Sure and Certain Death (7 page)

The murder of Marie Abrahams from Plashet was believed to have taken place later on that night. Not that anyone knew about it for a good eight hours until after it had happened. I was out and about when I heard.

I’d done some thinking since I’d had that conversation with Nan the previous evening, which made me even more certain that she was concealing something, probably something quite unimportant, from me. Nan’s a strange creature when it comes to things of a moral nature. Even when it doesn’t directly concern her, lack of morality can upset her enormously. It’s why I can’t tell her about my Hannah and why, possibly I thought, she might not want to admit to having gone to school with a drinker like Violet Dickens. But I didn’t see Nan that morning, as I had an early appointment to see the landlord of the Tidal Basin pub in Canning Town. His mother had just died, and although he was strictly on Albert Cox’s territory, he’d known my old dad and so he wanted Hancock’s to do his old girl’s funeral. Even in those rough parts I was still surprised to see a couple of blokes outside the pub as I went round the back to get to the flat up above. I commented on it to the landlord after we’d made our arrangements and I was leaving.

‘Oh, that’s bloody Ronnie Arnold and Fred,’ he said as he shook my hand on the back doorstep. ‘I tell you truly, Mr H, if Fred’s missus hadn’t just died, I’d tell the pair of them to fuck off.’

There’s no beating about the bush in pubs like the Tidal Basin. An oath is an oath and it is never apologised for. I can respect that. I tipped my hat to the landlord and went around to see the men, who I had, in a way, some interest in. Getting into conversation with Fred Dickens and Ronnie Arnold was not, however, a thing easily done. It was only nine o’clock in the morning and they were already three sheets to the wind.

Because the landlord’s mother had died the previous day, he’d been loath to leave her body in the pub when the sirens had gone. There hadn’t been much of a raid compared to what we’re used to, but most people, if not myself, had sheltered, including apparently Ronnie and Fred.

‘He let us go down his Anderson,’ the darker and older of the two men said as he jabbed a blunt thumb back towards the pub and, presumably, the landlord inside.

‘We took a couple of pints down with us,’ the other, red-headed bloke put in. ‘There was only us and Tilly, like.’

‘An’ Tilly too,’ the older man said. ‘Yes, Tilly . . . Tilly with a gin and lemon and . . .’ His eyes began to close.

‘Sir, is your name Fred Dickens?’ I began. ‘I . . .’

The eyes opened. They were bloodshot and now quite suspicious. ‘Who wants to know?’ he said.

‘Well, I’m . . .’

‘He’s a fucking undertaker by the look of him,’ the younger man said.

Well there was no denying that fact. I’d come out to visit a bereaved family and so of course I was dressed in a suit with a top hat on my head. There aren’t many people outside my profession, in the East End, who wear clothes like that. Even drunks can identify us.

‘He ain’t Cox,’ the other man said, alluding to my mate Albert.

‘No, my name is Hancock,’ I said. ‘I work in Plaistow.’

‘Oh, Barking Road,’ the younger man said to the older. ‘Fred, he’s that darkie undertaker.’

‘Oh!’ Fred Dickens smiled, showing me very quickly his complete absence of teeth. ‘Oh, you’re that one who runs about when raids are on, ain’t you?’

I do, and so I didn’t bother to deny it. After all, even if people are roaring drunk they generally deserve the truth about matters. I run out into the street when bombs start to fall because I fear being buried alive. I make no secret of it.

‘Mr Dickens,’ I said.

‘Mate, do you have any drink about you?’ the other, presumably Ronnie Arnold, asked me.

‘I don’t, I’m afraid,’ I said. ‘Although I can offer you and Mr Dickens a fag.’

Fred Dickens’s drink-sodden face assumed a serious expression. ‘You got Passing Clouds or something else posh, have you?’ he said.

I put my hand in my jacket pocket and took out a packet of Capstan Full Strength. ‘No . . .’

‘Oh, Capstans’ll do lovely!’ Ronnie Arnold said as he leaned across and took two fags from my packet.

‘I’ll have some of them!’ Fred Dickens said. But as his mate began to shakily light up one of his smokes, I withdrew my hand and the fags to one side for a moment.

‘Mr Dickens,’ I said, ‘I know that you’ve recently lost your wife . . .’

‘Gi’us a fag!’ Fred Dickens pushed against me, trying to grab the Capstans from my hand.

‘Mr Dickens, you’re still in mourning, I know . . .’

‘You gonna give me a fag then, wog?’

Ronnie was smoking contentedly away in his own little booze-soaked world. But Fred was getting aggressive. One thing that he wasn’t, however, was upset, at least not visibly so, about his late departed wife.

Still holding the fags out of his reach, I said, ‘Mr Dickens, what school did your wife go to when she was a kid?’

‘What school?’ Still looking up at the Capstans, he licked his dried-out lips and then said, ‘Why do you want to know where Violet went to school?’

‘I just do,’ I said. I didn’t want to have to stay and talk to these two for any longer than was necessary. Fred obviously wasn’t mourning his wife any more and I needed to carry on trying to find out if any connections existed between the Ripper murder victims – and maybe my sister Nancy too.

‘Why’d you want to know?’

‘If you tell me, truthfully,’ I said as I held the packet of fags up in front of him, just a little out of his reach, ‘you can have the whole packet.’

He stared at me for a bit then. Small black eyes surrounded by bloodshot whites tried, without success, to stare in what he probably imagined was a menacing way at me. But then he just caved in as drunks tend to do and said, ‘New City Road School. Give!’

I gave him the Capstans, which he shoved into the pocket of his jacket so quickly I almost didn’t see them go. I hadn’t wanted that particular answer, but I was glad nevertheless to have some sort of reply, even if it made me suspicious of and anxious about my sister. I was just about to go when Ronnie Arnold piped up and said, ‘Ripper done another one last night.’

‘What?’

‘Ripper,’ the red-headed man said. ‘Killed another woman last night.’

I leaned towards him and said, ‘Where? How do you know?’

‘Tilly talked about it,’ Fred Dickens said. ‘Talking nonsense!’ Then he turned to Ronnie Arnold, slapped him on the arm and said, ‘She’s a drunk! What you listen to her for? You should keep away from Tilly, like I told you!’

‘Fuck off!’

They started to fight.

I didn’t know who Tilly was or how she knew what these men claimed that she did. But I wasn’t going to find anything more out from either of them and so I left. I didn’t have long to wait to discover what the truth of the matter was, however. As soon as I got back into the shop, Doris pulled me to one side and said, ‘Mr H, a woman’s been killed up Plashet. They say she’s had her liver cut out and the skin peeled completely off her back! Can you imagine?’

Having seen the body of poor Nellie Martin, unfortunately I could.

By early afternoon, gossip had it that the Plashet victim was a fifty-one-year-old woman called Marie Abrahams. Because Plashet is to the north of Plaistow, and comes under East Ham actually, it’s not a place me and mine know too well. However, because the surname was, I at least imagined, Jewish, it wasn’t long before Doris was making contact with her friends and family living out that way. And so by the early evening we knew that poor Marie had in fact been a Jewish lady, that she’d grown up in Stepney and that she and her father hadn’t gone to live in Plashet until just before the start of the Great War.

‘My cousin Betty went to school with her,’ Doris said as she picked up her handbag and her gas mask and made ready to go home to Spitalfields.

‘Jewish Free School?’ I asked.

‘Where else?’ Doris smiled and then her face fell very quickly once again. It was only a few months since her husband Alfie had died in a raid, and so she still had sudden, quite disconcerting, patches of melancholy from time to time.

‘Doris . . .’

‘The coppers are all over the house up Plashet,’ Doris said as she pulled the shop door open and began to step outside. ‘Took this Marie’s old father away, they say.’

‘He was in the house when his daughter was murdered?’ I asked.

‘Poor old bloke’s simple, apparently,’ Doris said. ‘Off his nut, you know.’

And then she left. I looked down at the copy of the
Evening News
Arthur had brought in for me earlier and saw, with no surprise, that there was no mention of any murder anywhere. Same as Nellie Martin, Violet Dickens and even poor old Dolly O’Dowd. Censorship is used to cover up stories that might depress the population at large, bring down the mood of the war effort. It means that the East End is often alone in its mourning – its children bombed to bits in their own schools, whole dockside manors emptied of all human life. I don’t care if the King and Queen come and visit us down here every day, we’re on our own in the East End, I don’t mind what anyone says.

As I shut up the shop I thought about poor Marie Abrahams’s father. ‘Simple’ was how Doris had described him, but that covered a multitude of sins. Was the old man retarded or senile or was he just really, really shocked? If he had been in the house when his daughter was hacked up and skinned, was it surprising the old man was not himself? I wondered whether the police had taken Mr Abrahams away for his own safety and sanity, which had to be part of the reason certainly. But were they questioning him too? And if they were, what, or who, more to the point, had he seen? One thing that was starting to worry at my brain was the seeming fact that all the women killed so far had gone quietly to their horrible deaths. Nobody round and about had heard anything even resembling a scream on New City Road around the time it was thought Nellie Martin had died. Violet Dickens, living in what was now the middle of nowhere with two alcoholics, didn’t count, but no one had heard Dolly O’Dowd die or even seen anyone go into her house. Now, apparently, Marie Abrahams had been slaughtered while her father was in the house with her. The murderer was getting in and doing his business very easily and very anonymously. Even if all the victims knew the killer, why was he not being spotted by anyone else?

‘Hello, Frank.’

The door I’d just shut opened and my cousin Stella walked inside. Stella, who is the daughter of my dad’s brother Percy, was bombed out last October. Uncle Percy died in that raid and Stella, a funny old spinster at the best of times, went a bit shell-shocked for a while afterwards, which is why she now lives with us. For the past couple of weeks, however, she’d been staying with my dad’s sister Hester down in Margate. Thin and plain, Stella, who is just a bit older than Nan, is generally a very pale creature. But as soon as she came across the threshold I noticed that unusually she had a bit of colour in her cheeks.

‘Sea air must have done you good, Stella,’ I said as she hunched her way over towards me.

‘Yes,’ she said flatly, like she does. ‘Couldn’t get down the beach though because of all the wire and the mines and that.’

‘Well, it’s the coast, isn’t it?’ I said. Then, as it occurred to me how odd her presence in the shop was, I said, ‘Was the back gate closed?’

The girls and the Duchess and to a large extent Walter and Arthur use the gate in the back lane into the yard to get to the rooms behind the shop and up to the flat. It was unusual for Stella to come in from the street.

For a moment Stella looked away, and then she said, ‘Well, I didn’t like to . . .’

Walter sometimes has a few bottles of beer in the yard before he goes home of a night. Sometimes he has more than a few, and when he does that, he gets loud and not a bit intimidating – particularly to nervous middle-aged spinster ladies.

‘Was Walter drunk, Stella?’ I was prepared to go and read him the riot act. I can’t do without him but at the same time I won’t take any nonsense.

‘No, no, Frank, it’s not that,’ Stella said. Then she sighed a little before putting one of her hands on my arm. ‘Nancy and Aggie were in the yard when I came along,’ she said. ‘Frank, Nancy was crying. Crying so her heart would break. They never saw me and so I left. Aggie was trying to comfort her.’

It had to be about Dolly O’Dowd, in which case Aggie was probably the best person to comfort Nan. But there was a niggling doubt in my mind about this even then. I was very tense that evening until the girls came in from the yard, and with good reason.

I’d just made the Duchess a cuppa and taken it to her in the parlour when Aggie, pushing a still tearful Nan in front of her, came into the kitchen.

‘Cuppa?’ I said as I held the teapot up for my two sisters to see.

‘No thank you, Frank,’ Aggie said. She pushed Nan rather roughly, I thought, into one of the chairs at the kitchen table and said, ‘We have to talk to you.’

I poured myself a cup and then lit up a fag. ‘What about?’ I said. ‘Dolly’s funeral’s all in hand and . . .’

‘It ain’t about Dolly O’Dowd’s funeral,’ Aggie said as she too lit up a fag and then sat down next to Nan. Nan, I noticed, didn’t look at Aggie as she did any of this. But then Nan can sometimes be awkward with our younger sister. Pretty, blonde and always up for a good time, Aggie likes to wear what Nan describes as ‘racy’ clothes – short skirts and dresses and tight little jackets that show off her figure. Nan finds this unacceptable in a woman who has children and is still officially married even though her old man is off with another woman.