‘They don’t know nothing,’ Hannah said tightly, as we picked our way along the street, every so often one or other of us falling off the kerb and into the road. At one point poor Velma turned her ankle on a box someone had left outside a darkened shop. It had contained Fry’s Chocolate Sandwich bars – once. But the girl looked inside it, just to make certain.
On the corner of Brick Lane and Fournier Street, Hannah stopped and turned back towards us. ‘You wait here,’ she said. ‘I’m going to see if I can talk to someone.’
‘Who?’
‘I used to talk to an old bloke done paper and string when I was a kid. But he won’t take kindly to strangers.’
And then she walked off down Fournier Street, quickly disappearing into the blackout. Long after I’d lost sight of her I could hear her heels clicking on the pavement. When that noise finally faded there was nothing save for some faint, strange music coming from somewhere nearby. I looked down at Pearl and Velma as they huddled together in front of a door with a big knocker in the shape of a lion’s head. I knew we were all thinking alike. Now it was dark the raid could come at any time and, far from home, God alone knew where we’d be able to find shelter. Velma especially looked all done in so the thought of walking all the way back to Plaistow with her in tow wasn’t one that I wanted to consider. I knew the Duchess had said they could both stay, but the reality of that was going to be short rations and giving over to them the bed Aggie’s kids had shared in her room. I just hoped we could find this sister of Pearl’s, and soon. Quite why that thought, if it did, led on to my realising I didn’t know what Kevin Dooley had been doing the night he died, I don’t know. But I asked his widow, who said, ‘He was down the pub.’
‘Which one?’ I asked. I was curious to know whether it had been one of the East Ham boozers.
But Pearl didn’t know. ‘Me and Velma was out that night too,’ she said.
‘Oh. Where?’
I didn’t see her face, but I knew she had to have been doing something she shouldn’t because she turned it away from me. ‘Oh, well, er, we was with friends,’ Pearl said. ‘For the evening, like.’
‘Ah.’ I smiled, and she bit her lip. I thought about asking her who these friends were but I decided against it. Maybe I’d heard wrong or something but I seemed to recall that the Dooleys, including Pearl, didn’t really have any friends. Only family and ‘victims’ was the impression I’d got from Pearl. But, then, maybe that night she’d gone somewhere she didn’t want anyone to know about. Maybe she’d gone off to another bloke. Given what little, admittedly, I knew about Kevin, I couldn’t have blamed her if she had.
A few minutes later I got my tobacco and papers out and rolled myself a fag. We hadn’t seen any ARP warden since we entered the district, but I jumped into the doorway just in case someone told me to ‘Put that light out!’ when I sparked up. It was getting colder all the time and when it began to rain, drizzle, really, Velma put her head on her mother’s shoulder and sobbed. Pearl, embarrassed, forced a smile at me. ‘Come on, love,’ she said to her daughter. ‘It’ll be all right, you’ll see.’
I find it difficult to judge a person’s age, especially now that everyone’s so tired, but I now revised my estimate of Pearl Dooley’s age up a bit. She was, I thought, probably in her middle thirties. She was very thin for a woman with so many nippers. She had false teeth too, which added to the gaunt set of her face. Very like some of the young women I get through, sadly, professionally. Still lovely, poor things, but in the terrible, ghostly way of having too many kids, doing too much work and maybe in her case having secrets. It was a problem, I was finding, for me to take her story about being out with ‘friends’ seriously. I was almost hypnotised looking at her when Hannah appeared at my side. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We’ve got to go and see a woman called Bessie Stern, lives at number five Princelet Street.’
‘Who’s Bessie Stern?’ I said.
‘She’s a matchmaker and a right gossip,’ Hannah replied. ‘She lives next door to Shlomo Kaplan, the man the shikseh Ruby used to live with.’
‘She’s moved on?’ Pearl asked.
‘In a way,’ Hannah said, and she headed off towards Princelet Street, which was the very next turning.
Bessie Stern was a fat old woman who wore a very matted, very bad red wig. At first she was deeply suspicious, almost hostile. Even with Hannah talking Yiddish, the old girl – from her tone and the way she stood at her street door like an angry wrestler – wasn’t having any of it, whatever it was. Strangely it was only when Pearl was brought into it that her attitude changed. Suddenly we were in.
A tiny parlour with a scullery at the back was lit by a single gas mantle that hissed and spluttered as we entered. Over on the range, which had obviously been blackleaded to within an inch of its life, a pot of something was steaming and smelling of cabbage. Out in the scullery I could see a string with washing hanging down from it: a pair of great big stays, bloomers and a cardigan.
‘Sit! Sit!’ the old woman said, as she ushered us on to a row of hard chairs behind a large wooden table. As Hannah rattled away in Yiddish again, Bessie Stern settled herself in a busted-up armchair next to the range.
Once she’d finished listening to what Hannah had to say, she turned to Pearl and said, ‘You know Ruby kept the house for Shlomo Kaplan and he let her live without paying rent. He was a good man. I miss him. Do you want tea? What about the girl?’
‘Do you mean he’s dead?’ Pearl asked.
‘Oh, yes, love. Two and a half, three weeks ago. During one of the earliest raids here.’
‘So where’s Ruby?’ Pearl enquired.
The old woman shrugged. ‘Who knows? One day she’s there with Shlomo Kaplan, doing his housework, ironing his shirts, and the next day he’s dead and she’s gone! Do you want me to put the kettle on, dear? It really is no trouble.’
‘No . . .’
I looked at Pearl, whose face was quite white now.
‘How did he die, Mrs Stern?’ I asked.
‘Head bashed in,’ she said darkly. ‘Blood up the parlour walls! Saw it with me own eyes. Terrible!’
‘The coppers think he was murdered,’ Hannah said.
‘Yes, although why I don’t know,’ Bessie Stern said, as she looked at Hannah with, I felt, distaste. ‘Nothing stolen and he wasn’t a poor man, Shlomo Kaplan, oh, no! There’s a gramophone in there and everything! Then some said that maybe it was Ruby, but I put them straight on that, the police. She was down in Katz’s shelter with me and Etta Nathan when it happened – there was a raid on!’
‘Ruby can’t’ve done it,’ Pearl said. ‘Not Ruby. It’s impossible!’
‘But then, soon as the police come, she goes,’ Bessie Stern continued. ‘So what’re they to think, is what they say.’
‘His house wasn’t damaged in the raid?’ I asked.
‘Yes, a bit. I’m thinking when I go in there that maybe one of the gas pipes hit him on the head. One of them was down across the table. But the police say no, so what do I know? The police say he was murdered. God willing, whoever done it will get caught.’
‘It wasn’t my sister!’ Pearl was up on her feet now, tears in her eyes.
‘I’ve never thought it was, darling,’ the old woman said.
‘But you’re thinking that because she’s gone—’
‘I don’t know why she ran off any more than you do,’ Bessie said. ‘When the siren went, I took off to get Ruby. I never saw Shlomo, I admit that. He would never come down the shelter, too stubborn. “No German going to make me leave my home,” he always said.’ She laughed. ‘More like no German going to make him leave the money he kept all over the house. But whoever killed him didn’t take his money. I’m sure Ruby didn’t do no wrong, but it’s not me she needs to convince. It’s the police. That she’s gone they think is very suspicious. She was the last person to see Shlomo alive. They want to talk to her.’
I found myself looking at Pearl Dooley as the old woman spoke. Sweating
, in spite of the cold, her eyes were wide with what looked like terror and, as she raised one hand to wipe her brow dry, I saw that she was shaking. Hannah saw it too and gave me a look of recognition.
‘Ruby, see,’ Bessie continued, ‘didn’t take nothing with her. We found Shlomo together, her, me and Etta’s brother who it was went for the police. But then Ruby just says she’s going out for a while and she’s gone. The police asked all of us a lot of questions.’
‘About Ruby?’
‘Yes. They asked where she come from, was she married, what her name was. I said I didn’t know how she come to be with Shlomo, because I don’t. She wasn’t never married or so far as I knew. All I could tell them was that her name was Ruby House. They asked me that several times and I kept on telling them, Ruby House.’ She leaned forward to get closer to Pearl, and said, ‘You know, love, your old name before you was married. I’m sure they didn’t believe me, but I said, “It’s the truth,” and so . . .’
I looked again at Pearl, who had averted her eyes. Either she’d made up the name Reynolds for her sister or Ruby had lied. I know people have reasons for doing this, especially in our part of the world, but at that moment it was setting off all sorts of alarm bells in my head and I decided to have it out with Pearl as soon as we left Bessie Stern’s place.
‘If you want to know more,’ Bessie said, ‘you should go and see the police – if you can find them. Please God they will find the monster as killed poor Shlomo, but what’s one poor dead Jew among a city full of dead and dying people?’ She raised her eyes to the ceiling and shook her head. ‘Thanks to the Luftwaffe we could all be dead by morning! God willing it won’t be so, but . . .’
As we left it was with Bessie’s offer for us, or more specifically Pearl, to stay and, if necessary, use the shelter she used, ringing in our ears. ‘If a raid starts, where will you go, Missus, you and the girl?’ she said to Pearl. ‘In the blackout you could kill yourselves looking for somewhere before the Germans even get across the Channel! Stay and take tea, talk a while.’ But Pearl wanted to go so we left.
She was a good sort, Bessie Stern. She even offered, in view of the fact that I’m a man of ‘business’, to find me ‘someone nice’. I wanted to ask Hannah what she’d told her. Not, obviously, that we were together. In fact, I got the distinct feeling that Bessie would’ve thought less of me if she’d known that. I had no reason to suppose she knew what Hannah did for a living, but she had seemed to dislike her. Maybe my girl had said I was Jewish to ease our passage through the mysteries of Spitalfields and that was why Bessie had seemed so keen on me. But neither Hannah, Velma nor I had much of a chance to talk about any of this as we raced up the road to keep up with Pearl. Once out of Bessie’s she’d gone off like a silent rocket. I at least was frightened we might lose track of her, that she’d disappear, like her sister, like the old rabbi who had melted through a wall.
If you don’t know where the nearest public shelter might be or you’re a long way off from one, church crypts are always a decent bet. We’d just gone past St Anne’s, Limehouse, when the sirens went so I doubled back with the two women and the girl and took them down there. I asked Hannah to stay with Pearl and Velma, which she said she would. The vicar, who was in charge of settling everyone in, was a bit taken aback when I left.
‘My wife is making tea,’ he said, as I headed off through the crowds and up the stairs.
It’s often said that London is a collection of villages, each with its own distinctive character. This is true and yet not true too. Take Limehouse. There’s a belief some have that it’s a place full of Chinamen taking opium. Allow your sons and daughters to come down Limehouse and they’ll be dope fiends within days, probably on the game too. There is, of course, a bit of truth in this, but not much. In Limehouse, like everywhere else in the East, there’s good and bad of every race and religion you can name. The only constant things are the great big churches and the poverty. St Anne’s, Limehouse, just like Christ Church, Spitalfields, was built by the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor. Both white and sporting tall spires, they look more like churches for the smart set up Chelsea way than for the poor ragamuffins around these parts. It does indeed make you wonder why such magnificent buildings were put in places like this. But no one in the old days had imagined something like this nightmare.
I didn’t stray far. Maybe it was because St Anne’s is surrounded by a graveyard, maybe it made me feel at home. When the bombers came over I was leaning against a pyramid they’ve got there. It’s a big white thing. Not a monument as far as anybody knows, I’ve heard it said that Hawksmoor built it for reasons known only to him. There is something mysterious about it, probably because its shape sort of connects it to Egypt. But for whatever reason it seemed like the right place for me to be at the time. As the ground shook, the sky lit up like daylight and I strained to hear the sound of the ack-ack, I turned my mind back to recent events at Bessie Stern’s place.
Of course I could understand Pearl being so vehement about her sister Ruby’s innocence. I’d feel exactly the same if someone accused either of my sisters of murder. But there’d been more than that. There was the name for a start, Reynolds or House, and the police’s seeming belief that there was something wrong with the name Bessie Stern had given them. Why they thought that I couldn’t imagine, unless of course Ruby was known to them. Two things came to mind then: first, that Bessie hadn’t seen Shlomo Kaplan alive before that fateful raid, and second, if Pearl was out the night Kevin died, where had she been and why had she, as far as I could tell, lied about it? Unbidden, Kevin Dooley’s violent face, lit by the yellow and red glow of fire after fire, tumbled into my head. ‘I’ve been fucking stabbed!’ he’d said. ‘She fucking stabbed me!’ And I’d done nothing to help him . . .
I don’t know why I looked up then. When a bomb goes in the river there isn’t much noise, but a sort of a feeling like an earthquake when it detonates under the water. But the next I knew I was looking at what appeared to be a wall of water screaming up into the sky. Lit by burning wharves and fires on top of what had once been houses, this thing was like a tidal wave big enough, to me, to take over the whole world. Knowing it would do no good I braced myself nevertheless, eyes closed, against the side of the pyramid. I would, I knew, be smashed to pieces by this mountain of water. But after a bit when nothing happened, I opened my eyes and the only things I could see in the sky were the outlines of German bombers. I must’ve gone mad for a bit again back there. It was almost a relief and I laughed.
‘What the fuck are you up to, mate?’
He was about fifty and he had ARP written on his tin hat.
‘I-I-I, er . . .’
‘I don’t know how you bleeders get out!’ Then, pulling me by one arm, he said, ‘Come on, get you inside.’ He must have meant the crypt.
Of course, I resisted.
He wasn’t a bad bloke. Quite rightly, he thought I was barmy and who could blame him?
‘I-I-I’m n-n-not mad!’ I stuttered.
‘Yeah, right,’ he said, ‘and I’m the fucking Duke of York. Come on, Sonny Jim, it’s for your own good.’
‘No!’ I ripped my arm out of his grasp and, pointing at my chest with one hand, I screamed, ‘Undertaker! H-Hancock!’
It was all I could get out, over the noise of the bombers, the thud of the explosions, the crackle and spit of a thousand fires.
The warden’s creased, toothless face frowned. ‘You from . . . You from Plaistow . . .’
‘Yes!’
‘Ah.’
‘Y-y-you . . .’
He moved his head close to mine, his tin hat just touching the edge of my hair. ‘You’re old Tom Hancock’s son, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘I’ve heard about you.’
There was a lot as could be inferred from what he’d said but principal among all of it was that I wasn’t quite the ticket. Only a few years older than me, the warden had probably been in the first lot too. There was indeed a small light of understanding in his eyes.
As Albert Cox sometimes says, ‘When you’re in business round these parts there ain’t too many places to hide.’ There’s no such thing as an invisible undertaker. A mad one, maybe. But that is unusual enough for news of it to travel across all of London’s eastern villages.
The warden took one more look at me, then headed off back towards the Commercial Road. Dealing with the dying is one thing – there might just be some sort of hope – but talking to those already dead is pointless.
‘I lost them as we was leaving,’ Hannah said miserably. ‘All these women flying up the stairs with all their kids and blankets and food and whatever, I couldn’t keep on them.’
‘That’s all right, love,’ I said, as I put an arm round her shoulders.
‘There’s something fishy about that Pearl, ain’t there?’ Hannah said. ‘About that name, Reynolds, and . . .’
‘Turns out she and, she says, Velma, were out the night her old man died,’ I said, with a yawn. ‘She was cagy about where she was.’
Hannah shook her head. ‘So sorry I lost them, H.’
But it was as much my fault as Hannah’s that we’d managed to lose Pearl and Velma. Once the raid was over, which was just before dawn, I’d fallen asleep. When Hannah, all panicked over Pearl and Velma, had found me and then woken me I’d been dreaming about George Pepper’s first communion. He’d done it, in my dream, at age twenty-one in full battle-dress and kit.
I had to be home by ten because we were burying some collection of human pieces the coppers had chosen to call the late Reginald Burman. A bachelor who lived with his sister, Cissie, Reg had left the Anderson behind his house on Plashet Grove to go to the privy during a raid. Neither Reg nor the privy had been there in the morning. So now poor old Cissie was on her own in that house with a shell full of bits that had probably never been anywhere near her brother. But I had to go out and do the honourable thing for her sake and, rather than talk much more to Hannah about the previous night’s events, I hurried home.
Before she even asked me where I’d been half the previous day and all night, Nan said, ‘Water’s off.’
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