Last Rights (29 page)

‘All right,’ I said, after I’d had a minute or two to compose myself. ‘Give us the torch. Let’s move on very slowly.’

With no light, save the occasional quick flash from the torch, we picked our way carefully as if walking on eggs.

‘Not a soul about, is there?’ I whispered to Hannah.

I heard her laugh. ‘Don’t be took in, Mr H,’ she said. ‘This place is heaving.’

‘What?’

‘A lot of girls work in the parks,’ Hannah whispered. ‘Believe me, Mr H, if you shake a load of bushes round here at night
you’ll as often as not find a girl young enough to be your daughter with one or more gentlemen old enough to be your father!’

‘So is that why Speaker’s Corner—’

‘Can’t expect gentlemen to climb over gates, can you?’ Hannah said.

‘No. Oh, right.’ I said. Well, it made sense. If nothing else, the park had to be too big for coppers and other irritations
to those ‘courting’. ‘So is that how you knew to get in through Speaker’s Corner?’

‘Ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies,’ Hannah said.

‘Oh.’

As we got closer to where I reckoned the Serpentine had to be, I started to sense rather than see movement up ahead. It would
have been a bloody miracle if it’d been Sister Teresa and whoever it was she was meeting, but it wasn’t them. It was a group
of coppers.

As the tallest of the coppers shone his torch up into my face I could see that behind them, between them and the waterway,
was a huge roll of barbed wire. Squinting, I put Hannah’s little torch into my pocket.

‘What’s all this, then?’ he said, as he turned his light from me to Hannah and back again.

As frequently happens in situations like this I lost my speech. ‘I . . . I . . .’

‘Do you know this is a restricted area, sir?’

‘Er . . .’ This was bad. You can get into all sorts of bother if you stray across into military areas now. Looking about as
different from a German as a person can get is no defence either.

‘Identity cards, please.’

Hannah took hers out of her gas-mask box, which she quite often uses as a handbag. I eventually found mine, after a lot of
fumbling, at the back of my wallet.

The copper looked at the cards in silence, then passed them over to one of his fellows, who looked, to me, very young.

‘You’re a long way from home, Mr Hancock,’ the youngster said, ‘and you, Miss.’

‘Mmm . . . er . . .’

‘Do you want to tell us what you’re doing in a restricted area? Either of you.’

‘Well, it’s like this . . .’ I heard Hannah begin. Then I listened in silence. We were, apparently, star-crossed lovers –
a Jew and a Christian whose mother came, as Hannah put it, ‘from the Orient’. ‘He’s the colour of cardboard if you look at
him in the light,’ she said. We’d come ‘up West’ where nobody knew us so we could walk and talk as normal folk without fear
or favour. Coming into the park for a ‘cuddle’, she said, had been our way of rounding off our day out. After all, we were,
despite our differences, practically engaged. There wasn’t anything immoral going on, she assured them.

In the silence that followed I wondered how long it would take me to lose what was left of my mind behind a door with a lock.
Of course, now things half heard from customers, the wireless and on the street came back to me. There was a munitions dump
under the Serpentine. Never mind about Hannah’s bloody trenches, here we had weapons, barbed wire and coppers. They were,
I knew it, going to think that we were spies.

The tallest copper took our cards from the youngster and said, ‘Well, Miss, as a load of old cobblers goes, that’s probably
about one of the best I’ve ever heard.’

‘Oh, no, Officer, but it ain’t—’

‘Yes, it is, Miss,’ he said, ‘it’s tommyrot.’ Then he smiled. ‘In fact, it’s such a lot of you-know-what that if you are a
Nazi spy I’m Benito Mussolini. Mr Hancock here, I must say, makes Funf look like a university professor.’

‘Uh . . .’

He handed our cards back to us. I replaced mine in my wallet with shaking fingers.

‘A lot of East End girls come up here to earn a bit of bunce,’ the copper said, as he looked at Hannah gravely. ‘You all think
it’s the bleeding Promised Land, west of Holborn. But it ain’t. There’s ’undreds of you and, darling, as I’m sure you know,
you ain’t going to get any bloke any better than him. And you,’ he turned to me, ‘have some sense and knock her off down Rathbone
Street, like the rest of your lot.’

He was either local or he knew Canning Town well.

‘Now, you take these good people up to the Bayswater Road, Constable Barber,’ he said, to the youngster at his
side, ‘and you make sure that they leave this park without having “relations” either near or far from this restricted area.’

‘Yes, Sergeant,’ the young man said, and then he turned towards us. ‘Come on, then, you two,’ he said, and started to walk
on smartly in front of us. ‘Quick as you can.’

As he followed on after us I heard the sergeant say, ‘Undertaker, he was. Christ, you’d think he’d have enough to do down
that manor. If the docks cop it again tonight he’ll be glad I stopped him wasting his energy with her.’

I
’d heard that if you’d got money little had changed in the West End as regards clubs, dancing and drinking. Those who’ve always
had it still do and probably always will. For those of us with rather less, however, a late night on the town with your best
girl usually involves a pub. Hannah and I eventually fetched up in one on the corner of Sale Place and Star Street in that
area of Paddington, behind Praed Street, they call Tyburnia. We hadn’t said a word since the young copper had chucked us out
of the park and we didn’t speak again until I’d got myself a pint and Hannah a gin and It.

‘It’s me I’m more cross with rather than you,’ Hannah said eventually. ‘I should’ve brought you to your senses with your bleedin’
nun meeting some “person” in Hyde Park. Course it was ridiculous! All the parks have got anti-aircraft or allotments or—’

‘You said all the parks were given over to “courting”,’ I said.

‘Yes, well, some of them are, in parts. Obviously not up
by that bleedin’ river or whatever you call it.’ Disgruntled, Hannah lit up a fag and leaned back in her chair. ‘So what we
gonna do now, then, H? We gonna try and get home and hope there ain’t a raid, or we staying here and doing what?’

I shrugged, swigged my pint and began to roll up a fag for myself. The people around us were mainly squaddies home on leave
and girls in Hannah’s line of business so it might, I knew, get a bit lively later on.

Hannah sipped her gin, being careful not to get any of it on her lipstick. ‘I think you should stop running around after other
people now,’ she said. ‘You done what you had to telling the police about Kevin Dooley. Now leave it.’

‘Aggie and Nan have said similar things,’ I said.

‘Yes, and they’re right. Caused all sorts of complications. Not least of which between you and me,’ Hannah said, referring
once again to what my investigations had led me to find out about her family. ‘Hyde Park! By the bleedin’ water!’

‘It’s a munitions dump,’ I said. ‘I remembered.’

‘Too bloody late!’

‘Yes.’

‘And it’s not as if that “holy Sister” of yours could meet this whoever at another time. That’s a restricted area, that is.
No one in their right mind would arrange to meet someone there. Don’t make no sense . . .’

Hannah let it trail off into nothing. Sometimes she rants and chatters and she knows she rants and chatters. But not this
time.

The noise had gone down a bit now because most of
the squaddies had moved to the other side of the bar to watch a darts match. I smoked and drank and thought how stupid I’d
been. This, what I’d been doing, wasn’t about Kevin Dooley. It hadn’t been about him for a while. It was about those bloody
sisters! Not just one of them or each as a separate person, but the Reynolds girls as a whole and what had happened in their
lives had taken over, taken
me
over. It – they – were so strange. It was as if, certainly in the case of Ruby and Amber, they’d set out to get themselves
into places they thought they should belong – even if, in both cases, they actually didn’t. Ruby hid herself away among people
she could only guess were her own, and Amber was the strangest nun I’d ever met. There was nothing religious about her. She
just wasn’t right. Pearl, too, had put up with all sorts from Kevin, as far as I could see, just to keep a roof over her head,
but that’s not unusual down our way. I wondered what Opal’s problem was or even if she had one. If her adoption had been organised
by Blatt in the belief that he was her father she probably had a very nice life, thank you. Opal, the spoiled child, her mother’s
favourite – very privileged compared to her sisters, in all but one respect. Opal, and she alone, had been in the flat when
Victorine had killed Neilson and, asleep at the time or not, it had to have had some sort of effect upon the poor girl.

An old biddy, I think maybe the landlord’s wife, sat down at the joanna in the corner and started playing something I think
was an old Irish tune. Away a bit from the darts match, she was joined by one old boy who danced a slow, stiff jig. It was
getting late now and some
people were, as they do, starting to feel as if they could relax this evening. I wasn’t one of them. I know war doesn’t run
on any timetable. I know that in reality there are no rules at all. Take what you know and turn it upside-down and maybe you
might get a little bit closer to the truth. That’s what Ken used to say about the news we got at the front in the first lot.
It was designed to make us think the things the generals wanted us to think, not necessarily what was the truth. Propaganda,
they called it. And that was when I, too, started to think that maybe I should question what had happened all those years
ago in the flat on Praed Street. After all, propaganda, mis-direction, whatever you choose to call it, isn’t just the preserve
of generals.

‘They, the Reynoldses, lived on Praed Street,’ I said, as I pulled Hannah after me through the darkened streets. ‘It was in
their flat on Praed Street that Harold Neilson died.’

Hannah didn’t answer because, poor girl, she was all done in by this time.

‘The girls, with the exception of little Opal, were out in Hyde Park when it happened. They came home, saw what had happened
and Ruby, the eldest, went to get the police. That’s what I was told and that’s what the jury must have believed when Victorine
went on trial. But can we be certain that’s how it really happened?’

I always think that the sirens, when they first start up, sound like something living. Not any creature I know, but something
with blood and feelings in a lot of pain. As it wailed its way up to full volume, I said to Hannah, ‘It’s all
right, you can go into Paddington, down the tube.’

‘Do they use it as a shelter here, then?’ Hannah asked.

But I didn’t know so I kept quiet. Running now, on to Praed Street, where the great terminus and its station for the underground
are, we followed a mass of other folk with similar ideas, who’d suddenly appeared from the doors of their flats and houses.
Directly in front of us a woman, a baby in her arms, a toddler being dragged by his hand after her said, ‘For Gawd’s sake,
do come on, Derek!’ The poor kid began to cry, adding to the noise that always explodes just before a raid: the sirens, people’s
voices raised in panic, feet moving quickly over the pavement, crying and shouting, the clanking of metal teacups and other
comforts against gas-mask boxes.

‘Derek!’

Hannah bent down and scooped up the youngster off the ground. ‘You look after your baby – I’ll bring him,’ she said to the
mother, who nodded, probably with relief as much as fear.

When we got to the entrance to the station, I turned to Hannah and was about to speak. But she got in first: ‘I s’pose you’re
going out for a run now, aren’t you?’

‘I . . . I . . .’

‘Derek!’ the mother cried yet again, alarmed that Hannah, Derek and I had stopped.

‘We’re coming, keep your hair on!’ Hannah called over to her. Then, looking back at me, she said, ‘Just keep yourself safe.
Whatever you’re thinking about what’s happened and who’s done which to what, it can wait.’

And then she was off, striding forward like a youngster,
Derek still grizzling gently in her arms. As I pushed my way out into the street again, I wished that I’d kissed her, just
in case anything happened. But I hadn’t. Praed Street, it seemed, was emptying itself into the station now, hundreds of pairs
of eyes passing me in the opposite direction, eyes that looked at me as if I were mad. The noise starting just softly in my
head only proved them correct. Only nutters move about in the open in a raid.

As I ran across the road towards the shops with flats above them opposite the station I considered the questions that had
been forming in my mind since we’d been in the pub.
What if the Reynolds girls hadn’t been out by the Serpentine the night Neilson died? What if they’d been at number 125 Praed
Street instead? And what if whoever had telephoned Sister Teresa had known that, as well as the nun herself
?

Turning what I knew on its head. But why not? It would certainly explain why the meeting hadn’t taken place and could never
have taken place around the Serpentine. After all, if you want to make some sort of dodgy meeting with someone, you make sure
it’s possible to do so first. The park hadn’t been possible. But a flat would be, provided you knew who owned it or could
get in somehow. What that might mean, I didn’t know. Had Amber and the others seen what their mother had done that night?
Did they even help her somehow? Was that, perhaps, the deeper secret they all guarded so zealously?

I moved on towards the flats anyway, even though I couldn’t see anything beyond the black bulkiness of the flat roofs and
chimneys against what was now a sky criss-crossed
by searchlights. The Jerries would be here soon. The terror inside me babbled and screamed as I fought to concentrate
on looking for Tony’s café. Not that I could see anything much. Once a raid starts, especially in our manor, the sky can light
up like Guy Fawkes Night. But just before a raid it’s the blackest of blacks as can be imagined. I felt rather than remembered
Hannah’s little torch in my pocket. Tony’s wife had told me they didn’t go down the shelter. They’d let me into the building,
surely. Then we’d see who was in that old flat of the Reynolds family. Would it be the ‘smart lady’ Tony had told me about,
or would a nun and an unknown man be in there instead?