Sure and Certain Death

by Barbara Nadel

  I flung myself forwards. Cissy, the knife in her hand trailing a thin drool of blood behind her, was going hell for leather in front of me. It had been decades since I’d actually played on this stretch of the bank, and I didn’t have a clue as to where she might be going.

  ‘Walter!’ I called behind me, gasping as I did so. ‘Get down to the houses! Get help!’

  I didn’t know whether he’d heard me, or even if it were possible for the poor old sod to move at all. I just kept on ploughing forwards, gaining just a little on the woman in front of me as my lungs began to burn and feel as if they were about to burst. It came as a huge shock to me when Cissy suddenly took a dive to the left, off the path and down the side of the bank towards one of the tributaries of the River Lee. When I did finally pull level with where she’d disappeared, I glanced down and found myself looking only at brackish, sewage-filled water.

  There were bushes, brambles and lots of long grass on the way down to that sad little elbow of the River Lee. We hadn’t had that much rain, but all the fog and smog and drizzle we had suffered had taken its toll, and my way down was wet and muddy. By the time I hit the slush at the river’s edge, my work suit was filthy. Inwardly I cursed. I would have done so out loud if I hadn’t been worried about hopefully coming upon Cissy by surprise. But as it happened she was waiting for me, propped up against an old woody bush. There was a long, thin, black-clad figure draped across her lap. It had thick black hair, and when I got closer, I could see the very familiar face easily. Nan, it appeared, was sleeping, or so I hoped.

  ‘Laudanum,’ Cissy said as she held the knife still stained with Walter’s blood up to Nancy’s neck. It was a large and serious piece of equipment. I remember that at the time I thought it might be something used by a butcher or a slaughterman. ‘My mum had bottles and bottles of it for her arthritis.’

  The Duchess had been prescribed laudanum for her pain years ago too. But she’d put a stop to it. She didn’t like being asleep so much.

  ‘Where is your mother, Cissy?’ I asked as I looked down at my sister to make sure that she was indeed still breathing. To my relief she was. But she was still in the hands of this murderous woman and I knew that if I was to have any chance of getting the knife away from Cissy I’d have to try and keep her talking. I also didn’t know whether Walter had managed to stand up to go and get help. ‘Where is your mother?’ I repeated.

  Cissy’s face creased up and she said, ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘Your neighbours don’t think she’s dead,’ I said as I struggled to keep my balance on the steep slope underneath my feet.

  ‘The week after Albert,’ Cissy said.

  ‘Albert?’

  She looked up at me with eyes just on the edge of tears and said, ‘My young man. He died.’

  ‘In Claybury Hospital.’

  ‘You know,’ she replied as a statement of fact.

  If her mother had died a week after her sweetheart, then she must have been dead for about a year. It had to have been a terrible blow for Cissy to lose her mother and her sweetheart all in one go. But if that were so, and notwithstanding the fact that Mrs Darling believed both of Cissy’s parents to be dead, why did her neighbours not seem to know?

  ‘Is that what all this is about?’ I said to Cissy. ‘Your young man who died?’

  She turned her head to one side. Nan, her throat just lightly creased by Cissy’s knife, coughed a little before settling down into silence once again.

  ‘It’s about all of it,’ Cissy said. She looked at me, and not understanding what she meant, I frowned.

  ‘Everyone around me goes away or dies,’ she said. ‘I lose everything!’ It was said with such passion. ‘Nobody loses everything like I do!’ she continued. ‘Not Nellie Martin, not Marie Abrahams, not Violet Dickens not even that stupid, stupid Dolly O’Dowd!’

  I inched slightly forwards, but then stopped when I saw the terrible look that Cissy was giving me. If she had killed as frequently and as viciously as I thought she had, I knew she’d have no compunction about murdering me or my sister.

  ‘Because you know what, Mr Hancock? You know what your sister and her friends did in the Great War? You know the damage that they caused to men all over the East End of London?’

  ‘Nancy and her friends were White Feather girls,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know until just recently. I was away at the time, fighting in the trenches. Cissy, I don’t approve. Had I known, I would have put a stop to it, but . . .’

  ‘I’ve got no quarrel with you,’ Cissy said. ‘But those women have to pay for what they did to Albert.’ She looked up at me with eyes full of pain. ‘He wasn’t strong, he didn’t have to fight. And yet those girls, they went on and on and on at him every time they saw him! “Why aren’t you in uniform, young man?” “Don’t you want to fight for King and country?” “What kind of man is it who doesn’t want to defend his country’s honour?” He said they used to follow him. I told him not to take any notice.’

  ‘But he joined up anyway.’

  ‘He lost his mind out there in those trenches. He couldn’t do it! He couldn’t do what they wanted him to do, he wasn’t strong enough.’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘When first he came back, he didn’t know me! Then when he did, all he could do was say my name! We never spoke again after he went away. Not like you and me are speaking now – never!’

  ‘Cissy, I do understand . . .’

  ‘I visited him in Claybury every day,’ she said. ‘While I was doing that, although I was still angry, I could manage. But then one day Albert died. He got that dysentery so many of the patients get in that type of hospital, and he died. He should never have been there! If he hadn’t been in the asylum he would still be alive!’

  ‘And then your mum?’

  Cissy was crying now. ‘They just died! Both of them! I didn’t know what to do!’

  I moved slightly closer to her.

  ‘I lost the people I loved the most! I knew I’d lose the house too! We could only stay there as long as Mum was alive! I had to pretend. Day in and day out, I had to pretend – to everyone!’ Her face darkened again and she said, ‘They had to pay, those women! They had to know what it felt like to lose!’

  ‘Cissy . . .’

  ‘I will get them all eventually, you know,’ she said. ‘Even Rosemary out in Canada. I’ll get her too. I will.’

  ‘Cissy.’ I leaned down towards her, and in spite of myself I smiled. ‘Cissy, you can’t carry on like this, love,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t help. My sister Nancy was a silly girl when she was younger, but she knows now that she was in the wrong. It was nothing personal against you or Albert. I don’t think they knew either of you, did they? The soppy things just did what they did because they thought they were being patriotic.’

  I saw Nancy’s eyelids flicker for a moment. But I tried to ignore her and concentrate on Cissy.

  ‘They used to go down Custom House,’ Cissy said. ‘Albert lived there, on Garvary Road. I used to see Margaret Cousins, as she was then, and Marie Abrahams when they came into my Uncle Bob’s shop on East Ham Broadway. Waving their white feathers!’

  ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’ I said.

  She looked at me now with hatred. ‘I’d only just lost my dad! I had to work at Uncle Bob’s to help make ends meet. I couldn’t go upsetting his customers. He wasn’t keen to have me working there anyway. He wanted a lad. He’d have thrown me out on my ear’ole!’

  ‘Frank?’ It was a little, very tired voice and it came from my sister, into whose bleary eyes I was now looking.

  Cissy in response to this tightened her grip and shoved the knife even harder against Nancy’s throat.

  ‘Frank!’

  I looked down at my sister and said, ‘Just keep still, Nan!’

  ‘I am going to kill her,’ Cissy said in a voice that was so cold it almost made me pull my jacket tighter about my shoulders.

  ‘And I am going to stop you,’ I said.

  She frowned, and I saw the knuckl
es of her fingers holding the knife turn white.

  I made a dive for her wrist but she was a lot stronger than I had imagined and so I grabbed what I could of the knife itself. God, it was sharp! The blade cut into my fingers with such ease it was almost as if they were made of butter not flesh.

  ‘Nan!’ I shouted as I tried to pull Cissy’s arm away from my sister’s neck. ‘Get out of it!’

  But she was far too drugged to move. With the blood from my fingers dripping down on to Nancy’s face, I moved my one good hand away from Cissy’s wrist and then pulled my sister down towards the riverbank. I grabbed her skirt and just heaved. Luckily, what with her being so light and the ground so wet, Nancy just slithered down until her legs and body dangled into the filthy water of the creek. I was just aware of her coughing as I flung myself forwards on to Cissy.

  ‘Give me the knife!’ I said as I tried in vain to get a hold of the damn thing. But my hand was so badly cut that I couldn’t get any purchase, while my other, undamaged hand had to try and pin this now screaming woman to the ground. God almighty, if Walter wasn’t dead or dying, where the hell was he?

  There was blood everywhere now and all of it was mine. Cissy’s face screwed up with effort as she tried with some success to push me away. But I used the weight of my body to pin her to the ground even as she turned the knife in my injured fingers and fought to get the end of the blade close to my face. I thought that she might even succeed too as I felt my head go light and dizzy with the effort. Not that failure was an option for me under these circumstances. But then it wasn’t an option for Cissy either.

  ‘You are not going to stop me!’ she shrieked.

  I didn’t answer, I couldn’t. I managed to heave my head out of the way of the slashing blade beneath me but I knew that by this time I was fading. I couldn’t even spare any energy to abuse her and she knew it. I knew she knew it because she smiled. I thought at that point that I was as good as dead. But that shriek of hers, so I later learned, changed the direction of Walter and the little group of men who were looking for us up above on the bank. That shriek gave away where we were.

  Seconds later someone pulled me off and away and two blokes I didn’t know from Adam wrestled the knife out of Cissy’s hand. I just heard Walter’s voice say, ‘Fucking hell, Mr H!’ before I passed out cold.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The men from the pumping station took Walter, Nancy and me to the nearest hospital, St Andrew’s at Bromley-by-Bow. Cissy they took to Plaistow police station, which wasn’t the closest. It was Walter who insisted they do that. The sooner Cissy got into the hands of Sergeant Hill and his boys, the sooner everyone could find out whether poor old Fred Dickens still needed to be in one of Plaistow’s cells or not.

  The nurse who attended to both me and Walter was a sweet girl who looked to me to be just barely into her twenties. We did see a doctor briefly, but all he told us was that we’d both lost a lot of blood and that we’d have to rest. Neither of us could drive, but thankfully the ginger-haired neighbour of Cissy Hoskin we’d first met when we went to Abbey Lane, and who Walter had run to when the woman had attacked him, had taken us to the hospital. Now he volunteered to drive the Lancia and us home to Plaistow. Nancy was to be kept in St Andrew’s for the time being. Not because she was injured in any way but simply because it appeared she’d been given a very large amount of laudanum. She wasn’t used to it and the medical people wanted to keep an eye on her, for which I was grateful. Before we left St Andrew’s, however, I did just have to go and see her.

  She was deathly pale. Lying in a narrow metal bed in a ward full of equally pale but also bloodied and injured women, she looked tiny, worn out and old. Not that the way she looked bothered me. And besides, as soon as I got close to her, she opened her eyes and smiled and she was my beautiful sister all over again.

  ‘Frank.’

  I kissed one of her hands and then sat down on the chair beside her bed.

  ‘Frank, what . . .’ Her eyes suddenly widened and she said, ‘I was drinking tea! Drinking tea and then I felt odd and . . .’

  ‘Ssh, ssh, ssh!’ I put a finger from my one good hand up to her lips and said, ‘Don’t you worry yourself with anything. You’re all right now. They’ll look after you here tonight and then you can come home tomorrow.’

  Nan frowned. ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘Sunday,’ I said. ‘They just need to keep you in to . . .’

  ‘But I have to go to Mass!’ Panicked, she tried to sit up, but thankfully, for it wasn’t good for her to do so, she found that she couldn’t rise easily and so just slumped back helplessly on to her pillow once again.

  ‘You’ve had a shock,’ I said gently. ‘God’ll understand.’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’ And then her eyes narrowed and she said, ‘I was having tea with Alice. That’s right. She’d made some very nice cakes, although her house was ever so dirty. Ever so dirty.’

  ‘Nan, we can talk about this later,’ I said as I saw Walter and Mr Holland, the chap with the red hair, beckon me towards them. It was, so it seemed, time for me to go home.

  I bent forward to kiss my sister on the cheek. But she didn’t notice, as she was already asleep again. As I stood up, I wiped a tear away from my eye and tried not to think about what would have happened had I not visited Mr Abrahams up at Claybury. Because Cissy Hoskin would have killed my sister, she would have mutilated her body and my mother would never have been able to kiss her oldest child goodbye.

  Walter, who lives alone in a rooming house down by the Boleyn pub, stayed with us in the flat that night. The Duchess wouldn’t even entertain the idea of his going back to his digs.

  ‘Good gracious, no!’ she said when Walter tried to make an exit. ‘After you saved the lives of my son and my daughter? I should think not, Mr Bridges! You will stay and we will take care of you.’

  Aggie was working and so still didn’t know. But Walter and me regaled my mother and cousin Stella with the story of our recent adventures. Stella, who is a great believer in the power of blood tonics and the like, went over to the Abbey Arms and brought us both back bottles of stout. ‘It’ll build you up,’ she said as she handed us pint glasses. ‘Good for making blood.’

  Walter, who is more than partial to a drop, smiled. Later, and just before Aggie finally made it home from Tate and Lyle’s, Sergeant Hill came over and asked to speak to me. Walter was asleep in my bedroom by this time and so it was just the Duchess and me and the silence when Stella went down to answer the door.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about seeing Frank yet, Sergeant Hill,’ I heard her say. ‘He’s been through a shocking time. Attacked he was! By a lady!’

  ‘Oh.’

  I looked over at my mother, who had also heard the exchange, and I said, ‘Could you please go and sort Stella out, Duchess? And ask Sergeant Hill to come up, will you?’

  ‘Are you sure, Francis?’

  ‘Yes.’

  After some protest from Stella, who felt that she was better placed to make decisions for me than anyone else, Sergeant Hill was shown up into the parlour. He asked, if at all possible, if he could talk to me on my own. The Duchess was tired anyway and so she went off to bed. Stella, after making both Sergeant Hill and myself cups of tea, went to the kitchen to be with Aggie, who had just that second got home. Once the parlour door was shut, Sergeant Hill said, ‘Well, Mr H, what a day, eh? You and Mr Bridges attacked by a madwoman who now it seems is almost struck dumb.’

  I frowned.

  ‘Alice Hoskin says she’ll only talk to you,’ he continued. ‘We can hold on to her because she was found by the gents from the pumping station laying into you with a knife. I imagine you and Mr Bridges will want to press charges.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But about the attack on your sister and the other ladies I understand you say she admitted to killing, she won’t say anything.’

  When the pumping station workers had taken Cissy up to Plaistow, Walter and myself had told them what to say.
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  ‘All she will say is that she’ll only talk if you are present. Says she owes it to you to provide an explanation,’ Sergeant Hill said. ‘Oh, and she wants to see a lady she’s given as her next of kin, a Mrs Darling . . .’

  ‘You mustn’t let her see Mrs Darling!’ I said. ‘She’s one of the women Cissy wants to kill!’

  ‘Oh, we haven’t let anyone see Miss Hoskin yet,’ Sergeant Hill replied. ‘Mrs Darling has been told where Miss Hoskin is but she’s not as yet been told why. Now, Mr Hancock . . .’

  ‘I’ll come,’ I said as I slowly and painfully began to rise to my feet. Sergeant Hill put a hand on my shoulder and pushed me gently back into my seat once again.

  ‘Tomorrow morning will do, Mr Hancock,’ he said. ‘You need to get some rest, you’ve been through quite an ordeal.’ He lowered his head, looking down into the depths of his copper’s helmet. ‘If you’re right about this Hoskin woman, then . . .’

  ‘She’s been killing the White Feather girls,’ I said. ‘They made her fiancé go to war and then he lost his mind and . . . I don’t know too many details, Sergeant Hill, but I do know that she named Violet Dickens.’

  ‘Did she actually admit to killing her?’

  ‘Well no, not exactly, but . . . Sergeant, I’ve never thought that Fred . . .’

  ‘We can’t let Fred Dickens go until this woman confesses to Violet’s murder,’ Sergeant Hill said.

  ‘So I’ll come . . .’

  ‘In the morning is good enough,’ Sergeant Hill said with a smile. ‘But if you can come early, Mr H . . .’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. Stella had already said that she’d go and pick up Nancy from the hospital, and Walter’s job for the following morning was to go and talk to Albert Cox up in Canning Town. Neither Walter nor myself could drive or lift on account of our injuries, ditto Nancy, so Walter needed to get another undertaking firm, Cox’s I hoped, to take over our work for a week or so.

  ‘Well, I’ll leave you to rest now,’ Sergeant Hill said as he stood up and put his helmet back on to his head.