Sure and Certain Death (17 page)

Chapter Thirteen

M
y sister Nancy did not get home from Claybury Hospital until dawn the following morning. Arriving home just before my sister, I found my mother and cousin Stella almost prostrate with worry.

‘She’s been strangled by a lunatic!’ Stella said as she poured water into the teapot and then stirred the leaves vigorously.

‘I am really more worried that she might have been caught up in last night’s raid, Stella dear,’ the Duchess said.

I said nothing. Worried myself, I didn’t know what to say or to think.

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ Aggie said as she wandered in from the parlour, a smoking cigarette in her hand. ‘They have shelters at hospitals! Besides, if you look outside you’ll see the Jerries were after us again last night, not some hospital out in Essex. Mother, there’s a bloody great crater in the road outside! Trust me, Essex did not cop it last night. And as for being strangled by a nutter . . .’

‘Who’s been strangled by a nutter?’ Nan, as large as life and probably more confident-looking than I’d seen her before, stood in the kitchen doorway, frowning. ‘Who . . .’

‘You, you stupid girl!’ Aggie said as she ran over to Nan and gave her a very brief but very heartfelt hug. ‘Mum and Stella thought some nutter up Claybury had done away with you. Where you been?’

‘I was just about to leave the hospital when the sirens went,’ Nan said. ‘We all went down to the cellar.’

Then she looked over at me and quite obviously saw the look of confusion on my face. After all, I had known just how early Nan had left the previous afternoon.

‘I spoke to Mr Abrahams again, Frank,’ Nan said. ‘He told me that his nephew, Edward Abrahams, married Fernanda Mascarenhas. Marie introduced them, apparently. Not on purpose, like, but she was with Edward one day and then along came Fernanda . . .’

‘Nan,’ I said, ‘you can’t have been with Mr Abrahams all that time.’

‘No, I told you, the raid started and . . .’

‘You should’ve got there by four at the latest . . .’

‘Nancy, we were all very worried,’ the Duchess said.

Nan took in a very deep breath and then she said to me, ‘Frank, this Edward and Fernanda live over south London, miles away. Their families disowned them – including Mr Abrahams, who did, God love him, find it all very difficult to talk about. So Mr Abrahams don’t know where they live exactly, but he does know that it is south of the river and he thinks it’s Clapham.’

‘Nancy!’

Nan turned to the Duchess and for once she looked annoyed with her. ‘I got talking to some ladies who work up there at the hospital,’ she said. Turning back to me she added, ‘They do their bit for the patients.’

‘Nurses.’

‘No,’ Nan said. ‘They make tea and clean up. They help out.’

Aggie rolled her eyes. I knew what she was thinking. Middle-class do-gooder ladies no doubt allied to some sort of religious organisation. Sensing this hostility, Nan said, ‘I got talking.’ Then, to Aggie, ‘I’m a working woman, same as you, and you do as you please when you’re not at the factory.’

‘Nan, we were worried,’ I said.

But she was angry now. ‘I had a good conversation,’ she said to me. ‘What’s wrong with that? I found out where Fernanda was, didn’t I?’

And then she left. The rest of us just looked at each other in silence for a bit. It was Aggie who finally broke it when she came over and said to me, ‘You may well live to regret giving her a job, you know, Frank.’

And I had to admit, at least to myself, that Nancy’s finding of her feet, as it were, was not an unmixed blessing.

Later on that day, Walter turned up with a garbled story about how Fred Dickens had been charged with the murder of his wife. Most of the day so far had been spent cleaning the two hearses and waxing and polishing the horses’ saddles and bridles. But I had a recently bereaved family to visit at midday, and so on my way to where they lived, down by the Boleyn pub, I popped into the police station.

Sergeant Hill wasn’t on duty, but another bloke I knew fairly well, a Constable Atkins, was quite happy to talk. He told me that apparently Fred Dickens had confessed. Not to all the murders, just to that of his wife Violet. But it was still a shock.

I said to Atkins, ‘But would you think that a bloke like Fred Dickens would mutilate a woman like that? I mean, he might kill his missus, but . . .’

Atkins shrugged. ‘He was a boozer, Mr H. Who knows what he’d do?’

And he did have a point. Otherwise quite sane people will do mad things when they’re drunk.

I went to see the family down by the Boleyn and then I found myself doing something that even I haven’t done before – at least I haven’t done it outside of when a raid is on. I walked somewhere automatically. I left the bereaved family’s house, and instead of walking back to the shop, I went elsewhere. Only when I got where I was going did I notice where I was. Standing outside Margaret Darling’s house in East Ham.

Whether the medium was in or not, I didn’t know. But I now realised that I had been drawn to the house on Keppel Road by the anxiety her words the previous evening had raised up inside me. I didn’t and still don’t know if I believe in spirits, spooks and what have you. But what Mrs Darling had told me about myself had made me think. What had come through to her via her spirit guide had been right on the mark. And if this Linnit character had been right about me, then maybe she or it had been right about Mrs Darling too. Maybe she was being watched as both she and Linnit had claimed. And if she was, then that was reason enough for me to want to be not too far away. Nothing happened beyond a few curtains twitching in neighbouring houses – a tall man with brown skin does not go unnoticed in a place like East Ham. After a while I left. But it wasn’t the last time my feet made an attempt to take my only just conscious body out to East Ham. As the days wore on, I found that her words and the beliefs behind them worked more and more upon my brain, increasing my fears for her.

By the time I got back to the shop, the world and its wife was buzzing with the news about Fred Dickens.

‘God almighty, Mr H, fancy that Violet Dickens’s husband being the Ripper!’ Doris said as I looked over her shoulder at the diary for the following day.

‘Fred Dickens isn’t anybody’s “Ripper” Doris,’ I replied. ‘He’s only confessed to killing his wife, and quite honestly I don’t think that he did that.’

‘Don’t you?’

‘No.’

‘Yes, but people’ll be relieved anyway, won’t they?’ Doris said. ‘I mean, now the police’ve got someone, people’ll stop going on about it.’

‘Yes, they will,’ I said. ‘Which will please the government. Mind you, I doubt whether many outside the East End even know it’s been happening.’

‘You think . . .’

‘You try and find anything about these murders in any newspaper, Doris,’ I said. ‘Bad for morale.’

‘Yes, but everybody knows!’

‘Everybody knew about the bombing of Hallsville School and the hundreds who died in there,’ I said in a now lowered voice. Although it had happened almost six months before, people still spoke about that tragedy in hushed tones. ‘But not outside this area. People in Manchester or Plymouth won’t know about Hallsville!’

Although used to my occasional rants, poor Doris was obviously quite chastened this time and she looked down at the diary in silence. As I usually do, I quickly realised that I’d gone too far and apologised to her for going off in that fashion. Then I changed the subject.

‘We’ve a lot on tomorrow,’ I said.

‘Mrs Dobie’s funeral at eleven and then those little twins from Grange Road at two.’ Doris shook her head sadly. The twins, two girls aged five, had died of dysentery. But then with half the sewers bubbling stinking waste up into the streets, what did people expect, especially people already weakened by hunger and poverty.

‘Miss Nancy told me they’ve got dysentery up at Claybury,’ Doris said. ‘People in isolation apparently.’ Then she looked up at me and frowned. ‘You know she’s gone up there again, Mr H. Left about half an hour ago.’

‘Well, Doris, we cleaned down the vehicles and the tack this morning and so my sister can do as she pleases,’ I said. After all, Nancy was only trying out as a member of the firm, and so outside of actual funerals she could come and go, the Duchess permitting, at will. But quite why she’d gone off to Claybury again, unless it was to find out some more from Nathan Abrahams about the whereabouts of Fernanda Mascarenhas, I couldn’t imagine. She had said that she’d met some women she got on well with up there, do-gooders as Aggie would have it. Maybe she’d gone off to see them, or even to do her bit, as she had put it herself. Nancy was quite clearly on a mission to change and possibly mortify her life. I went up to the flat and found the Duchess sitting at the kitchen table looking anxious.

‘You know, Francis,’ she said as she reached up to kiss me on the cheek, ‘I am quite happy for Nancy to make more of her time. But I do fear for her too, you know.’

I sat down beside her and took one of her small, arthritic hands in mine. ‘She’s gone back to Claybury.’

‘Where apparently they have dysentery!’ my mother said. ‘I told her. I said, “Nancy, you know, back in India, people die in their thousands from dysentery!” But she just said, “Don’t worry, Mother,” and off she went! She’s made friends up there. In a place of mad people!’

I lowered my head. ‘Duchess, I’m afraid it was me who took her up there,’ I said. ‘I . . .’

‘Oh, she isn’t going to see the elderly Jewish man,’ the Duchess said. ‘No. Someone called Alice has her attention now. A woman apparently who does good works amongst the deranged.’ She leaned in closer to me and said, ‘You know, since poor Dolly’s death, Nancy has been . . . different.’

‘Dolly was her best friend,’ I said. ‘Her death was bound to hit Nan hard.’

‘Yes, but she is never still now!’ my mother said. ‘And although people are saying that this Ripper character has been arrested, I still fear for my daughter.’ She squeezed my hand hard. ‘Francis, I know you believe that these killings are connected to that awful White Feather movement your sister was involved in.’

‘Mum, I will try . . .’

‘Yes, Francis, I know that you will try to keep your sister safe,’ the Duchess said. ‘But my son, I feel there is something wilful and dangerous in Nancy at the moment. Not in a bad way; she only ever wants to help and do good. But I fear it is just that part of her that may prove my daughter’s undoing.’

Chapter Fourteen

L
ike the smell of sewage in the air, the sight of blood on the pavement was nothing unusual to me. There’d been a heavy raid that night, and because Canning Town is so often one of the Luftwaffe’s targets I wasn’t surprised to see the pavement of Rathbone Street sprinkled with blood. I’d run and run through the night, and the fact that I’d ended up near to Hannah’s house was more by instinct than by design. I was nevertheless relieved to see Dot Harris’s place still standing, and so when I went to have a butcher’s at where all the blood might be coming from, I knew that Hannah wouldn’t be involved. I was, as it turned out, wrong.

It came, the thin sprinkle of blood, from a half-ruined house four doors down from Dot’s place. Like a lot of places in Canning Town, it was empty, the residents long gone out into the country or to a more outer London manor. What the bombs hadn’t destroyed, the looters probably had. And now there was blood on the path up to the street door, and there were people inside the house too. One of them now, I could see, was my Hannah. Pushing the half-destroyed door out of the way, I went in and saw that she was with three elderly men. Holding their caps in their hands, they all looked down at the floor with horrified expressions on their faces. Hannah, weeping almost to hysteria, didn’t even see me arrive.

‘What’s . . .’

And then, like the old men, I glanced down and I saw something that looked almost exactly like the body of Nellie Martin I’d found all that time ago in New City Road. Just a piece of meat, shredded and torn. There was nothing as far as I could see, and I couldn’t bring myself to get too close to it, that could have identified this body. No clothes, no face either. But then Nellie Martin hadn’t had a face. What Nellie also hadn’t had, but which this body did possess, was a man’s torso. Though torn and slashed almost beyond recognition, it was most definitely a bloke. I walked over to Hannah and put my arm around her shoulders. Surprised to say the least of it to see me she said, ‘H?’

‘What’s going on here?’ I asked.

But Hannah just cried again.

‘Mr Patel here found it,’ one of the old blokes said as he pointed to what I now saw was an elderly Indian man.

‘I saw the blood,’ Mr Patel put in. ‘It was sprinkled all over the street! Like rain.’

The other old geezer, a short bloke with a boxer’s nose, said, ‘I live next door. I heard them,’ he nodded his head at the other two men, ‘so I come out to see what was what.’

‘So what are you doing here, Hannah?’ I asked my weeping lady friend.

‘There was . . . there . . .’ She began crying bitterly again and I held her close to my chest. The old men all, in their own ways, gave me funny looks. Obviously local, they had to know what Hannah did for a living.

‘Lady heard the commotion and come out to have a butcher’s,’ the first old man told me. ‘We all come in here together.’

‘Just after dawn,’ Mr Patel said. ‘In the first light of the morning.’

‘We wanted to help,’ the bloke with the boxer’s nose said. ‘We thought, all of us, that maybe some poor soul was trapped. We thought that p’raps we could help them.’

‘But then we found this.’

‘The police are coming,’ Mr Patel said. ‘Mrs Harris, she has gone to get them.’

I looked down at the shredded meat that had once been human and I said, ‘Do any of you know . . . Who is this? Who was . . .’

‘Gawd knows,’ the first old man said sadly. ‘Poor bastard! Christ, he must have howled having this done to him!’