‘Nah!’ The sleeve of her dressing gown was damp and a bit lumpy too, but that was probably the soup. ‘Blimey, H, are you wearing anything or are you in the buff?’
‘I’m, well, I’m, er, I . . .’
She laughed at my so very obvious embarrassment. Then, still in the pitch blackness, she found my lips and kissed me. So it was that I made love in a raid with a woman covered from head to toe in Heinz vegetable soup. Mad as it seems now, we laughed and joked a lot as we did it then too. Only in the morning, when the thin winter dawn broke over yet more death and destruction in the city, did Hannah and I speak of the White Feather girls again.
Just as I was leaving her, Hannah said to me, ‘H, if you don’t know who the other girls in the group were, then you have to find that out. Speak to Nancy. Take her to the coppers. Marie Abrahams must be the last to die like this. She must!’
I knew that.
There had been nine of them. All under twenty-five and all with a passionate love for ‘our boys’, as they had called them, brave men in uniform. As well as Nancy and the four murdered women, there had been twins, Esme and Rosemary Harper, from Forest Gate, a Margaret Cousins from East Ham and another girl from Canning Town who Nan could only remember as Fernanda.
‘Her people was Portuguese,’ she said. ‘I don’t remember what her surname was.’
It had taken a fair bit of courage for Nan to speak to me first when I’d come home that morning. I was still wild with her, which showed in how I responded now. ‘Well, you’d better try and remember,’ I said. ‘Because all these old mates of yours could be in danger.’
‘Frank, we don’t know that it’s because of the white feathers . . .’
‘How did you all get together?’ I asked. ‘How did you come to do this, this . . .’
Nancy, Violet Dickens, Dolly O’Dowd and Nellie Martin had all been to New City Road School together. Although Nan and Nellie had never got on, Nellie had been a good friend of Dolly O’Dowd and of Violet Dickens. Marie Abrahams also came in via Dolly O’Dowd, who met her shopping on Green Street and became her friend. The Harper twins were cousins of Nellie Martin, and Margaret Cousins had worked with Violet Dickens when they’d been in service together in a house up in Woodford.
‘Violet’s maiden name was Watts,’ Nancy told me. ‘One of the Harper girls, Esme I think it was, got married after the Great War, but I don’t know what her name became. Marie became very close with Margaret and later with Fernanda too.’
‘What about this Fernanda woman?’ I asked.
Nancy frowned. ‘I think she was a friend of Margaret’s first off,’ she said. ‘I expect Margaret got married in the end. She had a sweetheart in the forces.’
‘Do you know what his name was?’
She smiled. ‘Same as yours. Frank.’
‘Frank what?’
Nancy shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Can’t remember.’
I sighed. ‘Nan,’ I said, ‘you’re going to have to tell the coppers all of this.’
Her face turned white. ‘What, that I was a . . .’
‘Sergeant Hill knows you and so it’ll be . . . well, it’ll be all right,’ I said. A lot of the old coppers had been in the Great War and most of them felt much the same as I did about the White Feather girls. Even with Sergeant Hill over at Plaistow, who was basically a friend, Nancy wasn’t going to have an easy time of it.
‘Will you come with me, Frank?’ she asked.
I only made a pretence of thinking about it before I said, ‘All right.’
As much as people in general don’t like conchies, there isn’t the complete lack of understanding of those who don’t care to fight and kill as there was back in the First Lot. Now if a man is unfit to fight he’ll be found something else to do to aid the war effort. And there’s no shame in that, amongst normal sensible people. But the attitudes we have now are as a result of what happened between 1914 and 1918 and the aftermath of that war. I am lucky. I don’t always know what is and isn’t real but I can do a job of work and feed my family. How can you do that with no legs, or no face, or if indeed you’re stone dead in some blood-sodden field in Flanders? Girls still worship soldiers now, but they do that at the back of public shelters and in shop doorways in the blackout. They don’t hang around in gangs and make blokes out of uniform want to take their own lives. Maybe it’s because not so many girls now are as pure and untouched as they were back in those days. Maybe they’re not so frustrated any more. I watched Nan put her coat on as we both got ready to go to the police station and I found that my face was still set into a sneer of disapproval.
‘Never had time for White Feather girls meself but I can’t see why anyone’d want to kill middle-aged ladies who were misguided in their youth,’ Sergeant Hill said as he and I settled down to a smoke and a cuppa after Nancy had gone back to the shop.
‘I can,’ I said, which I could see from the expression on Sergeant Hill’s face shocked him. ‘I hated those bloody women,’ I carried on. ‘If I’d known my own sister was part of all that . . .’
‘That she kept it dark for so long shows that she knew she’d done wrong,’ Sergeant Hill said.
‘Our dad would’ve gone mad if he’d found out,’ I said.
Sergeant Hill cleared his throat. ‘But you know, Mr H, much as it’s always useful to find out as much as we can about murder victims, I’m not sure that this white feather connection between these women will come to anything. I mean, the Great War finished over twenty years ago.’ His face dropped then into a frown. ‘The world’s moved on, not for the better, but . . . Why, if someone had problems with these women, would he leave it until now to take his revenge? I mean, I’m assuming we have to be talking about some poor chap who had a bad time out in the trenches.’
‘If these women pushed this bloke to go to war when he wasn’t really up to it and he perhaps lost a leg or in some way couldn’t work again . . .’
‘I repeat, Mr H, why now?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe he’s got worse in health as he’s got older? Maybe he’s been told he’ll die soon? Sergeant Hill, it’s a connection I found because my sister told me about it. She and I have passed it on.’
‘As you should,’ Sergeant Hill said as he took a drag on his fag and then breathed out slowly. ‘But you know, Mr H, the big problem we have in all this, apart from the fact that we’re still being bombed by the Jerries, albeit not all the time now, is that no one has seen anything.’
‘I heard,’ I said, ‘that the father of that Jewish lady up Plashet was in the house when she died, or so it’s thought.’
‘Yes, he was,’ Sergeant Hill said. ‘But that’s for the boys up East Ham, Mr H, and no concern to us down here.’
The trouble is that the coppers work for their own manors. Someone was killing, skinning and eviscerating women across several different police divisions, but each of them was only dealing with whatever happened on their local patch. Can’t blame them for that, it’s the way they are required to work and the coppers are very overworked these days. But I was looking at a bigger picture that at the time I wasn’t sure was right or not. All I knew then was that several of the dead women had been to school together but all of them, so far, had been White Feather girls. And underneath my fury at her, I was worried about my sister.
‘Of course, as your Nancy said, Mr H,’ Sergeant Hill continued, ‘a lot of people didn’t like what her and the other girls did when they roamed the streets to look for ununiformed blokes. To my way of thinking, well, like you, Mr H, I never approved of such women, but . . . Quite a lot of people thought they did a good job. See them as heroines some people do, even now.’
He wasn’t lying. Some people I know still think the White Feather movement was a good thing and wish it was still in operation now. But I think they’re the minority. Now that war has come to us, as it were, most people want as little as possible to do with dying and killing. Most people can at least appreciate why someone might not want to fight even
if they can’t actually approve of it.
Sergeant Hill leaned across his table and beckoned me in towards him. I too leaned over the desk. ‘Between you and me,’ he whispered, ‘Marie Abrahams’s old man says the night she died, only a woman come to their house.’
‘A woman?’
‘Didn’t stay, so the old man said,’ Sergeant Hill continued. ‘Left well before what he said was Marie’s bedtime. But then what’s he know? Barmy, so East Ham say. Marie had been looking after him for years while he had conversations with the wall, so it’s said. So whether he saw a woman, a bloke or a dog is probably open to all sorts of questioning.’ He sat up again and raised his voice above a whisper. ‘Took him up Claybury, poor old bugger.’
Although I didn’t exactly shudder, I did feel as if someone had just walked over my grave. Claybury is a lunatic asylum in Woodford and is a place I’ve often imagined I’ll end my days. Once confined, the mad never come back, or if they do, they aren’t themselves or anyone else for that matter.
‘People have this barmy idea that Jack the Ripper has somehow come back to life,’ Sergeant Hill said.
‘Yes, but that’s ridiculous.’
He shrugged. ‘You know it, I know it . . . But the fact remains, Mr H, that no one – no one sensible at least – has seen anything or anyone around and about the places where these women was murdered.’
‘There were those flowers with those horrible messages left on Violet Dickens’s grave,’ I said.
‘Violet was a drinker . . .’
‘Yes, I know, but . . .’
‘Look, Mr H,’ Sergeant Hill said, ‘I’ll keep what you and your sister have told us about the White Feather girls in mind. I’ll let me opposite number at East Ham know. These crimes are horrible, truly horrific, but we’ve got other corpses we can’t account for too. We get them every day. Our boys and the wardens find them all over the place.’
‘Not skinned!’
‘Not generally, no,’ he said. ‘But Mr H, you know that the more things like this are talked about the more worried people get, and that ain’t good for no one. We’re doing our best, but . . .’ He shrugged again. ‘Keep your sister close and soldier on is what I say.’
In other words I was to try and think no more about it. That was going to be hard, considering the fact that the following day was Dolly O’Dowd’s funeral.
Chapter Seven
Aggie is a better person than I am. Come the following morning she was helping Nancy get herself dressed for Dolly O’Dowd’s funeral. I did my job with the horses and the carriage and making sure that all my lads were as clean and tidy and respectful as they could be. But I couldn’t comfort Nan. Later, down in the yard, Aggie watched the boys load the coffin into the hearse with me and then she said, ‘Frank, Nancy’s a silly bitch, but she knows it and . . .’
‘Ag, I need time,’ I said to my younger sister as I climbed up on to the box.
Aggie sighed and then went inside the shop with Arthur and Walter to retrieve the few bunches of flowers that had arrived for Dolly O’Dowd. I noticed when she came out that she was reading the cards on the flowers she was carrying, but I was still shocked when I heard her swear.
‘Christ!’
I looked down from my perch on top of the hearse and saw that my sister’s face had turned a very pale shade of grey. Arthur, looking over her shoulder, was wrinkling his nose in what looked like disgust.
‘Aggie?’
She looked up at me and said, ‘God help us, Frank, someone didn’t like poor old Dolly!’
I jumped down off the hearse and joined Arthur in looking over Aggie’s shoulder. In one hand she had a small bunch of daffodils, in the other a rather larger posy of violets. It was in the middle of the violets that my sister had found a card that simply said, Jealous cat.
‘Jealous cat? What does that mean?’ Arthur said.
Aggie, who is accustomed to various run-ins with Arthur’s less than quick interpretation of things, said, ‘It means that she is or was jealous of somebody and she was a cat, meaning she was vicious with it.’
‘Oh.’ Arthur was silent for a few seconds before he said, ‘I always thought that Miss O’Dowd was a nice quiet lady.’
‘Well, she was,’ Aggie said. ‘To us and to my sister, but . . .’
I didn’t hear anything more of what Aggie was saying, because by that time I was running back inside the shop. In spite of the fact that Dolly’s sister, Nan and what looked like another couple of old spinsters were sitting down in the office, I went up to Doris at the desk and said, ‘Where did all the flowers come from?’
Alarmed at my sudden and I have to admit probably red-faced appearance, Doris tipped her head towards the mourners and said, ‘Mr H!’
‘Doris, where did the flowers come from?’ I said. ‘I need to know! It’s important!’
Nan, who was giving me a funny look by this time, said, ‘Frank . . .’
‘Well, Mrs Bentham of course brought the big bunch,’ Doris said to me as she simultaneously smiled at Dolly’s sister. ‘Miss Nancy had the daffs and . . .’
‘What about the bunch of violets?’ I said as I looked, I knew in vain, at the other women in the room. ‘Where did they come from?’
‘Well, I certainly wouldn’t have brought violets,’ the older of the two said, while the other one just looked at me with undisguised fear in her eyes.
‘The violets?’
I turned back towards Doris and looked her in the eye.
‘Oh, they come early this morning,’ she said. ‘A well-wisher must’ve slipped them in through the front door just after I opened up. I come back from making myself a cuppa and there they was on the floor beside Miss Nancy’s daffs. Lovely little things. So pretty.’
It was cold over at the East London Cemetery. But it wasn’t that cold. I shook because someone who hated Dolly O’Dowd had been in my shop. Not content to leave his hateful bouquet on my doorstep, he’d been in my shop – where my sister Nan, for all her faults, lived. Standing now over the rough cross that marked the grave of that other ‘Ripper’ victim, Violet Dickens, I thought about the hateful posy that Albert Cox had discovered on her plot.
My lads and I had lowered Dolly’s coffin into the ground by this time and I was out of the way having a smoke while Father Burton said his piece. I’m not a religious man. Not many of us who came through the Great War are. As the priest droned on, I began to think about those other figures of authority, the police. Sergeant Hill wasn’t a bad bloke, but he’d made it plain to me that the Ripper murders were no one’s top priority. With enormous bombs capable of killing thousands of Londoners on the cards almost every night, I couldn’t blame them for not putting the Ripper and his doings first in their thoughts. But that hadn’t helped the women who’d already died or was of any use to those who might yet become victims of this killer. I looked over at the small group of women over by Dolly O’Dowd’s graveside, my eyes focusing on my sister, Nan.
To say that the sight of my poor weeping sister made my heart melt would be a lie. I was still too disgusted with her and what she’d done all those years ago for that. But I had promised her, when Dolly had been found murdered, that I would try to find out who was killing these women. At the time, of course, I hadn’t realised that the victims were connected in the way that I had subsequently discovered they were. And of course there were others too, women still alive and possibly in danger – including Nancy.
From what Sergeant Hill had said, it was doubtful whether the other women who’d been White Feather girls with Nancy would be found and warned about the possibility that they could be in danger. That would not be good for morale. It could spread fear and discord. I felt, however, that if I could just find these women I might be able to make them more careful while at the same time not frightening the poor things to death. How I was going to do this, I didn’t know. But it was going to mean talking to Nancy in as reasonable a way as I could manage. After all, the Great War and everything that had happen
ed around it was a long way in the past. I had almost convinced myself that that was true when I turned away and looked at the trees on the eastern side of the cemetery. On top of a tall monument, a stone-draped vase it was, the severed head of one of our poor young officers burbled blood from its smashed mouth on to the ground. Mocking my stupidity. One thing about being in and surviving the Great War is certain, and that is that it is never, ever over. I will not and cannot ever be free.
There was no wake following Dolly O’Dowd’s funeral. The Duchess had offered our parlour to Rita Bentham for a small gathering, but she’d turned it down. Dolly’s house, the one where she and Rita had lived with their parents, had been emptied out and shut up only two days after she died. What remained of Dolly O’Dowd and her world was being put away as quickly as her sister could manage. She only came back to the shop briefly, and that was just to pay her bill. Aggie, who was still at home and who had made herself ready to look after Nan when the funeral was over, said of Rita Bentham, ‘Stuck-up mare! Now she’s got her own place out in Essex and Dolly’s old house. She’s all right!’
Nan didn’t say much. While the lads washed down the hearse and stabled the horses, I took the card that had been on those violets over to the police station. The Duchess, meanwhile, made tea and went and sat with my older sister until, just as the light was going in the afternoon, I went into the parlour to see her myself. All in black and wearing for some reason a skirt that reached down to the floor, Nancy looked like one of those drawings of Victorian widows you sometimes find in old books. There was even some sort of bonnet on her head which was fastened with a very old-fashioned black crepe bow. I thought then that she looked rather striking. She didn’t look up at me and I, though observing her closely, didn’t speak for some time.
At the end of the Great War there were near enough two million what they called then ‘surplus’ women. These were ladies who would never marry due to lack of eligible men. Some had lost their sweethearts in the trenches; others, like my sister, had never and would never have a gentleman caller or a beau. Of course, not all women of Nan’s age were left on the shelf at the end of the war. Some, like Nellie Martin, married and had a normal life. But the women who did marry were of a much more sociable type than my sister. They were also, and there’s no getting away from it, far more obviously attractive than either Nancy or our cousin Stella. It is a fact of life that when men are in short supply, it is the pretty girls who will get them. Maybe my sister could have found comfort with a wounded man, but Nancy, for all her patience and care with the Duchess and her illness, is a squeamish soul. She could never have dressed a leg stump or taken a crippled man out to the privy – or so I’d always thought. I sat down beside her, feeling her cringe beside me as I did so.
Sure and Certain Death Page 7
