by Emily Gunnis
After spotting Kitty Cannon driving past Dr Jacobson’s house, Fred had followed her car at a distance to the building site entrance. She had turned onto the bumpy track and in the fading winter daylight he had pulled up on the main road and watched her car slowly move alongside St Margaret’s. With his engine still running, he had waited for her to get out before turning in and parking up behind her.
With darkness quickly descending, he had stepped out into the cold and seen a hole in the fence next to where Kitty had parked her car. At first there had been no sign of any workmen, but as he got closer to the house, he heard a car door slam and stopped in his tracks.
‘Bye, Andy. Last day tomorrow, see you at dawn,’ said a male voice.
‘Later, Stan,’ replied a second man, and Fred heard footsteps moving off in the direction of the house.
A car engine started, then the crackle of gravel was followed by silence. Fred had ducked down and waited as the man who had been left behind walked past the house and towards a Portakabin on the far side of the site. Last day tomorrow. He could already imagine the team standing around as the wrecking ball hit the house; slapping each other on the back as the external walls finally came crashing down. The preparations were finally in place; they were all set for demolition day.
Pausing for a moment to calm his breathing, he had stared up at the house. In the fading light it was hard to make out its features, but it struck him as a tragic sight: the ivy-covered Victorian mansion, which should have been a beautiful home full of happiness, now reflecting on its pitiful purpose in life and surrounded by a sea of machinery waiting to tear it limb from limb. The pointed turrets sticking up from its roof made its silhouette look jagged and harsh and it seemed to Fred like a giant creature unable to give up the fight even in its last moments, like a dying bull impaled in the ring.
A dog had barked in the distance then and Fred had turned to see a flash of light in the heart of the graveyard. He had made his way through the gap in the fence by Kitty’s parked car and over towards its source. At the edge of the graveyard he had seen her, and realised she wasn’t alone but holding hands with a child who was too small for him to have spotted before. Kitty had started down the steps, and the little girl had stopped at the entrance. Fred could see Kitty pulling her arm. As he got closer, he had heard the little girl crying, then for the first time he had got a good look at her and, just before the two of them had disappeared, realised with horror that it was Emma, Sam’s daughter.
Now he stepped down onto the first step, shining his torch onto the green slime covering it and feeling his way along the wet stone wall before continuing onto the next. Pausing occasionally to listen for signs of life, he eventually reached the bottom, where he found himself standing in a head-height tunnel, a stagnant pool of rancid-smelling water at his feet.
Though he had left the trapdoor open, the smell was overpowering, and he tugged a handkerchief from his pocket and held it over his mouth. In his other hand he held the torch in front of him as he walked along the dark, saturated tunnel, his shallow breathing his only companion.
Every few steps, he stopped and looked back, terrified that someone would come across the trapdoor and slam it shut. Though the darkness was blinding, his steamed-up glasses disoriented him further as his breath quickened in his makeshift mask. He began to feel dizzy. With no idea where he was going, he reached out to touch the tunnel walls that were his only guide. It felt as if they were closing in on him.
‘Fuck,’ he muttered to himself as he bent over, coughing from the fumes.
As he paused to catch his breath, a child’s cry rang out through the tunnel, suddenly followed by a loud bang like a heavy door slamming shut. Fred jumped. Distance was hard to judge, but the noise he had heard was in the opposite direction to the trapdoor and could not have been more than ten feet away.
‘Where are you going?’ Fred whispered to Kitty in the darkness.
Sam’s face flashed into his mind as he picked up his pace and headed in the direction of the child’s scream, the stagnant water soaking through his suede shoes.
At last he reached it. A brick wall at the end of the tunnel, and in the centre of it, a steel-framed wooden door. His mind was starting to blur as he felt for the handle and turned it. With a slow, moaning creak the door opened and a wall of smoke hit him.
Chapter Forty-Six
Monday 6 February 2017
With the policeman’s shouts ringing in her ears as he tried to catch up with her, Sam ran through the graveyard desperately searching for the trapdoor. The police had driven her with their blues and twos screaming all the way from Nana’s flat to St Margaret’s, but when they had got there, the gates had been locked. She had opened the car door and made a run for it, rushing around the perimeter fence until she found the hole.
When she finally found the open trapdoor in the graveyard, smoke was pouring from the empty space below her. ‘Oh my God, call the fire brigade!’ she shouted over to the policeman, as she put her scarf over her mouth and started down the slippery steps in front of her.
‘Stop, don’t go down there!’ shouted the policeman as she disappeared into the darkness.
Sam coughed through the thick weave of her scarf as she blundered through the stagnant water. The tunnel felt like hell on earth: dark and damp despite the smoke billowing around her. She lifted the scarf away from her face. ‘Fred, where are you?’ she shouted as loudly as she could.
‘Sam!’ came a voice from the blackness. As she ran towards it, she pictured Emma in the tunnel, alone and terrified without her.
‘Fred!’ she called again as she staggered through the thick smoke. ‘Emma!’
Suddenly Fred lurched into view, coughing and retching.
Sam launched herself at him. ‘Where’s Emma?’
‘She’s with Kitty, they went through a door at the end of the tunnel, but you can’t get through it now, she’s started a fire,’ said Fred.
Sam tried to keep going, but the thick wall of black smoke was poisoning her eyes and throat. The entire tunnel was engulfed and she could barely see.
‘We can’t leave her,’ she said desperately. ‘She could be trapped the other side of that door.’
‘We’ll find another way. Go back.’
Sam held her breath as she turned back, feeling her way through the smoke-filled tunnel. When she reached the trapdoor, she sucked in huge gulps of cold air as she and Fred helped each other up the steps. Outside, they stood, doubled over, as they coughed the smoke out of their lungs, then staggered through the graveyard towards the house.
‘How has Kitty got Emma?’ said Fred as they ran.
‘It’s not Kitty, it’s her twin sister Elvira. She knows Nana, they went to school together; she must have been with them when Nana had her heart attack. The tunnel leads to the house. I have to get in there,’ said Sam, stumbling in her desperation to reach her daughter.
As soon as the house came into sight, they both stopped dead in their tracks.
The whole of the ground floor was on fire. Smoke was billowing from the front door, and as Sam ran along the front of the house, every room was filled with leaping flames. Suddenly there was a huge explosion, and sparks and smoke poured from broken windows. Sam let out a primal scream, then ran to the front door and started trying to kick it in.
As Fred held her back, two policewomen came rushing over.
‘My daughter’s in there!’ Sam cried. ‘Emma!’
‘You need to stay back, miss, the fire brigade will be here very soon,’ said one of the officers.
Sam ignored them and ran around to the side of the house, desperate to find a way in. But the heat from the fire was making it impossible.
Suddenly she screamed, and Fred looked up in the direction of her horrified stare. On the roof, the figure of a woman was visible through the smoke, standing right at the edge. Sam ran towards the house again, the policewoman catching her and pulling her back. ‘I can’t let you go in there, miss.’
Fred looked up at Kitty on the roof, then over at his car, which was parked less than a hundred metres away. The decision took no time at all. He ducked through the hole in the fence and opened the boot of the vehicle, scrabbling through the paraphernalia for his climbing shoes and head torch. In seconds he had pulled them on and was running towards the back of the house.
When he reached it, he looked up, assessing the texture of the bricks, through which he could feel the furnace from the fire. As he hesitated for a moment, Sam’s screams for Emma and the fire brigade’s sirens, still miles in the distance, pierced the descending night. He looked up and stepped back five paces, planning his route up the crumbling mortar, then took a breath and ran for the house, launching himself off the ground. Just as he grabbed the first-floor windowsill and began pulling his legs up, a policeman appeared on the grass below him.
‘Hey! Get down from there!’ The man ran over to him, grabbing at Fred’s ankles, just as the heat from the window from which he hung hit him. Fred hooked his heel onto the windowsill and pulled himself up but the fire inside the house was overwhelming.
‘Get down on the ground now!’ the policeman shouted again, as Fred curled his legs up and away from his grasp.
Gripping the windowsill, he felt for an edge with his right foot, then found another with his left and carefully placed it on. His feet firm in their holds, he gripped the mantel tight and began swinging right to left, down and up, gathering momentum before launching himself up at a windowsill diagonal to him on the next floor up. For a second he was in mid-air, with nothing stopping him from falling twenty feet to the ground, then he grabbed the ledge, clutching on as gravity pulled his body down. He scrabbled at the wall for a hold for his feet and pushed them in as deep as he could, then hung still for a moment, his fingers cold, the ledge slippery, and looked around him for anything to help.
He hooked his heel up to the window ledge and pulled himself up onto it. He could see the roof now, but he still had two floors to climb. The ledge directly above him was two feet from his reach. He crouched down as low as he could and bounced twice before launching himself up onto it, clinging on before pulling himself up once more.
He looked up to where thick black smoke was billowing into the sky. He was nearly at the top, but the next window was a small attic one and too far away for him to reach. He caught sight of a wrought-iron lamp hanging from the wall and reached out, pushing against it with his right foot to check it was strong enough to take his weight. It held firm. He braced his foot on the light, stretching his arms up and feeling for more holes in the wall with his fingers.
The sound of fire engines arriving below was a comfort as he pushed himself up, listening to his own heavy breathing. Momentarily putting all his weight on the light, he moved methodically across the wall of the house like a spider, using the chipped-away brickwork as holds.
As the attic window appeared above him, he reached up to it, pulling himself up and pushing his foot into the bracket of a storm drain that ran around its perimeter. He paused for a moment, glancing down at the fire engines below him. They looked like wooden toys, the men rushing round them pulling out hoses, turning the ladders towards the house, just like the characters he’d imagined as a child in his own little worlds. He could no longer hear Sam, or anyone; just the rushing of the wind as it whipped the fire below him into an insurmountable frenzy.
The fire brigade were aiming water at the house from every angle as Fred carefully scrambled up the tiles that overhung the attic window, then ducked down to look across the roof. There, less than ten feet away, stood Kitty, with her back to him. Sitting slightly behind her was Emma. She was crying and begging for her mother. Kitty was ignoring her, leaning forward and looking down at the commotion below.
‘They’re all here for you,’ she said, turning to the little girl, ‘because you’re loved.’
As Kitty turned away again, Fred crept silently towards them over the roof, terrified that one of the tiles would slip and make a noise. He could see one of the firefighters extending a ladder up towards them, closing the gap between them and the ground.
‘Step back from the edge,’ a loudhailer belted out from below them. ‘There is a ladder on its way up to you and a member of the fire brigade will be coming up to help you.’
Fred looked around. A turret stood on the other side of the attic roof, and he slowly climbed up and over to it, keeping his eyes on Emma, who was curled up in a ball, crying. A whirring of machinery rang out as the top of the ladder appeared next to where Kitty was standing. Emma screamed, and Kitty grabbed her arm and pulled her in Fred’s direction, her feet dislodging a tile and sending it smashing to the ground below.
‘Stay back!’ Kitty screamed to the fireman climbing up the ladder towards them.
‘Mummy!’ Emma cried out.
‘Please, let us help you both down. We know you don’t want any harm to come to the child,’ said the fireman, attempting to climb onto the roof with them.
‘Stay back, or I’ll jump,’ said Kitty, dragging Emma further away from the ladder. Emma let out a desperate cry.
Fred squatted down, his heart pounding mercilessly, his hands shaking. He tried to think straight, desperate for some idea of what his next move should be. He suddenly felt an overwhelming rush of panic. What if he only made things worse? He had been so arrogant, rushing to climb, to get to Emma, for one reason and one reason only. Because he loved Sam. And now he was here, there was a chance he could make a fatal mistake and get her daughter killed.
The thick smoke continued to billow past. Fred could hear the smashing of glass below them and feel the heat of the fire.
‘Please, you need to come with me.’ The fireman reached out his hand. ‘We have to get you and the child down now, the house isn’t stable.’
‘Where were you when she needed you?’ said Kitty, as Emma screamed in panic.
‘Who?’ said the fireman.
‘Ivy. I saw her jump from the dormitory window. I was in the fields and I turned back and saw her on the roof. She had her arms outstretched like a bird. She wanted to fly. I wanted to be with her. I want to be with her now.’
‘We care about you both and we want to help you, but we need to get you down from here now. Just let me come onto the roof and I can help.’
‘No, stay back!’ shouted Kitty.
Fred stared desperately at the space between him and Emma. Kitty had the little girl held tightly by the top of her arm. If he tried to grab her, Kitty could wrench her back from him and lose her balance in the process, sending them both falling to their deaths. He could see another ladder trying to get close to the back of the house, but being pushed back by the heat.
‘Please just give me your hand. I can’t stay up here much longer.’ The fireman reached out with both hands, and Kitty took one more step away from him and closer to Fred.
An explosion rang out, and the fireman’s radio crackled into life. As Kitty loosened her grip on Emma, Fred saw his chance and shot to his feet, running towards them across the pitched tiled roof.
‘We can’t put the fire out,’ a voice said over the radio. ‘We’re pulling you back from the house, John.’
‘There’s a little girl up here, I can’t leave her. For God’s sake, please, give me the child,’ shouted the fireman as the ladder began to pull away.
As Fred reached Emma, the ladder was already five feet away from the building. A second explosion went off below them, shaking the building to its core. Kitty stumbled, loosening her grip on the little girl.
‘Jump, for God’s sake, jump now!’ shouted the fireman to Fred as he spotted him for the first time.
Fred felt a surge of adrenaline as he reached out his arms to Emma, who instinctively launched herself at him. He snatched Emma up from the roof and holding her tigh
tly in his arms ran towards the ladder.
As the world stopped turning for a second, everything went silent, and Fred jumped.
Epilogue
Sam shifted in her seat and massaged her temples as she paused to read over what she’d just typed.
The Times today reveals the incredible birth story of broadcaster Kitty Cannon, who died in an apparent suicide last month.
Famous for prising the truth from her guests, much-loved host ‘the Cannonball’ hid a secret of her own, more explosive than anyone could have imagined.
She was born Elvira Cannon, but stole her dead twin sister’s identity. Aged just eight, she was forced to impersonate Kitty in order to survive herself.
Today, writing for this newspaper, the great-granddaughter of the woman who made Elvira’s survival possible lays bare a saga spanning six decades and four generations. Journalist Samantha Harper stumbled upon a story in her own background more shocking than any she has ever covered.
Some might say Kitty Cannon’s life was a web of lies. But I have discovered that some lies are necessary. This is the case for Elvira and my grandmother. Both were so traumatised by the start of their lives that lying became the only option.
Elvira’s life ended at St Margaret’s and so did her sister Kitty’s – the real Kitty, sixty years earlier.
It was where my grandmother Rose’s life began.
The twins – born at St Margaret’s Mother-and-Baby Home in Preston, East Sussex, in 1950 to their father’s mistress – were dealt very different hands from the day they came into the world. While Kitty came out strong and fighting, Elvira struggled to breathe and was left for dead until she was later found to be alive and taken off to the infirmary. With his wife gravely ill in hospital, the twins’ father, George Cannon, took home only the stronger sister, and left Elvira in the hands of the cruel nuns at St Margaret’s.