‘Dot, how do you know all this about the Mascarenhas family?’ I said.
‘Oh, well, Mr H, Ronaldo was one of me regulars back when I used to do a job of work on the street,’ Dot said. ‘Old bag as I am now, there was a time when I was too busy getting in trouble meself to have time to help other girls get theirselves out of the family way.’
And then she laughed really loudly. It was enough to wake a very angry and sleep-sodden Hannah, who stuck her head out of the window of her room and said, ‘Dot, what the fucking hell are you doing?’
My mother knew all about Nancy and her involvement with the White Feather movement by this time, and although she still of course loved her daughter, things were a little frosty between the two of them.
‘I have told Nancy that if you will accept her, I have no problem with her working in the business,’ she said later on that morning when I joined her for breakfast in the kitchen. Aggie had gone to work and Nan was out shopping, so we were alone.
‘She wants to replace Arthur,’ I said.
‘I know,’ the Duchess said. ‘Bearing.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s heavy work.’
‘I know.’ I’d done it myself for years, when my dad was still running the business. ‘But are you going to be able to manage sometimes without her?’
The Duchess shrugged. ‘What would I do if Nancy did not live with us? If she were married? I would cope.’
‘Yes, well . . .’
‘She wants to feel useful,’ my mother continued. ‘Also . . .’ She looked up at me with wet eyes. She wasn’t exactly crying but she was close. ‘Also, Francis, I think that your sister may wish to do penance maybe, for what she did during the Great War. I think that maybe this could be some kind of mortification.’
That hadn’t occurred to me, but of course with Nan being so religious it did make sense. I didn’t reply to that specifically but said instead, ‘Arthur has a lot to do before he leaves and so I’ve told him to take next week off.’
Arthur’s only family, apart from some elderly aunts, is his mother. I knew she would be devastated at the thought of being left on her own, and would appreciate some time with her boy before he headed off to the rigours of basic training and then God alone knew where.
‘You’ll try your sister out?’
‘Next week, yes,’ I said.
‘I’ve lent her one of my long black skirts,’ the Duchess said. ‘And a jacket.’
‘I think you should have her wear a topper,’ Doris cut in as she bustled into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea. ‘I think Miss Nancy’d look lovely in one of them. She’s a good looking lady. Do you know, Mr H, I think your sister is going to be the first lady undertaker in London!’
‘Well . . .’
‘I mean, I know we don’t know all that goes on up west or in south London or . . .’
‘Doris,’ I said, ‘you know Marie Abrahams?’
‘The woman murdered up Plashet?’
‘Yes. You don’t,’ I asked, ‘know whether any of her male relatives married out, do you?’
Hannah hadn’t known anything about the Abrahams family. She had, however, accepted the fact that Dot Harris could be right about a possible marriage between one of Marie’s relatives and the daughter of a black ship’s steward from old Portuguese India – albeit a very pale daughter. Not that she personally had heard of such a thing.
Doris frowned. ‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ she said doubtfully. ‘I don’t know that family, if you know what I mean, Mr H. I just heard that the old man was a bit simple and that he and Marie had moved to Plashet before the Great War. Do you know who this relative of theirs is supposed to have married out with?’
‘A woman from a Portuguese Indian family . . .’
‘Goa,’ my mother put in. ‘That is the Portuguese part of India. Goa.’
‘Oh.’ Doris smiled. ‘You been there, have you, Mrs H?’
My mother smiled. ‘My father was Goan, Doris,’ she said.
I sometimes forgot that. Of course my grandfather had been a Portuguese Indian. Not that my mother had spent any time I knew about mixing with Portuguese Indians since she’d been in England. The Duchess had been born and brought up in Calcutta and so most of the Indian friends she did have were Hindus.
‘Doris, it’s possible,’ I said, ‘that someone in Marie’s family may well have married into a family called Mascarenhas.’
‘That is a Portuguese name,’ my mother said.
Doris shrugged. ‘I’ve never heard of such a thing before,’ she said. ‘But I can ask around.’ Then, frowning, she added, ‘You know, Mr H, you could go and ask Marie’s father.’
Albeit inside, I shuddered. Marie Abraham’s father was in Claybury mental asylum. What if I went up there to talk to him and lost my mind? What if they saw what I was up there and kept me in?
‘I could . . .’
Doris picked up the kettle, filled it with water and then lit the gas on the range underneath it. ‘He was a tailor, her old man,’ she said. ‘Simple, as I’ve told you before, Mr H. But he could make a jacket and trousers, provided you wasn’t expecting Savile Row. I expect they’ve taken him up Claybury because of what’s happened to Marie. You should go and see him.’
It was all so easy for her! She could go into a lunatic asylum and know that she wouldn’t see talking severed heads lying all over the floors of the corridors. But then my mother said something that made me think that perhaps I didn’t have to face such a thing entirely on my own. ‘Francis,’ she said, ‘didn’t Nancy know this lady, Marie Abrahams? Surely if she did, then at some point she must have come across her father too?’
That afternoon, Arthur and I saddled up the horses in the back yard and then rode them out on to the Barking Road. It was a dark, foggy afternoon but Rama and Sita hadn’t had a good gallop for some weeks, and besides, I wanted to get away for a bit. For years Hancock’s have taken their horses for exercise to the marshes down by the gasworks at Beckton. It’s a strange, half-wild sort of place where poor kids scour the boggy land for any coal that may have dropped off from trucks making delivery to the gasworks. Some people grow vegetables down there too, and then there are the gypsies. They are good horsemen, and like my father, I’ve always had my horses shod by a Beckton gypsy family called Smith. Time was when Horatio Smith used to go for gallops with me, but since his death, his brother, George Gordon, hasn’t had the same interest in it. So now it was just Arthur and me, the swirling fog and my own thoughts. Not that I really thought that much about anything really. That’s the good thing about exercising a horse in open country, it frees your mind to be a blank slate, and that, for a man like me, is a very soothing experience. For a mind that constantly jibbers, jabbers and hums, silence is truly the best and most soothing medicine.
But the gallop was only to be a short respite from the real world. As Arthur and myself walked the horses past Plaistow police station, Sergeant Hill, who had been just going back into the building, came over and said, ‘Have you heard about Fred Dickens?’
‘Fred Dickens?’ I said. ‘You mean husband of the late Violet Dickens?’
‘The so-called Ripper’s second victim, yes,’ Sergeant Hill said.
I recalled Fred and his lodger Ronnie Arnold sitting outside the Tidal Basin pub as drunk as lords.
‘Turns out,’ the copper continued, ‘that Fred’s been having a bit of a romance, like, with some barmaid called Matilda.’
Matilda – Tilly. That must have been the woman Fred and Ronnie had told me about when I found them outside the Tidal Basin after I’d been to visit the landlord. I told Arthur to ride Sita home and then I dismounted and held on to Rama’s reins while I had a confab with Sergeant Hill.
‘So what . . .’
‘Does it mean?’ Sergeant Hill moved in closer towards me and said, ‘It means, Mr Hancock, that Fred Dickens lied. When Violet was found, we asked him all sorts of questions about his relationship with his wife, including whether or not anyone else was involved,
if you know what I mean. He told us categorically that there was no one else.’
I looked into the fog around and about us, making sure as far as I could that no one else was there. Not that I could in any way be sure. ‘Sergeant Hill,’ I said, ‘just because Fred was having a fling doesn’t make him a killer. It certainly doesn’t mean that he’s the killer of any of the other women, does it?’
‘No.’ Sergeant Hill puffed heavily on his pipe and then he said, ‘But if he was seeing this Matilda, he could have got rid of his missus, couldn’t he?’
‘I’m not saying it’s not possible,’ I said, ‘but . . .’
‘But you think it’s to do with the old White Feather lark, don’t you?’ the copper replied. ‘Not that I’m saying that it ain’t . . .’
‘Sergeant Hill,’ I said, ‘I think that Marie Abrahams’s father might know where one of the other White Feather girls might be.’
‘Coppers at East Ham took him up to Claybury,’ Sergeant Hill said. ‘Mute he was, so they had it.’
‘So East Ham didn’t talk . . .’
‘Oh, I think the coppers spoke. It was Nathan Abrahams who didn’t – leastways not once the initial shock had passed,’ Sergeant Hill said. ‘Why, you planning to go and see him, are you, Mr H?’
‘Yes.’ Instinctively I put my head down a little. Sergeant Hill knows how I am. He knows that going to a place like Claybury isn’t easy. What I knew, however, was that there was nothing he could do to help me with that. The coppers are stretched with regard to manpower and I knew as well as he did that my theory about the White Feather girls was not one that the police shared. As far as they were concerned, they were looking for some sort of nutter who killed for mad reasons they didn’t even want to understand. To be fair to them, in the situation we’re all in – at war – there isn’t time.
‘Well, you’re more than likely to get nothing out of the old man,’ Sergeant Hill said. ‘Always been a bit funny, like, apparently.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Well, Mr Hancock, as long as you know what’s what,’ Sergeant Hill said as he began to move back through the mist towards the police station.
‘Oh, Sergeant Hill . . .’
He turned.
‘What about Fred Dickens?’ I said. ‘What’s happening about him?’
‘Well, he’s in custody at the moment,’ Sergeant Hill said.
That seemed very serious given that Fred Dickens had only apparently owned up to having an affair.
‘But . . .’
The sergeant came closer towards me again, through the thickening mist.
‘The person what tipped us off about Fred also had thoughts about what he might have done to Violet,’ he said in a low voice.
‘What, that he might have killed Violet?’ I said. When I’d seen Fred Dickens, he had been far too drunk to do anything except roll about and swear. A proper alcoholic, he probably wasn’t too far away from death himself. ‘How would anyone know such a thing?’
‘Depends whether that person lived with the people involved,’ Sergeant Hill replied.
The name in question came to me quickly. ‘You mean . . .’
Sergeant Hill moved back away from me again, through the fog. ‘Good afternoon, Mr Hancock,’ he said, and then he disappeared into the police station.
Apparently alone in a sea of silent fog, I wondered why Ronnie Arnold had gone to the police about his very convivial landlord, Fred Dickens. At that moment I couldn’t accept that Fred had killed his missus. I certainly couldn’t even begin to think about the alcoholic man I’d seen at the Tidal Basin in relation to the deaths of the other women. But Ronnie Arnold must have had a reason for doing what he had, even if that reason involved his having killed or at least harmed Violet Dickens himself.
Chapter Eleven
Even if I hadn’t wanted Nan to come with me to Claybury Hospital, I couldn’t have done much without her.
‘If you’re not a relative or a friend then you can’t come in,’ the nurse at the entrance to the men’s wards said.
Of course I’d started to stutter almost as soon as we’d walked through the front gate and so I hadn’t sounded exactly competent or even probably very sane. But then asylums, loony bins, nut houses, whatever you choose to call such places, don’t sit well with me. I know there are times when I should be in a place like Claybury myself. In fact when I came out of the army in 1918, I was threatened with it. Not by my family but my old sergeant major. Just before demob, it was.
‘If you carry on like this, Hancock, we’ll have you put away,’ he’d said to me on the day when the violence in my mind had made me tear the skin from my arms and hands in sheer rage. ‘And we all know what happens to nutters in them places, don’t we?’
Slowly at first his threat had filtered into my brain, bringing with it the horror stories that exist about such institutions. We’ve all had a relative or a friend in such places and we’ve all heard the rumours that gather around them too. In the nut house you lose your liberty; they lock you up, clean and feed you by force if necessary, and when you cannot sleep on account of the demons in your head, they tie you to your bed with leather straps. There are lots of tales about violence, but for me probably the greatest fear I possess about asylums is the way they want to treat all the patients the same. My running, for instance, which is essential to my sanity when the bombs begin to fall, would never be allowed in a place like Claybury. I would be one of those tied to his bed, screaming.
Quite how I straightened myself out after what the sergeant major had said to me, I don’t know. But I did. Or rather I learned to hide my madness and my misery a bit better than I had done before. Now, of course, many of the loony bins are used as ordinary hospitals too. The central London hospitals are too vulnerable to German attack. In Claybury, not all the patients were mad.
‘Now look, I know Nathan Abrahams,’ Nan told the nurse. ‘I’m a friend of his family. His late daughter specifically, like.’
‘Mr Abrahams has been very distressed by the death of his daughter,’ the nurse responded loftily.
‘Yes, I know, which is why we’ve come to give him some comfort,’ Nan said in a tone that was very bold for her. She’s usually not good with strangers. But I thought at the time that maybe her desire to be seen to be doing her bit in my eyes was what was driving her. Nan was, after all, still trying to make up for what she’d done with the White Feather girls back in the Great War. We both of us knew it.
The nurse considered this for some time before she spoke again. Her eyes, if not her voice, were still full of suspicion, but she said, ‘You wait here and I’ll bring Mr Abrahams out. You can have five minutes.’
There was a bench by the side of the wall just before the locked entrance to the men’s wards, and so Nan and I sat down on it while we waited.
‘He was a little man, Mr Abrahams, as I recall,’ Nan whispered to me once we had settled ourselves down. Somewhere in the building, someone screamed. ‘Fair-haired. But then Marie was fair. Lovely blonde hair she always had.’
‘Nan,’ I said as I suppressed a shudder, ‘h-how did you keep your . . . well, your being a W-White F-Feather girl, how did you keep it from Dad and the Duchess?’
Looking down at the brown lino floor, she didn’t say anything, just cast her head from side to side as if she were in pain.
‘Nan?’
‘We was just girls!’ she blurted. ‘Just friends. And then . . .’ She looked up at me and said, ‘It never started like how it became. We were young women going for walks together, shopping, meeting friends and friends of friends. Of course we talked about the war, about our boys. I talked about you, Frank. I was very proud of what you were doing.’
‘S-s-so how . . .’
‘It was the Harper girls who suggested the White Feather thing,’ Nan said. ‘They’d read about it in the newspapers and their parents were the type who thought that such a movement was a good idea.’
Having met Esme Harper as was, I knew th
at she at least was still very much of the same mind. Nan knew that I’d met Esme and the medium once known as Margaret Cousins.
‘Was Esme still . . .’ she began.
‘She’s ashamed of nothing,’ I said. ‘But your old mate Margaret is. I know you don’t approve of spiritualism, Nan, but Margaret Darling is, I believe, a good woman.’
‘To be fair, Margaret was one of those who was never really comfortable giving out white feathers,’ Nan said. ‘She did it, but she felt sorry for the blokes she did it to.’
There was a jangle of keys in a lock and the door to the men’s wards opened. The nurse we’d spoken to earlier appeared. Behind her she dragged an ancient wicker bath chair. Once through the door, she turned the chair around and I saw a tiny, pale man covered in thick grey blankets sitting in it. His eyes were so fixed and blank he could have been a blind man.
‘Well, here is Mr Abrahams,’ the nurse said to us as she parked his chair in front of where we were sitting. ‘You may have five minutes, and please do not upset him.’
She looked down at the watch pinned to her uniform and then went back to her desk to one side of the locked door.
Nan leaned towards the Bath chair and smiled. ‘Hello, Mr Abrahams,’ she said. ‘Remember me? Nancy Hancock? I was friends with your Marie, remember?’
There wasn’t so much as a flicker of recognition, or anything else for that matter. Nathan Abrahams just breathed. Slumped like a doll without its stuffing, he sat in that chair and did nothing except live. Not even yet another scream, which this time was followed by a furious altercation of some sort, roused him from whatever had silenced him.
But my sister, to her credit, persisted. ‘I was so sorry to hear about Marie,’ she said. ‘I know I hadn’t seen her for years, but . . . My mother’s been ill and looking after her has . . . has taken time. But your daughter was a good woman, Mr Abrahams. She was a good daughter to you, I know.’
Sure and Certain Death Page 11
