Sure and Certain Death (25 page)

‘No,’ she said. ‘Why?’

‘Well it’s just that my sister has . . .’ It sounded so ridiculous to say that my fifty-one-year-old sister was out with her and that now, suddenly, I wasn’t comfortable with that. But that was the truth, even though I couldn’t really say, beyond the fact that none of my family had met Alice, and Mr Abrahams’s reported reaction to her, exactly why. Mrs Ravens must have appreciated how much I was struggling and so she put a hand on my arm and said, ‘I’ll go and get Nurse Milburn. She’s known Alice for years.’

Mrs Ravens went away and was replaced a few minutes later by Nurse Milburn. A stout woman in her mid-fifties, Nurse Milburn sat down next to me and said, ‘You want to know about Alice?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘My sister has . . . well, she is friends with Alice . . .’

‘Miss Hancock.’ Nurse Milburn smiled. ‘We always need more helpers, given the war and, of course, our situation as an asylum. Not very popular places, asylums. But,’ she shrugged, ‘thank God for people like Mrs Ravens, your sister and of course our Alice.’

‘Our Alice’ implied a kind of ownership or great familiarity. I said as much to Nurse Milburn.

‘Well, Alice has been associated with the hospital since nineteen nineteen,’ the nurse replied. ‘When her sweetheart came to us.’

‘Her sweetheart?’

Her face assumed a sombre expression. ‘He’d been in the Great War, on the artillery guns,’ she said. ‘Unfortunately the poor man was deafened and . . . well, as you can tell from the fact that he was sent to us, his mind did not survive the experience either. Alice, to whom he’d been engaged before the war, came to see him every day until the day he died. Not that he ever said anything except her name, but . . .’

‘He died? When?’

Nurse Milburn paused for thought for a moment and then said, ‘Oh, it has to be almost a year ago now. For some time afterwards Alice didn’t come here at all, which I can understand. But then she came back to visit, spoke to a couple of our volunteers that she already knew, and then decided to come and help out herself. It was a very brave decision.’

‘Yes.’ It was a tragic story. It wasn’t one the like of which I hadn’t heard before. Stories like Alice’s are all too common. Not every story of this kind, however, chills me as this one seemed to be doing.

‘But then so many ladies of . . . well, of my age and Alice’s are obliged as it were to try to make something of lives that were really curtailed by the Great War.’ She smiled again. ‘So many men went away, so few came back. Poor Cissy, she . . .’

‘Cissy?’ It was as if an electric current went through me.

‘Cissy is what her sweetheart called her, and old members of staff like me who’ve known her for years. Alice Hoskin, Cissy.’

Cissy Hoskin, Mrs Darling’s mousy protégée. Cissy trying in vain to make contact with her dead sweetheart. Cissy who had caused Mr Abrahams, father of poor dead Marie, to scream. Why had such an inoffensive person made Mr Abrahams scream? Had he seen her before, perhaps? Had he seen her the night his daughter Marie died?

I felt sick. Cissy Hoskin, out and about somewhere with my sister . . .

Chapter Twenty-One

N
ancy had written in the firm’s diary that she was due to meet her friend Alice on Abbey Lane, which is up around the back of the River Lee, and beside the Abbey pumping station. The nearest station is West Ham underground. But before I could even think about jumping on to the District Line, provided it were running, I had to get out of the middle of nowhere.

I thought at first I’d ask to use the hospital telephone and call the police. Nurse Milburn, who gave me a bit of a funny look as she did so – I’d gone rather pale by this time – went and asked if this were possible. But as so often happens these days, the lines were down, and so I just ran out of there and kept on going until I finally found a bus. As I ran, I thought. Not that that helped my sense of panic very much. Cissy had had direct access to some of the dead women, indirect access to others. Being around Mrs Darling and her seances had put her immediately in touch with Esme Robinson and her husband and Violet Dickens. Through Esme she could have heard of the whereabouts of her estranged cousin, Nellie Martin. Marie Abrahams had, according to Esme Robinson during my first meeting with her, been getting interested in spiritualism just before her death, which implied contact on some sort of level. But then there was Dolly O’Dowd. How, if I were right about any of this, had Cissy got to her? And why, if indeed she had killed all of these women, had Cissy done it at all? As I emerged out of the countryside and into the back end of Gants Hill, I stopped for a moment to give my poor tired lungs a rest. Some little bloke in a long black overcoat, a Homburg perched on his unnaturally large head, stopped and looked at me, frowning. Because I’d gone to see Mrs Darling on business, I was wearing my work suit with my black tie plus my top hat complete with mourning veil. It isn’t the kind of outfit you often see people wearing when they run. But I ignored him. I braced my hands against my knees and rested for a couple of minutes before heading further south, looking all the time for a bus to take me faster towards my home.

As soon as Nurse Milburn had first said the name Cissy, my mind had immediately flown to the idea of getting the police. I’d been frustrated that the telephone lines were down yet again. But thinking about it as I ran had changed my mind. For all that Cissy’s position in Mrs Darling’s circle seemed to fit with that of a person able to murder the White Feather girls, I couldn’t imagine how, physically, she could perform such acts or why she should do them at this point in time. I could see
why
she might kill, however. It was only a thought, but I felt I knew that if Cissy had killed these women it had been because of her sweetheart. Had this group, my sister’s group of White Feather girls, goaded that young man into fighting, maybe against his better judgement or in the face of ill health? It was of course very possible. But if that were the case, why didn’t any of the girls recognise Cissy? Mrs Darling knew her from way back when Cissy, as a girl, used to work in her uncle’s shop on East Ham Broadway. But not once had she mentioned her in connection with White Feather business. And had she had any fears about anyone, I knew that Mrs Darling would have said something. She was as worried as I was. No, if Cissy were indeed guilty of these crimes, I was either missing something or I simply did not know enough to connect her completely with what had happened.

I finally managed to flag down a bus on the Cranbrook Road. It was packed, as buses always are these days. The little lady conductor came towards me and said, ‘Tickets, please!’

I asked to go to Barking, where I knew I could get a bus direct to Plaistow. Like the man in the Homburg back in Gants Hill, as well as, really, most of the other passengers, the conductor gave me a funny look. But she took my money and gave me a ticket, and slowly but surely we made our way into Barking. As soon as the bus stopped, I pushed my way towards the door. It’s not like me to be so rude and it didn’t go unnoticed. A woman in a fox-fur coat said to a woman in a threadbare jacket, ‘God, look at that! You wouldn’t expect behaviour like that from an undertaker!’

But I didn’t care. I had to get home, get in my car and go and find my sister.

When Walter washes down the Lancia, he doesn’t strain himself to finish the job quickly. He likes the car and enjoys making a good job of getting all the dirt and dust off the paintwork as well as buffing the chromium trim until it sparkles. It doesn’t stay clean for very long, but that isn’t the point. A clean car pleases Walter, and it is the only part of his job, I would say, he really takes pride in. He was just sloshing a clean chamois over the windscreen when I came hurtling in, breathless, through the back gate.

‘Cor blimey, Mr H!’ Walter said as he looked up at me. ‘Who’s on your tail?’

‘No one,’ I gasped. ‘Walter, has Miss Nancy gone out yet?’

‘To see her friend? Yes, about an hour and a half ago,’ he said.

‘Oh God!’ I barrelled past him and threw myself into the back of the shop. I grabbed the car keys which hung to the side of the back door and then called up the stairs to the flat. Aggie I knew was not at work and so I said, ‘Ag, I’m just going out for a bit. Taking the car.’

In the second it took me to turn to go, Aggie flew down the stairs and said, ‘The car? Frank, you’re only supposed to use it for work. The petrol . . .’

‘Bugger the petrol!’ I said. Then, thinking how stupid it was to say that because it might alarm her, I added to the problem by saying, ‘Oh shit!’

‘Frank!’

But by this time I was out in the yard and on my way over to the Lancia. As I moved past him I told Walter to get in the car, and then I slipped myself into the driver’s seat.

‘Get . . .’

‘Just get in, Walter,’ I said. ‘It’s an emergency.’

‘An emergency?’

‘An emergency? What’s an emergency?’ I heard Aggie say as a very troubled Walter got into the car beside me.

‘What’s up, Mr H?’ he asked.

‘I’ll explain on the way,’ I said as I fired up the engine and took off out of the yard before Aggie could even begin to stop me. The last I saw of her was her screaming face through the back window, shouting my name.

Abbey Lane is just to the north of West Ham station. It’s in an area of almost countrified ground that exists around the many creeks and tributaries of the River Lee at this point. If it wasn’t for the stink from the sewage or the almost constant fog that hangs over the area, it could be somewhere out in the wilds of Essex. But this is London, and so signs of industry are never far away. In this case, such a sign is in the very ornate form of the Abbey Mills Sewage Pumping Station. Decorated in that really intricate way only Victorian buildings can be, Abbey Mills is a great big place set in grounds enclosed by high walls and fences. Even though England was such a rich country in the last century, the idea that such an amazing thing – looks like a mansion to my way of thinking – could be built for industrial purposes is incredible. Years ago my dad knew an old bloke who’d worked at the Mills who told him that inside, everything was engineered to perfection. Everywhere he went inside that building, so he said, gleamed with the lustre of polished brass. Outside there used to be two very fancy towers that carried the smoke away when the station was powered by steam. Now it’s all electric and the towers were demolished anyway on account of the fact that they gave the Luftwaffe a rather too easy target.

And it wasn’t just the pumping station itself that was good to look at. The houses for the workers, which fronted directly on to the road, were big and, although nowhere near as ornate as the pumping station itself, had that slightly churchy or mansion style of architecture to them. There are no other houses on Abbey Lane, and so I assumed that Cissy had to live in one of those. Although how she was managing to do that if she didn’t work at the pumping station, I couldn’t imagine.

Walter, who I had now told much of what he needed to know to help me search, if necessary, for the women, said, ‘Miss Nancy’s friend must have a brother or a father working in the station, Mr H. You generally have to to have one of these houses.’

‘I’ve heard she lives alone,’ I said. Cissy’s parents were dead according to Mrs Darling.

‘I’ll go and ask that geezer just going into that house there,’ Walter said as I pulled the car up to the pavement outside the row of houses. ‘What did you say the lady’s name was?’

‘Alice Hoskin. Cissy.’

Walter went off and spoke to a middle-aged bloke with ginger hair. He looked over, warily I thought, at the car a couple of times, but he spoke to Walter nonetheless. When he came back Walter said, ‘Geezer says that the Hoskins live at number three. A mum and a daughter. The daughter’s called Alice. But he ain’t seen her today.’

Alice/Cissy had lied about living alone if nothing else. Although like Walter I did wonder how the women managed to live in a house that was connected to the pumping station. But as we walked up the path towards number three, Walter told me that the chap he’d just spoken to had provided him with something of an answer.

‘Apparently the old woman’s a cripple. Don’t go out much,’ he said. ‘The old man worked in the station for years, and when he died the family was allowed to stay on.’

‘Well, if they pay the rent . . .’ I knocked on the dark wooden front door with my fist and called out, ‘Mrs Hoskin!’

With luck I’d soon find Cissy, her mother and my sister all safely inside together, with rational explanations from Cissy for everything. But my knock had sounded ominously hollow and was followed by absolutely no sound from inside at all. Walter, who had taken it upon himself to look in through the front window, said, ‘Can’t see nothing. They’ve got the blackout up.’

Most people take their blackout curtains or blinds down in the daytime. Most people want to see some light whenever they can. But not everyone. I shrugged, knocked again and then, when that didn’t summon anyone, said to Walter, ‘Come on, let’s go round the back.’

We went down the side way between the Hoskins’ house and the place next door. We found a large garden which most people would have given over to the growing of vegetables. But not this one. Though large, it was just a disorganised pile of mud with a chicken coop at the far end next to what I recognised as the entrance to an Anderson shelter. Mrs Darling had said that Cissy was always first in line for any spare vegetables from her husband’s allotment. But I couldn’t, at that point, see why she didn’t grow her own.

‘Blimey, they live well out here, don’t they, Mr H?’ Walter said as he looked through the window in the back door. ‘Been eating tea and cake by the look of it.’

I joined him at the back door and saw a wooden table in the middle of a large kitchen that was indeed set for quite a dainty-looking tea. I knocked and called out, ‘Mrs Hoskin!’ once again. But to no avail. It was then that I tried the doorknob, which moved easily and without hindrance in my hand. Still calling out lest I frighten the women inside, I walked into the kitchen followed by Walter. It smelt of tea and baking but also of damp too. Around the sink there was a scum of mould which belied the dainty cakes that sat very invitingly on the china stand in the middle of the table. I wondered, if Nan had been here, what she would have made of it. Both of my sisters are practical but fastidious. After a swift butcher’s around, Walter said to me, ‘Shall we go and have a look at the rest of the place, Mr H?’