‘Excuse me,’ I said to Indra and hurried over to join Chapel, where a fire officer, in protective clothing and breathing apparatus, was being lifted up the outside of the building on the aerial platform.

‘He’s got a mic so he can tell us what he sees.’ Chapel was repeating the man’s commentary aloud to Dan and I. ‘Floor almost completely collapsed in the room on the left . . . some of the ceiling is down . . . nothing much in there . . . going to use binoculars . . . a few remnants of furniture . . . no-one alive in there . . . no signs of a corpse.’ He stopped. ‘We need to shift the lift over to the room on the right.’

A few agonising minutes later, the vehicle had moved and the crane was in place. The fire officers repeated the commentary procedure.

‘Floor intact in this room . . . what looks like a bed . . . a bump . . . bedding around the bump . . . yep, the body’s in there. He can smell it.’ Simon turned away from us to speak into his radio to his ground personnel. ‘Right, get the lift down and get him checked over. Someone chase up the structural engineer. If he can’t get here, get another one. We need to get that body out and that means getting in.’

I turned to look for Indra, to tell her that we had found a body, but she and her sister were nowhere to be seen.

Maya, 4.30 p.m.

Maya, 4.30 p.m.

While we waited for the engineer to arrive, I walked a couple of buildings away to make some calls. Dan was trying to get hold of Indra, so I rang the Royal London Hospital to inquire about Rosa Feldman. The news wasn’t good. With her asthma, and years of living with Józef’s cigarette smoke, the fumes she’d inhaled in the street had ripped through the lining of her lungs, the ward sister told me, and Rosa was still having difficulty breathing.

‘She’s on steroids and has been hallucinating,’ the nurse said. ‘She’s convinced she’s in the Warsaw Ghetto at the end of the war.’

We would have to hope she pulled through.

‘One thing,’ the nurse said. ‘She keeps mentioning masks. Black masks. Does that mean anything to you?’

*

Half an hour later, with so much soot in the sky, the light was fading fast. Floodlights shone over the crime scene and made it look as though it was the film set for a horror or disaster movie. The fire service engineer, Terry Dixon, had arrived. He confirmed within minutes that the building was not structurally safe to enter from the ground. To get Simas’s body out, we would ideally need to go through the windows, using support structures, but that would mean a further delay while we waited for those to arrive. Another option was for an enclosed cage – with a fire officer inside it – to be lowered through the hole in the collapsed roof from above.