nightcap. He can’t believe that tonight an innocent man could have died. Not quite so innocent. He was a drug dealer and thought Leah was a copper chasing him. He was lucky the car didn’t kill him. At least a broken pelvis will keep him off the streets for a while. But still. After the police brought Leah home and told George that she was in shock, he knew he should look after her but he couldn’t help asking what she was thinking.
She couldn’t answer. Couldn’t tell him why she was in the pub when she said she would be with Tash.
She’s lying.
He’s lying.
The thought that the man could have been killed chills George again. He sips his whisky to warm him. Perhaps he should rethink his plan but it’s all in place.
Tomorrow.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Carly
Then
Carly prised open her eyes, squinting as a brilliant white light poured through her.
Was she dead?
Chatter.
Laughter.
Music.
She blinked, once, twice, three times until the blur veiling her sight slipped away. Everything fell into sharp focus.
To her astonishment she was in the ballroom, but not as it had appeared when they’d hidden there earlier, with the soot and the ashes and scattered broken glass, but how it was in Mr Webster’s photos. The vibrant red and cream carpet lying smooth over the floor. The three chandeliers suspended from the ceiling, their light creating rainbows through droplets of crystal, long before they were wrenched down and stamped on until they smashed.
‘We’ll meet again…’ Vera Lynn promised. All around Carly couples danced. Around her, through her. She didn’t know if they were the ghosts or if she was. The handsome men in their high-waisted trousers and frock coats, pinned medals glinting as they spun around women in pencil skirts and hats, beautiful in their matching uniforms and matching smiles.
Happy. Everyone was happy.
‘Carly.’ Someone was calling her and she wondered whether it was the boy ladling punch with the cropped blond hair and the brilliant blue eyes. He couldn’t have been much older than her. Perhaps he wanted to dance with her. She felt a hand slip inside hers but the boy hadn’t moved. Carly was confused.
‘Wake up.’
But Carly didn’t want to wake up. She wanted to stay here where everyone was hopeful.
She wanted to feel hopeful.
Carly felt tears slide onto her cheeks. She wondered why she was crying.
If ghosts could even cry.
‘Is she dead?’ she heard.
She wanted to tell the boy she wasn’t dead, she was here and whole and she wanted to dance with him, but tears dripped again and Carly knew it wasn’t the boy who was whispering. It wasn’t her own tears she could feel.
‘I’m okay,’ Carly reassured her sisters but as she tried to sit up, feelings returned hard and fast. Pain in her head, her foot. The tang of blood in her mouth. She wanted to spit it out but didn’t want it to land on Leah or Marie so she swallowed it down. Felt it travelling down her throat, swishing around her empty stomach. She retched.
After taking a couple of deep breaths, she asked, ‘Are either of you hurt?’
‘I think I’ve twisted my ankle,’ Leah said.
Marie began to cry. ‘This isn’t a game, is it?’
‘If it is, we’re going to win.’ Fuelled by the courage Carly had witnessed in the ballroom, she forced herself to sit and then to kneel. The soldiers had faced far worse than she had. Where would the country be today if they had given up? ‘We’re getting out of here.’ Acid rose in her throat as waves of pain battered her skull each time she moved. ‘We need to look for a way out. We don’t have much time.’
‘But I can’t see…’
‘You can feel, with your hands. There must be a handle. Something.’ Carly remembered Mr Webster telling the class the decontamination chamber had been built when there was a real threat of gas attacks. He had told them about the chutes where any clothing that might be contaminated would be stuffed but he hadn’t said what would happen after it had toppled into this small space they now found themselves in. There had to be a way to empty it surely, or did they just burn it? Drop a match through the hatch. Carly looked up fearfully as though she might see fire, her panic raging.
‘Carly! I’ve found something.’ Marie was excited, she was always so desperate to please.
‘Good girl,’ Carly said, shuffling around on her knees, arms splayed out before her until she found her sister.