‘They’re all around about the same age.’
‘Yes, but a spinster, a respected widow and someone like Violet Dickens . . .’
He left what Violet Dickens was or had been like hanging in the air. Father Burton is not one who talks easily about what he generally expresses as ‘immorality’. Not that, from what Albert had said at least, Violet could have been considered exactly immoral. Although no churchgoer myself, I knew this priest well enough to know not to push him, and so I just waited for him to talk, which eventually he did.
‘Of course poor Violet had a cross to bear in the form of her husband,’ he said after a very long pause. ‘In a place of drinkers like Canning Town, it’s quite something to be known and almost made into a figure of myth for your drinking. But Frederick Dickens is such a man.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘When the police told me that the poor woman had been dead in the attic of that house for weeks and Frederick and that other creature completely unaware, I wasn’t surprised.’
‘You weren’t?’
‘Blind drunk the pair of them! God Almighty, Francis, I wouldn’t have been surprised if Violet had been dead since before the bombing started! All those men have done for years is drink. Not even sober at her funeral!’
‘I didn’t know they’d been . . .’
‘Oh, it was the woman who claims to speak to the dead who ran the funeral,’ Father Burton said. ‘God help us, Francis, that a Catholic woman like Violet should seek counsel from such people . . .’ He stopped briefly in order, I imagined, to collect himself once again. His normally colourless face was pink with fury. ‘Table-turning and ectoplasm and what have you! God help us!’
Albert had said Father Burton hadn’t approved of Mrs Darling. Not that I had really come to see him about her.
‘Father,’ I said, ‘I know that Albert Cox told you about the posy he found on Violet Dickens’s grave . . .’
‘During Mrs Salazar’s funeral, yes,’ Father Burton said. ‘A vile note! He gave it to the police, I believe.’
‘He told me about it because I’m doing Dolly’s funeral with you, Father, and Albert, well, he says we should be on the lookout maybe . . .’
‘For what? Deranged people carrying flowers with offensive cards attached? Why would anyone want to do such a thing to Dolly O’Dowd?’
‘Why would anyone do such a thing to Violet Dickens?’
‘Francis, she drank her drop too, you know. And it is well known that the first of her seven children was born only three months after her wedding . . .’
‘Father, whoever wrote that note called Violet a Nazi!’ I said. ‘That’s nothing to do with her love life or her drinking!’
‘No, but . . .’
‘Well, I’m sure she wasn’t a Nazi! But what if this horrible flower-sender sends something unpleasant to Dolly’s funeral?’
The priest looked down for a moment as if he was a little ashamed of what he had said about Violet Dickens. I didn’t think he was in reality, but I hoped that he’d taken my point anyway.
‘Albert told you, and me, so that we can keep an eye open,’ I said. ‘Mrs Bentham wants her sister’s funeral to be quiet and discreet, as do all of us.’
‘We don’t know when that ghastly posy was put on Violet’s grave,’ Father Burton said. ‘I don’t think it was at her actual funeral.’
‘I don’t suppose it was,’ I said. ‘But Father, if we see something suspicious . . . if it means that maybe we can catch someone in the act . . .’
‘Francis, that is a matter for the law, not us,’ Father Burton said coldly. ‘You commend the dead to the earth, I commend them to God. Neither of us can dispense justice.’ He fixed me with one of his not infrequent ‘you’re a mad person, Francis’ looks and said, ‘Especially not you, my son.’
I looked down at the floor of Father Burton’s parlour and noticed, calmly, that the rug was swimming in blood from Passchendaele.
The Duchess went to bed early that night, and with Aggie on the night shift down at Tate and Lyle’s it meant that I was left on my own with Nan. By this time, of course, she was in mourning for Dolly O’Dowd, and so even by her dark standards she was a deeply black presence in our flat. As night began to fall that afternoon I sat by the window in order to get the last of the daylight before we put up the blackout curtains. But soon the fog came down and there was nothing left to be seen and so I entombed us for the night while my sister cooked up a potato pie in the kitchen. Later, as I tried to read the Evening News by the light of a single candle, she came and stood next to me. So shrouded in black was she that I hardly knew she was there until she spoke.
‘Frank?’
‘F . . .’ I put a hand up to my chest and only just stopped myself from cursing. ‘Gawd above, Nan, what . . .’
‘Frank, have you found anything else out about poor Dolly yet?’ she asked. ‘Oh, and the other women who, er . . .’
I lit a fag up to calm my nerves and then I said, ‘No. Not really, love, I . . . Nan, this really is something for the coppers, love . . .’
‘Oh, what do they do?’ She sat down beside me and then shuffled her thin backside on the chair in an agitated fashion. ‘Terrible things go on all the time, but they don’t do nothing about it.’
‘Terrible things?’
‘Looting and all that what goes on down the public shelters.’ She gave me a significant look. ‘You know.’
Some say there’s been more kids conceived down the London public shelters in the last six months than in the whole of the country for the last year. Makes me smile, but to someone like Nan it’s an outrage.
‘Nan, love, murder’s a long way off from a soldier and his girl having a bit of a cuddle in the blackout.’
Even by the thin light of the candle I could see Nan blush with anger. ‘They ain’t doing nothing about murder and you know it!’ she said. ‘Frank, think about all the dear departed you’ve had to follow up on in the last year. Think about that bloke who got stabbed and only you knew!’
My old dad used to talk about the undertaker’s ‘third eye’. How to express that in words I don’t really know, beyond the notion that it is a feeling you get when a dead body isn’t right. When a person has met his or her end in a way that is premature or violent, a good undertaker, dedicated to the care of the dead, does know. At the height of the bombing back in 1940 I’d had such a feeling about a bloke who died apparently from the effects of bomb blast. I’d seen him by chance just minutes before he died and he told me he’d been stabbed. But there was no evidence that the police doctor could find of this, even though I knew the dying man hadn’t been lying. And I’d been right. He had been stabbed, but with a lady’s hatpin, which had left almost no mark on the outside of his body. The poor bloke had bled to death inside – a slow and apparently very painful death. That said, Dolly O’Dowd and the other women were known to have been murdered.
‘Nan, the police . . .’
‘Aggie was right. The coppers ain’t doing nothing, Frank, and well you know it!’
‘Do I?’ I lit up a Woodbine and said, ‘How do you know? Have you spoken to them? Sergeant Hill at Plaistow is a good bloke. I’m sure he’s doing his best.’
‘Yes, but you . . .’
‘I’m finding out what I can,’ I said. I wondered whether to tell Nan about the posy with the insulting card that had been placed on Violet Dickens’s grave and then thought better of it. Her low opinion of the dockers’ women in general would only make her dismiss that anyway. ‘And Nan, you must tell the coppers anything you might know about Dolly, and the others, too.’
She turned away slightly then and said, ‘I only really knew Dolly.’
‘You knew Nellie Martin,’ I said. Then, because all of the women were around about the same age and because I couldn’t remember anyway, I asked her, ‘Did you go to school with Dolly, Nan?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you went to school with Dolly O’Dowd and Nellie Martin?’
‘Yes.’ She was still
turned away from me, into the darkness.
‘Violet Dickens? What about her?’
‘She lived down Canning Town,’ Nan said.
It wasn’t really an answer and so I said, ‘Yes, but Dolly lived almost in Upton Park, but she still went to New City Road School. Did . . .’
‘I dunno.’ She turned still further away from me, and she shrugged.
I got up then and moved around so that I could see my sister’s face. The old third eye was apparently working with the living at that moment and I knew that what Nan was telling me wasn’t right in some way.
‘Nan, I have looked for connections between these ladies and I haven’t found any yet,’ I said. ‘They differ on religion, on whether they’re married and have kids or not and on whether they’ve got any money. All they have in common is their age. Now, if they all went to the same school . . .’
‘I don’t know where Violet Dickens went to school!’ Nan said. Her face I could see now was screwed up with tension. She wasn’t telling the truth about something, either that or she was leaving something out of what she was saying. ‘Frank . . .’
‘Because if you do know something, then you’ve got to tell the coppers.’ I bent down to look more closely at her and added, ‘Because, Nan, if this killer is murdering middle-aged women who went to New City Road School forty years ago, then that could mean that you’re in danger.’
She looked up into my eyes and I swear I saw a bead of sweat form on her top lip.
I stood up straight again and said, ‘And I don’t want any harm to come to you, Nan. None of us do.’
‘I don’t know anything,’ she said as she got up from the chair and ran out of the parlour back to the kitchen. ‘Nothing!’
Just over an hour later the sirens went and Nan headed for our Anderson shelter. I went out in the street.
Chapter Five
Her thick mane of strawberry-blonde hair had always been Marie’s best feature. Now it was twisted cruelly around a hand that was strong and determined and which she knew meant her harm.
‘Please!’ she said softly. Her head was pulled back so that she was looking up at the ceiling. Upstairs, just above the parlour, was where her dear old dad was sleeping. Even now, even with this monster in control of her beautiful hair, she didn’t want her dad to wake up. ‘Don’t pull out my hair! Not my hair!’
‘Not your hair.’
‘No! Please!’
There was a pause. No slackening of the grip upon her hair happened, but Marie began to feel her attacker’s other hand take hold of her blouse at the back and pull it upwards, away from her skirt. Panting with fear, Marie tried to move one of her hands around to her back, but doing that just resulted in her hair being pulled almost out by its roots once again.
‘No!’ she hissed again, still trying to be quiet, still so aware of her father asleep upstairs. ‘No!’ She felt groggy. When the cold air in the parlour hit her now naked back, the shock of it made her feel sick. ‘Oh God.’
Another tug on her hair. This time Marie just groaned. Stupid, stupid, stupid woman! Why had she allowed herself to get into a situation like this? She wasn’t silly, she was a bright girl, a good girl, a girl who would have made something of herself if her poor old dad had been more of what he should have been. ‘Not my hair! Not my hair! Please, please, please, not my hair!’ she murmured.
Her hair was left alone after that. The knife that her attacker had taken from Marie’s very own cutlery drawer first slid into the skin on her back and then scraped it off her flesh and her bones in one smooth, hard movement. Still not wanting to wake her sleeping father, Marie screamed silently as she felt pain like she’d never experienced in her life before.
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?’
Sure and Certain Death Page 5
