After the Mourning (21 page)

The Gypsy looked at the ground and I thought I caught guilt on his face. I had started to believe him but . . . but this made me unsure yet again.

‘Mr Stojka?’ I asked.

He looked up at me with violent eyes. ‘Believe what you like,’ he said, ‘I do not care!’

‘If there were more of us I’d offer to escort you back in your vehicle, Hancock,’ Mansard said, as he took Stojka’s arm. ‘But as it is . . .’

‘I thought you’d want to do us for aiding someone you believe to be a Nazi,’ I said. ‘You said yourself I could hang for such a thing.’

‘I’m feeling generous and you’re not a bad chap. It’s easy to be taken in by these exotic types.’

And I was, I admit, ready to take his kind ‘offer’. There I was, in the middle of the night with my ladyfriend in Epping Forest and a suspected Nazi sympathiser – it didn’t look healthy. But suddenly I was being given a way out. There is a coward in me as well as a man who just wants to protect his lady.

And thank God for that lady, who pointed at Mansard and said, ‘Now I fucking know where I’ve seen you before!’

‘You pushed me into the road, you bastard!’ she said. ‘You and all your Fascist mates!’ Even through the night-time gloom I could see that Hannah’s face was distorted with rage.

For once, Mansard did not respond to Hannah’s outburst by shouting. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said quietly, as he passed Stojka to one of his other chaps and attempted to take Hannah to one side. She shoved him away from her.

‘Brick Lane,’ she said. ‘Nineteen thirty-four. You and your pals pushed me in the road, nearly under a car! I’ve never forgotten it. You pushed your face right into mine and then you called me a Yiddish pig!’

‘I think you’re mistaken—’

‘I thought I knew you and now I know I do! Them days are burned into my brain.’

There was a moment of silence.

‘Hannah,’ I said, ‘what’s going on?’

She turned to me, but Mansard pulled her face around to his once again. ‘You’re—’

She spat at him, full in the face. ‘He’s a Fascist, H,’ she yelled. ‘Him and his mates all in black shirts, following that bastard Mosley!’

He slapped her hard across the mouth. Mr Lee and I sprang forwards in her defence. The sound of guns being turned against us brought us both to a standstill.

‘They used to come down to our manor terrifying poor Jews, right up until we kicked them out in ’thirty-six when the whole East End stood up to Mosley in Cable Street,’ Hannah said, as she wiped blood away from her mouth. ‘I’d gone back to see if my mum and dad were still alive, if someone like him hadn’t thrown them through a shop window!’

‘Shut up!’

Hannah had reckoned she’d recognised Mansard some time before. But I’d given it little thought – apart, of course, from wondering whether he’d been a customer of hers. I was relieved he hadn’t, but I was frightened too. Mr Lee had given his opinion that Mansard was working for someone higher up who wanted to get hold of Stojka and his nail. And now, if Mansard was or had been one of Mosley’s Blackshirts, there was a possibility that he and the three lads he had with him were doing that job directly for Adolf Hitler. There was something else to take into account too, something about Hannah.

‘Hancock?’ Mansard raised a questioning eyebrow. He began to appeal, I felt, to my good sense. ‘Are you going to take this “lady” out of the forest? I suggest that’s for the best. What do you think?’

‘The problem I have, Captain Mansard,’ I said, ‘is that Hannah doesn’t lie. She doesn’t get on with her mum and dad, and if she went back to Spitalfields it must have been for a serious reason. I remember all that trouble back in the thirties, and nineteen thirty-four was the height of it, Blackshirts everywhere. Hannah said you were a Blackshirt then.’

‘If I had been a Blackshirt, how the hell would I have got into the MPs? God! Do use your intelligence!’

‘I don’t know how Mr Stojka got here from Germany,’ I said. ‘Seems like a bit of a miracle to me, but he did it.’

‘He’s here because he’s one of their fucking agents, as I told you!’ Mansard yelled.

I looked at Martin Stojka, the Head, the keeper of the Nail of Christ or whatever it was. He was dirty, cowed and breathing heavily through fear. His story was ridiculous and he could easily have been a Nazi spy. But just as I knew that Hannah was telling the truth about Mansard, I knew that Stojka, whatever he might be, was no Nazi spy. After all Sergeant Williams had had no reason to kill Lily Lee, and I couldn’t accept that the spirit of the girl’s dead sister had done it.

‘Hitler wants to kill all of our people,’ Martin Stojka said softly, to me. ‘He wants our secrets and then our deaths.’

Mansard turned his gun on him.

The other three men positioned themselves, two in front and one behind the rest of the Gypsies. The travellers outnumbered the MPs, but sometimes those shot for desertion in the trenches were executed in groups. More than once, those we killed outnumbered those of us who had been ordered to do the shooting. I still see those things in waking nightmares. I had a feeling so bad it was almost as if my bones were melting.

‘Captain Mansard,’ I said, ‘I believe you are an enemy of this country, and I also believe that you have to be stopped.’

‘And you’re going to stop me, are you?’

‘No,’ I said truthfully. ‘I don’t have anything to stop you with. But if you want to stop me telling people about what you’ve been doing here in the forest with these people you’d better kill me.’

‘H!’

‘I’m sorry, love,’ I said to Hannah, ‘but I can’t just let him execute these people.’ I looked at Mansard. ‘Because you will, won’t you? I don’t know why you want Martin Stojka so much—’

‘I told you!’ I heard Stojka say. Then I watched, with everyone else in that clearing, as he put his hand into his jacket pocket and brought something very bright out into the darkness.

I heard Mansard click off his safety catch.

‘He wants this,’ Stojka said, as he held what looked like a dart of light up before him.

There was a gasp and then all of the Gypsies got down on the ground and hid their faces in their hands. The light from the thing, which was white and bright, made their deep black hair seem to shine.

‘The Fourth Nail,’ I heard Mr Lee say. ‘The Nail of Christ!’

I don’t believe in anything supernatural. I don’t think that such things are possible, but whatever Stojka had in his hand lit the scene in front of my eyes so brilliantly that I could now see the hard lines of hatred on Captain Mansard’s face. Addressing Martin Stojka, he said, ‘Give the Nail to me.’

I wanted to say something about his not believing in this thing, but by that time I was speechless. As Stojka held it out to Mansard I motioned for Hannah to get out of it sharpish. But she was as fascinated by what was going on as I was. Her eyes looked almost as if she were seeing inside herself rather than staring at what was happening outside. There was probably half a second of the deepest silence this side of the grave. I turned my attention from Hannah to Stojka. But now the scene had changed. There was nothing bright and ethereal in Stojka’s hand any more and Captain Mansard was screaming.

‘Oh, Christ!’ Mansard yelled. He was lying on the forest floor, rocking, holding his face and shouting.

I’d seen nothing happen, yet Mansard was tearing at one blood-filled eye. Martin Stojka, who had embedded the nail in Mansard’s face, watched impassively. Even when Mansard’s sergeant hefted his rifle and shot Stojka, the Gentleman Gypsy did not move. In fact, it wasn’t for some moments that I realised Stojka had been shot. Then, slowly, like a tree that has been felled, he dropped forwards on to the ground, the wound in his back pouring blood, his eyes wide open and seemingly without life. The nail in Mansard’s face had ceased to glow and we were all where we had been before Stojka had removed it from his jacket, caught in the gloom of Mansard’s boys’ torches.

‘Help me!’ Mansard shouted, as he clawed and shredded his face.

‘Fucking hell, Sarge,’ one of the younger MPs said, to the man with the stripes on his arm in front of him.

Rosie’s Edward and her mother lifted their heads from the ground, only to be shot by the other equally terrified young MP behind the Gypsy group. He did it as reflex, a deadly reaction to fear.

‘Betty!’ Mr Lee lunged across towards his wife’s twitching body.

‘Stay where you are!’ the sergeant MP warned him. He took his eyes off Mr Lee and turned to Mansard. ‘Captain?’ he said.

But Mansard was speechless. Gasping for breath, his fingers lost in a bloody hole inside his face, he rocked on the ground in the grip of an agony I could only imagine. I made to go over to him to see what I could do. We’re all human, aren’t we, and he was a human in great pain? But as soon as I moved I found myself looking down a gun barrel.

‘Kill ’em all, and then we’ll think about what we’re going to say later,’ the man with his gun in my face said to his younger colleagues.

‘There ain’t half a lot of ’em,’ the young lad who had shot Edward and Betty replied, as he surveyed the remaining wailing and bloodied Gypsies on the ground before him. ‘What about Captain Mansard?’

‘I’ll deal with him,’ the sergeant replied. ‘You do what I tell you.’

‘Sarge.’ He swung his machine-gun down from his shoulder again and clicked off the safety catch.

The man in front of me bent down towards Mansard as Mr Lee tore himself away from his wife’s body and shouted, ‘No!’

‘Sarge’ looked at his younger colleagues and said, ‘Now!’

I saw one of the kids swallow hard before he fired, but both he and his mate still did it. I could hear Hannah screaming behind me and I feared she might run forward in an attempt to save the Gypsies. But she didn’t move any more than I did. Whether we were rooted to the spot with fear or whether we didn’t feel the Gypsies were worth our own lives, I will never know. But the fear that it might have been the latter haunts me. I felt pain when I saw little Charlie Lee’s life shot out of him, but that doesn’t do anything to lessen my guilt. In the end, if you’re there you do something, and in that moment I did nothing.

Once the shooting had finished there was silence. People imagine that after an execution like that some of those only wounded will groan and cry out in their agony. But it doesn’t always happen, and it seemed at the time that the young MPs had been thorough. All I could hear was Hannah’s weeping and the pounding of my own blood inside my head.

‘You,’ Sarge said to me, as I stood trembling with terror in front of him, ‘get the nail out of Captain Mansard’s face. I think he’s almost dead now.’

‘No,’ I whispered, my throat almost closed by terror. His voice was so far from humanity it made me want to be sick.

Sarge moved towards me. ‘Now, you listen to me, you dirty little wog,’ he said. ‘The Captain, Jonesy, young Hanson over there and me, we’ve had ’ard time getting hold of what these bleedin’ Gyppos have. We’ve lost the fuckin’ war anyway, so why not give old Adolf what he wants, eh? Captain would’ve done it for love of the Fatherland, but I’m quite happy with the ackers and the chance to carry on living meself.’

Mansard had now stopped clawing at his face and was just twitching in a way that the dead Gypsies were not doing. The nail, long, dark and thin, stuck way out and up from inside his bloodied, smashed-up eye-socket.

‘Don’t do it, H!’ I heard Hannah cry. ‘We haven’t lost this war! We can’t have lost this war!’

Sarge’s face moved up into a sneer. ‘What the fuck do you know, love?’

I wasn’t going to do a thing to help him.

‘No,’ I said, more strongly this time. ‘You want it, you get it.’

‘I’ll fucking shoot—’

‘You’re going to shoot us anyway!’ I said. ‘No, you do it yourself.’

The youngster still standing behind the great heap of dead Gypsies said, ‘Sarge, it’s getting light!’

I would have done what Sarge did, which was glance up into the lightening sky, but my eyes were on something that was moving at the edge of my view. It was a man and, though bloodied, he did not appear to be hurt.

‘If you touch the Nail with bad intent it will do you harm,’ Mr Lee said, as he picked himself up from among the bodies of his dead children.

‘Jonesy!’

But the lad was frozen, his eyes riveted to the gory, weeping figure that had emerged from the massacre.

‘The Gentleman, Mr Stojka, was keeper of the Nail. It will let me, as one of his own, for a while, take it now,’ Mr Lee said.

Sarge moved his pistol away from me and pointed it at the Gypsy. ‘If you think I’m going to let you have what we’ve taken months to find, then you’ve another think coming! You ain’t doing to me what that German done to the captain!’

Mr Lee stood very still, then raised his arms slowly into the air.

‘Now, look here,’ the MP said, ‘unlike the captain, I ain’t no Nazi. Hitler must be a bloody madman to be offering ackers for something like this. I just want the money.’

‘You’ve killed all these people for it!’ I said. Until I heard him talking so calmly about money the true horror hadn’t really hit me. A man, a woman and children had been wiped out for something I would’ve put in the same box with Lily’s visions – something from the mind. Relics were just bits of old wood, metal and bone that people said were powerful because there was a story attached to them. They weren’t real. But all of us, Sarge included, had seen that nail glow when Stojka took it out of his pocket. And if Sarge was so confident he didn’t believe in its power, why had he asked
me
to pull it out of Captain Mansard’s face? Why hadn’t he done it himself?

‘Yeah,’ Sarge replied, ‘and if you try to stop me and Jonesy and Hanson, we’ll kill you an’ all.’

I glanced across at the other two and caught just the briefest hint of doubt flash between them. They were young and, as I knew from my own experiences, killing doesn’t always become a habit with blokes who take oath for King and country. There were four of us – Horatio, Mr Lee, Hannah and myself – and only three of them. They had less to lose than us, but they had the weapons we lacked. Not that that superior situation had saved Captain Mansard. Something else had happened to him, something I still can’t explain. It did make me think, though. ‘Well, Sarge,’ I said, as I fixed Mr Lee with what I hoped was a meaningful stare, ‘we certainly don’t want that, do we?’