Sure and Certain Death (4 page)

‘Dolly O’Dowd,’ Sergeant Hill replied. And then, seeing the probably very pale colour I had taken on, he frowned and said, ‘You feeling all right, are you, Mr H?’

Chapter Three

I
didn’t get a wink of sleep that night. Not that I often do have what most would call proper shut-eye. But even my poor brain doesn’t usually boil over all the time like it did that night. Dolly O’Dowd was one of Nancy’s best friends! Two old spinsters together, they went to Mass every Sunday and took part in every sort of church social and good-works thing that was going. My Hannah had said that Nellie Martin had been churchy too. Nan and Dolly O’Dowd went, I knew, to St Margaret’s in Canning Town, which was on the Barking Road like, it was said, Nellie Martin’s church. Had Nellie attended that church too, and if so, was that what was connecting these women?

Of course I couldn’t find out anything in the middle of the night. The Duchess and my sisters had seemingly slept through the coppers delivering Dolly O’Dowd’s body through the back of the shop. The coffin lid was nailed right down and there was nothing to indicate who might be inside. But that didn’t mean I was off the hook about telling the family. They would want to know who was in there, why the coffin was closed and why it had turned up in the middle of the night. Also, as far as Nan was concerned, I had a duty. Dolly, funny old character that she’d been, had been her friend and now she was gone. Nan was going to be upset even though I knew that she was unlikely to show it. My older sister keeps most things in, it’s her way.

Because I couldn’t sleep, I sat up in bed and lit a fag. There’s a gas-lamp bracket over my bed which works when there’s gas to power it, but mostly we use candles in our bedrooms. Thin, dusty candles that give off a light the colour of old lemons. Most of the time it’s not worth having, especially if you’re trying to read, and so I just lay in the darkness, puffing, trying not to peer too hard into the total blackness around me. Like most people’s bedrooms, mine is cold, damp and filled with heavy Victorian furniture. At night, made pitch dark by the blackout curtains, it’s a place where all sorts of horrors can rise up in the mind. I made to push them out of the way by thinking in what I hoped was a logical manner.

Dolly O’Dowd had been very obviously religious. Wherever she’d gone, she’d taken a handbag full of religious stuff along with her. Rosaries, religious pictures, crucifixes and holy medals – it wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d had a bottle of holy water in there too. As I remembered her, she’d been religious as a kid, one of those girls always wanting to become a nun. But then her mum had died when she was still at school and she’d stayed home to look after her dad from then on. Quite when he’d died I didn’t know, but it had been some years back. Her sister, Rita I think she was called, had obviously hopped off to Ilford and her printer at some point in the proceedings. Dolly, alone in the house on Green Street, had said her rosary, knitted for the annual church fete and tried to ignore the fact that her only great beauty, her once flaming red hair, had faded to the colour of dust. Apart from her friendship with my dark and very foreign-looking sister, there was nothing that hadn’t been totally conventional about Dolly O’Dowd. So why would anyone want to kill such a quiet and inoffensive woman in such a wild and violent fashion? Was it that the murderer didn’t like little spinster women, or that he didn’t maybe like Catholics? Neither of the other two victims had been spinsters, and I didn’t know, as yet, what if any religion they had followed. But I determined then to find out. Assuming that the killer of Dolly O’Dowd was one and the same as the killer of the other two women, there had to be some sort of connection between the three of them. If that wasn’t the case, then it was possible that more than one murderer was working the streets and houses of West Ham. I shuddered at that thought. My bedroom may always be cold but I’m a tough old soldier and so I don’t generally notice the chill too badly. But that thought, of more than one killer being amongst us, did what no London winter could and made my whole body shake and freeze right down to its bones.

Nan was mixing up powdered egg for everybody’s breakfast when I walked into the kitchen the next morning. The Duchess was still dressing in her bedroom and Aggie was sitting at the table reading a copy of
Picturegoer
and smoking a fag. I was going to try and discreetly get her to leave so that I could speak to Nan on my own, but Aggie had questions she wanted answered and which she came straight out with.

‘There was a lot of noise downstairs last night, Frank,’ she said. ‘What was it all about?’

‘Oh . . . uh . . .’ I’m not very quick off the mark with either Nan or Aggie. I developed a stutter back in the Great War which gets very bad during bombing raids, and sometimes during conversations with my sisters.

Nan turned away from the saucepan on the range and said, ‘I heard some sort of kerfuffle too.’

‘And there’s a coffin down in the back room sitting on one of the stands,’ Aggie said. ‘That wasn’t there yesterday.’

‘Haven’t had quite so many of the dear departed with us since the bombing stopped,’ Nancy said.

‘Yes, but people are still bombed out,’ Aggie said as she flicked the ash from her fag into an old tobacco tin.

‘That’s true,’ Nan said. ‘Not everyone’s still got a parlour to rest the one who has passed over in. I mean, we’re very lucky in a lot of ways . . .’

‘It’s, it’s D-Dolly O’Dowd!’ I blurted. I didn’t mean to. I hadn’t intended to be so blunt about it. But that said, I knew that my sisters weren’t going to shut up and let me speak unless I made them do so. Nancy and Aggie may not get on for much of the time, but what they both have in common is a huge ability to bloody rabbit.

There was probably half a minute of silence. As both my sisters looked at me with disbelief on their faces it felt like a bleeding lifetime.

Nan took the saucepan of powdered egg off the range and put it on the table. ‘But . . .’

‘You do mean Dolly O’Dowd from Green Street, don’t you, Frank?’ Aggie asked. And then tipping her head towards Nan she said, ‘Her churchy mate?’

‘Y-yes.’

Nancy sat down, staring at the saucepan as the sticky yellow goo in it began to congeal. Aggie flashed me a concerned look and so I sat down next to Nan and put one of my hands over hers. Any more contact than that would have upset her. My older sister doesn’t like to be touched.

‘Nan, love,’ I said, ‘I know that Dolly was your friend . . .’

‘She was my best friend.’ Nan looked across at me, her face long and taut with the strain of holding in a lot of tears. She said, ‘I never heard Dolly had passed away. Why ain’t she at her Rita’s? Why’s she here?’

I didn’t know where to start. Of course, in spite of the best efforts of the coppers, some people already knew about Dolly O’Dowd and very soon the whole manor would be buzzing with the news. I had to tell her.

‘I want to see her,’ Nan said as she jumped up from the table and began to walk towards the kitchen door.

‘Nan!’ I stood and made to follow her just as the Duchess came in for her breakfast. She caught the wild look in Nan’s eyes immediately and looked at Aggie and me.

‘Francis?’ she said. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Duchess, it’s . . .’

‘Dolly’s dead,’ Nan said matter-of-factly. ‘Downstairs. Frank’s just going to show me her now.’

‘Dolly O’Dowd?’ my mother asked. ‘My goodness! How . . .’

‘Frank’s just going to show me her now,’ Nan repeated as she began to shove against the Duchess in order to get past.

Aggie, alarmed at Nan’s fierce, insistent behaviour, looked over at me and bit her lip.

‘Frank . . .’ Nan began.

‘Nancy, sit down and let me tell you about it,’ I said.

‘Frank, I want to see Dolly, I . . .’

‘Nan . . .’

‘Frank . . .’ As she pushed against the Duchess, Nan began to cry. My mother put one of her arms around her. She’s the only person who can do anything so intimate with my older sister. ‘Frank, I want to see . . .’

‘Nan, you need to sit down,’ I said. Then, looking over her head at my mother, I added, ‘We all need to sit down for a moment.’

‘I’d better turn the gas off,’ Aggie said as she walked over to the range and put out the flame that had been heating our eggs.

Nan looked at me with such fear in her eyes I began to feel sick just at the thought of telling her what had happened to Dolly O’Dowd. But once she, Aggie and my mother were settled at the table, I did it anyway. I didn’t have any choice. When I’d finished I said, ‘So you can’t see Dolly, I’m afraid, Nan. She’s just in . . . in too much of a . . . mess, if you know what . . .’

‘Do they know who . . .’ Nan began. ‘The coppers, do they know who, who done . . .’

‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘No more than they know who killed Nellie Martin or Violet Dickens.’

‘Coppers think it’s the same person, do they?’ Aggie asked.

‘They think it’s possible,’ I said. ‘Although of course only Dolly and Nellie died in Plaistow. Violet is down to Canning Town.’

‘Jack the Ripper!’ Nan said, and then she began to cry once again.

I looked at the Duchess, who shrugged and then said to Nancy, ‘But dear, Jack the Ripper is long dead.’

‘’Course,’ Aggie agreed. ‘But Mum, someone’s cutting women up like the old Ripper used to do. Someone’s copying him.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Anyway, even if somehow it is the old Ripper, as long as he’s caught that’s all that matters,’ Aggie said. ‘Frank, you say the coppers brought the body in last night?’

‘They’re looking into it,’ I replied.

‘Yes, well, they’ve been looking into the other two women’s deaths as well,’ Aggie said darkly. ‘Don’t mean nothing’s been done. You know what they’re like, Frank.’

I did, but I didn’t say anything to either confirm or deny Aggie’s low opinion of the police. In truth of course they are overworked and there aren’t enough of them. All the A1 young blokes have gone off to fight or work in the mines, leaving our few sad old coppers here to deal with a hell of a lot of misbehaviour. To be fair, most people have pulled together with their friends and neighbours for the war effort, but a lot haven’t. Even with this lull or whatever it is in the bombing the looting still goes on. There’s murder too, old and not so old scores settled in the blackout, away from the beats of our very few coppers. Ordinary folk do their best and their bit. I’ve done my share in the past. In fact I have been quite successful, something that my sister Aggie alluded to now.

‘You should look into it, Frank,’ she said. ‘You’ve a better head on your shoulders than any copper I’ve ever come across.’

‘Ag—’

‘Agnes, your brother has a job!’ the Duchess said firmly, her eyes blazing in anger at Aggie. ‘It is a job he does well. He doesn’t need to do any more. Let the police do their job and allow your brother to do his!’

‘Yes, but Mum,’ Aggie said, ‘he’s helped the police out before! Blimey, it was our Frank who found out who killed that gypsy girl up in Epping Forest last year!’

It was true. I had indeed helped to bring the murderer of the gypsy girl Lily Lee to justice the previous autumn. And that wasn’t all I’d done.

‘Then there was that bother with them sisters from over the West End,’ Aggie said. ‘Our Frank found out who was killing them . . .’

‘That is enough!’ My mother held up a small, brown silencing hand and stared very hard into Aggie’s eyes. ‘In case you have forgotten, Agnes, your brother is not a well man.’ She looked over at me and smiled. ‘Wounded in the trenches. Francis needs calm and harmony, not this madness!’ She rose from her seat, and as she did so, she smiled down at Nan. ‘I am so sorry that Miss O’Dowd has died, Nancy. I am sure that the police will catch the person responsible. I think that now I must go back to bed. I . . . I don’t feel too well and . . .’

‘Mum, do you want me to take . . .’

‘No, no, please stay where you are, Nancy,’ the Duchess said as she patted Nan’s hand and then slowly began to walk towards the door.

‘What about your breakfast?’ Aggie called out just before the Duchess reached the door.

My mother turned slowly and regarded my sister with a very cold eye. ‘I don’t feel hungry now,’ she said, and then she left.

I was wounded in the trenches, but not badly, not in a physical way at least. What really went on out there went on in my mind. The look, the smell, the sound of violent death in all its forms was what did for me, and the Duchess knew it. But how does anyone talk about such damage to the mind? My mother doesn’t use the word ‘lunatic’ about her son. What mother would? That said, how else can you talk about a man who sees and hears things that aren’t there, who runs in the street when the bombs begin falling because anything,
anything
is better then risking being buried alive under bricks and wood and mud? I am not right and I shouldn’t do anything that might make my condition worse. I should not put myself in danger or under strain.

Once the Duchess was out of earshot, Aggie looked at me and said, ‘Frank, I’m sorry, if you don’t want to . . . It’s just that you’re good at finding things out, and . . .’

‘Look, Ag,’ I said, lowering my voice, just in case the Duchess could hear, ‘it’s down to Nan, all right?’

‘Nan?’ She looked at our older sister, who was still staring fixedly down at the kitchen table.

‘If Nan wants me to try and find something out about Dolly O’Dowd and maybe the others, then . . .’

‘Dolly never done no one no harm ever,’ Nan said as she lifted her head up and then looked over at me. ‘She was a good woman!’

‘Yes, love, I . . .’

‘She loved God and the Blessed Virgin and . . .’

‘Nan!’ Aggie put a hand on top of Nancy’s and looked deep into her eyes. ‘Do you want Frank to try and find out what happened to Dolly, or do you want to trust the bloody stupid coppers?’

I gave Aggie a look that wasn’t exactly approving while we waited for the answer. I knew what it was going to be, mind. Aggie hadn’t exactly left Nan too much room to say anything else.