Sure and Certain Death

by Barbara Nadel

  I lowered my head. ‘Duchess, I’m afraid it was me who took her up there,’ I said. ‘I . . .’

  ‘Oh, she isn’t going to see the elderly Jewish man,’ the Duchess said. ‘No. Someone called Alice has her attention now. A woman apparently who does good works amongst the deranged.’ She leaned in closer to me and said, ‘You know, since poor Dolly’s death, Nancy has been . . . different.’

  ‘Dolly was her best friend,’ I said. ‘Her death was bound to hit Nan hard.’

  ‘Yes, but she is never still now!’ my mother said. ‘And although people are saying that this Ripper character has been arrested, I still fear for my daughter.’ She squeezed my hand hard. ‘Francis, I know you believe that these killings are connected to that awful White Feather movement your sister was involved in.’

  ‘Mum, I will try . . .’

  ‘Yes, Francis, I know that you will try to keep your sister safe,’ the Duchess said. ‘But my son, I feel there is something wilful and dangerous in Nancy at the moment. Not in a bad way; she only ever wants to help and do good. But I fear it is just that part of her that may prove my daughter’s undoing.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Like the smell of sewage in the air, the sight of blood on the pavement was nothing unusual to me. There’d been a heavy raid that night, and because Canning Town is so often one of the Luftwaffe’s targets I wasn’t surprised to see the pavement of Rathbone Street sprinkled with blood. I’d run and run through the night, and the fact that I’d ended up near to Hannah’s house was more by instinct than by design. I was nevertheless relieved to see Dot Harris’s place still standing, and so when I went to have a butcher’s at where all the blood might be coming from, I knew that Hannah wouldn’t be involved. I was, as it turned out, wrong.

  It came, the thin sprinkle of blood, from a half-ruined house four doors down from Dot’s place. Like a lot of places in Canning Town, it was empty, the residents long gone out into the country or to a more outer London manor. What the bombs hadn’t destroyed, the looters probably had. And now there was blood on the path up to the street door, and there were people inside the house too. One of them now, I could see, was my Hannah. Pushing the half-destroyed door out of the way, I went in and saw that she was with three elderly men. Holding their caps in their hands, they all looked down at the floor with horrified expressions on their faces. Hannah, weeping almost to hysteria, didn’t even see me arrive.

  ‘What’s . . .’

  And then, like the old men, I glanced down and I saw something that looked almost exactly like the body of Nellie Martin I’d found all that time ago in New City Road. Just a piece of meat, shredded and torn. There was nothing as far as I could see, and I couldn’t bring myself to get too close to it, that could have identified this body. No clothes, no face either. But then Nellie Martin hadn’t had a face. What Nellie also hadn’t had, but which this body did possess, was a man’s torso. Though torn and slashed almost beyond recognition, it was most definitely a bloke. I walked over to Hannah and put my arm around her shoulders. Surprised to say the least of it to see me she said, ‘H?’

  ‘What’s going on here?’ I asked.

  But Hannah just cried again.

  ‘Mr Patel here found it,’ one of the old blokes said as he pointed to what I now saw was an elderly Indian man.

  ‘I saw the blood,’ Mr Patel put in. ‘It was sprinkled all over the street! Like rain.’

  The other old geezer, a short bloke with a boxer’s nose, said, ‘I live next door. I heard them,’ he nodded his head at the other two men, ‘so I come out to see what was what.’

  ‘So what are you doing here, Hannah?’ I asked my weeping lady friend.

  ‘There was . . . there . . .’ She began crying bitterly again and I held her close to my chest. The old men all, in their own ways, gave me funny looks. Obviously local, they had to know what Hannah did for a living.

  ‘Lady heard the commotion and come out to have a butcher’s,’ the first old man told me. ‘We all come in here together.’

  ‘Just after dawn,’ Mr Patel said. ‘In the first light of the morning.’

  ‘We wanted to help,’ the bloke with the boxer’s nose said. ‘We thought, all of us, that maybe some poor soul was trapped. We thought that p’raps we could help them.’

  ‘But then we found this.’

  ‘The police are coming,’ Mr Patel said. ‘Mrs Harris, she has gone to get them.’

  I looked down at the shredded meat that had once been human and I said, ‘Do any of you know . . . Who is this? Who was . . .’

  ‘Gawd knows,’ the first old man said sadly. ‘Poor bastard! Christ, he must have howled having this done to him!’

  Mr Patel shook his thin grey and black head and then said, ‘But we would not have heard him in our shelters. All anyone could hear was the bombs.’

  ‘You think that someone did this during last night’s raid?’ I said.

  ‘’Course,’ the old boxer replied. ‘I live on this street and he weren’t here yesterday. Of course someone did it during the raid, when better, eh?’

  Whenever I go to visit Hannah she always makes me a cuppa. This time I was the one who made tea for Hannah. Not that I wasn’t shocked by what had been found in the house down the road myself. I was, but Hannah had never seen anything like that before. Also the coppers, when they did finally come, were none too easy on her. They knew Hannah of old, and almost the first thing they asked her was whether what was on the floor in front of all of us could possibly be one of her customers. The last one, a middle-aged ‘decent-looking sort’, as Hannah had described him, had left just as the raid had begun.

  ‘I don’t know who he is but he’s been with several of the girls around here,’ Hannah said as I put a cup of hot tea into her hands. ‘I’ve seen him before. But H, I don’t know whether he was that . . . that thing in that house.’

  ‘You don’t know his name? This customer?’

  I don’t usually ask her anything about the men she goes with – I don’t want to know about them – and so Hannah looked at me puzzled. ‘No.’

  Quite apart from the shock of finding my girl at the scene of a murder, I was thrown completely now with regard to my theory about the White Feather girls. Skinned and mutilated just like the other victims, this one was nevertheless a man. As far as I knew, no men had ever given out white feathers to other men, and besides, my sister’s group I knew for certain had consisted solely of young women. I thought about the coppers too. It had been lads from Canning Town who had come to take charge of this latest killing. As well as being disgusted at the sight of the body, they were, I could tell, miffed by it too. With Fred Dickens banged up for the murder of Violet at Plaistow, I imagined they’d hoped the whole business might just miss them and go away. But this new body put that out of the question. Newspapers or no newspapers, word would get out around the manor and all the Ripper madness would get going again.

  ‘Bella was busy with one of her regulars last night,’ Hannah continued. ‘He left around the same time as my bloke. She might know his name.’

  ‘If she does, she should tell the coppers,’ I said. ‘They’re going to be round again, Hannah, now that this has happened.’

  ‘I know.’ She looked cold and broken and miserable.

  I wanted to say to her there and then that she could just pack in her whole life if she wanted to and let me marry her, take care of her. But I knew from past experience that that was hopeless. It isn’t that Hannah doesn’t love me; she does. It isn’t even the difference in our religions that stops her taking me as her husband. It is her own lack of worth. Thrown out of her own Orthodox Jewish community for having an affair with a Christian boy, Hannah learned to fend for herself in one of the few ways women could twenty-odd years ago. Now she is, she says, far too ‘mucky’ for a decent man like me. How wrong she is. But I can’t persuade her otherwise.

  ‘You got any further finding that Portuguese woman?’ Hannah asked as she sipped her tea and then lit u
p a fag. ‘That one you asked Dot about?’

  ‘I know that she married one of Marie Abrahams’s cousins, Edward Abrahams. But both families disowned them and the last place they were heard of was Clapham,’ I said.

  ‘You going over there, are you?’ Hannah asked, knowing that in all probability I would be. Except that now I was unsure.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘If that body you and the old men found is a man, then where does that leave me and my thoughts about someone killing White Feather girls? Maybe that connection I made between the victims so far was just a coincidence. I mean, I don’t want to worry people unnecessarily, do I?’

  ‘No.’ But she said it without really thinking. Staring down at the floor with half-closed eyes, she was all done in.

  ‘Why don’t you get some sleep, love?’ I said. ‘We could have another raid tonight. You look really tired.’

  Hannah didn’t argue. I put her to bed and kissed her before I left at just before eight. Outside the air was foggy and damp, and given the choice, I would have probably turned around, gone back and got into bed with Hannah. But neither the late Mrs Dobie nor the unfortunate little twins who had died of dysentery would or could bury themselves.

  Veronica Dobie had been a big woman and so I had to enlist assistance from Doris’s Uncle Woofie and his mate George to help Walter and Nancy bear her coffin. Arthur was off for the week to get himself ready for his call-up. But Woofie and, more rarely, George helped out often at the drop of a hat, and so the job got done even if my sister, on this occasion, did look quite pained.

  ‘You all right?’ I asked once we’d lowered the coffin into the ground and then moved away to let Father Burton conduct his service.

  ‘She was heavy,’ Nan said. Then added very quickly, ‘But I’m all right.’

  Father Burton crossed himself, and the mourners plus Nancy followed suit.

  ‘So you going off up to Claybury after we’ve finished this afternoon?’ I said into her ear. She hadn’t got back from the hospital until just after six the previous evening and I wanted to make sure that she wasn’t going to cause our mother to worry again quite so soon.

  ‘No.’ She looked at me as if I’d taken leave of my senses. ‘I’m not going up there every day, you know!’

  ‘Oh?’

  She looked over to make sure that Father Burton wasn’t looking at us and then she said, ‘Frank, I did what you asked me with regard to Marie Abrahams’s dad . . .’

  ‘Who is this Alice woman?’ I asked, probably more heatedly than I should have. But I was tired and still upset about the events of the early hours of that morning.

  ‘Alice is a woman on her own, just like me!’ Nan whispered angrily back at me. ‘She helps out up at the hospital. But she’s not there all the time! She’s got other things to do, just like I have. And anyway, Frank, why shouldn’t I have a friend? I had Dolly, but . . .’ I saw her eyes fill with tears and so I put a calming hand on her arm and then silently chastised myself for being so insensitive with her. Nan was right, there was no reason why she shouldn’t have a friend. There were thousands of women like her, alone and with very little hope of marriage in the future. Why shouldn’t they get together from time to time to talk and go out or whatever? After the Great War, many of the spinsters that had resulted from it were given a hard time, being looked at by society with either pity or hatred. People considered them tragic or queer, but whatever they felt about these women, most couples, and single men for that matter too, shunned them. I hated to think what would have happened to Nan without our family. Some women like her eked out poor livings by typewriting or cleaning and their homes were single damp rooms overseen by fierce and unsympathetic landladies. On the streets, and in fact almost everywhere they went, these women were almost invisible.

  ‘I’m sorry, Nan,’ I said after a bit. ‘It’s just that the Duchess worries and . . .’

  ‘Mum hasn’t got anything to worry about with me,’ Nan said softly. ‘And Frank, I know you had a terrible night last night. I’m sorry I was snappy.’

  I looked at her and smiled. I’d told my sisters about what I’d come across in Canning Town. I hadn’t gone into detail but I suppose I was preparing them for the fact that I might have been wrong about the White Feather girls all along. Maybe some sort of Ripper striking randomly at all sorts was the truth of what was at large in the East End.

  East Ham Broadway was abuzz with people getting in what they could before, possibly, the next raid began. It was just after four when I got there after the kiddies’ funeral, damp and shivering as I walked through the fog and the thin, annoying drizzle. As before, and again out of reflex, I was going to make sure that everything was quiet up at Mrs Darling’s place. But as I passed by the tobacconist’s up by the underground station, a pudgy hand grabbed hold of my arm.

  ‘If I didn’t know better, Mr Hancock, I’d think it was you who was watching me!’

  I’d already recognised the voice but I looked down to greet a fur-coat-clad Mrs Darling with a smile.

  ‘Old Mrs Fawcett saw you yesterday, hanging about,’ she said.

  I raised my hat and said, ‘I didn’t mean to cause you any sort of alarm, Mrs Darling.’

  She wound a fat, mink-covered arm around mine and then said, ‘Well you can help me take my old man’s fags home. Come on.’

  On the way back to Keppel Road I asked her whether her feelings of being watched, as well as Linnit’s observations, had lessened to any degree. She said that they hadn’t. She said that in fact if anything her feelings of dread were increasing.

  ‘And the fact that the coppers found a bloke’s body cut to ribbons down Canning Town last night don’t make me feel any better,’ she said as we began to walk up her small garden path.

  I knew that news travelled fast in the East End, but that was quick even by our standards. Amazement on my face I said, ‘How . . .’

  Mrs Darling tapped the side of her nose with her finger and then said, ‘Intuition, Mr Hancock. That and having a cousin who lives on Rathbone Street.’ She laughed.

  We went through the parlour and into the scullery at the back of the house, where Cissy was boiling a kettle on the range. When she saw me she looked surprised. ‘Oh.’

  ‘Cissy, remember Mr Hancock?’ the medium said as she puffed and panted her way over to one of the chairs at the table in the corner of the scullery.

  ‘Oh, yes . . .’

  ‘Sit down, Mr Hancock,’ Mrs Darling said. She moved a fat hand in the direction of the other chair and I duly sat down.

  ‘I was just making a pot of tea,’ Cissy said.

  ‘Oh well, don’t let us stand in your way,’ Mrs Darling responded with a smile.

  For some reason this made Cissy giggle, after which she excused herself and left to go out to the privy in the fog-covered shed at the end of the back yard.

  ‘Wants to be able to speak to her dead husband every day in the end, she says,’ Mrs Darling said as she tipped her head in the direction of the privy and Cissy. ‘It’s why she’s here so much of the time. That and she wants to learn.’

  ‘Does her husband come through every day?’

  ‘No.’ Mrs Darling shook her head. ‘He ain’t what you’d call frequent. But anyway, it wouldn’t satisfy Cissy even if he did come through easy every day. Not really.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She wants to be able to contact him herself,’ Mrs Darling said. ‘It’s why she’s here. Like I said, she wants to learn. Develop her sensitivity to the spirits.’

  ‘And does she have any?’ I said. ‘Sensitivity to the spirits?’

  Mrs Darling looked at me and laughed. ‘Oh, you’re a sceptical bleeder, aren’t you, Mr Hancock?’ Then she said, ‘But since you ask, I have to say that I don’t know, to be truthful. She can go into a trance and I believe she tries to make some kind of contact, but . . .’ She shrugged. ‘Between you, me and the gatepost, Mr Hancock, I think that coming here just gives Cissy something to do. She’s on her own n
ow, and beyond grave-tending and her own housekeeping, there’s little for her to do.’

  ‘She could do war work.’

  ‘What, a thing like her working in a munitions factory or down Tate and Lyle’s? Don’t make me laugh!’ Mrs Darling said. ‘She worked in her uncle’s shop on the Broadway, but that was donkey’s years ago. I remember her back then – just. But then she married, apparently, and that was that. Anyway, outside of my seances and the occasional appearance of my old man, I was very lonely, Mr Hancock. What with me arthritis and what have you . . . When Cissy fetched up at one of me Thursday circles and then said that she wanted to learn some more, I was all for it. She’s a funny thing, but . . .’

  Cissy returned from the privy then and proceeded, in silence, to make the promised tea.

  ‘So,’ I began, ‘your cousin in Canning Town . . .’

  ‘Alf’s a stevedore,’ Mrs Darling said, ‘before you start getting ideas I’ve got a cousin as walks the streets, Mr Hancock.’

  I turned my face away just briefly from her then, but I realised as soon as I turned back again that Mrs Darling had taken that in and interpreted it, probably correctly.

  ‘No, Alf don’t have nothing to do with no ladies of the night, Mr Hancock,’ she said. ‘Mind you, according to him, it was one of them same ladies as found the body. Her and some old blokes, one of them a Lascar so it’s said. The body was torn to pieces apparently.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did you know about it, Mr Hancock?’

  I told her. I had no reason not to.

  ‘So maybe this killer ain’t going after old White Feather girls after all,’ Mrs Darling said as Cissy put teacups down in front of both of us.

  ‘Maybe not,’ I said.

  Mrs Darling shook her head slowly and then said, ‘I hear that your sister Nancy is bearing for you now, Mr Hancock. Bit of a turn-up that, isn’t it?’

  I smiled. ‘My young apprentice is off to the forces soon, Mrs Darling,’ I said. ‘Nancy volunteered.’