2140, H.E. Café de Paris, Coventry Street. Casualties—
34 killed, approximately 80 seriously injured.

While I was waiting for the other files to be brought up, the librarian called me over to the information point to show me some of the pictures she’d found in the digital archive. Most of them came from the Daily Mail, which must have had a photographer on the scene almost as soon as the bombs fell. In monochrome everything looked curiously bloodless and it wasn’t until you recognized that the light gray tube poking out from under a table was a woman’s forearm that you realized you were looking at a charnel house. There were six more pictures of the interior of the nightclub and several of casualties arriving at Charing Cross Hospital, pale faces and stunned expressions among the blankets and primitive equipment of a wartime hospital.

I almost missed it but some flicker of recognition made me click back one and check.

The picture was confused and I couldn’t identify where it was taken, possibly the ambulance loading bay. A group of women were being led past the camera, all but one of them hunched over with blankets across their shoulders. One face was staring at the camera, the expression erased by shock into a smooth pale oval. A face that I recognized, and which I’d last seen in the green room at the Mysterioso the night Mickey the Bone had died.

She’d called herself Peggy. I wondered if that was her real name.

Chapter 8 - Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

THE CAFÉ de Paris had been built twenty feet below ground level and was considered safe by management and customers alike. Unless you took cover in the Underground system, no civilian shelter in London was built nearly as deep. Later it was determined that two bombs penetrated the building above the nightclub; one failed to detonate while the other dropped down an airshaft and exploded right in front of the band, killing the musicians and most of the dancers. Ken Johnson had his head blown clear off his shoulders and there were reports of customers killed where they sat, but remaining upright at their tables. Eyewitnesses remembered that there had been a great many Canadian nurses and servicemen in the club that night, but despite going down to the storage area with the librarian I couldn’t find anything that remotely resembled a casualty list. I found duplicates typed on paper as thin as tissue concerning an exchange of correspondence dealing with complaints that ambulances hadn’t arrived quickly enough to deal with the casualties, and a report on the shocking boldness of the looters who had steamed through the site nicking valuables.