Last Rights

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘Christ!’

  ‘Francis!’

  I looked at Nan and smiled sheepishly. ‘Sorry, Nan,’ I said. ‘It’s just that I’m filthy.’

  ‘Yes, I can see,’ she said.

  Nan and the Duchess are always good with water. When we’ve got it, they put some aside in the kettle and in a barrel out in the yard. But this time the barrel had caught some blast so a small cup for shaving was all I managed to persuade Nan to pour out of the kettle for me. I went through the motions of changing my clothes, but those I took off were only a bit dirtier than those I put on. I thought of Dad and laughed as it occurred to me how disgusted he’d have been with my appearance. Tom Hancock was always immaculate, even when he was dying. It was his belief that to be smart and clean was one of the few real things a person could do to show respect for the dead. More important, he always felt, than the quality of the coffin or the size and elaborateness of the monument.

  Once I’d sorted myself out I went down to the shop. Doris, all plump and exotic-looking in a tightly fitted green dress, was sitting having a cup of tea with Fred Bryant. He was out of uniform, but just seeing him made me ask Doris if we could have a moment or two on our own. Fred, true to form, watched Doris go with a little smile of regret. How long was he going to hold a torch for the poor girl?

  ‘Fred,’ I said, once Doris had gone and I’d taken one of his fags, ‘do you know anything about the murder of an old Jewish bloke up Spitalfields?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Two, three weeks ago,’ I said. ‘Paper-and-string merchant.’

  ‘Oh. Oh, yes, yes, I do. Course.’

  ‘What?’

  Fred is really too much of a gossip to be a copper. In my line of work you have to have discretion, so it never goes any further. But I do sometimes wonder who else Fred tells and what.

  Fred moved in as close as one bloke would consider doing to another. ‘Well, they don’t know who done it,’ he said, ‘but I’ve heard tell that it’s the housekeeper they’re looking for.’

  Nothing so far that I didn’t know already.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. What you want to know for, Mr H?’

  ‘I was up those parts yesterday,’ I said. ‘Heard a few stories, you know.’

  ‘Right.’

  I didn’t say anything else then. Fred usually, once you’ve shown that you’re interested, carries on without any further help. On this occasion, he was true to form.

  ‘There’s a sergeant up Shoreditch I know,’ he said. ‘No names, no pack drill. But anyway, he says this housekeeper, apparently she’s the daughter of that woman hung for murder some years ago.’

  ‘What woman?’

  ‘Something foreign,’ Fred said. ‘I dunno. But anyway, she was a “woman of the night”, if you know what I mean. Up West it was somewhere.’

  That all made sense. The horrible Vi Dooley had said Pearl had come from ‘up West’ and if Ruby’s and her mother really had been a murderess it would explain why Pearl hadn’t wanted to reveal her real name. Not that either ‘Reynolds’ or ‘House’ was foreign in any way that I could see. There was also the connection with prostitution. Vi Dooley had said that Pearl was on the game at one time, but perhaps she was just tarring the daughter with the same brush as the mother. That the police were pursuing Ruby despite, as far as I could tell, no evidence to show she’d killed Shlomo Kaplan, seemed like another example of this. But perhaps they knew something that I didn’t. In fact, almost certainly they knew something that I didn’t.

  ‘This woman they’re looking for,’ Fred continued, ‘her mother killed her fella.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Some geezer she was involved with, she killed him,’ Fred said.

  I felt my skin go very cold. ‘How? What did she do?’

  ‘Stabbed him through the heart.’ Fred said, and then added darkly, ‘With a dirty great hatpin, so they say. Apparently the body was soaked with blood.’

  ‘Fred,’ I said, as I put one fag out, then instantly lit another, ‘I think we should go and see Albert Cox now.’

  The policeman, obviously confused, frowned. ‘Why’s that, Mr H?’

  I told him of what my suspicions had been right from the start on the way down to Canning Town. This time, instead of going on about what Dr Cockburn had and had not said, Fred listened.

  When we arrived at Cox’s shop, Albert told us that Pearl Dooley had left after viewing her husband’s body about half an hour before. She’d come not only to see him but to find out when his funeral was going to take place. It was scheduled for the next day, so I knew we’d have to act fast if we were to have Kevin’s body examined again before the ceremony. Fred called his sergeant who, after what we were told was a lot of persuasive talking, eventually managed to get Marcus Cockburn out to Cox’s shop that night. As bombs fell all around us Dr Cockburn, reeking of whisky and cigars, nevertheless came to a rather different cause of death for Kevin Dooley than the one he had originally given.

  Why I’d treated Kevin as I had – like a nutter, the same way people treat me – on the night he died, I didn’t know. But the guilt was terrible then. The world was descending into madness again and, just as I’d done in the first lot, I was simply letting it happen. Which, after all, is more unforgivable? To kill a man on the orders of a so-called superior or to let a man obviously not well or in his right mind run off to meet his own destruction? My mates hadn’t let me desert: they’d taken care of this nutter and saved my life. I should have tried to save poor Kevin’s.

  Chapter Seven

  The Dooleys were a huge family. As well as the old mother and all of Kevin’s kids there were at least five adults who looked similar to the deceased. Brothers and sisters, I guessed, many with husbands, wives and kids in tow. Although none had come out in yellow, there wasn’t a lot of mourning wear to be seen. But it isn’t cheap as I’d be the first to admit. What doesn’t cost, however, is dignity and although the mother was obviously upset, there was precious little grief beyond that. Dodgy blokes wearing trilbies smoking fags, sometimes laughing, sometimes swearing angrily, blokes young enough I would have imagined to be in the services. No, the only real sorrow I could see was shown by Kevin Dooley’s wife.

  She came alone, still in her ratty old coat but with a hat she’d got from somewhere on her head. It had a bit of a veil, which she’d pulled down over her face that, with the trees she was standing among, concealed her from all but the most keen observer. That was me. I watched her cry for some time before I went over. I knew I wasn’t going to like what I had to do next. But no one had known where she was so it had seemed the best, if not the right, thing to do to all involved.

  ‘Mr Cox and his boys have done your husband proud,’ I said, as I watched Albert walk towards the graveside ahead of the coffin. It was one of those dank afternoons where the half-bare trees look like ragged skeletons against the battleship grey of the sky.

  As soon as she saw me, Pearl Dooley’s tears stopped and something that looked like fear came into her eyes. ‘I loved him, you know,’ she said, ‘my Kevin.’

  ‘But he hit you,’ I said. ‘You had nipper after nipper for him and he still . . .’

  ‘I loved him!’ she said. ‘He gave me my life, he did. I know it can’t make much sense to anyone else, but he took me in and he protected me. He was a hard man, yes, but . . . Anyway, what’s it to do with you?’

  In contrast to how humble she’d been with me when she and Velma had first turned up at the shop she was now openly hostile. As far as I could tell, Spitalfields, and what had been discovered there, had changed her.

  ‘Did your mother love her bloke?’ I said. ‘The one she finished with her hatpin?’ I turned to look down at her and found a face bursting with both grief and anger. ‘You know I saw your husband on the night that he died, Mrs Dooley,’ I said. ‘He told me he’d been stabbed.’

  She shook her head. ‘He died from the blast. The coppers’ doctor said so.’

  ‘There wa
s a little hole, just under his breastbone,’ I said. ‘It could’ve been where a long pin stabbed into him, maybe from a lady’s hat. Where were you and Velma the night that Kevin died, Pearl?’

  Her mouth opened and her eyes, even through the veil I could see, filled with tears.

  ‘No, it’s not possible!’ she hissed rather than shouted. Father Burton, at the head of the grave, cleared his throat prior to beginning his committal. ‘You think I killed him? Just because my mum—’

  ‘You know, some of the Shoreditch coppers reckon that your Ruby could’ve killed old Mr Kaplan,’ I said. ‘Bessie Stern didn’t see him alive before that raid. Ruby was the last person to see him, as you know. Some people believe murder’s in the blood.’

  I didn’t add that I had doubts about that. Although the way Kevin had met his end was uncomfortably like the way Pearl’s mother had killed her fellow, it was more Pearl’s whereabouts on the night that Dooley had died that bothered both me and the police, who wanted to speak to her and the rest of Kevin’s family. This was now, after all, a murder, which meant that everyone connected in any way to it would be questioned.

  ‘So you think that I . . .’ Fearing, I imagined, that someone might hear her, Pearl moved in closer to me and dropped her voice. ‘I never killed Kevin and I can prove it!’ she said.

  ‘Can you? You weren’t too clear when I asked you . . .’

  ‘Yes, I can!’ she said. ‘Ask your girlfriend’s landlady if you don’t believe me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I never killed Kevin. I wouldn’t. Why don’t you believe me?’

  ‘It’s not that I don’t believe you,’ I said, ‘but your story about where you were that night, with friends, just doesn’t ring true. You told me yourself you don’t have any friends.’

  ‘If you’re thinking of calling the coppers . . .’

  ‘No.’

  She stared at me. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because we’re already here, love,’ a deep voice said behind her.

  Fred Bryant’s guv’nor, Sergeant Hill, gave the order for the funeral to be stopped. Albert Cox duly went over to Father Burton and had a word in his ear. The Dooleys started hollering and swearing almost immediately.

  I looked at the chaos around me with fear. The police were taking a destitute, weeping woman away with them – something I’d had a hand in. If only I’d taken Kevin Dooley seriously that night! If only I’d asked him who ‘she’ was and why she’d done what she had to him.

  Because she’d managed to get Father Burton to perform Kevin’s funeral so quickly, Vi Dooley had wanted her son’s body to stay over at Cox’s. Maybe, in part, she’d thought that Pearl might want to see him too – although I didn’t suppose that was much of a consideration for her. But whatever the reason, Kevin being at Albert’s shop had allowed Marcus Cockburn to re-examine the body, if reluctantly, in something approaching peace. His new conclusion about the cause of death was a lot different from his first attempt. Kevin Dooley’s heart had been punctured by a long, sharp instrument that had caused him to bleed to death inside his own body. Like him or not, Kevin Dooley had suffered a painful death that, with or without evidence from that night to back it up, had to have been murder. No one does that to themselves, however barmy.

  Dr Cockburn’s first thought had been to stop the funeral. But now that I’d told the coppers everything I knew about Pearl, they were keen to speak to her – if they could find her. None of us knew where she might be so it was decided to let something that looked like a funeral go ahead. It was almost a dead cert she’d turn up, and even though Father Burton wasn’t happy about performing a funeral for an empty coffin and was, to make things even worse, without the bereaved family’s knowledge, he agreed to do it anyway.

  So, now Kevin’s wife and family were going to have to answer questions about what they were doing on the night he died. The coppers took them down the station while I followed on with the sergeant and the dead man’s wife. I was interested in what Pearl had had to say about Hannah’s landlady, Dot Harris, and her involvement in all this. I did begin to ask her about it until Sergeant Hill put me right. ‘You have to let us take it from here, Mr Hancock,’ he said. ‘Thank you very much for your help, sir.’ He then raised his helmet and, with one hand round Pearl’s thin arm, he led her away towards the cemetery gates.

  As she went she turned briefly and gave me a look that might have been of either desperation or hatred. But, then, if she did hate me, I could understand that. After all, I’d laid it all, whatever it turned out to be, open to the air. In effect, I had put her in the back of that police car and on her way to the station for questioning and God alone knew where after that. A woman already scorned by her in-laws, with no mother of her own for comfort. And what of her daughter? If she hadn’t come to the funeral with her mother, where was Velma? All I could hope was that Pearl would tell the coppers so they could look after her. But that had to depend upon what, indeed, Pearl and Velma had been doing on the night that Kevin died.

  I rode back to the shop with Albert in his motor. Hearses are classed as ‘essential’ transport so he can, most of the time, get the petrol he needs. Makes me wonder sometimes what I’m still doing with the horses. But as the Duchess always says, some people prefer horses and the dung comes in useful for Walter’s allotment – something we all occasionally benefit from.

  ‘I reckon me and old Kevin’ll be back at the East London before the week’s out,’ Albert said. ‘Murder or no murder, the coppers ain’t got nowhere to keep bodies now. Morgue situation just don’t get no better.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You reckon she done it then, Pearl Dooley?’ Albert said.

  I was looking out of the window at the time. It had begun to drizzle now. It made the houses out on Grange Road look even more miserable than they usually do. Funny the way places around cemeteries always look like that. Even if the people who live in them are happy types.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘She told me she loved him and I think that maybe she did in her way. And even if she did kill him there has to be more than a chance that she was only protecting herself. Kevin Dooley was not, as you’ve said, Albert, anyone’s angel.’

  ‘Bloody right. Vicious bastard. Mind you, if she did do it the same way as her mum, don’t ’arf give you the creeps, don’t it?’

  Yes, it did. People don’t like that sort of thing, in my experience. Murder in the blood. Puts you in mind of madness in the family or disease or any other type of ill the average bloke can come up against. If something is passed on through the blood it means people can’t have any control over it. And that is frightening.

  I looked out of the window again and wondered where Pearl’s sister Ruby might be now. God forgive me, I also wondered whether Shlomo Kaplan had had any other wounds apart from those to his head. After all, as far as I knew, the last person who could’ve seen him alive before the air raid, apart from Ruby, was Bessie Stern when she went to get her neighbours into the shelter. But Bessie had admitted she hadn’t seen him. Could the old man have been dead before the raid started? Could Ruby Reynolds have killed him? If she had, not to take any money and, further, to return to the scene of her crime when the raid was over, seemed stupid to me. And why, later, when the police were called, had she run away? If she were innocent, that had to be just plain daft. All I could think of by way of a reason was her mother’s crime and the connections the police might make between it and Ruby. Back again to the idea that killing runs in the blood. But as I know only too well, people, even coppers, like to think that lots of things exist in the blood. Frightening though it is, it’s easy to understand. It also helps ‘nice’ people make the separation between themselves and all the ‘bad’ people. Rubbish! In my case, when I was a nipper, it was selling carpets. We have a few of the Indian men selling carpets door to door around this manor – Johnny Boys, they’re called – the Duchess has one in for tea sometimes, Mr Bhadwaj. Despite my dad and his business, that was what som
e of the kids at school saw me doing when I grew up. I was brown, so carpet-selling had to be in my blood. It was worse at the grammar school, maybe because more of the kids there had parents who could afford to buy carpets, of any sort, and look down their noses at the Johnny Boys as they did so. Some years later, good, bad, black or white, we all fought and suffered in the Great War. You would’ve thought that might have killed off ideas about things being in people’s blood, wouldn’t you?

  ‘Hannah!’

  I’d already taken the Duchess down the shelter in anticipation of a raid when Hannah turned up at the shop door. Luckily for me, both Nan and Aggie were down the Anderson too, or I would have had even more explaining to do. And with the tale of Kevin Dooley’s strange fate still ringing in their ears, Mum and the girls probably had enough to gossip about as it was.

  ‘You’ve got a visitor,’ Hannah said, as she pushed a red-faced and tear-stained Velma into the shop in front of her.

  You never can tell when the siren’s going to go, so I took them both up to the kitchen for the time being. If the warning went they’d have to go in with Duchess and the others anyway and God knew how I’d explain it, especially Hannah . . .

  ‘She turned up at Dot’s a couple of hours ago,’ Hannah said, as she took off her hat and sat down. ‘I never knew until I heard Dot raving.’

  ‘Raving?’ I put the kettle on the range and lit the gas beneath it. ‘About what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Hannah shrugged. ‘But she was giving this one here a right going over.’

  Velma, her head down, began to cry.

  ‘Dot was all for bunging her out in the street,’ Hannah said, ‘but she’s only a kid so I had to take her.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Down the pub first,’ Hannah said. ‘Dot wouldn’t have her in the house. Then she said she wanted to come here, speak to you. It’s all I’ve been able to get out of her so far. All she’ll say about her mother is that she’s gone.’