After the Mourning (20 page)

‘Yes. If you remember in Lily’s tent, that day again, Mr Hancock, the Head raised the words the “Fourth Nail” to your charming mother.’

I did remember now and I looked at Stojka sharply.

‘It is a very holy thing,’ Stojka said. ‘Truly so.’

I felt myself shudder. Years before, I’d taken Nan and the Duchess up to Westminster Cathedral to see some relic or other paraded for the faithful. I’d stood outside having a fag. But the women had been impressed – Catholic, superstitious women. Now here I was in the middle of the night with a dodgy Gypsy bloke and, apparently, another bit of superstitious junk that had not one iota of meaning for me. Suddenly I felt angry. I turned to Horatio and said, ‘You brought me out here to rescue a fucking holy relic?’

‘Mr—’

‘H, calm down!’ Hannah said. ‘Hear this Mr Wotsisname out. Remember what I said about Hitler and what people say about magic.’

‘The lady is right. Hitler is very interested in magic,’ Stojka said. ‘I know, Mr Hancock, that to you this seems stupid. But Hitler is wanting everything – bones of saints, books of spells, the Holy Grail and the Fourth Nail of Christ. The Nail can be used to get power, it is said. Hitler wants power over everything. Roma people do not want power, which is why we keep it. But then comes Hitler. He has these people, magicians they call themselves. They want to do spells on the Nail, they take my children—’

‘Mr Stojka—’

‘No, listen to me!’ He raised a hand. ‘If Hitler gets the Nail it will give him even more power! When I ran away from Berlin and took the Nail with me, he sent men for my children and he killed them! My heart is dead!’ His eyes shone with tears and grief. ‘But I cannot give up the Nail to him or any of his people. I cannot!’

‘What sort of power does it have, this Nail?’ I said, not really believing any of it but asking anyway. ‘What do you mean?’

Stojka sighed, as if defeated. ‘I do not know,’ he said. ‘As with all holy relics it has to be made to work so if you do nothing with it it will do nothing. I am not worthy of its power, no man is. Mortal people can only use it badly because we are all in sin. It bleeds only. It is always covered with blood.’

His face was so devastated – which a man’s face would be if all his family had been murdered – that I put what I felt to one side and took the handbrake off. His eternally bleeding nail didn’t have to be ‘genuine’ for either him to protect it or Hitler to want it. After all, if the Lees, and principally Lily, had taken the trouble to hide this bloke inside an illusion, what he represented had to be important to them. The car rolled forwards into the darkness.

‘And the Lee family?’ I asked. ‘How do you know them?’

‘I escaped to Britain,’ Stojka said. ‘I went to Whitechapel, London. Then I hear, the Jews say, that the British are looking for me. All Germans are to be interned in prison camps. I am a German with German papers. Everyone is looking for me, I think! I run, I don’t know where. I want to find Roma people.’

‘How did you end up in the forest?’ I asked.

‘I heard of a fair there. I thought, If my people are anywhere they will be at the fair. I meet Zinaida – Betty Lee. She speaks the same Roma language as me. She knows who I am, what I am, what I have. All her group are excited and afraid. She takes me to Lily and the husband of her sister, another Roma from Europe. They were performing this illusion with the Head.’

‘So you took over from Edward.’

‘Not quickly, no,’ he said. ‘I just hide. Only when the Military Police come looking for me do I do the Head. To hide where all the world can see. It is Lily’s idea. She was a good magician.’

When he’d spoken about the nails of Christ to me and the Duchess back in Lily’s tent, he’d taken what I felt had to have been a stupid risk. I told him this and then I said, ‘That was a bit reckless of you, wasn’t it?’

He smiled. ‘Undertakers and priests do not talk,’ he said. ‘Only to the dead.’

I wanted to ask him whether, in the case of priests, he included God and the saints in ‘the dead’. But this nail he claimed to have was of God so he couldn’t not believe in God’s existence, or so I felt.

‘You know they only want to intern you,’ I said. ‘Put you in a camp for a bit. It isn’t pleasant, but you do get fed and attended to if you’re ill.’

From behind I heard Hannah sniff in disgust. Using the word ‘only’ with ‘internment’ is like swearing to her, and she does have a point. But it isn’t as if internment means death.

‘They want to kill me,’ Stojka said. ‘Whether here or back in Germany, they want my blood. Hitler, he wants to take the Nail and use its power. Because I run away he will kill me. He has people here to kill me. You have to believe it!’

‘Who do you mean? The MPs?’ I knew the word ‘spy’ had been mentioned by Sergeant Hill in reference to Stojka, but as far as I was concerned, the Gypsy was being sought with a view to his being interned, not executed. And, anyway, even if I were to believe every word that Stojka said, I couldn’t think it possible that people over here would kill him.

I peered into the darkness ahead. It seemed as if I’d been driving for a lot longer than it had taken me to get from that track Horatio had called a road to wherever it was we’d ended up taking Martin Stojka on board.

‘The captain of the Military Police killed Lily because she would not tell him where I was,’ Stojka said.

‘No. Sergeant Williams—’

‘I saw it happen.’

So it was from Stojka – or, rather, from him via Mr Lee – that Charlie had got that story. I turned to Stojka, whose face was blank now.

‘And you didn’t help her?’ I said. ‘She helped you.’

‘I saw only the end. I heard some voices. I ran over towards them. He stabbed her, she was dead, there was nothing I could do. I ran away.’

‘Nothing you could do?’ Hannah, who has strong views about violence to women, sounded more than displeased. ‘Too busy protecting that bleedin’ nail was you?’

I looked all around me and realised I didn’t recognise anything.

Suddenly Martin Stojka exploded with rage. ‘These policemen will take me to people who will either kill me themselves or send me back to Germany! They will not intern me! They will take the Nail! Hitler will use it, something that is ours, to give himself more power!’ He turned to me again and said, ‘You do not believe this, do you? You are going to give me to the police!’

Tired, confused and still suffering, if I’m honest, from the recent death of Alfie Rosen, I put the brake on, turned the engine off and spoke to a nervous-looking Horatio: ‘I don’t know where I am and I don’t think you do either,’ I said. And then I said to Stojka, ‘As for you, I don’t know what to believe. You and your lot say one thing, the police and the MPs say another—’

‘They are not telling you the truth!’

‘So you say,’ I said. ‘Show us this nail and—’

‘The Nail is not something people can just ask to see. You must do so with prayer, with pure things in your heart.’

I wasn’t believing this bloke any more. It was all beginning to sound like so much tosh. But suddenly – it was Hannah who spotted the light behind us first – we were all in a much more dangerous situation than I had ever imagined.

Chapter Fourteen

C
aptain Mansard had only three of his blokes with him, but they were all armed so the Lee family, who with Edward and the three young boys numbered six all told, were very much at their mercy. Betty Lee and the younger of Charlie’s two older brothers cried and shook with fear as Mansard and his men drove the family roughly in front of them.

‘Ah, Mr Stojka,’ Mansard said, as he put his head into the car with a brief smile in my direction. ‘Want to ask your passengers to get out, Hancock?’

I didn’t know whether I was relieved to see him or not, but I did as he said and Stojka, Horatio and Hannah got out and stood with me to the side of the vehicle.

‘Well, I don’t know what you’re doing all the way out here in a hearse in the middle of the night, Hancock,’ Mansard said, ‘but if you were, as I believe, trying to assist Mr Stojka’s escape, I should tell you I take a dim view.’

I said nothing.

‘Assisting a Nazi spy is a treasonable offence,’ he said to me. ‘You could hang for it.’

‘The Gentleman is not no Nazi!’ Betty Lee screamed. ‘You know what he is!’

Mansard tipped his head at one of his men, who smacked poor Betty’s face with the butt of his rifle. It was to me an over-use of force and something that would have outraged even the most hardened soldiers.

‘Steady on!’ I said, while Hannah shouted, ‘Oi!’

Mansard turned his full and violent attention on my girl and said, ‘Shut your filthy mouth before I shut it for you!’

There was something almost personal in his outburst and I said, ‘You’ll do no such thing!’ as I attempted to put myself between him and Hannah. ‘My ladyfriend hasn’t done anything except come along with me. She knows nothing about any of this!’

‘This being?’ he snapped nastily.

‘Well, this situation, with Mr—’

‘Assisting a Nazi—’

‘Mr Stojka is only a German citizen, as far as I know,’ I said. ‘You can say I assisted someone in avoiding internment, if you like, but him being a Nazi is not something I know anything about.’

Mansard shrugged, then leaned up against a tree and lit a cigarette. ‘If you’re telling the truth, maybe that could change things,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what stories he has told you but I imagine that, true to his . . . inclinations, he was quite persuasive.’

Whether he meant Stojka’s inclinations as a Gypsy or as a Nazi, I didn’t know. I looked across at Hannah who didn’t see me, her still furious eyes firmly fixed on Captain Mansard’s face.

‘Well, whatever Mr Stojka may or may not be, I think you should let Horatio and the Lee family alone,’ I said. ‘They did what they did because they thought it was right.’

‘Came out with some poppycock about being a poor refugee, did he?’

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know exactly what Stojka had said to the Lees and I didn’t want to talk about my own recent conversation with him. I’d had enough chats about strange and impossible things over the previous few weeks to last me a lifetime.

‘I saw you kill Lily Lee,’ Stojka said to Mansard. ‘You and this other man.’ He looked over at the captain’s sergeant.

‘What utter tosh!’ Mansard laughed. ‘Although it pains me I have to accept Dr Craig’s opinion that Williams did it. I didn’t want to accept it, but—’

‘But you know that is not true.’

Under cover of his three men’s pistols, Mansard moved in on Stojka. ‘Williams was besotted with the girl, I don’t know why. He had a lovely girl in the WRNS. But, anyway, he raped this Lily. Williams’s fingers were curled around the knife that was used to kill her afterwards.’

‘Because you put it there,’ Stojka said, ‘after you and your man murder him. I saw you.’

I felt my heart jump in my chest. Mansard had killed Williams? Why?

Mansard crossed his arms over his chest. He didn’t seem in the least upset by any of this. ‘And why did I do that, Mr Stojka?’ he said, echoing precisely my own thoughts. ‘I liked Williams. He was one of my chaps, totally loyal. And anyway, if you saw me commit all these crimes why didn’t you try to stop me?’

‘Sergeant Williams did not just like Lily Lee, he understood her heart,’ Stojka said. ‘For a time he knew she knows something about me, but she would not tell. She told him she could not answer his questions and he respected her because he loved her. But he believed your lies about me. He believed you almost up until the time you killed her.’

‘Oh, when the scales fell from his eyes?’

‘He did not know you were a bad man at first but then he did find out and he dies for that.’

But Lily Lee, I remembered Dr Craig saying, had not been assaulted. It had just looked as though she had. The Lees as a group began to get restless. Charlie, afraid but wanting to get closer to Stojka, moved towards him.

‘Get back, you little bastard!’ One of Mansard’s blokes poked Charlie’s chest with the butt of his pistol. The other two watched the rest of the family nervously.

‘Leave him alone!’ Hannah cried.

‘I’ve told you before!’ Mansard screamed. ‘Shut up!’

‘He killed my daughter, Mr Undertaker!’ Mr Lee pointed at Mansard. ‘He wants to know where our German Gentleman is so that he can take the Nail away from him! He’s working for Hitler! Prob’ly going to give the Nail to some bloke high up to take it to Germany. These Nazis, they all work together! The Nail has so much power—’

‘Christ Almighty, not this again!’ Mansard said. And then, turning to me, he continued, ‘Did any of them tell you their silly story, Hancock?’

I gazed at him as blankly as I could.

‘About their sacred nail? The one the ancestors of this rabble supposedly stole from the site of the crucifixion? God, what a load of tosh! Only Gyppos would boast about stealing anything. Not shown it to you, I suppose, has he?’ Again I didn’t respond. ‘No. Well, something that doesn’t exist can’t be seen, can it? Everything about this man is a lie! If he saw me kill both the girl and Williams, why didn’t he do anything about that, eh? With his miracle-working nail why am I still alive?’

‘The Nail is powerful. My first duty is to protect it always! You know nothing of it. I cannot show it—’

‘Oh, Mr Stojka – or Django the Head, as we now know you were – you and Lily Lee made quite a pair, didn’t you? She saw the Virgin Mary and you live with the nail that bleeds for Jesus Christ! God Almighty, if you hadn’t made such a fool of me with your tatty little fairground illusion I might have let you avoid internment. You are pathetic! Like Williams, like all of these pitiful Gypsies here. Or, rather, you would be if you were not working for the Third Reich, Mr Stojka.’ He paused, then looked directly at me. ‘You have to ask yourself what a German national is doing in this country, don’t you? Hiding out, disguising himself . . . Our friend here may well end up being interned but he will be questioned about his activities first – at some length.’