Paradise Court (16 page)

Robert slung his own bag down on a bench and turned to the women. ‘That one's mine.' He pointed to the mighty engine, its funnel gently hissing steam.

Hettie ignored a small convoy of wounded men crossing a faraway platform, some on crutches, some carried on stretchers. She smiled bravery. ‘Write and tell us how you're getting along,' she reminded him. ‘And there's no need to tell you again to make sure and look after yourself, is there?'

‘You too, Ett.' Robert gave her a quick hug. ‘And keep an eye on the O'Hagans.'

‘Try and stop me.'

‘She's a one-woman Sally Army,' Frances put in. She took Robert's hand, clasping it in her own small, gloved ones.

‘Well, say a prayer for old Daisy then,' Robert said to Hettie, one foot on the carriage step.

She nodded. ‘I already did.' The train door slammed, Robert leaned out of the window.

‘Go give him a kiss, quick!' Frances said to Sadie, who ran and reached up to his cheek. She clung on to his coat for a second, before the great iron wheels began to turn. Robert's face drew away into the distance. He raised his cap and waved, then went and sat in his carriage, with its smell of musty heat. The train left the station, shuttling between the backs of tall houses, through black tunnels, out into the open countryside, where shadows fell deep and the place names were hazy with steam and yellow flowering shrubs.

Annie Wiggin lingered until after most guests had left. The food was picked over, all the free beer drunk. Robert's departure had signalled the end of the party, of course. ‘Like
Hamlet
without the bleeding prince,' she said to Dolly. ‘Ain't you lucky your Charlie's too young for this lark?'

She ambled out on to the pavement in time to see a flat-topped
police car drive up. She noticed its soft rubber tyres with their smart white rims, its dicky-seat at the back crammed with three coppers in full uniform, besides the sergeant and his mate sitting comfortably inside. They all climbed out and looked up and down Duke Street. Trouble, she thought, and nipped back inside the pub for a ringside view.

To her surprise, the coppers actually followed her into the bar in single file, then fanned out across the room. Everyone stood stock-still, as if posing for a photograph. Joxer and Duke looked out from behind the bar.

‘Wilf Parsons?' the sergeant asked. ‘We want to talk to your boy.'

‘He just left.' Duke's voice was strained, but he returned the policeman's stare. ‘He enlisted for France. You won't find him here.' Whatever Robert had been up to would pale into insignificance beside that.

‘Your boy, Ernest,' the man continued.

Duke breathed out, almost scornful. ‘Well, there's been some mistake there. Ernie's . . .'

‘No mistake,' the officer barked. He took a creased cloth cap from a pocket and held it up for inspection. Jess gasped and took a step towards it. ‘This belongs to him, don't it?' He stuffed it back into his pocket without waiting for a reply. ‘We already identified it through witnesses. He was seen, you understand. This is his cap, all right. We found it at the scene of the crime.'

Jess backed off, feeling herself go faint. The sticky sensation of blood on her fingers came back to her with redoubled force. She looked round wildly to see where Ernie was. The policemen watched her like hawks.

‘Where? What crime?' Duke stared around the room.

‘He ain't exactly hard to spot by all accounts. Several witnesses seen him hanging about the place just before the murder.'

‘Murder? What you on about?' Duke lifted the bar hinge and stepped forward. ‘What the bleeding hell you trying to say?'

The policemen stiffened, but didn't move in on Duke. They waited while the sergeant explained.

‘We need to talk to Ernie.' He motioned two of the men to barge past Joxer down into the cellar. ‘It's in connection with the murder at the Palace. Bad news, I'm afraid. We got to arrest your boy.'

Jess cried out loud and went to cling on to Annie. Annie screeched at the nearest copper; a young man with a thin moustache. Duke lunged at the sergeant, but Joxer managed to restrain him as the two policemen emerged from the cellar on either side of a bewildered Ernie.

‘You can't arrest him, you bleeding idiot!' Annie yelled. ‘The poor boy wouldn't harm a fly!'

‘We got to take him down the station and ask him a few questions.' The sergeant turned to speak to Jess, who seemed to be the only one to have come to her senses. She was stunned but quiet. ‘I've got to warn you though that we'll most likely charge him and keep him in the cells. After that, you can go and visit him in the Scrubs. Got it?'

Ernie stared at the chaos around him. Two policemen held him by the arms. In confusion, he began to struggle. One arm was wrenched up his back, the other shackled by handcuffs. He felt the cold metal click around his wrist. ‘Pa?' he pleaded.

Duke pushed Joxer off and stood up straight. His head was up, though his hands trembled. ‘Go with them, there's a good boy, Ern.'

Ernie nodded and let himself be led off.

Duke's head dropped to his chest. He turned away.

‘Ern don't understand,' Jess told the sergeant. ‘You got to explain things to him clear and simple. You get him down the station and explain the charge, right? You tell him he's supposed to have stabbed Daisy to death. Then you listen to him. He'll tell you the truth.' She held on to the policeman's braided cuff. ‘You hear me? Ernie can't lie, he don't know how. You listen to him well and good, you hear?'

The man nodded, glad the boy was going quietly. ‘He was up the Palace that night, weren't he?'

Slowly Jess admitted it.

‘Shh, Jess,' Annie warned. ‘Don't tell them nothing.'

Duke watched the doors swing to after the men. Only the sergeant remained. ‘There's been a mistake,' he whispered.

Jess made one final appeal. ‘Ernie wouldn't kill Daisy!' Tears, poured down her face. ‘He worshipped the girl!'

The sergeant sighed. ‘I've seen everything in this job,' he said. ‘Most of it you wouldn't believe unless you'd seen it with your own eyes.' He looked almost sorry for them as he fixed his hat on his head and pulled the strap under his chin. ‘Look after your old man,' he advised. ‘He looks like he could do with a stiff drink.'

Annie followed him to the door, in time to see him clamber into the car, and to catch a glimpse of Ernie's pale, bewildered face staring out from between the blue uniforms as they drove him off up the street.

Ernie understood that they thought he'd done something very bad. He knew they could give him the cat or put him in prison, and he was very afraid. But his father had told him to go along quietly, and it surely wouldn't be long before they came from home and fetched him. Probably Frances would come, when she got back from sending Robert off to war, and she would sort things out. This went through his head as the policemen manhandled him from the car into the station. The handcuffs locked both arms tight in front of him. They chafed his skin as he was wrenched this way and that down the bare corridor into a room with a table and two chairs. One high, barred window provided daylight, and an electric light shone under a green metal shade. The door banged shut. He was alone.

Then a man he'd never seen before came in. He wore a long, pale coat and a brown bowler hat. A dark moustache hid his mouth. His cheeks were thin, his eyes set close together. He never smiled or said hello; just threw his coat across the back of one of the chairs and slammed some papers down on the table. He looked at Ernie. ‘Sit,' he said. He turned to the policeman in uniform who'd followed him in and puffed air into his thin cheeks. Then he blew it out in a loud sigh. ‘Best get cracking on this one, Sergeant. What's he said so far?'

‘Not a dicky bird, sir.' The sergeant stared at the blank wall above Ernie's head. ‘He's all yours.'

The inspector took a mottled blue fountain pen from his top pocket, preparing to make notes for the duration of the interview. ‘Does he know the charge?'

The sergeant blinked. ‘No, sir. His sister says you have to take it slow. He ain't all that bright.'

‘Oh my gawd.' The inspector stared narrowly at Ernie. ‘He don't look that bad to me. Come quietly, did he?' The youth looked strong enough to cause trouble if so inclined. They were charging him with a nasty business; stabbing the girl at least ten or a dozen times and leaving her to bleed to death.

‘Like a lamb, sir. Better tell him the charge and get it over with.'

‘Easy does it. Now listen, son, you know why we brought you down here?'

Ernie stared back. He shook his head. ‘I ain't done nothing wrong.'

‘That's for us to say. But you know about the girl what got killed at the music hall, don't you? Daisy O'Hagan; she lived down your street.'

Slowly Ernie nodded. Pain at the memory of Daisy creased his forehead into a frown.

‘And you was at the music hall yourself that night, wasn't you?' The inspector leaned across the table towards him. ‘You was seen, mate, so you gotta tell us exactly what happened. Take your time, no rush.' He eased back in his seat and held his pen poised over the paper.

The man's voice sounded gentle. Ernie looked at him in surprise. ‘Rob took me to see Ett and Daisy again,' he explained. ‘We went to meet up with them after the show, but I lost Rob. I never saw where he went.'

The inspector glanced at the sergeant. ‘Robert Parsons, older brother, just gone and joined up,' the uniformed man informed him.

‘Oh, very handy!' The inspector raised his close-knit eyebrows. ‘Maybe we'd have got more sense out of him. Never mind. And what happened to you after you lost Rob, Ernie?' he asked. ‘You're on your way backstage to see Ett and Daisy, remember?'

Ernie nodded, ‘Ett's my sister,' he offered obligingly.

‘Good, we're getting somewhere, then. But I want you to tell me what happened next. You lose your big brother. Now what?'

Ernie had begun to tremble. ‘I never saw him out in the street neither. There was people all around, but I never let them put me off. I just had to go and meet Ett and Daisy like we always do. That's what Rob says, and then we walk home with them!' For a moment his face cleared.

The inspector sighed. ‘Very nice, son. But it ain't like that on this particular night, is it? What happens when you finally get to the stage door? That's the bit we're interested in.'

Drawn back to that moment, Ernie's hands shook more violently against the bare table top. ‘I'm too late. They all gone home. Rob ain't there. It's dark and empty.'

‘What is?'

‘The alley. I got held up by all those crowds, see. I was late.'

‘Steady on, don't panic. What d'you do then, Ern?'

‘I don't know. I can't remember.' Ernie's voice fell to a low whisper. ‘Rob won't go home without me, I know that. He's gotta be somewhere.' He swallowed hard. ‘Rob gets mad with me when I get lost.' He stopped, suddenly unable to go on.

‘So what did you do next, Ernie?' The inspector concentrated on the boy's face. The confession had hit a brick wall. Their suspect had gone blank on the crucial part. He glanced down to bring his notes up to date. ‘Go ahead, son, tell us.'

‘I don't remember.' Ernie's blank face searched the room for clues.

The inspector frowned. ‘You don't expect us to buy that, do you, son?'

Ernie raised his tethered hands to his forehead. ‘I know I'm in the right place to wait for Rob. But something's not right. I don't know. I'm looking everywhere, but Rob ain't there. What am I gonna do now?' He stood up, reliving the incident. ‘Then I don't know what happens. Everything's gone wrong. I don't know!'

‘Easy, son, easy. What happened after you'd waited for a bit? Did you go inside? Who did you see?'

‘No! I don't know!'

‘Did you go inside and find Rob? Or Daisy? Did you find her?'

Ernie stood up and came to appeal to the inspector. ‘It ain't right. Rob shouldn't 've gone off, should he?'

‘Hang on a bit.' The inspector's voice hardened and he motioned the sergeant to come forward with a brown envelope. The sergeant tipped it and emptied a kitchen knife on to the table, then stood back. ‘Try thinking about this instead. Did you have this in your pocket that night, Ernie?' He looked keenly at the suspect, devoid of sympathy. They'd reached the crux of the matter.

Ernie shook his head.

‘I want you to think this through carefully, Ernie.'

He nodded, anxious to play the scene through to its conclusion and get it off his chest. ‘It ain't my fault, is it? Rob should never 've gone off. I was waiting for him, like he said.' He paused. When he took up again, his voice was strangled and faint. He shook his head. ‘I never meant to do it!' Ernie caught hold of the policeman. ‘Tell Rob I never meant to!'

‘All right, all right, ease off!' The inspector pulled away as Ernie seized his jacket sleeve. ‘That'll do for now. Have him taken down, Sergeant,' he said abruptly. He pulled his cuff straight and stood up as the constables came in to lead Ernie off to the cells. The heavy door shut behind them on to a long silence.

‘What d'you reckon?' the sergeant asked at last.

The inspector looked up at the ceiling and scratched his neck. ‘I think it's in the bag. He's got a touch of convenient amnesia around the actual stabbing, but I don't think the jury will wear that one. Maybe we'll never get it all out of him. He‘ll stay clammed up in court, if you want my opinion, but it won't make no difference. The rest is staring them in the face; he was there, his cap was there. This knife here is the murder weapon, and you can buy it from the ironmonger's opposite his house. Powells', ain't it?' He flicked the blade with his fingernail and made the knife spin under the glare of the electric light. ‘Very neat.'

‘No blood on him?' the sergeant asked.

‘Too late to find out. Maybe he had someone who cleaned him up? That'd be worth checking. You can trot back to the pub and ferret around,' he suggested. Then he shrugged, picked up the knife
and put it back in the envelope. ‘You happy with what we got so far, Sergeant?'

The other man nodded. ‘He ain't put up much of a defence, has he? Losing your memory don't convince no one that you're innocent.'

‘What above a motive? That's what the jury will be asking.'

‘Maybe he found her with another bloke,' the sergeant surmised. ‘The sister back at the pub reckons he worshipped the girl. The way he sees things in black and white I reckon he'd go barmy if he caught her with someone else, which she was more than likely to do by all accounts.'

The inspector nodded. ‘How about the older brother? That would account for him making himself scarce with a sudden attack of patriotism. Joining up is a surefire way of staying out of bother; he must know that. Anyhow, it looks to me like it'll hang together in front of a jury. Better get him properly charged. Ain't much more we can do now.' He sat to do the paperwork; suspect arrested at half-past seven on the 14th of September 1914. Ernest Parsons, aged eighteen, of the Duke of Wellington public house, Duke Street, Southwark.

Ernie's arrest shattered Duke. Men had died at his side in the army, and he'd watched his poor wife fade away under his own eyes. In the early days at the Duke, an unemployed scaffolder from one of the tenements had collapsed on his doorstep. They'd found the wife and three-year-old daughter dead of starvation at home. Horror stories of rats gnawing babies to death in Riddington's Yard, and anarchists shot dead by police in the Sydney Street siege were part and parcel of life in the East End, and now the war against Germany brought news of families who'd lost sons or fathers, or had them sent home wounded and broken. But nothing had robbed Duke of his will to battle on like this latest blow. They'd taken Ernie off in a police car, and life hollowed out to blank horizons, a slow stumble towards nothing.
‘Don't take on,' Annie parted his hand. ‘They got the wrong man, we know that. Soon as they ask him a few questions, they'll see they got it wrong.' She couldn't bear to see the strong man reduced
to this empty shell. She looked up at Jess, tears in her eyes. ‘Tell him not to take on, Jess. We need him to be thinking straight when the others get back home.'

But Jess's own thoughts ran riot. She'd wiped blood off Ernie's boots and burnt the evidence. She'd washed her hands clean and asked no questions. Even when news of the murder ran through the streets, she'd kept quiet. What a fool she'd been, thinking that by cleaning the boots she could keep Ernie out of trouble. ‘I done wrong,' she wept on Annie's shoulder. ‘I never asked Ernie about his boots. I could've got the truth out of him, but I never. I left it! I done wrong over it. Poor Ern!'

‘Don't you take on neither.' Annie put her arms round Jess. ‘You got enough on your plate looking after little Grace. Now you go up and pull yourself together, girl. I'll look after your old man, and Joxer here will get the place straight.'

The wreckage of Robert's send-off celebrations still littered the bar, only bringing home to Duke the tact that he'd lost both his sons at one stroke. He sat in a daze as Joxer cleared off the glasses and swept the floors. Annie sat quiet and held his hand, watching the minutes tick by. She stared at his face; saw the lined cheeks, the jutting forehead and hooked nose, watching for signs of revival. But Duke sat on, scarcely blinking, trying to imagine what was happening to Ernie right that minute up at Union Street station. ‘He ain't never been away from home before,' he told Annie. ‘He ain't never slept in no other bed.'

Frances, Sadie and Hettie came back from Victoria by underground train and tram. Their effort to stay cheerful for Rob's send-off had worn them into a subdued silence on their return journey, and their memories of the uniformed hordes all making their farewells held an uneasy sadness. How many of those bright young men would return on stretchers like the ones carried along the side platform? How many would never come back at all?
‘Chin up,' Frances said as they stood on the tram platform, ready to alight. ‘Robert made his own choice. No need to ruin Pa's day by looking so down in the mouth about it now.' The tram rattled
on while the sisters turned into Duke Street and walked the final stretch.

They wondered at everyone standing, arms folded and staring, as they drew near home. The pub doors were shut. Hettie grasped Sadie's hand and followed Frances along the pavement, then across the street. She noticed people withdraw inside their open doors to avoid them as they passed close by. ‘Oh gawd, I hope Pa's not been took ill by it all!' she gasped. Frances pushed the ornate brass door handle, familiar to her as the back of her own hand.

Jess stood at the top of the stairs holding Grace in her arms. The bar-room door stood wedged open. Joxer was there, leaning on his broom, staring at them. Duke sat at a table, unmarked by illness or accident, and only the mystery of the staring neighbours, the closed pub doors remained. Their father was well, at any rate.

‘What is it? What's wrong, Pa?' Frances hurried ahead again, picking at the fingers of her gloves, bag tucked under her arm, Sadie raised her arms to remove her hat. Hettie smiled up at Jess.

‘It's Ernie,' Annie Wiggin rushed forward to intercept them. ‘Your pa's had a shock, that's all. You'd best sit down.'

Hettie's smile turned to a look of alarm. She went and grabbed Annie by the arm. ‘What's up with Ernie? Is that why we're all closed up here? Oh gawd, he's had an accident, ain't he? Is it bad?'

‘Sit down, Ett.' Frances drew her on to a chair. ‘And you too, Sadie. Come and sit close by me.' She stared at the bowed figure of her father. ‘Go ahead, Annie, you tell us what happened.' She felt sure Ernie must be dead; she just wanted someone to tell them the news.

‘The coppers came.' Annie wrung her hands. She stood beside Duke. ‘They think Ernie killed Daisy O'Hagan. They took him away.'

Sadie cried out loud; the long, protesting cry of a young child, her mouth hanging wide. Frances stood up and walked to the window to stare out. Hettie hung her head. ‘It ain't possible,' she whispered. ‘Don't they know he couldn't hurt a fly?'

‘They wouldn't listen. It's hit your pa very hard, Ett. We can't get a word out of him hardly!' Annie gabbled. Now that the news
was broken, she darted round the room from one to another. ‘We gotta think straight, Frances. You got your head screwed on, girl. Think what we gotta do next!'