Sure and Certain Death

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘Fred has it that Ronnie’s taken with this Tilly and that Ronnie’s telling lies about him so that he can be with her,’ Sergeant Hill said. He took his helmet off and wiped some sweat away from his brow. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are you going to bring Ronnie in?’ I asked.

  The copper shrugged. ‘He’s made a statement,’ he said. ‘It’s up to Fred to be forthcoming about this barmaid.’

  ‘You think he is in love with Tilly?’

  ‘Oh, he admits that now,’ Sergeant Hill replied. ‘What we want to know at the moment is why he lied about it in the first place. I also do wonder, I must be honest, whether he did kill poor old Vi. I mean, her body was up in that attic for weeks. Skinned, seeping blood everywhere . . .’

  ‘Ronnie Arnold was in that house too,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, but what motive would Ronnie have had for killing Violet?’

  ‘To put the blame on Fred so he could be free to have his way with Tilly?’

  Sergeant Hill shook his head and then just gently laughed. ‘These men are drunks, Mr H,’ he said. ‘They can barely string a sentence together for most of the time. I can’t see either of them thinking anything through, as it were.’

  ‘Yes, but if you’re saying that Fred killed Violet . . .’

  ‘On the spur of the moment, in a burst of violence . . .’

  ‘You don’t skin someone on the spur of the moment!’ I said.

  Sergeant Hill looked down at the ground and then he said, ‘Mr Hancock, all we can do is look at each and every possibility as it arises. East Ham are looking into the death of Marie Abrahams and we’re doing what we can with Violet, Dolly O’Dowd and Nellie Martin. At the moment, with Violet, we have her husband in custody because he had a reason to want her dead.’

  I wanted to go on about the other women and the connections that I had made between them, but I knew it was useless to even begin to point such things out. The police work as they work and they operate in very clearly defined and discrete divisions.

  It was seven on the dot by the time I got to Margaret Darling’s house in East Ham. When I knocked on the door she answered it herself, lumbering slowly down the corridor like a wheezing horse. ‘It’s just me,’ she said as she led me through into her parlour. The table she used for her seances was pushed up against the back wall of the room this time and two comfortable chairs were drawn up in front of a small fire in the grate.

  ‘My husband’s fire-watching and everyone else went hours ago,’ she said as she offered me one of the chairs and then lowered herself slowly down into the other.

  ‘The note you sent me this morning, Mrs Darling,’ I said. ‘You wanted to talk to me.’

  ‘Yes.’ She offered me a cup of tea, but I declined. I wanted to find out what Mrs Darling wanted and then get home to see whether Nan had turned up back from Claybury or not.

  ‘Mr Hancock, I’m not a woman easily scared,’ Mrs Darling said. ‘But I am being watched and I don’t just have my own feelings to go by with that.’

  ‘Watched?’

  ‘If I’m honest, I had the feeling that someone was observing me well before you came here and we talked about all that White Feather business,’ she said. ‘I didn’t of course know that my being watched might be connected to that then. But when you told me just who had been killed and I realised that I’d known them girls in the Great War . . .’

  ‘Mrs Darling, you’re right to be cautious,’ I said, ‘but what I said about the White Feather girls is only my idea. I could be very wrong. The last thing I wanted to do was really frighten you.’

  ‘Mr Hancock, I am not imagining it,’ Mrs Darling continued. ‘Linnit told me I was being watched.’

  ‘Linnit?’

  ‘My spirit guide,’ she said. Then she added very matter-of-factly, ‘She passed over in the last century.’

  ‘Oh.’ I failed to keep the disbelief out of my voice, which she picked up on immediately.

  ‘I know how it sounds,’ she said. ‘But Mr Hancock, Linnit don’t get things wrong. Cissy’ll tell you, Esme Robinson’ll tell you, although I don’t suppose you’d be too pleased to see her and her husband again.’

  I sighed. She was right, though. I had no desire to see that deluded war-glorying couple ever again. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t concerned for Esme. I was. I asked if Linnit had mentioned anyone else.

  ‘No, just me,’ Mrs Darling said. ‘She don’t know who’s watching or why, beyond saying that whoever it is means me harm.’

  ‘She said that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was a pause then. I looked into the small fire in the grate struggling to come to life around three tiny coals, and then I said, ‘Mrs Darling, you said that you have, besides what Linnit has had to say, felt watched.’

  She sighed. ‘I don’t know how to describe it to you, Mr Hancock,’ she said. ‘It’s just a feeling as if wherever I go and whatever I do, someone is watching me. I’ve been like it about three months now.’

  ‘And do you ever see anyone?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’ She shrugged. ‘If I had, I would’ve gone to the police. But I never see anyone. It’s just . . .’ She leaned towards me, her brow furrowed. ‘Everything I do is being noticed,’ she said. ‘When I’m indoors, when I’m out, when my old man goes to work and . . .’

  ‘Have you told your husband about this, Mrs Darling?’

  She pulled a sour face. ‘He wouldn’t listen!’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’

  ‘Mr Hancock, my Frank goes out to get away from me and all my table-turning, as he calls it,’ she said. ‘You know, if my Linnit actually manifested in front of him he still wouldn’t believe in her.’

  ‘So why are you telling me this?’ I asked. ‘Might I not be as sceptical as your husband?’

  ‘You know about the White Feather girls,’ Mrs Darling said. ‘You made those connections before anyone. And besides . . .’ she fixed me with a gaze that was rather frighteningly intense, ‘you see things.’

  I didn’t answer her, but I did frown. I felt cold now too. In spite of the little fire I was decidedly chilly.

  ‘Terrible things,’ Mrs Darling continued. ‘Heads and legs, spirits screaming and tormented from the Great War.’

  I turned my head away, but even as I did so I spoke, I had to. ‘How do you know what I see?’ I said. I’m well known as a bloke not always in possession of his right mind, but very few people know what I see and hear when the terror comes upon me. In fact, only Hannah really knows what I go through, and Hannah, I knew, did not know this woman.

  ‘Linnit tells me what’s what,’ Mrs Darling said. ‘She can see what torments you, Mr Hancock.’

  And I knew that according to her own lights, Mrs Darling wasn’t lying. Linnit, just as surely as she’d told the medium that she was being watched by someone, had also told Mrs Darling that I heard and saw terrible things from the Great War. But try as I might, I couldn’t talk to this woman about that. I just couldn’t.

  ‘So, Mrs Darling,’ I said, ‘what is to be done about your feelings of being watched? The threat you feel from that?’

  ‘Well I can’t go to the coppers with just the word of me and Linnit,’ the medium said. ‘They’d have me put away. No. I know that what I’m feeling is real, and I think you know that it’s real too, Mr Hancock. But I don’t know who is doing this or really why. What I do know is that I want someone to know that this is happening, in case something should occur.’

  ‘You mean . . .’

  ‘Mr Hancock, I ain’t afraid to die . . .’

  ‘But Mrs Darling, if that is how you feel, you must have someone to be with you. Talk to your husband! I’m sure that Cissy would . . .’

  ‘Alone as she is, Cissy has other things to do,’ Mrs Darling said. ‘She ain’t here now because she’s grave-tending. Her husband, her parents and her uncle Bob. He had a shop up the Broadway years ago. Cissy loved her uncle. But she’s still a home to run, and besides, I need some time on me own.
Just me and Linnit and the other spirits. Mediums who surround themselves with the living all the time are no bloody good.’

  ‘Mrs Darling,’ I said, ‘I would hate it if something happened to you.’

  She leaned forward and patted my hand, smiling. But she didn’t say anything more apart from reiterating her thanks. Uneasy still, I left shortly afterwards, determined that even if they laughed at me, I’d pass what Mrs Darling had said on to the police when I next got the chance. But then the sirens went and all rational thought left my mind. As I ran back on to East Ham High Street, I heard the screaming of men long since dead follow me into the darkness.

  Chapter Thirteen

  My sister Nancy did not get home from Claybury Hospital until dawn the following morning. Arriving home just before my sister, I found my mother and cousin Stella almost prostrate with worry.

  ‘She’s been strangled by a lunatic!’ Stella said as she poured water into the teapot and then stirred the leaves vigorously.

  ‘I am really more worried that she might have been caught up in last night’s raid, Stella dear,’ the Duchess said.

  I said nothing. Worried myself, I didn’t know what to say or to think.

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ Aggie said as she wandered in from the parlour, a smoking cigarette in her hand. ‘They have shelters at hospitals! Besides, if you look outside you’ll see the Jerries were after us again last night, not some hospital out in Essex. Mother, there’s a bloody great crater in the road outside! Trust me, Essex did not cop it last night. And as for being strangled by a nutter . . .’

  ‘Who’s been strangled by a nutter?’ Nan, as large as life and probably more confident-looking than I’d seen her before, stood in the kitchen doorway, frowning. ‘Who . . .’

  ‘You, you stupid girl!’ Aggie said as she ran over to Nan and gave her a very brief but very heartfelt hug. ‘Mum and Stella thought some nutter up Claybury had done away with you. Where you been?’

  ‘I was just about to leave the hospital when the sirens went,’ Nan said. ‘We all went down to the cellar.’

  Then she looked over at me and quite obviously saw the look of confusion on my face. After all, I had known just how early Nan had left the previous afternoon.

  ‘I spoke to Mr Abrahams again, Frank,’ Nan said. ‘He told me that his nephew, Edward Abrahams, married Fernanda Mascarenhas. Marie introduced them, apparently. Not on purpose, like, but she was with Edward one day and then along came Fernanda . . .’

  ‘Nan,’ I said, ‘you can’t have been with Mr Abrahams all that time.’

  ‘No, I told you, the raid started and . . .’

  ‘You should’ve got there by four at the latest . . .’

  ‘Nancy, we were all very worried,’ the Duchess said.

  Nan took in a very deep breath and then she said to me, ‘Frank, this Edward and Fernanda live over south London, miles away. Their families disowned them – including Mr Abrahams, who did, God love him, find it all very difficult to talk about. So Mr Abrahams don’t know where they live exactly, but he does know that it is south of the river and he thinks it’s Clapham.’

  ‘Nancy!’

  Nan turned to the Duchess and for once she looked annoyed with her. ‘I got talking to some ladies who work up there at the hospital,’ she said. Turning back to me she added, ‘They do their bit for the patients.’

  ‘Nurses.’

  ‘No,’ Nan said. ‘They make tea and clean up. They help out.’

  Aggie rolled her eyes. I knew what she was thinking. Middle-class do-gooder ladies no doubt allied to some sort of religious organisation. Sensing this hostility, Nan said, ‘I got talking.’ Then, to Aggie, ‘I’m a working woman, same as you, and you do as you please when you’re not at the factory.’

  ‘Nan, we were worried,’ I said.

  But she was angry now. ‘I had a good conversation,’ she said to me. ‘What’s wrong with that? I found out where Fernanda was, didn’t I?’

  And then she left. The rest of us just looked at each other in silence for a bit. It was Aggie who finally broke it when she came over and said to me, ‘You may well live to regret giving her a job, you know, Frank.’

  And I had to admit, at least to myself, that Nancy’s finding of her feet, as it were, was not an unmixed blessing.

  Later on that day, Walter turned up with a garbled story about how Fred Dickens had been charged with the murder of his wife. Most of the day so far had been spent cleaning the two hearses and waxing and polishing the horses’ saddles and bridles. But I had a recently bereaved family to visit at midday, and so on my way to where they lived, down by the Boleyn pub, I popped into the police station.

  Sergeant Hill wasn’t on duty, but another bloke I knew fairly well, a Constable Atkins, was quite happy to talk. He told me that apparently Fred Dickens had confessed. Not to all the murders, just to that of his wife Violet. But it was still a shock.

  I said to Atkins, ‘But would you think that a bloke like Fred Dickens would mutilate a woman like that? I mean, he might kill his missus, but . . .’

  Atkins shrugged. ‘He was a boozer, Mr H. Who knows what he’d do?’

  And he did have a point. Otherwise quite sane people will do mad things when they’re drunk.

  I went to see the family down by the Boleyn and then I found myself doing something that even I haven’t done before – at least I haven’t done it outside of when a raid is on. I walked somewhere automatically. I left the bereaved family’s house, and instead of walking back to the shop, I went elsewhere. Only when I got where I was going did I notice where I was. Standing outside Margaret Darling’s house in East Ham.

  Whether the medium was in or not, I didn’t know. But I now realised that I had been drawn to the house on Keppel Road by the anxiety her words the previous evening had raised up inside me. I didn’t and still don’t know if I believe in spirits, spooks and what have you. But what Mrs Darling had told me about myself had made me think. What had come through to her via her spirit guide had been right on the mark. And if this Linnit character had been right about me, then maybe she or it had been right about Mrs Darling too. Maybe she was being watched as both she and Linnit had claimed. And if she was, then that was reason enough for me to want to be not too far away. Nothing happened beyond a few curtains twitching in neighbouring houses – a tall man with brown skin does not go unnoticed in a place like East Ham. After a while I left. But it wasn’t the last time my feet made an attempt to take my only just conscious body out to East Ham. As the days wore on, I found that her words and the beliefs behind them worked more and more upon my brain, increasing my fears for her.

  By the time I got back to the shop, the world and its wife was buzzing with the news about Fred Dickens.

  ‘God almighty, Mr H, fancy that Violet Dickens’s husband being the Ripper!’ Doris said as I looked over her shoulder at the diary for the following day.

  ‘Fred Dickens isn’t anybody’s “Ripper” Doris,’ I replied. ‘He’s only confessed to killing his wife, and quite honestly I don’t think that he did that.’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes, but people’ll be relieved anyway, won’t they?’ Doris said. ‘I mean, now the police’ve got someone, people’ll stop going on about it.’

  ‘Yes, they will,’ I said. ‘Which will please the government. Mind you, I doubt whether many outside the East End even know it’s been happening.’

  ‘You think . . .’

  ‘You try and find anything about these murders in any newspaper, Doris,’ I said. ‘Bad for morale.’

  ‘Yes, but everybody knows!’

  ‘Everybody knew about the bombing of Hallsville School and the hundreds who died in there,’ I said in a now lowered voice. Although it had happened almost six months before, people still spoke about that tragedy in hushed tones. ‘But not outside this area. People in Manchester or Plymouth won’t know about Hallsville!’

  Although used to my occasional rants, poor
Doris was obviously quite chastened this time and she looked down at the diary in silence. As I usually do, I quickly realised that I’d gone too far and apologised to her for going off in that fashion. Then I changed the subject.

  ‘We’ve a lot on tomorrow,’ I said.

  ‘Mrs Dobie’s funeral at eleven and then those little twins from Grange Road at two.’ Doris shook her head sadly. The twins, two girls aged five, had died of dysentery. But then with half the sewers bubbling stinking waste up into the streets, what did people expect, especially people already weakened by hunger and poverty.

  ‘Miss Nancy told me they’ve got dysentery up at Claybury,’ Doris said. ‘People in isolation apparently.’ Then she looked up at me and frowned. ‘You know she’s gone up there again, Mr H. Left about half an hour ago.’

  ‘Well, Doris, we cleaned down the vehicles and the tack this morning and so my sister can do as she pleases,’ I said. After all, Nancy was only trying out as a member of the firm, and so outside of actual funerals she could come and go, the Duchess permitting, at will. But quite why she’d gone off to Claybury again, unless it was to find out some more from Nathan Abrahams about the whereabouts of Fernanda Mascarenhas, I couldn’t imagine. She had said that she’d met some women she got on well with up there, do-gooders as Aggie would have it. Maybe she’d gone off to see them, or even to do her bit, as she had put it herself. Nancy was quite clearly on a mission to change and possibly mortify her life. I went up to the flat and found the Duchess sitting at the kitchen table looking anxious.

  ‘You know, Francis,’ she said as she reached up to kiss me on the cheek, ‘I am quite happy for Nancy to make more of her time. But I do fear for her too, you know.’

  I sat down beside her and took one of her small, arthritic hands in mine. ‘She’s gone back to Claybury.’

  ‘Where apparently they have dysentery!’ my mother said. ‘I told her. I said, “Nancy, you know, back in India, people die in their thousands from dysentery!” But she just said, “Don’t worry, Mother,” and off she went! She’s made friends up there. In a place of mad people!’