Sure and Certain Death

by Barbara Nadel

‘Blimey!’ the medium replied. ‘A lady undertaker. What next, eh?’

  Cissy left the scullery then and went off with her tea towards the parlour.

  ‘And yet I’m still being watched,’ Mrs Darling said, changing the subject again. ‘I’m still afraid.’

  She didn’t look afraid, but then Mrs Darling was not the sort of woman who showed emotions like fear with ease. She was too proud for that.

  ‘Are you being watched now, Mrs Darling?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yes, Mr Hancock,’ she replied without the slightest hesitation. ‘I’m being watched all the time.’

  I looked out into the medium’s fog-shrouded yard, no longer able to see even the outline of the privy where Cissy had so recently been.

  Chapter Fifteen

  There was blood all over the bed. Not just the counterpane and the blankets, but the sheets were soaked through too, top and bottom. God, what a mess! I looked down, and although the room was completely blacked out, I could see absolutely everything. My body all thin and long, a pencil-shaped thing inside the bed. The blood, I thought, could only be coming from me. But why was that?

  I looked around my bedroom, which, though dark, also seemed to be overlaid with a dusting of fog. Had the shop been hit and some vein or artery in my body exploded by the blast? The blood if anything was pumping out more vigorously. It was dripping down on to the lino on the floor now. I could hear it plop, plopping on to the shiny surface below. Unconfined as I was, I wasn’t actually scared. Not until I started to try and get out of my bed, that is.

  I couldn’t move a muscle. I was completely paralysed. A scream that was a scream inside and stayed that way fought to get out, but couldn’t. I began to sweat. Then I began to lose the rhythm of my breathing. I played around with the idea that perhaps I was just dreaming all of this, but I couldn’t convince myself of that even when the voices began to crowd into my mind.

  The sound of a whistle, followed by a man’s voice shouting, ‘Charge!’ A relic from the trenches, a recurrent terrible thing.

  Then, ‘Francis Hancock, you are a madman! Get to Claybury, Francis! Get where you belong!’

  The urge to scream became very great. It was as if some vast swell of water were building up inside my body, trying and failing to find some sort of exit. I wanted to wake up even though I didn’t know whether I was even asleep.

  Plop, plop went my blood down on to the lino, and I felt the wetness of my sweat pour down my face in a thick, wide rivulet. Help me! I thought. Someone for God’s sake help me!

  ‘Help you? Why should I help you?’ It was a girl’s voice, young and posh and full of sneering. Terrifying.

  Every part of me strained to scream, and then suddenly I felt something that wasn’t me, other hands upon my shoulders. My eyes flew open and I looked up into Aggie’s pale, frightened face. Her hair was all awry and she wore a terrible tattered old dressing gown. Standing beside Aggie was Nan with a lit candle in her hand. Her hair too was all awry and her face was a dark picture of terror.

  ‘Frank!’

  I gasped. Only now finally waking to no blood, no voices, only my sisters in my bedroom in the middle of the night. But then Aggie said something that nearly tipped me back into that nightmare again, because suddenly I knew whose voice had so, so terrified me.

  ‘Who the hell, Frank,’ Aggie said, ‘is Linnit?’

  Of course I didn’t tell my sisters who or what Linnit was. That I’d shouted out the name of Mrs Darling’s spirit guide in the middle of a nightmare was not something that, after the original shock of it, I put any importance upon. I had been, when I’d gone to bed that night, generally disturbed. We hadn’t had a raid, probably due to the thick London fog, and I’d for once slept very heavily. My sisters did stay with me for some time after I woke, however, worried that I might become distressed and scream the place down once again.

  ‘Did I wake the Duchess and Stella?’ I said as I sat up in bed to take the cup of water Nan had brought for me.

  ‘Yes, but they’re all right now, don’t worry,’ Aggie said. ‘God, Frank, that must’ve been some nightmare you were having! You bad at the moment, are you?’

  When Aggie described me as ‘bad’, what she meant was disturbed in my mind. Although she’d only been fourteen when I returned home from the Great War in 1918, she’d seen me go through terrible pain both physical and mental. Shocked at my appearance and behaviour, she had nevertheless taken part in looking after her damaged big brother. And although she is so much younger than I am, she is still as protective of me as she was when she was a child.

  ‘It’s all this business with these Ripper murders has upset you,’ Aggie said. Then, turning to Nancy, she added, ‘And you ain’t helped matters either.’

  ‘Me? What have I done?’ Nan said. ‘I’ve been helping Frank! I’m taking over from Arthur!’

  ‘Yes, and when you’re not here you’re off gallivanting up to bloody madhouses with strangers!’ Aggie said.

  ‘Well, you go out and . . .’

  ‘I’ve always gone out and I know what I’m doing!’ Aggie replied. ‘Nan, when you was out with poor old Dolly, none of us was worried.’

  Harsh though her words were, they were also true. Nancy’s outings with Dolly O’Dowd had consisted of church, church socials, the eel and pie shop on West Ham Lane and, on a warm day, a stroll around East Ham Central Park. The one time, during the Great War, when she had gone out a lot on her own we now knew was a time when she’d done something of which none of us could approve. Now that she was off up to Claybury and possibly around and about with this Alice woman, the family as a whole I could now see was nervous.

  ‘Mum frets,’ Aggie continued. ‘And so does Frank. Nan, if you’re going to go out, always let someone know where you’re going. Bloody hell, there’s raids all the time! What if you was trapped somewhere and we didn’t know?’

  ‘I do tell Mum . . .’

  ‘Yes, but Mother don’t always remember,’ Aggie said. ‘Write it down. Now you’re in the firm, you can put it in the works diary. She can put where she’s going in the works diary, can’t she, Frank?’

  ‘Yes.’ I drank my water and then leaned over to the table beside the bed and picked up my fags and matches. I was still shaken by what had been a debilitating nightmare, and really what I wanted was for my two sisters to go. But neither of them would leave until I’d assured them that I really was back to myself once again. Aggie of course had to smoke a fag with me before she would even think about leaving. When they had gone, however, I found that far from settling, my mind began to race once again. I thought about Mrs Darling and Linnit and how and why it was that someone might be watching the medium. I thought about that terrible mutilated male body I’d seen in Canning Town too and wondered who that had once been. In fact all sorts of things churned through my mind – Fred Dickens and his confession to Violet’s murder, poor Nellie Martin’s butchered body, and of course, Hannah. Had the bloke who had been killed in Canning Town been one of her customers? At that point, as dawn began to break over London, I put a stop to what I was thinking and got up. Thinking about what Hannah does and who she does it with does me no good at all.

  Sometimes, even in the midst of war, days pass in something like a dream. It was strange being without Arthur, and although I knew that he was coming back to the firm before he went into the forces, his absence felt like an ending. Nancy, on the other hand, worked hard but was rather quieter than she’d been in recent weeks. She didn’t go up to Claybury and apparently only met up with her new friend Alice just the once. From the coppers, no one heard a thing. The Canning Town body was still unidentified, the murderer still clearly at large. But whereas before I’d had maybe rather too clear an idea about why the killings might be taking place, with the murder of a man I was no longer sure. We were busy anyway, and so, like the rest of the firm, I worked. It was only at the end of that week that something happened to make me wish that maybe I’d used some of my time to try and track down Fernand
a Mascarenhas.

  Just after midday on the Friday, the bell over the front door of the shop clanked violently as a large woman pushed her way sweating into my premises.

  ‘Mr Hancock!’ Mrs Darling said breathlessly. ‘God help us, thank Christ you’re here!’

  Doris, who had watched the panting, fur-clad woman fling herself against the door, looked up at me and then immediately went and offered Mrs Darling a chair.

  ‘Mrs Darling . . .’

  ‘Oh, Mr Hancock!’ she said as she collapsed into the chair that Doris put behind her. ‘I had to come. I had to talk to you.’

  I pulled another chair over and sat down beside her. ‘Mrs Darling, whatever is wrong?’ I said.

  She looked over at Doris and then back at me again. I asked Doris if she wouldn’t mind stepping out for a moment. Mrs Darling obviously wanted some privacy.

  Once Doris had gone, the medium said, ‘It’s Esme Robinson . . .’

  I felt my heart jump inside my chest. ‘Oh God, not . . .’

  ‘Oh no, she’s all right, if you can call being on your own all right,’ Mrs Darling said.

  I frowned. Esme Robinson wasn’t alone; Esme Robinson had her husband Neville.

  ‘You know that body what you and them others found in Canning Town?’ the medium continued.

  I had a very cold feeling now. A very cold feeling indeed. ‘Yes?’

  ‘That was Neville Robinson,’ Mrs Darling said. ‘Esme reported him missing the day after the body was found. But only now do they know it certainly was him. What the bloody hell do you think a strait-laced old bore like Neville was doing down on Rathbone Street, Mr Hancock?’

  Speechless, I just sat and stared at her. Both myself and Mrs Darling had our own very similar ideas about that.

  ‘God almighty.’

  ‘No one’s as strait-laced as Neville was,’ Mrs Darling said. ‘Not really. They never had kids, him and Esme. Rattling around in that big place of theirs up Forest Gate. Of course they both came to my sittings. She, Esme, liked her garden. Neville obviously liked ladies of the night.’

  I looked at the medium’s white face but I was thinking about my Hannah.

  ‘But then he was a copper during the Great War,’ Mrs Darling said as if this explained Neville’s assumed behaviour. ‘Weak chest got him out of the forces.’

  ‘Whatever that may mean,’ I said.

  Mrs Darling frowned.

  ‘If he’d had consumption, the coppers wouldn’t have taken him,’ I said.

  ‘A touch of bronchitis you think, Mr Hancock?’

  ‘He got out of it somehow, Mrs Darling,’ I said. ‘But then some of the most patriotic did and do.’

  The medium cleared her throat and then she said, ‘I’m worried about Esme,’ she said. ‘She’s only ever lived with her family and then with Neville.’

  ‘Won’t her family look after her?’ I asked.

  ‘Her parents died in Canada and Rosemary’s still over there.’

  ‘Well isn’t . . .’

  ‘Neither the Martins or the Harpers will speak to her on account of her belief in the spirit world, and her mother’s people come from up north somewhere.’ She looked up at me with troubled eyes and was about to speak again when suddenly a figure pushed through the curtains at the back of the shop. It was Nan.

  ‘Oh.’ My sister hadn’t seen Margaret Darling, or Margaret Cousins as she had known her, probably since the end of the Great War. The girls, it seemed to me, had disbanded very quickly once the conflict was over.

  ‘Nancy.’ Margaret Darling smiled. It wasn’t an easy gesture for her but she did it in what seemed to me a sincere fashion.

  ‘Margaret.’ Nancy had known that I was seeing her old friends although I had never spoken to her about actually getting in contact with them herself. Now she turned immediately away from Margaret Darling and said to me, ‘Frank, I’m going out. We’ve no work on today and so I’m off.’

  ‘Where to?’ I was embarrassed by what seemed to me my sister’s rudeness. But then, looking up at her, it was obvious from the redness of her face that she was embarrassed too.

  Nancy’s eyes shifted from me to Mrs Darling and then nervously back to me once again. ‘I put it in the diary, like you told me,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, but . . .’

  ‘I’m going up the hospital!’ Nancy said angrily.

  ‘Oh, right, er . . .’

  ‘Do my little bit,’ she said. Very stiffly she nodded her head at Mrs Darling, said, ‘Margaret,’ and then pushed her way back through the black shop curtains and was gone.

  The medium looked at me, I looked helplessly at the medium, and then she thankfully resumed our earlier conversation.

  ‘Because of the way that I feel, that I’m being watched or followed or . . . you know what I told you the other day, Mr Hancock . . .’

  ‘You still . . .’

  ‘Oh, I still feel, well, hunted I suppose you’d call it,’ she said. ‘As if someone is looking at me through the sights of a gun.’ She shook her head as if to try and dislodge something unpleasant in her mind. ‘Something or someone is blocking me spiritually. I mean, I can still speak to spirit, Linnit is still with me, but it’s hard, like talking through water. But that to one side, even with that on me mind I’m thinking of taking Esme in, Mr Hancock. She ain’t got no one, she’s dedicated to spirit and I am afraid for her.’

  I didn’t even begin to broach the subject of my apparently having spoken to Linnit myself in a dream. That would have to wait.

  ‘Afraid? Why?’

  Mrs Darling took a deep breath in and then crossed her arms over her chest. ‘Esme was always highly strung,’ she said. ‘As a girl she had problems eating, and then . . .’ She looked around the office to make sure no one was either about or outside the shop waiting to come in. ‘Years ago, Rosemary told me that Esme tried to . . . well, she . . . she cut her wrists, you know.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I’m afraid that with Neville gone and in the circumstances that he went, Esme might, well, she might do something silly,’ Mrs Darling said.

  ‘Well, Mrs Darling,’ I said, ‘I can’t tell you what to do with regard to Esme. If you and your husband want to take her in . . .’

  ‘Oh, he don’t mind what happens as long as he can get his pint and his fags!’ the medium said. Mention of her husband obviously made her tetchy. Then she added, ‘Mr Hancock, what does it mean? Killing Neville. If this Ripper wants us White Feather girls, why murder Neville? I know he was boring and said silly things, but he never gave out white feathers to my knowledge. Why kill him?’

  She was right. Looked at from the point of view that Neville was the only male victim in a series of ladies, his death could be seen as completely separate from the others. But then given the manner of his death, that was unlikely. And the fact that he was or had been the husband of a White Feather girl had to be significant. Something else occurred to me too, something so calculated that it made my blood almost freeze solid in my veins. ‘Mrs Darling,’ I said, ‘if anything happened to Esme, how do you think Rosemary would take it?’

  The medium narrowed her eyes. ‘Happen?’

  ‘Like if her wrists got cut or . . .’ I sometimes wish that we could talk openly about suicide in this country. I know it’s a crime, but it happens. It happens, in my experience, quite a lot.

  ‘Well, Rosemary couldn’t come over, could she?’ Mrs Darling said. ‘Not from Canada, not now.’

  The days when civilians could still travel across the Atlantic are well past. I knew that.

  ‘But she would be devastated,’ the medium continued. ‘They’re twins, Rosemary and Esme, so there’s a psychic bond between them. If one died the other would know, you mark my words! If one died it would be as if the other had lost part of herself. It would be torture.’

  The psychic bond aside, that was what I had thought. If Esme died, then Rosemary would be punished too. Two for the price of one provided Esme took her own life, which seemed, f
rom what Mrs Darling had said, a probability at least. And all achieved via the death of one rather hypocritical and boring man. If indeed I was correct. I hoped sincerely that I wasn’t.

  Chapter Sixteen

  When Mrs Darling finally left me, it was to get a bus up to Forest Gate and the home of Esme Robinson. She made some play of trying to reward me for listening to her by saying that she’d try to secure Neville Robinson’s funeral for our firm. I told her she didn’t have to do that, but she didn’t appear to want to hear. To tell the truth, I didn’t particularly want the Robinson business. Where Neville had been found and the fact that Hannah had been one of those who had discovered him didn’t sit well. She had by her own admission worked the night Robinson had died. I didn’t want to know any more about it than that, and that included burying his body.

  That afternoon I spent doing bookwork with Doris. It’s not my favourite occupation as it often involves geeing up bereaved relatives for payment. I freely admit that without Doris, Hancock’s would be bankrupt. I don’t like asking for money, which means that I’m not very good at it. But it has to be done, and so after a good telling-off from Doris, I did trawl around to a couple of poor addresses and share tea and sometimes a drop of ginger wine too with people still in heavy mourning. I got a bit of money, here and there. When I returned, Doris had gone home but Nancy had returned, with visitors. Sitting up very straight in our parlour was a tall, average-looking Jewish bloke and a lady of breathtaking beauty. The woman, whose long blonde hair hung down her back in a thick, straight sheet, did not smile when she saw me come into the room. Black eyes in a face as pale as the moon regarded me steadily but without any sort of emotion. Nan and my mother, who were, it seemed, sharing tea with these people, both put their cups down when I entered the room.

  ‘This is my brother Frank,’ Nan said to the amazing blonde woman. ‘Frank, this is my old friend Fernanda.’

  Very often beautiful women know that they’re beautiful to the extent that it interferes with the way they are with ordinary mortals. Fernanda Abrahams was one such lady. She was pleasant enough and very far from rude, but there was a superiority about her that seemed to preclude any sort of facial movement. Every time she spoke, she looked down her perfect nose at the world and most people, I imagined, that were in it. Her husband Edward, on the other hand, was, or seemed to be, a very easy-going and natural person.