‘You know you’re not right, don’t you, Frank?’ Aggie rasped.
‘Why don’t you go and play ball up against that wall for a minute?’ I said to Velma, pointing to the bit of blank brick down the side of the pub.
The kid went with a smile and no questions.
I turned to Aggie. ‘What do you mean?’ I said, knowing full well exactly what she meant.
‘Wish I’d never put it into your head Kevin Dooley could’ve been stabbed,’ Aggie said. ‘If I’d never spoke maybe you would’ve just thought he was barmy and left it alone.’
‘But then we’d never have known he was murdered,’ I said. ‘A killer would be out there with no policemen on his trail.’
‘Oh, what, you mean police like Fred Bryant, do you?’ Aggie sneered. ‘There’s a lot of Jerries causing a bit of death and destruction here and there if you haven’t noticed, Frank. Some oik from Canning Town gets what’s coming to him, possibly from his poor old missus. No one cares!’
‘I do.’
My sister pursed her heavily painted lips.
I moved in closer towards her. ‘I’ve killed people, Aggie,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know them, they didn’t know me, but if I could find their relatives, show them who I am, then I think it might help them. It’s important to know the truth about the dead.’
‘Frank, you killed people in battle.’
‘It’s no different!’ I said, as I felt tears of frustration form in my eyes. Why couldn’t Aggie understand this? ‘Kevin Dooley came to me for help. I let him down and he died! Who killed him, the truth, it’s important for him!’
‘But he was a right—’
‘It doesn’t matter what he was like,’ I said.
‘Oh, so if that poor cow Pearl did, beyond doubt, do him in, then you’ll grass her up with her kid under our roof, will you?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘If she’s guilty I will.’
‘All for the memory of a bloke who got drunk and beat up women?’
‘He was a human being!’ I said.
‘Yes, but what are you getting out of all this, Frank?’
I didn’t answer her. I knew I could never make her understand. She can be very clinical. But, then, she’s never killed anyone. She can’t understand what it’s like to know you’ll never put right what you did – ever. The guilt that robs you of any notion of peace of mind.
‘You don’t understand,’ I said softly.
‘No.’ Aggie stopped for a moment to catch her breath and then said, ‘But what I do know is, no one saw nothing so anything could’ve happened that night. Not that that bothers me at all. It’s you I’m worried about. All this “investigating”, it’s taking you over. Stop it – you can’t do no good. Look even more like a bleedin’ ghost than you do usually.’
She was right, of course. I would’ve had to be blind not to see how sick I was starting to look. Because I’m dark I’ve always had to shave more than most so I’d been treated to my wan face at least twice a day. Not that it had registered. The other side of it is that when I get really sick, my eyes get very bright and there’s a sort of a wild urgency to everything that makes me forget about how I look or how I might be feeling. I thought about all of these things as I swung along with Velma, on foot and then on whatever buses or trams that were running, to Mr Blatt’s Knightsbridge office. But I knew I couldn’t change either myself or what the Kevin Dooley affair was doing to me. I had to see it through, whatever the outcome.
The West End, though scarred by bombing, like Paddington, is still recognisable. Blokes with a few readies still take their girls dancing up the Astoria on Tottenham Court Road, and the Corner Houses are as full as they’ve ever been. But when we got to Piccadilly Circus it was sad to see poor old Eros boarded up and everything around that area looking run-down, dismal and piled up with sandbags. Apparently up on Oxford Street there has been some bomb damage, the National Bank having caught it only a few weeks back, as, I heard, had John Lewis’s. But round Blatt’s office, down Hans Crescent, opposite Harrods, things – if you can forget the tape on the windows and the sandbags – look almost normal. Not much there to provide a target for the Jerries, I suppose. No docks or warehouses or anything that might help to break us down if it were hit, like St Paul’s Cathedral or Buckingham Palace. Just a big department store, a lot of women wearing high heels and furs, and Mr Blatt in his wood-panelled office, not looking very pleased at all.
‘You’ve got no right to ask me anything, Hancock,’ he said, after I told him I knew that he knew where Opal Reynolds lived. ‘How dare you listen in to a private conversation? Who do you think you are?’
I’d left Velma out in the reception area because what was being said wasn’t suitable for a child. But in view of all the shouting I imagined she could hear it anyway. I lowered my voice in an attempt to lessen the volume.
‘I’m someone who’s looking after Pearl Dooley’s daughter,’ I said. ‘I’m also—’
‘You’re an undertaker, Hancock!’ Blatt shouted. ‘Not a policeman! Good God, if it wasn’t for you none of this would have happened anyway!’
‘If it wasn’t—’
‘It was you, wasn’t it, who insisted that the awful Dooley had been murdered?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And I was right.’ Coming on top of Aggie’s little rant Blatt was giving me the ’ump now and I made sure he knew it. ‘Why? Would you rather a man had been murdered and no one know?’
‘Well, of course not.’ Blatt ran a hand through his heavily brilliantined hair. ‘But Pearl Reynolds, who I know is an innocent woman, wouldn’t now be in Holloway if you’d left it alone.’
‘No, she’d be on the street with Velma, cut off from the rest of her kids . . .’
‘Yes, but she’d be free,’ he said, and then he threw himself down into the chair behind his desk. ‘And I wouldn’t be involved.’
‘Yes, but you are, aren’t you, Blatt?’ I said tightly. ‘You’ve been involved since long before Kevin Dooley . . .’
‘What do you mean?’
I looked at him as his eyes darted back and forth across his desk, as if searching for something. Eventually he lit up a fag, without offering one to me, his fingers shaking as they wrapped themselves round the Passing Cloud. Blatt was a worried man.
‘I thought you’re defending Pearl because you want to,’ I said.
‘Because of her mother I feel obliged,’ he answered.
I didn’t say anything about what Sister Teresa and Ruby had told me regarding Blatt’s seeming incompetence. But then, surely, if he had done a less than perfect job for Victorine, maybe he felt more than obliged to try to help her daughter. Not that any of that explained why he’d felt the need to keep Opal’s whereabouts secret.
‘So is Opal—’
‘She has nothing to do with Kevin Dooley or you! Opal Reynolds is completely safe, as I told her sister,’ Blatt said. ‘I don’t know why some people seem fixated on the idea of a conspiracy against these women. All right, I know the authorities are probably prejudiced on account of Victorine and all that, but as for “others” out to “get” these women . . .’
‘And I don’t know about that either,’ I said. ‘But what you can’t get away from, Mr Blatt, is that Ruby Reynolds left what was a very safe place for her, with someone unknown, who used my name to get at her, and has now disappeared. I know Sister Teresa has fears. I heard—’
‘Amber Reynolds has probably spent too long brooding on the past,’ Blatt said, ‘sequestered away in that convent.’
‘Yes, but, Mr Blatt, there must be some basis for all this. I heard you and her talk about someone “knowing” something.’
‘Amber and the rest of them are all hysterical over an old crime they didn’t commit,’ Blatt said, as he ground out his fag in the ashtray and lit another. ‘They’re all as mad as hatters, always have been. I, to some extent, humour them. Not that their insanity is in itself surprising, given their background. But you have to remember, Mr Hancock, that t
he Reynolds women, though not with any criminal intent, of course, cannot be relied upon. They see enemies everywhere. Ever since their mother died they have been like this. I, for instance, did my best for their mother yet they all insist that it was entirely my fault that Victorine eventually went to the gallows.’
I wanted to ask him some more about his involvement, possibly of a personal nature, and, in particular, with Victorine Reynolds herself, but I didn’t. Beyond knowing where she was, I couldn’t prove that Blatt had anything to do with Opal Reynolds, much less that he was her father. So instead I said, ‘And yet you think that what Pearl has told you about the night Kevin died can be relied on?’
‘Yes.’ He smiled, but he didn’t say any more than that or give any reasons for his opinion. ‘Don’t you?’
‘I don’t know, Mr Blatt,’ I said. ‘Really I don’t.’
I went on to tell him about what Gimpy Charlie had said. I didn’t mention the old bloke’s name, although I knew I could get him to talk to Blatt easier than he would’ve done to the police, if need be. The lawyer was nothing short of ecstatic. In fact, I thought at the time that it was almost as if he’d needed this piece of information to get back his own freedom. His change in attitude towards me was nothing short of amazing.
Now he offered me a fag. ‘I’ll have to speak to this contact of yours myself,’ he said. ‘Just the fact that someone else was present with Dooley, and involved in an immoral act, throws serious doubt on Pearl’s supposed guilt, whether she was having an abortion or not.’
‘He didn’t actually see this iron bloke attacking Kevin, you know,’ I said. ‘And Kevin told me, as you know, that it was a woman as stabbed him.’
‘Yes, yes, but Dooley had been drunk all day and he must have been out of his mind with shock . . .’
‘And I don’t know whether this – person,’ I said, as I lit up my fag, ‘will want to come to court.’
‘Well, he’ll have to,’ Blatt said. And then he got up, went over to the door and opened it. ‘Miss Atkinson, could you bring me the Reynolds file, please?’
I heard the woman outside say, ‘Yes, Mr Blatt,’ followed by the sound of metal cabinet drawers opening and shutting.
‘I can’t thank you enough for this, you know, Hancock,’ he said, as the woman came in holding a thick cardboard file. ‘Pearl will be delighted.’
That her husband had been an iron? I wasn’t so sure about that. But as it happened I didn’t get to find that out on this occasion because only Blatt and Velma were allowed into Holloway to see Pearl. I don’t know what the arrangements for visiting prisons were before the war, but these days I think they’re pretty strict. Nowadays there are all sorts in prisons – traitors, Communists, who I know some see as traitors, and conchies. Conscientious objectors, ‘conchies’, refuse to fight or have anything to do with the production of weapons. Some of them work in reserved occupations – which is what I am in strictly, as well as being too bloody old to fight – on the ambulances and suchlike. I know a few and I like them, but most people don’t. They call them ‘cowards’ and ‘Nazis’ and sometimes the poor buggers get beaten up for their opinions. I can understand them only too well. If I were of call-up age, I’d be one of them. I make no bones about that. For a bereaved person there is no suffering worse than grief. For an unwilling killer there is nothing worse than living with the knowledge of what he’s done. I try to run away from it. I sometimes think I might kill myself because of it. But it never goes away. In the end I’m always led back to that same old condemned cell in my head. Can actual prison be any worse? In Holloway, it being a women’s prison, there weren’t likely to be any conchies, but there would be Communists and pacifists and just the thought of them in there, innocent of any actual crime, made me feel bad. I stood outside those grim grey walls while Blatt and Velma went inside and smoked myself to a standstill.
Chapter Sixteen
All the time Blatt and Velma were inside the prison I thought about Martine Dooley and her place in what I knew about Kevin’s death so far. On the face of it, her story would seem to undermine Gimpy’s tale about Kevin being an iron. But on the other hand, something had to have been going on so I told Blatt about Martine and about my own encounters with Johnny and his brothers when he and Velma came out of the prison. He adopted a troubled expression at this, but thanked me and said that he’d try to find out more about Kevin’s relationships. Pearl had not, apparently, told him about Martine. But maybe she hadn’t known.
I took Velma home, where we settled in to our normal routine of waiting and preparing for a possible raid. As usual, we sat in the kitchen – the Duchess all in black, with her hair piled up in a thick bun on the top of her head – listening to the Crazy Gang on the wireless, Nan wearing what looked like most of her clothes against the cold, knitting something or other, while Velma flicked through an old copy of Picture Post she’d found in the parlour. Disappointingly, she didn’t have much to say about her mother. From what I could gather, Mr Blatt had done most of the talking. Aggie was at work. I smoked. To be honest, my mind was a blank by this time so smoking was all that I did until I finally went to bed at just after ten.
I wake easily – I have done ever since the trenches – so I wasn’t worried about not hearing the sirens. But when I came to, at what I later learned was just gone four in the morning, I was convinced that somehow I’d slept through it. And although I couldn’t see even the dim glow of light you get through the blackout curtains when a raid’s going on outside, I could feel the whole building shaking, which had to mean something. I lit the candle I keep at the side of my bed, then pulled on my trousers. Somewhere above the shaking and the banging a voice was screaming.
I picked up the candle and ran out on to the landing. Strangely, for her, the Duchess was in her bedroom doorway, stock still, her hair hanging loose down to where her knees should have been.
‘Nancy’s gone downstairs to see who it is,’ she said calmly.
‘What?’
‘Someone at the door, dear. Your sister has gone to find out.’
I ran down the stairs, my candle extinguishing as I did so. War or no war, who the hell went knocking on doors in the small hours of the morning? Looters checking to see whether folk were in or not was the first thing that sprang to mind.
‘Nan!’ I said, as I burst through the black curtains into the shop.
But the door was opened and shut again by the time I got there and who had been outside was now in. The sheer blackness of her clothing told me immediately who she was.
‘I’ve had to walk from Dagenham,’ Sister Teresa said. ‘Train couldn’t go no further than that.’
In spite of being tired after all that walking, not to mention the energy she must have spent banging on my door and screaming, Sister Teresa was anxious to talk. Nan, whose love of all things Catholic had been tested a bit by the Sister, went back to bed, so it was the Duchess who made tea for the nun and me in the kitchen. Luckily Velma hadn’t woken. But she’d had a very busy and emotional day for such a young kid. And although she hadn’t said much, it had been easy to tell that the prison and the fact that her mum was in it had frightened her. Who wouldn’t it terrify?
‘I got a telephone call,’ Sister Teresa said, without preamble. ‘I wrote down what he said after, word for word.’ She pushed a piece of paper over the table towards me.
I was still a bit shocked by her appearance, to tell the truth, so my hands shook somewhat when I took it from her. It didn’t take long to read, just twenty-two words. After I’d finished reading I looked up and said, ‘What secret?’
The Duchess placed a cup and saucer in front of Sister Teresa just as she put her head down and said, ‘I can’t tell you.’
‘Do you know who it was on the phone?’ I said. ‘Did you recognise the voice?’
‘No. Only that it was a man.’
‘When did you get it? The call?’
‘This afternoon. I left straight away. I told Sister Emerita I had family
business again. You know how the trains are – I couldn’t risk leaving tomorrow, even in the morning. As it is, I’ve had a terrible time, on and off trains . . .’
‘So what do you want me to do?’ I said. I was still, frankly, needled by her outright refusal to talk about the ‘secret’ mentioned on the paper.
‘Nothing, really,’ she said. ‘But after what’s happened to Pearl and Ruby, I’m afraid. It’s taken me hours to get here. I just didn’t know where else to go.’
‘You should go to the police,’ I said as I threw the paper back across the table at her.
‘No!’
‘Why not? If you see some sort of threat in what this bloke said, which you must’ve done to bother to write it down, you should get some help.’
She looked away. The Duchess, meantime, placed my cuppa on the table and sat down with us.
‘I’ve known there’s been something else, a “secret”, for a while,’ I said, ‘and to be truthful, Sister, it’s given me the ’ump.’
The nun turned back to me, her eyes a little wet round the edges.
‘Because,’ I continued, angrily now, ‘I was only ever really interested in Kevin Dooley. That I’ve done what I could for your sisters along the way is lucky for you. But it’s not been easy for me. I’ve done it. My family have gladly looked after Velma—’
‘No! I can’t!’ She began to cry.
‘Oh, blimey!’ I said. ‘Don’t—’
‘No!’
‘Tell my son your secret, my dear.’ The Duchess reached out one twisted hand to the nun and smiled. ‘He can’t help you unless you do. Why indeed should he?’
The two women looked at each other in silence. It was a private moment between them. The same as when a bloke comes across two women gossiping and they stop and stare at him, he has to look away. I looked away now.
I heard the nun sigh and then she said, ‘Mr Blatt got Opal adopted to some family he knows, friends of his, because he’s her father.’
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