Last Rights (24 page)

‘What do you mean?’

‘She sent him a note,’ she said. ‘Sent it through the
prison governor, not you. She didn’t want you to be involved.’

‘But—’

‘Pearl, just like Ruby and me, know what you are, Blatt,’ the good Sister spat. ‘Now, you’d better get looking to see who
might be coming out of the woodwork. My father had more than just a sister to call his family and this bombing means that
people can get away with anything – including murder. There’s a lot of people out there who have scores to settle with you,
as well as us, so you’re in the firing line . . .’

‘You expect a lot of me, Amber,’ Blatt replied smoothly. ‘Getting your sister off, solving a mystery that is probably not
a mystery . . .’

‘Pearl was having an abortion when her husband died and Ruby, well, she loved that old Jew.’

‘A common failing in your family.’

‘Oh, drop dead, will you, Blatt? Look, do you think that Pearl and Ruby killed their fellows? Honestly?’

‘I don’t know,’ Blatt said. ‘After what you all saw at such tender ages . . .’ I heard him begin to laugh.

‘Fuck you, Blatt! Fuck—’

‘Why don’t you come back to the office with me and we’ll talk about these things?’

‘I’d rather die,’ I heard her say. ‘I’m not going anywhere with someone like you.’

‘Francis?’

The Duchess’s voice is always gentle, but sometimes disapproving.

‘Duchess?’

‘I do hope that you are not listening at that door, Francis.’ She lowered her voice as she spoke, lest those inside should
hear us. ‘The Sister and the gentleman came up here for a private conversation.’

‘Yes, Duchess.’

‘Then . . .’

I moved away, after her, down the corridor and back towards the kitchen. At that point I don’t know whether I was more confused
or less. Blatt’s involvement with the Reynoldses was obviously at a deeper level than the usual solicitor/client relationship.
But how deep it went, I couldn’t tell. The main thing among all the talk of Neilson’s possible relatives, and who might or
might not have done what, that had a lot of meaning for me was that Blatt knew where Opal was. It wasn’t a case of him being
able to find out, nor was it a case of him ‘believing’ she’d been adopted, as he had told me. No, he knew. Sister Teresa knew
it and so, I imagined, did Pearl. It would explain why she hadn’t asked me to find Opal. In fact, in her note she’d sort of
glossed over Opal’s existence. Did this mean perhaps that Blatt had already contacted the girl? There was something about
people ‘knowing’ something unspecified too. What was that, and why had the nun spoken about Blatt being ‘in the firing line’
as well as her and her sisters?

Had the nun not left without even a thank-you I might have asked her.

As I’ve said before, Father Burton and I don’t often see eye to eye. But we do agree when it comes to the subject
of children’s deaths. What do you tell the parents? Father Burton will talk about God and all that business, of course, because
that’s his job. But how to comfort the parents? He doesn’t know any more than I do and, even after all these years, I know
nothing.

William Clatworthy had been only six months old when slates falling off his mother’s roof had ended his life. Mrs Clatworthy
had to be no more than twenty, poor woman. Her old man, she said, was in the navy.

‘How can I tell him about little Billy?’ she said to me. ‘He’ll go barmy! He just won’t be able to take it, I know.’

And then she wept. I had no words. What can you say to someone who loses a child? I’m sorry? What good’s sorry? Kids die,
we all know, especially round here, especially in the big poor families. They die because of malnutrition, diseases we can’t
control, because some poor women are in labour for so long both the mother and the baby end up dying, and now they die because
of the Jerries. But whatever the reason, kids dying before their parents is an unnatural thing. Our kids, if we have them,
are supposed to outlive us. That’s the way it should be.

There was to be no wake for William Clatworthy so once he was buried I headed back to the cemetery gates. I’d been aware of
another service going on over the other side of the cemetery, and I thought I recognised some of Albert Cox’s boys, but I
didn’t pay it, or them, much attention. At the gates, however, there was Albert’s hearse, alongside mine, all its doors wide
open to the elements.

‘Frank!’

If I hadn’t known Albert as well as I do, I would’ve thought that perhaps he was happy. But his voice was slurred and I could
see the hip-flask in his hand, as could his boy, Paddy, who gave me a quick raise of his eyebrows as he passed.

‘Hello, Albert,’ I said. ‘How’s it going?’

Albert, who had been slumped down low in the passenger seat, pulled himself upright and smiled. ‘I’m going to the pub,’ he
said. ‘Do you want to come?’

I’m not the sort of bloke as goes to pubs a great deal. In fact, a lot of the behaviour that goes on in pubs gives me the
pip. I’m usually too busy these days, anyway. But on this occasion I needed a drink and I knew it. Even for me I was all over
the place. Poor little Velma aside, I didn’t know what to make of the Reynoldses, Blatt and all their doings. I’d started
out wanting to get at the truth about Kevin Dooley, doing what I felt I should, really, but now I seemed to be somewhere quite
different. Now I was caught up with people’s secrets, which is always a dangerous place to be.

‘Yes, I’ll come,’ I said to Albert. ‘Just let me send my lads on their way.’

I told Walter and Arthur to drive the hearse back to the shop and then I got in beside Albert.

‘Bleedin’ Dooleys,’ he said, as he passed his flask to me. ‘I hope those bastards take a direct hit!’

Vi Dooley, Kevin’s mother, hadn’t wanted Albert to do her son’s funeral.

‘How do I know you’re gonna bury my boy and not
fetch up with a coffinload of nothing like you did last time?’ she’d said, when he’d gone round to talk to her. Both Albert
and the police had explained it to her several times, but it took the skill of Albert’s father to get the old girl to go ahead
with Cox and Son. Harry Cox had always been a sweet talker – my dad had known him for years. Harry’s local was the Boleyn
on the corner of the Barking Road and Green Street. Albert often went there too, which was why we turned up in the saloon
bar at just about lunchtime.

Harry, already three sheets to the wind, bought the first round.

‘Here you go, boys,’ he said, as he placed the pints in front of us. ‘Get that down you.’

Albert lifted his glass up into the smoke-soaked light and said, ‘To Kevin Dooley. Thank Christ that bastard’s finally in
his grave.’

They laughed, I couldn’t, and then Harry said to Albert, ‘Bad do, was it, boy?’

‘I could’ve done without Vi keep on telling everyone what I’d put her through the first time,’ Albert said. ‘Never said a
bad word about it to Father Burton. All “Father this, Father that, thank you very much for such a lovely sermon, Father.”
Christ! And then Martine. Jesus, the state of her!’

‘What? Johnny’s wife?’ I said. ‘What about her?’

‘Well, she’s quite a looker, Martine. Or she was. Now she’s just like that poor little Pearl always was. Black eyes, her nose
all out of kilter by the look of it. That bastard husband of hers, I reckon.’

‘I heard there were some “stories” about Martine,’ I said.

Harry laughed. ‘There’s always stories about pretty women, son.’

‘Johnny knew she weren’t no saint when he married her,’ Albert said. ‘We all knew it. But I’ve never seen her like that before.
I reckon he must’ve caught her with another geezer. Right smashed up, but she kept looking across at Johnny as if she wanted
him to smile at her or something. Just like Kevin, him, has to be
the
man, no one so much as looking at his missus. What is it with these blokes who knock their women about?’

What indeed? Well, in this case there was, I suspected, just a little of me involved too. Johnny had obviously been aware
of what his wife might have been doing with Kevin for a long time before I came on the scene. But somehow, maybe, he’d lived
with it. Even after Kevin died he’d carried on as normal, as far as I knew, with his wife. But I’d opened my mouth outside
Canning Town station and this was, possibly, the result. But did it mean any more than it seemed to? Did it mean that Johnny,
Martine or both of them had had a hand in Kevin’s death? It didn’t seem that likely to me, but perhaps after what I’d put
in his mind, Johnny had felt the need to make sure Martine knew who was boss, as Albert had said. Or maybe she’d threatened
to tell someone everything she knew about Kevin and her involvement with him – someone apart from her family and her priest,
that is.

I was thinking about these things, coming to no conclusions, of course, when I heard an old dry voice
say, ‘Morgue’s son and the Coxes like a load of black crows.’

I turned quickly and there, half hidden by deep layers of smoke and dust, one thin yellow hand curled round a pint of stout,
was the old bloke from St Mary Magdalene’s churchyard. The leather-faced geezer from the bare-knuckle fight. He’d left me
only minutes before I’d seen Kevin Dooley in his illuminated death throes. He could, possibly,
surely
, have seen something?

Excited now, I didn’t take my eyes off him once as I went up to the booze-stained bar to buy a round for Albert, Harry and
myself. I didn’t want to lose him. Now I had him in my sights I had to hang on to him. Maybe I should have mentioned the fight
to the coppers, but I hadn’t. Kevin had been stabbed by a woman, so it didn’t seem relevant. But now, suddenly, coming upon
the old geezer, the only face I could’ve recognised from that graveyard, I began to wonder what he knew. There had been no
witnesses to any sort of attack on Kevin Dooley, according to the police. But in our manor you always wonder. Who, usually,
talks to the coppers?

I had to wait until he was on his own, which took some time, what with his bit of business with his bookie’s runner and another
bloke I think he might’ve bought some hooky meat off. When I did finally speak to him I had to, first off, spend a lot of
time getting him to admit he’d been in the graveyard that night. Bare knuckle is, after all, illegal and ‘Gimpy’ Charlie,
as the old boy was called, knew that as well as anyone.

‘Now, look, Charlie,’ I said, as I placed a bottle of barley
wine in front of him, ‘you were there and so was I. You helped me . . .’

‘Everyone knows you go off your nut in raids, Mr H,’ Charlie responded slyly. ‘How’d’ya know where you was?’

‘Because even I know a fight when I see one, and,’ I lowered my voice, moved in closer to the old chap, ‘I know the coppers
are always interested in who goes to watch these things.’

‘You ain’t no grass, Mr H!’

Appealing to an East-Ender’s sense of community is always a good one, but I wasn’t in the mood. ‘You don’t know what I am,
Charlie,’ I said, ‘because, as you’ve said yourself, I’m barmy so who knows what I might do?’

‘Yus, but—’

‘Charlie, all I want to know is what you saw that night,’ I said. ‘Not at the fight, I don’t care about that; on your way
home, did you see anything?’

‘Explosions. Brick-dust. A lot of black on account of the blackout—’

‘Yes! Yes!’ I’d really got his goat now. ‘But look,’ I glanced from left to right, then moved in close to his head once again.
‘A bloke called Kevin Dooley, a scrapper from Canning Town, died that night and—’

‘I don’t know nothing about that, Mr H. Never heard of that geezer.’

‘Are you sure, Charlie?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Because it’s been all round the manor.’

‘Oh, I don’t never listen to gossip, Mr H,’ Charlie
said. ‘There’s them as say women can do these things, but I say you shouldn’t be too hasty about such things meself.’

My memory isn’t what it was. Of course I knew ‘Gimpy’ once I had a chance to take a good look at him. He had one leg, hence
his nickname, and the story was that he’d lost the other at Mafeking in the Boer War. Or, rather, that was what Charlie always
wanted people to believe. ‘Gimpy Charlie’s whole family are dodgy,’ my dad had said, when he’d first heard this. ‘Gimpy lost
that leg dynamiting a bookie’s safe up Dalston!’

‘You’ve always been a rotten liar, Gimpy,’ I said, as I rolled up a fag for me and one for him. ‘You didn’t fool my dad and
you’re not fooling me.’

‘Mr H!’

‘If you don’t listen to gossip, then how do you know that there’s a woman suspected of Kevin’s murder?’

‘Well, Mr—’

‘Look, I met Kevin Dooley a few minutes after he’d been stabbed, just after I left you. You live up on the Barking Road and
must’ve seen something, Gimpy, even if it was only me talking to him. Now, if you did see Kevin Dooley or anyone you think
might’ve been him, you’d better get on and tell me,’ I said. ‘I’ll buy you another barley wine and you can have one fag for
now and one to put behind your ear.’

Gimpy thought about this for a few seconds before he said, ‘I kept quiet because no one don’t need to hear that sort of thing
about those what’ve passed on.’

‘What do you mean, Gimpy?’

‘I mean if, like, you had a brother and after he was dead it turned out he was an iron, would you want to know?’

‘Was Kevin Dooley an iron, then?’ I said.

Gimpy nearly got inside my jacket trying to get close enough so no one else could hear. ‘Yus,’ he said. ‘Saw him, you know,
with this geezer on the night he died. Disgusting it was!’

I
ron hoof – poof. I had a bit of bother believing it of Kevin Dooley, yet Gimpy Charlie said he’d seen it happen. Just behind
St Mary’s graveyard, he said, which meant that Kevin must’ve run from there, or at least walked quickly to get up to the Barking
Road at the same time as me. The other man, whom Charlie couldn’t really get a good look at, had seemed young. But then, as
the old bloke had said, it was difficult to see him, what with the blackout and him being on his knees in front of Kevin.

Had this young man stabbed Kevin Dooley because, maybe, he hadn’t paid him for what he’d done? Irons, unless they’re very
well connected and especially if they’re married, generally have to pay for their jollies. As soon as I could string a sentence
together again, I’d have to telephone Blatt and let him know. Too pie-eyed to go to the coppers right then, I’d come home
in what Nan calls a ‘right state’ and gone to my bedroom. Not to sleep – the room was spinning round far too quickly for that
even if my mind was quite slow.