As soon as Nurse Milburn had first said the name Cissy, my mind had immediately flown to the idea of getting the police. I’d been frustrated that the telephone lines were down yet again. But thinking about it as I ran had changed my mind. For all that Cissy’s position in Mrs Darling’s circle seemed to fit with that of a person able to murder the White Feather girls, I couldn’t imagine how, physically, she could perform such acts or why she should do them at this point in time. I could see why she might kill, however. It was only a thought, but I felt I knew that if Cissy had killed these women it had been because of her sweetheart. Had this group, my sister’s group of White Feather girls, goaded that young man into fighting, maybe against his better judgement or in the face of ill health? It was of course very possible. But if that were the case, why didn’t any of the girls recognise Cissy? Mrs Darling knew her from way back when Cissy, as a girl, used to work in her uncle’s shop on East Ham Broadway. But not once had she mentioned her in connection with White Feather business. And had she had any fears about anyone, I knew that Mrs Darling would have said something. She was as worried as I was. No, if Cissy were indeed guilty of these crimes, I was either missing something or I simply did not know enough to connect her completely with what had happened.
I finally managed to flag down a bus on the Cranbrook Road. It was packed, as buses always are these days. The little lady conductor came towards me and said, ‘Tickets, please!’
I asked to go to Barking, where I knew I could get a bus direct to Plaistow. Like the man in the Homburg back in Gants Hill, as well as, really, most of the other passengers, the conductor gave me a funny look. But she took my money and gave me a ticket, and slowly but surely we made our way into Barking. As soon as the bus stopped, I pushed my way towards the door. It’s not like me to be so rude and it didn’t go unnoticed. A woman in a fox-fur coat said to a woman in a threadbare jacket, ‘God, look at that! You wouldn’t expect behaviour like that from an undertaker!’
But I didn’t care. I had to get home, get in my car and go and find my sister.
When Walter washes down the Lancia, he doesn’t strain himself to finish the job quickly. He likes the car and enjoys making a good job of getting all the dirt and dust off the paintwork as well as buffing the chromium trim until it sparkles. It doesn’t stay clean for very long, but that isn’t the point. A clean car pleases Walter, and it is the only part of his job, I would say, he really takes pride in. He was just sloshing a clean chamois over the windscreen when I came hurtling in, breathless, through the back gate.
‘Cor blimey, Mr H!’ Walter said as he looked up at me. ‘Who’s on your tail?’
‘No one,’ I gasped. ‘Walter, has Miss Nancy gone out yet?’
‘To see her friend? Yes, about an hour and a half ago,’ he said.
‘Oh God!’ I barrelled past him and threw myself into the back of the shop. I grabbed the car keys which hung to the side of the back door and then called up the stairs to the flat. Aggie I knew was not at work and so I said, ‘Ag, I’m just going out for a bit. Taking the car.’
In the second it took me to turn to go, Aggie flew down the stairs and said, ‘The car? Frank, you’re only supposed to use it for work. The petrol . . .’
‘Bugger the petrol!’ I said. Then, thinking how stupid it was to say that because it might alarm her, I added to the problem by saying, ‘Oh shit!’
‘Frank!’
But by this time I was out in the yard and on my way over to the Lancia. As I moved past him I told Walter to get in the car, and then I slipped myself into the driver’s seat.
‘Get . . .’
‘Just get in, Walter,’ I said. ‘It’s an emergency.’
‘An emergency?’
‘An emergency? What’s an emergency?’ I heard Aggie say as a very troubled Walter got into the car beside me.
‘What’s up, Mr H?’ he asked.
‘I’ll explain on the way,’ I said as I fired up the engine and took off out of the yard before Aggie could even begin to stop me. The last I saw of her was her screaming face through the back window, shouting my name.
Abbey Lane is just to the north of West Ham station. It’s in an area of almost countrified ground that exists around the many creeks and tributaries of the River Lee at this point. If it wasn’t for the stink from the sewage or the almost constant fog that hangs over the area, it could be somewhere out in the wilds of Essex. But this is London, and so signs of industry are never far away. In this case, such a sign is in the very ornate form of the Abbey Mills Sewage Pumping Station. Decorated in that really intricate way only Victorian buildings can be, Abbey Mills is a great big place set in grounds enclosed by high walls and fences. Even though England was such a rich country in the last century, the idea that such an amazing thing – looks like a mansion to my way of thinking – could be built for industrial purposes is incredible. Years ago my dad knew an old bloke who’d worked at the Mills who told him that inside, everything was engineered to perfection. Everywhere he went inside that building, so he said, gleamed with the lustre of polished brass. Outside there used to be two very fancy towers that carried the smoke away when the station was powered by steam. Now it’s all electric and the towers were demolished anyway on account of the fact that they gave the Luftwaffe a rather too easy target.
And it wasn’t just the pumping station itself that was good to look at. The houses for the workers, which fronted directly on to the road, were big and, although nowhere near as ornate as the pumping station itself, had that slightly churchy or mansion style of architecture to them. There are no other houses on Abbey Lane, and so I assumed that Cissy had to live in one of those. Although how she was managing to do that if she didn’t work at the pumping station, I couldn’t imagine.
Walter, who I had now told much of what he needed to know to help me search, if necessary, for the women, said, ‘Miss Nancy’s friend must have a brother or a father working in the station, Mr H. You generally have to to have one of these houses.’
‘I’ve heard she lives alone,’ I said. Cissy’s parents were dead according to Mrs Darling.
‘I’ll go and ask that geezer just going into that house there,’ Walter said as I pulled the car up to the pavement outside the row of houses. ‘What did you say the lady’s name was?’
‘Alice Hoskin. Cissy.’
Walter went off and spoke to a middle-aged bloke with ginger hair. He looked over, warily I thought, at the car a couple of times, but he spoke to Walter nonetheless. When he came back Walter said, ‘Geezer says that the Hoskins live at number three. A mum and a daughter. The daughter’s called Alice. But he ain’t seen her today.’
Alice/Cissy had lied about living alone if nothing else. Although like Walter I did wonder how the women managed to live in a house that was connected to the pumping station. But as we walked up the path towards number three, Walter told me that the chap he’d just spoken to had provided him with something of an answer.
‘Apparently the old woman’s a cripple. Don’t go out much,’ he said. ‘The old man worked in the station for years, and when he died the family was allowed to stay on.’
‘Well, if they pay the rent . . .’ I knocked on the dark wooden front door with my fist and called out, ‘Mrs Hoskin!’
With luck I’d soon find Cissy, her mother and my sister all safely inside together, with rational explanations from Cissy for everything. But my knock had sounded ominously hollow and was followed by absolutely no sound from inside at all. Walter, who had taken it upon himself to look in through the front window, said, ‘Can’t see nothing. They’ve got the blackout up.’
Most people take their blackout curtains or blinds down in the daytime. Most people want to see some light whenever they can. But not everyone. I shrugged, knocked again and then, when that didn’t summon anyone, said to Walter, ‘Come on, let’s go round the back.’
We went down the side way between the Hoskins’ house and the place next door. We found a large garden which most peo
ple would have given over to the growing of vegetables. But not this one. Though large, it was just a disorganised pile of mud with a chicken coop at the far end next to what I recognised as the entrance to an Anderson shelter. Mrs Darling had said that Cissy was always first in line for any spare vegetables from her husband’s allotment. But I couldn’t, at that point, see why she didn’t grow her own.
‘Blimey, they live well out here, don’t they, Mr H?’ Walter said as he looked through the window in the back door. ‘Been eating tea and cake by the look of it.’
I joined him at the back door and saw a wooden table in the middle of a large kitchen that was indeed set for quite a dainty-looking tea. I knocked and called out, ‘Mrs Hoskin!’ once again. But to no avail. It was then that I tried the doorknob, which moved easily and without hindrance in my hand. Still calling out lest I frighten the women inside, I walked into the kitchen followed by Walter. It smelt of tea and baking but also of damp too. Around the sink there was a scum of mould which belied the dainty cakes that sat very invitingly on the china stand in the middle of the table. I wondered, if Nan had been here, what she would have made of it. Both of my sisters are practical but fastidious. After a swift butcher’s around, Walter said to me, ‘Shall we go and have a look at the rest of the place, Mr H?’
I said, ‘Yes.’
All the rooms except the kitchen were blacked out. They were all dusty, damp and in the case of the bedroom at the front of the house, full up with cardboard boxes and wooden crates filled with God knew what. They’re big places, the workers’ houses on Abbey Lane, and so all three bedrooms were large. Only two, however, had beds in and only one, the one over the kitchen at the back, looked as if it could be in use.
‘Bit of a two an’ eight, ain’t it, Mr H?’ Walter said as he looked around the top floor with me. ‘And where’s the old girl anyway? That bloke I spoke to said that Mrs Hoskin was some sort of cripple.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe her daughter and Nancy took the old woman out in a wheelchair.’
But then I remembered that I’d seen one of those in the chaotic parlour downstairs. Everything felt bad and wrong and I found that now my heart was really pounding. We went back downstairs again, for want really of anything else to do. Back in the kitchen, it was Walter who put his hand on the side of the teapot and said, ‘’Ere, this is still warm!’
‘So whoever made the tea can’t be very far away,’ I said.
‘Don’t seem like it.’
We went to the four houses nearest to the Hoskins’ place to ask if anyone had seen Alice, but only one person, a bloke of about sixty, was in. He said he’d seen no one all day except the bloke we’d already spoken to.
‘Well they can’t have gone far, given that the teapot was still warm,’ I said to Walter as we walked down the path of the last house we visited.
‘There’s a lot of ground around here, Mr H,’ Walter replied gloomily. ‘Down by the Lee and around the back of the pumping station. People get lost over here. Gangsters, some say, get rid of the bodies of their rivals here.’
‘And some say, no doubt, that the last Tsar of Russia and his family are buried down by West Ham underground station,’ I responded crossly. ‘Walter, we are looking for my sister! I’m very concerned about her. If you can’t say anything helpful, then don’t say anything at all!’
A bit shamefaced now, Walter said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr H.’
I looked up and down Abbey Lane twice before I decided that we’d go left towards the pumping station. Just before the station there is a bridge over the road that carries the great pipes full of sewage from the city to the plant. On top of the bridge there is a little lane that I can remember playing about on with my mates as a kid. It always stank up there and was known very aptly as ‘the Sewer Bank’. This path stretches in fact as far as my home in Plaistow. It is of course at Abbey Mills that it is at its most pungent. I knew there was a staircase just before the bridge, which Walter and I headed for now. As we got there, a thin young woman in blue work trousers, her head covered with a green scarf wound into a turban, came down the steps towards us. Her face was made up, bright and red, like an American film star, and she smoked a fag with all the aplomb of the lovely Greta Garbo. She gave me a bit of an old-fashioned stare as she looked down on Walter and myself, which of course was because of what I was wearing.
‘Miss,’ I said, ‘have you seen a lady or maybe two ladies walking about up there or maybe down by the water?’
She frowned. ‘Why?’
‘One of them is my sister,’ I said. ‘And I need to speak to her urgently. She’s gone, I think, for a walk with a lady called Miss Hoskin.’
‘What, Cissy?’
‘Yes!’
‘Why?’
‘What?’
‘Cissy’s my neighbour, and she might be a funny old thing but I can’t just go giving out her whereabouts to two blokes I don’t know,’ the woman said. ‘I mean, you could be anyone, couldn’t you? You could be Nazis.’
I looked at Walter and said, ‘God almighty!’ I know that careless talk can cost lives, but government instructions together with natural East End suspicion were holding me up.
‘Now listen, love,’ Walter said, ‘we need to find these ladies as a matter of importance. Life and death.’
‘Yeah, well . . .’
‘Do I look like a fucking Nazi!’ I finally exploded. ‘Miss, I am an undertaker with skin the colour of tea. Nazis, you’ll find, won’t usually go around in hearses and will probably be blond. Now . . .’
‘Blimey, keep you bleedin’ hair on!’ she said. ‘As it happens I’ve just seen Cissy. Up on the bank picking dandelion leaves for tea, she said.’
Neither Walter nor myself said another word. We just ran past that woman and up those stairs as fast as our legs would carry us.
Chapter Twenty-Two
From the Sewer Bank it’s possible to see the top of the pumping station. Even in the thick, smoggy afternoon light I could see that its decoration in blue, red and gold was still in large part intact. What I couldn’t see, for just a moment, was anyone about. It was actually Walter who first noticed the small figure crouching down apparently picking dandelion leaves from the side of the pathway.
‘Mr H, look!’
It was definitely Cissy. Wearing a limp floral dress several sizes too big for her, her thin hair hanging over her face as she pulled the plants up from the ground with long, skinny fingers. I went up to her and said, ‘Cissy?’
She put a hand on the bag she was apparently collecting dandelion into before she looked up at me and then smiled. ‘Mr Hancock!’
‘Cissy, where is my sister?’ I said. There was no point beating about the bush. ‘Where is Nancy?’
‘Your sister? I don’t know what you mean,’ she replied. ‘I’m here on my own.’
‘Where’s your mum, love?’ Walter put in as I stared at this woman I knew absolutely had to be lying.
‘My mum? She’s at home,’ Cissy said. ‘Tucked up in bed where I left her. Mother is an invalid.’
‘Yes, we know.’
‘We also know that your mum ain’t at your house,’ Walter said. ‘No one’s at your house, love.’
Although I would have said it was impossible before it happened, Cissy paled.
‘Well . . .’
‘Just take me to where Nancy is,’ I said. It wasn’t easy to control the anger that I could feel rising inside of me now.
Cissy stood up and pulled her bag close in towards her chest.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said. ‘I don’t know anyone by the name of Nancy.’
‘Yes, you do, you . . .’ I stepped towards her, but Walter, seeing that I was probably too full of anger to be reasonable, got in between us.
‘Now look, love,’ he said, ‘we ain’t asking here. Mr H knows that his sister come to see you. Now where is she? Don’t muck us about, love!’
Cissy put a trembling hand into her bag and
said, ‘Don’t threaten me! How dare you threaten a woman on her own!’
‘We’re not . . .’
All I saw was a bright flash pass in front of my eyes. Walter flung an arm up as if to ward something off, and then with a rapidity not normally associated with Walter Bridges, he hit the ground like a sack, clinging on to his arm with his one free hand and screaming.
‘Bloody hell, she’s got a knife!’
Cissy, a large, bloody knife in her hand, began to run. I looked down at Walter, who was clutching his forearm while trying simultaneously to wrap it up in his neck muffler. ‘Get after her!’ he said. ‘Fucking mare stabbed me!’
Sure and Certain Death Page 20
