright. ‘Bad luck,’ she breathed as she started back towards Musgrave Street.
‘Too late to do anything.’ Connie delivered her grim, truncated account of discovering the body to the rescue teams through a clenched jaw. She felt that she might vomit. ‘The second chap bought it good and proper.’
‘Ought we to move him?’ Sally asked Pamela, who had just watched Reggie being stretchered into Bill and Sam’s ambulance then driven away.
‘Yes – we can’t just leave him there.’ Pamela willed herself back into action. ‘You’re sure there was no way to identify the body?’ she checked with Connie.
Connie stepped over a fireman’s hose and felt a welcome spray of cold water from its jet drift towards her. The fire team was still hard at work, fighting the fresh flames that flared unexpectedly. ‘Honestly, no. But my money is on young Enright – he was probably working alongside Reggie when all hell broke loose.’
‘Sally and I will fetch him off the ridge.’ Pamela was keen to make up for her earlier lapse by carrying out the grisly task. ‘Connie, get someone to contact the team from the morgue – tell them we’re bringing in a body.’
‘Right you are, but I hope you both have strong stomachs.’ Connie handed them spare blankets in which to wrap the corpse.
Pamela and Sally set off, picking their way through tangled heather and spiky gorse and steeling themselves to face what lay ahead. Pamela paused at the spot where she and Connie had discovered Reggie. Her torch beam rested on a small silver object: a cigarette lighter. ‘This must have fallen out of his pocket,’ she murmured as she picked it up. Shining their torches at the ground, they trod carefully around the concrete base until they found the body just as Connie had described – burned beyond recognition.
Pamela shuddered. It would have been over in a flash; hopefully the victim had been knocked unconscious by the blast, rendering him oblivious to his fate.
‘Let’s hope it was quick.’ Sally covered the dead man’s blackened face; a tender, respectful gesture that moved Pamela as she held her breath then raised the man’s legs and slid a blanket under them. He’d been a small, slight man – not too heavy. The charred remnant of his sweater suggested that this was no German pilot or RAF engineer.
Sally gasped and rested back on her heels.
‘What is it?’ Pamela’s task of sliding the blanket into position was complete.
The sweater had been hand-knitted in a traditional cable stitch that fishermen wore. Sally knew someone who owned just such a sweater. She stared at Pamela in sudden anguish. ‘Look – here, at the jumper he was wearing!’
Pamela forced herself to study the top half of the corpse more closely. The man had been a civilian – the small scrap of sweater was evidence enough. Besides, the remaining hair was long and dark rather than regulation short back and sides. An object hung from a leather strap around the wrist of the bomb victim’s raised right arm – an object with a charred wooden handle attached to a heavy metal head. Pamela reached for it with trembling fingers. ‘A hammer,’ she whispered.
Sick and faint, Sally lowered her head. ‘Yes.’
Ron Butcher had met his end in a violent, ear-splitting boom. He’d been swallowed by a ball of flame.
‘Kite balloons are used to defend key ground targets such as industrial areas, ports and harbours and to direct enemy bombers towards anti-aircraft fire. Shaped like a giant fish, a typical dirigible is 66 feet long and 30 feet wide, tethered to the ground by a dozen strong steel cables.’ Weeks earlier, Ron had read and retained the exact facts and stored them methodically in his tortured brain. These were the final thoughts that flitted through his consciousness.
‘We know who this is.’ Pamela’s voice was scarcely audible.
‘Yes,’ Sally said again. Ron had perished in an instant, killed by an enemy he had never fought. Driven by a wild, insatiable desire for revenge, he had paid the ultimate price.