Sure and Certain Death (15 page)

Having met Esme Harper as was, I knew that she at least was still very much of the same mind. Nan knew that I’d met Esme and the medium once known as Margaret Cousins.

‘Was Esme still . . .’ she began.

‘She’s ashamed of nothing,’ I said. ‘But your old mate Margaret is. I know you don’t approve of spiritualism, Nan, but Margaret Darling is, I believe, a good woman.’

‘To be fair, Margaret was one of those who was never really comfortable giving out white feathers,’ Nan said. ‘She did it, but she felt sorry for the blokes she did it to.’

There was a jangle of keys in a lock and the door to the men’s wards opened. The nurse we’d spoken to earlier appeared. Behind her she dragged an ancient wicker bath chair. Once through the door, she turned the chair around and I saw a tiny, pale man covered in thick grey blankets sitting in it. His eyes were so fixed and blank he could have been a blind man.

‘Well, here is Mr Abrahams,’ the nurse said to us as she parked his chair in front of where we were sitting. ‘You may have five minutes, and please do not upset him.’

She looked down at the watch pinned to her uniform and then went back to her desk to one side of the locked door.

Nan leaned towards the Bath chair and smiled. ‘Hello, Mr Abrahams,’ she said. ‘Remember me? Nancy Hancock? I was friends with your Marie, remember?’

There wasn’t so much as a flicker of recognition, or anything else for that matter. Nathan Abrahams just breathed. Slumped like a doll without its stuffing, he sat in that chair and did nothing except live. Not even yet another scream, which this time was followed by a furious altercation of some sort, roused him from whatever had silenced him.

But my sister, to her credit, persisted. ‘I was so sorry to hear about Marie,’ she said. ‘I know I hadn’t seen her for years, but . . . My mother’s been ill and looking after her has . . . has taken time. But your daughter was a good woman, Mr Abrahams. She was a good daughter to you, I know.’

Still nothing. I looked around as a way of distracting myself from where I was. I couldn’t speak to the old man; I couldn’t easily form any words. In my mind I was with the people beyond the nurse’s desk, beyond that locked door that led into a world of pain and madness and lack of comprehension.

‘We used to go around with a lot of other girls back in the old days, Marie and me,’ Nan said to the old man. ‘Do you remember? There was Violet and Dolly, Esme and her sister Rosemary, Nellie Martin of the greengrocer’s family down Prince Regent Lane, Margaret Cousins . . .’

She paused then. Of course I’d asked her to ask the old man about the Goan girl from Canning Town. There’d been not a flicker from Nathan Abrahams as yet.

‘Fernanda Mascarenhas?’

Still nothing.

‘You remember Fernanda, Mr Abrahams,’ Nan persisted. ‘She was very pretty, like your Marie, very fair.’ She looked up at me and said, ‘Not like me and my brother, you know.’

But nothing happened on Mr Abrahams’s face. Still the same blank expression signifying, to me, a complete and utter absence. I would have gone then. I wanted to go. I wanted the noises that were starting up in my own head, and joining in with the mad noises around me, to stop. But Nan took one of the old man’s hands in hers and said, ‘Well look, Mr Abrahams, I am truly sorry about your Marie. And sir, I do wish you well, honestly I do. I’ll never forget them lovely bread and butter puddings you used to make for all of us girls years ago. They was the best bread and butter puddings in the world.’

The nurse, who had been watching us all along, stood up. Nan, still holding the old man’s hand, picked up her handbag and began to get up from the bench. But then suddenly she stopped. Turning to me she said, ‘Mr Abrahams just squeezed my hand.’

‘What?’

‘You’ve got to go now,’ the nurse said. ‘That’s enough.’ She put a hand on the back of the Bath chair.

Nan bent down towards Mr Abrahams and said, ‘Is there something you want to tell me?’

It was only then that his face came to life. Not dramatically, or even particularly obviously. But something changed and it was something that was easy to see. The nurse began to pull the chair away from Nan. Mr Abrahams, however, dug his fingers into her hand, hard.

‘Ow!’

‘You’ve got to leave!’

‘Ow, he’s . . .’

‘Come back again!’ His voice wasn’t that much more than a whisper, dry and heavily cracked around its edges.

‘Mr Abrahams!’

He held on to Nan’s hand like a limpet.

‘Please . . .’

Nan, looking daggers at the nurse now, said to the old man, ‘Yes, of course I will, Mr Abrahams. I’ll come tomorrow.’

The nurse, peeling Abrahams’s fingers from my sister’s hand said, ‘Come on! Let go now!’

‘Please . . .’

‘I’ll . . .’

‘The lady will come back and see you tomorrow,’ the nurse said. ‘Now let go, please, Mr Abrahams.’

A second passed and then he let go. At the same time his face slackened and went vacant once again. Nan, nursing her lightly scratched hand repeated, ‘I will come and see you tomorrow, Mr Abrahams. I promise.’

The nurse unlocked the door to the wards and then turned to look at us once again. ‘Yes, come,’ she said, albeit with her apparently customary grumpiness. ‘That’s the first time he’s spoken since just after his daughter died. But don’t upset him. Don’t make him agitated.’

That night the raid, when it did come, was short and to the west of our manor. The girls, Stella and the Duchess all went down the shelter. For once I didn’t go out running as I usually do when a raid is on. Maybe because the bombing was so far away I didn’t feel as threatened as I usually do. Instead I stood in the alleyway behind the stables, smoking and looking at the searchlights light up the sky, listening to the sound of our anti-aircraft batteries. There is often a terrible beauty in the colours and shapes of the flames that leap up once a bomb has hit the ground. The colours change depending upon what is being burnt and the shapes of the flames can come to resemble things that are sometimes either familiar or just strange. I’ve seen a lot of devils in the fires since the bombing began, but then I saw a lot of those back in the trenches. I saw them there when nothing was burning.

As I watched the sky light up in red and yellow and then turn green, I thought about what Sergeant Hill had told me about Fred Dickens back in the afternoon. He was in custody because Ronnie Arnold had told the coppers that Fred was or had been having an affair with the Tidal Basin’s barmaid, Tilly. When the police had asked Fred about his marriage and relationships just after they’d found Violet, he had apparently lied. Everything had been sweet between him and his missus, according to Fred. But then what bloke, particularly a drinker, wouldn’t say that to anyone prying into his private life, especially coppers? And besides, even if Fred had killed Violet, I was pretty sure he hadn’t killed all of the other women. Why would he? Apart from probably being too drunk most of the time to do such a thing, what could possibly be his motive?

And yet questions remained. Violet, like the other victims, had been disembowelled. Unlike them, however, she had lain undiscovered for weeks, and given the amount of blood that must have come out of her, surely Fred or Ronnie must have seen or heard something. But then maybe Ronnie had. Maybe he’d finally broken through the booze and decided to act? Unless of course he was covering his own tracks by grassing on Fred. But why would Ronnie have killed Violet? The three of them by all accounts had lived together in Freemasons Road reasonably peaceably.

The next morning I had to bury the mother of the landlord of the Tidal Basin. She was due to be interred in the East London Cemetery at eleven. The wake was going to be at the pub afterwards and I wondered whether Tilly the barmaid would be there. Myself and my lads, which on this occasion was going to include my sister Nancy, had been invited to the do, and it wasn’t as if we had any other funerals booked for that day. If she was there, would or should I even try to speak to Tilly about Fred? I didn’t know whether the woman was married or had a boyfriend or anything. The coppers, I imagined, had spoken to or were about to speak to Tilly. Not that in my heart of hearts I felt there was very much she could tell me. There was more to these women’s deaths than just the desire of one of their husbands for a barmaid.

On the way back from Claybury, Nan had told me that one of the theories about the old Jack the Ripper murders was that Jack was hiding his real intended victim within a series of other gruesome killings. Was only one of these modern-day women really meant to die?

The ground shook a little as something exploded over, I reckoned, Poplar way. I thought about my family down in the Anderson shelter, about how my mother would be pointedly ignoring the explosions while cousin Stella shook like a leaf. My sisters, in their own ways, wouldn’t be afraid. Aggie for her part would curse the Jerries, which the Duchess would pretend not to hear. Nan, generally hunkered down in a corner, would say her rosary over and over and over again. She is a strange creature, my older sister. Bitter and yet in certain lights oddly beautiful, Nan is not someone I’d have imagined would ever have had the stomach or the strength for undertaking – if indeed she proved to do so. But according to Aggie, ever since I’d said that she could try out to take Arthur’s place, Nan had talked of little else. It was a strange turnaround in a woman who had always seemed to be settled in the home. But then something else Aggie had told me was that Dolly O’Dowd’s death had apparently made Nan think. Never before had she spoken of actually using her life in some way. But as Aggie told me, Dolly’s death had placed the hand of time, as it were, on Nan’s shoulder. As it went, she had actually taken the initiative with Marie Abrahams’s father earlier on at Claybury. She had certainly taken over from my stuttering efforts very confidently. Nan it was who had eventually got the old man to speak. Nan it was too who had promised Nathan Abrahams that she would return.

Chapter Twelve

‘
O
h, Mr H, there’s a note for you!’ Doris said as she pushed a scrap of paper into my hands.

‘What?’ Arthur had just climbed up on to the hearse and taken the reins of the horses in his hands when Doris came shooting out with her little piece of paper. ‘What’s this?’

‘I dunno,’ Doris said. ‘It was on the mat when I come in this morning. It’s got your name on it.’

I started to unfold the small piece of lined paper whilst also calling out, ‘Nancy!’

We should have been on our way down to the Tidal Basin pub five minutes before, but Nan was still nowhere to be seen. Walter Bridges, who was perched up on one of the back wheels of the carriage, muttered, ‘Women!’

I read the note, which was signed
Margaret Darling
. It said:
Mr Hancock, I need to speak to you. If you come after seven this evening, I’ll be waiting
. The medium didn’t say why she wanted to see me or whether it was connected to anything she and I had spoken about before. But I resolved there and then to go and I put the note into the pocket of my waistcoat. ‘Nancy!’

But as I looked up, I saw that she was in front of me. Dressed in one of the Duchess’s long black skirts, Nan also wore a tightly fitted black jacket. Her long, thick hair was tied in a bun which nestled at the nape of her neck. On her head she wore a top hat, the same as the rest of us. Unlike the rest of us, however, she looked absolutely stunning. Not that I told her that. I didn’t even help her get up on to the hearse beside Arthur. Amazing though she had proved to be in the looks department, Arthur, Walter and myself knew that we had to treat my sister just like any other member of the firm. Soon her thin shoulders would have to be bearing much of the weight of a coffin. There was no way that blow could be softened for her, and if she couldn’t do it, her career as one of my assistants could come to a very abrupt close.

‘All right,’ I said, once Nan had settled down beside Arthur, ‘let’s go.’

Terry Oldroyd, the landlord of the Tidal Basin pub, gave me a half-pint mug filled to the brim with malt whisky.

‘Mum would’ve loved what you done today, Mr Hancock,’ he said as he clinked his own glass against the side of mine. ‘My dad always said that we could trust your firm to do a proper dignified job, and he was right.’

‘Reverend Sutton performed a very nice service,’ I said as I raised my glass to my old friend Ernest Sutton, vicar of St Andrew’s Church, Plaistow. Elsie Oldroyd had been one of his most stalwart parishioners. Now, after his job was over, Ernie was leaning against the Tidal Basin’s bar, partaking of the generous hospitality of old Elsie’s son.

‘Oh yes,’ the landlord said, ‘but Mr Hancock, the way you led Mum to her grave, that stick thing in your hand . . .’

The ‘stick thing’, or wand as we call it, is something that many undertakers use when they conduct a funeral. Back in the nineteenth century, when grave robbing was rife, it was used as a weapon to keep prospective thieves away from the body of the dear departed. Before that, the wand was said to have been used more magically, to beat evil spirits away from the last resting place of the dead. Although it was very recently quite badly damaged, I am very fond of my wand and in fact would feel very unhappy to be without it.

‘And your bearers didn’t so much as hesitate,’ Mr Oldroyd continued. ‘Rock solid. And your sister a bearer too! Blimey, Mr H, what a lady your Nancy is! Your dad would have been so proud!’

He was right there. Together with Arthur and Walter, Nancy had hefted Elsie Oldroyd’s coffin as if she had been doing it all her life. Only once did a little bit of strain show on her face and that was when the three of them, plus myself, lowered the coffin on to the ground beside the grave. Then the effort of it had made her wince. But she’d covered it up well and now I was pleased to see that she was having a drink, albeit small, together with Ernie Sutton at the end of the bar. For the first time since she’d revealed her, to me, shameful past, I actually felt as if I was beginning to like my sister again. Arthur and Walter came into the pub then, and Mr Oldroyd, when he saw them, called out to a fat red-headed woman who was behind the bar, ‘Oi! Tilly! Drinks for Mr Hancock’s boys, girl! Give his young lad a good drop, he’s just been called up to the air force.’