Last Rights

by Barbara Nadel

  Had the nun not left without even a thank-you I might have asked her.

  As I’ve said before, Father Burton and I don’t often see eye to eye. But we do agree when it comes to the subject of children’s deaths. What do you tell the parents? Father Burton will talk about God and all that business, of course, because that’s his job. But how to comfort the parents? He doesn’t know any more than I do and, even after all these years, I know nothing.

  William Clatworthy had been only six months old when slates falling off his mother’s roof had ended his life. Mrs Clatworthy had to be no more than twenty, poor woman. Her old man, she said, was in the navy.

  ‘How can I tell him about little Billy?’ she said to me. ‘He’ll go barmy! He just won’t be able to take it, I know.’

  And then she wept. I had no words. What can you say to someone who loses a child? I’m sorry? What good’s sorry? Kids die, we all know, especially round here, especially in the big poor families. They die because of malnutrition, diseases we can’t control, because some poor women are in labour for so long both the mother and the baby end up dying, and now they die because of the Jerries. But whatever the reason, kids dying before their parents is an unnatural thing. Our kids, if we have them, are supposed to outlive us. That’s the way it should be.

  There was to be no wake for William Clatworthy so once he was buried I headed back to the cemetery gates. I’d been aware of another service going on over the other side of the cemetery, and I thought I recognised some of Albert Cox’s boys, but I didn’t pay it, or them, much attention. At the gates, however, there was Albert’s hearse, alongside mine, all its doors wide open to the elements.

  ‘Frank!’

  If I hadn’t known Albert as well as I do, I would’ve thought that perhaps he was happy. But his voice was slurred and I could see the hip-flask in his hand, as could his boy, Paddy, who gave me a quick raise of his eyebrows as he passed.

  ‘Hello, Albert,’ I said. ‘How’s it going?’

  Albert, who had been slumped down low in the passenger seat, pulled himself upright and smiled. ‘I’m going to the pub,’ he said. ‘Do you want to come?’

  I’m not the sort of bloke as goes to pubs a great deal. In fact, a lot of the behaviour that goes on in pubs gives me the pip. I’m usually too busy these days, anyway. But on this occasion I needed a drink and I knew it. Even for me I was all over the place. Poor little Velma aside, I didn’t know what to make of the Reynoldses, Blatt and all their doings. I’d started out wanting to get at the truth about Kevin Dooley, doing what I felt I should, really, but now I seemed to be somewhere quite different. Now I was caught up with people’s secrets, which is always a dangerous place to be.

  ‘Yes, I’ll come,’ I said to Albert. ‘Just let me send my lads on their way.’

  I told Walter and Arthur to drive the hearse back to the shop and then I got in beside Albert.

  ‘Bleedin’ Dooleys,’ he said, as he passed his flask to me. ‘I hope those bastards take a direct hit!’

  Vi Dooley, Kevin’s mother, hadn’t wanted Albert to do her son’s funeral.

  ‘How do I know you’re gonna bury my boy and not fetch up with a coffinload of nothing like you did last time?’ she’d said, when he’d gone round to talk to her. Both Albert and the police had explained it to her several times, but it took the skill of Albert’s father to get the old girl to go ahead with Cox and Son. Harry Cox had always been a sweet talker – my dad had known him for years. Harry’s local was the Boleyn on the corner of the Barking Road and Green Street. Albert often went there too, which was why we turned up in the saloon bar at just about lunchtime.

  Harry, already three sheets to the wind, bought the first round.

  ‘Here you go, boys,’ he said, as he placed the pints in front of us. ‘Get that down you.’

  Albert lifted his glass up into the smoke-soaked light and said, ‘To Kevin Dooley. Thank Christ that bastard’s finally in his grave.’

  They laughed, I couldn’t, and then Harry said to Albert, ‘Bad do, was it, boy?’

  ‘I could’ve done without Vi keep on telling everyone what I’d put her through the first time,’ Albert said. ‘Never said a bad word about it to Father Burton. All “Father this, Father that, thank you very much for such a lovely sermon, Father.” Christ! And then Martine. Jesus, the state of her!’

  ‘What? Johnny’s wife?’ I said. ‘What about her?’

  ‘Well, she’s quite a looker, Martine. Or she was. Now she’s just like that poor little Pearl always was. Black eyes, her nose all out of kilter by the look of it. That bastard husband of hers, I reckon.’

  ‘I heard there were some “stories” about Martine,’ I said.

  Harry laughed. ‘There’s always stories about pretty women, son.’

  ‘Johnny knew she weren’t no saint when he married her,’ Albert said. ‘We all knew it. But I’ve never seen her like that before. I reckon he must’ve caught her with another geezer. Right smashed up, but she kept looking across at Johnny as if she wanted him to smile at her or something. Just like Kevin, him, has to be the man, no one so much as looking at his missus. What is it with these blokes who knock their women about?’

  What indeed? Well, in this case there was, I suspected, just a little of me involved too. Johnny had obviously been aware of what his wife might have been doing with Kevin for a long time before I came on the scene. But somehow, maybe, he’d lived with it. Even after Kevin died he’d carried on as normal, as far as I knew, with his wife. But I’d opened my mouth outside Canning Town station and this was, possibly, the result. But did it mean any more than it seemed to? Did it mean that Johnny, Martine or both of them had had a hand in Kevin’s death? It didn’t seem that likely to me, but perhaps after what I’d put in his mind, Johnny had felt the need to make sure Martine knew who was boss, as Albert had said. Or maybe she’d threatened to tell someone everything she knew about Kevin and her involvement with him – someone apart from her family and her priest, that is.

  I was thinking about these things, coming to no conclusions, of course, when I heard an old dry voice say, ‘Morgue’s son and the Coxes like a load of black crows.’

  I turned quickly and there, half hidden by deep layers of smoke and dust, one thin yellow hand curled round a pint of stout, was the old bloke from St Mary Magdalene’s churchyard. The leather-faced geezer from the bare-knuckle fight. He’d left me only minutes before I’d seen Kevin Dooley in his illuminated death throes. He could, possibly, surely, have seen something?

  Excited now, I didn’t take my eyes off him once as I went up to the booze-stained bar to buy a round for Albert, Harry and myself. I didn’t want to lose him. Now I had him in my sights I had to hang on to him. Maybe I should have mentioned the fight to the coppers, but I hadn’t. Kevin had been stabbed by a woman, so it didn’t seem relevant. But now, suddenly, coming upon the old geezer, the only face I could’ve recognised from that graveyard, I began to wonder what he knew. There had been no witnesses to any sort of attack on Kevin Dooley, according to the police. But in our manor you always wonder. Who, usually, talks to the coppers?

  I had to wait until he was on his own, which took some time, what with his bit of business with his bookie’s runner and another bloke I think he might’ve bought some hooky meat off. When I did finally speak to him I had to, first off, spend a lot of time getting him to admit he’d been in the graveyard that night. Bare knuckle is, after all, illegal and ‘Gimpy’ Charlie, as the old boy was called, knew that as well as anyone.

  ‘Now, look, Charlie,’ I said, as I placed a bottle of barley wine in front of him, ‘you were there and so was I. You helped me . . .’

  ‘Everyone knows you go off your nut in raids, Mr H,’ Charlie responded slyly. ‘How’d’ya know where you was?’

  ‘Because even I know a fight when I see one, and,’ I lowered my voice, moved in closer to the old chap, ‘I know the coppers are always interested in who goes to watch these things.’

  ‘You ain
’t no grass, Mr H!’

  Appealing to an East-Ender’s sense of community is always a good one, but I wasn’t in the mood. ‘You don’t know what I am, Charlie,’ I said, ‘because, as you’ve said yourself, I’m barmy so who knows what I might do?’

  ‘Yus, but—’

  ‘Charlie, all I want to know is what you saw that night,’ I said. ‘Not at the fight, I don’t care about that; on your way home, did you see anything?’

  ‘Explosions. Brick-dust. A lot of black on account of the blackout—’

  ‘Yes! Yes!’ I’d really got his goat now. ‘But look,’ I glanced from left to right, then moved in close to his head once again. ‘A bloke called Kevin Dooley, a scrapper from Canning Town, died that night and—’

  ‘I don’t know nothing about that, Mr H. Never heard of that geezer.’

  ‘Are you sure, Charlie?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Because it’s been all round the manor.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t never listen to gossip, Mr H,’ Charlie said. ‘There’s them as say women can do these things, but I say you shouldn’t be too hasty about such things meself.’

  My memory isn’t what it was. Of course I knew ‘Gimpy’ once I had a chance to take a good look at him. He had one leg, hence his nickname, and the story was that he’d lost the other at Mafeking in the Boer War. Or, rather, that was what Charlie always wanted people to believe. ‘Gimpy Charlie’s whole family are dodgy,’ my dad had said, when he’d first heard this. ‘Gimpy lost that leg dynamiting a bookie’s safe up Dalston!’

  ‘You’ve always been a rotten liar, Gimpy,’ I said, as I rolled up a fag for me and one for him. ‘You didn’t fool my dad and you’re not fooling me.’

  ‘Mr H!’

  ‘If you don’t listen to gossip, then how do you know that there’s a woman suspected of Kevin’s murder?’

  ‘Well, Mr—’

  ‘Look, I met Kevin Dooley a few minutes after he’d been stabbed, just after I left you. You live up on the Barking Road and must’ve seen something, Gimpy, even if it was only me talking to him. Now, if you did see Kevin Dooley or anyone you think might’ve been him, you’d better get on and tell me,’ I said. ‘I’ll buy you another barley wine and you can have one fag for now and one to put behind your ear.’

  Gimpy thought about this for a few seconds before he said, ‘I kept quiet because no one don’t need to hear that sort of thing about those what’ve passed on.’

  ‘What do you mean, Gimpy?’

  ‘I mean if, like, you had a brother and after he was dead it turned out he was an iron, would you want to know?’

  ‘Was Kevin Dooley an iron, then?’ I said.

  Gimpy nearly got inside my jacket trying to get close enough so no one else could hear. ‘Yus,’ he said. ‘Saw him, you know, with this geezer on the night he died. Disgusting it was!’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Iron hoof – poof. I had a bit of bother believing it of Kevin Dooley, yet Gimpy Charlie said he’d seen it happen. Just behind St Mary’s graveyard, he said, which meant that Kevin must’ve run from there, or at least walked quickly to get up to the Barking Road at the same time as me. The other man, whom Charlie couldn’t really get a good look at, had seemed young. But then, as the old bloke had said, it was difficult to see him, what with the blackout and him being on his knees in front of Kevin.

  Had this young man stabbed Kevin Dooley because, maybe, he hadn’t paid him for what he’d done? Irons, unless they’re very well connected and especially if they’re married, generally have to pay for their jollies. As soon as I could string a sentence together again, I’d have to telephone Blatt and let him know. Too pie-eyed to go to the coppers right then, I’d come home in what Nan calls a ‘right state’ and gone to my bedroom. Not to sleep – the room was spinning round far too quickly for that even if my mind was quite slow.

  Of course, this latest bit of information didn’t solve anything so much as add further complications. If Kevin Dooley was an iron, then what was he doing having something with Martine – if indeed he had been? And where had Martine, and maybe Johnny too, been that night? I, at least, still didn’t feel sure. If Martine had been out, had she seen Kevin maybe, been disgusted by what he was doing with another man and killed him? Kevin did, after all, say that ‘she’ had stabbed him, which seemed to rule out his iron chum. Maybe ‘she’ was Pearl after all. How did I know that Dot Harris had really done that abortion on her? I didn’t. Pearl and Velma could be lying very well, and with some knowledge regarding Dot, about the whole thing. Then again there was what I’d overheard Sister Teresa say to Blatt about people who ‘knew’ something about, I had to presume, Pearl and Ruby’s predicaments. I’d have to go and talk to Mr Blatt, be straight with him and tell him what I’d overheard if I wanted to go any further with all this. But before I did that, I’d have to do something else first and that was speak, if I could, to Sister Teresa.

  Between sobering up, talking to Fred Bryant down the police station, and not being able to get through on the telephone, I only managed to speak to Sister Teresa at near on ten o’clock.

  When she came on the line she said, ‘Do you have any idea how late it is?’

  ‘Do you have any idea how it feels sitting here with the telephone not knowing if the Luftwaffe are going to cut your call short?’ I said. Yes, I knew that nuns went to bed early: I’d had it chapter and verse from my mother before I called.

  ‘So what do you want?’ she said.

  I didn’t go into detail, but I did tell her there was a possibility someone else, a man, could have been involved in Kevin Dooley’s murder. ‘So if you think your father may still have some angry relatives or mates out there . . .’

  ‘Were you listening in on my conversation this morning, Mr Hancock?’

  ‘Yes,’ I responded calmly. I could hear that she was outraged so I got it all over with quickly. ‘So I know Mr Blatt knows where your sister Opal is,’ I said. ‘I also know that he lied about that to me. I don’t know why he did that, except that your family seem to have more secrets than most, Sister Teresa, and not for any reason I can easily fathom.’

  ‘Our mother—’

  ‘Yes, your mother killed somebody a long time ago,’ I said. ‘But that’s not you, and I don’t know why you and your sisters seem to be so worried about people having some sort of grudge against you. And what is it people might know or find out?’

  ‘You—’

  ‘I’m not trying to accuse anyone here,’ I said. ‘I just think that those who kill people should be punished.’

  ‘I don’t know where Opal is!’

  ‘Yes, I know that,’ I said. ‘But what about these enemies and what—’

  ‘My dad, Neilson, he did once speak about another kid he had a long time ago—’

  The line went dead before she could say any more. I was tempted to throw the bloody telephone down the stairs I was that frustrated with it. But that Bakelite stuff breaks easily and, besides, what would getting into a paddy about it do? Talking to the nun had been a waste of time, but what of it? Talking to Fred Bryant hadn’t been a walk in the park either. I couldn’t tell him who’d told me about Kevin Dooley’s ‘thing’ for blokes so Fred said he couldn’t go any further with it.

  ‘But you must know some of the local pansy boys. You’re a copper,’ I’d said. ‘Ask around them.’

  But all Fred would say was that he’d mention what I’d said to Sergeant Hill. I think he’s afraid of irons myself.

  ‘Any case the Dooleys won’t like that iron business one bit if they find out,’ Fred had said, as I’d left.

  I thought, Tough.

  As the sirens started up for another night’s entertainment, I passed Velma in the hall on her way down to the shelter. She looked at me and smiled. ‘Seeing me mum tomorrow, eh, Mr Hancock?’

  Even with the raid about to start, she was so excited.

  ‘Y-yes, l-love,’ I said.

  No one slept that night. No one. Not my family
, not me – out and about on my run once again. Not the firemen I saw lift a burning girder off a little girl who’d been pinned underneath it. Her legs had melted. I started to shake apart when I heard her scream, ‘I’m going to die! I’m going to die!’ And, yes, she was, I knew that. But one of the firemen, I don’t know how he bore it, said, ‘No, you ain’t, love. We’ll soon have you out of here and back to your mum.’ I heard the death rattle in her throat only seconds after that. Then her eyes closed and she was gone. Me, screaming inside and useless, I went over to the firemen and said, ‘I am an undertaker.’ They ignored me. They behaved as if I was, for all the world, really back on the Somme, my hell instead of this new hell that they lived inside.

  ‘What are you doing, Frank?’ Aggie wheezed, as she watched Velma and me step out of the shop on to what was left of the pavement. You get days when, for some reason, all the brick-dust just gets right down on your chest. Aggie’s poor pipes sounded like a couple of busted-up old bellows.

  ‘We’re going to see my mum’s lawyer,’ Velma said brightly. I’d found a couple of tennis balls that had once belonged to my nephew and Velma was enjoying herself juggling with them.

  ‘I didn’t think that was until this afternoon,’ my sister said doubtfully, as she took out and lit up a fag. ‘Mum said—’

  ‘I have a few things I need to speak to Mr Blatt about first,’ I said, in a way that I thought sounded reasonable.